WHAT'S HIP HOPPING? - NEW KID IN THE BLOCK AT THE PENANG SCENE

SCHIZZOW

Georgetown, MY Hip Hop

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ARTIST INFO Members: Yung Shen The Schizzowphrenic You can also find us at: Label: Rogue Squadron

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ABOUT

Biography:

The issue with the individuals or "rappers" in the Malaysian Hip-Hop scene in this day, besides the tendency of having a fetish for "beef" and hate, is that too many of them boast of skills they do not have, achievements nobody has heard of, talk which they have never walked, and more importantly, the sad fact that they can't rap.

Come 2009, where the individuals in the scene still continue to talk about "big things" which might hardly materialize, a single individual pledges to step back from the rest, and be at a different level from these average rappers. And that level is not one above the rest, yet. It is the one below the rest. It is not about being at a lower level in terms of skills or talent, but rather about lying low, and not talking the talk before the walk is done.

This individual carries no cliches about "coming soon", or being "the next big thing". There has hardly been any egoistic self-promotion about his works or albums prior to their releases the way this individual keeps his music truly underground. While other aspiring emcees or rappers are flaunting their ego and talent, having only few real songs (sometimes even none), Schizzow has released two independent albums by the age of 19, together with his group, the Fundamental Mentalities. Other notable rap appearances include Point Blanc's Straight To The Point (2007), MC Mahadhir's Momentum (2009) as well as Jin Hackman's Jinius At Work (2009).

Together with Phalanx and The Rogue Squadron, the journey of this Penangite in the highly competitive world of rap music has just begun - starting with his debut solo effort "The Schizzowphrenic". Quiet as though it may seem, best believe that Schizzow will make his solo album be one that exceeds expectations, without having any big talk about "taking over the scene". For the lack of hype and anticipation however, rest assured that the quality of the album will pretty much make up for it.

Schizzow is just like a communist; he is hardly seen or heard in the scene, and you don't know where he lurks or what he is up to. But when it's time for action, he will definitely bring an impact to the scene.

Discography:

Fundamental Mentalities' EP Back2DBasix - 2004
Voices From Beneath Mixtape - 2004
The CLHS Rap Anthem - 2005
Rapsody's EP Seven Days - 2006
YinYang's EP The First Verse - 2006
Fundamental Mentalities' Sentimentalities album - 2006
Point Blanc's solo LP Straight To The Point - 2007
Graffiti Greatness CD Single - 2007
Voices From Beneath II Mixtape - 2008
The Rogue Squadron -_- (Dash Underscore Dash) Mixtape - 2008

MC Mahadhir's Momentum - 2009

Jin Hackman's Jinius At Work - 2009

The Schizzowphrenic LP - 2009

MUCH ADO ABOUT THE 30% BUMIPUTERA EQUITY PARTICIPATION POLICY

MUCH ADO ABOUT THE 30% BUMIPUTERA EQUITY PARTICIPATION POLICY Posted by admin Friday, 03 July 2009 02:06 By Matthias Chang Any genuine attempts by the government to mitigate the effects of the global financial tsunami and promote growth of the economy must be applauded and I do so here in this column. It is better late than never. The policy instruments that are available to the Prime Minister who is also our Finance Minister are limited because of the nature of the problem that we have to confront. If I may be permitted to use a simple analogy - If one has only five bullets and there are ten targets, shooting the wrong targets would be a waste of the bullets and if we end up without any bullets, we will be at the receiving end of hostile fire with no defences whatsoever. When the government announced recently that the Foreign Investment Committee would be abolished, as its principal role of ensuring the 30% equity ownership by Bumiputeras of the Malaysian corporate cake has failed, it brought cheers from some quarters and deep anxiety and worries from bumiputeras and other stakeholders who were the primary beneficiaries of the “discarded” policy. But the first tier bumiputera elites have no complaints. I appreciate that there is a desire to effect change and a serious attempt has been made towards that end, but the bullet fired has been wasted, because I take the view that the so-called policy change has not resulted in any fundamental shift in addressing the underlying social and economic issues. Common sense tells us that this instrument of the NEP is an inaccurate measure of the share of the national corporate wealth and has in fact caused unnecessary friction and misunderstanding between the bumiputera and non-bumiputera communities in Malaysia. It is one of the root causes of the continuing racial tensions between the various communities in Malaysia. The policy sounds good, looks good but its effects were far from being good for Malaysia, specifically the bumiputera community. Let me explain this matter by applying common sense. READ MORE HERE

