Little walk down the memory lane…

Some of you old farts might remember this place.

bongkersz.com.

The Flaccid Mind.

A stupid name for a blog where I spent an equally stupid amount of time writing equally stupid things.

I started blogging sometime around 2005. Back then there was no Instagram, TikTok, Threads or whatever shit people are using nowadays. Facebook wasn’t even a thing for most of us yet.

We had blogs. And we actually READ other people’s blogs. Imagine that.

You wrote 1,500 words about what you ate for lunch, uploaded five badly compressed 640×480 photos, and somehow 30 people would leave comments. Those were the days. Then somewhere along the way, life happened.

Blogging slowed down. Facebook came. Twitter came. Everything became shorter and faster. The blog eventually went dormant. And at some point I managed to lose the bloody website itself.

Not just stopped updating it.

LOST IT!

Database. Files. Images. WordPress installation.

Gone.

Fuh!

Actually I did not renew my domain and hosting lah at one point because at that time I was thinking like – what’s the point? But as time passes and people grow old (you lah!) then that nostalgic feeling of having things you used to love, memories from the past, shits you spent long hours and efforts creating and making, then I decided to at least try to recover some of it back. But even then I consistently putting it hold, just doing some searches and downloads, then saved some files. That’s it.

For years, bongkersz.com existed mostly as scattered remains across the Internet. Some posts were still sitting on an old WordPress.com account. Some were preserved by the Wayback Machine. Images were scattered across Flickr, Photobucket and other long-forgotten image hosts. There were old WordPress XML exports here and there. Some pages survived in web archives. Some links pointed to websites that haven’t existed for more than a decade.

Basically an archaeological site. Then in 2026 I had this brilliant idea: Why don’t I rebuild the whole farking thing?

How difficult could it be??

Very.

Very farking difficult.

At first I thought this would be straightforward.

Find the old WordPress export.

Import it.

Download whatever is available from Wayback Machine.

Done.

Bwahahahaha!

No.

The first problem was figuring out what actually existed.

Different backups contained different versions of the same posts. Some exports had articles that others didn’t. Some articles had titles but incomplete bodies. Some had comments. Some didn’t. Some posts existed in Wayback but not WordPress.com. Some existed in WordPress.com but had broken images.

Then there were duplicates. Lots of them. Even I got confused which one I should use.

One archive might call something Post A while another archive contained what looked like Post A but with slightly different HTML, comments or metadata.

So simply merging everything would create a Frankenstein blog full of duplicated posts.

Which, naturally, is exactly what happened during some of the early recovery attempts.

Shit, this kind of crap is damn annoying!

Then things got serious

What started as “restore my old blog” slowly became a proper digital archaeology exercise.

I gathered everything I could find:

Old WordPress XML exports.

The surviving WordPress.com copy.

Wayback Machine captures.

Firecrawl recovery data.

Archivarix archives.

Old media folders.

Recovered HTML.

Several partial recovery packages produced during earlier attempts.

Then we started comparing them against each other.

Post by post.

Title by title.

Date by date.

URL by URL.

Comment by comment.

Image by image.

The early exhaustive audit suggested there were 74 missing post slots.

Important distinction here: we didn’t actually know what those 74 posts were.

The archive counts told us something had existed in those positions, but most had no trustworthy title, date, permalink or article body.

So I refused to simply manufacture 74 articles and pretend they were recovered.

If I wrote some rubbish in 2009, I wanted my original 2009 rubbish.

Not newly generated 2026 rubbish pretending to be my 2009 rubbish.

I think I went at it seriously this past one week, after that one tweet sharing about Nokia N900, comparing it against the newly launched iPhone Duo, I was so excited that I reposted it and looked up my old blog post on N900, which you can read about it Nokia N900 review! Of course I got it from Wayward Machine and I just suddenly so motivated to put more work into the recovery. With whatever I managed to salvage, I went and registered a new bongkersz.com and bought hosting, install WordPress and huarghhhhhhhhhhh!

Then we hit gold

The breakthrough came when additional archive material was recovered.

Suddenly we could compare much more of the original site against the reconstructed WordPress database.

And things changed dramatically.

We recovered 30 genuine posts that were completely missing from the previous master.

Real titles.

Real dates.

Real permalinks.

Real archived article bodies.

Posts from April, May and June 2009 appeared again.

Things like:

“Ani O’hev O’Tach, Gal Gadot!”

“Experience Lomorgasm!! Get your Lomo now!”

“Breaking News: Nizar is the legitimate MB!!”

“I killed my blog”

“Fuck you”

“My A-Z & Selamat Hari Gawai Dayak!”

And, appropriately enough:

“Wash your hands too!”

YoohooooO!!

Even better, 72 article bodies that had previously been reconstructed or editorially filled could now be replaced with genuine archived HTML.

That was important to me.

The objective wasn’t to make bongkersz.com look complete.

The objective was to make it authentic.

If something couldn’t be recovered, I’d rather admit it was gone than quietly invent something to fill the hole.

543 posts

After all the archive reconciliation, we discovered another problem.

Duplicates.

Thirty-one duplicate export records were identified and removed during the major reconciliation.

The resulting recovery master contained 543 historical post records.

But even that wasn’t quite the end of it.

After browsing the revived site manually, I noticed several articles that looked suspiciously familiar.

Same post.

Slightly different title.

Same date.

Different archive version.

