Fountain of Youth ?

The fragility of life?

About 30 years ago, my brother Suresh and I used to find it a little amusing that my Dad, now 87, started his day by reading theStar's obituary column first. I was then a young 26 year old professional thinking that I was somewhat invincible. I must admit, religion was a low priority then.

As many years passed by, only then did I really understand why Dad did what he did. It was because his friends and family were slowly exiting life. Each time someone he knew died, a piece of his history died with them.

Today, there is hardly a month that passes by when I don't read of the passing away of a friend/ family or simply, an acquaintance. In the past 30 days, 6 of my friends, all but one under 60, have said their final words. The youngest was just 48 and the oldest 67. I would say, for all, just too soon to say goodbye to life. Whatever happened to the dictum that 60 was "young" ?

Man may conquer space and earth's core today but as of now, eternal (or even a 150 yr life span) life is just a dream. Maybe one day in the future, we can, thru the use of cryogenics or a future science, preserve our brains to be reborn into a new body. It would be a real treat to be "alive" in 2121 and see how the world has progressed...if we haven't killed it by then. But then again, Man would have colonized Mars and more. But does the fountain of youth really exist? Fable (or his-story) tells us of great sages living till 200 years.

When we are at our deathbed, does it really matter if you graduated at 17, or won several gold medals in the Olympics, or if you were the best golfer in the country. My grandpa, Arumugam, just before he passed away in 1981, told me, he only remembered the women he loved and his children who hugged and kissed him goodnight daily. Everything else was immaterial when it was time to go.

I can echo his sentiments when I was in prison in late 2019. I didnt think about the many "great" accounts/mergers/public companies etc that I worked on but my children and family, were at the top of my mind. It really brings perspective to life.

Whenever a friend/family member passes away young (as one did today), I question the fragility.....or maybe, the ephemerality of life. Ok, as a Hindu, God allows me to relive life about 900+ times so there's some consolation:). But not everybody is a Hindu.

Someone once said, when it's your time to go, make sure it's really the last thing you have to do. Wise words indeed. I intend to live by it.

Do you?

Philistines......?

There's been so much LIES told by media on the situation in Gaza that not many people know what's true anymore. Even "educated" people don't know what's going on. Religion has got everything to do with this confusion. Watch the videos where they are faking the attack's result.

I'm not at all advocating violence but if someone fires 100's of rockets at us from southern Thailand, do we keep quiet in KL? We would expect our army to defend us and indeed, repel that attack. The Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) did just that.

Our schools do not teach history (nor religion) correctly. Hence our folks do not know the real history behind this 73 year old war: The new religion came about less than 1,500 years ago. So it's not possible that the disputed ancient land (some say 8,000 years old) belonged to those claiming it. In fact, as a country it NEVER existed before 1948, just like it's nemesis didn't. The British via the Balfour Treaty created an area for the Jews to settle. The Romans, who sacked Jerusalem and drove away the residents, renamed it Palestina (to rid the old name) and described this land as a district of Syria around the 5th century BC. Listen to the Arab confirming this in the video.

Take Malaysia lah. Up until about 600 years ago, this was a Hindu land with most rulers being Hindu too, everybody agrees on this part. Then Islam arrived, then Portuguese, then Dutch, then British and finally, in 1957 as agreed under the Reed Commission, a land for all races with a special dispensation for the Malay until economic parity was met. Are we still practising what was agreed by the Founding fathers? So do we fire rockets at each other because we disagree on the original formula now flawed by racist policies?

Even in the holy book, Chapter 26, verse 59, states “We made the Children (of people of the book) the inheritors of the land”. Even more in Chapter 17, verse 104: "God granted the Land to the Children of (the people of the book) and ordered them to settle there. In addition, it is predicted that before the end of days, God will bring the Children of (the people of the book) to retake possession of the Land, gathering them from the different countries and nations"

Seriously, just how long do we need to go back into history to decide who "owns" the land ? Can someone in Rome today claim France because in say 121BC, there was no France but Gaul, a Roman territory ? Or can Malaysia lay claim to Singapore because it was illegally sold to Raffles some 200 years ago by a Temenggong in order to overthrow the real Sultan with the connivance of the Brits?

So even if you dispute what the historical fact is/was, how about what the holy book itself says? Are you now trying to re-write what was sayeth by the lord himself?

https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=513727429826356

When it comes to religion, one has to ignore facts, be blind to justice and just take a leap of faith in plain "belief". And of course, most of the holy words were written by man some hundreds of years later, and obviously it's "his"story. For interest, the Bible wasn't written till about a 60+ years after Jesus' death (although Mark's Gospel was about 15 years after His death) and the other holy book wasn't compiled till about 250 years after the prophet's death. Imagine the number of additions/deletions and amendments that would have been made over the 1000 years to now? Even our local language translated holy book has "added" words (see pic below)

to the original one for obvious reasons.

And btw, the IDF can easily take out the terrorists but it will cause a lot of collateral damage as the terrorists are hiding within the civilians and so, the IDF has to go slow.

If You believed, they put a man on the Moon.....

Unless you have been asleep for the past 3 years or completely "off grid", you would have heard about DOGE coin. (Yes, you may Google it in case you have not).

