This is the Statue of the Late Stamford Raffles, The British colony official who signed the lease agreement with Temengong the then King of Johor in Malaya.
He is a visionerist that who foresee the strategic position of Singapore geographical location.
This great shot by *Hurricane Hilda, a rising star & member on www.flickr.com
It is no point to regret on already happening.
Looking at the falls of Imperialism of the European kingdom & The falls of the Asian Kingdoms.
That is folloing the:
CharlieBrown8989 says:
In according to Dao of Nature.
Union & Independence is Nature!!
Just Like Yin & Yang!!
According to the Gotama:
Every Seeing & Un-Seeing beings have & will have the following Noble Truth :
Birth
Growth
Decay
Death!!
This is a interesting report.
I suggest that you read over.
Then I shall futhre comments later!!
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Posted 7 hours ago. ( permalink )
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CharlieBrown8989 says: name reply / icon reply
I regret dumping of prisoners; imperism-opponents; convicts .....in New Foundlands!!
I regret Sign-off the Independance Rights for the British Colonies!!
I regret declaration on the Fall of The B. Empire!!
The list would be endless.......
Oxford University Debate! 'Regret the Founding of America'? A raucous debate in front of a packed house, the motion - "this House regrets the Founding of America" - overwhelmingly squashed. "Its easy to find those who disagree with its current direction"
Photo-Gail orenstein.
BBC- Last Updated: Wednesday, 2 May 2007, 11:40 GMT 12:40 UK
How many ideas has the US allowed to flourish that would otherwise have withered on the vine?
I am happy to report to you that the Oxford Union, in its infinite wisdom, has allowed America to continue existing.
After a raucous debate in front of a packed house, the motion - "this House regrets the Founding of America" - was overwhelmingly squashed.
My colleague Jonah Goldberg, from the National Review, made a witty and punchy case for the birthright of America, lambasting the Union for a motion that "sounded like a bad joke".
Peter Rodman, a former US assistant secretary of defence, entered the fray with patrician aplomb and, for what it's worth, this was some of my contribution to joust for the country where I keep my toothbrush and pay my taxes:
It is very easy to find Americans who disagree with its current direction. But you'll be hard pressed to come across those who regret its very existence in a fit of collective self-annihilation. The confusion of one with the other strikes me as the fundamental flaw of this motion.
Let's say you didn't need to regret the founding of America, because it had never been founded. How different might our lives look? We would not be listening to George Bush's fluent Texan. We would never have had the benefit of Donald Rumsfeld one-liners or clogged our arteries on a Big Mac.
But what music would we be listening to on our iPods? Would it be German marching songs or Russian ballads? Would we even have an iPod?
Yes, the beloved iPod was designed by a British citizen, Jonathan Ive, a son of Chingford, Essex. But would his design have changed the world of music if it hadn't been for Apple, an American company, based in Cupertino, California?
Freedom to dream
So much for iPods... what about ideas? How different would the world be without the Bill of Rights? What about Thomas Jefferson?
It's hard to imagine life without TV series like the Sopranos
The Declaration of Independence was the quintessential treatise of self-determination. If America had never been founded it would have remained unwritten. And who can imagine life without the Dumb Waiter, another Jefferson innovation?
The list goes on and on (and I apologise for any omissions): Thomas Edison, who had 1,093 patents for inventions in his name; Henry Ford; the Wright brothers; Bill Gates; the Boeing corporation; Desperate Housewives; The Sopranos and, of course, SpongeBob SquarePants.
As a TV correspondent, I would be out of a job. The television was invented over decades by a German, a Brit and a Russian but their ideas all came together in the middle of Middle America.
The United States created an environment in which inventive minds had access to easy credit, a willing market and the freedom to dream and create without fear of prosecution or recrimination.
As the writer and poet John Ciardi put it: "The Constitution gives every American the inalienable right to make a damn fool of himself"!
Europe's offspring
If we regret the founding of the US we regret a thoroughly European creation. If George III hadn't been as mad as a hatter, if the Redcoats had been more in touch with the feelings of His Majesty's subjects in the colonies, the English colony of Jamestown might never have given way to Yorktown, where 174 years later the English crown was finally defeated in the War of Independence.
There is nothing wrong with America that cannot be cured by what is right with America
Bill Clinton
To be against the founding of America is not to be original but to continue a long line of misguided bigots who always resented the birth of the US. In the late 18th Century, the eminent Dutch scientist Cornelius De Pauw wrote that everything from America was "either degenerate or monstrous". He was considered the foremost expert on the New World of his time and, like many critics of America, he never went there once.
Then there's the Oscar Wilde quip, plagiarised by former French Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau: "America is the only nation in history which miraculously has gone directly from barbarism to degeneration without the usual interval of civilisation". Anti-Americanism is as old as America and it continues to miss the point.
America did not come from nowhere. It was an offspring of Europe, the step-child of a corrupt, moribund post-feudal system. America encapsulated the principles of the Enlightenment - Liberty, Equality, Fraternity - wrapped them in the pursuit of happiness, underpinned them with an inalienable right and turned an IDEA into a country.
It took the missteps of the French and the English revolutions and it made them work.
Yes, there were terrible mistakes - the gross hypocrisy of slavery, segregation and McCarthyism, to name a few. But America found and keeps finding the solutions to its mistakes. It is a giant, rolling social experiment in constant pursuit of self-correction. As Bill Clinton once said: "There is nothing wrong with America that cannot be cured by what is right with America."
In America the idea was ragged, rough and imperfect but it kept growing, it kept evolving and, if this isn't a vote of confidence, it kept attracting people, millions of them - Dutch pilgrims, Russian Jews, persecuted Egyptians, hungry Mexicans, uprooted Kurds, homeless Armenians, unloved and underpaid British film stars, now luxuriating in Hollywood. Ask them if they regret the founding of America!
