Learning from Britain’s Moral Rot

Posted by Thomas Sowell

The orgies of violent attacks against strangers on the streets — in both England and the United States — are not necessarily just passing episodes. They should be wake-up calls, warning of the continuing degeneration of Western society.

As British doctor and author Theodore Dalrymple said, long before these riots broke out, “the good are afraid of the bad and the bad are afraid of nothing.”

Not only the trends over the years leading up to these riots but also the squeamish responses to them by officials — on both sides of the Atlantic — reveal the moral dry rot that has spread deep into Western societies.

Even when black youth gangs target white strangers on the streets and spew out racial hatred as they batter them and rob them, mayors, police chiefs and the media tiptoe around their racism and many in the media either don’t cover these stories or leave out the race and racism involved.

In England, the government did not call out the troops to squash their riots at the outset. The net result was that young hoodlums got to rampage and loot for hours, while the police struggled to try to contain the violence. Hoodlums returned home with loot from stores with impunity, as well as bringing home with them a contempt for the law and for the rights of other people.

With all the damage that was done by these rioters, both to cities and to the whole fabric of British society, it is very unlikely that most of the people who were arrested will be sentenced to jail. Only 7 percent of people convicted of crime in England are actually put behind bars.Read more

Najib's Electoral Reform: Damned If You Do,Damned If You Don't!

Hantu Laut

What's the point at the end of the day the opposition Pakatan Rakyat and Bersih would still rebuke and ridicule him.

You can never appease the oppositions with their "kedai kopi" politics and Malaysia's dirty politics on both sides of the political divide.Damned if you do, damned if you don't.



Giving in should not be an option now. You should have acceded before the Bersih rally.

The politicking is going to get murkier and dirtier as you get nearer D-Day, muddled by your erstwhile comrade-in-arms and his political hopefuls and with not much help from your inertial UMNO leaders who half the time spewed foolish and unintelligible statements.

Malaysia's Najib Calls for Electoral Reform

Najib will clean up the electoral process

Or is it a ploy to buy time?

Apparently bending to widespread criticism of a government crackdown of a July 9 march demanding electoral reform, Prime Minister Najib Tun Razak said Tuesday that a parliamentary select committee is to be formed as soon as possible to seek to reform the current system.

The announcement appears to answer a central demand of the reform group Bersih, a coalition of good-government organizations backed by opposition parties to clean up the electoral process.

The big question, however, is how soon the select committee will meet, and whether the reform provisions it comes up with – if any – could be put in place before national elections expected to be called late this year or early next. In that, the announcement of the committee carries certain dangers. If the committee is still meeting when the election comes and goes, the decision to create it is likely to be regarded as a public relations gesture.

Wong Chin Huat, one of the leaders of Bersih, told Asia Sentinel that Najib must hold up the polls until the reforms can be implemented.

Bersih itself, in a prepared statement, said it welcomed Najib’s announcement of a bipartisan committee, asking that immediate reforms be carried out before the next state and general elections and that other reforms be put in place within two years after the formation of the committee.

The process is bound to be complicated and subject to possible delay. The Malaysian constitution must be amended after the legislative, policy drafting and enforcement mechanisms are finished, then laws must be put in place by the executive branch to carry out the mandate.

That will require an automated voter registration system. The government has already said it is creating a so-called biometric registration system which would use fingerprints or other biometric data for voter identification. Bersih, however, charges that the system is open to abuse and wants a system in which voters will be marked with indelible ink once they have voted.

The government took a severe beating in the international press after police cracked down on the so-called Bersih 2.0 rally, blocking entrances to Kuala Lumpur, dousing the marchers who got through with water cannons and firing tear gas at them despite the fact that most were determined not to fight back. Nonetheless, anywhere between 10,000 and 30,000 marchers got through depending on who was doing the counting. Some 1,700 people were arrested, many for merely appearing in yellow tee-shirts, the Bersih color.

Najib’s international image took a further beating when it was discovered that in an effort to turn around its negative image the government had paid RM86 million in two contracts to a British public relations company to plant favorable interviews and news stories with the international media. The contract was withdrawn abruptly when its existence was exposed by a Sarawak NGO, the Sarawak Report.

Just days ago, Najib was likening the Bersih marchers to the hooded rioters that torched buildings and caused violence in London and other cities. The abrupt about turn is being regarded in Kuala Lumpur as an indication that the government crackdown and attempt to demonize the marchers has backfired badly and hurt Najib’s standing.

The prime minister reportedly is already under fire from members of his own party, particularly those who advocate so-called Ketuanan Melayu, or Malay rights to take precedence over those of the country’s other races. Although some reports had him returning early from an Italian vacation to put down a party rebellion, those reports have been denied. But he clearly has been weakened from the affair.

“The prime minister must have realized that middle Malaysia will not tolerate a government that fanatically makes ‘clean’(Bersih, in Malay language) a dirty word, and losing the middle ground will erode his edge as a moderate leader in the increasingly rough intra-UMNO rivalry,” said Wong Chin Huat.

