Category: Development EN

By Fitri Amir Recently, several business groups and certain parties from the Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI) have been actively lobbying the government leadership for Malaysia to ratify the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP). The CPTPP was signed by 11 countries namely Australia, Brunei, Canada, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, Peru,...

As we celebrate the 64th anniversary of Merdeka – the seminal event that marked our breakaway from colonial rule and the creation of our nation-state – we should reflect on the core element that has shaped our identity and destiny as Malaysia. That key element or primal substance is none other than our diversity. Our nation would not exist if the diverse communities and political entities...

With all the political turmoil our country has been going through, trolls as well as downright malicious people, have been creating and spreading questionable videos on social media and handphone messaging apps such as WhatsApp. These videos that are going around have hateful messages and clearly portray seditious and racist sentiments. The Consumers’ Association of Penang had recently...

"Lawns, it seems to me, are against nature, barren and often threadbare - the enemy of a good garden. For the same trouble as mowing, you could have a year's vegetables: runner beans, cauliflowers and cabbages, mixed with pinks and peonies, shirley poppies and delphiniums; wouldn't that beautify the land and save us from the garden terrorism that prevails?" ― Derek Jarman  

“The ideal of the 11th/17th century physicists was to be able to explain all physical reality in terms of the movement of atoms. This idea was extended by people like Descartes who saw the human body itself as nothing but a machine. Chemists tried to study chemical reaction in this light and reduce chemistry to a form of physics, and biologists tried to reduce their science to simply chemical...

"Mass production is profitable only if its rhythm can be maintained — that is if it can continue to sell its product in steady or increasing quantity. Today supply must actively seek to create its corresponding demand … cannot afford to wait until the public asks for its product; it must maintain constant touch, through advertising and propaganda … to assure itself the continuous demand...

Protection against this general monopoly is as difficult as protection against pollution. People will face a danger that threatens their own self-interest but not one that threatens society as a whole. Many more people are against cars than are against driving them. They are against cars because they pollute and because they monopolize traffic. They drive cars because they consider the pollution...

“The all-pervading disease of the modern world is the total imbalance between city and countryside, an imbalance in terms of wealth, power, culture, attraction and hope. The former has become over-extended and the latter has atrophied. The city has become the universal magnet, while rural life has lost its savour. Yet it remains an unalterable truth that, just as a sound mind depends on a...

Urban Cycling Institute

“The cardinal features of this culture were acquisition and consumption as the means of achieving happiness; the cult of the new; the democratization of desire; and money value as the predominant measure of all value in society,” — William Leach, in “Land of Desire: Merchants, Power, and the Rise of a New American Culture”