Al Qaeda threat, 21 US embassies and consulates closed

The Americans have received the most explicit threat of attacks by the Al Qaeda and have closed 21 embassies and consulates in the Middle East region. With the vivid memory of the bombing of the American embassy in Benghazi, Libya, the Americans are not taking any chances. The threat is not only limited to Sunday and will extend through the month of August.

The American law makers are busily trying to second guess what this threat is all about with mounting fears over the safety of Americans and their families in the Middle East and the rest of the world. The danger of this threat is best described by a retired general, “We have to remember that we’re up against an enemy who kills indiscriminately — whether it be women, children, diplomats — and our embassies … have been one of the targets,” Mattis told CNN on Friday. Funny that I thought this is what the Arab and Middle Eastern countries are saying about the Americans bombing them and killing and maiming hundreds of thousands of their olds, women and children. But the Arabs did not know that those innocent civilians killed by the Americans were not seen as victims of American warfare but collateral damages, not lives or living things.

With a whole month of Ramadan, paranoia is hitting the American law makers. It could be anything, it could be anywhere. And the Americans are also self praising their govt and claiming credits for taking such a drastic and comprehensive measure in advance. Whether anything incident occurred as a result of this intelligence, the Al Aqaeda won. They are now in a position to cripple the Americans in a big scale across the world by simply creating a threat which could be a hoax. And they need to make it looked real serious to make the Americans jumpy.

The next threat could be American businesses or anything and the Americans would be made to jump and scurry for cover. And this can go on and on till the American’s guards are down and a real incident could strike that will drive the American bonkers and blaming one another and everyone. The intelligence agencies would be the first scapegoat. They will not blame those in Congress and the White House for starting wars against other people.

The initiative is now in the hands of the Al Qaeda to set the time and place in a war of terror, a war without borders, that the Americans or any country will be ill prepared. They cannot keep closing down their embassies or businesses all over the world whenever the Al Qaeda leaked out an intelligence threat. When would the war mongers learn the lesson that the enemies are now in as good a position to deal a crippling blow to them in places beyond their wildest imagination and at their own time and own target?

It is amazing how warfare has changed and the hunter is now the hunted. The terrorists have found a way to squeeze the American balls and make them jump whenever they like it.

Education - What kind of education are our young getting in schools?

Other than teaching the 3Rs, going to schools to get educated involves a lot of other things. The students are taught to be a wholesome person, to learn some good values, to be honest, caring and responsible persons, and more.

And there are more challenging agendas like telling the children to seize the moment, dare to be different, just do it, to stand up for what one thinks is right, to think critically, to challenge conventional thoughts, to be creative, to be caring, kind, compassionate and to help those who need a helping hand. Actually no, none of these if you know what I mean.

One thing I believe our education system should not teach is to make the students conformist, unthinking, follow the rule blindly, to be just another exact copy of many from a standard mould. The educators must not try to force all the different pegs into a square hole.

Educators are there to inspire the students to find themselves, to be themselves, to find their own ways in life, to light up a spark inside them. Educators must not be there to restrain and enforce stupidity for the sake of stupidity.

Foolish, idiotic and bureaucratic educators have no place in an education system that is preparing the young to meet the challenges of a brave new world that is ever changing in increasing speed. This is the 21^st Century. Why are the youth of Korea so innovative and creative and taking the world by storm? Why are our students still sucking pacifiers, restrained, inhibited, and believing in follow the teachers or follow the leaders, without a mind of their own, dull, lacking in fresh ideas, and fearful of authority, and bullied by narrow minded old matrons or school masters that walked around with a cane on their backs?

No wonder our students are straight As but blank in everything. Did I hear that some girl students were punished for shaving their heads bald to support a cause for cancer patients because getting bald is unacceptable in the school? And did the MOE support the stand of the school or otherwise?

What kind of values are our young taught in schools, or what kind of products is our educational system supposed to produce? Little droids? R2D2 or C3PO?

The USA is what it is today because of a dare devil spirit of crossing the line, to do something when they believe in it and will break away with whatever rules and convention. That is the American free spirit. That is the greatest value of American education. Our education system, though we professed to be the best, to want our children to be innovative, creative and entrepreneurial, but in practice we are turning them into fearful conformists, fearful of authority, fearful of initiative and adventurism. And the authority will kill the fire in them before a little spark can light up.

