TR EMERITUS

[Warning: the following article contains satire. If you have experienced difficulty in the past digesting satire and parody then please consult a doctor before proceeding.] Hi, has anyone seen this post making the rounds of social media? No idea who wrote it but as it makes some valid points, I thought I would share it with you. Mr Kenneth Jeyaretnam leader of The Reform Party who attended my forum that somebody else invited him to, has reported the following  in The Online Citizen. Quote: “When I sat down in that room I looked at the enormous glass coffee table and thought, “Finally some transparency from the PAP.” Mr Jeyaretnam is a liar. That did not happen in the forum. No coffee table or anyone or anything present provided Mr Jeyaretnam or any other attendee with any required transparency at any time. Opacity was the whole point of the forum and Mr Jeyaretnam lacks all credibility in  suggesting otherwise. The coffee table was not there to provide any transparency from the PAP, by the PAP or with the PAP.  Any transparency it provided was purely coincidental and entirely unconnected to our policy of obfuscating the facts and replacing them with our belief system. Mr Jeyaretnam is trying to destroy our nation by perverting our firmly-held beliefs in quadruped furniture as support for empty coffee cups, disposable chop sticks and old tissues. To suggest that the coffee table could provide the answer to how much is in the reserves or provide answers to gaps in the budget presentation or information on the returns of Temasek and GIC  is not a constructive method for conducting an accessorial-furniture-interface dialogue. If we wanted to have an accessorial-furniture-interface dialogue I would go about it like this. I would start an Event page on Facebook,  open to all so that Mr Jeyaretnam could be invited to the Event by someone else and I would comment on that public page that non-residents were welcome to accept the invitation. Then for the avoidance of doubt, as the host, I would post on my own page that I was happy non-residents were also signing up. If it were later discovered that Mr Jeyaretnam, who is a well-known glass coffee table provocateur, had followed these steps,  I would then publicly denounce Mr Jeyaretnam for  “Inviting Himself”.  I would smear him with the suggestion that his only intention in attending was to destroy the unique position that glass furniture holds in our robust democracy. But we are not having that dialogue so of course I won’t do anything like that. Mr Jeyaretnam’s allegation that the coffee table provided transparency is very serious indeed. Mr Jeyaretnam’s allegation that the coffee table provided transparency is very serious indeed. It is as destructive as those people in other countries who take old furniture and up-cycle it into something useful and attractive. In fact as my video recording will demonstrate, two people in that group roundly shouted at Mr Jeyaretnam in turns, entirely demolishing his arguments with their unsubstantiated stories of how much tax they had to pay to overseas for similar furniture products. Nor did the PAP stuff that forum with PAP supporting furniture, whether a table of glass, plastic or that stuff that Ikea uses, as Mr Jeyaretnam has so evilly insinuated. Mr Jeyaretnam lacks all integrity and credibility. That coffee table was a bona-fide resident of Thomson-Toa Payoh.  As such it was there of its own accord in its personal capacity.  It was a non-partisan coffee table, not even an activist coffee table or a civil society coffee table. It had NOT been put there in advance or polished up by any member of  Thomson-Toa Payoh CC. It wasn’t me, it was Mr Jeyaretnam who stuffed that forum with supporting furniture. In fact everyone there who questioned my presentation or disagreed with me or smiled at Mr Jeyaretnam instead of me or wanted to shake his hand, not mine, was a personal friend of Mr Jeyaretnam and just pretending to be a resident.  It was ‘fixed’. There is no other reason they would have demanded the return of their CPF. As it is my experience that many of you are childlike or otherwise “daft”, I will summarise - ”Mr Jeyaretnam was the only person at the forum seeking transparency, not the coffee table.” Kenneth Jeyaretnam * As a blogger, KJ hopes to help imagine a model for a New Asian Nation to bring about a free and fair future for Singapore. KJ is a Cambridge trained economist who could be broadly described as from the Keynesian school. He is also a successful ex-hedge fund manager and a liberal opposition politician who contested in the 2011 General Election with his party. He is currently the Secretary-General of The Reform Party. He blogs at Rethinking The Rice Bowl.  Read More →

Coffin Provident Fund Days have passed and The Sunday Times has not been asked to make a retraction, or worse, slapped with a letter from a lawyer. We can safely adduce that the quote attributed to a certain politician is accurate: “This is a resident who has an issue. I spoke with her personally after the dialogue and I’ll be doing my best to assist her. She’s a resident in one of the landed estates in Thomson.” Was the third sentence really necessary? Ad hominem attacks take the form of overtly attacking somebody, or more subtly casting doubt on their character or personal attributes as a way to discredit their argument. The result of an ad hom attack can be used to undermine someone's case without actually having to engage with it. Ex-Straits Times editor Cheong Yip Seng wrote in his memoir ("OB Markers: My Straits Times Story") that he resisted Lee Kuan Yew's pressure to print the full O-level results of Opposition politician Chiam See Tong during the 1984 election. Chiam won that bout, but Mah Bow Tan was allowed to sneak into parliament via the Group Representation Constituency (GRC) route at the next electoral opportunity. Ad hominem attacks can backfire. The 76 year old spinster must have been frugal enough to set aside a portion of her teacher salary to pay for her terrace house, assuming she owns the property. Decades ago, such units could have been selling at a fraction of present day prices. A friend sold off her father's spacious house at the old teacher's estate after he passed on, and could only afford a tiny condominium unit with the proceeds. She's not the only one who is asset rich, cash poor. Plaintively, the senior citizen had begged, “What I want is my money back and I want to arrange for my funeral and I want to arrange for my rice and I want to arrange for a nice settlement.” She articulated what we now see as a truism, the three letters for our retirement money spell Coffin Provision Fund. “That’s all I want. Give me back my money. CPF, give me back my money. And make it as soon as possible. Because 76, I won’t be able to live (too long),” she added. If we are in her shoes, we too would like to spend the final hours on our own bed, rather than the tented facilities of our over-crowded public hospitals.   Tattler * The writer blogs at http://singaporedesk.blogspot.com    Read More →

Clothes maketh the man Intervention saves PM Najib’s political standing (14 June 2014)     Malaysia’s aging former Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad had to act earlier this week to save Prime Minister Najib Tun Razak from embarrassing legislation that would have given the Sultan of Johor executive powers to run the housing authority of the country’s second biggest state. Eventually the legislation was amended to remove the threat. But once again it is Najib, in the eyes of political analysts in Kuala Lumpur, who is regarded as having suffered a blow to his political standing because of his failure to act. Former Deputy Prime Minister Musa Hitam, at 80 still a political force in Johor, also joined the fray to stop the legislation. Although Najib’s position remains secure because there is no threat from anyone either inside or outside the United Malays National Organization, the country’s dominant ethnic political party, he is the subject of widespread criticism. He has come to be viewed as indecisive ever since the 2013 general election, in which the ruling national coalition lost the popular vote for the first time since 1969 although it maintained its majority in parliament,. “Thank God for Mahathir,” said a prominent Kuala Lumpur opposition source. “I never thought I’d say that, but thank God for Mahathir.”   Read more:     http://www.asiasentinel.com/politics/mahathir-thwarts-sultan-power-grab/    Read More →