The truth about violence

www.dictionary.com defines violence as (http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/violence):

1.	swift and intense force: the violence of a storm.

 

2.	rough or injurious physical force, action, or treatment: to die by violence.

 

3.	an unjust or unwarranted exertion of force or power, as against rights or laws: to take over a government by violence.

 

4.	a violent act or proceeding.

 

5.	rough or immoderate vehemence, as of feeling or language: the violence of his hatred.

 

6.	damage through distortion or unwarranted alteration: to do editorial violence to a text.

It pains me greatly to read what is transpiring in Gaza (http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=2009\01\08\story_8-1-2009_pg1_8).

According to Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israeli-Palestinian_conflict ) the Israel – Palestine conflict’s roots can be traced to late 19^th century (1897). One would have thought that after more than a century of misunderstanding, the people would want a stop to all the unnecessary killings and sufferings due to the continuous confrontations. I guess  that was how the saying ‘violence begets violence’ came about.

Mahatma Gandhi (Indian political and spiritual leader (1869 - 1948)) said “An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind”. I find this adage applicable for the events that have transpired in the Middle East conflict. I visited (http://www.mideastweb.org/briefhistory.htm) and (http://www.mideastweb.org/briefhistory-oslo.htm) and came to the conclusion that history is indeed written by the victor. I find it difficult to trust the authenticity of records that dates back to 1800 B.C.

Each and everyone of us have a choice – if you think it is acceptable for a nation to invade another, please visit http://votersforpeace.us/index2.php

 

The Day The Earth Stood Still

‘The Day the Earth Stood Still’ made me think when Klaatu (Keanu Reeves) said:

‘It doesn’t make sense for one species to occupy this planet at the expense of all other species’

Or something to that effect. He was referring to the continuous destruction of planet Earth with our pollution and waste that was directly contributing to the decimation of other species.

Someone should have told Klaatu that common sense isn’t common, because if common sense was common, then humans wouldn’t resort to such environmentally destructive ways.

 

The corrective actions:

Governments of the world must play their roles to draft new regulations to ensure that companies products / services are environmentally friendly. Companies that are not environmentally friendly should be fined and be given an agreed time frame for them to ensure that their products / services / processes / wastes are environmentally friendly. Continuous failure to comply should result in the closure of such companies.

The ball should not stop there. Laws should be approved that anyone caught buying / using products / services that are not environmentally friendly would risk being fined.

This may sound drastic; however, drastic situation requires drastic measures. I fail to see how the environment will recover if no drastic actions are implemented.

As the saying goes ‘Every cloud has a silver lining’. The oil price peaked to US 147 in July 2008 has propelled car makers to intensify research into electric cars and hydrogen-powered engines that virtually is zero emission. Unfortunately, the R & D cost into these environmentally friendly technologies are profoundly enormous – thus expect cars with these technologies to be costly.

Or think of it as your contribution to save Mother Earth. What do you think?

Financial Crisis - tip of the iceberg

These days, financial crisis seems to hog the media: governments pumping in more money into their economies, large corporations posting record losses, well known large companies filing for bankruptcies, people losing their job leading to homes being foreclosed, cars being repossessed etc.

You would think that we had seen the worse of it all in the financial crisis. How would you feel if I were to say that worse has yet to come? I do not have a crystal ball nor am I a psychic but I believe that the world has grown so tiny, thanks to globalization, that what we are seeing in the media today is just the tip of the iceberg.

The following is extracted from http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2008-10-16-crime-economy_N.htm :

The collapse of U.S. financial markets is forcing deep cuts in local police agencies and stoking fears among police chiefs that mass home foreclosures are bringing more crime to suburbs.

Problems created by the financial meltdown are starting to touch everything from police response times to unsolved crimes.

"As we see significant reductions, we'll be seeing increased response times, fewer cases solved and reduced services for victims of crime," says Prince William County, Va., Police Chief Charlie Deane. His $73 million budget could drop up to 30% next year because of declining property tax revenues.