More checking eventually identified another seven redundant historical records that had escaped the automated duplicate detection. Those are now sitting harmlessly in the WordPress Trash while the better published versions remain online. The live archive currently has 535 published historical posts, plus two strange old blank/unfinished drafts that I’ve decided to preserve because, well, they were there.

One of those drafts contains only a tiny image/smiley fragment.

The other is an unfinished piece from June 2009 about the USM student-intake controversy.

I’m leaving them alone.

Digital fossils.

And then there were 6,904 comments

Remember when people actually commented on blogs? The recovered database currently contains 6,904 comments. That number itself became another investigation because the recovery master reported 6,914.

Ten comments missing?

Another recovery failure?

Nope.

After digging through it, the discrepancy could be explained by duplicate/redundant records and old unapproved spam comments.

One article, “Bloggers Unite!”, for example, had old comments containing obvious automated pharmaceutical spam.

Viagra. Cialis. Tramadol. Xanax. HAMIKLANJIAO???

All the wonderful things apparently required to operate a Malaysian blog in the late 2000s.

My old blog had been infected with crap!

During the final integrity audit we found hidden display:none blocks buried inside dozens of old posts.

Pharmaceutical spam.

Viagra, tramadol, hydrocodone, Cialis, Xanax and friends.

FIFTY-THREE contaminated records eventually had to be cleaned. The spam was removed while preserving the actual articles.

Then the WordPress installation itself was checked. 3,338 WordPress core files verified.

No modified core files.

No missing core files.

One mysterious wp-admin/error_log remains outside the normal WordPress core set. That’s being treated separately rather than randomly deleting things and praying nothing explodes.

Then came the images

This might actually be the most tedious part.

A blog from 2005–2013 depended heavily on external image hosting.

Flickr. Photobucket. Random websites. News sites. Image hosts that probably died before TikTok existed.

Some images survived.

Some didn’t.

So instead of continuing to depend on those ancient external URLs, we’re now recovering the surviving originals and bringing copies home to bongkersz.com.

One by one.

An old Flickr image from my “I am going bald for Go Bald campaign! Wheee!” post?

Recovered.

Five Flickr photographs from “Experience Lomorgasm!! Get your Lomo now!”?

Recovered.

Old Chinese New Year photographs?

Recovered.

Sibu photographs?

Recovered.

Old cooking photos?

Recovered.

My old cute-kid photos?

Yes.

Unfortunately recovered too.

Dozens of those images have now been downloaded from their surviving original locations and stored locally inside bongkersz.com. Some cannot be recovered because the original servers simply don’t exist anymore. And that’s where I draw the line. I’m not going to put some random photograph there just because it looks vaguely similar.

If the original is gone, it’s gone. Maybe another forgotten backup will surface someday. Who knows? Nothing is really missing in the internet of things.

Even the URLs needed archaeology

Thousands of references still pointed to:

https://bongkersz.com

instead of HTTPS.

A database-wide cleanup corrected 2,343 references.

Then we found old internal links using WordPress’s ancient:

?p=69

type URLs.

One was even:

http://https://bongkersz.com/...

WTF.

Those have now been traced back to their actual posts and changed to proper permanent URLs.

The internal-link audit currently shows zero remaining malformed or legacy bongkersz references of those types.

How long did all this take?

This is where it gets ridiculous.

The serious recovery effort ran through several rounds rather than one sitting.

The major recovery push in September 2026 alone stretched across multiple days, with repeated six-minute, ten-minute, half-hour and much longer recovery/audit sessions, plus archive crawling and automated processing running between them.

There were earlier recovery attempts before that as well.

I don’t have an honest stopwatch total for the entire project, so I’m not going to invent one.

But measured in human attention, archive processing, repeated audits, imports, corrections and checking hundreds of posts and thousands of comments, we’re comfortably talking many tens of hours of work.

And we’re still not completely finished.

At the time I’m writing this, we’ve actually hit the daily limit on one of the WordPress recovery tools while migrating the remaining historical images.

Very appropriate.

Even the machines are tired of bongkersz.com.

So… is bongkersz.com finally recovered?

For the posts?

Yes.

As far as everything currently available to us can establish, the historical post-recovery project is complete.

There are no manufactured article bodies remaining.

There are no known mystery placeholder posts waiting for somebody to make up their contents.

What could genuinely be recovered from the WordPress exports, Wayback captures and later archive packages has been reconciled.

The media preservation work is now in its final stages.

After that we’ll freeze a proper preservation copy of the restored site.

Then comes another problem. Making this ancient bastard work properly on modern devices. It already works rather nicely on most screens. Then I opened it on an iPhone 17 Pro.

Of course something had to look wrong. Cheebuy iOS. That fight is for another day. For now, though…

Seeing posts I wrote nearly twenty years ago appearing again, together with the stupid jokes, broken English, photographs, arguments and thousands of comments from people who wandered through this little corner of the Internet…

Fuh!

It feels strange.

In 2008, after recovering access to an even older version of this blog, I apparently wrote:

“I am freaking estatic! I am so farking happy!”

Eighteen years later…

Same feeling.

bongkersz.com is alive again.

The Flaccid Mind refuses to die.

Wheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!!

ps: Of course, I have my new assistant to thank for, helping me greatly with the recovery. Just $20/month.

pps: Yes. 10 years. Last post I wrote was in 2016, during the Sarawak State Election. Then I wrote a post in 2018, a feeble attempt at trying to write something again on a new WordPress.com blog – hamiklanjiao.wordpress.com

I have written on this before but for an online publication called The Belian Post in 2019. The site is no longer available, but am still keeping my 2019 draft. I have recently updated the draft with more details since there are more regulations and requirements put in place by the government, authorities and relevant departments. I have also changed the tone of my writing to a more… ‘informal’ way.

