It is a day of reckoning when DAP (Democratic Action Party) trounced Gerakan and BN in the recently concluded Malaysian 2008 General Election. Now we have a new Chief Minister Lim Guan Eng who was sworn in yesterday to be the people’s spokesperson. No longer do we have an academic Tan Sri Dr Koh Tsu Koon who was muted about the NEP (New Economic Policy) and could hardly fight for the Chinese rights. NEP was implemented by the second prime minister of Malaysia Tun Razak. It is biased and unfair to the Chinese and the Indians while enriching the Malays, more likely those in positions of political power.

To quote from Datuk Lim Keng Yaik, it is scary to see the UMNO Youth president, Datuk Hishamuddin wielding the keris (Malay sword) in their general assembly. This should stop. No wonder the Barisan Nasional lost quite a lot of seats. There has been much corruption, cronyism, and insensitive remarks made in the past by UMNO members. And we Chinese have to learn to bear with it and try to get along with them because they are in power. Hopefully with DAP in charge of Penang now, this will no longer be the case.

Tags : Lim Guan Eng, Penang’s new chief minister, Malaysian 2008 General Election, New Economic Policy, Democratic Action Party, DAP, Barisan National, NEP

The results of the Malaysian 2008 General Elections took everyone by surprise. Incumbent Barisan lost 4 more states - Penang, Kedah, Perak and Selangor to the opposition. What has really happened? There are some plausible reasons to this. When our former deputy prime minister, Anwar released the Lingam’s video to the press near election time, it was very destructive for the goverment to know that a common lawyer like Mr Lingam could broker the appointment of judges in high court. There was much corruption with the ‘Correct, Correct, Correct’ lawyer offering free tours, houses, handphones to top judges. This show how corrupt the judiciary is.

Secondly, churches were not allowed to use the word ‘Allah’ in their printing materials and in their preaching. What the heck! The word ‘Allah’ was used before Islam came to Malaysia. It shows how narrow minded the government is. And Bibles were confiscated recently by the customs that belong to a Baptist church. Looks like the citizen’s freedom is being eroded bit by bit.

People were also fedup especially the non-Malays of the NEP (New Economic Policy) favouring the bumiputras or simply the Malays. All government contracts are given to bumiputra companies only leaving out the other races, the Chinese and the Indians. No wonder Lee Kuan Yew said we were being marginalized just because we are more hardworking, diligent and rich. Most of the common Chinese in Penang have felt the pinch of NEP and they are not as rich as before. People are angry and therefore, don’t expect the rakyat to vote for you when you are not fair to all races to begin with. You preach one thing, but your actions speak another.

Since Penang is now in the hands of the opposition, I hope future tenders will be fair to all races and not solely for bumiputras only. Hopefully my company will be able to participate in sports open tenders meant for anyone and any race on a fairer system. I also hope that goverment planned projects to develop Penang like the monorail, Penang’s second bridge, Penang Outer Ring Road and the like will not be delayed any further by the government since the rakyat or citizens have chosen the opposition to govern them. Congratulations to Lim Guan Eng and Karpal Singh of DAP, Datin Seri Wan Azizah of PKR and the other victorous candidates.

Tags : Malaysian 2008 General Election, reasons for 2008 Malaysian General Election results, Democratic Action Party, DAP, Barisan National

I just make a donation of just 1k RM to the Thai orphans through Pastor Cheah Chee Moon. His dream is to ensure the homeless children under his care in Chiang Rai, Thailand, acquire a sound education. To achieve this, the 46-year-old Penangite recently embarked on a fund-raising mission to collect money for the schooling expenditure of the 56 children in his centre, called Agape Home. Riding a 30-year-old Honda Cub, Cheah travelled from Thailand to Singapore through the west coast of peninsula Malaysia.

“I am hoping that people will generously donate a ringgit for every kilometre covered.” said Cheah, who expects to have ridden about 6,000km by the time he returns to Thailand. Cheah’s involvement with orphaned and destitute children in Thailand began in 1984 when he went there as a missionary worker.

He found that there were far too many of them, some ending on the streets after both their parents succumbed to AIDS. “Some of these children were also HIV-positive and needed special care,” said Cheah. “My heart went out to them and I decided to take up the challenge of giving them a better life.”

He added that these street children had little opportunity in life and no way of acquiring an education. After years of working hard as a missionary to take care of their needs, he set up Agape Home several years ago to take in destitute children and give them a proper education.

According to Cheah, he wanted the children in Agape Home to go as far as possible academically. “Once they are well-educated, they will be able to take good care of themselves,” said Cheah, who runs the home with the help of four workers. He said homeless children had better opportunities in Malaysia compared to Thailand as there were many centres in Malaysia catering to their needs.

Cheah can be contacted at 016-408 3401 or call 012-227 2289 (Pastor Albert Ong). For security purpose, I am not putting the bank account number here or the bank account name. Just send Pastor Cheah a message and he will sms you the banking details to make the donation for a worthy cause helping the orphaned kids.

Tags : Agape Home, Pastor Cheah Chee Moon, make a donation, orphaned kids

Our former health minister, Dr Chua Soi Lek had to resign when he was brutally honest in admitting for being the Chinese minister caught in the sex video taped in a hotel in Johor. Had he been a Christian, he would not have been so blunt and commit the act in spite of him having a wife and 3 children. Being a public figure, he has to show good example of being a family man to the nation. But no, he could not control his ‘langciau’ and some would wonder how long this has been going on before the video was taped secretly. Hotel Katarina or whatever the name was ought to have its license revoked for brutal invasion of privacy where Dr Chua was videotaped. He has stripped naked to Malaysia and caught in the act. Imagine, booking a hotel room where they installed pin-hole video camera and start videotaping you when you have having sex or changing clothes. No wonder the boss of the hotel was sick recently. Apparently he does not know what goes on in his hotel and the hotel staff are up to monkey tricks.