They should duly all be replaced by the never say die attitude of the foreigners grown up in the wild and a free wheeling spirit to try and take the unbeaten road.

National Geography - A publicity stunt in Raffles Place

A group of actors were hired and dressed up as soldiers of the SAF and formed up in the heart of Raffles Place. The public was encouraged to shout orders to the soldiers to stand at attention or at ease, maybe pusing kanan and pusing kiri as well. Some of the lunch crowd, including aunties, were amused enough to shout their orders at the actor soldiers, and they reacted like robots, drilled to respond to commands.

Some Sinkies find it nothing amusing but insulting and belittling our army boys, the guardians of our security. Below are some comments posted in Yahoo News.

‘In a comment on Yahoo! Singapore’s Facebook page, Renson Seow said that regardless of whether the men were full time NS men or paid actors, what mattered was that the stunt portrayed NS men and the army.
“They were being advertised as automatons, playthings for the command and amusement of civilians, who in fact…owe it to our NS men for their security,” he said.
Another Facebook user, Au Kah Kay commented, “It makes a mockery of NS and trivializes the sacrifices that Singaporean men have to make to defend the country and its people, including foreigners.”
A part-time student, 31-year-old Adrian Poon, whom Yahoo! Singapore spoke to, also felt that the stunt trivialised life in the army.’

I think it will be more hilarious and meaningful if we let the foreigners yell at our actor soldiers and see how they will obey without questioning. Let the foreign maids have a good too, and the construction workers. That could be a reality in the foreseeable future when more foreigners are in charge or join the SAF. Then we will have foreigners ordering Sinkies around like robotic toy soldiers. It will be an eye opener of what things could be in the future to come. Mesti akan datang.

When the truth sinks in. What is the moral of this publicity stunt? Is there one or none?

Why was China erased from Western memory

The remarkable history of Chinese invention - Why was China erased from Western memory? Article by 龙信明

Introduction

Joseph Needham was an English medical doctor and biologist, teaching in England in the 1930s. By an accident of fate he acquired some Chinese students, and was intrigued to hear their claims of so many medical and scientific discoveries having originated in China, rather than in the West.

Needham became fully fluent in Chinese, and eventually moved to China in 1942 to investigate these claims and to research the entire history of Chinese invention. That work led to an astonishing voyage of historical discovery.

Needham originally planned to write a book cataloguing Chinese inventions, but his first volume barely scratched the surface of his subject. He slowly gatherred many of his students into this enterprise, and they eventually wrote a collection of 26 books, to catalog the history of Chinese discovery.

Myth and Misrepresentation

It leaves one speechless to learn the vast extent of things invented by the Chinese many hundreds of years, and often several millennia, before they appeared in the West.

All the myths about China and the Chinese being good at 'memorising and passing exams', but being unable to think independently or to be imaginative and creative, are just that - myths. Those stories were never true, not then and not now.

This isn't a simple matter of gunpowder and fireworks, but encompasses the entire range of human knowledge from endocrinoloy to mathematics, from agriculture to astronomy.

How could such facts have been hidden from the entire Western world for so long? And why were they withheld? Needham made his discoveries in the 1940s, but our Western education has never made reference to them, never acknowledged them.

We Westerners were taught that virtually all inventions and discoveries arose in Europe but, thanks to Joseph Needham, we have clear documentation proving they existed in China often 1,000 or more years before the Europeans copied them.

In all of the above, Needham has published not only old Chinese texts, but photos of old drawings that clearly depict all of these items, from texts that can be accurately dated. These are not wild claims or
supppositions; the evidence is both conclusive and striking, and is there for anyone to examine.

Where has the world been, for so many years? How could all of this have remained hidden? How - and Why - did the West so thoroughly erase China from the world's current historical memory?

China's Former World Position

Eurocentric historians have distorted and ignored China's dominant role in the world economy until about 1800. There exists an enormous amount of empirical data proving China's economic and technological superiority over Western civilization for the better part of several millennia.

Given that China was the world's supreme technological power up to about 1800, it is especially important to emphasize that this is what made the West's emergence possible. It was only by borrowing, copying, and assimilating Chinese innovations and China's much more advanced technology that the West was able to make the transition to modern capitalist and imperialist economies.

