Syria and Islam's dilemma

Syria: the foreign fighters joining the war against Bashar al-Assad http://gu.com/p/3aj49

What is solution for Palestine and Palestinians?

Making a call to expand Israeli hegemony based on logic such as this is unprincipled and immoral. The solution is to extend aid in all areas such that the Israeli occupation and colonisation is pushed back and the lesson that their bullying and power play has no place in this modern age.

Palestinians need a one-state solution | Ghada Karmi http://gu.com/p/3ahnh

Major decisions and emerging maturity, choices and risks

1. Political choices: The need to express and articulate the third way, the less paranoid and the rational, non-xenophobic way of expressing the vision for this country.At the end of the day, the largest leveraged outcome of the simplest decision is to sway the fence-sitters away from the corrupted, lousy, rotten status quo, no matter where the position of comfort the owner of the opinion is. In this case, I do need to participate, I do need to expres a position, I do need to ensure there is a sizable buy-in and engagement to the choices that I make and the convictions that I have. But the first step is to firstly have that list of convictions first. It's so much easier to be the cleaner that sweeps the mess of others, but it's more desirable to be the one that stands in front and expresses abhorrence of this practice and prevents it from happening.
2. And in that respect, how important can it be to have an opinion, arrived to thoughtfully, and expressed gently and articulately, that could sway the opinions of many. Less of the consultant-speak, more of arriving at a resolution that speaks volumes of the character and generosity of spirit.
3. And more importantly, is how could this be achieved without reflecting on the choices of asking for divine guidance and help? How would personal wisdom be enhanced that you could see past the iniquities of others, be informed of the personal agendas, and prepare and strategise accordingly such that the objectives of justice can be assured, and having the wisdom that the guidance that we seek are the right and divinely acquired despite the naysayers and grounded in the reality of the world that we live in.. ok ok.. I know this is dragging, but this is the difficult part of idealism meeting practicalities.
4. Offers and choices - and at the end of it all, we seek Allah's acceptance of our amal, niyyah and iman, and importance is not necessarily relfected in that order. Then the task of leading people, and the risks of leading them falsely can be mitigated somewhat as I have this innate fear of leading them wrongly. And in that respect, the Dark Knight Rises truly inspires the choices that we ought to make to realise the world we ought to live in, and guided by a divinely-inspired moral compass that helps our innermost innate judgment.

Insanity rules

1. The runup to the GE13 has started and silly season is well underway. Everything is a proxy issue now, and your stand on any issue that affects you risks being seen as a stand that you take due to your political affiliation. It's absolutely crazy, and absolutely ridiculous.
2. From a personal viewpoint, any stand should be taken after some thought at least as to the background problem, acceptaiblity of boundaries, positives and negatives of the idea, implications to stakeholders, long-term consequences, alternatives. WIthout all this being done, then you really run the risk of letting your cognitive biases of the lazy System 2 to abdicate responsibility and leave the thinking to supporters of the various factions, and hence really be taken by a ride by the cybertroopers' debating factions.
3. Take issue of MAS: MAS has been well and truly messed up for a long time now. Perhaps WAU was really the final nail, but at that point in time it was seen as a necessity to save it from oblivion, or so I was told and remains a fact that needs to be validated. Assuming this is true, the real killer for MAS is then an issue of being unable to resolve its fundamental issue of getting back to business profitability. Cutting the story short rather than going through the whole cycle of marketing, cost management, operations - who's the CEO then? What was the turnaround plan? I do hate pointing at individuals, but the fact remains that you get this one single decision wrong, and you're well and truly *bleeped*.
4. Take TNB. What was the problem within TNB back in 2004? Low staff morale due to an intervening Chairman keen to move out performing leaders but unfortunately waving the wrong political flag into 'cold storage', investments in coal mines about to go awry, and collapsing under the weight of its massive debts about to mature in the short term with very little cash pile to pay off. Credit to CK for resolving the financial challenge, and a lot more should be attributed to Izzaddin, but being a monopolistic integrated utility, the expectation would be to bring it overseas. In many ways, when spin shows that CK is the superhero who saved TNB, my reality would be that he missed a trick and in many ways was someone who merely kept it ticking over, as had many other previous TNB guys had done. Take non-tech losses for instance, heck, credit to Datuk Sidek for beginning this, Datuk Engku Hashim and Datuk Aishah for supporting it, and should be given just as much credit to this.
5. Take Sime Darby. Wow, this is mind-boggling when a former CEO is charged with CBT when an investment goes south. Remind me to decline any close working relationships with ex-politicians, especially the malay kind, not to attribute any personal agenda against them, but merely to eliminate any possible recriminations.
6. Take Telekom. Spin out the profit-making wireless business and merge with regional players and you have a winner. The fixed line business is compensated with a huge government project and funding and survives the restructuring. Job done and here's your promotion. And by the way, you've also done well changing the logo.
7. in addition to the lousy fact-fitting theory kind of writing associated with blogging, such as this, we can attribute the laziness of the media who failed to highlight such stories. And also those in the know would do well to explore the best ways of sharing the information in the most equitable ways possible that does not seek sensationalism, but espouses facts and credibility, such that the truth gwts out and paints the darkest pictures of these fake writers.
8. Point is, the GLCs are tough nuts. Monopolistic positions but outdated business models. Profitable but declining yields. Malay proxy business due to government policy and therefore politically charged when dealing with employees and hence difficult to change business culture. Intervention from all over and poor governance and all-over reporting lines.
9. Breaking them up into smaller business units would be the way to go. In this way, you open up the opportunities to many more people, and believe you me, there plenty of talented malay employees to develop and compete alongside and within a more pluralistic non-racial and non-discriminatory talent development policy if this is the unspoken objective, although there is no reason why this sort of policy cannot be made explicit. At the moment, what we have as Daim's boys in the 90s have made way to a different sort of Malay cartel, and this drives the insanity at the moment when political drivel makes up economic justifications and reasonings for why so-and-so are unsuited for what.
10. The hard rule is this - grow these GLCs. Massively. And for that, let all these detractors from both sides of the fence eat humble pie.
11. Just like a certain Mr Brick in Wall needs to eat humble pie for endorsing En Salleh Budu's Feedlot strategic initiative.  http://anotherbrickinwall.blogspot.com/2011/12/another-khazanah-amokh-failure.html I guess he felt that diversification into property is a typical business strategy when you use government mandated funds. tsk tsk
12. The question is who to trust to carry it out. In the malay tradition, I dont think we should be looking for a Hang Tuah character, rather there should be an apolitical, commercial, business-savvy entity that does this work, preferably in the background. Would that stop the detractors? No. But at least there is someone looking at it from a fair and true perspective, without influenced one way or the other to setup a huge media-friendly and cash-sapping organisation.

