Foreign Policy: Thomas Friedman’s Plan for a Hot, Flat, and Crowded World

One other article I found of interest today, a short interview by Foreign Policy magazine with Tom Friedman, the NY Times columnist and author. Tom is coming out with a new book, and I thought three sections of the interview were worth bringing some more exposure: on American oil "independence" and offshore drilling, on Tom's vision of a "green revolution," and a brief discussion about the possibility of China going green before the U.S. The entire article can be read here.

BTW, that "drill, drill, drill" quotation is a classic: When I hear McCain pounding the table for “drill, drill, drill,” it reminds me of someone pounding the table for IBM Selectric typewriters on the eve of the IT revolution.

Foreign Policy: In his speech to the Democratic National Convention last Thursday, U.S. Presidential candidate Sen. Barack Obama promised, “In 10 years, we will finally end our dependence on oil from the Middle East.” Is that even feasible? Does anyone you talk to believe that’s doable?

Thomas Friedman: Well, if you just talked about oil imports from the Middle East, I think it is feasible. I don’t know exactly how he would want to get there, but I think that it is a feasible goal if you’re just talking about the percentage of our oil that comes from the Middle East.

FP: And what about drilling? Republican presidential candidate Sen. John McCain, his running mate Gov. Sarah Palin, and President George W. Bush are implying that lifting environmental restrictions on drilling is the way to promote energy independence.

TF: Well, I think it’s patent nonsense. No one believes that somehow offshore, there’s enough oil in any near term and even the long term to provide us oil independence. It’s the wrong approach because in a world that’s hot, flat, and crowded, fossil fuels—and particularly crude oil—are going to be expensive and exhausting. Therefore the focus should be on the next great global industry: clean energy technology. When I hear McCain pounding the table for “drill, drill, drill,” it reminds me of someone pounding the table for IBM Selectric typewriters on the eve of the IT revolution.

I’m not against offshore drilling, by the way, because I believe the technology and the safety has improved far beyond where it was back in the 70s, 80s, and 90s, even. What I’m against is making it the centerpiece of our energy policy. If all McCain said was, “Let’s drill, but let’s also throw everything into innovating the next generation of clean-energy technologies,” I’d say, “You’ve got it exactly right, pal.”

FP: Your new book is called Hot, Flat, and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution — and How It Can Renew America. What do you mean by a “green revolution” and how do we get there from here?

TF: The green revolution is about how we produce abundant, cheap, clean, reliable electrons, which are the answer to the big problems we face in the world today. I would point to five problems, and they’re all related: Energy and resource supply and demand, petrodictatorship, climate change, biodiversity loss, and energy poverty. They all have one solution: abundant, cheap, clean, reliable electrons. The search for and the discovery of a source of those electrons is going to be the next great global industry. And I think the country that mounts a revolution to be the leader of that industry is going to be a country whose standard of living is going to improve, whose respect in the world is going to improve, whose air is going to improve, whose innovation is going to improve, and whose national security is going to improve. That’s what this book is about.
Click Here!

I want a green-energy bubble. I want so many people throwing crazy dollars at every idea, in every garage, that we have 100,000 people trying 100,000 things, five of which might work, and two might be the next green Google. But I don’t want a Manhattan Project of 12 people in Los Alamos. I want it to be like the IT revolution: everyone becoming a programmer. Only in this case, it’s everyone becoming a green innovator. What IT was to the 80s and 90s, ET, energy technology, will be to the early 21st century.

FP: What conditions don’t exist right now that could create this bubble?

TF: Three things. One is a price on carbon, a fixed, durable price signal that says, “Carbon is always going to be this price.” Let’s just use a simple example: We put a floor under the price of crude oil that says, “Oil simply will not fall below $110 a barrel. If it does, we’ll tax it up.”

Second, we need to change the bargain we have with our electric and natural gas power utilities. Your dad was right when he came into your room and you’d left the lights on and he said, “What, do you own stock in the utility company?” He was right, because the more you left your lights on, the more money the utility made. And we need to change that bargain—this is already going on in California—so that utilities are paid by how much energy they help you save, not by how much energy they help you consume.

And third, we need a national renewable portfolio standard that says to every utility, “By 2025, you need to produce 30 percent of your electricity by renewable power: wind, solar, biomass, hydro, you name it.”

...

FP: You went to China for the Olympic Games, and I know you’ve been there many times in the past. Do you think China is serious about going green? Is China going to have a green revolution before the United States does?

TF: Every time I go to China, as I say in the book, it always strikes me that people speak with greater ease and breathe with greater difficulty. As the country grows, it gets more integrated with the world, standards of living rise, and people are able to move more and have more personal freedom. I don’t want to exaggerate it, but clearly it’s a more open place.

So, they speak with greater ease but they breathe with greater difficulty. And that’s a real tension. Right now, if you said, “Tom, snapshot today: Where’s China at? OK, choice: More growth or less pollution?” They’re going to go for more growth. Look what happened after the Olympics. They cleaned up Beijing for two weeks by shutting down factories and limiting driving. But as soon as the Olympics were over, they went back to the old system.

But you’re also getting a transition. You’re getting the birth of wind power and solar companies in China, so they’re seeing the market potential. And you’re seeing the rise of an environmental consciousness. The inertia and the momentum of the old, pure GDP system is much stronger than the green GDP system, but there is now a competition between the two.

China is hiding behind the United States, saying, “If the Americans aren’t going to do it, why should we?” When we move they will move, because we define modernity for them. They’ve copied us: our highways, our cars—the whole thing. And when we change, they will change.

The Economist: Faith-Based Finance

This is the second of two articles in this week's (September 4th) Economist about Islamic finance. This article is much shorter, and also easier to digest (even for most Muslims ;) ) than the main article, being more of an introduction to the topic of Islamic financing.

The modern history of Islamic finance is often dated to the 1970s, with the launch of Islamic banks in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. But its roots stretch back 14 centuries. Islamic finance rests on the application of Islamic law, or sharia, whose primary sources are the Qur'an and the sayings of the Prophet Muhammad. Sharia emphasizes justice and partnership. In the world of finance that translates into a ban on speculation (or gharar) and on the charging of interest (riba). The idea of a lender levying a straight interest charge, regardless of how the underlying assets fare in an uncertain world, offends against these principles—though some Muslims dispute this, arguing that the literature in sharia covering business practices is small and that terms such as “usury” and “speculation” are open to interpretation.

Companies that operate in immoral industries, such as gambling or pornography, are also out of bounds, as are companies that have too much borrowing (typically defined as having debt totaling more than 33% of the firm’s stock market value). Such criteria mean that sharia-compliant investors steer clear of highly leveraged conventional banks, a wise choice in recent months.

Despite these prohibitions, Islamic financiers are confident that they can create their own versions of the important bits of conventional finance. The judgment of what is and is not allowed under sharia is made by boards of scholars, many of whom act as a kind of spiritual rating agency, working closely with lawyers and bankers to create instruments and structure transactions that meet the needs of the market without offending the requirements of their faith.

Non-Muslims may find the distinctions between conventional finance and Islamic finance a trifle contrived. An options contract to buy a security at a set price at a date three months hence is frowned upon as speculation. A contract to buy the same security at the same price, with 5% of the payment taken upfront and the balance taken in three months upon delivery, is sharia-compliant. Then again, winning over non-Muslims is not really the point.