Blocks of homes vacant from foreclosures are becoming magnets nationwide for gang members, drug users, prostitutes and thieves, who steal appliances and fixtures, Deane and other officers say.

At the same time, police agencies are dramatically reducing their forces as local governments struggle to allocate shrinking revenue from property and sales taxes to fund basic services.

This may very well be happening in other countries as well due to the ballooning credit crunch that many economies are now facing. A country’s economy is so heavily dependent on the well being of the financial sector; when this sector so much as sneezes (due to flu), the entire economy may suffer a seizure. The actual scenario now is the financial sector is crumbling, imagine what is happening to the economy.

When I was younger, I loved playing with dominoes. I would line them up in a long line and then I would push one tile down to see the domino effect. This is what happened in the financial crisis:

With good intentions (albeit against logic), USA Congress encourages lending to lower income people (which basically means high risk low returns instead of the conventional theory high risk high returns) resulting in the number of mortgages exposed to this group increase by a factor of 15 times (from a low of 2% high risk mortgages, it skyrocketed to 30%) (USA Congress being the 1st domino tile in a long line). Overzealous financial institutions (2nd, 3rd, 4th and more domino tiles) repackaged these high risk mortgages into low risk securities and sold them to investment banking firms (more and more domino tiles) who in turn sold them to individual and corporate investors worldwide (a whole lot more domino tiles). When the mortgages are defaulted, everyone gets burnt (and the domino tiles starts falling).

As a result, big corporations started posting record breaking massive losses, some even filed for bankruptcies, they had to reduce their costs thus they started retrenching. When people lose their jobs, that isn’t a nightmare; the nightmare begins when people find that they are no longer financially capable to continue to put food on the table or provide shelter for the family. That is when crime (blue and white collar) increases dramatically. This is just the tip of the iceberg; the domino tiles have yet to stop falling.

The corrective action for individuals is to appoint capable people to form a government and for the government to overhaul the entire financial system; never ever consider a high risk low return option.

The truth about financial crisis

Believe it or not, the global financial crisis spawned from good intentions that were poorly executed; the following is extracted from Wall Street Journal, who interviewed Stephen Schwarzman, the chairman of Blackstone Group
(http://blogs.wsj.com/deals/2008/09/24/wall-street-crisis-stephen-schwarzman-explains-it-all/?mod=sp_deals ):

It’s a perfect storm. It started with Congress encouraging lending to lower-income people. You went from subprime loans being 2% of total loans in 2002 to 30% of total loans in 2006. That kind of enormous increase swept into the net people who shouldn’t have been borrowing.

Those loans were packaged into CDOs rated AAA, which led the investment-banking firms [buying them] to do little to no due diligence, and the securities were distributed throughout the world, where they started defaulting.

When they started defaulting, out of bad luck or bad judgment, we implemented fair value accounting….You had wildly different marks for this kind of security, which led to massive write-offs by the commercial banking and investment-banking system.

In the face of those losses…you needed to raise new equity…which came from sovereign-wealth funds in part, which then caused political resistance to sovereign-wealth funds, who predictably have withdrawn from putting money into the system….It seemed pretty obvious that would happen. We now find ourselves with a liquidity crisis where fundamentally the cost of money for financial intermediaries [such as investment banks] is significantly in excess of their cost of lending it. So several institutions found themselves in a structurally impossible position. We had a series of bankruptcies, whether Bear Stearns or Lehman, or forced sales like Merrill. Goldman reverted to a banking charter for a lower cost of funds, which today is still not low enough for the business.

So that’s the story of how we got there.

In this high technology era, it makes one shudder now as to who we can trust these days; when financial institutions blindly follows orders by politicians (who may or may not have any knowledge of financial markets), it is high time for us to put in some check and balance. The question is not what or how – it is a question of when these check and balances are put into place to prevent such a major fiasco from happening – again.

