Petronas and petrol prices

I received this e-mail (see below) today and it is purportedly about how consumers can force Petronas to lower the price of petrol by boycotting it.


Want petrol prices to come down?


We need to take some intelligent, united action. The oil companies just laughed at last year’s action because they knew we would not continue to 'hurt' ourselves by refusing to buy petrol. It was more of an inconvenience to us than it was a problem for them. BUT whoever thought of this idea, has come up with a plan that can really work. Please read on and join with us!


By now, you're probably thinking petrol priced at about $1.50 is cheap. It is currently $2.15 for regular unleaded.


Now that the oil companies and the OPEC nations have conditioned us to think that the cost of a liter of gas is CHEAP at $1.50, we need to take aggressive action to teach them that BUYERS control the marketplace...not sellers.


With the price of gasoline going up more each day, we consumers need to take action.


The only way we are going to see the price of petrol come down is if we hit someone in the pocketbook by not purchasing their petrol! And, we can do that WITHOUT hurting ourselves.


How? Since we all rely on our cars, we can't just stop buying petrol.


But we CAN have an impact on petrol prices if we all act together to force a price war.


Here's the idea: For the rest of this year, DON'T purchase ANY petrol from PETRONAS
the biggest price-up driver company.


If they are not selling any petrol, they will be inclined to reduce their prices. If they reduce their prices, the other companies will have to follow suit.


But to have an impact, we need to reach literally millions of Petrol buyers. It's SO simple! Now, don't wimp out on me at this point...keep reading and I'll explain how simple it is to reach millions and even BILLIONS of people!!


I am sending this note to 20 people. If each of you sends it on to at least twenty more that's (20 x 20 = 400) ...... And those 400 send it to at least twenty more (400 x 20 = 8000 .... and so on, by the time the message reaches the fifth group of people, we will have reached over SIXTY FOUR MILLION consumers!!!!!
20x20 = 400 400x20 = 8,000 8,000x20 = 160,000 160,000x20 = 3,200,000 3,200,000x20 = 64,000,000 64,000,000x20 = 12,800,000,000 That's 12.80 Billion people folks, who will have been contacted!!!!!


Unbelievable?? Do the math and see for yourself! Again, all you have to do is send this to 20 people. That's all!
I'll bet you didn't think we had that much potential, did you! Acting together we can make a difference..


If this message makes sense to you, then please pass it on. THEY will LOWER THEIR PRICES TO BELOW THE $1.50 RANGE AND KEEP THEM DOWN. THIS CAN REALLY WORK.


It’s simple – send the message along to others and choose to not buy petrol from Petronas. LET'S DO IT ! ! ! More power to you friend.


It all sounds attractive since consumers are empowered to change things for the better - in this case by forcing Petronas to lower the pump price of petrol.


But if you were to examine it logically and intelligently, it is flawed.


The author claims that if consumers were to stop buying petrol from Petronas it would be forced to lower its price.


However, consumers would still be pumping RON 95 petrol at the other petrol stations run by Shell, BHP or Esso/Mobil at the subsidised price.


Even if all Petronas stations sell zero litre of RON 95 petrol due to the purported boycott, Petronas would not suffer any loss because the station owners would have paid for the tanker-loads of oil. The station owners would be the ones who would bear the losses.


Even if Petronas stations sell zero litre of petrol, the excess capacity at Petronas tanks would easily be distributed to Shell, BHP or Esso/Mobil.


Bear in mind that even if the purported boycott takes place, there is no decrease in total demand because every motorist will still be pumping petrol - only not at Petronas stations. 


Shell, BHP and Esso/Mobil stations would enjoy higher turnover, but the total demand would remain the same.


"...by the time the message reaches the fifth group of people, we will have reached over SIXTY FOUR MILLION consumers!!!!!"


The author should get his/her facts right. Malaysia has perhaps 27.4 million people. Why is it necessary to reach 64 million consumers to boycott Petronas?


"That's 12.80 Billion people folks, who will have been contacted!!!!!"