What started of as a "joke" in 2013 (the creators were so put off by BTC's rise, I think, they decided to create a "shit" coin and see where this will lead to) to challenge the dominance of the then handful of crypto currencies. Nobody believed crypto had a "space" (remember this word...) in the fiat (paper) currency world. And back then, a shit coin was a token that had little purpose (called tokenomics) in their jargon....and DOGE was a meme-d (a caricature/corruption of a Japanese dog) shitcoin.

As a lifelong student (and some say the Gemini influence), anything that is "new" (new cars, new wife etc...) excites me - in any field. I am the most "unusual" accountant that I know - and many agree. Having jumped on the notion of the blockchain innovation since early 2016, and after gathering some mileage, I had been teaching classes on crypto since late 2017. I had also offered my advice to educational institutes, financial outfits and indeed, the regulators. Besides my students (perhaps about 1000 pax over the 2 years before Covid forced me to stop), NOBODY in Malaysia believed in the technology called "BLOCKCHAIN". Sometimes in life, the technology "arrives" earlier than when the world is ready to accept: While Henry Ford is credited for bringing cheap/affordable cars to the masses, it was his genius that birthed highways to America. Before cars, there was no "use/need" for proper roads. If in the early 20th century, someone proposed to the US govt the need to build roads/highways costing billions connecting the whole country - he would have been laughed away. With cars, came the highways. With the highways, came rapid growth of townships...and the rest is history. The same with blockchain....time will prove.

Of course now, everybody has heard of Blockchain and many believe it's the "new" internet. But I can't blame the naysayers. In 1994, when as a young accountant, I advised my boss that he should consider putting the firm's accounting expertise on the internet, he told me that the internet was either for the "techie geeks" or porn purveyors - and asked me in which category that I fit. I replied since I was useless in technology, I suppose he can decide easily:). Later that year, because of my "pornographic" interest, he sent me off to New York to work on the Yahoo IPO (that he opined will bomb miserably) that blew everybody's mind away on the "value" of the Internet - suddenly, it was a $billion industry. For interest, today, the 5 top listed companies in the world - are in the internet/tech related business.

And the 5th largest is - of course, BITCOIN ! This "company" started less than 12 years ago and at the rate it's growing, I dare bet a bottle of Singleton, it will be the largest "institution" in the world by 2030, if not earlier. It's value has beaten the mighty Facebook's and Tesla's, and of course, Berkshire's (Buffet incidentally has changed from a "hater" of BTC to an "undecided" now).

We return to DOGE. You recall the 1968 Bee Gees' hit song (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jrg1UAixGaMthat) that went like this:

I started a joke

Which started the whole world crying

But I didn't see...

That the joke was on me, oh no

Well, folks, the 2013 joke DOGE is now the world's 4th most valuable crypto with a market cap of almost $70 billion today. As comparison of it's financial might in local terms, DOGE is worth more than the top 5 listed companies in Malaysia (Maybank, TNB, Public Bank, Petronas, and IHH) COMBINED !!! I suppose, for those who didn't believe, Robin's song is a good reminder.....that the joke was on you?

And what happened yesterday, 9 May 2021, was simply incredible. Elon Musk (also known as the DOGEFATHER) while hosting SNL, at about 11.30pm EST (about 11.30am Sunday in KL), "joked" that DOGE was a "hustle". By 12pm KL time, DOGE fell by 30% wiping out a market cap of almost RM 100 bil ! If this happened on the Bursa (KLSE for those off grid), you may well see some stockbrokers jumping off Menara TA and so on.

Now picture this:

When Elon appeared on SNL at 11.30pm Sunday in New York and said DOGE was a "hustle" coin, it was trading at 70c. Immediately after his "joke" it fell to a low of 44c - by a whopping 37% and wiping out $33 bil (RM 130 bil) in global crypto equity value! 3 hours later, Geomatric Energy Corp (supplier of fuel to SpaceX.....a company owned by Elon) announces DOGE as the currency that's "going to the moon" ie being the funding for the payload in Falcon 9, the space rocket. DOGE bounces back by 30% almost within 6 hours. Outside the stock market crashes of 1929 and 2008, have you seen a stock's equity sinking 37% within minutes and only to rise by 30% within hours. In my "accountant/analyst" life of some 40 years, I have never seen this phenomenon! But I was not at all surprised: I had many students privately messaging with panic tones.....I merely said "it may be a good time to buy DOGE". For those who bought at 44c, you just made 22% within hours.

Assuming "someone" keyed in a "buy" at 44c......"he" made $30 bil in about 10 hours on Monday. You doubt this?

DOGE went as low as 43c and within 20 hours, it's back up by 30% from it's lows and now at 56c. "Somebody" just made about $30bil in less than 24 hours. You all can guess who he was. When I wrote to the powers that be on 31 Aug 2018 to lodge a market manipulation complaint against JP Morgan's CEO who caused a panic run on BTC by saying it was worthless....only to buy BTC in the millions when it fell momentarily by 40% on his spew, they threw my complaint in the bin. You see, the regulator doesn't take action against the Big Boys...the same everywhere. Elon has been hyping up BTC and DOGE and they only "rap" his knuckles for market manipulation. Anyone else would be charged and jailed.

DOGE was $0.004 on 1 Jan 2021 and I know someone who owned about 4mil then. If he/she kept all, he/she would be sitting on a fortune of RM 8.5 mil today! And those who don't take the blockchain seriously, better rethink...).

So, will DOGE reach the moon....well, follow this space :)

As a hint, Elon seems to think DOGE may well turn out to be an inter-planetary currency: "If you believed, they put a man on the moon"