The corrective action would be to ensure that we elect the right people to form the government.

School Shooting - What makes a person kill

On 23rd September 2008, 10 students were shot dead by Matti Saari who then turned the gun on himself. (http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5gmPkjy3Rc56YqQQ1LYm_OfXgW5VwD93DDESG0) Reading the article above made me reflect on what is becoming to the human race.

A quick search on Google on “school shooting” revealed 1,780,000 results. I clicked on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/School_shooting and I would not be lying when I say that my jaw dropped. I extracted the following:

Mind you, these are just the recent incidents for USA. There are many other documented cases that are listed at the website above. Reading these statistics really made me think whether by the time I have children, would it be safe for me to send my kids to schools?

While I take profound comfort at the strict gun control laws in Malaysia (probably the only reason why there aren’t any school shooting incidents in my country) I cannot but worry whether it will be safe for me to send my kids to school by the time they are of school going age. I cannot remember with absolute certainty but I do recall reading in the newspapers that students are getting more unruly and violent.

But what intrigued me most was what makes a person kill? I would like to quote Tapio Varmola, principal of Seinajoki University of Applied Sciences who commented on Matti Saari:

"I personally feel that maybe there are too many silent young boys in Finland who are alone. The parents, the schools and the healthcare system should do something together with young boys".
(http://thestar.com.my/news/story.asp?file=/2008/9/25/worldupdates/2008-09-24T233624Z_01_NOOTR_RTRMDNC_0_-356358-1&sec=Worldupdates)

If silence can drive a person to kill, then I believe a possible solution to stop these killings would be to talk to as many people as possible. What do you think?

The corrective actions for us all is to play our part by reaching out to as many people as possible, regardless of gender, race, age and etc. What I mean is – START TALKING & START SAVING LIVES!

The truth about promises - how to keep them

Promises are like babies: easy to make, hard to deliver. ~Author Unknown

Half the promises people say were never kept, were never made. ~Edgar Watson Howe

The best way to keep one's word is not to give it. ~Napoleon Bonaparte

For every promise, there is price to pay. ~Jim Rohn

Promises are like crying babies in a theatre, they should be carried out at once. ~Norman Vincent Peale

We must not promise what we ought not, lest we be called on to perform what we cannot. ~Abraham Lincoln

Promise is defined as (http://wordnet.princeton.edu/perl/webwn?s=promises&sub=Search+WordNet&o2=&o0=1&o7=&o5=&o1=1&o6=&o4=&o3=&h=000000)
Noun
S: (n) promise (a verbal commitment by one person to another agreeing to do (or not to do) something in the future)
S: (n) promise, hope (grounds for feeling hopeful about the future) "there is little or no promise that he will recover"
Verb
S: (v) promise, assure (make a promise or commitment)
S: (v) promise (promise to undertake or give) "I promise you my best effort"
S: (v) predict, foretell, prognosticate, call, forebode, anticipate, promise (make a prediction about; tell in advance) "Call the outcome of an election"
S: (v) promise (give grounds for expectations) "The new results were promising"; "The results promised fame and glory"

In view of so many broken promises, especially in light of the recent financial market meltdown in USA, can we ever trust someone who has broken their promises? It has become a norm for companies to over promise but under deliver; they promised something that they know couldn’t be delivered. For me, I would think that promises should only be made after careful consideration and must be delivered at all costs instead of saying it for the sake of saying it resulting in the failure of delivering the promise. One of the most important lessons that I have learnt is to under promise but over deliver; it simply means giving more than what was promised. End of the day, everyone is selling something, be it a product or service (in the form of a promise; this product / service can do this and this and this etc).

Using the financial market meltdown in USA as an example, can you imagine how does the employees, who are laid off, feel now that they are jobless and that they retirement plans are wrecked due to the fact that the companies that they have been slogging for numerous years have filed for bankruptcy? With this image in mind, how important it is for us to keep our promises?