It is the mechanics of the process that are important. Although the prime minister said the committee would include lawmakers from both the Barisan Nasional, the ruling national coalition, to “discuss all the questions and issued raised about electoral reform so that a mutual agreement could be reached,” Deputy Speaker Wan Junaidi Tuanku Jaafar, a member of the United Malays National Organization, told local media that it would take at least year before the committee could finish its work and the reforms, if any, could be implemented. Read more.

The World's Most Miserable Rich Country

The Lap of Luxembourgery

So what if it has the world's highest per capita GDP? A visit to the debt-ridden capital of European complacency.

BY ERIC PAPE | SEPT/OCT 2011

In the dark heart of Europe lies a nation rotten to the core. Renowned as a secret banking haven where North Korean leader Kim Jong Il allegedly squirreled away billions of dollars, its economy is tied to the whims of capricious global money markets. The country's per capita external debt is 84 times that of the debt-ridden United States (some $3.76 million for each man, woman, and child). Democracy is a joke, undermined by a hereditary and unelected head of state who not only can dissolve parliament, but appoints some of its members in the first place. Beleaguered citizens worry about just how sustainable their ever-more-fragile country is, which is no surprise given that foreigners make up 44 percent of the population and the equivalent of another 25 percent invade the country daily just to do its work.

So where is this armpit of the European Union, this cancer of the continent? Greece? The Balkans? Not exactly. Behold the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg, population 503,000, a tiny freckle on the map between Belgium, France, and Germany.

Sure, cyclists and hikers might see this bucolic country as a verdant paradise, with its rolling green hills and lush pastures. And bankers may marvel at its spectacular wealth: Luxembourg boasts the world's highest per capita GDP, $108,832 in 2010. But something must be wrong. The miserable Luxembourgers -- who rate lower than all but one other European country on the Happy Planet Index (they're tied with war-torn Sudan!) -- buy more cigarettes and alcohol and have a higher per capita carbon footprint than any other country. And yet their national motto is "We want to remain what we are."

I had to know: Could this hard-partying little duchy hold the secret to the dark forces now tearing apart Europe?

On the cloudless summer day when I arrived, the quiet, well-kept streets of Luxembourg's capital, creatively named Luxembourg City, seemed idyllic enough. The only time I sensed any sort of abyss was when I looked down from the elegant stone Pont Adolphe into the lush, precipitous gorge that cuts through town. An 18-piece military brass band was playing "Come Fly With Me" in the city center as well-dressed white people filtered in and out of luxury chain stores on the edge of the charming old town. In the distance, a row of investment banks glistened in the sun, identically armored with reflective, modern exteriors.

I wandered into a stylish bistro that leaked pulsing rhythms onto the Rue de la Boucherie, the trendiest street in the center of the old town -- the kind of place, the waiter told me, where bankers gather to knock back copious amounts of booze on weekends. A bottle of whiskey in Luxembourg, explained Panagiotis Meidanis, an 18-year-old server with a truncated pompadour, sells for half the price that it does in his native Greece, where people earn a fraction of the local income, especially now. "When we close on weekend nights, they always want more," said Meidanis of his customers. "But for some reason they never get into fights here."

But what did he know? I needed to find a real Luxembourger. Across from the 19th-century Gare de Luxembourg with its art nouveau flourishes, I met with Georges Hausemer, who has published one of the remarkably few novels in the native Lëtzebuergesch language. Hausemer's 1998 novel, Iwwer Waasser (Above Water), is a tale of a broken marriage set in the world of banking that the author describes as a "portrait in miniature" of Luxembourgian society.Read more.

Malaysia:A Reluctant Symbol for Electoral Reform

A Reluctant Symbol for Electoral Reform in Malaysia

By LIZ GOOCH

KUALA LUMPUR — Her photograph has been burned by ethnic Malay nationalists, there have been calls to revoke her Malaysian citizenship and she has been threatened, via text message, with death. The movement she leads, Bersih, an alliance of 62 nongovernmental organizations pressing for electoral reform, has been declared illegal, and a demonstration that brought thousands of its followers into the streets of this capital city last month ended with nearly 1,700 arrests.

But having stared down these challenges, Ambiga Sreenevasan, 54, a University of Exeter-educated lawyer and former president of the Malaysian Bar Council, is now being hailed by many here as the “new symbol of civil society’s dissent.”

“She has not been afraid to speak the truth to power,” said Ibrahim Suffian, director of the Merdeka Center, an independent polling firm in Kuala Lumpur.

Over peppermint tea in a busy cafe recently, Ms. Ambiga squirmed uncomfortably at the attention she had attracted.

“This focus on me is actually ridiculous,” said Ms. Ambiga. “It’s a true citizens’ movement, because the citizens have taken ownership of Bersih.”

The Coalition for Clean and Fair Elections, or Bersih — “clean” in Malay — got its start in November 2007. Members of the political opposition and civic groups defied restrictions on gatherings of more than five people without a permit and rallied for changes in an election system they said unfairly favored the governing coalition, which has been in power since Malaysia achieved independence in 1957. Read more.