w.I.b:warung ikan bakar:
Harap-harap INI KALILAH !
Tuesday, January 31, 2006
CRASH, one of the best films I have watched last year,is nominated as Best Picture for this year's Academy Awards.
IT is an honest film that leaves a sore in everyone's racist' spine. It puts forth convincingly the ugliness of racism yet at the same offer a tiny glimpse of hope for genuine tolerance and acceptance...though the movie ended with a solid example of a disastrous racial prejudice.
Looking back at ourselves in UMNO-land, we can come up with better scripts and stories about ridiculous racism, if only the media and the censorship board would allow a local film that discuss honestly the racism in Malaysia.
Our university student representatives, who are supposed to defend our rights as students, submitted a memorandum to DPM Najib to ask for the AUKU to be retained.
Who voted in these student reps? UMNO, the university administrators or the students oourselves?
IF they are known as student reps, why are they doing things that further gag our mouths and favour the UMNO-led government ?
Fewer Breast Cancer Patients to Get Chemo By MARILYNN MARCHIONE AP Medical Writer Dec 10, 7:07 PM EST
SAN ANTONIO (AP) -- For years, doctors have known exactly what to do with breast cancer patients like Eva Ossorio: Poison them. Blasting women with toxic chemicals was considered the best way to save their lives. The bigger the cancer or the more it had spread, the more vile liquid doctors pumped into their veins to try to kill it. But there's been a sea change in the last year.
Guidelines recently adopted in Europe and similar ones unveiled this weekend at a conference in Texas will result in far fewer women getting chemotherapy in the future.
The new advice calls for choosing a treatment based on each woman's particular type of tumor.
"In the past, we made all decisions based on how big the tumor was and whether the lymph nodes were involved. If you had a lot of cancer, you got treated one way, and if you had a little cancer, you got treated another way," said Dr. Eric Winer of the Dana-Farber Cancer Center in Boston.
Under the new rules, hormone status - whether a tumor's growth depends on estrogen or progesterone - becomes the single most important factor in picking treatment.
That is why Ossorio, a 62-year-old nurse in San Antonio, last week was started on a hormone blocker rather than the chemo she formerly would have been given for her relatively large tumor. She was relieved.
"I don't care if I die tomorrow. I decided I didn't want chemotherapy," she said.
Women have reason to dread it. Chemo is a sledgehammer, killing all rapidly dividing cells whether they are out-of-control cancerous ones or healthy ones that naturally grow quickly, like those lining the mouth and stomach. That's why chemo causes hair loss, nausea and mouth sores.
But the worst part is, it only helps about 15 percent of those who get it after the usual surgery to remove their tumors. Roughly 25 percent get worse despite chemo. A whopping 60 percent would have been fine with hormones alone.
"For the vast majority of patients, we probably overtreat," said Dr. William Gradishar of Northwestern University in Chicago.
"It's not that chemotherapy is not of value, it's that the value is smaller in women with hormone-driven disease," said Dr. Robert Carlson, a Stanford University physician who led the U.S. guideline-writing group. "We're trying to determine if the benefit is so small that we should not be recommending chemotherapy."
Several developments in recent years help doctors pick who really needs it....(to be continued)
There is one thing I realize time and time again - is that people tend to disagree. Which is okay, if we also know and practise the ethics of disagreeing.
Most of the time a conflict arise not because of differing views, but because we handle the difference in opinion rather poorly. Most of the time, we are too proud of what we believe in…and refuse to hear reasons from the other side.
This I see happening in the management of the college, in departments, in the faculty, in organizing committees, and sadly, also in the church.
It is always good to have a stand instead of being a fence-sitter, but we should not be overzealous in defending the stand. Disagreeing should not always result in sour faces. Taking away the personal and selfish issues, a resolution can be reached via a good, honest, open dialogue with humility and prayer.
It is okay to disagree, but not okay to cast stones and hurl insults.
I overheard this while coming back to PJ on Monday night, 2/1/2006:
"Malaysia ini is going from bad to worse. Rasuah sana sini. Ministers do stupid things. Is this negara Islam? If so Islamic, why still so corrupted and the government so dirty? The prime minister is suspiciously, uninspiringly quiet. The ex-prime minister still cannot keep his mouth shut, criticising his own policies nowadays. Look at Thailand and Korea - they have come back strongly after the economic crisis. What are we doing? Is this Islamic country doing real things against corruption, or is this Islamic country just interested, overzealous in ensuring proper religious burials for new converts, Islamic family law, dressings and all that?"
