It's A Dog's Life After All

Businessman Lim Soo Seng was fined the maximum S$10,000 for “unreasonably omitting” to bring his female cross-breed dog to the vet for treatment. Under the present Animals and Birds Act, anyone convicted of animal cruelty can be fined up to S$10,000 or jailed for up to a year or both.

Members of Parliament have now tabled a bill to amend the Animals and Birds Act to propose harsher penalties for those convicted of acts of animal cruelty. A person convicted for animal cruelty for the first time can now be fined up to S$40,000 and/or jailed up to two years. Subsequent offenders can be fined up to S$100,000 and/or jailed up to three years, if the law makers have their way with the proposed changes.

The Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (SPCA) thinks Lim has been let off easy and has appealed to the Attorney-General’s Chambers for a heavier sentence - lock the bugger up and throw the key away. Which means somebody else will have to house and feed the three other toy dogs belonging to Lim. Looking at the horrific picture of the dog that died, another body may even suggest that Lim be put out of his misery.

Quite obviously, dog lovers are getting a bit overboard here.

Especially when you consider how our senior citizens have hardly been given a fair shake after years of toil. When MOE scholar Sun Xu - who objected to some seniors looking his way - said "there are more dogs than humans" in Singapore, he wasn't paying us a compliment. In one particular poll, 39 per cent of respondents felt the punishment meted to him was too lenient - his scholarship was terminated, and he was required to pay back about $8,200 for the first tranche of the semester’s scholarship benefits - while 35 per cent said they were too little, too late. It was too late to save the canine's life, but is it too late to come to the aid of seniors trying to access their CPF? What we need is a SPCA that stands for Society for Prevention of CPF being Abducted.

Watch His Lips

We don't know what kind of company the prime minister keeps, but contrary to what he imagines, Singaporeans do know what ISIS and ISIL stands for. In case he still thinks cockles are served with mee siam, Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant is used by the U.S State Department as well as the United Nations since the group has more ambitious plans to extend their influence even beyond Iraq and Syria. We do know that Thailand - and India, and Indonesia - has a new head of state. Which begs the question why ours always has the same surname, except for the seat warming interlude when the in-house training had to be extended. So much about not knowing what's happening in the world beyond the little red dot.

Maybe he prefers the company of sycophantic grassroots leaders like foreign talent like Yang Yin, who rarely bring up the shortcomings of housing, transport and healthcare. Which explains why they are always thinking of spending more of our money in China. Quoting Tencent as example of an IT company in China is unfortunate, it reminds one of Ibu Tien a.k.a. Madam Ten Percent, the rapacious wife of Suharto who demanded a cut of every major construction contract.

And why are we so palsy walsy with the commies? Didn't they once upon a time undermined the national security of our young nation, same reason offered for banning Tan Pin Pin's award winning "To Singapore, With Love"? If movies, specifically pseudo-documentaries are so bad, why did they air those fairy tales about the Laju incident, Maria Hertogh affair, Hock Lee bus riots, etc on the television screen?

And there's this mega film project beginning pre-production this month with principal photography starting in November. Supported by the Media Development Authority of Singapore under the Production Assistance Scheme, "1965" will be operating on a budget of $2.8 million. "It’s not a biopic of Mr Lee Kuan Yew. It’s not a political film nor a propaganda film. It’s not a docu-drama. It’s not a movie about the independence of Singapore," explained Daniel Yun, executive producer  of the "SG50 celebration film". Spending millions on a film which is not a film. Whatever they are drunk on, it must be potent stuff.

"You watch the movie, you think it's a documentary. It may be Fahrenheit 9/11, very convincing, but it's not a documentary", said Lee. Maybe he forgot his cameo appearance in "Inside Job", the 2010  Academy Award winner for Best Documentary Feature about the late-2000s financial crisis which was directed by Charles H. Ferguson. Some of the lines were damn convincing.

The War On Secrets

The Ministry of Home Affairs hosted the 23rd GovernmentWare (GovWare) conference & exhibition event on 23 to 25 September 2014.

With the whipping boy of cyber threats in today's connected cyber world identified, the Government urged academia and industry partners to develop a close partnership which will enable such initiatives and measures as the sharing of information, development of innovative cyber solutions, training of the next generation of cyber security professionals and the establishment of local operational or research facilities. These and other "collaborative" efforts are supposed to aid in the shaping of a cyber security ecosystem that is both robust and vibrant.

One of the secret documents exposed by Edward Snowden was a 41-slide PowerPoint presentation explaining the function of PRISM, the program used impudently by the National Security Agency (NSA). The first to provide PRISM with material was Microsoft (September 2007), followed by Yahoo (March 2008), Google (January 2009), Facebook (June 2009), YouTube (September 2010), Skype (February 2011) and AOL (March 2011). Apple held out till October 2012.  The top secret PRISM program allows the spy agency to access emails, Facebook posts and instant messages.