There is no ultimate authority for sharia compliance. Some worry that this may hold the industry back. Malaysia has tackled this by creating a national sharia board. Some industry bodies, notably the Accounting and Auditing Organization for Islamic Financial Institutions (AAOIFI) in Bahrain, are working towards common standards. That a few scholars dominate the boards of the big international institutions also helps create consistency. But differences between national jurisdictions — between pious Saudi Arabia and more liberal Malaysia, say, are likely to remain.

Both of these countries feature in the top three markets for Islamic finance, measured by the quantity of sharia-compliant assets (see table). Top is Iran, although international sanctions keep its industry isolated. The Gulf states, awash with liquidity and with a roster of huge infrastructure projects to finance, are the most dynamic markets. Britain is the most developed Western center, although France, with a much larger Muslim population, wants to close the gap.

The Economist: Savings and Souls

The Economist has come out with two articles this week (September 4th) on Islamic finance. Below is the main article, Savings and Souls; I've posted the second article, Faith-Based Finance, separately.

The basic premise of this article is to give a primer about the state of Islamic finance in the world today, focusing on various problems and challenges facing the industry.

To see Islamic finance in action, visit the mutating coastline of the Gulf. Diggers claw sand out of the sea off Manama, Bahrain’s capital, for a series of waterfront developments that are part-funded by Islamic instruments. To the east, Nakheel, a developer that issued the world’s largest Islamic bond (or sukuk) in 2006, is using the money to reorganize the shoreline of Dubai into a mosaic of man-made islands.

Finance is undertaking some Islamic construction of its own. Islamic banks are opening their doors across the Gulf and a new platform for sharia-compliant hedge funds has attracted names such as BlackRock. Western law firms and banks, always quick to sniff out new business, are beefing up their Islamic-finance teams.

Governments are taking notice too. In July Indonesia, the most populous Muslim country, said it would issue the nation’s first sukuk. The British government, which covets a position as the West’s leading center for Islamic finance, is also edging towards issuing a short-term sovereign sukuk. France has begun its own charm offensive aimed at Islamic investors.

Set against ailing Western markets such vigor looks impressive. The oil-fueled liquidity that has pumped up Middle Eastern sovereign-wealth funds is also buoying demand for Islamic finance. Compared with the ethics of some American subprime lending, Islamic finance seems virtuous as well as vigorous. It frowns on speculation and applauds risk-sharing, even if some wonder whether the industry is really doing anything more than mimicking conventional finance and, more profoundly, if it is strictly necessary under Islam (see article).


Sukuks in the souk

As the buzz around the industry grows, so do expectations. The amount of Islamic assets under management stands at around $700 billion, according to the Islamic Financial Services Board, an industry body. Standard & Poor’s, a rating agency, thinks that the industry could control $4 trillion of assets. Others go further, pointing out that Muslims account for 20% of the world’s population, but Islamic finance for less than 1% of its financial instruments—that gap, they say, represents a big opportunity. With tongue partly in cheek, some say that Islamic finance should by rights displace conventional finance altogether. Western finance cannot service capital that wants to find a sharia-compliant home; but Islamic finance can satisfy everyone.

Confidence is one thing, hyperbole another. The industry remains minute on many measures: its total assets roughly match those of Lloyds TSB, Britain’s fifth-largest bank (though some firms that meet sharia-compliant criteria may attract Islamic investors without realizing it). The assets managed by Islamic rules are growing at 10-15% annually—not to be sniffed at, but underwhelming for an industry that attracts so much attention. Most of all, the industry’s expansion is tempered by its need to address the tensions between its two purposes: to serve God and to make as much money as it can.

That is a stiff test. A few devout Muslims, many of them in Saudi Arabia, will pay what Paul Homsy of Crescent Asset Management calls a “piety premium” to satisfy sharia. But research into the investment preferences of Muslims shows that most of them want products that benefit their savings, as well as their souls—rather as ethical investors in the West want funds that do no harm, but are also at least as profitable as other investments.

A combination of ingenuity and persistence has enabled Islamic finance to conquer some of the main obstacles. Take transaction costs which tend to be higher in complex Islamic instruments than in more straightforward conventional ones. Sharia-compliant mortgages are typically structured so that the lender itself buys the property and then leases it out to the borrower at a price that combines a rental charge and a capital payment. At the end of the mortgage term, when the price of the property has been fully repaid, the house is transferred to the borrower. That additional complexity does not just add to the direct costs of the transaction, but can also fall foul of legal hurdles. Since the property changes hands twice in the transaction, an Islamic mortgage is theoretically liable to double stamp duty. Britain ironed out this kink in 2003 but it remains one of the few countries to have done so.

However, just as in conventional finance, as more transactions take place the economies of scale mean that the cost of each one rapidly falls. Financiers can recycle documentation rather than drawing it up from scratch. The contracts they now use for sharia-compliant mortgages in America draw on templates originally drafted at great cost for aircraft leases.

Islamic financiers can also streamline their processes. When Barclays Capital and Shariah Capital, a consultancy, developed the new hedge-fund platform, they had to screen the funds’ portfolios to make sure that the shares they pick are sharia-compliant. That sounds as if it should be an additional cost, but prime brokers already screen hedge funds to make sure that risk concentrations do not build up. The checks they make for their Islamic hedge funds can piggyback on the checks they make for their conventional hedge funds.

Mohammed Amin of PricewaterhouseCoopers, a consulting firm, says the extra transaction costs for a commonly used Islamic financing instrument, called commodity murabaha, total about $50 for every $1m of business. That is small enough to be recouped through efficiencies in other areas, or to be absorbed in lenders’ profit margins. In addition, bankers privately admit that less competition helps keep margins higher than in conventional finance. “Conceptually, Islamic finance should cost more, as it involves more transactions,” says Mr Amin. “The actual cost is tiny and can be lost in the wash.”

The other area of substantive development has been in redefining sharia-compliance. New products require scholars to cast sharia in fresh, and occasionally uncomfortable, directions. Some investors express surprise at the very idea of Islamic hedge funds, for example, because of prohibitions in sharia on selling something that an investor does not actually own.

“You encounter a wall of skepticism whenever you do something new,” says Eric Meyer of Shariah Capital. “It is no different in Islamic finance.” He says that it took eight long years to bring his idea of an Islamic hedge-fund platform to fruition, applying a technique called arboon to ensure that investors, in effect, take an equity position in shares before they sell them short. Industry insiders describe an iterative process, in which scholars, lawyers and bankers work together to understand new instruments and adapt them to the requirements of sharia.

Differences in interpretation of sharia between countries can still hinder the economies of scale. Moreover, the scholars can sometimes push back. Earlier this year, the chairman of the Accounting and Auditing Organization for Islamic Financial Institutions (AAOIFI), an industry body, excited controversy by criticizing a common form of sukuk issuance that guarantees the price at which the issuer will buy back the asset underpinning the transaction, thereby enabling investors’ capital to be repaid. Such behavior contravened an AAOIFI standard demanding that assets be bought back at market prices, in line with the sharia principle of risk-sharing. The sukuk market has enjoyed years of rapid growth (see chart), but early signs are that the AAOIFI judgment has dented demand.

