All because of Yap Yen Yen

Good for you that the prosecutors aren't appealing. I never followed your case closely and my interest wasn't even you but how CPIB conducted investigations (so disappointing) and eventually your wife Yap Yen Yen. She is a most remarkable woman. Indeed as you aptly said, "words cannot convey my gratitude to my wife". Welcome back to the club of men who do  not cheat on their wives and for those who learned the hardest way, you will cherish it far better.

From the look of it, most Singaporeans want to support Yen Yen. We want her to be successful in forgiving you. As far as I can tell you seem to have come out of this a new man. So I hope the Police Force would take you back despite your commissioner calling your behavior reprehensible.

A forward looking Police organization must have the wisdom to ask and judge if the new you is an asset. Again to me it helps so much that Yen Yen was steadfastly there for you. Now why not the Police because we are backing Yen Yen. The "we" is the reason for the Police to even exist in the first place.

I haven't even mentioned your name yet in this post and I want to do that when you have done something which I can use these bits and bytes to remember with joy.

I am choosing to look ahead and I believe I am not in the minority. Let's hope that the Police Force would do the same. The fraternity of lawyers did it for Glenn Knight, why not you?

I think I will make another post when the civil service disciplinary panel  is done. I vaguely recall an earlier post which I wrote about someone sending me an email that you have enemies in the Force trying to do you in. We shall see.

P.S. Often doctors who have been critically ill as patients return to their jobs as more caring and effective doctors. I think this experience potentially made him a better police officer isn't it? I hope the Police Force is not backward looking or worse vindictive.

Update: June 13 7:10am

This is utter madness. The ultimate price of turning your anger inwards. The polar opposite of what Yen Yen had chosen to do.

The last time I blogged about turning your anger on yourself wasn't very long ago. That was when owners of blogs and socio-political sites chose to go dark for 24 hours.














Update: June 14 9:05am

The sentence is "excessive" were Peter Lim from the private sector.

There is nothing to show that he is a new man from this trying times he has gone through. Nothing from his attitude to support that and he also doesn't have the benefit of a wife like Yap Yen Yen. Does he deserve one? To add insult to injury there were two other women, but the most unforgettable about him was this: that he said the woman begged him for sex. Despicable. I hope the appeal judge add to his sentence.

Blk 538 suggests PAP never learn

In one stroke the revelation of Ng Kok Khim's possible role in the hawker centres cleaning spat has put what many of us feel was an unnecessary distraction and waste of time onto many people's radars. Smells like a suitable sequel to AIM-gate.

I don't care about small quarrels over who pays for cleaning. May be I should care if the problem turns chronic but we were far from that.

The papers had to report the quarrel because it was as newsworthy as the maiden MPS when WP won the GRC. It was a significant event in our political history. The rest of Singapore wait to see if WP can run a GRC well especially when they quietly showed they could do it cheaper than the PAP. For years and that was pretty long ago, my parents' paid $135 or thereabouts for conservancy for their apartment in Braddell View. That paid for covered parking, a club house, swimming pool, security posts etc. That's less than what you had to pay when you add season parking and regular conservancy charges if you lived in HDB next door without so many extras. Oh yes, I was also paying more than my parents at Pine Grove, which is a fair comparison to Braddell View and I only had open parking and the standard conservancy services from HDB. I thought that wasn't right but what could we do? With WP now running a GRC and two SMCs we have alternatives to compare against PAP TCs performance. I am forced to conclude that the PAP do not welcome WP coming into the picture to keep them honest. Now despite AIM-gate, they could very well again continue to use despicable means to make life difficult for the WP and by that keep trying to deny Singaporeans their freedom to choose who could represent them.

AIM-gate would be well remembered into the next GE and beyond. Blk 538 would be forgotten if  not for silly Mr. Ng Kok Khim. It is yet another lesson to the ruling party to play clean and fair which I am beginning to wonder they are capable of  learning.

A side point. If I were the MSM in this new environment I would take every such opportunity to show readers that I am not pro-PAP and strenuously prove myself to be fair in my reports. Their credibility and long term viability as media companies depend on seizing such opportunities. I haven't seen today's papers yet and I wonder how they will present Ng Kok Khim to readers. I am going to do that right now.

Update: 6:40am

This is all I could find from the ST about this issue. No Ng Kok Khim anywhere but plenty of visitors came to see him in my post yesterday. Mind you, I don't promote my blog and yet they found their way here. Imagine how much more traffic other sites with the same info. must have attracted. As newsworthy as AIM but not yet for ST. I am trying to cut them some slack but their competitors unless the government stop them would not be so generous.

Ng Kok Khim in the hawker centre cleaning spat

Thanks to TRE for uncovering this. I believe many of us are tired of this unending spat but with evidence like this we need to return once more.

Mr. Ng Kok Khim is the Chairman of the Blk 538 Market Association is also a PAP member and PA grassroot leader. Very curious isn't it?

Such people are only serving to take us to new depths of cynicism.

And someone better informed and following this more closely put it best.

Vladimir Tepes Sylvia Lim; Vivian Balakrishnan: I am very perturbed by this news. It appears that a certain ng kok khim, supposedly the Chairman of the Blk 538 Market Association, has called for a quotation for ATL Maintenance to carry out high level cleaning without going through the AHPETC. This dovetails nicely with what Ms. Sylvia Lim has said. 

