Of Daughters, Moms, And Their Dads

Even modern cyber-savy parents freak out when their kids send sms'es instead of talking to them face to face. But what do you do with an offspring, adult-size, who sends you an email when she needs a new toothbrush? One mother's response: "I am telepathic. I just got a toothbrush for you. But one day, the commisariat will not be around." Mrs Lee Kuan Yew has been bedridden since 12 May 2008, result of a massive stroke. Some people will just have to grow up, even if she's already in her 50's.

Another daughter recalls how Mrs Lee broke protocol momentarily by abandoning her place of honour next to Mr Mahathir's wife to be near to her own mother for a few words, as latter's hearing problems inhibited conversation. Although Ms Tan Siok Choo wrote that she, and her mom, will always cherish Mrs Lee's kindness, it was the "continuing animus" against her father that prompted her to write to the Straits Times.

In deference to the surviving kin of the late Goh Keng Swee, Ms Tan had waited until after the customary 100 days of mourning before responding to what she calls "Mr Lee's unwarranted attack on my father," the late Tan Siew Sin. In the eulogy to Goh on 23 May 2010, Minister Mentor Lee Kuan Yew had said:
"After we had joined Malaysia, we discovered we had been ambushed. He (Goh Keng Swee) stood up for our rights and fought to protect Singapore's interests against the Federal Finance Ministry, whose Finance Minister was his cousin, Tan Siew Sin, who was out to spite Singapore."

Refuting the suggestion, Ms Tan used her father's own words in a Parliamentry speech of 1 June 1965 to demonstrate the true side of the story, "I would like to make clear that we in the Central Government, whatever our differences with the Singapore Government might be, have no quarrel with the people of Singapore. Not only do we wish them well, but also we want them to progress as they should progress, bearing in mind some of the great qualities which they possess in so marked a degree."

Much as Ms Tan is sad that Lee still harbours ill will against a man who has been dead for 22 years, we are sadder still in that kind, encouraging words for Singaporeans had to come from across the Causeway. Back home, we are lambasted with all sorts of pejoratives (literal and metaphorical) and relegated to third class citizen status while $10 million is splurged to welcome foreigners of all shapes, colours and smells. Ms Tan's filial piety is worthy of emulation, and living testimony that she is not the product of a dysfunctional family.

The Speech That Need Not Be Delivered

The following is just part of the text of Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong's speech for the National Day Rally 2010:
"32. First, competition from foreigners
a. Many Singaporeans accept the economic logic – that Singapore will benefit with foreigners working here
b. But they fear that it will hurt them personally
c. I empathise with this"

Notice he speaks in mechanically numbered paragraphs, there is no prose in his arguments and no poignancy in his words. If you are expecting a "I have a dream" type of inspirational delivery, you need to change channels. Or play the "'Rocky" DVD again. Obviously the desert of disparity that is the current state of our nation, is gazillion miles away from any oasis of hope.

How can he speak of empathy when he has no sense of the angst in our hearts? His father already said that foreigners were brought in as spurs to dig into our hides, and that's got to be painful, whatever the noble the purported objective. What economic logic has Singaporeans accepted, and what benefits have Singaporeans seen with the tsunami of the foreigners? All we see are strange faces grabbing our jobs in the office, even at the kopitiams, and limited places in school and university given away to outsiders, like the recent group of Vietnamese receiving $100,000 each gratis to study here. No bond, no obligation to sign up for National Service. Oh, he did promise to build more schools, but the caveat is that "these new programmes will be expensive", meaning, watch out for fee hikes and new taxes after the election.

The $9K for NSmen is as blatant as any attempt to "buy supporters' vote". After all, in the event of a freak election result, the armoured boys will have to climb into their Leopard tanks and make Tiananmen look like a Disneyland parade on Main Street. But the "largesse" is actually pittance when HDB flats are changing hands at $750,000 (the Bishan seller actually asked for $900,000). Young couples starting out don't wish to be burdened with an albatross of a mortage for fancy BTO flats - they just need affordable subsidised housing, and spare cash for baby diapers. And please provide the long overdue definition of subsidy as HDB declares it. Don't you just hate it each time he says, "I don't want to go into the details" and leaves it to people like Mah Bow Tan and Raymond Lim to cook up fresh new ways to further improverish the citizenry? Lee Kuan Yew may cajole us to stop at two and marry graduates, but at least he does with with charts and empirical data. A Chesire cat grin and canned applause can only strain credibilty.

And what's with the "Goh Keng Swee Command and Staff College” and “Goh Keng Swee Centre for Education”? If they are sincere about honouring the pioneer nation builders, how about a building/public road/bus-stop named after Dr Toh Chin Chye? Oh, he's not dead yet. Then why do we have a "Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy"?

At the end of the speech, no one is the wiser how a calibrated inflow of foreigners - from 755,000 in 2000 to 1.25 million last year - could have been justified. If they blame God for the Orchard Road floods, someone should own up for the gross oversight at ICA. Of course that's as likely an event as Balakrishan being made to account for inflating the YOG budget FOUR times. Sure am looking forward to the Auditor-General's report next year.

