Singapore's Achilles Heel

According to Senior Lecturer (NUS Real Estate) and Director of Sustainable Asian Cities Malone-Lee Lai Choo, Singapore's built up land has a net density of 12,400 persons per square km, compared to Hong Kong's net density of 26,000 persons per sq km. Therefore, this expert thinks that there is room to increase built-up land to 70 per cent and for the population to grow to 6.5 million.

Like all talking eggheads, this baloney spouting Malone ignores the fact that Hong Kong has a hinterland to retreat to. Heck, most of their hardworking males probably have a 2nd, 3rd or 4th wife installed in Shenzhen or similar rural respite from the urban jungle. After a harrowing work in the city, they have a countryside to retire to for a healthy family life.

How crowded exactly is Singapore? The Kaiser Family Foundation's global health gateway is an online clearinghouse for the latest data and information on the U.S. role in global health. The Foundation receives substantial support for the global health gateway and its work on global health policy from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. According to its database made available online, Singapore tops the country list for population density.

If you are still looking for the Swiss standard of living promised, wake up. The other interesting data extract shows that lots of thriving countries are experiencing low population growth rates too. So why is Thailand, Switzerland and Japan not shipping in aliens by the plane loads? Obviously, GDP growth and productivity is fueled not only by sheer numbers - unless all the planners intend is a sprawling ghetto of sweat shops.

The Economist (21 April 2012, "China's Achilles heel")) touched on how China's one child policy, not unlike Singapore's stop-at-two, resulted in the total fertility rate falling from 2.6 over the past 30 years to 1.56. Another clear example of why social engineering in the hands of myopic bureaucrats is so dangerous. But the article also highlights that America is one of the rare examples where a country can utilise mass immigration to build a skilled labour force. And that's because America is an open society with a long history of immigration and strong legal and political institutions, and we might add, healthy respect for human rights. Dictatorships in the tropics trying to duplicate the formula produce only nation wide misery. They may dig up academics to justify their harebrained schemes, but the ugly results are plainly visible in our overloaded trains, cramped housing, precipitous wage gap, and growing social friction.

Smaller Sizes, Bigger Lies

Retiree Chan, 76, remembered fondly that his previous home, a four-room HDB flat in the 1980s, boasted a size of 105 sq m, or 1,130 sq ft. Today, four-room flats built by HDB have shrunk to about 90 sq m, or 969 sq ft.

In Nov 2011, speaking at the HDB Professional Forum held at DB Hub Auditorium, HDB chief executive Cheong Koon Hean confirmed same, that it reduced flat sizes in the mid-1990s. What riled just about everybody was her perverse justification that household sizes in HDB flats had decreased from 4.6 people in the 1980s to 3.4, ergo the shrinking floor area. Thanks to Cheong, the average HDB flat will be not be a conducive nest to grow a larger family, and improve the total fertility rate. Oh, we forgot - the hidden agenda to import foreigners to dilute the Singaporean breed, people like the fictitious Deutsche Bank employee from the Philippines who pledged undying support for the PM on his Facebook wall ("Please remain as our leader for as long as you can. Only you sir can lead this nation to continued success").

If you buy Ms Cheong's line of argument, living space per person actually improved to 26 sq m to 32 sq m for four- and five-room flats in new projects - up from the 23 sq m to 27 sq m for the same types of flats built during the 1980s.

The only glitch is that it makes National Development Minister Khaw Boon Wan a liar. At the annual REACH Contributors' Forum on Wednesday night, he told a student from the National University of Singapore that HDB flats are not shrinking, contrary to popular belief. In fact, sizes of HDB flats have been the same for the past 15 years - 1997 onwards. The trick, you see, is selecting the timeline for the illusion of truth. If you go back further in time, back in the good old days of Lim Kim San, HDB flats were factually affordable. If you had $1,000 a month then, back in the 1980s, you would probably have snubbed HDB and gone straight into private property.

The Minister promised that Singapore will not go the way of Hong Kong, where flats are "far smaller". But would you buy a second hand car from a guy who once boasted he paid only $8 for open heart surgery? "In the past five years, the population was growing rapidly that infrastructure could not keep up so because of the temporary imbalance, prices shot up," Khaw explained, conveniently skipping the part where HDB joined in the feeding frenzy of the property developers to rip off those desperate for a simple roof over their heads. The average flat size may have shrunk by about 10 percent, but the prices have jumped more than 10 fold. The lies have also grown more audacious.

Money Never Enough

TIME's May 7 adapted account of the take down of Osama Bin Laden (Manhunt: The Ten-Year Seach for Bin Laden by Peter Bergen) describes the high stakes that faced Obama. Everyone knew he was "betting his presidency" on the available options - Predator drones with Hellfire missiles, B-2s with laser guided bombs, special forces on the ground, or joint operations with Pakistan. If he hesitated and Osama escaped, he would be tarred and feathered like Jimmy Carter, following the abortive 1980 raid to rescue the Americans hostages in Iran. Although the president of America is paid peanuts compared to the prime minister of Singapore, Obama showed true guts and took the risk .

Our PM, on the other hand thinks it's too risky to increase the salaries of low wage workers by 50 percent over 3 long years. He put the final seal on the "shock therapy" proposal by Lim Chong Yah, relative or no relative. In the earlier shock therapy of 1979 - 1981, the paper general was spending more time in classrooms instead of being out in the field. It shows.