Anyway, since the incident, Dr Chua was apparently forced to resign to safeguard the government and coming election. He did the right thing by resigning, otherwise he would have been sacked by higher authorities which would be more embarassing. In the past, mighty men or those holding top positions in society were brought to shame when they keep a mistress or have sex outside marriage. These people ought to remember that they are under public scrutiny when they hold top positions.

Now his children have to bear the shame and also chip in money to help maintain the family as Dr Chua is now a retiree. Overnight, from a somebody, you become a nobody and resign from all public posts. Let this be a lesson to all ministers there who are keeping mistresses. Don’t ever get caught with your pants down.

PayPerPost now has a new name, Izea which sounds like Easy. Below is the email that all PPP posties received from the head honcho, Ted Murphy.

Going forward our company will be known as IZEA, with PayPerPost as its flagship product and other properties including Blogger’s Choice Awards, RockStartup, Zookoda and BlogInSpace under the IZEA corporate umbrella. These changes are the natural result of our phenomenal growth as a company and the continued success our user community is having with our social marketing tools and strategies.

The image done above is certainly attractive with glassy feel. The name is easy to remember and short. It reminds me of shopping for furnishings in Ikea, many years ago in Singapore.

Blogger has just added a new feature on the dashboard. We can now upload videos to our blogs the same way we upload pictures. We no longer need to embed the codes from YouTube. Though I have not tried this yet, I think it is a nifty feature to use. Maybe one of these days, I might just upload my own videos of a stage performance taken in China that comes with the delicious Mongolian food buffet. Blogger only allows video uploads of not more than 100mb each time. Most formats are accepted. Have fun with your videos.

Nhl entry draft from Hockey’s Future dot com is the number one prospects resource. You can check out the link for many featured articles on NHL entry draft. And for the newbies, NHL is an abbreviation for National Hockey League. Hockey’s Future board is the top forum for anything on hockey. There are comprehensive topics to discuss such as National Hockey League Talk, Prospects, The Business of Hockey, The History of Hockey, The Rink, Hockey’s Future Media, vBookie Hockey and many others. This forum is very active with some topics having more than a million posts from its many members. As of now, there are 36,819 members and over 9 million posts.

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In recent weeks, you may have heard of BP Whiting Refinery. BP plans to spend more than $3 billion to modernize the Whiting Refinery to process additional heavy crude oil from Canada, a secure and reliable source. What is released from their refinery is treated water that is more than 99.9% water - not sludge. All sludge is treated separately, according to state and federal requirements, and never discharged into Lake Michigan. For the benefit of the environment, the Whiting Refinery voluntarily reduced total suspended solids in its water discharge by 40% in just the past four years.

Recently one newspaper editorial stated that “Lake Michigan should not become a victim of Indiana’s economic development,” however they also said “. . . given the increasing value of fresh water resources, the decision could easily become shortsighted economically as well as environmentally.” Those editorial related with press release from BP about their investment plans of $3 billion to increase gasoline and diesel production by 15 percent, or 620 million gallons a year on BP’s Whiting Refinery in Northwest Indiana.

They operate a modern wastewater plant in Whiting today and plan to invest about $150 million to enhance the refinery’s wastewater treatment capability. The Whiting Refinery produces gasoline, diesel and jet fuel people need for their daily lives. Today the refinery has about 1,700 employees and another 1,500 contract workers. The planned modernization will create new jobs for about 2,000 contract workers during peak construction, as well as an estimated 80 full-time BP employees when complete. For 117 years, the Whiting Refinery has served this community. BP is committed to environmental and civic leadership and looks forward to working with our neighbors for many decades to come.

The environmentalist worries about increasing scale of waste related to the increasing gasoline production. They worried that those fluid waste will be destroying Lake Michigan. In their opinion the production process is always producing waste at particular amount and for BP’s Whitling Refinery the waste will flow and will be end on Lake Michigan and it will destroy the Lake.

Many of you perhaps already know that BP is the company that markets itself as an environmentally friendly company and obviously they should held this standard. In relation with the investment plan, BP received permission from the Indiana Department of Environmental Management and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

As a user, this augurs well for the community without any pollution to the environment. People should get the right facts of what is really happening so that they do not have the impression that sludge is being discharged in Lake Michigan. Environmental pollution is a serious problem and pose a health risk to the residents nearby. With the news that BP Whiting Refinery is taking steps to prevent pollution, people can be rest assured of their own safety and to dismiss any gossip or misconception of the company discharging sludge in Lake Michigan.

PayPerPost (PPP) gets bigger as the days go by with more innovative ideas from Ted and his team. PPP’s programmers are working hard to get the features out and more improvements are seen constantly. And the good news is that PPP managed to get funding of USD$7 million this morning. This is good news to everyone involved in PPP from the CEO to fellow bloggers like me. As they are feeling lucky, naturally PPP has created Lucky 7’s program where opps with offers of $10.77, $70 and even $700 will be offered from noon today to noon next Tuesday. And guess what? The juicy $700 offer given out today has been snapped up so quickly. Perhaps next time for me.