Asian Games and the takeaways

The 2018 Asian Games are progressing well in Jakarta and Palembang. Everything is going as fine as if they were to be held here or in any other Asian countries. The Games have been going on for years and organizing it is more or less using a carbon copy of the processes of the previous Games. No need to reinvent the wheel.
 
There are a few takeaways from the Games so far. First is the appearance of North Korea, a country suffering from abject poverty if one is silly enough to believe the western media, and the medals they are winning. At this point of writing, 28 Aug, they have already won 12 gold medals, far ahead of rich and prosperous Singapore and even all the Asean countries except Indonesia that have 1 more gold. How could they produce so many sports champions when they did not have enough to eat, no proper training facilities, definitely cannot afford to hire super talented and expensive foreign coaches. If you are to believe in the western narrative, the North Koreans would be training with antique equipments and with half full stomachs. Their total medal tally is 12 golds, 6 silver and 7 bronzes, ahead of Thailand, Taiwan, India and of course Singapore with 3 golds, 4 silvers and 10 bronzes. And this is not counting their medals in the combined Korea team.
 
As the top medal winner nations are the richer Asian nations, it is foolish to say that North Korea is an exception, that it is very poor and still did better than the supposedly rich Asian nations. Sports competition today is a very expensive hobby that only the rich and able could afford. It is no longer simply about brawn and raw power but about training, systems, nutrition, equipment, medication and plenty of money for travelling, competition and coaches.
 
The other nation that stood out in the Games is Kazakhstan. This is a newly rich country, thanks to the wealth brought along by becoming a new transportation hub in the New Silk Road. The wealth of this landlocked country, once written off for good for many centuries, its natural resources untapped due to poor transportation network, is now a prosperous central Asian country. They sent in a huge contingent of 440 athletes, something they could not afford before and never dreamt of. Nevermind if they were not medal winners, they could afford to travel all the way from central Asia to Jakarta/Palembang to have a bit of fun and competition, to tell the world that they are around.
 
The other notable country is Bahrain. This Middle Eastern oil rich country is splurging its money on acquiring the best sports men and women from Africa. And their acquisitions are almost all winners and record breakers. This is how to use money cleverly. They have a lot of OPM to splurge and splurge they did, to buy winners. Singapore can learn a lot from them and turn our 3 miserable gold medals to a dozen at least. Money, especially OPM, if used cleverly, can achieve a lot of fame and glory, never mind if they are worthy of it or not. Compare to the OPM spent on footballs and table tennis, I think the Bahrainians are wiser or at least smarter in how they spent OPM.
 
Singapore can have a lot of sports heroes from Africa and a lot to cheer about if we go the Bahrainian way. There is still hope to hitch a ride on the New Chinese Silk Road, if we have not messed it up for good, and be as prosperous as the Kazakhstan. Our wealth cannot last if we are replaced as a commercial and transportation hub by our stupidity, arrogance and poor strategic thinking.
 
How many are still out there laughing at the ‘poor’ North Koreans, deceived and deluded by the western media? Without all the American sanctions and economic isolation pressure, North Korea would be as rich as South Korea. There are the same people, with the same DNA and intellect.

Belt tightening versus belt loosening

Hsien Loong’s key speech during the National Day Rally was to teach the people how to change their habits to save some money given the high cost of living in this most expensive city in the world. To the masses, it is belt tightening time and this has been going on for the last few decades. Their lives have been a serial of downgrading and downgrading, from the 5Cs to smaller flats or even selling part of their leases, from country clubs to community clubs, from car ownership to riding bicycles, from eating in restaurants to foodcourts to hawker centres. And to make eating in hawker centres more palatable, without being undignified, like the best thing in the world, Singapore is going to apply for UNESCO recognition that hawker centre is Singapore’s treasured way of life.
 
minister has come out in support of this belt tightening exercise. “The Government will do its part – that is our commitment … But at the same time, we hope that people will also think through what they are able to afford and manage and also to make the right choices”: Second Minister for Finance Indranee Rajah on the cost of living in Singapore. Channel NewsAsia
 
On the other side of the rich poor divide, Chok Tong is telling the people that the ministers are underpaid. Is this the first hint that minister’s exorbitant salary, out of this world’s salary, is going to be raised and is he hinting that the ministers are not happy with their high salary? Are the belts of the ministers too tight and need loosening so that they could fatten themselves more? Looking at everyone one them, ruby and oily cheeks, they really look very well fed. And one MP is driving a Bentley, only an MP and can afford the luxury of a Bentley. Still salary not enough?
 