It’s that time of the year again, when the noonday sun dims, mountains and buildings disappear behind a curtain of grey, and that familiar smell of smoke follows you around wherever you go.

The haze is back!

For those of us living in this part of Southeast Asia, especially in Borneo, this has become an almost seasonal affair. During prolonged dry periods, fires appear across Sumatra and Kalimantan and, depending on where the wind decides to blow, the smoke eventually finds its way across borders.

We have been dealing with this for decades. The 1997 haze remains probably the most memorable, when the Air Pollutant Index (API) in Kuching went beyond an astounding 800.  I was in Form 3 back then taking my PMR. Sarawak declared a 10-day state of emergency on September 19, 1997 because the API reading was over 500. I think in Miri it was close to over 900, visibility was really poor. I was staying at the hostel back then and I remember walking to the dining hall and could not see like 5m-10m distance ahead.

Then we had few more notable periods of serious haze like in 2013, 2015 and 2019 when I wrote the article because it got so bad as well I remember. 2015 and 2019 was bad, I think it was El Niño season as well in 2015. Anyway, since then we have had several serious episodes, schools closed, flights disrupted, visibility reduced and millions of people breathing air that they really should not be breathing and of course this year with the what El Niño “Godzilla”, by far this year is among the worst, on par or even worse than 1997 episode. In Pontianak, last Sunday and Monday I think the reading was 1,500 – 1,900 from the AirVisual app.

And every time the haze comes back, so does the same explanation.

It must be the oil palm plantations.

Those big plantation companies are burning thousands of hectares to clear the land again.

Why doesn’t the Indonesian government do something about them?

I work in the plantation industry, so perhaps I look at this differently from someone looking at a hotspot map from outside. I have seen what actually happens inside plantations during the dry season, how fires are dealt with on the ground, how complicated the ownership of land within and around plantation areas can be, and just how much manpower and equipment can be involved when somebody reports smoke somewhere.

That does not mean plantation companies are innocent. Some have undoubtedly been involved in illegal burning and where that is proven, they should be dealt with accordingly.

But the idea that the transboundary haze can simply be explained as “big oil palm companies burning forests” has always bothered me because the reality on the ground is far more complicated than that.

First, finding a hotspot is not the same as finding who started the fire

Satellite technology today is remarkably good. We can detect hotspots across Sumatra and Kalimantan almost in real time, plot them on a map and overlay them against plantation boundaries.

This is extremely useful.

The problem starts when we make the next jump.

Hotspot inside plantation concession = plantation company started the fire.

That is not necessarily true.

Anyone who has actually worked around large plantation areas in Indonesia will know that the neat boundaries we see on a map do not necessarily describe what exists on the ground.

Inside and around plantation landscapes you can have villages, community land, independent farmers, conservation areas and land with competing or unresolved claims. You can have people cultivating land independently even though, when you look at a concession map from a few hundred kilometres away, everything appears to sit inside one giant polygon belonging to Company A.

Then there is the obvious fact that fire does not understand cadastral boundaries. A fire that starts on somebody’s farm does not stop at the boundary marker, check the map and decide that the next piece of land belongs to somebody else.

So satellite hotspots are very good at telling us where something is burning. They are not necessarily capable of telling us who lit it.

That second question requires investigation on the ground.

There is, however, another side to this argument which plantation companies themselves cannot conveniently ignore. Even if somebody else started the fire, that does not necessarily end the company’s responsibility.

Who started the fire and who was responsible for detecting, preventing and controlling the fire are two different questions. This distinction is important, and under Indonesia’s latest regulations it has become even more important.

Why would a plantation burn its own trees anyway?

Slash-and-burn agriculture has existed for centuries for one very obvious reason: it is cheap. Cut the vegetation, let it dry and burn it.

Compare that with bringing in excavators, bulldozers, tractors, trucks and workers to mechanically clear the same piece of land and you can understand why a farmer with very little capital might choose fire. Commercial plantations historically used burning as well. Nobody needs to pretend otherwise. But the economics and practicalities of managing a modern commercial oil palm plantation are quite different.

Oil palm is a long-term crop. You plant it, wait roughly three years before meaningful commercial production begins and then manage the same palms for around two decades before replanting becomes necessary. You are not clearing and replanting the entire estate every few years.

When replanting does come, simply burning everything is not particularly useful.

You still have to establish planting rows and planting points. Roads need to remain accessible. Drains need to function. Old palm biomass needs to be dealt with. Soil and water conditions need to be managed. All of this is much easier to control, measure and supervise mechanically. More importantly, fire is unpredictable. And evidently it is HARD to control or else we would not have the problem we face today.

An uncontrolled fire does not politely burn the old palms you want removed and then extinguish itself when it reaches the next block. It can jump roads and drains, damage palms you intended to keep and, during very dry weather, get completely out of control. From a plantation manager’s point of view, this is not merely an environmental problem. It can become an operational and financial disaster.

And today there is another very important consideration: plantation land opening and cultivation without burning is no longer merely a matter of good agricultural practice. It is regulated.

The HGU problem

Another thing that is frequently misunderstood outside Indonesia is Hak Guna Usaha, or HGU.

HGU is a legal right to cultivate land under Indonesia’s agrarian framework, originating from Law No. 5 of 1960 concerning Basic Agrarian Principles (UUPA). On paper, an HGU or plantation licence can cover an enormous area. On the ground, things are rarely so tidy.

