The Old Guard is always resistant to something new.
Clearly the creative industries need to rethink their business models and marketing strategies, not restrict a Revolution whose time has come.
Read this awesome post - http://ploum.net/post/im-a-pirate
The Internet is Free and must remain Free.
Google, Facebook, Wikipedia are just some of the big websites on the Internet that will be going on strike today to protest SOPA.
Click here to read The Trillion Dollar Lawsuit That Could End Financial Tyranny.
Yesterday was Day 0 when I asked my wife to change the password to my Facebook account so that only she has control over it and can allow me usage of it only on weekend mornings.
Today is the next step in my Productivity Boosting Experiment in which I had unsubscribed from a couple of internet marketing email lists so I won’t be distracted by the seemingly attractive offers of making money online, up to $10,000 a day at the push of a button in some software they’re selling for only $37 (but only if I buy within one minute of reading their 10,000-word sales letter / viewing their 45-minute sales pitch video).
Next step will be installing the StayFocusd Chrome App and limiting my usage of certain websites like the Warrior Forum (which was my addictive muse before Facebook) and other blackhat forums (which I’ll not reveal) to only a couple of minutes a day.
If there is an app to force me to use certain productive websites (like updating my own WordPress blogs) for at least a couple of hours a day, that’d be useful too.
Whether you’re an online entrepreneur or your line of work requires extensive use of the web for finding and/or publishing information, there tend to be certain websites that might suck your productive time.
This article from LifeHacker might give you a useful tip – How to Limit Visits to Time-Wasting Web Sites and Give Your Willpower a Break
You should try this. I am going to limit my usage of Facebook to only weekend mornings. You can adjust your ‘Facebook schedule’ to only once a week or whatever timing as you see fit.
Ask a friend or loved one (in my case, my lovely wife) to change your Facebook account’s login password to something only he or she knows.
Make an agreement with him or her to only allow you usage of Facebook to that earlier stated period of time.
Focus the rest of the week on more productive activities.
You may also want to check out StumbleUpon if you want to have some creative inspiration or mind fillers.
I will now post all my brilliant ideas, share thought provoking articles or comment on breaking significant news on my own website (which you are reading now). You are allowed to comment here (with some moderation – not that I want to curtail freedom of speech, but the WordPress platform is inherently prone to comment bots that spam blogs for backlinks).
For my close friends, you can contact me via traditional, old fashioned channels known as email, phone or meeting me in person. Or you can contact my wife.
If you wish to join me in this exercise, I highly recommend you do so.
I’ve been observing your messages for some time now.
I do find some, if not many, of them agreeable.
I am part of the 99% too, and I am also part of the 1%.
In fact, I am part of the (less than) 0.0000001%
Because I am completely unique, there is no combination of physical characteristics, personality traits, mental patterns, religious and spiritual beliefs and life experiences that matches mine.
I am also part of the 99% because I have some debts, I am working to earn just enough to pay my debts and survive to support my family, but have little left to save, let alone invest, and I am a bad monthly performance away from being removed from my sole source of income, my current job, and having to go through the grueling job-finding routine again (which can last anywhere between a month to a few months, which means there will be some months I have to default on my loan repayments, meaning a negative impact on my credit score, bla bla bla).
But I am also lucky that I am part of a network of supporting friends and family members. I am also lucky that my religious community is also a supportive community. We help each other. Not that many people are that lucky (or realise they are actually lucky).
But I want to put across one very important point which I feel is being missed or overlooked or simply disregarded conveniently in this “Us VS Them” mentality.
WE ARE ALSO PART OF THE SOURCE OF OUR OWN PROBLEMS.
Let’s face this monster head on, people.
WE TOO HAVE CONTRIBUTED TO THE 1% BEING RICHER THAN ALL OF US COMBINED.
While not all of us in the world are living in a democratic country where we can vote for the leaders that we want, but many of us do have this (hard-earned, hard-won) privilege.
We blame the greedy, the conniving, the cunning, the mal-opportunist for crashing the stock markets, manipulating foreign exchange rates to such an extent as to impoverish entire nations while enriching their personal wealth, yet we forget something -
WE the 99% are the ones who mass consume, who bought the products, who chose the brands, who voted with our wallets, our credit cards, who voted with money that we don’t have to buy what we don’t need to impress people that we don’t like.
WE the 99% are the ones who seek to satiate our unending lusts, desires, fetishes, hunger, greed for PERFECT products or PERFECT services with the LOWEST possible cost, delivered to us in the SHORTEST amount of time possible, creating the perfect market for these “Demons” of ours to exploit us.
WE the 99% are the ones who bitch about our jobs, our bosses, the economy, the price of fuel and goods, while watching TV, watching Lost, or American Idol, or America’s Next Top Model, drinking and binging, feeding our own vicious cycle (which is a virtuous profit cycle to the 1%), and then DO NOTHING about our problems, drown our day’s sorrows with late night TV or Facebook or YouTube, then come back to work the next morning exhausted, lethargic and without any motivation to work, then get laid off for a poor performance, while some people -
Who WERE from the 99% and eventually get to be part of the 1% – quit TV, quit the distractions, quit the drinking and binging, quit the overspending – work hard in something that they enjoy doing, develop discipline, develop their skills, upgrade and improve their knowledge and skill sets, create something useful for the world, offer it to the world and get rich in the process.
