TR EMERITUS

Around Sengkang area near Sengkang river, I see many new BTOs going to be ready, they are residing near the river, which was the forest which was supposed to be conserved. And now the BTOs are actually a few metres from the river, there is no more forest. This leads me back to the 10M question raised by Dr Chee, Lim Tean and many online postings about population plan. If we are not going to 10M, why are we digging all these from Tenga to Bukit Brown, and still reclaiming land around our seas. The recent pandemic has made so many locals lost their jobs, so this foreign talent issue is becoming sensitive. You see again ministers coming out to defend that no locals are affected and in fact these foreign talents create jobs for locals. Honestly, they have been repeating the same mantra over years and decades. I have worked in the IT industry for years, the talents I saw mainly from Malaysia, India, Philippines and third world countries. Most of their qualifications come from un-ranked universities and of course a lot were sponsored by the govt to study and later work in Singapore for few years. I am not sure why the govt keeps saying they are talent, their skills and attitude are mostly third rated. In the places I worked, I found Singaporeans most productive and focused but they were all outnumbered by these foreign talents. And when the foreign talents landed management position, they hired their own natives. This explain once an Indian management comes into the office, not long they office will start hiring Indians, this is a norm now. As a Singaporean, when I think of foreign talent, it is going to be someone from prestige university like Havard, Standford, Princeton, or someone who possess skills or knowledge which most Singaporeans do not possess. But the reality is I don't see much or any of these calibre in the companies are work, these days I don't even understand the English they speak in office, it is so hard to hear the Pinoy or Indian accent English. If they are those cleaners you see down your block, you can understand. But when they are EP holders and making more than $5000 a month, you wonder. When you check their linkedin, they are from some ranked above 100 or even 200 university. I m lying? Go into your office, check their profiles on linkedin, tell me how many are from Havard, Princeton and Standford? So my conclusion is this foreign talent is actually a guise for liberal immigration. 10M is becoming so sensitive that they will POFMA if they need but would not tell you the population plan. During this pandemic, I still a lot of foreigners landing in Singapore getting jobs and ministers keep saying we need foreigners, you know this massive import of foreigners will not slow down or stop. If they do, who is going to buy all the new BTOs or ECs being built? The conversion of many of these third world foreigners is strategic, what I see is for GDP growth and votes. Many of these new citizens told me they vote the party who gave them scholarships, PRs and new citizens because they want them to keep door open so that they can bring their relatives, friends and families. Things in Singapore is failing often now, things are not perfect, quality of work is shoddy, more than 40% of the work force are foreigners (not including those already converted to new locals) and productivity has dropped. Foreign talent scheme is sacrificing quality for quantity, instead of having Sam from Havard, we have someone from some unknown school from third world and rebranded "foreign talent" by the party who imported them. While the real quality locals are told to retrain or end up driving PHV or doing Grab Food, the inferior quality third world are given your rightful lunches. We are heading towards 9.9M for sure....if not 9.9, it could be 9.8 or 10.1; no one will tell you the truth. 61% loves it this way.   Tan Lok Seng      Read More →