There may be villages, community land, independent farmers, conservation areas and unresolved land claims within and around the wider plantation landscape. Plantation companies normally try to consolidate economically viable areas through land acquisition or cooperation arrangements such as plasma schemes (sort of like co-operative, farmer-owned by local organisation that partners with a large plantation company to manage a portion of community agricultural land, most commonly in the Indonesian palm oil sector), but not everybody wants to participate.

Some farmers prefer to manage their own land. Some distrust plantation companies. Some claims existed long before the plantation arrived. Others remain disputed for years.

It can be messy.

This is why looking at a hotspot and saying “that is inside Company X’s area, therefore Company X started the fire” is not enough to establish what actually happened. But again, this does not mean Company X can wash its hands of the matter. And this is where things have changed considerably since I first wrote about this issue.

Indonesia has tightened the rules considerably

Indonesia introduced Minister of Agriculture Regulation No. 06 of 2025 (Permentan No. 06 Tahun 2025), amending the earlier 2018 regulation governing plantation land opening and cultivation without burning. If you go through the regulation, some of the requirements are surprisingly specific.

This is not merely a document telling plantation companies that they should have some pumps lying around somewhere in case something catches fire. Plantation companies are required to establish a proper fire-control organisation with manpower, equipment, detection systems and operational procedures. The number of dedicated core firefighters is tied directly to plantation size.

For an operation of 1,001 to 5,000 hectares, there must be two core teams totalling 30 personnel. From 5,001 to 10,000 hectares, it becomes three teams totalling 45 personnel. A plantation between 10,001 and 20,000 hectares must maintain four core teams with 60 personnel.

Yes. It is a law and mandated for the plantation companies to set it in such a way. A 15,000-hectare plantation is expected to have 60 core firefighting personnel. Firefighting is no longer something the manager can delegate to five security guards and a water tanker when somebody sees smoke.

The requirements go further.

For oil palm, there must be one fire observation tower for every 250 to 600 hectares, subject to adjustments for the topography of the estate. The observation floor has to be at least three metres above the highest crop canopy. Usually they just put up a 15m and above observation tower, made from steel structure  at a minimum 1 unit every 600 hectares. The local authorities would come and inspect and count how many observation towers already been built against the requirement. Modern technology is specifically recognised as well. Monitoring can involve CCTV, real-time remote sensing and hotspot information, while drones or binoculars form part of the monitoring equipment.

Then you have the actual firefighting equipment.

Protective clothing, helmets, masks, gloves and firefighting boots. Axes, fire beaters, rakes, shovels, backpack pumps and chainsaws. High-pressure pumps, portable pumps, hoses, nozzles and water tanks. GPS units, handheld radios and vehicles or boats depending on the terrain.

There is even specific equipment for injecting water into burning peat — suntikan gambut — because anyone who has dealt with peat fires knows that putting out the flames you can see is sometimes the easy part.

The fire underneath your feet is another matter altogether.

Water availability is regulated too. Plantation companies are required to provide one or more water-storage facilities for every 500 hectares, with a combined minimum capacity of 800 cubic metres. Estates have to allocate machinery to dig up ponds with storage capacity more than 800 cubic metres, every 500 hectares. Well during the long period of extreme dry season like the current El Niño “Godzilla”, most of the ponds dried up anyway.

These are measurable requirements. We can therefore judge a plantation not merely by whether it claims somebody else started the fire, but by whether it was actually prepared to deal with one.

Was the fire detected quickly?

Were the towers operational?

Were the firefighting teams properly staffed?

Were the pumps working?

Was sufficient water available?

How quickly did the team reach the site?

If its own resources could not control the fire, did it call for assistance?

This is a much more useful way of determining corporate responsibility.

Then we have the smallholders

Now imagine a farmer with two hectares of land.

He wants to plant paddy, vegetables, fruit trees or perhaps oil palm. He has a parang, some basic tools and his own labour.

He does not have an excavator.

Mechanical clearing costs money. Fire costs almost nothing.

The economics are obvious.

One farmer burning one hectare is not going to cover half of Southeast Asia in smoke. But if many people are preparing land during the same dry period, many individually small fires become a much larger problem. And there is a specific regulation allowing local farmers to clear their land by burning – 2 hectares per household. Look it up, Google it yourself which province allows that.

Then add peat into the equation.

And this is where things can go very wrong, very quickly.

Peat changes everything

Healthy peat is naturally wet. In that condition it is relatively difficult to burn.

Drain it, lower the water table and then subject it to a prolonged dry period, and you have something completely different. You have fuel. A vegetation fire at the surface can ignite the dry peat underneath. The visible flames may eventually disappear and everyone thinks the fire is under control. Except that the ground is still burning. And during this extreme dry season, without proper water management in the peat area, the area will be dried out and prone to fire. Just a passerby, motorist or hunter in the jungle discarding or flicking a cigarette butt, still hot or not fully extinguished would spark a fire.

Peat can smoulder below the surface for days or longer, moving through the organic material and appearing somewhere else. Fighting it is extremely difficult because you are no longer merely trying to extinguish burning vegetation. You are effectively trying to extinguish burning soil. This is also where assigning responsibility becomes uncomfortable.

Imagine that a farmer starts a fire outside a plantation and the fire eventually reaches drained peat within a developed area.

