I take the bet Roy
even called some friends who should know in JKT 2 hours ago. Let it be 20 US$ ok for dinner with you ok? :lol:
Parking lot? I park all my cars in ONE garage
, so I don't care much which or whose cars park on other lots.
Regarding American policies here a nice piece:
What Bush should have said after Sept 11 but didn't.
The following is a speech that United States President George W. Bush should have given in the immediate aftermath of the Sept 11 attacks, but didn't.
By Janadas Devan
MY FELLOW Americans, the rubble that was once the World Trade Centre teaches us two lessons: Culture matters; government matters. Let me explain.
The people who flew those planes that crashed into the twin towers weren't born wanting to do that.
Terrorism is no more a peculiarly Arabic or Muslim instinct than the Holocaust was coded in the Germanic or Christian gene, or the Rape of Nanking in the Japanese or Buddhist one.
Aberrations and distortions in any culture can pervert human beings into beastly replicas of themselves. Failed cultures flew those planes.
And that is precisely what most of these societies, with some significant exceptions - Malaysia comes to mind - have become: bankrupt societies. Their politics are bankrupt, their economies are bankrupt, their intellectual cultures are bankrupt.
In place of Salah al-Din Yusuf (or Saladin) we have uninspiring leaders. In place of the riches and glories of the Abbasids, the Almohads, the Almoravids and the Mughals, we have the hovels of Cairo and Damascus, Beirut and Lahore.
And in place of Ibn Sina and Ibn Rushd - known to Western philosophy as Avicenna and Averroes - we have 10,000 fire-breathing preachers spewing hatred and venom.
I'll give you just one statistic to illustrate the intellectual poverty. All of Egypt, this ancient cradle of civilisations, produces just 350 books a year. Just one university press in America produces more.
REALISE THE SIZE OF THE VOID
HOW did they get this way? The causes are many. First, political: The Ottoman Empire collapsed suddenly in the aftermath of World War I, and nothing legitimate succeeded it. Colonialism did its thing, succeeded by pan-Arabic nationalism. Both failed.
Pax Americana didn't help either, for we propped up brutal and corrupt dictatorships for cheap oil.
Second, economic: Without oil, all these countries in the Persian Gulf would be poorer than sub-Saharan Africa but because of oil, they became corrupt.
Egypt, which has no oil, has an unemployment rate of 25 per cent, and 90 per cent of the jobless have university degrees. Those figures are going to get worse, for half of the population in most Arabic countries is under the age of 25.
And finally, religion: For what filled the void left by failed politics and failed economics was a distortion of Islam.
You remember our old friend, Karl Marx? He got all his economics wrong, but the old coot knew a thing or two about history.
'Religion is the opium of the people,' he said.
But that's not all. He also said: 'Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the feeling of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of unspiritual conditions.'
That is spot on. For if you live in hell, what do you do? Well, you create a heaven in your head where all the difficult questions are neatly resolved, and presto, you have a comforting Theory of Everything.
Find modernity difficult? Force your women into purdah. Find it tough to compete with Hongkong and Taiwan? Withdraw into the madrasah. Feel ashamed of what has become of the once glorious Arabic civilisation? Blame the West and Jews.
Up to just 100 years ago, they didn't feel like that. Do you know who protected Jews for almost 2,000 years after the Romans destroyed the Temple in Jerusalem? It wasn't Christians, folks. Christian Europe killed them by the millions. Rather, it was Muslims.
Dhimmi, they called them - people of the Book - and allowed them full religious liberty for the most part. Jews became prime ministers in the Ottoman Empire.
Now all that is gone, except for islands of almost cowed rationality, amid a sea of hatred, fear and intolerance. The sea is spreading, the islands are shrinking. What is more, this Thing - these horrid distortions of Islam - seems to have a life of its own, quite apart from socio-economic factors. Why?
Karl Marx again: There is base - economics and politics - and there is superstructure - culture, religion. The two are connected, but the latter can have a life of its own.
Thus, we find scholarship boys in prosperous Malaysia joining Al-Qaeda, world-class physicists in Pakistan offering to make the bomb for Osama bin Laden, and Osama himself, a blasted millionaire. There is no economics here; this is straightforward religious obscurantism.
Can we do something about all this, besides capturing or killing the chief lunatics, which we must and will? Can these cultures be fixed?
Yes - they must; we have no alternative. But we can't do the fixing ourselves. Americans can't be theologians to the Islamic world. Muslims have to be that themselves. But we can help.
So I'm announcing today a US$1 trillion (S$1.74 trillion) development programme, a joint European-Japanese-American, public-private sector plan to shake up the Middle East and put it back on its feet.
Harry Truman did something similar in Europe and Japan after World War II, and named it after his Secretary of State, a former general, George Marshall. I'm naming my programme after my own Secretary of State, also a former general, Mr Colin Powell. He is African-American, and he knows what it means to overcome oppression.
The Powell Plan's aim is simple: Where there are politico-socio-economic swamps feeding this beast, we will help drain them. Men and women of goodwill in the Arab world, you take on the ideological battles yourselves.
But this is not baksheesh, free money. The Arab world has to earn it.
No transparent and accountable governments, no money. No liberation of women, nothing for health clinics. No bunsen burners and test-tubes in the madrasah, zilch for education.
CHANGE OR DECLINE FURTHER
MESSAGE to ordinary, decent Arabs: This is your chance, folks; force the changes to make a better life; grasp modernity.
Message to oil-rich Arab kingdoms: By Sept 11, 2011, all cars in the US will be battery-powered. We put a man on the moon and brought him back; we can make a battery-powered car to drive from New York to Los Angeles, and back.
So Arab princes, get a life. Teach your peoples to earn a living the old-fashioned way - by working - or you can drink the oil.
Alas, Mr Bush gave no such speech. There is no Powell Plan, only a botched State Department advertising campaign in the Middle East. And there is no battery-powered car, only thirst for more oil which, in part, is driving the US to invade Iraq.
source:
http://straitstimes.asia1.com.sg/commen ... 21,00.html?