"The world is a tragedy to those who feel, but a comedy to those who think." - Horace Walpole

Random Playlist Song: Trevor Pinnock - The English Concert and Choir: Handel - Messiah - Behold, A Virgin Shall Conceive (contralto, recitative)

Behold, a virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and shall call his name Emmanuel, God with us.


Random Trivia bit: The first description of acupuncture is in "The Yellow Emperor's Classic of Internal Medicine" ("Huang Di Nei Jing") which was once believed to date back 4,700 years, but is now thought to have been written about 2,100 years ago.

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LJ does have its occasional uses, despite my previous dissing of it, so I shall occasionally place some friends-only entries on it.

So now would be a good time for all the closet fans who use LJ to crawl out of the woodwork if they want to read something too controversial for even me to put here, exposed to the whole world (golly, just imagine that).

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Some essays I'm hosting:

Mill and Social Mandates - "If someone cheated on his income tax cleverly enough, he wouldn’t get caught, but if that same person insisted on repeating every sentence he uttered in Pig Latin, he’d be ridiculed and mocked. Ergo, past a certain point people need to be protected from society’s dictates and pressure to conform."

Continuing Discrimination Against the Dalits: Reasons and Possible Solutions - "One of the ways from preventing abuse of power is to have a rigorous selection process for policemen and those in positions of power; only those with irreproachable integrity and honesty should be allowed to assume office. In practice, however, this is certainly no easy task. Besides the difficulty of ascertaining true character, the Indian civil service faces the problem of ‘bullets-to-ballots’: it is riddled with corrupt politicians and ex-criminals, a notorious example being the ex-Minister of Railways, Laloo Prasad. The Parliament itself currently has more than 100 of 542 lawmakers facing criminal charges. Against such a background, until the Indian government takes a firm and decisive stand against corruption and criminal acts by its servants, the plight of the lower classes will continue. It is vital that improper practices be prevented and harshly dealt with; audits and checks must be conducted on a random basis by an independent government agency to root out corruption." (Abdullah)

Proud to be “SingapoLian”: A Scrutiny on the Rise of “Ah Lian” Culture in Singapore - "By ditching conformity, “Ah Lians” seem to be predicating that the taste of the masses does not equate to good taste, conversely, the taste of “Ah Lians” is not the equivalent of bad taste. The notion of good taste is challenged by “Ah Lians” and it is legitimate. This is because there is no such thing known as “genuine good taste” (Bourdieu 56). “Legitimate good taste” is nothing more than the “taste of one particular class – the ruling class” (Gronow 11)." (Huiping)

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Leninism, Asian Culture and Singapore By Chung-Kwong Yuen

Lengthy analysis published in Asian Profile, June 1999, and posted 27 Sept 1999 in response to Buruma & Mahbubani dialogue "Are Singaporeans Afraid to Think" in Straits Times.

"It is therefore no wonder that, as the country became more wealthy under the PAP government, the party organization has all but lost its identity as a political party. It has ceased to have a party ideology that is distinct from the policies of the government... The leaders, the government, the important national institutions, and the country as a whole are so closely identified with each other that it is difficult to oppose one without coming under suspicion of being also opposed to the others; being against what policies the PAP has worked out for the country is almost automatically considered unpatriotic. Further, given the career situation, it is easy to believe that the government and its network of trust encompass the best educated and most able people of Singapore; to oppose all these must mark one as a disgruntled incompetent or a deliberate spoilsport, motivated by alien thinking. The idea of several political partiesof equal legitimacy competing for power as alternative governments, seems very remote from reality.

[...]