Who caused the resulting haze? The farmer who struck the match? The company whose drainage system contributed to drying the peat? The authority that approved the development? The people responsible for enforcing the regulations? The landholder who failed to respond quickly enough?

Potentially, several of them contributed to the outcome in different ways. Which is why I think we spend too much time asking who started the fire, when another equally important question is:

Why was the landscape capable of burning like this in the first place?

“We didn’t start it” is not enough either

This is one aspect of the 2025 regulation that is particularly important. If a fire occurs within the plantation area covered by the company’s business licence, the plantation company is required to undertake firefighting. If the company cannot control it with its own resources, it has to coordinate with government brigades, community fire groups, Manggala Agni, local fire departments or firefighting units belonging to other plantation companies.

In other words, saying “not our fire” is not sufficient.

You may not have lit it, but if it is burning inside your operational area you are still expected to do something about it.

That is fair.

Large companies have resources. They have people, equipment, vehicles, roads, pumps, management structures and increasingly sophisticated monitoring systems. If a company deliberately burns land illegally, prosecute it. If it is required to maintain 60 firefighters and does not, deal with it. If its fire towers exist only in inspection reports but not in the field, deal with it. If the pumps do not work, the water ponds are dry and nobody responds to a hotspot until hundreds of hectares are burning, then “somebody else started it” is not much of a defence.

Corporate responsibility should be enforced properly. In Malaysia, we even tried to come up with a transboundary haze law in 2019. The new Pakatan Harapan government at that time considered introducing a Transboundary Haze Pollution Act (similar to Singapore’s 2014 law) to penalise Malaysian companies contributing to smoke-causing fires abroad, or specifically in Indonesia. However idiots from the tebuk-atap government took over and the Enviromnent Minister at that time, that PAS fler Tuan Ibrahim put it on hold cancelled it. You can read more about the haze act chronology here.

And actually, the more difficult problem is what to do with everybody else.

You cannot give every farmer an excavator

This is where environmental policy runs into economic reality. Tell a plantation company managing 15,000 hectares that it cannot use fire and must purchase equipment, build water ponds, maintain observation towers and employ firefighting teams. Fine. It has the financial and organisational capacity to do that.

Now tell a farmer working two hectares that he cannot burn the vegetation on his land. His immediate question will probably be: Okay, so who is paying for the excavator? But this does not mean smallholders should be allowed to burn indiscriminately. Smoke does not become less harmful because the person who produced it is poor.

But simply banning something without providing an economically viable alternative does not make the underlying incentive disappear. Interestingly, Indonesia’s new regulatory framework appears to recognise this problem as well. The regulation provides for Kelompok Tani Peduli Api (KTPA), or Farmer Fire Awareness Groups, consisting of a trained farmer as leader together with 15 to 30 trained farmers. These groups are supposed to help educate farmers about land preparation without burning, monitor hotspots, conduct early firefighting and coordinate with government and other firefighting organisations.

In theory, you begin to get several layers of defence: plantation firefighting teams, community KTPA groups, government brigades, Manggala Agni and other emergency services.

Whether all of this works equally well everywhere on the ground is another question altogether, like usual lah.

A regulation is only as useful as its implementation.

And then there is politics

This is probably the most difficult part of the problem.

Smallholders are not corporations. Many have limited financial resources. Some communities have used controlled burning as part of their agricultural practices for generations. Land ownership itself may be disputed. Alternatives can be expensive.

And, of course, these communities vote.They protest. If you are stopping their way of life, their culture of doing things you need to provide the alternatives and solutions. Actually I think they need more incentives – the carrot, to not to burn rather than giving them the stick.

Governments cannot ignore illegal burning simply because the people doing it are poor. At the same time, marching into rural communities every dry season and treating a subsistence farmer in exactly the same way as a company illegally clearing hundreds of hectares is hardly a sensible solution either.

There has to be something in between.

Shared machinery. Especially during the dry season when nearby farmers or communities are clearing lands to plant their crops, the large companies – plantations, mining, pulp, instead of asking them to spend money and allocate resources for the fire fighting and monitoring which usually already “after the effect”, maybe should look into offering their resources and machinery during this period. The government and authorities can incentivise them to do so, for sure. Community land-clearing programmes. Financial assistance. Training. Properly equipped village firefighting teams. Better land records. Peat restoration. Practical alternatives that make not burning economically possible and attractive to all.

Otherwise we will continue dealing with the symptom while leaving the incentive untouched.

So who is responsible for the haze?

I think this is where the whole argument normally goes wrong.

We want one answer.

The plantation companies did it.

The smallholders did it.

Indonesia did it.

El Niño did it.

Pick your villain.

The reality is considerably less satisfying. There are really several questions that need to be answered separately.

Who started the fire?

Who benefited from the burning?

Why was the land so combustible?

Why did the fire spread?

And who was responsible for controlling it once it did?

The answers may not point to the same person.

A farmer can start a fire. A commercial interest can start a fire. A badly managed drainage system can make peat dangerously dry. Drought can magnify everything. Poor enforcement can allow illegal practices to continue. Inadequate firefighting can allow a manageable fire to become an uncontrollable one.

Then the wind blows. Suddenly something that started on a few hectares of land in Kalimantan or Sumatra becomes everybody’s problem. That, I think, is the more useful way of understanding transboundary haze. It is not simply an oil palm problem. Neither is it simply a smallholder problem. It is a land management, peatland, agricultural economics, enforcement and governance problem, all interacting with each other during the worst possible time of the year.

