The Nostradamus Code: World War III

I have not bought this book nor read it yet. It sounds interesting.

It is authored by Dr. Michael Rathford who studied Quatrains of Nostradamus since 1975. He is the author of this book, The Nostradamus Code: World War III.

By combining traditional analysis techniques with state of the art data mining algorithms, he made significant discoveries that resulted in the book.

You can find out more of this book from www.nostradamusonline.com/



Excerpts:

With a total of eight chapters, The Nostradamus Code: World War III opens with an overview of the bewildering events currently unfolding on the world stage. You will find out why they are happening...

The years 2008 through 2012 are explained in precise detail by Dr Rathford. Referred to by Nostradamus as the Time of Troubles, this period is full of war, despair, and evil.

When the prophecies-within-prophecies are deciphered, the hidden timeline of World War III is revealed. New predictions include:

• A conflict between the US and Iran
• The next major terrorist attack on the US
• Osama Bin Laden
• The nuclear destruction of Rome

A passage in Chapter 4 caught my eyes:

Chapter Four: The Time of Troubles

Third world country leader creates strife
(Century III, Quatrain 60)

A "young dark man" will arise as a leader in a Third World country; his main goal is to unite the other Third World countries to do battle with the superpowers. The area of conflict will be in Eastern Europe and the Middle East...

A young man from a 3rd world country; who will that be? From Malaysia? Can't be; we're closer to 4th World, aren't we? ehm... I love this piece!!!

Drawing on newly discovered Nostradamus manuscripts, a startling new view of the world is revealed. If you agree that signs like widespread terrorism, a volatile Middle East, and an economic depression could lead to World War III - then you will find this book truly eye-opening.

You can purchase a soft-copy in pdf format online HERE.

Malaysia & The Club of Doom

Abstract from Syed Akbar Ali's book Malaysia & The Club of Doom

"In Malaysia the traffic cops will come in droves on Saturdays and Sundays to issue parking tickets to the exasperated housewives who parked their car on the yellow line to get to the congested and overcrowded wet market. This is another example of Third World Thinking. In the end it is we who tie ourselves down to the Third World. Why can't the traffic cops allow parking at the yellow lines for certain hours near the wet market to allow housewives shop quickly in peace? They are not law breakers but just housewives?"

"This is the hallmark of Third World - plan and policies are put into practice which hinder more than benefit…Islamic countries like Malaysia did inherit a good working system from the colonials but decades of independence sees these systems breaking down."

When the controversial Amendments to the Islamic Family Law Bill were bulldozed through the Parliament in 2005, some of the religious outfits started making the usual tin can noises in the media that 'ONLY those who know the syariah, the ijma, the qiyas etc should comment. Here is an example (from Dr Sarah Haniza Abdul Ghani for Muslim Professional Forum, NST, Feb 16, 2006):

"We wish to state that the Bill is Syariah Compliant... Any criticism and comment on Syariah matters should only be made by parties who are well versed in the source...

Those who have been uncompromisingly critical of the Bill have only exposed their lack of grasp or ignorance of the Masdir al Syariah, the Maqasid al Syariah and the Qawaid al Syariah."

Well without them realising it, the millions of Muslims in Malaysia have been duped into thinking that somehow all the so called Islamic Family Laws are super duper and heavenly... Actually it is ciplak from the British Undang Undang Kristian. ...What has clearly happened is that the Islamic Family Law has confirmed that Section 76 of the Marriage and Divorce Act (UK Law) is now "Syariah Compliant"!

"...whenever something goes wrong, they (Muslims) do blame it on ... conspiracies. ...They do not realize that by endlessly blaming these conspiracies, they are openly acknowledging that they are gullible simpletons. The only conclusion we can draw is that if there are bad wolves in the forest and they are looking for easy victims, they can always rely on the Malaysian Muslims to play that role. But few Muslims want to admit that they had been manipulated by their own leaders ..." (Syed Akbar Ali, page 63, Chapter 4, ibid)


It is ironical that after all the fuss the same undang undang sekular, undang undang barat, undang undang kristian has been adopted to help create two separate legal system.

- Syed Akbar Ali, Malaysia & The Club of Doom, 2006

Critical Path

Abstract from Critical Path

The earth does not belong to man; man belongs to the earth.
All things are connected. We may be brothers after all.

One thing we know which man may one day discover: Our God is the same God.

He is the God of man and His compassion is equal for the red and the white.