The process of younger people being introduced into government has been called PAP's political renewal, but it seems to be renewal to a very set pattern. Political career is now viewed as an extension of a normal career, like promotion in a company from operational staff to executive, instead of an alternative calling for people with particularly political interests. There is of course nothing wrong with the idea that only well educated and already successful persons should run the country, but the set pattern does raise the question "is there any other way to succeed?" If one is not selected as a government cadet at 18, does not have an Oxbridge/Ivy League degree and is not plugged into the network at an early stage, will there be any opportunity in life of reaching high places at all? In theory, any school child has the chance to do well at A Level examinations and qualify for a government cadetship. In practice, the chance of a child from a wealthy or upper middle class family is very much greater. Its parents can afford to hire domestic tutors, have a home library, buy computers and take the child on frequent overseas trips to widen their exposure. Whereas the better off children are whisked to school in cars by parents, or in some cases by family chauffeurs, poorer children spend long periods of time each day travelling by public transport or walking. They do their homework in cramped and noisy homes, sometimes in the shops and hawker centres where their parents work as there is nobody at home to keep an eye on them, whereas wealthy families hire Filipino maids to take care of the children's needs.

[...]

Contrary to the rather priggish image of the country, sexual mores are far from conservative. Single American and European business executives working in Singapore, while they may complain about other things, rarely mention difficulty of meeting girls and getting sex, and the preference of some girls for such boyfriends has produced the term "Sarong Party Girl" to denote the type. Divorce rates, as high as those in Taiwan, Hongkong and Japan, are rising. Abortion is available on demand, with the number at nearly 15,000, in a country where live births are under 40,000 per year. The number of abortions indicates widespread pre-marital sex: since contraceptives are freely available (in fact, packets of condoms are displayed at most supermarket cashiers booths), one would guess that for every teenager that gets pregnant, at least 10 would have used contraception.

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I see two practical shortcomings in the Singapore system: the difficulty of finding imaginative leaders and its vulnerability to infiltration by foreign agents. The system has the tendency to promote conformity, and those who thrive in the system are people who are good at conforming, or at least, at appearing to be conforming. The cautious and the sly have a better chance of survival than the frank. Such survival characteristics do not however associate with the vision and real convictions that the system needs in leaders. Obedience is not the same thing as loyalty, which often requires one to speak out and point out problems. It is not surprising that, despite the vast increase in the number of well educated people and the more effective machinery and database for identifying candidates, the government has often complained of the difficulty of finding enough good people to stand for parliament, especially those with ministerial potential.

There is a security risk in the practice of recruiting cadets and sending them for overseas studies before posting them to fast rising career tracks, because a foreign government can easily identify promising targets for agent recruitment. A combination of the cadet's admiration for the host country, money, career assistance, participation in exciting secret ventures, and blackmail since young people living alone in a foreign country could easily commit indiscretions, may be used towards recruitment success."

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Greek Lawyers Threaten To Sue Over Gay Alexander Film - "The upcoming film Alexander and Oliver Stone its director are being threatened with a lawsuit for portraying Alexander the Great as a bisexual. A group of Greek lawyers announced Friday that they have served Stone and Warner Bros film studios with "an extrajudicial note""
Considering that the evidence that he was bisexual is better than that for Jesus being gay, their fury is curious. Besides which, he was Macedonian, not Greek.

CacheLogic - P2P Traffic Analysis - BitTorrent alone took up a third of bandwith.

Cook's Thesaurus: Exotic Tropical Fruit - "feijoa = feijoda = pineapple guava. Notes: To eat feijoas, just cut them in half and scoop out the pulp with a spoon. They also make terrific preserves and syrups. Look for them in large supermarkets. If they're hard when you buy them, allow them to ripen at room temperature until they give a bit when you squeeze them, then store them in the refrigerator."

Vocal clip of a vocal trainer called Brett Manning, the techniques of whom, taught in a US$199 home program, supposedly give one a 5-octave range. Allegedly, he can sing as high as Mariah Carey.

Singapore: past, present and future - by Francis Seow - "Singapore’s chief justice – believe it or not -- receives more than the combined salaries of the Lord Chancellor of England, the Chief Justices of Australia, Canada, and United States Supreme Court."
I think it would be more effective, at least from a pedagogical point of view, if he did not make his bitterness and hatred obvious, leading people to think that he had a hidden (or otherwise, as the case might be) agenda. His analysis of the weaknesses of the opposition, however, is surprisingly incisive.