Large plantation companies are actually the easier part of this equation. We know who they are. We know where they operate. Indonesia now has measurable requirements for the number of firefighters, observation towers, equipment and water they are supposed to maintain.

Enforce those requirements properly. The much harder task is building the same level of fire resilience across thousands of independent farmers and communities who do not have corporate resources behind them. And that cannot be solved by fines and jail sentences alone.

So the next time the mountains disappear and that familiar smell of smoke starts creeping into the house, by all means ask:

Who started the fire?

We should find out.

But perhaps after decades of going through the same thing, we should also be asking a bigger question.

Why do we still have landscapes where one fire can become an international environmental disaster?

Because whoever held the match is only the beginning of the story. Everything that allowed that small flame to become thousands of hectares of fire and millions of people breathing the smoke is the real problem. And until we fix that, we will probably continue doing what we have been doing for decades.

Wait for the rain, lah!

 

How do I start? I was on Twitter and I saw @abe_ame replied to the tweet by the @theTAPIR on this “Ralph Breaks the Internet movie” review saying “when I grow  up, I want to be able to write as well as this dude.” I saw @theTAPIR’s tweet this afternoon and I even replied him that I was going to watch the movie later. But I didn’t pay attention who wrote the review. So I clicked it again just now. It is TheVisitorQ who is on a roll it seems, churning out post after post (in fact he wrote two posts on the 24th November) revisiting his old blog after six years away. Didn’t know you have a blog, TheVisitorQ!

One click led to another, after reading few posts and just amazed at how good he is at framing his words (what, anthropomorphic? I’ll just pretend I know what that means), here I am. Just shy a few days from my 36th birthday, trying to construct some sentences on my phone for my 1st blog post in here. And I think I finally figured it out. Those years I spent blogging furiously and why I could not continue to do so after social media came along.

One of it was due to the nature of my job. I was working in remote locations with limited access to internet connectivity so I could not write and post with ease. And I was on the move a lot, traveling to work sites. You see, blogging takes a lot of effort for me and to do a proper blog post I would be on my computer arranging sentences, formatting, transferring, searching and editing photos, videos and all that work. Truth to be told I used to have plenty of time just sitting in front of the computer with proper internet connection. The time when I wrote so many blog posts? It was during those many long office hours, less productive on my work but very productive on my blog.

But with Twitter and Facebook  you don’t have to write a lot. Twitter limited your tweet just to 140 characters back then and only recently changed it to 320 characters. (I don’t actually know the exact number but just from the top of my hand that is the figure.) Best of all, everything you can just do from your phone even with just bare minimum internet access. So slowly I just wrote less on my blog, more on Twitter and Facebook and it just became a habit after a while. And after keeping it half dead for many years, one year I just stopped renewing the domain and hosting. Died a slow, unevenful death like how most deaths are. Well, I think I was in some jungle so I couldn’t be bothered about it. And you know what? I got my old laptop repaired last few days. That laptop I bought just before I came to Indonesia for work. The screen cracked, I probably accidentally sat on it because I forgot I put in on my bed that one time and I didn’t send it for repair for many years. Anyway I got it repaired the other day, set it up in my room and then it hit me.

I have been doing all my internet browsing and online activities mostly on my phone. I only use my laptop for work, that is to type up some reports, doing some spreadsheets. Not actually having that arrangement purposefully all this while but that’s just how things fall in place. Routine. Habit. You stick to what is easier and simpler after a while. It feels damn weird to be back surfing on a bigger screen and I even tweeted that it’s been a while since I tweeted not from my pbone. Been a while since I listened to songs from my laptop.

So because of all these “reasons”, I just lost my mojo. I tried few times trying to get back to it and guess what, I spent time writing blog posts on my phone. It is not a pleasant thing to do. I can tell you that blogging from phone is damn tiring and in no time you would get carpal tunnel syndrome if you have it already. My thumb is hurting already from tapping (yes tapping not typing) so many words.

I need to go to sleep now, so I shall stop here for now.  Hopefully I can find my writing mojo again, by doing things differently and not repeating the same patterns like what written above. Let’s see if this blog will get updated more often in the future! I am also encouraged by few fellow old bloggers who suddenly are back writing again and I knew that after reading their Facebook posts and tweets. Ha!

1. What are the top three issues facing Sarawak at the moment?

2. What key issue will most impact on your vote on in the forthcoming state election?

3. Will the issues at Federal level have any impact here on the Sarawak election?

4. What would you like the political parties to do about these three issues?

I was asked the above questions today as part of a short interview.

Here is my long answer.

Three key issues facing Sarawak at this moment.

1. Bread and butter issues.

Yes, after 52 years of independence and under the governance of the great and wonderful Barisan Nasional government, we are still grappling with bread and butter issues. And this bread and butter issues will spill over to other pertinent issues which are interrelated like public infrastructure and development issues, access to basic utilities like water and power, good roads and bridges, affordable health services and good education and cost of living. Oh, poverty and inequality as well. We can frame all these issues under the bread and butter issues.

2. Autonomy

Autonomy. State powers. Empowering the state for participation and decision making process when it comes to state affairs. It goes back to the Malaysian Agreement 1963 signed during the formation of Malaysia, and Sarawak being one of the willing signatory with mutually agreed terms and conditions to safeguard the interests of the state. This is actually getting traction after all the Sarawak for Sarawakians call and many Sarawakians feel that Sarawak is being shortchanged by the Federal Government in areas like job opportunities and career advancement for the locals in state agencies and public offices, oil royalty, budget allocations and lack of consultation with the state when it comes to policies decided at the Federal level for state affairs. But I feel that this is just a carrot by Adenan for the middle class, urban voters because the idea of autonomy is so attractive to them. As a result, they focus more on this and less on other issues on national level they typically more concerned on.”As least he is doing it for the best of Sarawakians”, you are hearing that now. Sarawak or Malaysia? Sarawak is part of Malaysia. Do not get confused.

