Kuala Lumpur:Urban Sprawl And Crawl

Hantu Laut

I have written a number of articles about Kuala Lumpur as a growing metropolis particularly the mishmash urban development and its horrendous public transportation system.It has one of the worst taxi services in the world and a limping public transportation system.

To add to its woes, productivity in the service industry is still much to be desired compared to other growing economies in the region.

As a simple measure, go to any fast food chains in KL or anywhere in Malaysia, it's normal to wait 10 minutes before you get your food delivered to you, which loses the very essence of a fast food outlet.Some Chinese and Indian hawker's stalls can serve food much faster than franchise chains like KFC and McDonald. People who goes for fast food either go for the price or they are time constrained.

My KL friends used to laugh at me and think I am talking cock when I say KL is becoming a dysfunctional city.Its ostentatious looks tells a different story. You have to be a world traveller to understand whether a city is fully functional or not and Kuala Lumpur is not one of them.Some American and European cities are not much better.

I used to hate Manila,Jakarta and Bangkok with the terrible macet (traffic jam).I used to do day trip to Bangkok and Jakarta before, go early morning flight, finished doing my business and returned same day to Singapore, where I used to live.

Unless, you have been to many other cities of the world you wouldn't have a clue how to rate a city.The World Bank has came up with a report here deriding KL as a poorly planned and inefficient city due to bad and poor planning.

The haphazard urban sprawl has brought with it the big urban crawl.Bumper to bumper traffic is a common sight in KL.The city planners are not forward looking, lack planning skills, or just couldn't care less.In spite of building more roads and flyovers at great costs they have not been able to resolve the problem.

Malaysia, should change its "five-year" plan policy and look at longer term planning.Five years is too short and infrastructures could be quickly overwhelmed.

A good example of poor foresight is the LCCT in Sepang, which is now at bursting point creating great discomfort to travellers, while the bigger KLIA main terminal is grossly under utilised.Arrived anytime during the day, one would not fail to see there are only MAS aircrafts parked on the tarmac.

Malaysian Airports (MAB) is solely to be blamed for the poor traffic, they have failed miserably, to attract foreign airlines to KLIA with their uncompetitive pricing and lack of facilities.KLIA, must be one of the few airports in the world that has no bars where weary travellers can unwind themselves. The travesty! They sell all kind of alcohol beverages in the duty free store and serve the same on the national carrier.Foreign airlines still prefer Singapore and Bangkok as transit stops.With the type of management running the airport KLIA would continue to stay a ghostly airport.Mahathir's dream of taking away business from Singapore would forever stays a dream.

Kuala Lumpur is also the most pedestrians unfriendly city.Try walking along Bukit Bintang and the multitudes of steps ups and downs that make walking a knee-crunching experience, particularly for the elderly. Take a walk at Orchard Road, Singapore and see the vast difference between the two.It tells a lot about the city planners in both cities.Singapore, has also made its roads, streets and buildings handicap friendly.

KL also have poor maintenance culture.I once went to KL Tower to get aerial view of the city and took some photographs.It's such a disgrace, the glass that surrounds the viewing deck were all dirty, stained, probably never been cleaned since the day it was installed, leaving it to the mercy of the elements.

In anticipation of the big urban migration, Kuala Lumpur should have planned and built its mass transit system some 15 years ago.The excuse given before, if I remember well, was because of high water table the mass transit couldn't go underground, which now appears to be completely untrue.

Although it sits on karstic limestone with high water table there are technology that can do the job available more than a decade ago.Bangkok, suffers from the same phenomenon of high water table but have overcome it and now have in place a fully functional underground network.

The Smart Tunnel completed in 2007 using tunnel boring machines (TBM) was an example of such technology.Now, taxpayers would have to pay more building the mass transit, which, I believe, is again being planned haphazardly.

The first attempt, a politically motivated project and an attempt at bumiputras eugenic engineering was a costly disaster.The government eventually have to take over the STAR and PUTRA transit system which is a far cry from being a true mass transit.

The proposed mass transit would be the most expensive project ever undertaken and probably would suffer many rounds of cost overrun..... Malaysian style.... that put money into the wrong pockets.

Most cities in the region have built their mass transit decades ago.

Seoul completed its first Metro line in 1974, Hong Kong in 1979, Singapore 1987 and Bangkok in 2004. Only Jakarta,Manila and Kuala Lumpur do not have a fully functional mass transit.

It tells you something about Malaysia,Indonesia and the Philippines and the quality of leadership.

Giving Islam A Bad Name

Hantu Laut

The Muslims can't even get their act together let alone expand an Islamic empire.Muslims killing each other in the name of their religion.Suicide bombing killing innocent civilians are some of the most gruesome act of terror perpetuated by Muslims against their own kind.

What's happening in the Arab countries, in Afghanistan and in Pakistan are depictions of Muslims showing disrespect to their own religion and desecrating the sanctity of Islam.This morbid fascination of going to the Garden of Eternity filled with vestal virgins have brought great embarrassment to the religion.

The Koran prescribed reward for martyrdom, but in no uncertain term, proscribed suicide in whatever form.Killing innocent men,women and children by strapping bomb to your body and blowing yourself up and those around you is not by any stretch of one's imagination considered martyrdom.You have to be really stupid to believe in such deviant teaching.

Islam does not encourage the propagation of violence and militancy, no mention of honour killing in its scriptures and so were most of sharia laws, some from the Koran but majority were taken from the hadiths formulated over hundreds of years after the death of Prophet Mohammad in A.D.632.The sharia was assembled over many centuries by Mohammad's followers and Islamic dynasties.The Koran sets out basic standards of human conduct, but does not provide a detailed law code.