SODOMY PART III

POLITICS: U.S. Uses False Taliban Aid Charge to Pressure Iran By Gareth Porter* WASHINGTON, Jul 2 (IPS) - The Barack Obama administration has given new prominence to a Bush administration charge that Iran is providing military training and assistance to the Taliban in Afghanistan, for which no evidence has ever been produced, and which has been discredited by data obtained by IPS from the Pentagon itself. The new twist in the charge is that it is being made in the context of serious talks between NATO officials and Iran involving possible Iranian cooperation in NATO's logistical support for the war against the insurgents in Afghanistan. Since the early to mid-1990s, Iranian policy in Afghanistan has been more consistently and firmly opposed to the Taliban than that of the United States. The Obama administration thus appears to be pressing that charge as a means of increasing the political-diplomatic pressure on Iran over its nuclear programme, despite NATO's need for Iranian help on Afghanistan. CENTCOM commander Gen. David Petraeus declared in testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee Apr. 1, "In Afghanistan, Iran appears to have hedged its longstanding public support for the Karzai government by providing opportunistic support to the Taliban." Defence Secretary Robert Gates told reporters in Brussels Jun. 12, "Iran is playing a double game" in Afghanistan by "sending in a relatively modest level of weapons and capabilities to attack ISAF (International Security Assistance Force) and coalition forces." The State Department's annual report on terrorism, published Apr. 30, 2009, claimed that the Iranian Qods Force had "provided training to the Taliban on small unit tactics, small arms, explosives and indirect fire weapons." It also charged that Iran had "arranged arms shipments including small arms and associated ammunition, rocket propelled grenades, mortar rounds, 107mm rockets, and plastic explosives to select Taliban members." The report offered no evidence in support of those charges, however, and Rhonda Shore, public affairs officer in the State Department's Office of the Coordinator for Counterterrorism, refused to answer questions from IPS about those charges in the report. A military official who refused to be identified told IPS the charge of Iranian assistance to the Taliban is based on "an intelligence assessment", which was limited to "suspected" Iranian shipment of arms to the Taliban and did not extend to training. That admission indicates that the charge of shipments of weapons to the Taliban by Iran is not based on hard evidence. The only explicit U.S. claim of specific evidence relating to an Iranian arms shipment to insurgents in Afghanistan has been refuted by data collected by the Pentagon's own office on improvised explosives. In an April 2008 Pentagon news briefing, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Adm. Mike Mullen said in reference to Iranian authorities, "[W]e're seeing some evidence that they're supporting the Taliban in Afghanistan". When pressed by reporters for the evidence, however, Mullen admitted that there was no "constant stream of arms supply at this point" and that the basis for the charge was primarily "evidence some time ago" that Iranians were providing amour-piercing EFPs (explosively formed projectiles) to the Taliban. That was a reference to a July 2007 allegation by the U.S. command in Afghanistan, under obvious pressure from the White House, that Iranian-made EFPs had appeared in Afghanistan. Col. Tom Kelly, a U.S. deputy chief of staff of the ISAF, told reporters Jul. 18, 2007 that five EFPs that had been found in Herat near the Iranian border and in Kabul were "very sophisticated", and that "they're really not manufactured in any other places other than, our knowledge is, Iran". That was the same argument that had been used by the U.S. command in Iraq to charge Iran with exporting EFPs to Shi'a insurgents there. But in response to a query from this writer last July, the Pentagon's Joint Improvised