Last Friday the Attorney General’s Chambers (AG) issued a statement saying that claims that preferential treatment had been given to members of the group who killed a man at an Orchard Towers nightclub were “baseless” and directed the police to investigate those responsible for the social media posts as being “potentially in contempt of court” saying “Allegations of preferential treatment for different races are baseless and have the potential to disrupt racial harmony in Singapore”. This mixture of bluster and intimidation by the AG is unconvincing as is the explanatory statement issued on Monday which purports to explain why only one out of the seven involved in the murder has been charged with murder while the rest have been let off with what amounts to a slap on the wrist. This seems particularly egregious in the case of the three who were involved in the attack on the victim. The AG says that the man accused of murder ” had at one point placed the murder weapon, a karambit knife, “on the table which was seen by various members of the group.” The statement says they “did not know that Tan would use a weapon during the fight”. The karambit knife is an ancient weapon of Indonesian, or more precisely Sundanese, origin. I know nothing about combat knives but there are a number of websites (see here and here) which extol its qualities as a lethal weapon. The AG’s statement does not explain why the group got into a fight with the victim and seems deliberately vague. It says “the deceased confronted them“. This seems unconvincing since one person could not be seen as a threat to seven people, one of whom was carrying a lethal weapon. The statement also says the altercation “lasted less than one minute.” It is almost as though the AG is doing the job of the defence counsel. While the AG warns the public against committing contempt of court, it actually seems to be predetermining what should be left to the judge. I am not a lawyer but there would seem to be at least a triable case that the group committed an offence under Article 308A of the Penal Code: (2)  A person who is guilty of an offence under subsection (1) shall be punished with imprisonment for life or imprisonment for a term which may extend to 20 years, and shall also be liable to caning. It would appear that the other defendants were astonishingly lucky to get off with such light penalties, particularly the ones who were involved in fighting. They knew about the weapon, they must have seen the knife being wielded and by also attacking the victim they must have made it more difficult for him to escape from being slashed to death. It may only be coincidental that the group were all from the majority race and that the murder victim was Indian, maybe a foreign national. The AG is silent on whether there was a racist motive to the killing which has been brushed under the carpet with a complete lack of explanation as to how the fight started. However there are many other examples where  the PAP Government has passed legislation that has had such a disproportionate application to minority communities. Also the AG, which is supposed to be non-political but is in practice controlled by the Government, and the courts have applied the law in ways that seem to treat minority defendants more harshly than those from the majority race. One recent example is the case of a man who killed his son-in-law (who appears to have been Indian) in a premeditated murder (as the victim lay dying he stood over his victim and prevented passersby from helping him). He only received 8.5 years jail because he was supposedly suffering from a “major depressive disorder“. This contrasts with the mandatory death sentence for anyone caught in possession of more than small amounts of drugs and therefore deemed to be trafficking. It seems unjust and inequitable that someone trafficking in drugs receives a mandatory death sentence, whatever the circumstances, whereas someone committing premeditated murder gets only a few years in jail. The Government provides no statistics on the ethnic composition of death row inmates but most of those executed in the recent past have been ethnic minorities or foreign nationals from Malaysia, Indonesia and Nigeria. Lawyers like M. Ravi, who does many of the pro bono appeals, have stated publicly that 90% of inmates are minority race. There have also been cases where the AG has withheld evidence from minority defendants who have been sentenced to death, most notoriously in the case of the Malay men who were only saved by JBJ’s dogged persistence, so well documented in Lee’s Law by Chris Lydgate. There also seems to be a disproportionate treatment of sexual offenders even though again the Government refuses to provide any statistics. I have previously drawn attention to the case of a 63 year old gynaecologist who was only sentenced to ten months in jail after having sex with a 14 year old on three occasions, an astonishingly light sentence compared to what he would receive in most developed countries. Not surprisingly he claimed “depression” as a mitigating factor. Then there was the case of the US martial arts instructor, Joshua Robinson, who only received four years for having sex with two 15 year olds. By way of contrast an Indian minimart worker was sentenced to 13 years jail for sexual assault, though not sex, with a 12 year old minor. The AG insists that justice is colour-blind in Singapore but if the Government has nothing to hide then Law Minister Shanmugam should provide statistics to show that it is. The Government insists that all Singaporeans be identified by race on our NRICs so it cannot claim that it does not have the data. It may be that race is just a proxy for income levels (minorities are likely to have lower median incomes than the majority though again the Government fails to provide statistics that might embarrass it) and that justice in Singapore is relatively colour-blind but a more lenient view is taken of those with the potential to excel in life, as shown by Justice Kaur’s sentencing of an NUS student to probation for molesting a woman on the MRT. As with other controversial subjects such as the size of the reserves and the PM’s wife’s civil servant salary, the statistics regarding sentencing and the ethnic make-up of the prison population and death row inmates are kept secret, presumably only because they might cause embarrassment to the Government. In the US there has been a huge outcry over racial unfairness in the treatment of African Americans in the criminal justice system. A large part of this is over the harshness of sentences for drug offences and in particular for crack cocaine, which historically was used more by black Americans than white. By failing to provide detailed statistics the AG and the Law Minister are the main culprits in creating  the conditions which “have the potential to disrupt racial harmony in Singapore.” Why are they so reluctant?   Kenneth Jeyaretnam * The author blogs at https://kenjeyaretnam.com/ .  Read More →

Well there are the dog and cat type of leaders. Then there are the ones you can't trust at all who are more like snakes crawling around in the underbrush. Conventional wisdom is that dogs are happiest when trained so that they know what is expected of them. Heel and come and sit and stay make for a happy dog. Most dogs probably can read the emotions of their masters pretty well, but this one seems to have taken it to a new level. We've reached the pinnacle of excess and stupidity by 'worshiping dogs' in this country. Dogs are everywhere due in part to that goofy "emotional support animal" white tag everyone gets free off the Govt. Now dog are in shopping malls, gyms, movie theaters, restaurants and get this ... CHURCH! The implication of anthropomorphizing dogs is that they don't get to be dogs. They are not allowed to make mistakes, or go off-script. They may not get stressed, or think of enforcing their own personal space or wiggle away from people and situations that make them uneasy. There has never been a better time to be a dog.   SojoüRner      Read More →