The white too shall pass; perhaps sooner than all other tribes.
Contaminate your bed and you will one night suffocate in your own waste.

That destiny is a mystery, for we do not understand when the buffalo are to be slaughtered, the wild horse tamed, the secret corners of the forest heavy with scent of many men and the view of the ripe hills blotted by talking wires.

Where is the thicket? Gone. Where is the eagle? Gone.
The end of living and the beginning of survival.

We have learned in the last decade that aggression is a secondary behavior of humans -

that when they get what they need, when they need it, and are not overwhelmed, they are spontaneously benevolent; it is only when they become desperate that they become aggressive because what they have relied on is no longer working.

Income Tax & Wealth

Income tax did not disclose capital wealth. It disclosed only the declared income of the wealthy.

The rich get richer and the poor get children.
The rich get their buildings built for a song and people them with many servants for another song.
Nobody ever knew what the wealthy really had.
The wealthy seemed to be just fantastically so.

The Banking Poem

Oh, our parents forgot to get married.
Our parents forgot to get wed.
Did a wedding bell chime, it was always a time
when our parents were somewhere in bed.

Ye banker, ye broker, ye joker,
Three prominent bastards are thee, tra la,
Three prominent bastards are thee!

As the children of the cop possess the flattest kind of feet,
As the daughter of the floozie has a waggle to her seat,
My position at the bottom of society I owe
To the qualities my parents bequeathed me long ago.

My father was a married man and, what is even more,
He was married to my mother - a fact which I deplore.

I was born in holy wedlock, consequently by and by.
I was rocked by every bastard who had plunder in his eye.
I invested, I deposited, I voted every fall,
And I saved up every penny and the bastards took it all.

At last I've learned my lesson, and I'm on the proper track,
I'm a self-appointed bastard and I'M GOING TO GET IT BACK.

Oh, our parents forgot to get married.
Our parents forgot to get wed.
Did a wedding bell chime, it was always a time
when our parents were somewhere in bed.

Ye banker, ye broker, ye joker,
Three prominent bastards are thee, tra la,
Three prominent bastards are thee!

Source:

Richard Buckminster Fuller
Adjuvant Kiyoshi Kuromiya
Critical Path, 1981
St. Martin's Press, New York.

Shooting an Elephant & Other Essays

Today is a rest day for me. So, I tried to catch up with some readings as the pile of books I bought recently are catching dusts and mites.

Since I do not want to have any serious readings, I got hold of this book by George Orwell, "Shooting an Elephant and Other Essays."

It wasn't exactly an outstanding book, but I like to borrow the term he used: "Good Bad Book", that is, the kind of book that has no literary pretensions but which remains readable when more serious productions have perished.

It was, to me, an escape literature where my mind browse at odd chapters. I like what Eric Arthur Blair (George Orwell his pen name) said: "While civilization remains such that one needs distraction from time to time, 'light' literature has its appointed place." This book is, for me, one of them.

There was one chapter that strikes me much: "Books v Cigarettes." Here, Eric reveals his estimates of how much money he spent on books. The hypothesis is that 'buying books is an expensive hobby and beyond the reach of average person which deserves some detailed examination.

Exactly what reading costs, reckoned in terms of dollars and cents per day, is difficult to estimate. According to Eric, he probably possess some 900 books (collected over a period of 15 years) which was estimated to have cost him some £166. Including other costs, the average expenses per year is £25 which is equivalent to about 83 cigarettes. Eric concluded that, "he is spending far more on tobacco than he did on books."

I am a smoker and I love buying books, regularly. But it never cross my mind to make a direct cost comparative study on this two hobbies. I think, I should and I too love to do so now.

As for me, I spent an average of about RM9,000 a year on books from the period 1997-2004. In the last 3 years, the average had gone down to about RM6,000 per annum. Let me just use RM6,000 as a baseline for tabulation. That works out to be about RM500 a month, RM17 a day which is equivalent to 2 packets of 20-stick cigarettes.

Oh, I didn't smoke 2-packets a day, but not too far off. But the likelihood that I will be scaling down on my cost of books procurement would sooner match the cost - cost of cigarette consumption = cost of books procurement.

How much is your cost of cigarette v books, or liquor v books, or cosmetics v books, or clothings v books? This looks like a good assessment of our expenditure vs knowledge acquisition.