Explosive Device Defeat Organisation (JIEDDO), which is responsible for tracking the use of roadside bombs in Iraq and Afghanistan, provided the first hard data on EFPs found in Afghanistan. The data showed that there was no connection on which to base even an inferential connection between those EFPs and Iran. Every one of the 13 EFPs reported to have been found in Afghanistan up to that time were "crude and unsophisticated", according to Irene Smith, a spokesperson for Gen. Anthony Tata, JIEDDO's deputy director for operations and training. In fact, the insurgents in Afghanistan had not shown the ability to make the kind of EFPs that had been found in Iraq, Smith said. The U.S. command in Afghanistan, moreover, does not appear to be an enthusiastic supporter of the administration's political line on the issue. NATO officials began a serious dialog with Iran last March which focused on the possibility of moving supplies for NATO troops to Afghanistan from Iranian ports. At an off the record seminar in Washington last month, a senior U.S. military officer in Afghanistan said the Iranian policy toward Afghanistan is neither a "major problem" nor a "growing problem" for the war against the Taliban, according to one of the attendees. The lack of enthusiasm of the U.S. command in Afghanistan for charges of Iranian support for the Taliban suggests that the impetus for such charges is coming from those in the administration who are trying to ramp up the overall pressure on Iran to make concessions on its nuclear programme. Gilles Dorronsoro, a specialist on Afghanistan and visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington, says he sees sharp differences between the position of those responsible for Afghanistan and those whose primary concern is Iran's nuclear programme. "You have one discourse of officials in Afghanistan, who would support collaboration with Iran," Dorronsoro said in an interview with IPS. "It's very clear that those people don't want a crisis with Iran and don't want to push Iran too far." But those who want to put pressure on Iran to stop its enrichment programme, he said, "are acting as though they are building some kind of legal case against Iran." The Bush administration initially claimed it had evidence of Iranian aid to the Taliban in 2007 that didn't exist, only to have it refuted by the U.S. command in Afghanistan. In April and May 2007, NATO forces in Helmand province found mortars, C-4 explosives and electrical components believed to have been manufactured in Iran. Then Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs Nicholas Burns asserted that the United States had "irrefutable evidence" that those weapons were provided to the Taliban by the Qods Force of Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. When State Department spokesman Sean McCormack was questioned about the Burns statement on Jun. 13, 2007, McCormack admitted that the charge was an inference. Gen. Dan McNeill, then the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, rejected the idea that any official Iranian role could be reasonably inferred from Iranian weapons showing up in Afghanistan. "[W]hen you say weapons being provided by Iran, that would suggest there is some more formal entity involved in getting these weapons here," he told Jim Loney of Reuters. McNeill said he had "no information to support that there's anything formal in some arrangement out of Iran to provide weapons here." The obvious alternative explanation for Iranian weapons in arms shipments is that drug lords and the Taliban have used commercial arms smugglers to get the weapons from Iran into the country. Arms dealers have close ties with Afghan officials, and have been reported to use police convoys to carry smuggled arms, according to a BBC2 television report last September. *Gareth Porter is an investigative historian and journalist specialising in U.S. national security policy. The paperback edition of his latest book, "Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam", was published in 2006.

