Integrity, as defined by BN

Two protests happened on Sunday in the Klang Valley over the issue of bullies and unfair treatment of citizens.

One was aimed at the US government and its occupation of Iraq. A side dish was the Malaysia-US FTA. Quit the bullying, the 300 or so assembled conveyed this message at the American Embassy under the hot morning sun. The Embassy, if you're familiar with the KL neighborhoods, is in the heart of high-end, expat-loaded part of the city. Tourists also pass this area if they're in the KLCC vicinity. The demonstration lasted about 2 hours. Nobody was arrested.

The same evening, another protest was planned at the Summit in USJ, this time over alleged bullying by the Barisan govt in the toll price hikes. Some of the speakers in the morning's event were also present at the Summit. Ditto demonstrators. The Summit is in a middle/upper middle class of the town; mostly locals shop at its mall. You may say it's one of the heartland suburban focal points. The demonstration never really got off the ground. The police got in quick and forced the organizers to stand down. There was a little cat-and-mouse inside the mall disrupting a poor taekwondo tournament. And they arrested five. (See Malaysiakini for accounts of both events. Subscription required.)

Here's the gist of BN-style integrity.

If somebody else gets called bully, that's okay. If someone points out that you yourself are guilty of the same thing, omigod, shut them up.

Insecure little snakes aren't they?

Remember LMG Auto and Hydroxene?

Seven months ago, on August 15, some f'lers came out claiming they're about to revolutionise the car industry. Just add water ... blared the ads (although any advertising hack could've told you it's a tagline stolen from Arena swimwear back in the early 90s).

The news reached around the globe albeit greeted with fair sceptism. Many weren't sure about its claims, because not much was revealed in the first place. Let's wait and see, advocated the fair-minded.

The trick was in Hydroxene - a Putrajaya-pioneered secret recipe so finger lickin' good it was bound to weaken the knees of the greatest energy researchers the world over. This technology uses half the gas for the same mile by combining hydrogen extracted from water. Boosted combustion, that's the essence.

The principle is good enough, but making it cheaply has always been the problem. Some of the best brains in energy and engineering have been racing to reach that goal. But Malaysia Boleh.

Thanks to waste aluminium and water in a 'magic canister', this hydrogen extraction had been solved. Thanks to Dr Halim Mohd Ali (left in pic), inventor, patent-holder, Ph.D alumnus of Birmingham University and director of Hydrogen Fuel Technology (M) Sdn Bhd.

He was very protective about the technology.

Reported the Star back then:
He said that although he has received offers to sell the technology, some offers amounting to US$26mil (RM95.7mil), he had no intention of letting foreign parties get hold of it. ... "There are only 12 people in the world who know how hydroxene works and even then they only know 70% of the technology,” he said, adding that the core aspects of the technology remained with him.


You'd need shades for such kegemilangan.

And so LMG Auto was founded rolling out two SUV models, Trekker and Tourer, which use this secret nano-mano-adotechnology. The product is a tie-in with Dadi Auto of China and priced vey nicely (Tourer, the cheaper model was RM58,888). Why a tie-in with ailing Proton wasn't done, nobody said nothin'.

AAB (they tested the magic canister on one of his cars) officially launched it so some are still wondering if LMG Auto has qualified to be the third - or is it the fourth? - national vehicle.

In any case, big plans were afoot that August day. LM Star Autoworld, the parent company, was going to invest in a RM378 million manufacturing plant in Johor; they were targeting sales of 18,000 vehicles mostly for export.

Most of all, the world held its breath for this new kid-guru to show us the way with a new technology which could fundamentally change how energy is generated in countless aspects of our lives, not just transportation.



Seven months later, I may be blind but I see squat. I'd like to know more but its website is still under construction. So you tell me. Is this for real?


pic credit: The Star

Clever, Singapore

Sometimes, you can't help but envy what comes out of the little red dot.

Saw this post on the green blog treehugger.com and it blew my mind with its simplicity. It seems the island republic's A*Star (Agency for Science, Technology and Research, a govt-initiated body) has come up with a urine battery, which is currently good enough to crank 1.5 volts of juice. The idea's so clever simply because it's basic science, something school students could've thought of - IF it was thought of.


Further googling revealed that this battery is actually old news - it had been announced as early as Aug 2005 - shows how in touch i've been about regional news. But then again, i used to read the local mainstream media, whose editors probably use a jealousy factor in news-editing.

But seriously, take a quick peek at A*Star's website and look at the mountain we have to scale to compete/collaborate at the same level as the folks down south (a number of whom, sadly for us, are Malaysians). Suspend for a while all those boasts we make about ourselves from IT to biotech and get the real story of what it means when a neighbor has the will to get things going. Remember that a mere 40 years separates the visions of the two sovereign nations.

Meanwhile we struggle with basic education, unemployable graduates (yet it's always somebody else's fault isn't it, Giant?), an increasingly unreliable infrastructure, and the dearth of real R and D initiatives and opportunity.

So mainstream media boasts aside, you tell me which govt couples vision with gumption?

Even more important, with a leading cast from Dracula to Sleepy Hollow, can we even begin to be serious about the journey?