One More For The Road Ahead

Vying for the last blooper of the year - the other contender being the Downtown Line - the spanking new Marina Coastal Expressway (MCE) won hands-down.

The breakdown of the new Downtown Line (DTL) on Friday 27 Dec was the second time DTL services have been disrupted since its official opening on 21 December 2013 by Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong. Purchased at a cost of $570 million the 73 DTL train sets were manufactured in Changchun, Jilin province, China. Operator SBS Transit is blaming a little girl for activating the detrainment door device and grinding the multimillion dollar system to a halt. They refused to release the incriminating CCTV footage, guarding it like a national security secret. They did admit that "the internal laminate of the metal cover which holds the detrainment door switch had debonded." Shoddy workmanship or quality assurance aside, the chap who signed off the acceptance inspection deserves the sack.

Thousands of motor vehicles were stuck in a 2-hour traffic snarl along the $4.3 billion MCE on the second day of operation yesterday. Reputedly the worst congestion was at the exit to Central Boulevard where the 10-lane superhighway turns into a 2-lane slip road.  LTA says it will "immediately" convert that stretch from 2- to 4-lanes, something that obviously did not cross their minds during the many months of road traffic planning. In this instance, LTA lays blame on the motorists for not being familiar with the new road configuration. Worse is to come. "If the traffic condition today was already so bad when half the working population in the Marina area is away on holiday, I think there will be chaos on Jan 2," dreaded one affected citizen. You don't even want to contemplate the horrors ahead when the population hits 6.9 million.

The Fragile Peace

The ideliable image of overturned police cars at Little India has been etched into the annals of history. The rosy picture of peace as painted by politicians has been rudely rescinded. Noticeably, the target of the violence was the inanimate vehicles, not the human occupiers.

Violence need not be directly interpersonal, as in a clear case of one person hitting another person. Author Jack Eller has plenty of examples of the latter. From religious Crusaders proselytizing with a sword, to warring factions fixated on ethnic cleansing, humans always had an excuse to eradicate other humans. Even godly men were not spared by Communist fanatics in Russia, China and other Marxist systems in the early/mid-twentieth century. Stalin forbade any religious activities or instruction beyond basic religious services in sanctioned church buildings, and a 1931 five-year plan stipulated that the very notion of God will be expunged as a survival of the Middle Ages and an instrument of "holding down the masses". Marx fully expected religions would disappear; with humanity's material needs fufilled, people would no longer need a "pie in the sky" a.k.a. the "opium of the people".

Structural violence refers to less direct, more pervasive, and sometimes even intentional or at least"invisible" harm caused by the very arrangements and institutions of society. Paul Farmer takes the concept of structural violence to be:

"sinful social structures characterized by poverty and steep grades of social inequality, including racism and gender inequality. Structural violence is violence exerted systematically - that is, indirectly - by everyone who belongs to a certain social order: hence the discomfort these ideas provoke in a moral economy still geared to pinning praise or blame on individual actors. In short, the concept of structural violence is intended to inform the study of the social machinery of oppression."
(Paul Farmer,"An Anthropology of Structural Violence," Current Anthropology 45, no.3 (2004): 307)

Victims of structural violence can be patient for only so long. Even Gandhi's nonviolent movement saw some cracked heads. Kenneth Boulding (" Stable Peace", Austin: University of Texas Press, 1978), an expert of violence and nonviolence, explains that nonviolence has both positive and negative sides. Negative nonviolence is merely the cessation of violence: I am hitting you and I stop hitting you, we are now in a state of nonviolence, although you will still be in pain, neither of us may be happy, and no problems may have been resolved. Positive nonviolence is much more; he describes it as "a condition of good management, orderly resolution of conflict, harmony associated with mature relations, gentleness and love." Let's see what prevails in the coming year.

Biting The Bullet

National Development Minister Khaw Boon Wan confirmed the existence of the housing bubble when he wrote on 22 Dec:
"Housing bubble and its inevitable bust bring huge misery to many... We cannot eliminate property cycle but we can try to keep bubbles less bubbly. This means taking away the punch bowl when the party is getting hot, much to the unhappiness of sellers and developers. But this is the right thing to do." The question that remains: is it too little, too late?

S'pore fell from
3rd to 7th place

Fund managers Shroeders and Baring Asset Management are advising clients to avoid Singapore like the plague. Real estate and financial companies account for 47 percent of the Straits Times Index (STI), according to data compiled by Bloomberg. STI was the worst performing developed market this year, dropping 9.5 percent since May. Heading the plunge were property firms like City Developments (down 25 percent) and Capitaland (down 18 percent). Even rentals for Orchard Road prime retail space told the same story, nosing downwards by 2.1 percent.

Dividends from real-estate investment trusts lose their shine when 10-year US bonds climbed to a two-year high in September. Many of the property buyers come from neighbours like Indonesia, but IMF has lowered the growth target for South-east Asia's biggest economy to 5 - 5.5 percent this year and the next, down from 6.2 in 2012. "There's no driver to spur investment interest in Singapore," said Baring Asset Management's head of Asian multi-asset strategy, "The recent penny stock crash isn't really helping." He was referring to the $8.6 billion wiped out by three commodity firms in October, which happened under the noses of watchdogs Monetary Authorty of Singapore (MAS) and Singapore Exchange. As usual, the investigation is taking place after the horses have bolted.

