9/18/2014
Two pieces of good news yesterday
In a trouble world of deceit and treachery when everything is all about self and money, two good pieces of news came out yesterday. The first, Obama has decided to go bombing the IS in Iraq and Syria all over again. Now why is this good news? To the Americans they have found a way to spend their weapons and probably getting someone to pay for it. Or if not, the defence industry would be getting the American citizens to pay for the rounds fired and the soldiers doing the bombing, not killing of the innocents. And this would keep the Americans in Washington very busy and got no time to cause mischief in other parts of the world.
The pivot to Asia can take a break and China would have some breathing space. So did North Korea.
Hopefully Putin would increase the stakes in Syria and Ukraine to keep the Americans busy busy. Sorry Arabs and Ukrainians, your troubles are a sacrifice for peace elsewhere. I hope the silly Asian and SE Asian countries learn a lesson or two from what is happening in the Middle East and Eastern Europe and don’t invite trouble into the region. And when trouble offers itself, they must be smart enough not to welcome trouble here.
The second piece of good news is the growing tolerance and acceptance of drugs in the West and in Latin America. They are raising the white flag. They are claiming that even countries like Singapore and Malaysia with death penalties could not wipe out this scourge. The conclusion, might as well live with it, live with the drug menace. Oops, the new drugs are not that dangerous anymore. A little drug can be quite an acceptable lifestyle choice. They are quite fanciful and with nice names and very good looking too. Many celebrities are using them too. It is the new in thing, to replace the damn smelly cigarettes.
Many of these states are going to legalise drug consumption as a new and harmless lifestyle. I said this is good news. Just hope Singapore and Malaysia would not follow suit but increase the penalties for drug abuses. This will become a carrot and stick situation and all the drug addicts and lifestyle choosers would flock to those countries to enjoy their new lifestyles within the law and be very happy. There is no need to risk capital punishment in Singapore and Malaysia. It is a win win solution. Those who love the life style of drug taking can find their safe havens in those countries that legalized drug takings. Those countries that frown on this lifestyle choice would have lesser drug takers in their midst.
Now, isn’t that good news? Nobody’s freedom of choice is curtailed. Everyone is happy.
Kopi Level - Green
The future fashion of Sin City
Khaw Boon Wan was gazing at this crystal ball and foresaw that car
ownership would no longer be fashionable to the young in the future.
This would free up spaces occupied by carparks for the people’s use. We
will have more parks and, not forgetting, more space for a bigger
population, maybe the highly desired number of 10m.
I could see many things going in and out of fashion in the future, and as a result a better quality of life. People will not longer want to stay in landed properties or big properties. They would prefer a new and futuristic style of living, each one renting a cocoon in the shape of a big cigar for sleeping. They will spend their times enjoying life, working or staying awake for 18 to 20 hours a day.
High salary jobs would also not be popular. People do not need so much money since they don’t need to buy big houses and expensive cars. So they would be very happy earning just enough for the day. They would even opt for temporary or contract jobs, work for a few hours and enjoy all the free time they have. The happiest people will be those who are their own bosses, like taxi drivers, a highly desired and preferred occupation.
University education will definitely be passé. Who needs an expensive university education when they are aspiring for part time or temporary jobs? Many will be contented with an O level or ITE education. And they know that they could get very far with them as long as they work hard and are good at what they are doing. It will be so fashionable as a career choice that parents will all be opting their children for it, less stress and lower cost. No more expensive tuition, no more exams and everyone very happy, parents happy, children lagi happy.
No one would want to eat in fine restaurant, it will be unfashionable to go for fine dining for the average Singaporeans. Only the very few conservative rich that refused to follow the fashion will still be going for fine dining. They will still think living in big houses is good and stick to their old fashion ways, owning and driving big cars that the young have rejected as unfashionable. They forget that the new lifestyle, of very high quality living, is to take public transports, without owning cars. They do not mind being laughed at driving their big cars around. And they don’t mind being out of fashion or being unfashionable. But this group of people will be so small that they will hardly be seen in public places except in their private clubs. For the rest of HDB dwellers, another popular and fashionable past time, other than talking about down grading, will be walking in and out of pawn shops with their flats.
The future is really interesting, with high fashion and high living with no loss in the quality of living, eating in hawker stalls. Yes, eating hawker food will be a lifestyle choice too, for the people of Sin. There is a great and exciting future ahead of us.
Kopi Level - Green
I could see many things going in and out of fashion in the future, and as a result a better quality of life. People will not longer want to stay in landed properties or big properties. They would prefer a new and futuristic style of living, each one renting a cocoon in the shape of a big cigar for sleeping. They will spend their times enjoying life, working or staying awake for 18 to 20 hours a day.
High salary jobs would also not be popular. People do not need so much money since they don’t need to buy big houses and expensive cars. So they would be very happy earning just enough for the day. They would even opt for temporary or contract jobs, work for a few hours and enjoy all the free time they have. The happiest people will be those who are their own bosses, like taxi drivers, a highly desired and preferred occupation.