Although Islamic finance has done well to reduce its costs and broaden its product range, it has yet to clear plenty of other hurdles. Scholars are the industry’s central figures, but recognized ones are in short supply. A small cadre of 15-20 scholars repeatedly crops up on the boards of Islamic banks that do international business. That partly reflects the role, which demands a knowledge of Islamic law and Western finance, as well as fluency in Arabic and English. It also reflects the comfort that this handful of recognized names brings to investors and customers.

There are plenty of initiatives to nurture more scholars but for the moment, the stars are pressed for time. That can be a problem when banks are chasing their verdict on bespoke transactions. It takes a scholar about a day to wade through the documentation connected with a sukuk issue, for example. But scholars are not always immediately available. “You’ve got to have the scholar’s number programmed into your mobile phone and be able to get hold of them,” says a banker in the Gulf. “That is real competitive advantage.”

Assets are another bottleneck. The ban on speculation means that Islamic transactions must be based on tangible assets, such as commodities, buildings or land. Observers say that exotic derivatives in intangibles such as weather or terrorism risk could not have an Islamic equivalent. But in the Middle East, at least, the supply of assets is limited. “Lots of companies in the Gulf are young and don’t have assets such as buildings to use in transactions,” says Geert Bossuyt of Deutsche Bank. This limits the scope for securitization, a modern financing technique that is backed by assets and is thus seen by sharia scholars as authentically Islamic. There are not enough properties to bundle into securities.

Governments have more assets to play with. The Indonesians have approved the use of up to $2 billion of property owned by the finance ministry in their planned sukuk issuance later this year. But oil-rich governments in the Gulf have little need to issue debt when they are flush with cash. That is a problem. Sovereign debt would establish benchmarks off which other issues can be priced. It would also add to the depth of the market, which would help solve another difficulty: liquidity.

It may seem odd to worry about liquidity when lots of Muslim countries are flush with cash, but many in Islamic finance put liquidity at the top of their watchlist. The chief concern is the mismatch between the duration of banks’ liabilities and their assets. The banks struggle to raise long-term debt. In a youthful industry, their credit histories are often limited; they also lack the sort of inventory of assets that corporate sukuk issuers have.


Desert liquidity

As a result, Islamic banks depend on short-term deposit funding, which, as Western banks know all too well, can disappear very rapidly. “Lots of assets are generally of longer term than most deposits,” says Khairul Nizam of AAOIFI. “Banks have to manage this funding gap carefully.” If there were a liquidity freeze like the one that struck Western banks a year ago, insiders say that the damage among Islamic banks would be greater.

There are initiatives to develop a sharia-compliant repo market but for the time being the banks have only limited scope for getting hold of money fast. Loans and investments roll over slowly. The lack of sharia-compliant assets and a tendency for Islamic investors to buy and hold their investments have stunted the secondary market. The shortest-term money-management instruments available today are inflexible. Cash reserves are high, but inefficient. Western banks with Islamic finance units, or “windows”, are just as troubled by tight liquidity as purely Islamic institutions are: their sharia-compliant status requires them to hold assets and raise funds separately from their parent banks.

There are other sources of danger, too. Because Islamic banks face constraints on the availability and type of instruments they can invest in, their balance-sheets may concentrate risk more than those of conventional banks do. The industry’s ability to steer its way through stormy waters is largely untested, although Malaysian banks do have memories of the Asian financial crisis in the 1990s to draw on.

None of these tensions need derail the growth of Islamic finance just yet. There is plenty of demand, whether from oil-rich investors, the faithful Muslim minorities in Western countries or the emerging middle classes in Muslim ones. There is lots of supply, in the form of infrastructure projects that need to be financed, Western borrowers looking for capital and ambitious rulers eager to set up their own Islamic-finance hubs. The industry is innovative; new products keep expanding the range of sharia-compliant instruments. And as in conventional finance, the economics of the Islamic kind improve as it gains scale.

But further growth itself contains a threat. The AAOIFI ruling on sukuk earlier this year neatly captured the contradictory pressures on the industry. On the one hand, bankers are worried that the narrow enforcement of sharia standards is liable to stifle growth; on the other some observers fear that Islamic finance is becoming so keen to drum up business that its products, with all their ingenuity, are designed to evade strict sharia standards. This presents a dilemma. If the industry introduces too many new products, cynics will argue that sharia is being twisted for economic ends—the scholars are being paid for their services, after all. But if it fails to innovate, the industry may look too medieval to play a full part in modern finance.

Balancing these imperatives will become even harder as competition grows fiercer. Anouar Hassoune of Moody’s, a credit-rating agency, believes that unscrupulous newcomers could harm the reputation of the entire industry, “like the space shuttle undone by something the size of a 50 cent coin”. Islamic finance serves two masters: faith and economics. The success of the industry depends on satisfying both, even if the price of that is a bit more inefficiency and a bit less growth.

What Do You Talk About?

What do you talk about when you have nothing to say? What do you talk about when you cannot explain the last eight years of failure?

In the meantime, Failin' Palin's selection brought in a record $10 million dollars to the Obama campaign in one day.

HT: WTF Is It Now?!?

Bedtime Music: The Who - Who are You

Milady is a rabid fan of the three CSI TV series, yet she's not really familiar with any of The Who's music. So it's sort of natural that I should look for a video from one of the three theme songs; in this case, Who are You, which is used for the Las Vegas CSI series. What's surprising about this song is that, despite its strong popularity, it only peaked at a mere #14 when it was released back in 1978. Strange.

Bedtime Music: Van Halen - Why Can't This Be Love

Well, we'll try to resume our series as best we can, insha'allah. :)

I really like Van Halen, both during the David Lee Roth and Sammy Hagar eras, but trying to find a music video or concert footage that's "halal" from the DLR era is really difficult. So, we'll take this clip of the single Why Can't This Be Love, from the 1986 release 5150. This concert was filmed in Toronto for the 1995 Balance tour.

"It's over."

Mike Murphy: You know, because I come out of the blue swing state governor world: Engler, Whitman, Tommy Thompson, Mitt Romney, Jeb Bush. I mean, these guys -- this is how you win a Texas race, just run it up. And it's not gonna work. And --

Peggy Noonan: It's over.

Mike Murphy: Still McCain can give a version of the Lieberman speech to do himself some good.

Chuck Todd: I also think the Palin pick is insulting to Kay Bailey Hutchinson, too.

Peggy Noonan: Saw Kay this morning.

CT: Yeah, she's never looked comfortable about this --

MM: They're all bummed out.

CT: Yeah, I mean is she really the most qualified woman they could have turned to?

Peggy Noonan: The most qualified? No! I think they went for this -- excuse me-- political bullshit about narratives --

CT: Yeah they went to a narrative.

MM: I totally agree.

Peggy Noonan: Every time the Republicans do that, because that's not where they live and it's not what they're good at, they blow it.

MM: You know what' sreally the worst thing about it? The greatness of McCain is no cynicism, and this is cynical.

CT: This is cynical, and as you called it, gimmicky.

MM: Yeah.

For more, see Juan Cole, Think Progress, and Crooks & Liars.

CNN: Dangerous Ground

CNN Int'l showed an excerpt of a longer documentary last night, entitled Dangerous Ground, about the tense relations between Australia's Muslim community vs. the non-Muslim population. Much of the excerpt focused on the feeling of alienation Muslims felt, especially the youth, when faced with the Islamophobic behavior of many Australians.