An Officer And A Gentleman

Mr Abdillan Zamzuri served his national service obligation as a policeman (police NSman). He learnt enough during his training to appreciate that the law was abused when Lianhe Wanbao photographer Shafie Goh was handcuffed for snapping pictures of the Bukit Timah flood. "As someone who still reports for reservist duty as a police officer, I am well aware of the Penal Code and statutes that govern and dictate what a police officer can and cannot do," he wrote on his blog about the incident that drew castigations of all sorts against the thuggish tactics of a draconian police force. If Hitler were alive, he would certainly rant against his Brown Shirts for being wimps by comparison.

One would have thought Enche Abdillah deserved praise for presenting a more positive image of the protectors of the law. Instead, the careerist elements of the police force dragged him into the Pasir Ris Neighbourhood Police Centre and grilled him for an hour. Officially, he was told he was being investigated for the offence of "prejudice to the conduct of good order and discipline." That has to be the ultimate perversion of common sense. The cop with the handcuff fetish was a model of "good order and discipline", and identifying rogue behaviour and abuse of the public trust is an offence? No wonder no officers in the Whitley Road Detention Center pointed out that there were no bars in the toilet window that enabled Mas Selamat to take flight.

We are told that officers from uniformed groups are bound by a code of conduct that forbids them from detailing information about operations and procedures, among other things. In other words , see no evil, hear no evil, and definitely blog no evil. Commandos under training can die in simulated drownings, but no officer is supposed to report it. Rostered officer fails to turn up for guard duty, but even the son of the Prime Minister is not supposed to blow the whistle on the miscreant. What other dirty linen is secreted within the barracks of the uniformed groups?

Goh Chok Tong was quoted by the Straits Times, Apr 6, 2002, as saying, "If you sing Jailhouse Rock with your electric guitar when others are playing Beethoven, you are out of order. The whip must be used on you." Which is some what different from what he said earlier on 3 Nov, 2001, "“I would want to form an alternative policies group in Parliament, comprising 20 PAP MPs. These 20 PAP MPs will be free to vote in accordance with what they think of a particular policy. In other words, the whip for them will be lifted." Police officers, like other civil servants, know what is the political flavour of the day.

Our sympathies go out to the career sycophants who are not allowed "speak in the capacity of a _____ (insert appropriate job description here)". They may never leave home without their American Express Card, but their thinking brains, they likely leave behind in the Victoria's Secret underwear drawer.

Two Sets Of Records

Number of Gold Medals won:

"I only wish to question the increase in the YOG budget, which rose to $387 million from the initial $104 million," said Abdul Malik Mohammed Ghazali, who was arrested by the police for having "incited violence" with his postings on a Facebook site, "burn Vivian Balakrishnan and the PAP" and "rally together and vote them out".
Asked to comment, Balakrishnan's response was, "I didn't know about it until I read about it in the papers. It shows that I almost didn't care." Without citing any numbers, the Minister still insists that the Games would bring Singapore "significant tangible benefits".

Number of Presidential Pardons granted:

Benjamin Sheares (1971-1981)	2
Devan Nair (1981-1985)	1
Wee Kim Wee (1985 -1993)	3
Ong Teng Cheong (1993-1999)	1
S R Nathan (1999 - present)	0

Except for the civil rights groups battling tirelessly for an end to the Mandatory Death Penalty, nobody else seems to care either.

Of Mouse And Men

Asked why he flew away to escape US jurisdiction, Oscar winning film director Polanski said in the Marina Zenovich documentary "Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired ", "Well, I, as you say, ran away, because I think that I was very unfortunate to have a judge who misused justice. I think that I was some kind of mouse with which some abominable cat begins a sport." On July 15, 2008, Polanski and his lawyer Douglas Dalton asked the L.A. district attorney's office to review his case based on new evidence disclosed in the film, including alleged improper communication between a member of the prosecutor's office and the aforementioned judge, Laurence J. Rittenband.

After her elder brother was cleared of wrong doing by the Court of Appeal in July 2010, the biggest reaction came from Mrs Ivy Singh-Lim, who put up the $1 million needed for his defence, and kissed the ground in celebration. She said loudly that she wanted to know how much State funds had been spent in the 5 years to prosecute Mr Bachoo Mohan Singh. Latter, 61, made legal history as the first person charged in Singapore with making a false claim; he is also the first lawyer in Commonwealth countries to be convicted of such an offence. Singh's case arose from a failed 2003 property deal , unaware that the flat buyer and seller were involved in a clandestine cashback scheme in which an inflated sale price is declared to the HDB authorities.

The high profiled and former president of Netball Singapore is not one who keeps mum when things are not as they seem to be on the surface. She is now hauled up to court by the Building and Construction Authority (BCA) for failing to have the buildings on her farm in Kranji inspected. Her lawyer accused BCA of "malicious prosecution", since BCA allowed many farm buildings in Kranji to be occupied and used, some more for more than 20 years, without a CSC (Certificate of Statutory Completion), the piece of bureaucratic paper that mandates the 5 year inspection. BCA executive engineer Tan Kwan Joo's response was that they did not take action on those owners as "there were too many of them". But somehow Ivy-Singh Lim's Bollywoood Veggies seemed to loom brightly on their radar screen.

This case is worth monitoring, since Tom and Jerry cartoons are such entertaining cat and mouse developments.