If you say dissenting voices in the net don’t amount to a hill of beans.

Then why is there such an urgency to steamroll over all the dissenting voices in the Internet. To me, this is most strange and curious. If you say that the Internet promotes falsehood. Then why didn’t the masses vote with their wallets to support the nation building press? Again this is something that is very difficult to square off in my head and if you say the Internet is closer to perdition than salvation how can you account for the fact that it is the preferred platform that continues to attract the brightest minds.

When one is ignorant of a thing. One will destroy it without a thought.

https://www.theatlantic.com/notes/2017/03/internet-creativity-responses/518514/

The Chimeric Quality of Chasing $

I made alot of money from commercial farming. But it all came at an incredibly high personal cost. I lost the woman who I ever loved. I took what I can only describe as great personal risk that made a tight rope walker look like a stroller on Sunday in the park. Eventually, I discovered there wasn’t anything beyond the idea of money. After that. I was just filled with an indescrible pang of emptiness that seemed to stretch out like some long and unending road that ran beyond the horizon…I am not bitter. I take full responsibility for my actions. I just want to tell you. It was not worth all the bother.

I will see you in my next life Yen.

The end of The Online Citizen

If I am asked. What’s really the site that started it all in Singapore, it wouldn’t be Mr Brown. To me, he accomplished something very remarkable by adding an absolutely perfect zero to the Singaporean social political landscape. The premier social political site that single handedly defined the social political blogging scene nearly 20 odd years ago and had the biggest impact in shaping the Singaporean digital consciousness was undoubtedly TOC. The Online Citizen was jump started by Andrew Loh and Remy Choo sixteen years ago. They pioneered many innovations that had the effect of consolidating all the far flung voices in the digital wilderness to create a one stop venue. Before TOC, most of the content creators were at best hobbyist who were just writing and stuffing them into a bottle only to throw them out into the infinity of space. TOC was the first online platform that brought some measure of coherence and structure and professionalism to the social political blogging scene. Not only did it churn out regular social political reads from it’s stable of resident writers. The editorial team also featured many pieces from guest writers and it had a very vibrant chat forum that was able to converge all the noise in the Internet and give it some measure of meaningful expression to those who were interested in where power and politics was going in Singapore. To be fair. No one knew exactly how to handle the new media back in 2006 least of all the government of the day. It had nothing to do with ineptitude or lack of foresight. The Internet was simply a very new medium and it was very hard to plot where all this would go. Eventually an overgrown kid like myself had to learn the realities of being a responsible daddy and paying the bills. I went to Malaysia to pursue commercial farmng and as time went by the whole idea of a better Singapore just seemed to grow fainter till it faded entirely away. I would like to take this opportunity to apologies to anyone that I called unflattering names in TOC. We didn’t always see eye to eye, but we all knew that we were in the same boat. I think that sums up the sentiment. You will never be crushed by time. We will always remember you. Thanks for all the fish TOC and travel well.

My name is Darkness 2021, 1st Class Interspacing Guild Navigator of the Brotherhood.

Will Singapore be the last of the Mohicans?

How do you like my photo? It depicts the jungle slowly creeping into the urban landscape. I suspect at the super slow motion speed at which the custodians in power are planning (or maybe no one is in charge!) to live with Covid. You may need to mentally prepare yourself for such a sight when you next visit Orchard Road. I just want to reiterate – if the number of beds in hospitals happen to be the constraining factor that determines the pace of society opening up. Then it’s conceivable, what you are dealing with is not a Covid, but rather a capacity issue and the only way to resolve this hubris is to increase the number of beds by hook or crook. There is no other way out of this hubris. If you choose not to increase the number of beds by commandering event centers and stadiums or any other space that can be conveniently transformed into field hospitals. Then it will take a very long time to reach the inflection point or equilibrium and life with Covid will be one very painful stop and go and stop and go affair etc etc. Please think outside the box…we don’t live in a world where free lunches are served…no one paid you millions just to fail conventionally.

Will Singapore be the last country in the world to learn to live with Covid?

To my understanding (and I could well be wrong!). Living with Covid is simply a round about way of saying – eventually you and I and everyone else will all get Covid. So part and parcel of living with Covid involves engineering a steady stream of the population infected. This to me is not such a bad thing. As getting infected also means one has a certain degree of natural immunity. So if that is the case, there’s a need to provision more hospital beds. But if we base the decision to open or slow the flow of infection on the constraining factor of the SAME number of beds. Then the living with Covid exercise can only be a painful stop and go affair. Maybe. We should learn from China. In China if the bottle neck is the number of beds in ICU. Their solution is brutally practical. They just increase the number of beds. But if the logic centers on ONLY the SAME number of beds. Then the narrative will really only be about protecting the health care system. In which case, it will take a very long long time to open up.

Why it’s good to doubt yourself a little bit

When you rely too much on your eyes…the rest of your senses will decay and they will cease to be sharp and reliable tools of assessment. In the same way, when you rely too much on ONLY your mind to form an opinion about everything in this world. Then at some point, your intuition and instincts can only decay and they too will cease to be sharp and reliable tools of life.