On the brighter side of things, Samsung has launched a new TV that responses to hand gestures. Just imagine, when your pet hate politician comes on screen, you can raise a middle finger, and he goes off in a poof. No need to wait for another by-election.

Taking The Easy Way Out

The first statement he issued on Dec 9 said it was an isolated incident arising from the unlawful actions of an unruly mob reacting to a fatal traffic accident. Only once in 44 years, no big deal. Nevertheless Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong  directed the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) to convene a Committee of Inquiry (COI) to: (1) look into the factors that led to the incident, (2) check how the incident was handled on the ground, and (3) review the current measures to manage areas where foreign workers congregate. On Dec 14, he explained why he left out (4), one of the possible causes of the riot being the eruption of pent-up tensions among foreign workers in Singapore.

Then there's the part that makes you wonder if the neurons in his cerebral cortex are misfiring: “The people who were involved in the riot were not from one company, or one dorm; (they were from) several dorms, many different companies, and it is unlikely that all the companies will have the same problem.” You don't need a degree from Cambridge or Oxford to deduce that since there were representatives from several dormitories and different companies that the problem is not isolated, but has to be island wide. Lee also blamed alcohol, also available island wide, provided in abundance at Clarke Quay watering holes and similar. Just count the number of liquor licences issued at Ang Moh havens.

After telling the COI what to write in their report, on 25 Dec, he specifically spells out what to leave out: the broader issues of whether social or population policies need to be re-thought. The sacred cow of Population White Paper will not be slayed.

“I do not accept that we must straight away ask whether fundamental approaches or the whole way our society is organised needs to be re-thought immediately,” he stubbornly insisted. His father said the same thing more or less when reminded of George Yeo's irritating suggestion of change, "And every defeat must be accompanied by a thorough rethink. But it does not mean a change in your basic values and policies." So much for "we didn’t quite get it right, I’m sorry, but we will try and do better the next time". The apple does not fall far from the tree.

In a perverse way, it makes glorious sense. Why change when one has benefited immensely from the system? The COI has been a very effective rubber stamp, LTA spent $10 million on the COI hearing, and trains still break down. Even the brand new Circle Line had a disruption involving 23 out of 30 stations on Wednesday. And they can always shell out big bucks for a consultant to add a layer of authenticity. Hopefully not a $2 set up headed by an ex-member of parliament like what Chandra Das did to supply software for Teo Ho Pin's town councils.

The Year In Images

January
Responding to questions on the by-election outcome of Saturday January 26, Ng Eng Hen haughtily dismissed the notion that the result is a report card of the ruling party's performance. Their candidate did perform to script: "Before (my wife and I) moved into our house, in our combined bank accounts... we had $11.50".

February
Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong once said "People support CPF cuts because there are no protest (sic) outside the Parliament." From his perspective, the guys at Hong Lim green were just having a picnic.

March
Episode 7 of the Series 2 Idhayam Pesugirathu talk show demonstrated what a no holds barred National Conversation is really about.

April
The sex-for-grades trial was not just about a horny law professor. It was an invaluable insight how CPIB Deputy Director Teng Khee Fatt operates: "I stab you once, you die beautifully, legs straight up. But if you insist, I can stab you tens of times, and you die most horrendously."
Caught with records of wrong timings in his interrogation diary, he cavalierly dismissed the discrepancy with, "But this was the timing that was taken down by me during the time."

May
Man of the year Yaacob Ibrahim dismissed the backlash against the proposed news website licensing requirements in monetary terms as "just a banker's guarantee", arguing that no upfront payment is involved.

June
Forget about the alleged profiteering on face masks, what is really important is that one man's view was spoilt. Lee Hsien Loong's Facebook photo of the haze taken at the Istana, commenting: "The city in the distance is barely visible. We are all affected by the haze."

July
There's no CCTV footage or phone camera capture, so we can only speculate how the young life of Dinesh Raman was snuffed out.

August
The Attorney-General's Chambers decided not to proceed  with the contempt of court charges against cartoonist Chew in light of his apology and undertaking, "which he initiated".

September
It was supposed to be his show, so he didn't expect Aung San Suu Kyi to be quoted, "You can't expect everyone to agree with you, that is simply not possible... if you believe that what you are doing is good for the country, then you must be prepared to lose the next elections."

October
Father and son were allegedly barred from entering Sydney's Botanic Gardens because they were not Singaporeans. Irate people phoned 2GB radio talkback host Ben Fordham to complain that "white people" had been "turned away in droves" from the Singapore Day event. But they are welcomed with open arms in Singapore, leh.

November
Within the computing community, the primary meaning of hacker is a complimentary, not pejorative, label for a particularly brilliant programmer or technical expert, like Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux.

December
Enough said.