The world's population is perhaps 6.92 billion. How does one contact the non-existent 5.88 billion folks?


Coming back to the price of petrol in Malaysia. The pump price of RON 95 petrol in Malaysia is subsidised by the Government and it is fixed according to a pricing mechanism which is based on the world prices of petroleum and the exchange rate of the US dollar.


The world prices of petroleum and the exchange rate of the US dollar are beyond the control of the Malaysian Government - or the government of any other country for that matter.


If the world price of Brent Crude Oil shoots up to US$150, is it the fault of the Malaysian Government? If the pump price of RON 95 at Malaysia petrol stations has to be raised because the world crude oil price shot up, is it the fault of the Malaysian Government?


If the author of the e-mail were to dig deeper, he/she would find out the world prices of crude oil are determined by the markets based on supply and demand factors - and speculation. Perhaps speculators influence the price fluctuations more these days.


And who are the speculators? They are the usual culprits - the fund managers of Goldman Sachs and other investment banks, the hedge funds, commodity funds and billionaire investors.


They are the ones who make billions of bucks for their rich investors (and the fund managers still get millions of dollars in bonuses).


And who are the losers? The billions (definitely not 12.8 billion) of consumers/motorists around the world and it's not the fault of the governments of the countries they live in.


Crude oil producers also make plenty of money when crude oil prices shoot up in world markets. These are mostly in the Middle-East.


However, Malaysia is still a net exporter of crude oil and Petronas will make lots of money when world prices of crude are high. And the profits end up in the Government's coffers.


So boycotting Petronas petrol stations will not force the pump price of RON95 to come down and it will also not affect Petronas financially.


The entire argument posited in the e-mail is flawed. 


If this message makes sense to you, then please pass it on.


This message actually makes no sense. People who have received it should just delete it.

Hero or court jester?

Perkasa president Datuk Ibrahim Ali may think he is a hero among the Malay masses, but frankly he is seen as a court jester among the non-Malays and he is not being taken seriously by slightly less than half the population of Malaysia.

His latest claim that he believes communists are stirring up trouble and causing chaos by using local groups to take part in the alleged plot to replace Islam as the official religion of Malaysia has made him look comical and terribly ill-informed.

He said he suspected Communist Party of Malaya supporters had infiltrated political parties, non-governmental organisations (NGOs), religious groups and business associations after the party laid down arms in 1989 in order to carry on their activities.

“I believe there are (former) Communist Party members who still hold communist beliefs and want to see the country descend into chaos,” he told The Malaysian Insider in Kampung Baru on May 8.

The "political parties" and "religious groups" he was referring to obviously meant DAP and Christian bodies since the entire issue of the unsubstantiated plot to have a Christian Prime Minister and replace Islam as the official religion started from the infamous Utusan Malaysia report about a meeting between Christian pastors and DAP leaders in Penang.

Ibrahim could improve his knowledge if he were to read this report that was published on May 11:

BEIJING (AP) — Chinese police have detained 49 leaders of an underground Protestant church in a central province, an advocacy group and local official said Wednesday.

The U.S.-based China Aid Association said all three floors of a church building in Henan province's Weishi county were searched and thousands of dollars worth of property were seized during the raid Tuesday on a religious education seminar.

Also detained were three Korean citizens, including a Bible instructor, the group said. South Korea's Foreign Ministry said it had no immediate information about the reported detentions, which reflect long-standing ties between South Korean church groups and Chinese believers.

An official with the Weishi county religious affairs bureau confirmed Wednesday the detentions but gave no details. Like many Chinese officials, he gave only his surname, Sun.

China requires all religious groups to register and accept Communist Party oversight, although millions of believers continue to worship in unregistered congregations that typically have an evangelistic, charismatic character.

That includes members of Beijing's unregistered Shouwang Church, who have recently repeatedly defied police demands and attempted to gather for banned outdoor services, leading dozens to be detained. The group, which includes numerous intellectuals, was evicted from its rented space under police pressure.

Rural congregations, drawn from poorer, less-educated communities, tend to be more vulnerable to coercion from authorities.

