Tommy Peters' Bicycles

∆    The 'Gazzette' report (14.6.2012)   Link to the book is removed  ∆ ∆   Bad astronomy  (Philip C. Plait 2002)  ∆ ∆   Books Challenged or Banned in 2010-2011  (Robert P. Doyle 2012)  ∆ ∆   Conversation with Elihu Lauterpacht in 2008  (on the Nineties and new Millennium)  ∆ ∆   Cult of the Presidency  (Gene Healy 2009)  ∆ ∆   Deterrence and Security in the 21st Century  (Avery Goldstein 2000)  ∆ ∆   Hitler's Jewish Army  (A preview of Bryan Mark Rigg's LHJS 2007)  ∆ (Afterword: The link to Allah, Liberty and Love (Malay Version) has been removed by the administrator on account of the gazette initiated by the Home Ministry that came into effect on June 14th 2012)

A friend on my Facebook list asked if Malaysians are oblivious to geopolitical violence. She lives in Aleppo, Syria, where on the one hand, snipers and terror commandos are having a field day ratcheting their work beyond the nine thousand dead marks. Still, on the other hand, her dodgy internet provides enough buzz to flesh out some mind-numbing entertainment from my Malaysian page, where the vanity index of hip hop and everything else cool appears to be peaking amongst the females as well the males. She said in her zone of fear and strife the conceited self-ennobling index is becoming non-existent and less and less people are updating their pages and albums with egoistical poses coupled with the ubiquitous V sign between the eyes and that the most profound of eye-rollers encountered on my page was the difficult decision one woman had to make as to whether to wear her Islamic shawl with a hood or have it streamlined onto her scalp to go with her Malay dress of a specific color worn on

Two decades ago Malaysia failed the Salman Rushdie test. Five years ago it failed Karen Armstrong. Four months ago it abandoned Hamza Kashgari and last week it capitulated to Irshad Manji. As the baritone that supposedly glues the narrative becomes brittle by the year, this Saturday June 9   young and 'emancipated' Muslim friends will fail an invitation to a Glad Tidings solemnization of a beautiful couple underscoring the humble power of the cross but that is another story.  In Satanic Verses the Ayatollah's edict dribbled down to die-hards who could not endure let alone understand the author’s complicated prose. Kashgari was apprehended upon request of his pervasive host who contends that since a citizen had failed one of its exams, he would by extension fail the test of any Muslim nation he sought refuge in. Manji was deemed detrimental in Malaysia only after an Islamic non-governmental organization in Indonesia hijacked her book launch and evicted her out the c

Say your bank forgives your mortgage, but neither does the benevolent lender alert you nor explain its position. It simply stops reminding you that you are a debtor. Understandably the scenario encourages you to disremember being a borrower but as liberating as it is, the situation creates a blackhole in your psyche that enables you to disregard the presence of the 'ominous' creditor, not unlike the hip and hop Petronas scholar who had good reason, in that he was not reminded of the regular stipends that fueled his studies that enabled his profession to forget the career-enabling moola disbursed to his benefit but instead with passage of time finds he himself well entrenched in a mental blackhole trashing the propensity of his benefactor towards its extravagant sponsorship ventures for instance and the general lackadaisical economics it practices such as not pursuing scholarship 'doles' and not unlike the recreational cyclist who saves the life of his friend who is not