Sure, we have racists. If you call it racist, not accepting a community that also happens to... they, they've got terrorists amongst them. OK? We can't say they haven't. They have! If we let 'em in here, they want to be here because they can go on hiding in their country-little farmhouses.

The documentary highlighted a number of recent incidents, such as the Cronulla riots of December 2005 and the controversial decision last year to deny construction of the Islamic school in the Sydney suburb of Camden. Some of the more level heads presented in the documentary were the Australian police, who are starting to reject the "you're either with us or against us" rhetoric in favor of community policing, and the Global Terrorism Research Centre at Monash University, who are recognizing the need for Australian Muslims to remain involved with the greater Australian society.

The problem is that there have been a number of cases where Australian Muslims have faced various barriers, not just by ordinary Australians who may spout Islamophobic and racist speech toward individual Muslims, but by various government bodies who have rejected various Muslim groups' requests: a youth center application being denied, a boxing gymnasium run by a Muslim being told to vacate their premises, and two school applications (one being the Camden school) being denied. The irony and disgust about the last is that one school's application was denied by a town council that, on the same night, also approved the expansion of a local brothel.

Based on my watching of the excerpt, I don't have high hopes for an improvement between non-Muslim Australians and the Muslim community there. The larger problem, IMO, is the racist and xenophobic attitude of the Australian community. I've seen a lot of people argue that Muslims need to become more integrated into the local community, but when the larger community continues to build walls and shut doors in the faces of Muslims, I don't see how integration can be achieved. Non-Muslims need to realize that we're not going away, and that the problem is also theirs.

From the documentary's reporter, Sally Neighbour:

We set out to do this story after hearing anecdotal accounts of a rising sense of alienation and resentment among young Australian Muslim men, a result of the fallout from September 11 and the Bali bombings, and the subsequent "war on terror."

Their typical experience is being yelled at in the street: "Go back to where you came from. We don't want you here."

But the fact is 40 percent of Australian Muslims were born here. They have nowhere else to go.

I felt this story was important, not just because everyone deserves to feel at home in the country of their birth, but because I know from my own research on terrorism that alienation is a key factor in the evolution of disillusioned individuals toward terrorism.

The first obstacle we faced in making the program was getting anyone to talk to us. Muslim groups and communities are deeply suspicious and resentful toward the media, which they feel has stigmatised them.

Many groups and individuals we approached refused to co-operate, out of (an often legitimate) fear that they would be typecast as "the bad guys" or potential terrorists.

Thankfully some of them decided it was worth taking the risk, in order to have their say.

Another difficulty was distilling the historic and political complexities of the current global Islamist insurgency into a 45-minute television program. We think the results are revealing and disturbing.

The following two video clips are from the documentary. The first is from CNN; there's a second part, but I was unable to get the proper embedding code from their website.



This video clip was taken from Youtube, which has just this ten-minute excerpt. Hopefully, both of these will give an indication of what the documentary is like.



The entire video can be watched (for a £1 price) here.

Juneau

From the party that gives you gross hypocrisy about "family values"...


HT: FrostFireZoo

Ramadan Mubarak!

I wrote this as a diary for Street Prophets, and thought I would repost it here. It's more "educational" than what I might normally post on this blog but, then, the intended audience was for non-Muslims who may not know much about Ramadan.

Once again, the fast begins. Today, Monday the First, in case you didn't know, starts the Islamic month of Ramadan. This is the ninth year I've fasted during Ramadan since my reversion to Islam; as a result, the experience isn't anything new to me now. I'm used to the hunger and thirst that can develop (not that it has for me as I write this, nine hours after I began fasting this morning). In fact, Ramadan, for me, isn't really about the fasting; it's about trying to be a better Muslim in my daily life.

Today, I thought I'd give a basic rundown about Ramadan this year and what I and my fellow Muslims will do in the average day.

First, Ramadan runs for an entire lunar month, from the sighting of the first sliver of the new moon (which should have happened yesterday) through the sighting of the first sliver of next month's new moon. That, at least, is how it goes around most of the world. Here in SE Asia, due to the heavy overcast that is frequently a daily occurrence, we rely upon a counting method that predetermines when the moon should be spotted every month. As a result, here in S'pore, Ramadan started today, on the first, and ends on the thirtieth, insha'allah.

Muslims fast all day, from the crack of dawn through sunset, neither eating, drinking, smoking, nor having any sexual activity through that time. In S'pore, we begin fasting an additional ten minutes in the morning, on the theory that any last remaining food or drink in our mouths will be swallowed prior to the official start of the fasting period. Thus, I began fasting at 5:33 am this morning, with the crack of dawn starting ten minutes later, at 5:43. This is the time when the dawn prayers (fajr) starts, so I did my ablutions (wudu) and prayer (salat) before going back to bed. (I had a rough night last night; newborn baby, ya know.) I woke back up this morning to a dry taste in my mouth, but nothing worse than that. Of course, we must take any medicine and brush our teeth before the fasting starts, which I did this morning.

Now it's almost mid-afternoon, but we don't break our fast until sunset tonight; locally, that's 7:09 pm. So, today's fast will be for a total of 13 hours, 36 minutes. One of the joys of living near the equator is that the length of day remains relatively the same from month to month; we don't suffer like some people do in higher latitudes, especially in those times near a solstice (which is what it was like about ten years ago). Because Ramadan falls this year during the time of a solstice, everyone worldwide should have relatively equal fasting periods.

Later tonight, Milady, our maid and I will break our fast, insha'allah, with what is known as the iftar meal. Iftar can be very simple affairs, but can also be sumptuous banquets. It depends upon the family. A lot of people eat prepared meals either because they don't want to cook during the day or perhaps because they've gone to a local masjid and eaten there prior to doing their maghrib (evening) prayers. A lot of people also try to help the needy during this time. Zakat (alms) is required sometime during the year, but many Muslims pay their zakat during Ramadan. Usually, zakat is paid with currency, but some people may also pay their zakat in kind, especially with food. One Muslim blogger has discovered that the price of rice has skyrocketed and worries, quite rightly, about well the poor may be able to support themselves.

Before bed, many Muslims go to additional prayers, done only during the month of Ramadan, known as tarawih (tara-wee). These prayers may be performed at a masjid, or at home. In S'pore, many people do tarawih prayers on the void decks of housing blocks because the masajid are otherwise overflowing with people. During the tarawih prayers, Muslims also listen to a recitation of the Qur'an where one-thirtieth of the Qur'an is recited every day. In this way, the entire Qur'an is recited in the month of Ramadan.

What McCain Really Thinks About Palin

John McCain's choice of Sarah Palin for Vice President is the stupidest political decision I've ever come across. It almost makes George H.W. Bush's decision to pick Dan Quayle look like an enlightened choice. Seriously, do you want a complete unknown to become the next president should McCain win the election and become incapacitated in some manner?

Bedtime Music: U2 - New Year's Day

Unlike Loverboy and REO Speedwagon, bands whose music I enjoy but never bought their albums (despite wanting to), U2 is one of those bands I never wanted to buy their albums. (The same with Led Zeppelin.) Don't get me wrong, U2 and Zep are great bands and I enjoy listening to their songs on the radio. I just never felt compelled to buy their music; my album collection didn't feel "incomplete" without them.