This bunch of shitheads who come to other people's country and want to impose their religious law on others should be locked up before they start spreading their madness to gullible and uninitiated Muslims.They are danger to society, not only in Britain, but to the rest of the world.They should go back to where their forefathers came from.

Malaysia have just arrested using the ISA 18 Islamic militants in Tawau, Sabah, who were caught with arms and explosives, to be used God's knows where, to kill civilians.Yet, human rights groups like Sukaham and political party PAS/PKR admonished the government for doing so.I am sure if there were terrorist bombing in this country they would also blame the government.

Watch this most cruel and brutal punishment and public execution carried out in Iran.

Do you want this in Malaysia?

Aquino vs. Arroyo: It's personal

Hantu Laut

Every president will have his/her hand in the cookie jar.

The next one, supposedly to clean up the mess, would continue the tradition.

A feud between two powerful political families embarrasses the Philippines

The pathetic standoff at Manila’s Ninoy Aquino International Airport involving former President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo and Philippine immigration officials Tuesday evening, only highlights how far contradiction among the country’s privileged elite can go – a bitter clash that could plunge the country into a constitutional crisis.

Both camps – the Arroyos and President Benigno S. Aquino III – have only themselves to blame.

Arroyo, bearing a Supreme Court order to allow her to leave to seek medical treatment for a reputed rare bone disease, arrived with her husband Jose Miguel Arroyo to board a flight to Singapore. However, immigration authorities stopped them on orders from Aquino and the Justice Department.

That sets up a confrontation with the Supreme Court, the majority of which she had appointed, issued the order allowing her to seek treatment in any of five countries that do not have extradition treaties with Manila.

Legally, there is nothing that would and should bar the besieged former president from leaving the country in the absence of a proper court order. In fact, Aquino’s Justice Secretary, Leila de Lima said that authorities can’t arrest the Arroyos because no charges have been filed against them. There is an executive order, ironically issued by the former president herself, however, that places a person under a watch list and whose flight outside the country may be stopped by immigration officials. It is an executive edict that is now being questioned before the highest court of the land by the Arroyos.

The Aquino government believes it has a case against the former president and is morally obliged to perform its duty of preventing a potential fugitive from justice from leaving the country. As it now appears, the Aquino government is taking the risk of being cited in direct contempt by the Supreme Court for what the current president believes is his moral obligation.

Longtime personal feud
The NAIA standoff however is not just mere legal and political issues between two of the country’s powerful political clans, it also has personal undertones to it.

During several attempts to impeach President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo when she was still the president, the Aquinos – at least the Cojuangco side of the president’s family – were among the leaders of the movement that sought her resignation. President Noynoy Aquino’s late mother Corazon, also a former president, went to great lengths to apologize to former President Joseph Estrada for joining the protest movement that led to his ouster. Corazon Aquino played a major role in the installation of Arroyo as president of the republic in the aftermath of Estrada’s impeachment.

Ironically, it is Corazon Aquino, and to some extent her son, who also were among the first to drop Arroyo as an ally and call for her resignation due to corruption and widespread electoral fraud in 2004. It is a falling out that left Arroyo enraged. Under her watch, the vast Hacienda Luisita property of the Cojuangcos was declared subject to the coverage of the land reform program.

Aquino in turn has not got over the fact that the Arroyos pulled all the plugs during the 2010 presidential elections in which the current president won convincingly on an anti-corruption platform.

Both the former and current presidents share the same place in the history of Philippine politics. They are the only presidents whose parents also served as presidents of this oldest republic in Southeast Asia. They practically share the same origin, having roots in central Luzon. Their parents were stalwarts of the Liberal Party, one of the oldest political parties of the country. They are also among the old rich families in the Philippines. Read more.

Home Is Hell For DSK

By Tracy McNicoll

The Daily Beast

Two months after returning to France, and six months after the former International Monetary Fund chief was first accused of sexually assaulting a hotel maid in Manhattan, salacious new tattle has made life miserable for the man who not long ago thought he would be France’s president. Ensnared in a tentacular prostitution scandal—the so-called Carlton affair, which pundits believe has killed his last distant hope for a return to public life—Strauss-Kahn is floundering as he fights to clear his name. On Monday, he and his wife, the former TV journalist and art heiress Anne Sinclair, added a media lawyer to their legal team and issued a broad threat to sue over gossipmongers’ “most detestable voyeurism” after rumors swirled through the weekend suggesting the couple might divorce. But DSK’s real foe is bigger than idle curiosity. Instead, the battle is against no less than his compatriots’ hunger for a grand collective catharsis.

The headlines are pitiful. “DSK, an Isolated Man,” read the front page of the popular French daily Le Parisien on Monday over a photo of Strauss-Kahn alone in a parking lot, with tousled white hair, open shirt, lazy eye, and grizzled beard. “DSK ‘Sick’: ‘A Broken Man’ on the Verge of Divorce,” declared France-Soir, another daily. The articles linger on the plight of DSK, stuck in his luxury apartment on the posh Place des Vosges. They cite anonymous friends who say he plays a bit of chess, escapes into math equations, cannot bear to watch TV, bites his nails down to the bleeding quick. “He used to take two days to answer a text message, now he responds within the minute,” an anonymous relation told the Journal du Dimanche. Hardly anyone visits anymore, the reports declare, and DSK rarely goes out, fearing the “frequent” insults from strangers. “DSK suddenly seems no more than a lonely old man,” Le Figarochimed in this weekend, in a piece singled out for legal action by the couple’s lawyers on Tuesday, titled “Anne Sinclair’s Profound Distress,” which suggested divorce was possible for the couple, married 20 years this month, after the latest embarrassing developments in the Carlton affair.Read more.