Beware of anonymous bloggers and websites

This is the main topic of discussion in the ST forum page on Saturday 20 Jul. Do not trust bloggers that post as anonymous, or blogs that are owned by anonymous owners. In other words trust only those you know who is behind the blogs or when the identity of the owner is known. Would this also apply to articles in the main media when the name of the writer is not stated, like from the Editor, from the PMO, from the Ministry of Dounce?  Some may not even say that it is from the editor.

Superficially it may sound true that an article or blog with the owner identified is likely to be more composed and less capricious in what is being posted. Then again, there are many blogs with owners living in no man’s land and letting everything flies, right or wrong, truths or untruths, blasphemy, defamation, scandals, anything goes. And on the other hand there are many very serious bloggers blogging under anonymity and making very good sense. Even using a nick is posting in anonymity if no one knows who is behind that nick.

I used to pose as redbean without identifying myself until I signed up as a writer with Asian Correspondents. I do not see any difference in what I posted then and now. The style and content are still the same. What I am trying to say is that it is the person and his intent and not whether the person is posting in his real self or incognito.

Another forumer in the ST forum by the name of Tan Ying San also warned of websites run by anonymous owners. Then he quoted, “there have been reports of foreign agencies setting up websites to promote certain causes and regularly editing entries in Wikipedia to favour certain viewpoints (CIA, Vatican and Howard’s office ‘edited Wikipedia’”. He went on to say that ‘Many less discerning Singaporeans believe whole articles on such websites simply because parts of them are true and the message resonates with them. They forget the best liars do not lie completely.’

Tan Ying San has an important point here. Many undiscerning readers are unwitting made to believe what they read, sometimes over an article, sometimes over a long period of time reading a certain viewpoint. A very good example is the anger and hatred for countries the Americans have painted as bad or evil, like North Korea, Iran, Myanmar, China, Russia and a whole lot of others. People are just reading the American slanted views from American and western media source, NYT, Washington Post, Guardian or Reuters, AP, Agencies, Fox, CNN etc etc and will eventually think like them without realising it. That is why China and North Korea are so hated by unthinking Sinkies till today. The mentioned of North Korea will send the blood pressure up as if they are enemies of Singapore and are about to launch a nuclear strike on the island. Daft can be acquired or programmed by others with the victim unknowing or did not understand what is happening.

It is thus very important to know the source of the information, who wrote it and what is his agenda and motive. Know the author or owners of blogs and websites helps and is better than not knowing who is behind them. The important thing is to be discriminating and thinking and questioning and don’t be a literate fool, being fooled all your life without knowing it. North Koreans bad, Americans good. North Koreans killer, Americans not killers. North Koreans for war, Americans for peace. You have been programmed and conned.

How many of you trust the main media or information coming from the govts or official sources?

More cases of teachers abusing children exposed

A primary 6 boy was allegedly pinned on a school desk by his neck. This was done by his teacher.The incident happened on Tuesday, July 2 at about 10am in an elite school in the east of Singapore.

He had gone for classes late as he was not feeling well, and his mother was shocked to see his teacher chase him into the classroom. She claims she saw the teacher pinning her son on a desk by his neck.
Tay Weiming's father, 63, and his mother made a police report, complained to the Ministry of Education and also alerted Lianhe Wanbao.

There was another case reported in Stomp I think, of a primary school boy being made to stand in a corner for 3 hours without food, drink or break to go to the toilet and with a paper bag on his head. Punishing a child for bad behaviour is acceptable but it must be reasonable and should not go over the limit especially for primary school children. Forbidding a child to go to the toilet, without food or water is cruel, wicked and inhuman. Unacceptable for adults to dish such punishment to children unless these adults are from some primitive tribes that have yet to be civilised.

Harsh punishment, roughing up children, yelling at young children, and handling them in a threatening manner not only frighten them, they instilled fear in them. What the shit are these adults thinking, that they can harass young children without harming them emotionally and psychologically? My impression is that these are not only insecure adults but likely to be mentally sick or just unfit to take care of children.