This month, a U.S. commission listed China as one of the worst violators of religious freedoms. Beijing denies the charge.

Tuesday's raid came on the second and final day of twice-annual high-level talks between U.S. and Chinese officials that were overshadowed by sharp U.S. criticism of China's human rights record.

In an interview published Tuesday on the website of The Atlantic magazine, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said China's human rights record was "deplorable" and that history was not on the side of governments that resist democracy.

Ibrahim ought to be taught that Communism and Christianity are anathema to each other. In Marxist theory, religion is said to be the opiate of the masses.

In Communist countries like China, Christians were forced to worship secretly especially during the Cultural Revolution. Priests and pastors were jailed or sent to rehabilitation camps. Christians were officially persecuted by the communists then - and even now.

To claim that communists have infiltrated Christian organisations in Malaysia and are creating chaos is at best laughable.

A veteran politician like Ibrahim should know better than to spin alarmist and ridiculous stories for the sake of being populist (among the Malays). If he thinks that by being racist, bigoted and, now, anti-communist can ensure that he is voted into a position of power again in the coming general election as an independent candidate or a member of some political party or even as president of Perkasa (which is more like an NGO), he is sadly mistaken.

There are plenty of younger, well-informed, well-read, more intelligent and more capable Malays out there who would make better next-generation leaders than an opportunistic has-been who has to play the race and religion card desperately in his comeback trail.

Second episode of sex video

Now that Mr Y has been linked to Datuk Seri Anwar Ibrahim in the Saiful sodomy court case, his enemies are really hammering the nails into the coffin.


The second episode of the video of a man who looks like Anwar having sex with a China Doll was posted online today.

Soon after lunch, the buzz was that the video was on YouTube. About an hour later, it was removed. But screen-capture shots of the clip were posted in several blogs.

By around 7.30pm, the video was re-posted on several blogs.

After viewing the second episode, anyone who has intimate knowledge of Anwar and his sartorial preferences will be able to confirm if it is indeed him or someone resembling him.

This is because his private part can be seen for a second or two (though the genitals of the woman and the man have been pixelated) and also the man wears a T-shirt instead of a singlet before donning a shirt.

Plus, the man wears a pair of underpants that looks like boxer shorts. I don't think many Malaysians wear boxer shorts.

To view the video, click http://www.parpukari.blogspot.com/

Fight for the Chinese votes

After the recent Sarawak state election revealed that Barisan Nasional has lost the Chinese votes, the battle is now on to woo the Chinese.


The worry is that whatever that happened in Sarawak may happen in the entire nation when the general election is held.


If that happens, then MCA will become the next SUPP. Already licking its wounds after the bashing given to it in the 2008 general election, MCA has - led by its new president - tried to woo back the Chinese voters.


Now it has warned that if it gets a worse bashing in the next general election, it will have to reconsider its role in the ruling coalition.


In the meantime, Umno seems exasperated by the Chinese who are seen from their perspective to have 'betrayed' the ruling coalition by voting against them.


The Malay politicians and Malay newspapers like the Umno-controlled Utusan Malaysia are hitting out at the MCA and the Chinese, and even DAP, the party that thrashed SUPP in Sarawak.


Such no-holds-barred quarrelling among members of the ruling coalition will only serve to hammer the wedges deeper into the fault lines within the coalition - to the advantage of the opposition Pakatan Rakyat.


Now, it's a case of Pakatan Rakyat sitting back and watching as Barisan Nasional seems to be in the early stage of implosion. If the quarrels between MCA and Umno are not controlled, then the chasm between the two founding members of the coalition will become deeper and the wounds may not heal properly before the next general election.

Barisan will eventually win the Sarawak race

The Barisan Nasional bigwigs are in Sarawak campaigning like hell to stem the tide of rising dissent.

If the number of people attending the ceramahs held by Pakatan Rakyat leaders is a yardstick, Pakatan is ahead by a more than a mile.

Pakatan has successfully exploited the issues that have been bothering Sarawakians - and Malaysians in the peninsula - for many years and which nobody in the government of the day had bothered to solve, and perhaps made worse.