Until then, China was the leading trading nation, with long distance trade reaching most of Southern Asia, Africa, the Middle East and Europe. Even as late as the early 19th century China's merchants employed 130,000 private transport ships, several times that of Britain, and China had held this pre-eminent position for millennia.

China's innovations in the production of paper, book printing, firearms and tools led to a manufacturing superpower whose goods were transported throughout the world by the most advanced navigational system.

Moreover, banking, a stable paper money economy, excellent manufacturing and high agricultural yields resulted in China 's per capita income surpassing that of Great Britain until the late 1700s.

China's Opening to, and Withdrawal from, the World

From this study of Chinese inventions and discoveries, a theory is developing about the reasons China closed itself off from the world some hundreds of years ago.

It's almost impossible to overstate that a first thought of anyone reviewing all this research would be that the world must have seemed very primitive to China 500 years ago. Here are two noteworthy examples:

Agriculture

China's agriculture and comparative food production was orders of magnitude ahead of the West, and of other countries as well, for more than 1,000 years. Compared to China, the rest of the world must have seemed truly "third world" at the time.

Europe and other nations had difficulty just feeding themselves, while China could produce surplus food in abundance, in spite of having a much greater population.

China had invented the seed drill, sowing in rows, a scientifically-efficent plow that is still in use around the world today, animal harnesses and collars, the winnowing fan, the spinning wheel, and so much more.

China's advances in agriculture were eagerly copied by the Europeans and were the enabling cause of Europe's agricultural revolution that first permitted it to begin feeding itself adequately.

Sailing and Navigation

More than 1,000 years ago, China's sailing ships were far larger than any in the rest of the world. The Chinese invented and deployed multiple masts, luff sails that permitted sailing into the wind.

They invented the rudder, enabling ships to be steered. Chinese ships had watertight compartments, enabling them to complete journeys even when damaged.

The Chinese invented the compass, and had such extensive astronomical knowledge that they could navigate the world by the stars, while Western ships were small, uncontrollable and fragile, and were useless for travelling any distance.

As Needham so strongly pointed out, China was so far ahead of the Western world in sailing and navigation that comparisons are just embarrassing.

China Closes its Doors

When the Chinese conducted their voyages of exploration around the world, with Zhang He and others, they must have been disappointed in what they found.

The rest of the world had no paper or printing, no mathematics, no science, little medicine of note, almost no metallurgy to speak of, a most primitive agriculture, no manufactures of any worthy kind, no porcelain, no spinning wheels or weaving looms to make clothing. No nothing.

From reviewing the history of Chinese invention, one easily develops an increasingly strong feeling the Chinese looked at the world and found nothing they wanted, nothing to interest them, in all those societies that were centuries, and in some cases millennia, behind China in almost every way.

One can easily theorise that this is one of the reasons China closed itself off from the world at that time. In all of China's travels and exploration, it would have been easy to conclude that other parts of
the world were so backward there was nothing to be gained from prolonged contact.

One can imagine they returned home and closed the door, perhaps planning to return in another 500 years to see if things had progressed. With the addition of detail, this is most likely how events transpired.

The Christian West Shows its Appreciation

What China didn't count on, was the West taking all these ideas, turning them into weapons of colonisation and war, and returning to the nation that was the source of that knowledge, and invading it - along with every other nation they could find, to colonise, to steal the resources, to enslave and massacre the populations.

China's interest was always only exploration and trade. The Chinese were never expansionist or warlike, wanting only to protect their own borders from invasion from the North. China was quite unprepared for the violent nature and savage brutality of the Christians who sailed the world with God on their side, invoking His blessing on their countless atrocities.

Coupled with a weak domestic government at the time, and with the inventiveness of the Baghdad Jews in using opium to profit while enslaving a nation for the British Empire, and the greed and savagery of the White-Supremacist British, we have the severe downward swing for 100 or more years.

China's Inventiveness has not ended. It may have only just begun

Now China is finally recovering and once again taking its rightful place in the world.

China is back on track to continue where it left off 200 years ago. Today, China is putting men in space, has built a space station that functions well, and plans to put men on the moon. This is all done without Western technology, since the West won't share.