Of the promises that I listed above, I do not agree with Napoleon Bonaparte’s way of keeping a promise. I think the best way to keep promises is to understand the implications of being able to deliver them and the implications of not being able to deliver them.

What do you think?

The truth about values

Enron filed for bankruptcy 2nd December 2001 leading to the massive plunge of its share prices from a high of more than USD90.00 to USD0.50. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enron_scandal)

The main reason for Enron’s fall is no doubt the Arthur Andersen accounting firm (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Andersen)

The recent US financial meltdown is truly a déjà vu experience because history is repeating itself.

In the wake of the Enron scandal, we have the Bear Stearns fiasco (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bear_Stearns), Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Lehman Brothers and last but not least AIG. The massive losses posted by companies in the US financial market has directly prompted the Bush administration’s current proposal to spend USD700 billion capital injection to prop their financial market from crashing. At the same time, the FBI is investigating these firms for possible mortgage fraud (http://money.cnn.com/2008/09/23/news/companies/fbi_finance/index.htm?cnn=yes).

To the best of my knowledge, corporations / companies are inanimate entities. It is the employees that makes or breaks corporations / companies. This fact leads me to question myself: what is it that made the above giant corporations to suffer massive financial losses? Surely the answer cannot be luck (or lack of it) or they were at the wrong place at the wrong time for the wrong reasons. I believe the answer for the above scandals is simple: the corporations failed mainly because of wrong values.

Values is defined as (http://wordnet.princeton.edu/perl/webwn?s=values)
S: (n) values (beliefs of a person or social group in which they have an emotional investment (either for or against something)) "he has very conservatives values"

The basis for the massive financial market meltdown is US is largely blamed on the subprime mortgage crisis (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subprime_mortgage_crisis). In my opinion, that is not the real reason. The real reason behind the US financial market meltdown is the values of the employees in the corporations have ‘evolved’ drastically to the extent that they are no longer recognizable. Now why in the world would I say that?

Let me ask a simple question: who wouldn’t want lots of money? As corporations are inanimate entities, the financial health of corporations falls into the jurisdiction of the company’s board of directors. I think I would not be wrong to say that the word ‘directors’ was derived from ‘direct’ as in to provide directions. The biggest pre-requisite for directors should be the values that they subscribe to. If the directions provided by a director does not have good values embedded in it, chances are the outcome would be disastrous, as is evident in the financial meltdown in U.S.

Coming back to my earlier question: who wouldn’t want lots of money? Making lots of money isn’t difficult at all, that is if a person doesn’t subscribe to good values. Plenty of career options available for people who subscribe to dishonesty, selfishness and blatant disregard to rules / laws. But most end up behind bars. The truth about values is simple: good values will prevail over bad values. For a person who subscribe to honesty, selflessness and abides by rules / laws, it may be prove to take a longer time to accumulate lots of money but at the very least, the chances of them ending up behind bars are very low.

The corrective action = please educate and instil good values in children, relatives, friends, community, colleagues and everyone that you know in order to prevent any undesirable circumstances.

The truth about logic

Logic is defined as (http://wordnet.princeton.edu/perl/webwn?s=logic)
S: (n) logic (the branch of philosophy that analyzes inference)
S: (n) logic (reasoned and reasonable judgment) "it made a certain kind of logic"
S: (n) logic (the principles that guide reasoning within a given field or situation) "economic logic requires it"; "by the logic of war"
S: (n) logic (the system of operations performed by a computer that underlies the machine's representation of logical operations)
S: (n) logic, logical system, system of logic (a system of reasoning)

With the vast increase in literacy rates since 1900, it is logical to assume that people are getting more educated. With more people getting more educated, it is logical to assume that the world should be having less issues / crises. What defies logic is the fact that instead of progressing forward, I suspect that the human civilization is actually regressing backwards (http://correctiveactions.blogspot.com/2008/08/truth-about-humans-are-we-evolving-or.html). How so? I met E.T’s (http://correctiveactions.blogspot.com/2008/07/are-you-et.html) who are highly educated but do not behave as a highly educated person. We proudly call ourselves civilized (human civilization) but we conveniently forget our civilities when it comes to discussion on corrective actions.