Real promise
The US is a nation built not on ethnicity, not on religion, not even on history but on an idea.
Many Americans see Guantanamo detentions as a big mistake
Not only does this make America different, I would argue it also makes it ideally suited for the 21st Century. We live in a globalised world in which national boundaries are less and less relevant and the citizenship of ideas is more and more defining.
Al-Qaeda also strives for a world without borders, a trans-national entity based on ideas, which a majority of Muslims find as unpalatable as we do. So, ask yourself and be honest: where would you rather live - the Caliphate or California?
We Europeans created America and to regret this is to engage in a colossal act of self-denial verging on self-mutilation. We have a stake in its survival and its success and we ought to nurture it, not bring it to its knees or delight in its misfortunes. We can criticise its leaders without regretting its existence.
The reality of America may be vexing, frustrating, infuriating and puzzling but its promise is no less real and, given the right voice, should be no less inspiring.
Guantanamo Bay, the Abu Ghraib prison scandal and yes, so many aspects of the war in Iraq, were big mistakes. But these are aspects of current foreign policy, not part of the nation's DNA. They are lamented as much inside the US as outside. And that too speaks for America!
To quote the Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington: "America is not a lie; it is a disappointment." But what is worse than being disappointed? It is not even to know what you're missing.
Source- news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/6613861.stm
Uploaded by gailorenstein on 2 May '07, 10.47pm PDT.
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Threats stifle female bloggers!! Sexual harassment on the rise in blogosphere-As women gain visibility in the blogosphere, they are targets of sexual harassment and threats. Men are harassed too, and lack of civility is an abiding problem on the Web.
Photo-Gail orenstein-Threats stifle some female bloggers
Sexual harassment on the rise in blogosphere
Updated: 1:08 a.m. ET April 30, 2007
A female freelance writer who blogged about the pornography industry was threatened with rape. A single mother who blogged about "the daily ins and outs of being a mom" was threatened by a cyber-stalker who claimed that she beat her son and that he had her under surveillance. Kathy Sierra, who won a large following by blogging about designing software that makes people happy, became a target of anonymous online attacks that included photos of her with a noose around her neck and a muzzle over her mouth.
As women gain visibility in the blogosphere, they are targets of sexual harassment and threats. Men are harassed too, and lack of civility is an abiding problem on the Web. But women, who make up about half the online community, are singled out in more starkly sexually threatening terms -- a trend that was first evident in chat rooms in the early 1990s and is now moving to the blogosphere, experts and bloggers said.
More technology news
A 2006 University of Maryland study on chat rooms found that female participants received 25 times as many sexually explicit and malicious messages as males. A 2005 study by the Pew Internet & American Life Project found that the proportion of Internet users who took part in chats and discussion groups plunged from 28 percent in 2000 to 17 percent in 2005, entirely because of the exodus of women. The study attributed the trend to "sensitivity to worrisome behavior in chat rooms."
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Joan Walsh, editor in chief of the online magazine Salon, said that since the letters section of her site was automated a year and a half ago, "it's been hard to ignore that the criticisms of women writers are much more brutal and vicious than those about men."
Arianna Huffington, whose Huffington Post site is among the most prominent of blogs founded by women, said anonymity online has allowed "a lot of those dark prejudices towards women to surface." Her site takes a "zero tolerance" policy toward abusive and excessively foul language, and employs moderators "24/7" to filter the comments, she said.
Sierra, whose recent case has attracted international attention, has suspended blogging. Other women have censored themselves, turned to private forums or closed comments on blogs. Many use gender-neutral pseudonyms. Some just gut it out. But the effect of repeated harassment, bloggers and experts interviewed said, is to make women reluctant to participate online -- undercutting the promise of the Internet as an egalitarian forum.
Robert Scoble, a technology blogger who took a week off in solidarity with Sierra, said women have told him that harassment is a "disincentive" to participate online. That, he said, will affect their job prospects in the male-dominated tech industry. "If women aren't willing to show up for networking events, either offline or online, then they're never going to be included in the industry," he said.
The treatment of women online is not just an equivalent of what happens offline, some women say. The Internet allows the content to be seen immediately, often permanently and far more widely than a remark scribbled on a restroom wall.
"The sad thing is, I've had thousands of messages from women saying, 'You were a role model for me,' " Sierra said in an interview, describing communications she received after suspending her blog. Sierra was the first woman to deliver a keynote speech at a conference on the Linux operating system. Her blog was No. 23 in the Technorati.com Top 100 list of blogs, measured by the number of blogs that linked to her site.
Her Web site, Creating Passionate Users, was about "the most fluffy and nice things," she said. Sierra occasionally got the random "comment troll," she said, but a little over a month ago, the posts became more threatening. Someone typed a comment on her blog about slitting her throat and ejaculating. The noose photo appeared next, on a site that sprang up to harass her. On the site, someone contributed this comment: "the only thing Kathy has to offer me is that noose in her neck size."
CONTINUED_SOURCE: www.msnbc.msn.com/id/18386900/
Uploaded by gailorenstein on 1 May '07, 12.24pm PDT.
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Posted 5 minutes ago. ( permalink )
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CharlieBrown8989 says: name reply / icon reply
Gail this is what I refered as eGansterism & eHooliganism!!
The Bullies goes internet.
It is the traditional Communities & societies goes on to the dark side!!
The action is just like the triads & Gangsters & Marfias turn to websphere!!I have mentioned these in my peech in the late 80's & 90's.
Therefore, a truely independent governant body need to regulate the internet.
