Japan nuclear crisis and our Elected Presidency

I feel a growing sense of unease as I read this article from the NYT, "In Nuclear Crisis, Crippling Mistrust". I wasn't thinkig of Japan, but what Singapore someday might face. I wasn't thinking of a local nuclear crisis. Just any crisis fits the bill. What about the way we had been managing the floods? The explanations from PUB and MEWR are clearly unacceptable. To me they are clueless and feckless.

Next I thought of the Elected President. He could be easily overwhelmed as PM Naoto Kan was. I am starting to have doubts this institution could work. One President, his council of advisers against the government and civil service.The President can be easily overwhelmed. I think the President ought to be the custodian of government transparency. He is presently not. We need new ideas and strategies for growing transparency of governance here. How much accountability can you achieve without adequate transparency?



From the article:

“It’s more of an emotional thing,” Mr. Matsumoto said of Mr. Kan. “He never trusts bureaucrats.”


That is a legacy from Mr. Kan’s stint as health minister in the mid-1990s, when he became wildly popular after exposing his own ministry’s use of blood tainted with H.I.V., which led to hundreds of hemophiliacs dying of AIDS. Mr. Kan found that bureaucrats and pharmaceutical company officials had long known of the tainted blood.

Fish & Co @ Clementi Mall

Had lunch today at Fish & Co @ Clementi Mall. This is a reminder not to return. Prior to this, we had lunch by them at their AMK mall outlet. It was the first day of CNY and options for lunch were limited. I remarked to them that the ang mohs do not know how to prepare fish. I repeated it again this time.

Except my portion, the rest of the family had plenty of leftovers.

Gimmick: They provide an iPad to present their menu. We didn't use that high tech option to place our orders.

Growell Shampoo - Excellent

This "Growell" shampoo is excellent. We just bought the 500ml size one for about $22 at Unity Pharmacy just now. Wifey had bought a small one to try on her business trip recently and gave it the thumbs up.

Female Politicians and Sex Scandals

Found this in the ST today, "Why female politicians rarely get caught up in sex scandals"

I have always worried about people vying for powerful political positions for the very same reasons Debbie Walsh has suggested here. Look at all the trappings and behavior. Even low class MPs have advanced parties when they go visiting residents homes. Very good for the ego eh?

Meanwhile the new MP for Hougang from the WP spent five hours with a bunch of young volunteers cleaning out a horrifically dirty HDB apartment. PAP, cut the stupid pomp, show and ceremony. You are helping to attract the wrong guys to political office. After LKY is gone, I bet you will have your sex scandals. What holy orders like Dr. Goh alluded to in 1984?

We should have more women in the Cabinet.

It is not a good turn when we start questioning which MPs and Ministers are in this for the ego. Again, we are becoming like any other very imperfect city in the first world. Perhaps there are always far too many powerful positions and not enough good people to fill them. This is what human history had always pointed out. We will need the special few to keep the many other potentially dishonest ones on a short leash.

A pic of success for now

A picture of success and answered prayer for now for me :-)

OK in life there will be reversals as much as we wish against it. We keep pushing.

I often remember the other one how had lost his wife in the most tragic circumstances many years ago. By faith there would be a happy reunion. Some of us must have staked this before the Lord.

Many Joseph stories in the making here.

Obedient Wives Club

Put aside moral and family values. Don't think about them. View the problem pragmatically. Lean on what the latest in Evolution or Biology we have learned about our specie, the thrusts of the OWC can be seen as pragmatic but totally wrong.

We are moral beings. Science reduces us to animals plus and that is just good Science not stepping beyond its boundaries. But to use Science only to inform our actions, that is absolute foolishness.

No, the OWC claim to be Islamic. Many Muslims here are protesting. Islam is just a convenient cover. This whole idea of the OWC reduce our society to that of a lions pride. Brings us closer to the animal kingdom and away from the fact that God made us in his own image.

A wife, the Bible teaches us is to be loved first and foremost. These guys get the order wrong. Sex arises from love. Therefore sex happen infrequently if there is less love, but men have no problems with having loveless sex. This will take sex in the wrong direction, turning it into a narcotic with no good end. Perverted and cruel sex and eventually death from the pursuit of shallow and unsatisfying pleasure is the outcome. Have you seen a hedonistic king or emperor ever satisfied with his huge harem? It is always more is better. Never ends.

In my parents' time, I suspect husbands practically order their wives to give them sex. To policy makers this create a more stable society - Think LKY. With the rising status and growing economic power of women, wives often refuse sex to their husbands. Yes, if you do not already know, marriage is often more about money than love. In God's eyes, we often do not know what love is, and God is waiting for us one by one to learn it. He gave us the story of the Prodigal Son didn't he? OWC types take us away from God or Islam. It is evil.

Husbands love your wives; Wives submit to your husbands as in the Bible. If you love, you do not demand submission. If a wife submit for her risen Lord's sake, she does not ask to be loved by her lousy husband. Forget it, uninvited guests reading this don't know what I am talking about because there is so little faith around. As I am not the wife, that is not my business to care. My privilege and duty is to love. If loved a wife might submit, but her submission or in the context here, sex is not why you love her in the first place. You love her for the very same reasons Mother Teresa loved. That's why God hates divorce. It is so not him.

I have been too idealistic. To be practical, do not exceed your faith or you would end up far worse than giving in to your lust. Don't be stupid. Don't try to look good. Where sin abounds, grace will also abound. If you pretend to be good, where are you going to find grace? I think prostitutes especially the unwilling ones are finding grace far faster than their unholy clients. So many of them say their work make them feel dirty.

Paul was right all along. It is better to be single. Of course, he was aware that he wasn't being practical. So most people should marry, love and submit to each other. It is a God given way to find him.

Revisiting "Wisdom of Crowds" with NaviMap

I am re-reading portions of James Suroweicki, "Wisdom of Crowds"

The Wisdom of Crowds

http://www.amazon.com/Wisdom-Crowds-Jame...

In this fascinating book, New Yorker business columnist James Surowiecki explores a deceptively simple idea: Large groups of people are smarter than an elite few, no matter how brilliant–better at solving problems, fostering innovation, coming to wise decisions, even predictin...

The crowd is smarter than any group of experts if the following conditions are met.

(1) diversity of opinion;
(2) independence of members from one another;
(3) decentralization; and
(4) a good method for aggregating opinions.

but the writer didn't suggest why, only that the results have repeatedly spoken for themselves to be true.

The first time I read it years back, I was fascinated. Then I accept it as a property or feature of the crowds. This time I have a hypothesis for it in NaviMap thinking. Crowds as a group know, even as individuals they do not the reinforcing and counterbalancing loops in the system. There is no wisdom if the system is randomly chaotic, the worst case being like the model of Brownian motion. It is relationships and aggregation that creates loops. What that have been studied and written up in papers were examples of simple relationships. Investigators are naively trying to use them for our purposes. My guess is that they will be disappointed more often than not because our social systems are more insightful as a consequence of richer relationships, which are shielded from view in plain envelopes of simple results.

Therefore diversity of opinion is crudely; independence of members; and decentralization they have unaware captured a NaviMap Microworld. Loops are not complete and cannot not begin to be interesting and useful unless an entire Microworld is studied.

I have been trying to construct Microworlds from bottom up and find them too complex. I need to find a simpler and more efficient way.