You can have the best, you can have the best of what you have, or you can just have not necessarily the best of what is in stock. The choice at present narrows down to the third category.
There are damned lies, there are statistics, and then there are budgets. Add the new ingredients as "speculative" and "projected" - all gains or losses achieve the null hypothesis. Nothing was ever lost, because gains were speculative. A lot is possibly to be gained, simply because losses are the difference between what you project as your ambition, and what you actually achieve. Projections are the gap between what you are, and your karma. Projections are therefore subjective, ideational mirages, and only mislead you. You never had, you have nothing to lose. Now you are a gainer with the first morsel thrown at you! Three cheers for the psychological turnaround!
Some were closer to confessing the truth. The term "feelgood" factor was coined. That is old hat. Now you only talk of "good" - reinforced psychology
“Former Prime Minister Tun Abdullah Ahmad Badawi was so easily fooled in the PKFZ scandal. This includes the Cabinet from Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad’s time. Most of those that were fooled then are still in power including the current prime minister and his deputy,” the PKR president said, referring to Datuk Seri Najib Razak and Tan Sri Muhyiddin Yassin respectively.
Former Transport Minister Tan Sri Chan Kong Choy, who held the post from July 2003 but stepped down prior to the March 2008 election, was charged on Monday with three counts of cheating, totalling RM1.9 billion in the project that may eventually cost the government RM12.5 billion, six times the original estimate.
“How can we allow this group of negligent leaders who have lost RM12 billion to control the country? What is the guarantee that they will not do the same seeing as they are still proud enough to propose a 100-storey building,” Dr Wan Azizah said, referring to the RM5 billion Warisan Merdeka project.
Former MCA deputy president Chan pleaded not guilty to deceiving then-prime minister Abdullah about development and upgrading work at the PKFZ site between 2004 and 2006.
In the first charge, Chan was accused of misleading Abdullah in 2004 into approving Kuala Dimensi Sdn Bhd (KDSB) as the main developer to build up a 1,000-acre piece of land on Pulau Indah at an estimated cost of RM1 billion.
The second charge totalling RM510.38 million concerned more development work in PKFZ in 2005 and that the project was to be financed by government bonds through a public company.
The last charge also concerned infrastructure work in early 2006, amounting to RM335.8 million.
Another former transport minister, Tun Dr Ling Liong Sik, was also hauled up last year over irregularities with the shipping hub project.
The former MCA president was charged last July under section 418 of the Penal Code for misleading the Cabinet in 2002 into agreeing to purchase 999.5 acres of land on Pulau Indah for the PKFZ project.
The PKFZ project was mooted during Dr Ling’s tenure as transport minister and the cost of the project, initially estimated at less than RM2 billion, more than doubled to RM4.6 billion by 2007.
The cost of the project has been further projected to swell to as much as RM12.5 billion due to interest incurred from deferred payments if the trans-shipment hub fails to perform.
Dr Wan Azizah said it was the responsibility of all Malaysians to reject careless leaders to save the country from going bankrupt.
The former president of the Selayang Municipal Council (MPS) was charged in the Sessions Court here this morning with misappropriating RM26,500 from the local council to pay for maintenance work on his own house.
Datuk Bakaruddin Othman, who is now deputy secretary-general (planning and development) in the Federal Territories and Urban Wellbeing Ministry, was accused of abusing his position as MPS president to sign off on the expenses for the work on his Batu Caves home.
He had allegedly committed the act between June 2001 and April 2002 at the MPS office during a meeting of the council’s quotation committee.
Bakaruddin, who was not represented, pleaded not guilty.
Judge Asmadi Hussin granted him bail of RM8,000 in one surety.
The court set the case for mention on April 4 where Bakaruddin will be prosecuted by Datuk Abdul Razak Musa from the Malaysian Anti-Corruption Commission.
If found guilty, he faces a jail sentence of up to 20 years and a fine of at least five times the value of the bribe.
Death, thou shalt die, said the Metaphysical poet John Donne almost 400 years ago. Today, that prophecy seems eerily close to becoming a reality: the death of death itself is being projected as a scientific possibility. A crackpot theory? Perhaps. But a recent edition of Time magazine has made it its cover story. The theme of the article is the growing credence given by the scientific community - spanning computerology and artificial intelligence to genetics and biotechnology - to what is called Singularity: the moment in the foreseeable future (some put the date as 2045) when human beings, with the aid of supra-human machines, will have the power to banish death forever and make themselves immortal.
Two of the leading proponents of Singularity are Raymond Kurzweil, a 62-year-old American computer scientist described by Bill Gates as "the best person i know at predicting the future of artificial intelligence", and British biologist Aubrey de Grey who believes that with the advances made in biotechnology it will soon be possible to rewrite our genetic code so as to reverse the ageing process.
Their core argument is that advances in science, particularly computer science, take place not incrementally but exponentially. Which means that science and technology are not only growing faster and faster, but the rate of acceleration is itself increasing the rate of acceleration: according to one estimate, in 2011 more breakthroughs in scientific research are being made in one hour than in 100 years a century ago.