When challenged - Google prided itself on its mission statement "Don't do evil" - the tech companies said they only released information to NSA in response to a specific court order. It was only part of the story. In October 2013, the Washington Post revealed that NSA had hacked into the private fibre-optic links "on British territory" that inter-connect Yahoo and Google data centres worldwide. The NSA codename for the tapping operation is MUSCULAR, with the British doing the actual tapping on behalf of the US, and sending the data back to NSA's Fort Meade headquarters ("The Snowden Files", Luke Harding, page 206, 207). Snowden says it was his concerns over PRISM that pushed him towards whistleblowing.

What is pushing the government into all the talk about need for cyber security specialists is easy to guess. While George Bush had the Patriot Act to go by in the aftermath of 9/11, our great leader is paranoid about old geezers pining for home in a documentary movie. Transparency and accountability were never their goals, neither was the privacy of the citizens they are supposed to serve. Their invasive bags of dirty tricks makes the NSA rogue agents look like angelic forces.

Double Standards

There are two Susan Lims. She is the talented surgeon who performed the first successful liver transplant in Asian history in 1990. You can see her giving a TED talk on "Transplanting Cells, Not Organs" in April 2011, which has garnered 567,316 total views thus far. At the age of 36, Lim rose to the prestigious position of associate professor in surgery. Her hands have been replicated for display at Madame Tussaud's Exhibition, probably in recognition of her surgical skills.

And there's the Susan Lim who was convicted of professional misconduct in respect of overcharging one of her patients, the sister of the Queen of Brunei. She was fined $10,000 by the Singapore Medical Council (SMC) and suspended from practising for three years. The punishment is believed to be among the most severe meted out to an errant doctor, short of being struck off.

The story could have ended there. The law was allowed to take its course, and the good doctor should have been given time off for a period of self reflection and repentance.

“All things whatsoever ye would that men
should do to you, do ye even so to them."

Except for the ugly fact that SMC's lawyers proceeded to practise exactly they had argued against in court. After losing the case by SMC asserting that she had overcharged her wealthy Bruneian patient, Susan Lim ended up facing an over inflated bill to pay the SMC's costs. The irony can't get any better than this.

SMC's lawyers - Senior Counsel Alvin Yeo and Melanie Ho of WongPartnership (WongP) - overcharged by $637,009 (the difference between the original bill amount of $1.007 million and the $370,000 allowed by High Court Judge Woo Bih Li, who reviewed the matter, and eventually allowed that total sum for the bill of costs).

The latest development is that the court has slashed SMC's cost claims, and awarding the council only $317,000 of the $1.33m it was itching to collect (note the numbers keep changing, as if plucked mysteriously from the air). Examples of the overcharging include bills for two expert witnesses which were set at some $52,000, and slashed by the court to $14,000. Ring binders for which SMC had priced at $6 per unit for Dr Lim to pay were cut to $2.50 per unit after the court found it had used the cheaper version in past hearings. Greed knows no bounds.

The end is not yet in sight. When politicians get involved -  and Alvin Yeo is a PAP MP - the muck takes forever to clear. Yang Yin did his homework well, he knew the Kodak moments with Lee Hsien Loong, Grace Fu and Intan Mokhtar will be worth more than the $4,000 he splurged for a fake degree.

Significant Damage To Readers' Trust

Leading Japanese daily, the Asahi Shimbun, has been forced into a series of embarrassing admissions over errors it published on the country’s Fukushima nuclear disaster and the use of sex slaves by Japanese troops during the Second World War. Asahi's president, Tadakazu Kimura, said that an internal investigation had found the Fukushima article to be incorrect. “We have caused significant damage to the trust our readers place in us,” he was quoted by the Guardian as saying. The revelations are set to send shock-waves, with dismissal of staff and reprimands promised by executive editor Nobuyuki Sugiura in the aftermath of the scandal. But Singapore is not Japan.

It was the Straits Times who first quoted Ang Mo Kio GRC MP Intan Azura Mokhtar as saying Yang Yin “is one of several [grassroots] leaders in Ang Mo Kio GRC helping foreigners integrate into society.” She quixotically added that Yang Yin “doesn’t hold a position” in the grassroots organisation. To make sense out of nonsense, the holder of a string of university degrees explained that she had described him as such because she considers all grassroots volunteers as “grassroots leaders.”

Then the paper quoted the People's Association as having confirmed that he had been a member of the neighbourhood committee since July 5 last year but resigned on Sept 8 this year. More confusing, on its volition, it chivalrously apologised for an error in reporting. Whether the error is about Yang Yin having held a position, having sent his resignation, or Intan's inability to discern volunteers from leaders, we are none the wiser.

It was the prime minister who first cast negative aspersions when he told student at a forum, "Do you (really) believe everything you read in the Straits Times?" But the perm sec who was made CEO of Singapore Press Holdings (SPH) need not worry about his day job, so long as he remembers the old man's birthday. Chan was once described as "a Rafflesian who has crossed many boundaries" - Principal Private Secretary for LKY, Deputy Secretary at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Permanent Secretary of the Ministry of Communications & IT and the Ministry of Transport - all of which had nothing to do with journalism.