This is only the tip of the iceberg, a few cases that were reported after the My First Skool case was exposed. Today another mentally sick teacher abused a 5 year old girl by making her standing naked in front of her classmates in a PAP Community Foundation Centre. She even swung her against the white board. And she was given a 21 probation on the ground that she too was an abused child. What a sick joke! What a sick mitigation excuse!

Is our teaching profession going mad? Or is our society going sick? Don’t the principals or MOE put their ears on the ground to find out what is happening? Oh, the second case mentioned above was dealt by a principal. No wonder Singaporeans are so docile, so authority fearing. They must have been mentally castrated from young in our schools.

The MOE must take a stand on this and get rid of sadistic adults that are unsuitable to take care of children. They will do more harm than good and the earlier they are removed the safer it is for the children. There is an urgent need to do some spring cleaning for the well being and safety of young children. Stop wasting time on cleaning hawker centres.

We need to guard against pyschopaths walking around as teachers. A serious personality and pyschiatric assessment must be conducted on all teachers. Though this may not weed out all of them, at least a big chunk could be taken out early. It is better to be safe than sorry. Subsequently, schools and pre schools, nurseries, kindergartens must have a continuous programme to monitor the teachers to ensure that they are safe for the children. There is an honest and naïve assumption that teachers are all normal people, love children and can be trusted in their entirety with the children in their care. They could be monsters and little devils in disguise.

Wake up and stop being complacent and think that every human bean is ok if he or she calls herself a teacher. Even one in a robe is committing all kinds of crimes behind the robe. Our children need to be protected from their teachers. Our preschools, kindergartens and nurseries must not be turned into frightening places for our children.

The right COE Scheme

Please note that I used the word right and scheme. I could have said the best COE formula or the correct COE system. You see, the right scheme to different people means different things. The right scheme to a super talent is different from the right scheme of a layman or the right scheme of a crook. They are all right schemes to each one of them.

When a designer of a scheme starts from the point of a right scheme you can bet what are his objectives and goals. The current COE Scheme is the right scheme for the govt and for the rich buyers. It is the wrong scheme for the less well off buyers for sure, and for those who cannot do without a car, eg the invalids or handicaps, the families with dependent young and old that have to be ferried to and fro. That is the reason why so many people are so unhappy with the current right COE Scheme as it is not right to them. And that is also the reason why so many people have so many brilliant ideas to offer but will not be accepted or ignored. Cause those ideas are good, excellent but not right.

Anyone who wants to offer any good suggestions to modify the current COE Scheme must take note of who it shall benefit. Otherwise, no matter how good or brilliant the suggestion is, it will simply go into the waste bin, wasted time and effort.

Now did I get my right idea across? It is the goals and objectives of the COE Scheme that determine how it should be designed, what to consider and what not to consider. Get it?

Anyone still wants to offer the best formula, the correct solution or better please think what is the right scheme first?

How to get rich quick?

The whole world is entering a golden era when wealth of money is made so easily, so quickly and in such a sum that our forefathers would never have imagined. Many of the old rich made it after a life time of slogging and business acumen and hoping that all the decisions made were the right ones. In today’s context, the money made by the old ways was just too slow and too little. The internet age has made many very rich overnight, and many are very young. These are the true entrepreneurs that were there at the right time with the right products. They truly deserve every cent they made.

The money did not go to only the mavericks of the internet world. Money is everywhere, overflowing and it is up for everyone to grab in whatever ways they could. Ok, the internet whiz kids are just an exception. And making money the true honest way is still the way forward for many. But there are many that are taking the shortcut to instant wealth. They defy the old wisdom of making money slow and steady in all honesty. Instant wealth does not come easy for many.