WHAT'S HAPPENING AT GREEN ACRES

CLIMATE CHANGE: Opportunity For Biopirates?
By Ranjit Devraj

NEW DELHI, Jul 2 (IPS) - Genetically modified (GM) crops that can withstand environmental stress may be one answer to climate change but a powerful lobby is building up against the patenting of technologies involved, especially when they are derivatives of traditional farmers’ innovations.

"Climate resistant traits that the agricultural biotechnology giants have been patenting have been evolved through centuries of farmers’ breeding," says Vandana Shiva, the New Delhi-based, internationally acclaimed food security campaigner.

Shiva told IPS that the gene giants were piling "one disaster upon another" by looking at climate change as a business opportunity.

"On the basis of this new form of biopiracy, the biotech industry is positioning itself as the climate saviour and making governments and the public believe that, but for them, there will be no climate resilient seeds," Shiva said. "By making broad claims on all crops and all traits, the industry is closing future options for adaptation to climate change," she added.

Shiva named four companies - BASF Bayer of Germany, Syngenta of Switzerland and the U.S.-based Monsanto and Du Pont as leaders in the game of trying to corner "climate-ready" genes that are known to help crops withstand floods, droughts, saltwater ingress, warmer temperatures higher ultraviolet radiation and other projected effects of climate change.

In 2001 Shiva’s activist ‘Navdanya’ group successfully challenged ownership of traits claimed by the U.S. corporation RiceTec for its variety of long-grain, aromatic basmati rice. After it was proved that RiceTec’s variety contained genetic material developed from farmers’ varieties, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office struck down the claims.

Similarly, Navdanya, along with Greenpeace and the Bharat Krishak Samaj (BKS), an Indian farmers’ group, challenged and got revoked, in October 2004, patents taken out on the Indian ‘Nap Hal’ variety of wheat by Monsanto, the world’s biggest seed corporation.

A Monsanto advertisement reads: "9 billion people to feed. A changing climate. Now what?" It then goes on to portray that GM crops are the answer, although many developing countries have rejected genetically engineered seeds and crops in favour of traditional farming that depends on saving seeds after each harvest rather than buying engineered seeds from corporations.

Last month Navdanya released a list of hundreds of climate resistant crops saved by communities in several Indian states but on which patents have been taken out by the gene giants.

The idea of publishing the list, part of report called ‘Biopiracy of Climate Resistant Crops’, was to prod India’s policy-makers to include farmers’ innovations and participatory breeding options in India’s National Action Plan on Climate Change which focuses on biotechnology.

Shiva sees hope in the fact that governments, starting with those of the G77 countries and China, are waking up to the importance of excluding climate-friendly technologies from patenting at the Jun. 1-12 negotiations on climate change in Bonn.

China and the G77 proposed that "all necessary steps be immediately taken in all relevant for a to mandatorily exclude patenting climate-friendly technologies held by Annex II countries which can be used to adapt to or mitigate climate change’’.

Annex II of the Convention contains a list of 24 developed countries with financial obligations. The "no patents" proposal is one of several ambitious proposals put forward by developing countries to address the intellectual property barrier to the transfer of and access to environmentally-sound technologies (ESTs) for climate mitigation and adaptation.

These proposals were submitted on "Enhanced action on development and transfer of technology", one of the five building blocks of the Bali Action Plan (BAP) adopted by Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in December 2007.

Developed countries, in particular Japan, Canada, Australia, Switzerland and the US have been insisting on strong intellectual property rights (IPR) regimes, even opposing the use of compulsory licensing, which is allowed under the TRIPS Agreement.

The Philippines has proposed that: "All necessary steps shall be taken immediately in all relevant fora to mandatorily exclude from patenting environmentally sound technologies which can be used to adapt to or mitigate climate change’’.

Bolivia has proposed that Parties should "take all steps necessary in all for a to mandatorily exclude form patenting in developing countries environmentally sound technologies to adapt to or mitigate climate change including those developed through funding by governments or international agencies’’ and ‘’to revoke in developing countries all existing patents on essential/urgent environmentally sound technologies to adapt to or mitigate climate change’’.

The Bolivian proposal also speaks of immediately creating and providing ‘’new and additional financing that is adequate, predictable and sustainable for joint technology excellence centres in developing countries, to enable entities in these countries to do research and development especially on adaptation as well as mitigation technologies’’.

Last year the Ottawa-based ETC Group, an activist organisation that champions the cause of subsistence farmers, released a report showing that the biotech majors were leveraging climate change as a way to break into seed markets.

ETC had warned in its report, "Patenting the 'Climate Genes' . . . and Capturing the Climate Agenda," of the dangers to public-sector breeding through corporate consolidation of the seed market and documented in it about 530 applications for climate-related plant genes.

At the Bonn negotiations the concern of the chair was evident in its proposal for the establishment of a committee, an advisory panel, or designate body to "proactively address patents and related IPR issues to ensure that both increased innovation and increased access to both for mitigation and adaptation technologies"