Malaysian Politicians Say the Darndest Things

It wasn't exactly an outstanding book, but it is a "Good Bad Book", a term coined by George Orwell.

"Malaysian Politicians Say the Darndest Things is a collection of over 100 Quotes. Amir said it will make you go hmmm and gaga.

Amir promised more to come; that's why he called this book Vol 1.

The interesting point to note is how Amir started with the Introduction using Winston Churchill's quote:

"It is a good thing for an uneducated man to read books of quotations."

But I too like books of Quotation, Amir?

I like to quote here some of his work:

Shoot II: "They [taxi drivers who cheat tourists] should be lined up against the wall and shot. They are the new enemies, the same as communists. I am not joking, this is a serious matter. If they can be shot, all the better."

(This comment was made by Sheikh Kadir Sheikh Fadzir, the then Cultural, Arts and Tourism Minister, Berita Harian, 26 August 2002).

It was a nice one. I was just wondering Amir, that our ministers deemed it necessary, if the law would permit, to shoot taxi driver who cheat the tourist. What then about those ministers, politicians, and civil servants who cheated millions and billions from the taxpayers' money? Should they just be shot at the wall or should it be far greater torture on them such as, gang-raped them, make them eat shit, slew them and throw their bodies to the vultures.

I darned think it will happen to them but the punishment may be meted out on those policemen who take $50 along the highways and expressways.

I also have another of Amir's book, "Generation - A Collection Of Comtemporary Malaysian Ideas", co-authored with Kam Raslan and Sheryll Stothard, published by Hikayat Press, 1996.

Good-to-Great & Built to Last

Jim Collins wrote the book, "Good To Great" to illustrate the management hype - the cult of the superhuman CEO.

His research explains how a good company, mediocre companies, and even bad companies are able to achieve enduring greatness.

Jim started his writing with the caption: 'Good is the Enemy of Great'.

This is some of what he wrote:

We expect that good-to-great leaders would begin by setting a new vision and strategy. We found instead that "they first got the right people on the bus, the wrong people off the bus, and the right people in the right seats - and then they figured out where to drive it."

The old adage "People are your most important asset" turns out to be wrong. People are not your most important asset 'if you got the wrong people' (emphasis added). The right people are.

Few people have the culture of discipline.. and... when you combine a culture of discipline with an ethic of entrepreneurship, you get the magical alchemy of great performance.

Good-to-great companies never use technology as the primary means of igniting transformation. Paradoxically, they pioneers the application of carefully selected technologies.

Good-to-great CEOs didn't talk about themselves. They'd talk about the company and the contributions of their executives and would deflect discussion about their own contribution.

""The comparison leaders did just the opposite. They'd look out of the window for something or someone outside themselves to blame for poor results, but would preen in front of the mirror and credit themselves when things went right.""

Does this statement sounds familiar to you? How often did you read this statement in our daily press and news? It is just unshockingly believable in our society and governmental system.

Jim continued: 'The great irony is that the animus and personal ambition that often drive people to positions of power stands at odds with the humility required for Level 5 Leadership. The term Level 5 refers to the highest level in a hierarchy of executive capabilities that was identified in the research. Level 5 Leaders are modest and willful, humble and fearless. They are ambitious to be sure, but ambitious first and foremost for the company, not themselves."

Jim conclusively summarized up his research of the Good-to-Great companies:

• To go from good to great requires transcending the curse of competence.
• Those who launch radical change programs and wrenching restructuring will almost certainly fail to make the leap.

"Some of the key concepts discerned in the study will fly in the face of our modern business culture and will upset some people," Jim commented.

The book is a good read. But I would suggest that, for those who had not read his earlier book, 'Built To Last', it would be better to read that first.

Built To Last is a fantastic research project for Stanford University Graduate School of Business by Jim Collins and Jerry I. Porras who took 18 exceptional top companies and studied each in direct comparison to one of its top competitors.

In the Author's note (2002 Edition), they wrote: "Creativity often sprouts from frustration. Built to Last is not fundamentally about building to last. It is about building something that is worthy of lasting - about building a company of such intrinsic excellence that the world would lose something important if that organization cease to exist. It's about a Global Visionary Company with timeless core values and purpose beyond just making money.

Those who built the visionary companies wisely understood that it is better to understand "who you are" then "where you are going" - for where you are going will almost certainly change. It is a lesson as relevant to our individual lives as to aspiring visionary companies and most of all, relevant to our governmental system of administration.