Public policy making.. the world of Malaysian civil administration

1.       You know it’s bad when in reaction to tough economic times, government deliberates more and more of such Bantuan Rakyat 1Malaysia schemes, of course spending money it has out of additional debt taken on to fund budget deficits. Why this policy? Because the politics involved requires them to outdo a revitalized Opposition who is dangling more of the same – free university education for all, and if there isn’t enough unioversities we’ll build more of them. Where’s the monet coming from? Easy.. Petronas. Let’s disregard that there’s a big economic debate on the resource curse, ie countries blessed with natural resources tend to blow all the accrued benefits away until when the resource is depleted, the economy begins collapsing onto itself. By the way, just forget for the moment that Petronas’s dividends and taxes make up a huge chunk of public sector revenues anyway, and that is frittered away on misguided policies on already substantial subsidies. There’s a race to the bottom now, and frankly, neither side is of much use in this debate.

2.       Let’s also view the madness of society without the arguments being clouded with dumb acronyms. Baby-dumping, violent crimes, tough love from the police on “illegal” gatherings, poor education system etc. A Tahrir-square uprising is the rage now, but what if those who leads them are deluded and unfit to lead? There isn’t anyone around to lead a multi-cultural, diverse community such as ours. With hindsight, Mahathir’s ‘enlightened autocracy’, (without its attendant excesses of course) seems to be the best path for the country. None of this liberal, happy-go-lucky stuff.

3.       Policies are relevant according to the recipients. Unfortunate then that the recipients have always been seen as separate, using the segmentation of religion and race, and therefore policies could never be applied consistently. Biggest bugbear for me is that education according to racial lines is even allowed based on an obsolete “social contract”. Someone with balls needs to bring this issue out into the open, but of course then it becomes the subject that cannot be broached without significant electoral losses. So, we then continue to muddle along, not really finding the path to breaking free.

 

[From: Flin Flan] Premier League clubs lost ?361m last year despite record ?2.3bn income

Flin Flan spotted this on the guardian.co.uk site and thought you should see it.

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Note from Flin Flan:

What an unsustainable business model looks like. Fenway could be on to something.
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To see this story with its related links on the guardian.co.uk site, go to http://www.guardian.co.uk/football/2012/may/23/premier-league-losses-2010-11-profits

Premier League clubs lost ?361m last year despite record ?2.3bn income

? Only five Premier League clubs made a profit in 2010-11
? Manchester City's ?197m loss the biggest in football history

David Conn
Thursday May 24 2012
The Guardian


http://www.guardian.co.uk/football/2012/may/23/premier-league-losses-2010-11-profits


The Premier League's 20 clubs collectively made a loss of ?361m last year, after spending all of their record ?2.3bn income. Of the clubs which were in the Premier League in 2010?11, the year of most clubs' latest published accounts, eight made a profit, of ?97.4m in total.

Of the other clubs, 11 made losses, totalling ?458m. Manchester City, in the third year since Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed Al Nahyan of Abu Dhabi's ruling family bought the club [http://www.guardian.co.uk/football/2009/sep/23/manchester-city-takeover" title="] and began to pour in money to acquire a team capable of winning the Premier League, lost ?197m, the greatest financial loss in the history of football.

Chelsea lost the next highest amount, ?68m, bankrolled by their owner, the Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich, who loaned ?94m to the club during 2010?11. Liverpool, documenting the first eight months of ownership by John Henry's Fenway Sports Group, lost ?49m.

