Lynas in UMNO owned Pahang and the Taiwanese company in UMNO owned Johor. The 2 aluminium smelter in PBB owned Sarawak (that did not happen at the end) are also good example of how we are lowering our health compass for money.Lynas should be BANNISHED from Malaysia. A case of an advanced economy taking advantage of a third world economy with pretext of providing employment and knowledge to us. Go back to Australia where you belong!!
A genuinely conservative point of view would be that the West, indeed much of America, is warming, that the fires in the Rocky Mountains could well become an annual event, and that those who choose, as I do, to live in the mountains now must calculate the risk they assume by living in timbered areas. Somehow, this cautious view, a characteristic of conservatism, is the new “liberal” for those who distrust overwhelming scientific evidence.
The neo-conservative or ideologically anti-scientific mindset is the topic for much consideration. It has to do with denying the facts when the facts don’t support your preconceived opinions. There is a history of this, including the Roman Catholic Church’s threatened excommunication of Galileo.
When the rich, powerful, selfish and greedy lead the world, the way to dooms day can never be surer…
The truly wise, smart, balanced, sensible know that riches can only worth and do so much; beyond which only the greedy and selfish would pursue.
The fault with a materialistic and corrupted society is that those who ‘lag’ behind in material wealth are ostracised and condemned, and those who are ‘fortunate’ to be able to amass large amount of riches are favoured and treated like kings. And the rich and powerful need not be more intelligent and sensible than those who are lesser endowed.
Too much of riches would give a false sense of ability and capacity, misleading and presumptuous, leading to conceit and disdain – negative traits that would lead to downfall and waywardness.
At the end of the day, the wise and sensible would prevail over the corrupted and greedy. History is replete with such instances, even causing the greatest empires to crumble under their own dirty weights…
But for us true Western conservatives, the fires are here and they require soul-searching. Quite a number of people in my area are now storing family memorabilia in units in the city, anticipating an evacuation order that may provide only minutes to round up children and pets. It’s a new lifestyle. This is the hottest summer in my memory in Colorado. There is now a persistent drought. Crops are drying up. Streams are dry. The air is smoky. And the winters bring less snow and cold. Something is going on.
Even the cautious Economist newspaper now has a special section documenting the warming of the entire Arctic. The good news is that ships will now be able to use the Northwest passage. The bad news is that it opens up the entire region for multi-national oil and gas development which, of course, will produce more carbon fuel to accelerate the global warming. For money conservatives this is a welcome thing. For nature conservatives, like me, it is pure disaster, disaster of epic proportions.
How do you prevent catastrophe when no single individual or nation is responsible? When behavior, in this case carbon consumption, is universal, how do you alter behavior on a mass scale? The single, simple answer, of course, is tax the carbon. Place an escalating price on its use until masses of people quit using it. But the money conservatives have made taxes and the governments who enact them demons.
The great historian Barbara Tuchman wrote a book called The March of Folly. Folly she defined as blind pursuit of a destructive policy with knowledge that a better alternative exists. That’s us, folks. There is a special place in hell, wrote the immortal Dante, for those who, in times of moral crisis, preserve their neutrality. How much worse place in hell must there be for those who perversely destroy Nature herself in the interest of money?
No one is responsible. We are all responsible. The black bears of the Rockies, actually a rich dark reddish-brown, are roaming the foothills with their cubs overturning trash barrels to stay alive. Meanwhile, their polar cousins are adrift on melting blocks of ice. I don’t want to live to see the last one die.
While environmental protection is a rather recent phenomenon, environmental issues have been in existence since time immemorial.
Even a powerful empire, an ancient civilisation, could be engulfed by natural disasters.
I was referring to the Roman Empire, the most powerful and glorious kingdom the Western World has seen. This ancient empire that existed until about 2,000 years ago could have been annihilated by Man’s ignorance of their living environment.
Historians in the past had made assumptions on the fall of the empire: political turmoil, flagging economy and undermined military power that had brought down the once invincible empire with a little help from the invading barbarians.
But there was a missing link between the cause and effect. Why had the once-insurmountable people suddenly been denied of their absolute superiority in politics, economy and military?
There must have been some intrinsic changes that caused the decline of a powerful people, something many historians are still exploring today.
Some emerging environmental historians have offered new reasons in recent years. They looked at things from the historical ecosystem and pointed to the ingression of environmental disasters as key to such changes, with a host of evidences.
After the Romans conquered much of the continent, their people were increasingly basking in material indulgences, thanks to their new-found wealth and unprecedented economic boom.
Sumptuous feasts aside, they also made sure the utensils used to hold their food were of supreme qualities.
To satisfy the needs of the people, businessmen coated a special substance on the utensils to give them a sparkling lustre. The empire’s rich and famous were particularly enchanted by such utensils, not knowing that the special substance coated on them was actually highly toxic lead.
Other than utensils, many day-to-day items, including the water pipes, also used lead, which got into the blood stream of the Romans over time to dangerously high levels.
What makes lead all the more frightening is that lead poisoning does not present early signs and symptoms, progressively invading our brains and organs instead, culminating in physical degeneration and debilitation, and the harms are passed down to our children and grandchildren.
Poisoned by lead, many Roman children were born physically and mentally disabled.READMOREhttp://malaysia786.wordpress.com/2012/07/07/the-state-of-pahang-is-burning-will-najib-be-elected-without-the-postal-votes/
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