It is only when we understand that both our intuition and instincts have taken billions of years to evolve that we can begin to appreciate these are not life tools that we should regard as lower than intellect….they are in fact complimentary and often interchangeable in managing ourselves and others and I invaluable in the art of decision making. Often when we rely exclusively on the intellect, our mind is proned to mind flooding. Mind flooding is a term that I had to come out with to graphically describe how the mind can be overwhelmed by a torrent of data till it becomes useless. It is only when we begin to still the ceaseless chatter in our mind can we begin to hear our inner voice……Give it a try.

Wu-Wei : The Art of not Forcing

The Taoist philosophy of Wu-Wei is much more than the idea of not forcing….or for that matter going with the flow. For one to be precise about Wu- Wei, one may need to understand people, situations and things at a much deeper level. Only then can we understand where is the direction of the grain or how one should go about setting up a sail to catch the wind. When we learn to observe ourselves truthfully without any filters of ego or our shadows of our emotional baggages. We will at some point begin to realise many of the traits we resent in others are also an elemental part of who we are….we merely choose not to see our own flaws and defects. Why is this insight so jugular in the context of trying to get a handle on the philosophy of Wu-Wei? Because when we cannot see deeply into the inner workings of our own mind. Then how can we possibly understand others deeply and if we do not have this insight…..then how is it possible to know for certain this or that is not something that should be forced to get the desired results. Because in life, it is not entirely true or honest to say that some things should not be forced or willed from the realm of theory into reality. Some things we need to force……others we should not. But unless we know the way of people, situations and things FIRST, then how will we know when is it right to force and when should we just sit down and wait. Knowingness is wisdom in the art of Wu-Wei.

There are many men in a man

There was once a young man who went to Africa to plant. One day civil war broke out and when the militia came into his village they killed every male over the age of fourteen, raped every female irrespective of their age and after that they wiped this tiny village off the face of the map as if it was just a smudge. The young man ran away like a spineless coward and he cried for days and nights. He could not understand.

Many years later. When the man was not so young any longer. One day he saw a pillar of black smoke rising for days in the far distance. He could make up the rumble of distant artillery. On moonless nights. The man would put war paint and venture deep into the bush with his tribesmen. He always came back before dawn. One morning he came back late and all the villagers could see the grisly sight of cut off arms and legs that had been neatly arranged at the back of the landrovers. The man did not speak. He was as the tribesmen would say Bako – not of this world any longer…..(This word carries with it such an evil undertone, it is taboo to speak it. Instead it is expressed as a sign by placing the palm on one’s solar plexus to signify the seat of the soul and gesturing with the other hand that it has departed to signify the man is no longer present. He has moved on to that unmentionable place and all that remains is the creature.) he looked like a man who no one knew. A different sort of creature. One where the children of the village no longer knew his legs any longer. But that year was a veery strange year. As despite it being a prophetic year that the bones foretold would bring forth both the twin heads of famine and civil war. No one came to the tiny village where the man who never smiled turned the wheel of life.

The moral of the story is this. In life make sure you speak with the right man in all the men who live in the head of this one man.

No one cares….

It is, what it is….no one cares about you and that’s why it’s important that you learn to put yourself first.

Veggies

Let me share with you an industry secret. There’s no such thing as pesticide free veggies. It doesn’t exist like a snowman in the Sahara. There’s really only acceptable levels of herbicides based on the unit of measurement known as parts per billion. To be able to access pesticide free veggies, one has to be either very rich or have your own farm. Because to produce one bunch of pesticide free kailan roughly requires four bunches be eaten by bugs. That doesn’t mean that I don’t still buy veggies…I do. Only I submerge them overnight with a dumbell in a big bucket of tap water with just a tablespoon of regular salt stirred in. In the morning if you stoop down low against the light and look at an angle at the surface of water. You will be able to make out a film of oil…that’s poison so make sure you skim off the water before you draw out the veggies.

Try it out if you don’t believe me…do the same with fruits.

Use only one at a time

Skin

A Spot on the Hill

If you r really so good…

as the government of the day. Why is there a need to shut up every alternative site in the internet? Sure its possible to legislate all sorts of draconian and repressive laws just to stay in power like a gangster. But at the end of the day – how the hell are you going to stop millions of people thinking about what I just said….some serious shit there to stuff into your pipe 🙂

https://www.channelnewsasia.com/singapore/toc-online-citizen-class-licence-cancelled-imda-2246596

Where does it lead?

Sakeru Gummy

To appreciate some things…I reckon you just need to be Japanese.

Do cat’s dream?

Will Singapore end up with the world’s longest exit strategy for Covid?

I have never been in favor of using FEAR to manage people when it comes to Covid. Or for anything. My reservations concerning FEAR as a behavioral management tool has alot to do with a cautionary example my dear lecturer once shared with me in the moment of my youth in University. It goes something like this…what do you do when the cat keeps jumping on the kitchen stove. Well the simple answer is to switch it on every time the cat does that. The only problem with that strategy is eventually the same cat will also not jump on a cold stove either…..the moral of the story is a little FEAR goes a very long way. Now you know why I much rather use anything else other than FEAR to get the message across. Because once FEAR is screwed right in tight, its almost impossible to get it out. If you observe very carefully, the countries that have the least grief exit strategies out of Covid have paradoxically also been countries where the population has the lowest qoutient of Covid related fear. Some times a bit of mistrust and askance and even a questioning attitude towards officialdom is not always a bad thing especially when it comes to getting back to the way it used to be again.

Tying good knots

He is right…Thamby what’s the big rush lah?

Are the Chinese planning to invade us next Monday?