"One of the few good things about modern times: If you die horribly on television, you will not have died in vain. You will have entertained us." - Kurt Vonnegut

Random Playlist Song: Mozart - Piano Concerto No 23 in A, KV488 - 03- Allegro Assai (Vienna Philharmonic - Bohm, Pollini)

Although the Twenty-third Concerto is famed for its graceful melodies and elegant structure, it was not published during Mozart's lifetime. This fact might lead one to imagine that Viennese publishers were seriously short-sighted, which in some instances they certainly were, but in this case, they seem to be blameless, for apparently Mozart himself withheld the piece from publication. In a letter to his father, he cites it as being amongst "the compositions that I keep for myself or for a small circle of music-lovers and connoisseurs, who promise not to let them out of their hands." This special concerto was not a piece that he was willing to trade for mere money. Even when his finances were at their worst, he would not sell this score, but rather retained it as a personal treasure. It was music that had, for him, a deeper meaning, yet behind his decision might have lurked a measure of the showman's judgement. Four decades later, Paganini would also withhold works from publication, lest other violinists start performing his own trademark compositions. Like his later colleague, Mozart might have thought to keep this wonderful work from the hands of his competitors. If you wanted to hear this concerto, you had to attend a concert by its creator. [Classical Music Pages]

***

How the CPF led to property speculation (not written by me)

I think we have to agree but what we mean by 'choice'. Filbert seems to think that as long as there is no overt coercion, any choices you make are based on your own free will, so you ought to take full responsibility for it. For instance, if the government decides to force all males to do NS, and that's not enough to force you to migrate at the expense of great financial and psychological trauma - well, too bad, you chose to stay in Singapore. If the government makes you learn your 'official' mother tongue instead of another language and you refuse to go into private schooling which would cost 50 times more, well that's your choice. If you speak up against the government, knowing that you could be sued for defamation even if you were making legitimate objections, hey, that's your choice. After all, you knew the costs involved when you decided to make those silly remarks about aid to Indonesia, or investments in China. So because you were a free agent, and you knew the rules, it was entirely your fault. No matter what the rules were, and no matter whether you had a choice to play by them.

I'm no philosopher, but something seems wrong with that.

Let's say you have a government which says, "You have to save a certain proportion of your money, and you can either a. leave it in your CPF account and get nominal returns of 2.4% which won't be enough for your retirement or b. invest it in real estate and there might be a chance that your property will appreciate, and besides we encourage you do to this with rebates and first-time buyer policies, and so on."

Under option a., you will have barely enough for retirement. Under option b., you get a house, and if house prices fall, you still won't be doing so well retirement-wise, but there's a relatively good chance that your property will appreciate, and you could possibly sell it off and make a bundle. You might even do well enough so that you can go beyond your Minimum Sum and pay for a nice retirement holiday. What would you choose?

So everybody rushes out and buys property, raising property prices and confirming initial optimistic hunches. Many buy two, even. Huge speculation in the real estate market escalates. By the way, you aren't restricted by how much you can spend on housing - you can run your Ordinary Account to zero if you wish. You can buy second properties with your CPF. You also don't have to buy non-residential housing, any office space would do! By the way, that also drives house prices up for everyone else, raising the cost of living substantially.

Of course, some people enter the market at the wrong time, make the wrong decisions etc. It's not so bad if it's just the unlucky gamblers who are bumming out, but when most of your ageing cohort is playing the same game as well? So much for a central "retirement providing" fund.

So the real problem comes when you make those choices, a. and b. Maybe the government shouldn't be the uber-insurer so that it guarantees that no matter what happens whether you choose a. or b., but it should make option a. rather more attractive so that people have to think really hard about selecting option b. In other words, you should be really confident about being able to take on this additional risk - comfortably - before buying that piece of prime land. Now we have more options available to us: unit trusts, equity, and so on, so we might choose option a. so that we can earn bigger and better returns, and have a diversified portfolio. But what about the generations before us? The CPFIS only came into being in 1997. That option just didn't exist in the past.