3. Corruption, mismanagement, incompetence, leakages, wastage, regressive, repressive, divisive and stupid policies, the whole issue of good governance. Actually all the corruption, mismanagement, incompetence, leakages, regressive, repressive, divisive and stupid policies can be resolved with good governance. Can add in Native Customary Rights Land issue somewhere here as well. Heck, all the other issues above, the whole bread and butter issues and call for greater state autonomy can be solved with good governance. We will come to this later, in a bit.

Key issue that will most impact my vote in the forthcoming state election will be issue number 3. Good governance. With good and responsible government, leaders that care and honest in doing their jobs, right people in public offices, institutions and agencies to safeguard our interests, we will have less of these issues.

We cannot eliminate all the bread and butter issues, nor the abuse of trust and promises, corruption, mismanagement, wastage, regressive, repressive and stupid policies because this is not an ideal world. But we will have very less of these problems we are facing now.

Why are we still focusing on bread and butter issues after 52 years under BN? We praise BN come every election when they dish out instant noodles allocations and pork barreling for new roads, schools, hospitals, funds, donations and all other goodies. Shouldn’t these things been done all this while and not during election time? Why the Pan Borneo Expressway planning and construction takes so long to be realised? Incompetence? Is it we do not have the money and resources to do it? Why all the big infrastructure projects only given to the certain same companies? Corruption? Where is our oil, palm oil and timber money? Mismanagement? Why the gap between the poor and rich is so big in Sarawak? What the state leaders have been doing all this while, to allow erosion of our state powers that we need to make a stand and negotiate for it now? Why didn’t they fight for it before? Have they been sleeping on the job?

Will the issues at the Federal level have any impact here on the Sarawak election? Sadly, from my observation, the issues at the Federal level will not have very much impact here except for the urban voters. It is only good for coffee shop talk.

1MDB? Adenan Satem is fast to distance himself from the issue saying it has nothing to so with Sarawak and that is a smart political move. Because it should matter. All the things that happened in Federal will affect us in Sarawak because we don not live in isolation. Goods and Services Tax, that was decided at the Federal level and pretty damn sure that is affecting the people of Sarawak now. The 1MDB scandal implicating the very person this state government is supporting and dealing with, how is that not affecting us? The decision to use Tabung Haji money to ‘bail out’ 1MDB, how is that not affecting people in Sarawak who have deposits in Tabung Haji? And that was decided at what level? The appointment of the AG that also has his hands in the Allah and bible issue, that is not affecting us here? The appointment of the next Bank Governor, that doesn’t concern the people of Sarawak?

We have been fed lies and disinformation that issues happening at the Federal level will have no impact to the state of Sarawak. Do you pay tax to the government? Do you send your kids to schools, universites here? Do you buy car and house here? Do you live and work here? It is still Sarawak, Malaysia. Unless we go for Republic of Sarawak.

Lastly, what would you like the political parties to do about these three issues? Nothing. But I want the people to start questioning. And take charge. Take ownership of this state and country. Be a responsible citizen and carry out your due duties. Question everything. Be a learned and educated voter. Look for consistency when judging a person or any entity. Match talks with actions. And vote wisely this coming election. Give yourself a chance to make it right.

#GiveYourselfAChance

Tags: Adenan, Malaysia, Politics, Sarawak, State Election

I am going to be 33 in another week. 30th of November. Time sure flies. My 3rd birthday in the jungle of Kalimantan, Indonesia. Just another day for me, maybe a spike of wall messages on my Facebook and mentions on Twitter. Calls and text messages? Nah people don’t do that anymore. So 33 is middle age or what? Just in case I need a reason to blame all the stupid things I did or going to do on mid-life crisis.

Funny sometimes I feel like I have a lot of things to write about but when I get to it, nothing seems to come out. You need to keep on writing to keep it flowing I guess. Even when you are just writing craps and not making any sense.  Nowadays everything is in bite size, (or it is bit size? See,  my grammar also gone into the drain) we hardly can express ourselves more than few lines of words.

I had the chance to be an interviewer last Monday.  It was for the hiring of management trainees in preparing of the upcoming oil mill. I was one of the 3 panel interviewer. About 16 candidates, all fresh graduates registered for the sessions and we interviewed them in a group of 4 persons. This was actually the first time I sat as an interviewer in a formal interview session. I must say I was impressed with the quality of the fresh graduates who came for the interview. Almost all of them dressed impeccably for it and shown great confidence in expressing themselves and communicating throughout the session. The common ‘theme’ that I got was for them to be given a chance at the job. None of them talked or brought up the issue of salary or benefits even when the session was open for questions to them. I could feel their passion and sincerity, have no choice but accepting them for their infectious enthusiasm and eagerness to prove themselves. Just so long as they are given the chance to do so. We concluded the session after shortlisted ten of them, eight males and two females.

I wonder if I did as good when I started out as a fresh graduate. But I certainly grateful for the opportunity given to start as a junior engineer with a consultancy firm in Puchong,  Selangor. I learnt so much in my short three and half year there.