Anyway, of all U2's music that I do like, I enjoy their earliest music the best. This particular song, New Year's Day, came from their 1983 album, War, and was inspired by the Polish Solidarity movement (Solidarność).

Bedtime Music: Toto - Africa

Another fantastic album was Toto's 1982 release, Toto IV. The album produced three hits (although I don't think there's a single song on the album that I don't love), including the band's only #1 hit, Africa.

Interestingly enough, despite the enormous success of this particular song:

A quote from the second verse was voted the sixth worst lyric ever, in a poll for the BBC.

The wild dogs cry out in the night
As they grow restless longing for some solitary company
I know that I must do what's right
Sure as Kilimanjaro rises like Olympus above the Serengeti

In case you didn't know, the band broke up earlier this year, in June, when Steve Lukather announced that he was quitting the band permanently and the band was dissolving.

Bedtime Music: Supertramp - The Logical Song

I haven't had much time to do any blogging in the past month due to the birth of A'ishah and then a thorough cleaning of the apartment before Milady and A'ishah returned home. As a result, my three regular series of posts (Bedtime Music, Drum Corps Saturday and Movie Sunday) went on a temporary hiatus. In fact, if you'll notice, the last Bedtime Music post was published on July 18th, which was the day A'ishah was born - I had set that up to be posted for that night, but haven't had the chance to prepare any more posts since then. Be that as it may, I hope to resume all three series now, and I start tonight by resuming with my series of music videos, the theme of which no one has still guessed.

This particular song, The Logical Song by Supertramp, is a long-time personal favorite. Released in March 1979 on their #1 (US; #3 UK) album, Breakfast in America, I became really familiar with this song in the summer of '79 when I worked as a lifeguard at an outdoor public swimming pool and the staff played the radio on a loudspeaker system all day long. I rather enjoy the song now, though, for its political commentary, the contrast between "liberalism" (such as it's presented in the song) vs. "conservatism." Unfortunately, I've found Roger Hodgson's description of conservatism to be all too true.

A'ishah @ 1 Month

It's hard to believe, but A'ishah is 38 days old today (a little over five weeks). Both she and Milady moved home recently after spending a month at Milady's parents' flat. (I believe we picked up that idea from a comment at Izzy Mo's blog.) Anyway, here's the little darling asleep on the couch as we cleaned our place for a baby shower:


And now she's just starting to wake up from her nap. (This picture and the next were taken by my bro-in-law, Du@n.)


Yeeaaaahhh! Get that thing outta my face!


This next picture was taken late at night recently before A'ishah's midnight feeding. (I normally feed A'ishah around midnight, while Milady does the 4 am and 8 am feedings. More often than not, A'ishah's playful at that time of night, and I don't get to bed till 1:30 or 2:00 am, when she finally falls back asleep. Of course this has completely screwed up my sleep schedule.) Anyway, just before feeding, I was struck by the whiteness of the scene, yet I didn't want to use the flash for fear of waking A'ishah up. So the only lighting here was a halogen lamp on the other side of the room, next to a wooden bookcase, which gave this picture a brownish tone.


One more pic, taken by Milady, who wanted to thank my sister, EFva, for the outfit A'ishah's wearing in the photo:

Musings on BSG

For the fun of it, I thought I'd write down some thoughts about the "reimagined" Battlestar Galactica (BSG), a series I only recently got the chance to start watching (due to the fact that Singapore TV started airing these episodes for the first time only a few months ago... and despite the fact that the series has been playing for several years in the US). In that regard, what I have to say may very well be wrong; I've not quite watched all of the first season, nor have I seen the miniseries. However, I have relied a lot on the well-written Battlestar Wiki and even the Youtube video covering the first three seasons has helped to make sense out of the series. But, in this diary, I'm interested in addressing a few specific issues.



Whom do you identify with more, the Cylons or the Humans?
One of the more interesting twists in the series is that humanity is made up of polytheists, whereas the Cylons are mostly monotheists (with a sprinkling of atheists among them, such as Number One and (perhaps) pantheists, such as Number Two). One of the more "Muslim" of the Cylons is Number Three, aka D'Anna Biers, played by Lucy Lawless. In the episode Exodus, Part II, Number Three said, "[There is] no other god but God." That is certainly close enough to the first half of the shahadah, "I testify that there is no God but God..." But are the Cylons muslim (little "m," as opposed to capital "M," which they certainly are not)? I don't know.

Why aren't the Cylons "Muslim?"
While I identify more with the Cylons, perhaps, due to their monotheism, one very significant problem I have with them in the series is their attempted genocide upon humanity. In the Qur'an, Allah (swt) makes it abundantly clear that He does not love aggressors (e.g., 2:190). But, was the surprise assault on Humanity aggression? Were the Cylons being oppressed? "...for tumult and oppression are worse than slaughter..." (2:191). These are questions I don't know the answers to, nor have I seen any definitive answers.

What's the Cylons' "plan?"
In the page at Battlestar Wiki on the Cylon's religion, there's a quotation that I found of interest:

The Cylons, seeing themselves as mankind's children, believe they cannot not truly come into their own until the human race is gone. The logical conclusion they reach is that they must commit genocidal "parenticide" in order to evolve and mature ("Torn" Podcast, Act 2).

This, I think may have been the original "plan." However, between the realization among some of the Cylons that the genocide and occupation of the Colonial planets was wrong (sinful) and their continuing work to create a Cylon-Human hybrid child and (later) the Cylon-Cylon child, I think the plan metamorphizes into one of assimilation. If it's now possible for a child to be born of a Cylon and Human parent, what ultimate difference then is a Cylon from a Human? In this respect, I wonder if the story line will resemble the assimilation of the Honored Matres by the Bene Gesserit in Frank Herbert's novel, Chapterhouse: Dune.

Who do you think is the last, unrevealed Cylon model?
I've read some of the speculation as to who might be the fifth of the "Final Five." Personally, I still think that it's probably Gaius Baltar, although (apparently) he's been ruled out due to his appearance in a picture taken for Entertainment Weekly called The Last Supper.






Cross-posted on Street Prophets.

Pop vs. Soda

One of the blogs that I have on my RSS reader is Strange Maps, which is not so much devoted to "strange" maps as it is to unusual maps. This being an interesting map, IMO.


In 1996, the Journal of English Linguistics published an article (Soda or Pop?, #24, 1996) and the above map by Luanne von Schneidemesser, PhD in German linguistics and philology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and senior editor of the Dictionary of American Regional English. The article shows the regional variation in American English of the names given to that type of drink as of the mid 90s.

The reason I find this of interest is that this topic was the subject of much debate when I was a teenager. :) In the fall of 1977, the drum corps I was marching with at the time (the Mark Twain Cadets) merged with another corps sixty miles to our east (the Grenadiers of Broome County, NY) to form a new corps (the Empire State Express) that I marched with in the summer of '78.