So the real issue is in designing a system that works, and giving people the right incentives that will ensure people do not simply have it in their best interests to take the riskiest option by default. The system should also consider other crucial domestic markets - such as the housing market - and ensure that a retirement scheme does not create distortions because of perverse incentives. This is especially so when the government controls a huge chunk of the supply of residential housing, and, through the CPF, influences the demand strongly. The Singapore government also technically owns all land in Singapore (all land is technically on lease .) A lot of the 99 year lease holdings are expiring soon with rather marked uncertainty as to what the government is going to do, so in private property markets clearing the air might nudge these property prices up a little.

[More on the Young Republic Yahoo Group]

***

My God Problem

"No, most scientists are not interested in taking on any of the mighty cornerstones of Christianity. They complain about irrational thinking, they despise creationist "science," they roll their eyes over America's infatuation with astrology, telekinesis, spoon bending, reincarnation, and UFOs, but toward the bulk of the magic acts that have won the imprimatur of inclusion in the Bible, they are tolerant, respectful, big of tent. Indeed, many are quick to point out that the Catholic Church has endorsed the theory of evolution and that it sees no conflict between a belief in God and the divinity of Jesus and the notion of evolution by natural selection. If the pope is buying it, the reason for most Americans' resistance to evolution must have less to do with religion than with a lousy advertising campaign.

So, on the issue of mainstream monotheistic religions and the irrationality behind many of religion's core tenets, scientists often set aside their skewers, their snark, and their impatient demand for proof, and instead don the calming cardigan of a a kiddie-show host on public television. They reassure the public that religion and science are not at odds with one another, but rather that they represent separate "magisteria," in the words of the formerly alive and even more formerly scrappy Stephen Jay Gould. Nobody is going to ask people to give up their faith, their belief in an everlasting soul accompanied by an immortal memory of every soccer game their kids won, every moment they spent playing fetch with the dog. Nobody is going to mock you for your religious beliefs. Well, we might if you base your life decisions on the advice of a Ouija board; but if you want to believe that someday you'll be seated at a celestial banquet with your long-dead father to your right and Jane Austen to your left-and that she'll want to talk to you for another hundred million years or more—that's your private reliquary, and we're not here to jimmy the lock...

I admit I'm surprised whenever I encounter a religious scientist. How can a bench-hazed Ph.D., who might in an afternoon deftly purée a colleague's PowerPoint presentation on the nematode genome into so much fish chow, then go home, read in a two-thousand-year-old chronicle, riddled with internal contradictions, of a meta-Nobel discovery like "Resurrection from the Dead," and say, gee, that sounds convincing? Doesn't the good doctor wonder what the control group looked like?"


Inventing a Religion by Dr. M.D. Magee - "In the nineteenth century, the Japanese were an irreligious people and admitted it themselves. Fukuzawa wrote: “I lack a religious nature, and had never believed in any religion.” Educated Japanese saw the educated European as superstitious, and preoccupied with other-worldly matters. Japanese could not comprehend how supposed spiritual leaders like the Pope, or the Archbishop of Canterbury, could be so revered and important. Yet the bureaucrats saw some advantage in it. They manufactured a religion from the turn of the twentieth century to serve the purposes of their rulers—Mikado-worship."

***

How to Deconstruct Almost Anything

"Professors of Literature or History or Cultural Studies in their professional life find themselves communicating principally with other professors of Literature or History or Cultural Studies. They also, of course, communicate with students, but students don't really count. Graduate students are studying to be professors themselves and so are already part of the in-crowd. Undergraduate students rarely get a chance to close the feedback loop, especially at the so called "better schools" (I once spoke with a Harvard professor who told me that it is quite easy to get a Harvard undergraduate degree without ever once encountering a tenured member of the faculty inside a classroom; I don't know if this is actually true but it's a delightful piece of slander regardless). They publish in peer reviewed journals, which are not only edited by their peers but published for and mainly read by their peers (if they are read at all). Decisions about their career advancement, tenure, promotion, and so on are made by committees of their fellows. They are supervised by deans and other academic officials who themselves used to be professors of Literature or History or Cultural Studies. They rarely have any reason to talk to anybody but themselves -- occasionally a Professor of Literature will collaborate with a Professor of History, but in academic circles this sort of interdisciplinary work is still considered sufficiently daring and risquÝ as to be newsworthy.