In today’s world of high finance, many fortunes were made by many through other than by the honest, slow and steady way. The old ways cannot make people rich overnight. Only the crooked ways, by cheating, by gambling, by conning and deceiving, by robbing, can people make money so easily and so fast other than the few exceptions stated above. When people are making quick money without having to really sweat for it, the answers are all out there. Put one and one together and you will get two, but the instant wealth makers will get three or four. And remember that they are cheating and robbing others and many will be poorer because of them.

An example of how corrupt the financial system is and how the crooks are making tons of money is the trial of an ex Goldman Sachs trader now going on in New York. ‘The trial of former Goldman Sachs bond trader Fabrice Tourre was about "Wall Street greed," a lawyer for the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission…’, reported Nate Raymond in a REUTER article on 15 Jul 13.

The gist of the case is as reported in the same article: ‘The SEC accuses Tourre of misleading investors in a mortgage investment called Abacus 2007-AC1 by not telling them that a hedge fund was involved in selecting the underlying assets and betting against it.

Matthew Martens, a lawyer for the SEC, told the jury the deal Tourre put together was "secretly designed to maximize the potential it would fail" to the benefit of the hedge fund, which made about $1 billion.

"In the end, Wall Street greed drove Mr. Tourre to lie and deceive," Martens said.’

The snake oil seller, Goldman Sachs trader, was selling some toxic product designed to fail and pushing it to his clients while knowing that another party was shorting it and with knowledge of how the CDO was structured, could actually cause it to fail. The result was expected, the clients of Tourre lost more than one billion and the hedge fund of John Paulson made the one billion. How convenient and how easy to make money in Wall Street and how easy to find innocent suckers? The formula is being repeated across the big financial centres of east and west.

Structured products, derivatives, CDOs (Collateral Default Obligations) and CDS (Credit Default Swap) are instruments that the designers had a handle to turn them to their advantage without the victims having a clue of what is going on. That is why they called them ‘sophisticated’ instruments for ‘sophisticated’ clients, with clients thinking that they are sophisticated and clever but in fact the definition means ‘thinking that they know and can afford to lose but cannot claim ignorance.’

And the selling of such snake oils is spreading across the world financial markets with the perpetrators of such products seen as financial geniuses and welcome by greedy govts everywhere. In the meantime the financial time bomb has been set clicking. When will it blow up?

It is just a poll

This latest poll was prompted by a very assertive statement from Hsien Loong arising from the hawker centre cleaning issue debated in Parliament. His statement, ‘Singapore has succeeded because we have honest, upright people in politics: people who can be trusted to uphold the public interest, to speak the truth even when it is inconvenient...’ And the poll is conducted to see whether the people agree or disagree with his statement. What do you think?

93% of the respondents disagree with Hsien Loong’s comment that Singapore has upright people in politics, people that can be trusted, to speak the inconvenient truths when needed. How come like that? Is this frightening, that the people don’t think we have upright and trustworthy people in politics?

The poll is just a poll and it is not conclusive to say that the people are right and we don’t have upright people in politics. We may have a lot of them, we may not. What the poll is saying is that they don’t believe, rightly or wrongly, that there are upright and trustworthy people in politics. This is bad enough. It is like an innocent guy in court while the jury insists he is guilty.

For the people to say so, alright, just the people who responded to the poll, it says something. What has the Govt done to deserve such mistrust from this group of people? Go do some soul searching ok?

The other point is for the Govt to do the right thing so that they can regain the trust and faith of the people, that they are good and upright and can be trusted to speak the truth. I think this is a trying task looking at the emotions today. Can the Govt change this negative perception?

What is bad is that if the perception of the people is true. In that case no medicine can cure this sickness. Habis lah.

Is this poll important to the Govt? It depends. It depends on whether they want to believe in it. It depends on how genuine or how close it is to the perception of the whole population. If this is a true representative of what the people perceived the Govt to be, it is definitely not pretty. The Govt and Hsien Loong can only hope that this poll is not representative, not real or biased, or only the views of a small group of anti PAP cynics.

What do you think?