Birmingham City, now in the Championship, have failed to file their accounts for 2010?11, which were statutorily due on 31 December. The club's parent company, Birmingham International Holdings, registered on the Hong Kong stock exchange, has not yet published its own accounts, and Carson Yeung, who led the takeover of the club in 2009, is awaiting trial on money-laundering charges [http://www.guardian.co.uk/football/2011/jun/29/birmingham-city-carson-yeung-police" title="], which he denies.

The clubs' combined turnover of ?2.3bn is partly the result of the first year of the Premier League's 2010?13 TV deals, in which a record ?1.5bn was earned from overseas broadcasters. The financial figures portray a league of fierce sporting competition which relentlessly forces up players' wages.

In total, ?1.5bn was spent on wages by the 20 clubs in 2010-11 (including Birmingham's ?38m wage bill in 2009?10). That accounted for 69% of the clubs' total income, slightly up from the 68% of income the clubs spent in 2009?10 on wages.

The largest profit was recorded by Newcastle United, in their first season back in the Premier League since relegation in 2009. The accounts were published before last summer's transfer business, swollen by the ?35m sale to Liverpool of the striker Andy Carroll, which netted ?33m profit. Manchester United, despite paying ?50m in interest on the debts loaded on to the club by United's owners, the Glazer family, won the championship having spent less on wages, at ?153m, than Chelsea and City, and still made a profit of ?12m.

Liverpool, by contrast, made an operating loss of ?90m. Had they not recorded a profit of ?43m for the sale of players, including ?50m from Chelsea for Fernando Torres (the money spent on buying players, such as Carroll, is accounted for more gradually), Liverpool would have stated a much greater overall loss than the ?49m final figure.

Richard Scudamore, chief executive of the league which this season celebrated 20 years since it was formed by a breakaway of the old Football League First Division clubs, has rejected introducing a break-even rule similar to "financial fair play". Such rules, designed to make clubs break even rather than rack up losses, whether bankrolled by an owner or not, have been agreed by Uefa for its competitions and, more recently, by the Football League.

In the Premier League, clubs playing in Uefa's Champions League or Europa League must comply with financial fair play over this year and next. Even the two which are lavishly backed, Chelsea and City, have stated they want to move towards breaking even.

Lower down, most clubs make losses in the effort to stay up. The Wigan Athletic owner, Dave Whelan, who wrote off ?48m in loans to the club last August, said that financial fair play "can only be a good thing ? for football in general to ensure that debt is maintained at reasonable and sustainable levels".


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If you can change the world... or perhaps just one person's thinking..

1. I am confronted with the possibility of putting myself right in the middle of the crossfire - the MRT project, with a controversial contract owner as a potential employer. As always, I'd need to examine my heart and pray the istikharah - not that I have even attended the interview.
2. To do this, I need to have a sincere positioning as to this opening. What is my role, and this role must be one that I can live with. Of course, the devil uses all sorts of bogeys to prevent decisiveness and encourage uncertainties - but alhamdulillah Allah has provided aql and also to reach out to Allah for hidayah.
3. Principles are as below:
• That I benefit the most people in my position of responsibility
• That I uphold truth and justice in my dealings. While this means exercising independent thought, this also means being able to discern the different roles of the different stakeholders.
• That I have the opportunity to do good to my family and to myself.. ie leave a legacy. 
4.  Now I've got that out of the way, let's examine facts about the MRT.
• by all accounts, extremely high cost vs all others. I'm not sure if inflationary effects and base raw material effects have been included in the consideration, but surely that is a question to be asked? Are the specifications common or there are additional features in the Malaysian design that seemingly inflated the costs to most worrying levels.
• That it seems rushed. The alignment has still not been sorted out for the Jalan Sultan, TTDI and perhaps other locations. The overall MRT masterplan is still out there somewhere. Yet this unsolicited MMC-Gamuda bid has been awarded at this inflated cost.
• Speaking of costs, does the Govt know how to value projects of this size? My prior experience in PBX2 seems to indicate they have no idea and the fact that there is willingness for the public sector to fund private sector profits indicate they are ignorant of a proper funding structure for these PPP/PFI type projects.
• Auctioneering is necessary otherwise government will always be beholden. Will the private sector refuse generous terms? Are there kickbacks involved? I wouldnt want to know if there are - but these are dangerous times to turn a blind eye and a deaf ear to this types of development. The Arab Spring had "sprung" up in reaction to raging impotence to a sense of injustice. RM36b - RM50b can do that. The question will be what is the funding structure? Refusal to have open tenders, or a token Swiss Challenge, is insufficient.
• But again, Government is probably a bit smarter in that there is the added layer of building a "world-class private sector objective", although in this case, privatising profits is a strange way of doing it. There should be no additional subsidies / grants to support financing given the ridiculous profit margins for this and to consider the construction as purely a private sector play. Having said that, where is the breakeven for the operators?
• And here GoM has the trumpcard of a property play for the sites. And so, there is the answer for a rather complex equation. Does this mean the numbers work out? That remains to be seen.
5. So what would my role be? Primarily to deliver value to the company, increase credibility of the engineering profession, and ensure I turn out fine insyaAllah. May Allah guide me in my affairs.