If it is logical for humans to live together in peace, why have we not achieved world peace? As the number of educated people increases, how is it logical that the chances for world peace actually diminishes instead of being increased? The hostilities that are happening world wide are mainly due to misunderstanding arising from ignorance of political, religious or cultural differences from one another. I have yet to come across a country who can proudly claim that their country’s politics are not marred by dirt / grime / mud). Surely that is illogical because politics are meant to be clean but how is it that politicians end up becoming dirty?

All of the religions in the world preached about living together in harmony. Is it logical that we end up killing one another to uphold the good name of our religions? What if one day an alien race were to come in peace but they do not practice any of our religions? Do we tell them “I am sorry but I have to exterminate you because you are a pagan?”. I find such thinking highly illogical befitting a civilized person.

Cultural differences have sparked many deaths as well. I read that in India, where banned caste systems are still being practiced, young couples are executed by their own family members because they tried to marry some1 from a lower caste. Human race has 6,000 years of recorded history, despite all these years, is it logical for us to continue to behave how we had behaved?

One of the definitions for crazy is doing the same thing over and over again BUT expecting different results. Taking into consideration that human race is behaving the same way but expecting world peace without making the extra effort to do so is tantamount to crazy. Is this a logical assumption?

The corrective action for us to progress forward is to adopt a logical approach in whatever we do. What do you think?

The Truth About Superstitions

“Break a mirror and risk 7 years of bad luck” was something that I read in one of the many The Adventures of Tintin comic book series (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Adventures_of_Tintin) during my younger days.

I remember vividly when I showed the comic to my father and asked him “Why seven years, not more or less”?. He replied that it was an old belief by the Westerners.

Growing up, I discovered that for most of the superstitions, when I asked around, nobody knew the reason for such beliefs. Superstition is defined as (http://wordnet.princeton.edu/perl/webwn?s=superstition) :

S: (n) superstition, superstitious notion (an irrational belief arising from ignorance or fear)

For a more elaborate definition on superstition, please visit http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superstition

As superstition is defined as an irrational belief arising from ignorance or fear, since knowledge was limited to the wealthy or nobility since ancient times, it makes sense that with the literacy rates increasing, the number of superstitions would slowly vanish. The main reason why superstitions would not vanish is because adults continue to emphasize it to their young. Some of the more common ones include (http://www.oldsuperstitions.com/) :
* An apple a day keeps the doctor away.
* All wishes on shooting stars come true.
* Friday the 13th.
* Walking under a ladder.
* 4 leaf clover / horseshoe
The list goes on and on.

It is human nature to blame, justify and give excuses as it is comparatively easier, and safer, than to investigate the actual reason. For an example, Friday the 13th is nothing more than an observation that a series of natural and man-made disasters taking place on Friday the 13th. It doesn’t make sense to me because every single day, there is a disaster, be it natural or man-made. I believe that births are a celebration of life and every single day thousands of new babies are born across the globe. This being the case, how can Friday the 13th be classified as a ‘bad’ day?

The 4 leaf clover / horseshoe are ancient beliefs symbolizing good luck – but how much research has been conducted on it to prove that they really do bring good luck? The truth about superstition is that if you believe in them, they will become manifest in your subconscious mind and the law of attraction will attract the necessary forces in the universe to make your belief come true. But where do you draw the line? Do you believe in all of them or only in the ones that you choose that you want to believe in? For me, I choose to believe in facts, not fiction. The corrective action would be for parents to stop disseminating such false beliefs to their children. I came across the following saying:

There is no cure for stupidity but there is a remedy for ignorance; it is called learning.

Superstition is a way of the past – in this era of Knowledge Economy, there is no room for ignorance.

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