Strong wings and deep roots

Chok Tong is worried that we are losing some of our top students who went overseas for their studies. This is a drain on our small talent pool and it is important to bring them home to roost. In a way they are a consequence of our success, giving them strong wings to fly high and far, but not deep enough roots to stay put back home. Chok Tong is asking the schools to inculcate emotional values or bonds in the hope of keeping them with us. How much is emotional bonds anyway? The brighter and smarter the students, the clearer they see and understand the ethos of our society. It is all about how much, and not about emotions, sentiments or silly values like giving back to your country or serving the people. Everything is calculated in monetary terms here. There is no room for ties or intangibles. No free lunch, there is a price for everything, except compulsory National Service. Now who have been passing such values to the young? But what is the problem? What we lost we can easily be replaced with talents from China, India and neighbouring countries. And they are not only better talents, they are also more appreciative of what of the goodness of our country. They may be new here, with no emotional ties, no family ties, and short roots. But we know that they will develop all these that Singaporeans born and brought up here, with family ties, cannot. Singaporeans are ungrateful and unappreciative of what the govt have done for them. The migrants will be grateful and appreciative and will not go away for greener pastures. Is there any contradictions or any hypocrisies? Haven't we been very successful in buying foreign talents here? Now, why are Singaporeans running away? In numerical terms, for every Singaporeans that went away, we can bring in 100 or more. In hard cold numbers, in our calculative ways, we are net gainers. Where got problem? Soon we will have a strong migrant population in the majority, and bringing our country to a higher level of material success. PS. More pics of the Singapore River Festival in the blog link.

Notable quote by Gerard Ee

'Many social entrepreneurs do not understand that social enterprises are for profit. Some even feel guilty about it.' Gerard Ee Do Singaporeans understand the above statement? Or do they need further explanations on the purpose of social enterprises? They are set up for profit, yes to make profit. What charity, what helping the needy, what nonsense? There is no need to feel guilty about making profit. That is the reason for all enterprises, govt, social or charitable organisations. The rest of the reasons of how noble, how kind and compassionate, the need to help those who need help, are all a big bullshit. Ok, profit is not necessary bad. Profit is good, just like greed is good. But make profit for what or for who? Be greedy and more greedy, for what and for who? Now with so many professionals in it, they even coined the term venture philanthropy. They went in with the skills of well trained corporate executives and wielding knives as sharp as those of sushi chefs. Remember those organisations that collect a lot of money and were praised sky high that they were good? Even monks and priests are at it. If only they were not discovered and their dirty laundries washed in the open, they will continue to do what they knew best, and enjoy the perks of top class business executives. Today we have several pages of write ups in the ST glamorising the passionate and committed, and in tailored suit executives doing charitable work, helping the needy. I hope they were doing it not for profit. But what's wrong with that? They should not feel guilty about it if they were doing it for profit. I don't know how many of you will agree with my nonsense above?

The ridiculous nature of progress

Yes we are rich, very rich. Many people have gone pass the comfort zone and have time and money to be philanthropists. Actually I prefer this word to be spelt philantrophist. The piss sound in the first word doesn't do justice to the do gooders. Where am I heading? Oh yes, we now have excess money and energy to help more needy people. All our needy people are well taken of by the govt and the legions of charitable organisations in our midst. I do not know the statistics, but we could have more do gooders or charitable organisations per capita than any country in the world. What shall we do with so many good things? Spread them around, overseas, to help the world. And if that is not good enough, we can import poverty to live with us. This will give us more opportunities to explore our creativity and the compassionate goodness in us to help these needies. We must thank the importers of foreign workers for helping the do gooders in their cause. Let's import more foreign workers so that we can feed them and look after them. It is always a good thing to help others. Never mind if they came here in debt and without a job. We can all do our part to feed them. It is good for the soul. The MOM must be more generous in the issuing of WP and not go around chasing after them as illegals.

First brown General

The US took more than 200 years to welcome a black President. We took 44 years to produce a brown General. Not too bad actually. BG Ishak Ismail is the first Malay to be promoted to the general rank, at the age of 46. The world is changing for the better. Let's hope that he will beat a path for more able Malay soldiers to rise to higher ranks, and not because we need to promote them to fill up some quota or a public relations exercise. So far the reports on Ishak is quite commendable. As we move on, our Malay brothers and sisters should move on together as a people and share the progress of the nation. The able ones should take the lead and show the way.

Fake degrees in the Education Hub

We want to be the premier education hub of Asia. We want to attract hundreds of thousands of foreign students here to pursue their studies. We had a spate of frauds coming from the private school providers. Now we have more revelations of fake degrees being offered over the years, undetected. Undetected!!! My god! Could all these be avoided? Is it so difficult to weed them out before they even enrol the students? It cannot be that difficult than sending man to the moon. Alas, the squeaky clean and administratively efficient state is now no better than a third world country. How could we be an international education hub when such simple frauds like accreditation from reputable institutions can get pass so easily? It is definitely a case of negligent, no one or organisation being assigned to administer it. Another equivalent of selling toxic products. Come on Singapore, you can do much better than this, to allow such blatant frauds to exist right under your nose, Terribly disappointing. Exactly like the motor insurance fraud. Nobody's child, nobody's problem. Not my problem. Soon we will be known as an island of super first world infrastructure but operated by third world conmen and tricksters. This is a reputation we cannot afford to live with. Rip Van Winkle is still enjoying his nice nap.