The people are told to tighten their belts and the ministers are thinking of loosening their belts, to consume more with higher salary? We are in it together, in the same boat? Anyone hallucinating?

Crazy Rich Asians - The Awakening

I read some of the reviews about Crazy Rich Asians to find out what people were crazy about. Here are a few paragraphs from a Bourree Lam, she called herself American, about what was so startling to her about this movie. It is about Asian men, that there are Asian men that are really men, just like Joe and John, that can be desirable, and can speak and believe it or not, are human beans on this world. Before this Crazy Rich Asians,  there were no Asian men, only white men. Wow! What a great discovery.

This is a little bit from her article in Yahoo News titled Crazy Ripped Asians.

'This has hardly been the case in America.

Before the 1900s, Asian males were often portrayed as dangerous to Western society. In the era of the Chinese Exclusion Act and Yellow Peril, Asian men were depicted as cartoonishly cold-hearted villains. Anxieties that Asian men may marry white American women led to racist portrayals of Asian men as evil, feminine, and generally undesirable. “The Asian male figure was conjured as an Other who is threatening and dangerous at worst, and distasteful and dismissible at best,” said L.S. Kim, an associate professor of film and digital media at UC Santa Cruz, of that era.... But I posit that there’s one aspect of the movie that we can all agree on: I’m talking about the abs. All one thousand of them.

Serving up male bodies to gawk at is one of the oldest tropes of the rom-com genre. These movies are made for swooning, and swoon we did. Have you ever seen so many Asian Adonises who have misplaced their tops in one movie? Singapore is known for its tropical climate, but is it codified that a man must spend half of his waking hours (and 100% of his sleeping ones) airing out his upper half?

It’s not superficial, either. This display of Asian male beauty is fighting a decades-old narrative in America, a racist one where Asian male bodies were either portrayed as made for kung-fu or made for being laughed at. If you know the history, you might end seeing the abs in Crazy Rich Asians in a slightly sharper light.'

This Bourree Lam must have swooned over the male Asian bodies that she had never seen before all her adult life. Is she 25 or 35? She could not be older as she remembered this western bias existed only for decades, not centuries. Where had she been? Oh in America of course, she is American. And there were no Asian men in America, or at least in her life or in her association. 

This is not the only awakening. Since Bruce Lee kicked open the white men's only door of Hollywood nothing really happened after that. Perhaps if Bruce Lee could carry on kicking for a few more years, think would have changed a bit more. It was like they repaired and put back the broken white men's door after Bruce Lee left.

It seemed that every writer or actor/actress, I mean of Asian origin has suddenly woken up to the fact that there were no Asians in Hollywood other than the stereotyped, very nerdy, no character, the cartoons, or kung fu fighters. They have awakened, they have removed their blinkers, that Asians are also human beans but strangely non existence in Hollywood or in the USA!

Wow, unbelieveable. This is a great scientific discovery since they discovered the theory of gravity or homo sapien originated from apes. Now every Asian actor/actress is standing up and asking the same question that they did not think should be asked in the world of movie making.  But this is the world of the bananas. They did not know the existence of Bollywood and the movie world of Hongkong, Taiwan and now China. These movie industries don't exist or don't count. Their only world of make belief is the Hollywood stereotyped of James Bond, Tom Cruise, and who else, their white gods. And they were comfortable living in this world of white gods and nothing else. Now why would Hollywood want to cast Asians when their stories are western and catering to a western audience?

This is perhaps the greatest happenings of Crazy Rich Asians, the awakening of the bananas, that before this movie, they don't exist and they did not know. Now they know. But unfortunately this is going to be another flash in the pan incident and would be over when the light is out.

Electricity tariff in Singapore versus oil price

Hsien Loong startled the audience of his National Day speech asking the people to ‘kee chiu’ if they think electricity tariff is lower than 10 years ago. Many got it wrong, believing that electricity today is higher instead of lower. He then showed two graphs, one on electricity tariff and another on oil price to show the complementarity of the movements of the two items. When oil price is up, tariff is up. The audience was astonished that electricity price today was lower than 10 years ago. Hsien Loong supplement his discovery with this statement:

‘”Describing the issue of electricity tariffs as “more complicated”, he noted that the current rate of 23.65 cents/kwh is more affordable than it was in the third quarter of 2008 at 25.07 cents/kwh.