You know what, my fellow Malaysians, maybe we should just stop looking at Badawi for answers and the right moves. Badawi alone cannot do much if at the grassroots level -the vice-chancellors of universities, the headmasters of primary schools, the religious leaders, the mayors, the district officers, the kindergarten teachers, et cetera are still under the same old, shallow, racist, greedy mentality since the gloomy Mahathir times.
2)My good friend, Mr Product sent this to Malaysiakini :-
Beautiful land, ugly government by Product of the System Dec 30, 05 6:23pm
From any perspective, by any standards, the year of 2005 has been a rotten one for Malaysia, to say the least. It is the year I would remember a schizophrenic minister went hysterical and ran amok in the parliament, shouting "Bloody racist!" like a patient non-compliant to his anti-psychotic medications. That of course, is an insult to psychiatric patients for they are more well-behaved and likeable.
Anyway, the same psychotic minister is now the appointed chairman of the Parliamentary Human Rights Caucus. Rather than being remembered for his unjustified psychotic outburst, Mohd Nazri Aziz is now touted as a defender of human rights.
A true believer in human rights would permit freedom of speech and freedom of ideas and freedom to vote with conscience. But Nazri was the one who proposed a suspension penalty against a fellow BN colleague merely for speaking his mind and insisting that BN female senators “must support the Islamic Family Bill”.
The year 2005 also saw Jerai MP Badruddin Amiruddin became more brazen in his racial slurs. After his May 13 “history lesson” in 2004, the Umno deputy chairman made a comeback this year with a double dose of “tak-suka-Malaysia-boleh-keluar” and “keling botol”.
It’s mind-boggling that he ends up becoming national hero while opposition leader Lim Kit Siang is portrayed in the indecent mainstream media as anti-Islam, anti-Malaysia. I have accepted that no disciplinary action of any form will ever be taken against such self-righteous old man like Badruddin.
I've also learnt to anticipate more racial taunts and religious blackmails from the party that preaches Bangsa Malaysia yet practices blatant discrimination.
I hope that Hishammudin Hussein's keris war cry at the Umno general assembly is not forgotten by Malaysians already. It’s baffling how someone can hold the omnipotent portfolio of education minister entrusted to sow racial harmony yet make violent intimidations on national television.
Just when it seems that most national shame and disgrace has reached its peak and tapering off for the year, we are greeted with the arrogant stupidity of Mohd Noh Omar and his battalion of police. Allegations of power abuse by police officers are nothing new as we had a full dose of that in 1998.
We have roughly, more than a million illegal immigrants from neighbouring Indonesia yet we have seen no genuine crackdown. The last operation earlier this year was put off so many times that by the time it actually took place, the results and impact were negligible.
Yet when it was reported that 50,000 Chinese tourists are missing and believed to have been lured into “vice”, the government sprung on a super-charged crackdown with random harassments, baseless arrests complete with strip searches.
The figure has already been refuted with much logic and sense by DAP's Lim Guan Eng. But assuming that it is true, it is still an insignificant compared to a million Indonesians. If it’s not racial in origin then is it not pure stupidity?
Perhaps the most saddening thing in the midst of all these nonsense is the fact that Malaysia’s top man is a weakling that does little except quoting from brilliantly-phrase speeches. After two years at the helm, Abdullah Ahmad Badawi has little to be proud of.
It’s hard to believe that a land like Malaysia with so much potential has made so little impact on the international front, except for the wrong reasons. All of geography favours us - friendly weather, ready water sources, fertile soil, rich heritage of flora and fauna, attractive natural landscapes and yes, abundant oil.
With this armamentarium of God's blessings, we could have soared like eagles in any field of endeavour. Instead, the paradise called Malaysia is quick degenerating into a useless wasteland under the present gang of corrupted warlords - stricken by a cancer with distant metastasises.
Indeed, Malaysia is such a beautiful country, but we have such an ugly government.
*W.I.B is the personal blog of fooji. He works for the ministry of health seven days a week, skips his breakfast and looks forward to a good dinner at the end of the day.
w.I.b:warung ikan bakar:
