Categories
Environment History & heritage

[233] Of Californian forest fire

California is suffering one of its worst forest fire in 50 years and major cities such as Los Angeles and San Diego have been put on alert.

Categories
History & heritage Sports

[232] Of Ajax – PSV

Two days after the retirement of Concorde, life’s still the same. Nevertheless, it is an end to an era – the end of the supersonic era for the transatlantic journey.And Ajax drew with PSV at the Philips Stadion in Eindhoven. For almost a full game, Ajax played with 10 men without van der Vaart and still survived the onslaught.

p/s – Just saw the PSV-Ajax match 20-minutes highlight and I’ve found somebody to hate – van Bommel. That bitch… Anyway, courtesy of ajaxfanclub.de, I am hosting a match highlight of Ajax-Celta CL match, in Dutch. Also, I have the 20-minutes, 44 MB hightlights of the PSV-Ajax match. Mail me at mnoorsha[at]umich[dot]edu for the file if you are interested.

Categories
This blog

[231] Of version 2.1

The __earthinc is now on version 2.1.
The html code was modified to accomodate Mozilla and Netscape. Hopefully, Mac’s Safari too. However, This site still doesn’t fully conform with those 3 browsers as good as Internet Explorer.

Special thanks to Terry Eaton of Button Monkey and Boris Novak of The Challenge for the motivation.

p/s – And tomorrow is Ramadan. How time flies…

Categories
Liberty Politics & government

[230] Of between mercy, moral and rights

A few days ago, Governor Jeb Bush of Florida saved a life. Though his action came a little bit too late from my point of view, nevertheless he technically saved a life. And I doubt his action should be appreciated.
I believe each one of us have the right to freedom, with some limitation of course. In doing so, I also believe a person has the right to choose between life and death for themselves. However, I believe Morpheus sucks. Err, I mean, it takes courage to live a life, to take up new challenges as each new day is given another chance of sunlight.

Don’t get me wrong. I don’t consider suicide committer as a coward. Quite on the contrary, it takes tremendous amount of courage to take one’s own life. It’s just that, unlike living a life, committing suicide is essentially the epitome of giving up. But then, it is not my right to decide what’s and what’s not when it comes to such a philosophical issue. Everybody has their own opinion. So in the end, one’s direction must be decided by oneself after all opinion considered.

Respecting freedom, I cannot impose my belief on anybody else (unlike those Taliban and other fundamentalists. And also the communists. It’s amazing how some Malaysians strongly advocate for a total Islamic law for the mass while at the same time they themselves lament the US domination over the Muslim world. Human hypocrisy is endless).

The life that Jeb Bush (the brother of the infamous Georgie Bush) saved, is suffering from a permanent brain damage. Terri Schiavo has been in vegetative state since 1990 and her life now depends on machines.

Life seems hopeless for her and she, according to the media, has expressed her desire to die.

I have no quarrel with her decision but the way the doctors handle the case is much left to be desired. Of all the methods available, they chose to pull her feeding tube. This is an inhumane act.

Depriving her from the feeding tube simply means starving her to death. Of all the methods available, from overdose of morphine to lethal injection, why starvation?

Florida legislature should have prevented the starvation earlier than later. Understandably, the red tape prevented them from acting swiftly.

Seven days into the case, she was almost dying and without doubt got through the pain. Then magically, the state legislature finally got rid of the red tape and reinstated the tube for Terri. Again why?

The action would be welcomed if it were done earlier but she was almost there. And now her seven days struggle came to nothing. Imagine how she would feel?

No. Better yet, how would you feel if you were in a car race, you were on the first spot and you almost crossed the finish line. And all the sudden, your engine failed and you ended up a mere meter from the end?

After all effort, in the end you ended up last; in the end, it doesn’t even matter. How would you feel?

Categories
Sports

[229] Of Ajax 1 – 0 Celta

Ajax 1 – 0 Celta. And the good news is, Ajax is currently the leader of Group H, thanks to the Dutch’s Belgian cousin, Club Brugge. I could imagine how the Azzuri played – “defense, defense, def…, offense, offense”.
It feels good to be on top.