I’m not saying all those who are in the 1% get there that way. I am sure most of us who are in the 99% who are complaining about this are not complaining about those who rightfully earn their wealth and get what they deserve.
WE the 99% think and believe that luck is everything, luck determines wealth, luck determines good health, luck determines a good life, not knowing the TRUTH that WE can create our own luck through applying right effort to right knowledge.
For God’s sake, let’s stop whining, complaining, bitching. We’ve already got the attention we deserve, now let’s go do something worthwhile, let’s upgrade ourselves, learn something new, develop our innate talents and skills (each and everyone of us has a unique gift, talent or skill that we can sharpen, hone and use to improve our life), grow things, grow ourselves, quit our jobs (if necessary), question our bosses, question authority, find solutions, start a business, run a sideline business doing something we love, network and get to know more people, get to know “the rich and greedy 1%” (maybe more of them are willing to share their success secrets with us than we care to believe), try things, FAIL at something, learn and pick ourselves up and try again, until we can truly say we are happy with our lives.
AND stop spending the money we don’t have to buy things we don’t need to impress people we don’t like.
These are the first few paragraphs of the first chapter / prologue of my in-progress novel, which I tentatively title “The Last King of Arabia”, which I intend to release on Kindle or self-publish on Amazon. Please do give your comments, my friends, also suggestions on where to take the story to.
Copyright © 2011 Mohamad Latiff.
All Rights Reserved.
Prologue.
“IF you tell anyone that His Majesty has died, we will find your family and behead them in front of you before we slowly dismember you limb by limb and bleed you to death.”
As always, these encrypted calls were done via text-to-speech software so there was no way for the voices to be identified, but he had never anticipated over the past few months that these secret conversations would get this serious – or threatening.
His palms were sweaty as he typed his response. “I understand, but why are you telling me this?” He clicked on the ‘Encrypt & Send’ button.
“We are planning something,” came the reply. “That no one – not even the Americans – had ever thought of – to manage this situation.”
“What are you planning? What has it got to do with the King?”
“Nothing.”
He remembered in all his dealings with these people, he never got the answers he wanted, only what they wanted him to know, when they wanted him to know. So some questions are futile. “What do you want me to do?”
“For now, you need to take charge of the investigations into the incident that we are planning for.”
“When? What will this incident involve?”
“You will know soon enough, Mr. Hamzah Faruq,” said the voice. “And by then, we won’t need to tell you…”
Call ended.
His ears were hot when he took off the headset.
Hasten ye unto prayer!
With the push of a button, the soundproofed shielding was deactivated and the muffled voice of the Muezzin from the minaret of the Grand Mosque reached his ears, piercing through the bulletproof glass windows of his twenty-seventh floor office.
He reached for the Tasbih to do the Istikharah, the Muslim equivalent of flipping a coin, to make crucial decisions based on trust that Allah has the best interests for His servants instead of depending on blind chance.
If his colleagues were to see his Tasbih, a string of beads made of baked clay from the soil of Karbala, not only would his career be in jeopardy, but his life might end abruptly. Despite overtures for inter-sectarian unity by the late King who was seen to be a moderate and reform-minded monarch, the Shiahs were still seen as second class citizens in the Kingdom – or worse.
His fingers, covered in nervous sweat, moistened the little clay beads and some of the dust stuck onto the skin of his fingertips as he counted them. One of the beads split in two and dropped on his shoe. A bad sign…
He needed to make a decision. Fast. I don’t want to deal with these people anymore! O Allah please help me get out of this!
Then he remembered his mentor’s advice that Allah usually answers prayers and bestows help through the intermediary of fellow believers, especially when they are good, righteous people – and there was only one person he could think of.
He picked up his touch phone and dialed the first number on his call log.
“Assalaamu’alaikum,” the cautious and whispering voice of a man slightly older than Hamzah answered.
“Wa’alaikumussalaam, Doctor,” Hamzah’s voice was just as cautious. “It’s me, Hamzah. I would like to ask if there is anything significant that has happened at your workplace in the past few hours.”
Silence.
“Many things happen in the hospital, Hamzah,” the Doctor said. “People die, babies are born, the sick are healed. Is there anything urgent I can do for you, son?”
“I need to speak with you in person… privately.”
Another pause.
“I need to go for my Isha’ prayers now. Maybe we should pray together?”
“Good idea, Doctor.”
“Where are you?”
1. Annihilate usury at all levels.
2. National currencies should be for mutual trade of goods, labour, skills and services among the citizens of that nation only. This currency can be quasi-fiat in the sense that it is not backed by any “hard commodities” but it should be backed by a basket of values defined by the composition of human, social, land, physical and knowledge capital existing within that country. Demurrage / Zakat-like tithing regulates and stimulates the flow of the economy (in a multi-religious state, Muslim citizens can be exempt from the national demurrage requirement).
3. Institute a global, universal currency that is to be used only for trade of goods and services (import / export) between nations, states or diplomatic / political / geo-economic groupings. The backing for this global, universal currency can be the same as the national one explained earlier, implemented on a global scale, or it can be based on a mutual credit exchange (like Time Banking or LETS). Demurrage at this level also exists to stimulate the equitable distribution of wealth throughout the world, especially beneficial for nations or geographical regions which may not be rich in physical resources or other forms of capital necessary to develop and sustain itself.
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