The first important milestone in the journey to Singularity is the creation of what are called strong artificial intelligence, or AI, machines capable of thinking. Supercomputers like Deep Blue, have been programmed to beat international grandmasters in chess. But no computer, as yet, can replicate the complexity of human consciousness, which includes that infinite hall of infinitely reflecting mirrors that we call consciousness of the self, consciousness of consciousness itself. It is this capacity of human thought to know itself as thought that separates us from the domain of animals. And of machines.
But people like Kurzweil are confident that in a few short years - by 2023, by one estimate - strong artificial intelligence, or super-supercomputers will overtake the human capacity for thought, in not just mathematics but in everything, including the creative arts. When that happens, the super-supercomputers will endlessly replicate themselves in an ever-swifter spiral of evolution.
So, will these super-smart machines become our masters? Or will they, by helping us conquer disease and age, eventually make us immortal by enabling us to transfer our consciousness - our memories, our sense of 'self', our soul, if you like - onto an imperishable hard disk that cocks a snook at death?
Singularity raises a lot of questions. Can already overcrowded Planet Earth endure the burden of an ever-increasing, deathless human population? Is immortal super-humankind destined to colonise the cosmos and, in effect, become God?
But perhaps the most haunting of all questions is whether, along with our mortality, we will also lose our humanness. It is the knowledge of human transience that makes us human: capable of love and sacrifice, joy and sorrow, of responding to the beauty of a sunset or a line of poetry. It is the inevitability of death that makes life taste sweet, nectar in a sieve, as novelist Kamala Markandaya said. Mortality is the price we pay for our humanness. Take away mortality, subtract death, and what do we have? A robot God? A ghost in a deathless machine? According to Singularitists, the choice is ours. Or maybe it isn't. Because the choice has already been made for us by the impending Singularity.
Life goes through many phases, each of which ends to give way to another. We may not realise it then, but later when we join the dots, it is clear how each ending paved the way for a new beginning
Every relationship comes with an expiry date and when it is time for it to end, there are distinct signs that point towards the same. Now, it is another matter whether we choose to heed these or not. Of course, the ending may not necessarily always mean a physical separation, as in the case of blood relationships or a marriage, but definitely a phase ends to enable the start of another.
It is difficult for us to accept endings even though the only certainty about anything in life is the inevitability of its expiry. And so sometimes, even when it stares us in the face, we refuse to accept that a relationship has played itself out. It often happens that one person accepts the finality earlier than the other. This can be a traumatic experience for the one left behind.
Early signs of expiry appear when a relationship starts giving us more stress and pain, than happiness. You may have tried everything and yet not been able to get it back on the footing you desire. You try all the old tricks and yet are not able to bring back the magic of earlier days. And when this starts distressing you so much that it affects your peace of mind and hurts your dignity, it is certainly time to end the relationship.
It is said that we come into each other's lives and strike up relationships when we need to learn certain lessons from each other. Our mutual experiences teach us a lot. When there is nothing more to be learnt, we move on to other people and experiences as life is a constant process of learning. Sometimes, we may do so voluntarily; at other times matters are taken out of our hand and we become mere witnesses or victims of the situation.
Women, it is observed, find it more difficult to let go and walk out of a relationship than men do. This is because, nurturer and preserver that she is, a woman tries to patch things and keep the boat steady before she accepts the inevitable. A man, on the other hand, is quicker to accept the expiry date and finds it a waste of time and energy to hang in there longer. So he cuts his losses as he would with business and walks out. That does not mean that he hurts any less, just that he accepts the inevitable faster.
What is true of relationships is true of other things in life as well. For instance, a job. Nobody may throw you out, nor any circumstances make you particularly uncomfortable, but you may still realise that it is time to walk out of the job you are holding presently. You have learnt what you could here and are raring to go to another place and learn some more. The choice could be yours, or suddenly you may get thrown out!
Life goes through many phases, each of which ends to give way to another. We may not realise it then, but later when we join the dots, it is clear how each ending paved the way for a new beginning, and so life moved on towards its destined goal, with us picking up new experiences and learnings along the way. When the Apple CEO, Steve Jobs, got fired from the company he built, he was stunned, but years later he was to say, "I didn't see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could ever have happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure of myself." In the next five years, he started a company called NeXt and another called Pixar and met the woman he married. And the rest, as they say, is history.
And of course the greatest ending of all is the inevitability of life itself ending in Death. Steve Jobs has been in the news recently with conjectures that he is terminally ill. And I am inspired to quote extensively from the very inspiring and uplifting 2005 Stanford Commencement Speech of this iconic man.
"If you live each day as if it was your last, some day you will most certainly be right," he quoted to great applause. "For the past 33 years I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself if the day were the last in my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today? And when the answer has been ‘No' for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.
"Remembering that I would be dead soon is the most important tool I have encountered to help me make the right choices in life. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose.
"No one wants to die and yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that's as it should be because Death is very likely the single best invention of life. It is life's change agent. It clears up the old to make way for the new.
"Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma, don't let the noise of others' opinions drown your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you want to become. Everything else is secondary."
And so, what's wrong with endings? Nothing if you look at them as new beginnings! And rather than regretting them, get on with the rest of your life!
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