While I'm very sure that mr. ng must have had very good reasons for doing so, nonetheless it is very troubling that he did not come forward to clarify the issue and instead allowed it to be blown out of all proportion. 

I believe you when you said that the NEA and the hawkers are honest people. That being the case, can you get mr. ng to clear this matter up? I'm sure you'll have no problems getting him to do it since he's a pap grassroots leader. It's distracting you and the NEA from far more pressing issues like the current dengue epidemic.

2 hours ago · Like · 18

Update: 5pm

Wah Lao! Just realized so many people come see this post. Now I am waiting for MDA to issue me a take down notice. LOL!

Update: 9:35pm

Excellent infographic here giving a bird's eye view of the issue. Unlike me blogging only for myself and family, these are the good people who blogs for all of us.

My OC from NS days passed away

Sad to see in the papers today that my former OC had passed away.

He was a reasonable and kind fellow. I was one of a handful of NSmen among mostly regulars. He seemed to think I had aptitude for the tech and systems stuff and would get me to research and explore various ways to do things differently. It was there I conceptualized 'ratios'  to measure the performance of our unit only to be surprised that the accountants were doing that de-rigueur when I had to take a course in accounting at university. I had an interesting time in the army thanks to him. Pity he left so soon.

Hawker & Benefactor: Day in the Life of Toh Ah Wat

Link to 'Day in the Life of Toh Ah Wat: Hawker and Benefactor'

For the first time something the PM shared makes my day :-) Just only yesterday I was blogging about the big(-hearted) portions NSmen get from Mr Tan.

It isn't just the story of Toh Ah Wat that had engrossed me. I can see images in my mind these things happening across our many hawker centres. That's what makes it special.

People are the same everywhere. My first example in this blog happened to be American. What is unique is how it is expressed in our own style and unlike the ST story on Mr. Tan this one on Mr. Toh captures that quality. I hope ST, yahoo, Breakfast Network etc., notice too.

Bernanke's right view on meritocratic winners

Here is Ben Bernanke's ten suggestions to Princeton grads. I pay most of my attention to his remarks on meritocracy.


Quoting from his third point:

3. The concept of success leads me to consider so-called meritocracies and their implications. We have been taught that meritocratic institutions and societies are fair. Putting aside the reality that no system, including our own, is really entirely meritocratic, meritocracies may be fairer and more efficient than some alternatives. But fair in an absolute sense? Think about it. A meritocracy is a system in which the people who are the luckiest in their health and genetic endowment; luckiest in terms of family support, encouragement, and, probably, income; luckiest in their educational and career opportunities; and luckiest in so many other ways difficult to enumerate--these are the folks who reap the largest rewards. The only way for even a putative meritocracy to hope to pass ethical muster, to be considered fair, is if those who are the luckiest in all of those respects also have the greatest responsibility to work hard, to contribute to the betterment of the world, and to share their luck with others. As the Gospel of Luke says (and I am sure my rabbi will forgive me for quoting the New Testament in a good cause): "From everyone to whom much has been given, much will be required; and from the one to whom much has been entrusted, even more will be demanded" (Luke 12:48, New Revised Standard Version Bible). Kind of grading on the curve, you might say.

Because so often and so many of us are so much consumed by fear we expend all our energies keeping our positions or trying to do better rather than giving another a helping hand. Where is the capacity to do as Bernanke advise except for the negligible few, too small to make an impact against the forces pulling us in the other direction.

I am afraid we have over paid for our present success, which is neither wise nor durable. Moral persuasion by ministers cut no ice because there is no skin in the game. Heng Swee Keat might have gone further than most  of his colleagues from the changes he is bringing to MOE but without the confidence and courage to purge the sacred cows of exams, the inertia of the civil servants with their poverty of imagination, his right ideas can only stay on track with much effort. Much energy goes into producing so little output and temporary results. I am seeing it with my kids' and their schoolmates experience with the latest, "Values in Action" program. By and large it is impossible to take students, teachers and the principals minds away from exams grades. In fact the highest scoring ones, considered the ablest, plan their lives around them. It's a fools' game which time will prove. For where your heart's is, there is your treasure. It is the old heart and old treasure with an updated look. We try to design luck out of our system, hence the obsession with tests. Willfully blind, we pretend that we have succeeded especially for those who had  'meritocratically' reached the top. If in your mind luck has no role in your success, you have no obligation to the rest. Guess what we are ending up with - Those who have more 'merit' demands the lion's share because they had earned it.

Everything we do we are creating a society of a few winners with many losers. How sustainable is that? We are doing something about this but with more show than substance. We have no courage to re-admit good and back luck into our education system. We forget that without some unpredictability we cannot truly build characters. We also cannot give people the hope that they can do better because they tried.

I guess I have to come back and rewrite this sometime. I am trying to squeeze ten times the thoughts into one time the number of words. An impossible task.

Moving on from cleaning hawker centres

Nobody will come out looking good in that tiresome quarrel over the cleaning of the hawker centres. I bet most of us are confused including those involved in that unending spat. Dont' they know that is not the game to play?

The latest initiative by PAP Town Councils is the new game. Sure, it is unequal competition but would the WP be able to step up to this unfair plate? Life is not fair and despite the odds stacked against them, the WP have come this far.






















Update: June 11, 7:15am

Both sides have chosen to be losers in this quarrel. The wise one is the first one who do not respond to the bait. Vivian Balakrishnan has been gifted with the opportunity. Would he respond wisely?