’––Singapore’s electricity tariffs are dependent on the fluctuations in oil prices as the nation uses natural gas – all imported – to generate almost all of its electricity, he explained.’  Yahoo News

Many in the audience or watching the TV must be amazed for seeing that electricity tariff has actually gone down and their perception was wrong, that electricity price is high.  Here are the two charts.

For flashing the two charts in a speech and giving the audience very little time to ponder and understand what they were shown is a clever way of getting one’s point across. Now we have a bit more time reading the charts and see what they meant and whether they really made sense. Yes, the tariff is lower today, 23.65 cents against 25.07 cents. What about the relative oil prices for the respective time? I could not figure out the scale of the above oil price chart. To me the numbers were funny. Below is a 10 year oil price chart by Macrotrends.net. Oil price peaked in 2008 to US$140 per barrel and hit a low of US$30 in 2009 and below US$30 in 2015.

Oil price in 2008 was $140 per barrel against $60 per barrel today. If electricity tariff is to fluctuate in sync with oil price, when the oil price is halved, should not the electricity tariff be halved as well or somewhere near there? The 23.65/25.07 numbers showed that electricity tariff has fallen by 1.42 cents or 5.66%! Should it not be bigger for the 80/140 or 57%  difference in price of oil? The latter is the percentage of change  when oil price fell from $140 to $60.

Yes they both swing in the same direction but the quantum is vastly different. Does it make sense that one changed by 57% and one by 1.42%?

What is the problem with the numbers? What is the problem with the charts? Should the people be happy that electricity prices have fallen by 1.42%? Or should it go down by a bigger percentage? Why is the fall so miniscule?

The above chart shows the prices of oil over the last 10 years. The chart Hsien Loong presented showed the prices of electricity of the same period but the fluctuation is not more than 5 cents each way.

Mahathir just gives Singapore a second chance

Mahathir has cancelled the US$20b East Coast HSR in Malaysia. Without this rail link, the super port in Malacca and the ports on the east coast would become white elephants and likely to be cold storage. The whole concept of these two mega projects is to make Malaysia the gateway to China and Europe by high speed train. Now the train would stop in Thailand, likely at the Isthmus of Kra. Cancelling the East Coast HSR would mean cancelling the port projects on both sides of peninsula Malaysia as well. All other projects linked to the BRI would become meaningless and likely to end abruptly. The Kra Canal project would take precedence now for China to by pass the Straits of Malacca and the port of Singapore.

The Kra Canal project is very costly and would take years to contruct and build and is a project that China would not want to commit if given a choice. This is a window of opportunity for Singapore to reposition itself as a major shipping node in the BRI. As far as Malaysia is concerned, even though Mahathir said he supports the BRI, Malaysia is out of the game. Whether Singapore can ease its way into the vacuum left by Malaysia would depend on what the Singapore govt is going to do to assure China that its interests would not be compromised by the American military presence in Singapore.

Here comes the tricky question. What is Singapore going to do to balance the American presence in the city state that virtually controls the shipping through the Malacca Strait? Two obvious choice, by allowing the Americans to continue to be in the island and also allow the Chinese to have similar access for their warships under the same terms as the Americans, nothing more nothing less. Another option is to ask the Americans to vacate Changi which is going to be a tough ride. Once in, the Americans would not be easy to leave this strategic little corner, just like their presence in Japan, South Korea and Iraq. They would not leave without a fight.

The future of Tuas mega port and Singapore's shipping and logistic industry would depend on how Singapore plays its cards. China has other options other than the Kra Canal. Qwadar in Pakistan and Myanmar ports would be fully developed to take on the role of channelling oil from the Middle East to China, by passing the Straits of Malacca if all else failed. Singapore must not think that China has no where else to go but come begging to use Tuas. This is a great opportunity that Singapore must seize and take full advantage of before Mahathir knows what he is doing and change his mind or step down and Anwar takes over to revive a dying Malaysian economy that is being bypassed by China's BRI.

For the moment Mahathir has chosen to go it alone. If Singapore is smart, it must quickly chope the vacated seat by selling to China all the favourable terms it can offer for Chinese ships to come calling at Tuas. Singapore would not have another chance if this window of opportunity is closed again. And it can close as quickly as it is opened now.

Would Singapore seize the moment and turn it to its favour?