Excuse Me, You Somebody Meh?

This Baey Yam Keng guy is such a walking PR disaster, it makes one wonder what he's doing at global public relations company Hill & Knowlton. Read his Facebook post and try to figure what message he was attempting to send. It starts like this:
"My child scored the second highest in her class for a recent Maths common test, but her achievement was undermined by a classmate to be due to her father being an MP. "

Somewhere down his convoluted train of thoughts, we sense the justification for his exercise in futile verbosity, "Your classmate may not necessarily understand what I do, but I am sure his comments meant no malice." He's using his daughter as a proxy to hit back at a kid her age! Hello, if you want to pick a fight, at least choose someone your own size.

Quite obviously Baey hasn't watched the Roman Polanski movie "Carnage", in which two sets of parents initiated a cordial meeting after their sons are involved in a playground rumble, and ended up exposing their own visceral failings as their increasingly childish behavior throws the evening into utter chaos. Some so-called adults, instead of the kids they are trying to preach to, should be seen and not heard - or read in social media.

Baey rode the coattails of the GRC sham into parliament, instead of facing the opposition mano-a-mano in a SMC like, say, Hougang. One hopes his daughter will not follow the cowardly ways of his poor example, and fight her own battles instead. Else she should follow the example of Goh Chok Tong's daughter and emigrate to a foreign land, where her own kids need not be embarrassed by the antics of a screwy grandpa. 

Kate Winslet unleashes the honest truth in "Carnage"

The Chinese Are Here! The Chinese Are Here!

Zhuang Guotu is Dean at the Center for Southeast Asian Studies of Xiamen University and a consultant at the Overseas Chinese Affairs Office of the State Council (OCAO). According to his research findings, the steadily rising rate of Chinese migrants to Singapore has accelerated sharply in recent years, with about 500,000 to 600,000 Chinese applicants approved in the past two decades. The number accounts for 10 to 12 percent of the city-state's total population.

Zhuang predicted an expansion in Singapore's strategies to welcome more Chinese, based on the government's 2030 blueprint to house a population of about 6.5 million and maintain the ratio of Chinese Singaporeans at around 75%, aided by an inflow of 1.2 million from mainland China.

He categorised the migrants into four groups: "hi-tech" talents and students, "normal" technology migrants, investment migrants, and labor migrants. Chinese migration cases on matrimonial grounds or lacking legal documents, or people entering as self-employed persons, were also noted in the study.

Zhuang presented the progress his research team had made studying the distribution status of and development trends in Chinese migration, during the second official forum in November 2011, sponsored by OCAO. It seems ecns.cn (China News website) knows more about the PRC intake than we do.

Apparently Chinese businessmen are having second thoughts about emigrating to the United States, as the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act, which was enacted in 2010, requires a US citizen or green card holder living in China to file Form 8938 and report his or her foreign financial assets if their total value exceeds $200,000. Thanks to a soaring federal deficit and to combat tax evasion, the US has stepped up efforts in recent years to track down citizens with significant offshore financial standings. It would appear Singapore's ICA prefers the soft touch, applicable also to wealthy Indonesian Chinese.

No End To SMRT Maintenance Woes

Senior Vice President of SBS Transit Corporate Communications Tammy Tan said the water leakage in an MRT train was "due to an electronic failure in the air-conditioning control system". That's bull and you don't need an engineering degree to know it.

Air conditioners work by removing moisture from the environment to give us a feeling of comfort. The water extracted from the air during operation falls down the cooling coils and drains into the base and channels or passages to the discharge outlet. Air conditioners "sweat" when the air filters are dirty or the discharged channels clogged. In other words, assuming the system was installed correctly in the first place, it is an issue of poor maintenance.

The on-going 6 hour disruption for the Dolby Ghaut to Harbour Front NEL is attributed to a connecting cable of the overhead power supply located south of Outram Park station which had snapped. No doubt it is due to another failure of the maintenance system, or the lack there of.