We should not be too hard on the fresh graduates or young people looking for an opportunity to prove themselves. Some employers demand too much of fresh graduates, not realising they were young, inexperienced and naive once. Life is tough for anyone starting out. Give them a chance.

Bersih is not about rhetoric.

What Bersih wants? You know. I know. A lot of people know. So it is very clear what Bersih wants.

Yes, Bersih wants a clean government. Bersih wants free and fair elections. Now, Bersih also wants to “save the economy.”

Why Bersih wants these? For the lack of vocabulary, #BetterNation heh.

And how to achieve all these? The specifics of it? May I direct you to some of the recommendations made by Bersih.

Bersih’s 10 institutional reforms:

1. Electoral reform 2. Making the Election Commission a constitutional party answerable to Parliament 3. Barring Prime Minister from simultaneously holding the office of Finance Minister 4. Parliamentary Reform 5. Making MACC (Malaysian Anti-Corruption Commission) answerable to Parliament 6. Separating Attorney General from the role of Public Prosecutor 7. Freedom of Information laws at Federal and State levels 8. Public declaration of Ministers and senior government servants’ assets 9. Repeal of/Amendments to draconian laws

10. Establishment of the Independent Police Complaints and Misconduct Commission (IPCMC)

If all these recommendations by Bersih are accepted and carried out, we should be able to achieve the two main “wants” mentioned earlier.  The 3rd “want” is just the after thought of the other two.

But, really HOW to get all these recommendations done? Through a rally? Heck, rally is just a process. A referendum of collective voices and opinions. To unite and organise people with shared objectives. Really, a rally is one of the simplest mean for common folks to voice out when every other avenue is either being closed down or being bullied into submission. I don’t think people are so naive to think just through rallies we would able to achieve all we want.

The “hows” to achieve all above although is clear and appears to be easy as spelt out in the recommendations, yet it is not quite clear (confusing, but yeah..) because the lack of any result to show. The journey is still a long and windy one, even for an optimist. Especially when this is going to be the 4th edition of Bersih since its first rally on 10th November 2007. What Bersih has really achieved since then? Indelible ink? More awareness? More noise? Really, to be honest not much in measurable results when you compare with the recommendations mentioned earlier.

But that is because we have a very stubborn and irresponsible government in place. Many promises were made, not many were met. All the structural changes recommended to achieve the main objective of Bersih – free and fair election yet to be made. Election Commission is still not reporting to the parliament. Political funding yet to be regulated. Delineation, very minimal to none have been carried out.

So we are stuck with the same old play. Yes it is silly to keep doing the same thing over and over again but expecting different results. But what choice do we have for now? Do you have better and workable ideas? By all means, do it. Just don’t ridicule the persistence of Bersih supporters.

Because at this stage we are still only concern about “what.” And “why.”

Why we want a free and fair elections? So we hopefully will get a clean government  in the process when we have free and fair elections.

When we have a clean government, hopefully we will have a government that actually cares about the economy, that will listen to the voice of the people who put them in office and will implement measures and policies to the benefit of better economy and all.

How Bersih want to achieve all this? Well before that, does Bersih have a consistent and big enough voice to get things done as what they want? As what you and I want if we all support its objectives and fights. Because if we don’t have a consistent and big enough support to pressure the power to be to carry out the recommendations for all the things we want and why, no point we go talking about how now.

We must remember that Bersih is nothing but a pressure group with its main objective is for electoral reforms. Bersih is not the policy maker. To burden Bersih with all the how to get this and that done, shouldn’t these questions be asked to those who actually can make it happen? Ask the bloody government. Ask the bloody Election Commission. Ask the bloody Prime Minister who is having a chokehold over the whole cabinet and everything that moves (maybe some already dead, unfortunately) in this land.

There are so many things to do, a lot of it have to be in place before what we want can happen. Do we expect to have all the answers before we want to be a part of anything? You already knew the what and why. You want to know the how as well? Bloody hell, go play your game with your cheat codes and walk-through guide don’t you?

We want to save the economy, save the nation and shit, but before all that can happen, we need to restore the confidence and strengthen the institutions we entrust to safeguard our interests, foremost. And I have lost confidence in all the major institutions we entrusted to safeguard our interests, to do its sacred jobs because all are falling apart due to political interference. Look at how much power the Prime Minister and its office wield over the Attorney General’s Chamber, Malaysian  Royal Police, Anti Corruption Agency, judiciary, the submissive cabinet and by extension the parliament by holding some balls just enough to make it a lame duck parliament eg. balls of the Speaker of the House of Representatives?

What else common folk like me do other than voting come every rigged-election and making noise on the social media that soon-to-be-regulated-and-clamped-down? This government is making a mockery of its mandate day in day out, hell no I have not and will never give my vote to anyone to abuse the governance system, public institutions and ruin the nation like what is happening now.

So, you be damned if people want to walk the streets with the like minded to show their displeasure with the government and the system. The most important of all, to throw their support for Bersih in its fights for electoral reforms.

For free and fair elections.

For clean government.

For me, I just need these two reasons. How many do you need?

Tags: BERSIH, Bersih4, Better Nation, Clean Government, Free and Fair Elections, Institutional Reforms, Malaysia, Politics, Thoughts

The uncle is directing passengers to the sections following their destinations. When you already have big signs just in front of the entrance. Yet there many who stopped and asked him which section to go.

Redundancy.  That is why some people never learn to pay extra attention.  What a waste of productivity. Then again, maybe this is a way to “create jobs”.

Good morning.