What you have is rather like birds on the Galapagos islands -- an isolated population with unique selective pressures resulting in evolutionary divergence from the mainland population. There's no reason you should be able to understand what these academics are saying because, for several generations, comprehensibility to outsiders has not been one of the selective criteria to which they've been subjected. What's more, it's not particularly important that they even be terribly comprehensible to each other, since the quality of academic work, particularly in the humanities, is judged primarily on the basis of politics and cleverness. In fact, one of the beliefs that seems to be characteristic of the postmodernist mind set is the idea that politics and cleverness are the basis for all judgments about quality or truth, regardless of the subject matter or who is making the judgment. A work need not be right, clear, original, or connected to anything outside the group. Indeed, it looks to me like the vast bulk of literary criticism that is published has other works of literary criticism as its principal subject, with the occasional reference to the odd work of actual literature tossed in for flavoring from time to time.

The basic enterprise of contemporary literary criticism is actually quite simple. It is based on the observation that with a sufficient amount of clever handwaving and artful verbiage, you can interpret any piece of writing as a statement about anything at all. [Ed: Emphasis mine] The broader movement that goes under the label "postmodernism" generalizes this principle from writing to all forms of human activity, though you have to be careful about applying this label, since a standard postmodernist tactic for ducking criticism is to try to stir up metaphysical confusion by questioning the very idea of labels and categories. "Deconstruction" is based on a specialization of the principle, in which a work is interpreted as a statement about itself, using a literary version of the same cheap trick that Kurt Gðdel used to try to frighten mathematicians back in the thirties."

What follows is a delightful step-by-step procedure for deconstructing almost anything.

***

Sex Among the Lotus: 2500 Years of Chinese Erotic Obsession

"Eras represented will range 'from the explicit imagery of 200 BC tomb tiles and sexual escapades of Tang dynasty emperors to the latest pornography hot off China's commercial presses.' And visitors will see such rare objects as 'a 10th century rock-crystal penis, exquisitely painted pillow books created to educate young brides and concubines, an extraordinary selection of shoes for bound feet, and remarkable photographs of sex workers from Shanghai's notorious red light districts.'

In response to what single piece best represents the show, Vollmer's response was, 'The delights and excitement of concealed and revealed sexuality are present in a spectacular small ivory sculpture of a woman probably made for a man's desk. Measuring about five inches long, this exquisitely-carved ivory woman reclines under an inlaid lacquer coverlet. Even when exposed after the coverlet is removed, the woman's erotic appeal is further emphasized by the fact that she is partially dressed. She wears a bib-like bodice, tiny shoes and leggings -- leaving something more for the mind's eye.'

'China has a long history focused on sexuality and erotica that stimulated libidos. Secondly, the erotic obsession with women's feet is both foreign and familiar as well as repellent and fascinating, but it provides a singular insight into Chinese culture'"


Asian Values (don't forget the Indians and the Kama Sutra) must be celebrated and perpetuated to strengthen the moral fibre of our society and preventing it from falling into Western decadence!

***

There's a shop called "John 3:16 Photo Supplies" in Funan Centre. Wth?!

***

Jushi Sentai France Five - Fan-made Sentai... in French!

Computer Rage - "Rather than bottling up the frustration with technology and entering into "techno-frustration denial," we propose to let the user vent in safe, controlled, and vicarious ways."

The Firefox religion - "One of the questions I’m asked most frequently by innocent observers of the Firefox phenomenon is: “What’s all the fuss about? It just surfs the web.”"

Microsoft: Legit Windows or no updates - "Aiming to crack down on counterfeit software, Microsoft plans later this year to require customers to verify that their copy of Windows is genuine before downloading security patches and other add-ons to the operating system."
You die. All die!!!

FRBSF: Economic Letter - Does Singapore Invest Too Much? (5/15/97) - "Of all the world's nations, Singapore seems to be a prime candidate for excess saving and investment. Singapore's saving and investment rates are the highest in the world, and much of this saving and investment is mandated by the government. I find that we cannot rule out the possibility that Singapore invests too much."

SGMassage.COM - The "massage" industry in Singapore goes online!