The real worry is the falling e-clip, last detected at the Clementi section. Manufacturer PANDROL introduced their e-PLUS System in 2000 as a retrofit system for older ‘e’ clip sleepers installed in locations with very high lateral forces, such as the curving section at Clementi when centrifugal forces kick in. SMRT is still using the old ‘e’ clips.

The SMRT spokesperson with the fancy job title said the "indoor rainfall" fault has since been rectified. Let's see how she comes up with another story when a train flies off the track.

Invitation To An Execution

The squatter farms bounded by former KTM railway tracks, Sungei Ulu Pandan canal and Clementi Avenues 4 and 6 yielded jackfruit, melons, bittergourd, chilli, sweet potatos and fish, a gotong-royong type enterprise that had gone on unperturbed for years. Until a spoilsport made a complaint about leaves being burnt at the plot. SLA promptly slapped eviction orders on the illegal sheds and structures, giving March 20 as the date line to cease and desist agricultural operations.

We are firmly reminded that under the State Lands Encroachment Act, it is an offence to unlawfully use the land by erecting buildings, cultivating, enclosing, clearing or residing at any part of it. Ms Poh, writing as SLA Head of Corporate Corporations, also alleged that "some individuals have not only encroached on state land for their private purposes, but several have also fenced up parcels of land as their own and padlocked them for their exclusive use." Apparently several ponds with stagnant water were also found, which means NEA can also be roped in to jointly prosecute the wanton law breakers for mosquito breeding.

Holland-Bukit Timah GRC MP Sim Ann has called on those who have been using the 1,800 square metres site to come forward "so their views can be heard." So far, the owner of the fenced up vegetable patch has identified himself, one of those trusting souls who probably still believes compassion is not yet dead. The invite would be more assuring if the proposed discussions serve to explore the building of elder-care centres in idyllic Garden of Eden environs, complete with gardening and horticultural opportunities, until authorities firm up their profit generation plans for the vacant state land. Instead of locating them in built-up areas like Woodlands and Toh Yi.

Inciting Violence

The Associated Press photo of Brigadier General Nguyen Ngoc Loan, then Chief of the Republic of Vietnam National Police, putting a bullet through the head of prisoner Nguyễn Văn Lém (referred to as Captain Bảy Lốp) during the Tet uprising of 1968 helped galvanize American public opinion against the war in Vietnam. It was later ascertained that Lem was suspected of having murdered one of Gen. Loan's senior officers, and his entire family, during the carnage in Saigon. The death of a single Viet Cong would hardly have seemed noteworthy, especially in a week when thousands of his communist comrades were killed mounting an abortive offensive that included Vietcong death squads targeting South Vietnamese National Police officers, or in their stead, the police officers' families.

Four years after the picture by Eddie Adams, another indelible image of the war created an equally emotive impact of revulsion, the sight of a screaming 9-year-old Phan Thị Kim Phúc as she ran naked along a road after having been burned in a South Vietnamese napalm attack. Such is the power of the photographic image in the hands of the print media. Adams told Time magazine, “The general killed the Viet Cong; I killed the general with my camera. Still photographs are the most powerful weapon in the world. People believe them, but photographs do lie, even without manipulation.”

For doctoring the Pulitzer Prize-winning photo of the impromptu summary execution, a former employee of Singapore Technologies was fined $8,500 for inciting violence. Instead of the Vietcong, the face superimposed was that of the former Deputy Prime Minister and Home Affairs Minister. The only similarity was that both were unpopular figures of the time. The Deputy Public Prosecutor had urged the court for a 9-month jail term, arguing it was in line with the criminal intimidation sentencing benchmark. The defendant's lawyer said that the posting was "a grandiose statement, hyperbolic, surreal" and the exclamation marks at the end of the comment underlined those facts. We've heard quite a bit of those grandiose statements in the press recently, hyperbolic and surreal, such as $850 a month can afford a $100,000 HDB flat.