Being typical teenagers, we all loved our soft drinks, except that we discovered there was a significant difference between the two sides of the corps: all the ex-Cadets called pop "pop" (as I still do) and all the ex-Grenadiers called pop "soda." And that was just something we had the most difficult time getting over. What do you call a soft drink? Is it pop or soda (or some other word)? And what I find extremely interesting about this map is that it shows exactly why the two corps could not agree on such a trivial matter. The county I grew up in, where the Cadets were located, is the furthest southeast in New York (along the Pennsylvania border) of the blue counties where people say "pop" (in the 50-80% range). And the Grenadiers came from two counties over to the east along the Pennsy border, which is an 80-100% "soda" county. And I never knew until now that my county was literally on the border of that great northern swath of "pop" drinkers that extends all the way from central New York to the Pacific, and from the Canadian border down south to roughly the latitude of 37° North (i.e., the southern border of the states of Virginia, Kentucky, Kansas, Colorado and Utah).

So for the entire summer, whenever we'd travel to some city or town for a parade or competition, there was this running joke in the corps: "Hey, let's see what the local people call it, soda or pop." And as you can see, whenever we were in the eastern half of New York or Pennsylvania (or, later that summer, Massachusetts), they called it "soda." And when we traveled to the western halves of New York and Pennsylvania (and Ohio), people called it "pop." (BTW, we corps members were also warned prior to our trip to Lynn, Massachusetts that the people around Boston called pop "tonic," as is mentioned in the last bullet point below.)

coke: this generic term for soft drinks predominates throughout the South, New Mexico, central Indiana and in a few other single counties in Nevada, Utah and Wyoming. ‘Coke’ obviously derives from Coca-Cola, the brand-name of the soft drink originally manufactured in Atlanta (which explains its use as a generic term for all soft drinks in the South).

pop: dominates the Northwest, Great Plains and Midwest. The world ‘pop’ was introduced by Robert Southey, the British Poet Laureate (1774-1843), to whom we also owe the word ‘autobiography’, among others. In 1812, he wrote: A new manufactory of a nectar, between soda-water and ginger-beer, and called pop, because ‘pop goes the cork’ when it is drawn. Even though it was introduced by a Poet Laureate, the term ‘pop’ is considered unsophisticated by some, because it is onomatopaeic.

soda: prevalent in the Northeast, greater Miami, the area in Missouri and Illinois surrounding St Louis and parts of northern California. ‘Soda’ derives from ‘soda-water’ (also called club soda, carbonated or sparkling water or seltzer). It’s produced by dissolving carbon dioxide gas in plain water, a procedure developed by Joseph Priestly in the latter half of the 18th century. The fizziness of soda-water caused the term ‘soda’ to be associated with later, similarly carbonated soft drinks.

Other, lesser-used terms include ‘dope’ in the Carolinas and ‘tonic’ in and around Boston, both fading in popularity. Other generic terms for soft drinks outside the US include ‘pop’ (Canada), ‘mineral’ (Ireland), ‘soft drink’ (New Zealand and Australia). The term ‘soft drink’, finally, arose to contrast said beverages with hard (i.e. alcoholic) drinks.

Death Star Over San Francisco

Awesome!


HT: IZ Reloaded

Monkey Off Their Backs

Congratulations to Singapore for winning their first Olympic medal since 1960. Table tennis players Feng Tianwei, Li Jia Wei and Wang Yue Gu lost to the Chinese team tonight for the gold medal, but I'm sure the country is rather happy at the outcome all the same. The last person to win an Olympic medal for Singapore was Tan Howe Liang, who won a silver medal in weightlifting back in 1960, at the Rome games. The country had become rather desperate in its efforts to win something after 48 years. (American sports fans may be able to relate if you're a fan of the New York Rangers, who finally won the Stanley Cup in 1994 after a 54 year drought, the Boston Red Sox, who won their first World Series in 86 years in 2004, or (for the truly diehard fans) the Chicago Cubs, who haven't won a World Series since 1908.)

Part of the problem has been that Singapore doesn't have much of a sports culture. If you compare the medal count to national populations, some countries with smaller populations, like Croatia, Mongolia, Armenia and New Zealand, have more medals than Singapore (two, two, five and five, respectively). So Singapore is definitely slacking. The good news is that there have been some steps taken by the government and the media to improve the situation, but progress is very, very slow.

Now, when I wrote the title above, "Monkey Off Their Backs," one "back" is that of the government, which has been working to improve Singapore's sports culture. But the other "back" is that of Tan Howe Liang himself, the 1960 silver medal winner. Now 75, Mr. Tan is glad that someone else has won a medal:

'Every four years when the Olympics come around, many people look for me. Aiyah, I've got tired of it.

'Mind you, my achievement came so very long ago, and I have to repeat the Rome story again and again. It's time for others to take the spotlight.'

So, congratulations once again to Singapore; insha'allah, the women can bring in one or two more medals with the individual table tennis play.

Daisy

George Carty wrote as a comment on another post: "I almost wonder if Obama could do good by nicking LBJ's "Daisy Girl" attack ad. :)" My response: Excellent idea! Seriously, in this presidential election, is there any real difference between Goldwater in 1964 vs. McCain today? I think not!

Barackrolling

File this under "Someone's got waaay too much time on their hands." :) Barack "singing" Rick Astley's Never Gonna Give You Up:


HT: Juan Cole

Handphone A'ishah

A'ishah's definitely in her colic season, and Daddy spent a fair amount of yesterday afternoon walking back and forth in the corridor outside the flat, humming old drum corps songs as he tried to get her to fall asleep. In the meantime, I thought I'd download three photos from my handphone that I took of A'ishah.


This is the first picture taken of A'ishah. As you can see, the image is rather crappy (the "joy" of a handphone camera). :P The photo was taken about ten minutes after she was born, when they had wheeled her into a small family reception room for me to see her.


And, as you might expect, this is the second photo taken of A'ishah. I've been using this photo as my handphone's "wallpaper" for the past few weeks. When A'ishah was born, certain parts of her face were rather puffy. In these two pictures, you can see that her lips were quite puffy; however, in a few days, all of the excess fluids drained away and now her lips are normal looking.

After I took this photo, I spent the next five and a half minutes videotaping her before the nurse wheeled A'ishah away.


This last photo was taken about two weeks after A'ishah was born. We had needed to go to one of the local polyclinics to have a blood test taken for A'ishah's jaundice level. She was sleeping in her carseat and I thought she looked adorable like that, so I used the only camera I had with me (the handphone) to take her picture with.

Special note to my sister EFva: Thank you so much for the package; we got it yesterday. Milady was a bit shocked that you had wrapped everything up individually, and then almost had an overdose of sweetness and cuteness. ("Oh, this is so sweet! Oh, this is so cute!" :) ) We were both very, very pleased with your gifts. Thank you so much!

Do You Want "Other" Wars?

BUSH: The danger to our country is grave. The danger to our country is growing. The Iraqi regime possesses biological and chemical weapons.

[VARIOUS SPEAKERS]: Weapons of mass destruction, weapons of mass destruction, nuclear weapons, weapons of mass destruction.

BUSH: Well, our people are gonna find out the truth. And the truth will say that this intelligence is good intelligence. There's no doubt in my mind.

RUMSFELD: There are a lot of people who lie and get away with it, and that's just a fact.

[Scary music, flag-draped coffins, ugly statistics, injured Iraqi civilians, more ugly statistics.]

BUSH [joking in front of an audience]: Those weapons of mass destruction have got to be somewhere. [Audience laughs.]

BUSH: Nope, no weapons over there! [Audience roars with laughter.]