University education will definitely be passé. Who needs an expensive university education when they are aspiring for part time or temporary jobs? Many will be contented with an O level or ITE education. And they know that they could get very far with them as long as they work hard and are good at what they are doing. It will be so fashionable as a career choice that parents will all be opting their children for it, less stress and lower cost. No more expensive tuition, no more exams and everyone very happy, parents happy, children lagi happy.
No one would want to eat in fine restaurant, it will be unfashionable to go for fine dining for the average Singaporeans. Only the very few conservative rich that refused to follow the fashion will still be going for fine dining. They will still think living in big houses is good and stick to their old fashion ways, owning and driving big cars that the young have rejected as unfashionable. They forget that the new lifestyle, of very high quality living, is to take public transports, without owning cars. They do not mind being laughed at driving their big cars around. And they don’t mind being out of fashion or being unfashionable. But this group of people will be so small that they will hardly be seen in public places except in their private clubs. For the rest of HDB dwellers, another popular and fashionable past time, other than talking about down grading, will be walking in and out of pawn shops with their flats.
The future is really interesting, with high fashion and high living with no loss in the quality of living, eating in hawker stalls. Yes, eating hawker food will be a lifestyle choice too, for the people of Sin. There is a great and exciting future ahead of us.
Kopi Level - Green
9/17/2014
Roy Ngerng - Night vigil at Hong Lim - Pictorial essay
Again, Malays are Still Lazy – Dr Mahathir
By MIKOspace
Mahathir
defends ‘lazy Malays’ remarks.
He had a few days ago vilified the Malays for
being lazy, saying he was ashamed that they had been left behind by the
forward-thinking Chinese community. Dr Mahathir continues to see the “Malay”
problems of intelligence, performance and social mobility by attributing them
fundamentally to their “inferior” genes, as elaborated in his 1970 book “The
Malay Dilemma”.
“THEY ARE STLL LAZY”, he again told the
Utusan Malaysia newspaper in an exclusive interview, citing the gender
imbalance at institutions of higher learning where the majority were women as
an example. “The Malays are lazy; they are not interested in studying and
revising. If we go to the universities, 70 per cent of the students are women,
where are the men?” “They prefer to become Mat Rempit (Malay motorcycle gang
members), that is why I said they are lazy,” Dr Mahathir told the
newspaper.
The former Malaysian Prime Minister continues
to disparage his country’s Malay ethnic group.
He blamed himself for failing to transform the country’s ethnic majority
into a hard-working race during his tenure as the 4th Prime Minister from
1981-2004. Truth is that under the leadership of Prime Minister Dr Mahathir
over 22 years, his economic and business agenda has created a large number of
politically connected Bumiputra rent seekers promoting a business system
riddled with kickbacks and corruption.
The poor economic attainment of many in the
privileged Malay majority in Malaysia can be better understood not in terms of
their race, but in term of a class structure of social inequality created by
their own Malay elites.
Read the Full
Post: Again,
Malays are Still Lazy - Dr Mahathir
and:
Kopi Level - Green
Thomas Friedman - A most entertaining piece
Friedman had an article in the Today paper reposted from the NYT a couple of days back. The article titled ‘War on ISIS: It’s about Arabs, not Americans’. What Friedman did was to add in some humour in the way he ridiculed the Americans and their allies. I would be doing him injustice to paraphrase what he crafted. Let me quote a few of his wise jabs here.
‘There are 3 things in life that you should never do ambivalently: getting married, buy a house and go to war. Alas, we’re about to do No 3….How could he(Obama) not? Our staying power is ambiguous, our enemy is barbarous, our regional allies are duplicitous, our European allies are feckless and the Iraqis and Syrians we’re trying to help are factious.
Consider Saudi Arabia. It’s going to help train Free Syrian Army soldiers, but, at the same time, is one of the biggest sources of volunteer jihadists in Syria….Turkey allowed foreign jihadists to pass into and out of Syria and has been an important market for oil that ISIS is smuggling out of Iraq for cash….Qatar is with us Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays and against us Tuesday and Thursdays. Fortunately, it takes the weekends off.
Back home,… the Republican Party who are urging him to bomb ISIS will be the first to run for the hills if we get stuck, fail or accidentally bomb a kindergarten class.’
Still he has good reasons to want Obama to start the war. His reason, ‘if ISIS jihadists consolidate their power in the heart of Iraq and Syria, it could threaten some real island of decency, like Kurdistan, Jordan and Lebanon…’ Here he was a bit evasive and not telling the whole truth. The island of decency is Israel but not politically correct now to say it is all about Israel’s interests.
But he has his fingers at the pulse of the conflict. If the Americans were to enter this war and turn it into a Christian against the Muslims or the West against the Arabs, it would be disastrous. ‘ISIS wins if it can make this America’s war with Sunni Islam.’
So, would the Americans listen to him and stop making this an American or Obama’s war against the Arabs? Would America be roping in the non Muslim states to fight the Arabs/Muslim states or would American be able to get the Arab/Muslim states to fight among themselves?
For a start the Americans and the ‘Coalition of the New Willings’ are going to start training more fighters to fight IS and Assad. And they jolly well know that these fighters would be the new Al Qaeda or Talebans or ISIS of the future, and will be more deadly when will be fighting the Americans.
Kopi Level - Green
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