The first issue is that of Christians feeling that their right to freedom of worship as enshrined in the Constitution has been slowly but surely eroded by a ruling coalition that was built on racial and religious lines. That the dominant party, Umno, has pushed its ketuanan Melayu ideology, which is intertwined with the so-called supremacy of the Arabic religion called Islam, has only made the situation worse.

Some 50 per cent of Sarawakians are Christians and they have practised their religion for decades, if not centuries, without any problems and they have been using the Malay Bible and praying to 'Allah' (the Arabic - not Malay - word for 'God') without any issues till the "Semenanjung" (Peninsular) politicians, especially from Umno, stepped in and caused disharmony and anger with their bigotted policies like impounding Malay Bibles and trying to prevent non-Muslims from using the word 'Allah', the Arabic (not Malay) word for 'God'.

The politicians did not expect something miraculous to happen - a religious revival. As a reaction to official persecution, Christians in Sarawak have rediscovered and renewed their faith in Allah.

The Christian revival took the Barisan Nasional government by surprise, judging by their knee-jerk reactions by coming out quickly with amicable solutions so soon after both the Deputy Prime Minister and Home Minister denied that the Malay Bible issue had been resolved. The about-turn was quite surprising given the political cost involved regarding Umno's standing among the Malay-Muslim voters.

Sarawak Chief Minister Tan Sri Abdul Taib Mahmud said the stamping of serial numbers on Bahasa Malaysia Bibles was sacrilegious and a "very stupid thing to do". Here you have the Chief Minister of a State of Malaysia, whose political party is part of the ruling coalition, stating that the Federal Government is doing a very stupid thing.

I have never encountered such a peculiar situation before.

Now, the Prime Minister himself wants to meet Christian leaders before the Sarawak State election takes place on Saturday probably to pacify and reassure them.

The other issue exploited by Pakatan is the Sarawak Chief Minister Tan Sri Abdul Taib Mahmud himself. Rumours of his immense wealth have been circulating for years and the Sarawakian press has been muzzled for a long time, but in the age of the Internet, news - accurate or otherwise - cannot be suppressed even by someone as rich and powerful as Tan Sri Abdul Taib Mahmud.

After all the dirt that has been smeared on Taib Mahmud, he now appears to be more of a liability to Barisan. And that there are conflicting reports on when exactly he would step down have not helped to endear him to the voters, especially those in urban areas.

So what is likely to happen this Saturday?

The way I see it, Barisan has more or less lost the Chinese and urban voters. DAP will win more seats at the expense of SUPP. But the voters in rural/upriver areas - where access to Internet gossip is limited and where politics of development (i.e. cash handouts for local projects) still works - will continue to back Barisan which will mean that despite huge crowds at Pakatan rallies, Barisan will eventually win the race - perhaps not by a mile.

Sex video teaser posted on another site

Well, I was right.



The Internet is so ungovernable that no content can be removed permanently from it.


This is because someone somewhere can just download an article, photo or video from one site and post it in another site.


The sex video featuring a man who looks like Anwar Ibrahim which was removed from http://www.youtube.com/user/thepowercam can now be found in http://www.youtube.com/user/MrBroJinggo.


Update: The cyberwar is moving fast and furiously. The video was removed from www.youtube.com/user/MrBroJinggo this afternoon, but you can still watch it on this site: http://politikharian.com/?p=3450

Sex video teaser removed from YouTube

Looks like somebody from some political party somewhere has been doing some damage control.



The video which showed a man who looks like Datuk Seri Anwar Ibrahim about to undress a China Doll which was posted on YouTube yesterday has been removed from the site: http://www.youtube.com/user/thepowercam.


The video was removed "as a violation of YouTube's policy on nudity or sexual content".


If you go to the site now, you will find 46 comments made by those who saw the video.


But in the world of the Internet, nothing can be removed permanently.


I am sure it has been downloaded by somebody somewhere.


And I am sure it will be uploaded again in another website somewhere.


I am also sure that the second episode will be uploaded somewhere soon.