QUESTIONER: President Bush has talked about our staying in Iraq for 50 years--

McCAIN: Maybe a hundred.

BUCHANAN: There's no doubt John McCain is going to be a war president. Can anyone see John McCain as sort of a peactime Calvin Coolidge president? It's preposterous! His whole career is wrapped up in the military, national security; he's in Putin's face, he's threatening the Iranians, we're gonna be in Iraq a hundred years.

RITTER: The Bush Administration has built a new generation of nuclear weapons that we call "usable" nukes. [TEXT: Cochran statement.] And they have a nuclear, you know, posture now which permits the pre-emptive use of nuclear weapons in a non-nuclear environment if the Commander-in-Chief deems US forces to be at significant risk.

If we start bombing Iran, I'm telling you right now it's not gonna work

McCAIN: Bomb Iran? Heh-heh. [singing, to tune of Beach Boys' "Barbara Ann"] Bomb, bomb, bomb, anyway, heh-heh.

RITTER: My concern is that we will use nuclear weapons to break the backbone of Iranian resistance, and it may not work. But what it will do is this: it will unleash the nuclear genie. So to all those Americans out there tonight who say, "You know what? Taking on Iran's a good thing,"

McCAIN: My friends, I know how to handle the Iranians, and I'll handle them.

RITTER: And if we use nuclear weapons, the genie ain't going back in the bottle until an American city is taken out by an Islamic weapon in retaliation. So tell me, you want to go to war with Iran: Pick your city. Pick your city. Tell me which one you want gone. Seattle? LA? Boston? New York, Miami? Pick one! Because at least one's going.

And that's something we should all think about before we march down this path of insanity [repeating "insanity" as pictures flash on screen.]

MIKA BRZEZINSKI READING WES CLARK ARTICLE: "The truth is that, in national security terms, he's largely untested and untried" -- John McCain, this is what you're talking about -- "he's never been responsible for policy formulation. He's never had leadership in a crisis or in anything larger than his own element on an aircraft carrier or in managing his own Congressional staff.

It's not clear that this is going to be the strong suit that he thinks it is. McCain's weakness is that he's always been for the use of force, force, and more force. In my experience, the only time to use force is as a last resort. When he talks about throwing Russia out of the G8 and makes ditties about bombing Iran, he betrays a disrespect for the office of the Presidency."

McCAIN: And I'm sorry to tell ya that we're gonna be in further wars. . . . And we were in two wars today, combatting it, and there are other places in the world where we may have to. These young people that are in this crowd, my friends, I'm gonna be asking you to serve.

There's gonna be more wars. There's gonna be more wars. We're in a greater struggle that is gonna be with us for the rest of this century.

It's a tough war we're in. It's not gonna be over right away. There's gonna be other wars. I'm sorry to tell you, there's gonna be other wars.

[Scary music, scary statistics, scary pictures.]

BUCHANAN: "He will make Cheney look like Gandhi."

HT: NWTerriD at Daily Kos

Pax Singaporeana: Why They Hate Singapore

Straits Times political editor Chua Lee Hoong has an interesting op-ed today about the discomfort Westerners have with Singapore. As a PR who's lived in Singapore for almost six years now, I've come across several of these Westerners online, people who are upset with the laws that govern social behavior here. I'm not so sure Westerners are as upset with the health and wealth of Singapore's economy as they are with that of China's, but their dislike for the social behavior laws here is fairly strong.

The thing is, I don't have much of a problem with how society is governed here. As I've argued a number of times on my blog, governments have a trade off to make: either deregulate social behavior and accept a society that may be more chaotic, or regulate social behavior to some degree in order to create a harmonious society. Personally, I see the wisdom of the latter strategy. Pax Singaporeana is a value I cherish; its benefits certainly outweigh its costs.

As for the issue of economic success being tied to the model of an "authoritarian" state (which I don't consider Singapore to be), as opposed to being tied solely to "Western-style 'liberal' democracy," that should be obvious to any student of international management. The fact of the matter is that almost any country that sets up pro-economic growth policies upon a solid legal framework (the rule of law) and adheres to both should do well in the long-run. And this is why, IMO, "communist" countries like China and Vietnam have been doing well economically over the past 20 years. Westerners (especially Americans) often suffer from this paradigm paralysis, their inability to accept that other paradigms may be just as good (or even better) than their own.

SINGAPORE is small enough to be a suburb in Beijing, but it has something in common with the mammoth People's Republic. The little red dot and Red China are both countries the West loves to hate.

There are those who wish bad things to happen to the Beijing Olympics. Likewise, there are those who have had it in for the Lion City for years.

What's eating them? The easy answer is that both China and Singapore are authoritarian states. The freedoms taken for granted in the West - freedom of speech and assembly - come with more caveats in these two places.

But things are not so simple. There are plenty of authoritarian states around, but most do not attract as much attention as Singapore and China.

The real sin: Singapore and China are examples of countries which are taking a different route to development, and look to be succeeding.

Success grates, especially when it cocks a snook at much-cherished liberal values.

As Madam Yeong Yoon Ying, press secretary to Minister Mentor Lee Kuan Yew, said last month: 'Singapore is an example to other countries of how the free market plus the rule of law, and stable macro-economic policies, can lead to progress and success, but without Western-style 'liberal' democracy.'

Don't believe her words? Read these lines from British journalist John Kampfner, writing in The Guardian last month, lamenting the spread of what he calls the Singapore model.

"Why is it that a growing number of highly-educated and well-traveled people are willing to hand over several of their freedoms in return for prosperity or security? This question has been exercising me for months as I work on a book about what I call the 'pact.'

"The model for this is Singapore, where repression is highly selective. It is confined to those who take a conscious decision openly to challenge the authorities. If you do not, you enjoy freedom to travel, to live more or less as you wish, and - perhaps most important - to make money. Under Lee Kuan Yew, this city-state built on a swamp has flourished economically.

"I was born in Singapore and have over the years been fascinated by my Chinese Singaporean friends. Doctors, financiers and lawyers, they have studied in London, Oxford, Harvard and Sydney. They have traveled across all continents; they are well-versed in international politics, but are perfectly content with the situation back home. I used to reassure myself with the old certainty that this model was not applicable to larger, more diverse states. I now believe this to be incorrect.

"Provincial governments in China send their brightest officials to Singapore to learn the secrets of its 'success.' For Russian politicians it too provides a useful model. These countries, and others in Asia and the Middle East are proving that the free market does not require a free society in which to thrive, and that in any battle between politics and economics, it is the latter that will win out."

Mr Kampfner seems in a genuine intellectual funk. He cannot quite understand why otherwise normal, intelligent Singaporeans would trade certain freedoms for economic progress, and accept the Singapore political system for what it is.

But perhaps he has got the wrong end of the stick. The problem lies not in the Singaporeans, but in his own assumptions. Namely: If you speak English, if you are well-educated and well-traveled, you must also believe in Western-style democracy. They are a package.

I was on the receiving end of similar assumptions when I was in the United States in 1991-1992. When Americans asked me, 'Why is your English so good?', often it was not out of admiration but bewilderment. Their next question revealed all: 'Why then do you (i.e. your Government) ban chewing gum?'

Another telling indicator of Western assumptions about Singapore comes from a remark by Singapore's Ambassador to Washington, Professor Chan Heng Chee, who went to the US at the tail end of the Michael Fay saga.