All the naysayers, including supposedly labour champion Lim Swee Say, have focused on the pay rise. Prof Lim's initiative also calls for a wage freeze of those fat cats collecting more than $15,000 a month, Lim and Lee included. The irony was not lost on union leader Rajendran, "the higher income are getting more each day, while the lower wage ones just get a little every year -$40 or $50".

Ministers and other political appointment holders cooked up a new formula to award themselves 2.625 months of "national bonus" for last year's lacklustre performance, with nothing to show for it except nation wide chaos in floods, transportation, housing and spiralling inflation. PM helped himself to twice the payout, 2 x 2.625 months of his $2.2 million a year. How did Lim Swee Say put it? Q.E.D. - Quite Easily Done. You don't need a degree in Mathematics to understand why Prof Lim's shock therapy was shot down in flames.

Health Hazards

What is tuberculosis?
Tuberculosis is a contagious bacterial infection usually affecting the lungs (pulmonary TB), but may spread to other organs like lymph nodes, kidneys, bones, joints, etc. (extrapulmonary TB).

What are the symptoms of tuberculosis?
The symptoms of TB include a low-grade fever, night sweats, fatigue, weight loss and a persistent cough. Some people may not have obvious symptoms.

Who gets tuberculosis?
Tuberculosis can affect anyone of any age. People with weakened immune systems are at increased risk, for example due to chemotherapy, diabetes, or certain medications.

How is tuberculosis spread?
Tuberculosis is spread when a person with untreated pulmonary TB coughs or sneezes, releasing microscopic droplets of bacteria into the air. Prolonged exposure to a person with untreated TB is necessary for infection to occur, such as someone you live with or work with. Forced proximity in a congested public transportation cabin is not helpful.

What are the experts saying?
It is clear that TB control in Singapore is now at a cross road; additional measures and resources are critically needed to battle this disease. Pivotal to this is to acknowledge and address TB in foreigners and its impact on the local population.
Between 2004 and 2010, the population increased 22 percent (from 4.17 to to 5.08 million), thanks to a "liberalised immigration policy" after 2005.
During that period, there was a 46 percent spike (from 1,916 to 2,791) in total number of new TB cases notified in Singapore - with the proportion of foreigners increasing from 29 to 47 percent, as pointed out by Dr Chee and Dr Wang in last month's edition of Singapore Medical Journal.

What is the government saying?
"In 2010, the TB incidence rate among Singapore residents was 39.2 per 100,000, while that in non-residents was 42.1 (?). Non-residents accounted for 27 percent of TB cases reported in 2010, hence the majority were contributed by Singapore residents," pooh-poohed a Ministry of Health (MOH) spokesperson. In November 2011, MOH actually called a a press conference to correct a "misleading" press report that "a lot of our TB problems are from the foreigners."

Who do you believe?
As Clinton would put it, define "foreigners". The citizenship papers liberally handed out by the ICA merely change the statistical presentation, but the bacteria Mycobacterium tuberculosis (M. tuberculosis) remains politically insensitive. Tuberlin skin testing (PPD) for TB is but one method to ferret the carriers from high risk sources. It remains to be seen if the public health of Singaporeans rates prompt action from the pro-alien authorities.

Conduct Unbecoming

There are many posts on the closed doors meeting pertaining to the impending crackdown on the Singapore internet. It was conducted according to the Chaltham House Rule, which stipulates that nothing should be done to identify, either explicitly or implicitly, who said what. The government representatives obviously were not looking forward to being named in public, like the infamous 48 listed, in case they said something stupid. After all, their wife and children may suffer from the unwarranted glare of the media.

One said representative explained that in the light of recent reports of hoaxes, falsehoods and racist comments that have spread online, there is a need for a code of conduct to serve as an alternative mechanism for people to seek redress. Otherwise, they will resort to calling the police.

Let's deal with the last line first. A netizen made a police report about Sun Xu's “I will wait for him with a knife” threat of bodily harm. The police first said a magistrate's complaint was required, then said it had decided to take no further action “after careful consideration of the facts and circumstances of the case and in consultation with the Attorney-General’s Chambers.” The combined civic action of the bloggers was more effective in the take down of the PRC scholar ingrate.

Racist comments there are aplenty, but none beats the failure to integrate over a meal accusation levied at our Muslim brothers. But unlike the two young men who were jailed under the Sedition Act, this one culprit was let off with a "I stand corrected" cop out. By any first world standard, this is conduct unbecoming.

We are not told what hoaxes and falsehoods the government representative alluded to. For all we know, the police warnings about spreading "false information about unverified cases of kidnapping" could have been a plant, a precursor to the excuse for a clampdown on cyberspace. What we do know is that hoaxes and falsehoods continue to be propagated and sponsored by the mainstream media. As are the lies that housing, transportation, healthcare, education are "subsidised". The truth that social media has maintained all along is that these tariffs are but a discount from the market rates, an adaptation of the pricing model used by TT Durai's NKF. Tan Chuan-Jin may blog until he's blue in the face, but a $100,000 flat is not affordable to someone drawing $1,000 a month, even before inflation hit 5.2%. And then there's the guy who said foreigners are workers transient workers who go home after the infrastructure is built. Just to make sure we are on the same page,
falsehood [ˈfɔːlsˌhʊd], noun, is
1. the quality of being untrue
2. an untrue statement; lie
3. the act of deceiving or lying

That's the definition from the internet version of The Collins English Dictionary.