Mark Deeble

http://markdeeble.wordpress.com

Today I discovered something sad.

A blog of a photographer of wildlife in Africa. Stunning photos and terrible stories. Poachers, the weather and what keeps the wild life population sustainable.

Racism in Malaysia

Below is a comment made on a website called: Present Tense Media on the post Racism In Malaysia



" I grew up with so much racism that by the time I was a teenager I was certain about one thing: that I had to leave this country. Being half Indian & half Malay (Javanese) I did not belong anywhere. I spoke Malyalam so wasn’t accepted in the Tamil-speaking Indian clique. I was always dismissed as Indian from the way I look by the Malays but then I’d be in Agama class so all sorts of questions start – most common one, “so, your father’s a convert or your mother?” Used to piss me off to no end. Which prompted me to dig into history, my family’s, my country’s so that I have a perfect comeback – that by the time these arrogant idiots ancestors discovered Islam, my dad’s Indian ancestors were already Muslims for a few generations! Knowledge, I learnt, is power.

The worst experience I had was when I was 12, attending a Qur’an class, which my parents paid for, with my brothers. The Ustazah, a bleeding bigoted racist bitch, called one of my brothers “keling” for not able to memorize a Surah! I walked up to her and asked her what kind of person would call a child keling but has no issue taking the same keling’s money and dragged my brothers out and never went back.

I married a Cina boy from Malacca who went to a public uni and was ostracized by the Chinese there because he spoke good English. And excellent Malay. And very bad Cantonese. And did not read or write in Chinese!

Being in HR consultancy for more thn 15 years, working with various MNCs in Malaysia, I learnt that racism at workplace is usually topdown. If the manager is of certain race, he/she would hire only people of the same race – this applies to all the races. Because there are predominantly more Chinese in the private sector, so would the hiring requirement skew towards that one race. Salary discrimination – don’t even get me started! I have at many instances, come across people being hired for the same level job, doing the same bloody thing, similar background, same qualification, same level of experience, the Chinese one paid TWICE as much ad the non-Chinese. I also learnt that nothing ever happens when you highlight such things because the HR Director, MDs, were all Chinese too. Someone need to inform these MNCs pledging equal employment that those words are just mere words to their local managers, it means jack shit in the real world where racism is rife.

This is the sad fact.

Now that my not-Cina-enough his and I are raising 2 multiracial kids, we decided to leave the country. Tanahairku sudah tidak sesuai untuk anak-anakku. Unfortunately."

The French and the American

From a blog called A lady in the city


Un guide culturel transatlantique

Amélie Poulain et son fabuleux destin à Montmartrevs Carrie Bradshaw, l’héroïne de Sex & the City que l’on croise dans l’Upper East Side à Manhattan.

Un macaron chez Ladur ou un cupcake chez Magnolia Bakery ?

Au-delà des clichés

Les façades parisiennes de style haussmannien en pierre de taille vs les immeubles en briques et leurs escaliers de secours externes

Un Parisien à New-York

Jean-Luc Godard, cinéaste de la Nouvelle Vague, illustre le parisien intelloet Woody Allen, son pendant New-yorkais

Yayoi Kusama

I saw this picture in a magazine. It came with an advertisement for her exhibition in MOCA Shanghai. I absolutely loved her eyes and the startling expression from her eyebrows. I related to it quite nicely. On Facebook, I said I loved her hair, but it was just what she said to me in her expression. The replies I got told me who she was and that she admitted herself into a mental institution while she continued to work. My comment to that was, "Wow! did she do that to get someone to cook and clean for her? Most men get married." She did this when she was 46, so there is hope for me yet. About Yayoi Kusama in the Sydney Morning Herald 

Her collection: Infinity

Her work with Louis Vuitton

The pumpkin sculpture in Naoshima Island

Whitney Museum

A lady in the city

MH 370

Curious and curiouser, I am led to believe that this theft of a Boeing 777 has been the perfect crime.

Here is the Playback: http://www.flightradar24.com/2014-03...MAS370/2d81a27

Above is the playback of the ADS-B signal received by a company called flightradar24, a company that has put the location of all aircraft with an ADS-B transponder on the internet for everyone to see.

More insight from the flight radar forum:

What about military submarines? Wouldn't there be Chinese + US submarines (at least? - also Indian, Russian?) in the Indian Ocean with sophisticated equipment on 24/7 and able to catch the noise of a plunging aircraft? Assuming that they shared info on such noise wouldn't they be able to triangulate a crash location (if indeed this is what happened)?

IF the following info I gather from the internet is accurate:

1) Australia's OTH radar coverage

JORS_640px.png

2) The "official" OTH radar range is 3000 km (i.e. unofficially could be farther)

3) Current area of south Indian Ocean search

mh370_australia_search_2103_840_441_100.jpg


Then wouldn't/couldn't this translate to Australia actually detected MH370 on the day it vanished (at their outermost OTH radar envelop), hence their focus on searching this area from the start?

But it doesn't make sense that AUS would with-hold this kind of info?!?!


Just wondering....



I am reading that sound can travel far without loosing much energy along specific depth channels so I am hoping that it would be similar along the water surface (i'm not an acoustic engineer)....




http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/satellite-locates-malaysian-flight-370-still-flying-seven-hours-after-takeoff/2014/03/15/96627a24-ac86-11e3-a06a-e3230a43d6cb_graphic.html

7 year old Angelina Jordan

How to be creative

John Cleese on the 5 Factors to Make Your Life More Creative

by Maria Popova

1. Space (“You can’t become playful, and therefore creative, if you’re under your usual pressures.”)

1. Time (“It’s not enough to create space; you have to create your space for a specific period of time.”)

1. Time (“Giving your mind as long as possible to come up with something original,” and learning to tolerate thediscomfort of pondering time and indecision.)

1. Confidence (“Nothing will stop you being creative so effectively as the fear of making a mistake.”)

1. Humor (“The main evolutionary significance of humor is that it gets us from the closed mode to the open mode quicker than anything else.”)

“Creativity is not a talent. It is a way of operating.”

Much has been said about how creativity works, its secrets, its origins and what we can do to optimise ourselves for it. In this excerpt from his fantastic 1991 lecture, John Cleese offers a recipe for creativity, delivered with his signature blend of cultural insight and comedic genius. Specifically, Cleese outlines "the 5 factors that you can arrange to make your lives more creative"

We need to be in the open mode when pondering a problem — but! — once we come up with a solution, we must then switch to the closed mode to implement it. Because once we’ve made a decision, we are efficient only if we go through with it decisively, undistracted by doubts about its correctness.


Cleese goes on to caution against a trap in this duality, one particularly hazardous in politics:


To be at our most efficient, we need to be able to switch backwards and forward between the two modes. But — here’s the problem — we too often get stuck in the closed mode. Under the pressures which are all too familiar to us, we tend to maintain tunnel vision at times when we really need to step back and contemplate the wider view.


This is particularly true, for example, of politicians. The main complaint about them from their nonpolitical colleagues is that they’ve become so addicted to the adrenaline that they get from reacting to events on an hour-by-hour basis that they almost completely lose the desire or the ability to ponder problems in the open mode.


Cleese concludes with a beautiful articulation of the premise and promise of his recipe for creativity:


This is the extraordinary thing about creativity: If just you keep your mind resting against the subject in a friendly but persistent way, sooner or later you will get a reward from your unconscious.


For a related treat, see Cleese’s reprise of the talk nearly two decades later at the 2009 Creativity World Forum.


Thanks, Simon