One year into her posting there, in 1997, she arranged for a retrospective of the late choreographer Goh Choo San's works. Her Washington audience was awed.

'People suddenly remembered Choo San was a Singaporean. They may have known about Goh Choo San, but to connect him with Singapore was not so obvious for them,' she said.

Sub-text: World-class choreography does not fit their image of a country with corporal punishment.

So the real difficulty for the West is this: We are so like them, and yet so not like them. We speak, dress, do business and do up our homes very much the same way as them. Yet when it comes to political values, we settle - apparently - for much less.

One observer draws an analogy with Pavlovian behavioral conditioning. So conditioned have Westerners become to associating cosmopolitan progress with certain political parameters, they do not know how to react when they encounter a creature - Singapore - that has one but not the other.

So they chide and berate us, as if we have betrayed a sacred covenant.

Adding to the iniquity is the fact that countries - rich and powerful ones too, like Russia and the Gulf states - are looking to the Singaporean way of doing things to pick up a tip or two.

I can imagine the shudders of Singapore's Western detractors should they read about a suggestion made by Mr Kenichi Ohmae this week.

In an interview with Business Times, the Japanese management consultant who first became famous as author of The Borderless World, said Singapore should 'replicate' itself in other parts of the world.

What he meant was that Singapore should use its IQ, and IT prowess, to help organise effective economies in other regions, as its own had succeeded so well.

To be sure, his reasoning was economic, not political. But for those who hate Singapore, a Pax Singaporeana would be something to work against and head off.

What the Frak is Going On?

My new love (television-wise) is the "reimagining" of Battlestar Galactica. The local cable company recently started playing the SciFi channel and, with our HubStation (a TiVo-like device), I've got almost all of the first season's episodes recorded. However, if you'd like to catch up on what's gone on in the first three seasons of the series, be sure to check out this eight-minute video. And be sure to listen very carefully; she talks really, really fast.



What the frak!?

Exorcisms "R" Us

The block I live in has a row of shops on the first floor instead of the usual void deck, with one of the shops selling joss paper. That, in and of itself, isn't unusual; in fact, this block has always had a retailer selling joss paper, joss sticks, etc., since Milady and I moved here.

What is unusual is that the new retailer has a small sign posted outside their shop, which I took a photograph of today. Both Milady and I had our curiosity aroused at the first service offered: exorcisms. :) All of the other services offered are very commonplace here, especially among the Chinese community, but this is the first time I've ever seen anyone say they're willing to perform an exorcism. One wonders whether they've done this before and, if so, how successful they were in the past? :)

A Response to "The Qur'an and Being True to Ourselves"

Two people over at a blog called The Zen of South Park are trying to work their way through the Qur'an. Their first post was on Al-Fatiha, and now they're trying to get through the first ten verses of Al-Baqarah. What appears below is one of my comments with respect to the Qur'anic view of determinism vs. free will. I admit that this is a topic that I've had problems with in the past, but I tried to answer the questions as best I can. If anyone wants to help out, please feel free to join me. :)

According to Islam, everything in this life and world is dictated by and under the control of Allah (or God).

First, I don't know how much you've read of the Qur'an, but I will say that unless you've read through the entire Qur'an at least once (and preferably several times), it's best not to try to draw conclusions, especially on only a few verses. The Qur'an will bounce around and provide snippets of information here and there that need to be synthesized, along with material from the ahadith, in order to have a more thorough understanding of the topic being studied. This is especially the case for the topic of determinism and free will. :) The Qur'an essentially teaches that mankind has limited free will. We do have the ability to make choices although, perhaps from the perspective of Allah (swt), He knows what the final outcome will be in advance. In this case, you might say that from His perspective this is determinism, but from ours it is free will. We believe we are making our own choices. In your life, do you not think that the choices you are making are your own? Do you have the ability to choose to believe in Allah (swt) or not? We (Muslims) would in fact argue that you do have a choice. See below.


However, it is interesting that verse 7 mentions that “God has sealed their hearts and ears, and veiled their eyes.”

Because they had already made their choice not to believe in God. Even so, they are still given chances to reform their beliefs: "See they not that they are tried every year once or twice? Yet they turn not in repentance, and they take no heed." (9:126)


Under this notion, everything in this wolrd is pre-destined or determined, leaving us with no liberty to really choose what is the “straight path” because Islam and the revelation of God is what is right.

Well, Islam and the revelation of God is what is right. :) "He will admit to His Mercy Whom He will..." (76:31) If you choose to submit to the will of Allah (swt), you may, insha'allah, be able to obtain His Grace and Mercy; if you reject God, you'll suffer the penalty, insha'allah.


If the way of Allah is supreme and reigns over all other paths in this world, then why would Allah put in this world unbelievers?

The Qur'an points out in many, many passages that we are all here to be tested; e.g., see the above verse 9:126. Even if you took the extreme position that "unbelievers have no chance whatsoever to go to heaven in the afterlife; it's all been predetermined that they won't," perhaps they are being used to test the believers. Allahu alim. (God knows best.)


There is a slight impression that the God we speak of here is pretty merciless. However, if you read the bismillah, which starts off every surah of the Qur’an, except the ninth, it states, “In the name of God, the most gracious, the most compassionate.” Am I seeing things or is there a contradiction here?

To those who disbelieve, who mock Him, His messengers and His believers, who sin in such a gross fashion without sincere repentance, yes, He might seem merciless, insha'allah. To the believers, He is the Most Merciful, insha'allah. In which case, we would say, "Why would you not want to be on His good side?"

Crazy, Old, Desperate, Goony, Erratic, Republican - John McCain

HT: WTF Is It Now?!?

Sweet Child O' Mine... Usually

Daddy decided that he'd take some photos of A'ishah today, seeing how it was Saturday and he hadn't taken any in a while. A'ishah turns one-half month old in less than an hour (i.e., she's 15 days, 11 hours old as I write this). As you can see, A'ishah's fully recovered from her jaundice.


The custom here in S'pore is to wrap babies tightly in a blanket while they sleep; it restricts their movements but keeps them warm, both of which may remind them of their time in the womb.


A'ishah has a very expressive face, and she'll smile every now and then. I happened to have the camera ready when this unexpected smile came forth. It certainly made Daddy happy to see it.


For the first two weeks, it's been very difficult to get pictures of A'ishah with her eyes open. After she woke up from the above nap, Daddy was able to get a bunch of pictures with A'ishah fully alert. This is one of the better photos. (Another is so clear, you can see yours truly reflected off of her eye.)


A'ishah was registered with the Singapore government a week ago, last Saturday. To give her her full, proper name, Daddy needed to get a legal alias, which is my Muslim name. So now my identification card has two names, plus the Jawi transliteration. Of course, I've been using my Muslim name as an informal alias for several years now; virtually all of Milady's family (except for Milady!) call me by my Muslim name. If I had needed to, I would have legally changed my name, but I'm glad that I didn't due to the amount of work that would have entailed (all my various legal documents, including my passport).

Unfortunately, A'ishah suffers from colic in the evening. When I left her a little over an hour ago, she wasn't the peaceful little angel she was in the above photos.

BTW, if you're a "friend" of mine on Facebook, all of the above photos plus two others not shown here (Daddy patting A'ishah's back) can be seen there as well.