China is building its own GPS system, again with entirely home-grown technology, and has built a submersible that can descend below 7,000 meters into the sea. Only one other nation can do that, and China didn't get their help.

China leads the world in HSR train technology, and is rapidly developing its own aircraft industry and supersonic missile technology.

China leads the world in the human genome mapping, and is rapidly progressing in a long list of other fields, not only catching up to the West but close to surpassing it.

China's large-scale engineering skills are second to none in the world today. China built a computer that was 150% faster than the fastest in the world - with an entirely Chinese-developed operating system.

China already leads the world in cat-scan technology and in DNA mapping and synthesising, also in many medical fields such as laser eye surgery and cornea transplants.

The only thing that might derail China's rise is the very real danger of the US starting yet another competitive "war of liberation" in blind pursuit of its stated objective of full-scale global dominance.

Only 6 interviews for jobless PMET, 53, since Dec 2011

This is the title of a very depressing post in the TRE that I recommend Hsien Loong and all his ministers to read. And I would recommend that Hsien Loong throw away the National Day Speech he is working on at the moment and write something with the issues raised in this post. The comments following the article by a lkh are cries of despair and hopelessness, and very resentful of the PAP and the govt. And if more and more people are feeling this way, the PAP is a goner comes 2016.

The issue is about the plight of Sinkie PMETs above 45 years old, very qualified, very experienced, used to earn 5 figure salaries, but cannot find employment. To make matter worse, many have growing up children to feed and some may also have mortgages to service. Many were jobless for years and have to downgrade to cheaper homes.

What makes them angrier is that the country has jobs for more than a million foreigners, many of which are less qualified and with a big number with fake qualifications. A govt that cannot provide jobs for qualified professionals who are citizens, who are willing to work, who are able, will not last long, not longer than the next election. The call to ‘Vote Them Out’ is getting louder.

The problem of the PMETs is a very serious one, a clear and present crisis, as every PMET has a family and extended family to get to know of his plight. If the Govt still continues to be yah yah papaya and tiada apa, and refuses to acknowledge and deal with this problem immediately, the end of its rule will come much faster than they think.

With a life expectancy of 80 or 90 years, and with good medical care and good quality of life, many are healthy and can continue to work till their 70s. And many must continue to work as not many have enough savings to retire when their nest eggs are eaten up by high inflation. 50 or 60 is the prime of their lives and they should not be cut off from the job market just like that and be replaced with foreigners.

Is the govt listening? Is Hsien Loong listening? Or would they bother? Do they really think that the people will vote for them again in the next GE while they keep ignoring the people’s jobless problem? Do they think it is ok to send these PMETs to be cleaners and security guards or taxi drivers or whatever part time agents? Is it just a matter of mismatch that their skills and experience could find no takers and they need to be retrained to be cleaners and security guards while the questionable skills and experience of foreigners could find a few hundred thousand jobs here?

Hsien Loong better makes his National Day Speech counts and addresses the unemployment of PMETs now while there is still time to make amends, how to get them decent jobs that befit their qualifications. An easy task is to freeze all ministries, stats boards and GLC hirings of foreigners right away and take in all the Sinkie PMETs immediately. No Sinkie can afford to be unemployed living in this very expensive city.

I urge Hsien Loong and his ministers to read this post in the TRE and the comments again and again personally. Or is it that they are so used to such matters that they are no longer sensitive to them, just treat them like all the patients waiting outside the Emergency units of the hospitals, all equally ill, desperate and needing immediate medical attention. Just let them be. There are better things to do, like bringing in more foreigners to replace the older Sinkies.

The two most important and urgent matter for the govt to deal with are jobs for jobless PMETs and a home for every Singaporean without all the silly disqualification rules. Every Singaporean deserves and is entitled to buy his first flat direct from the govt. This is a social contract the govt owes to the citizens. With the unbearable high cost of private housing, not allowing Sinkies to buy from HDB is as good as telling them to move out, unwanted, Singapore has no place for them.

There is no need to waste the people’s time with a 2 or 3 hour speech that makes the listeners feel good for a moment but not solving the dire problems of the people. A short half an hour speech with concrete measures to make the lives of Sinkies better, get them the jobs and the homes, is more important, useful and welcome than a long and grandiose speech of nothingness.