A Quest For Truth

November 22, 1963, was the day President John Fitzgerald Kennedy was shot during the motorcade ride down Elm Street, Dallas, Texas.  To this day, the lone gunman explanation by the Warren Commission is still being challenged, and the ballistics and politics of the ricocheting “magic bullet” are analysed in many web sources.

Vincent Bugliosi, the prosecutor who put Charles Manson behind bars, took 20 years to research and write “Reclaiming History” (W.W. Norton & Company 2007, ISBN 978-0-393-04525-3), purportedly to answer all the questions and shut all the doors to conspiracy theories in the most important murder case in American history.  Still, his monumental volume of 1612 pages is decried by some as a one-sided attempt to do the impossible, to wash away the conspiracy and pretend it never happened.  Oliver Stone used his “artistically and commercially potent paranoid film” to delve into a byzantine labyrinth of deceit and intrigue. While at odds with what conspiracy buffs will admit is the record, his 188 minute “JKF” movie resulted in Congress passing legislation for the creation of the Assassination Records Review Board, to pressure government agencies, and cajole private citizens, to make public documents, films, and other materials related to the assassination. The story has to be told.

Madam Kaur died from intra-abdominal haemorrhage after donating a kidney to her husband in 2005. He sued the hospital for negligence last year, as the unexplained slippage of clips applied to the cut end of the left renal artery by attending doctors led to fatal blood loss.  The National University Hospital (NUH) has decided not to appeal the High Court judgment which held NUH was partly to blame for her death. Professor Michael Nicholson from the University of Leicester, had testified that it is wrong to use 4 clips on the renal artery, and the patient should have been monitored every 15 minutes instead of hourly. The monetary settlement with the bereaved family means the public will never know why 4 clips instead of 2 were found by the pathologist, and how the slippage escaped the hospital’s attention.

But the family of Derrick Peh, who became bed-ridden after a shoulder operation in 2006, is rejecting the NUH’s offer of settlement. Through their lawyer Michael Yap, they are sending this message: “This is not about money, this is about grief and emotion and closure.”  Another who wants the truth told is a 79-year-old woman who had to undergo emergency surgery when a needle pierced her heart instead of her liver. Her lawyer said, “I am waiting what it (NUH) has to say in its statement of defence which is due to be filed soon.” Their stories have to be told.

Just don’t expect the Jack Neo remake of Michael Moore’s “Sicko” to be screening at a cinema near you anytime soon.

Time’s Five Pointers

Time International Editor Mike Elliott was the moderator of the Apec 2009 Summit Dialogue with Minister Mentor Lee Kuan Yew.  Elliot was obviously trying to work in a free plug for the latest edition of Time magazine when he asked Lee for five things the US could learn from China. Self proclaimed Sino-phile that he is, Lee surprised the audience by asking Elliot to list the five Time identified, so he could comment accordingly. Did Lee finally run out of ideas, or was he dissing the Time article as a piece of crap? You decide, the five enumerated by Time are:

1) Be Ambitious
The Chinese version of the can-do spirit is yong wang zhi qian, literally “march forward courageously”. We are told Americans know the original phrase well, since they invented it. But they can’t adopt the Chinese variant, which critics say is, “can do — or else.”

2) Education Matters
Foreigners, and a fair number of Chinese, believe the obsession with education in China is overdone. The system stresses rote memorisation, i.e. ting xie (dictation) and mo xie (memorising text). Nick Reilly of General Motors Shanghai believes that emphasis families puts on the importance of education in turn puts pressure on the government to deliver a decent system.

3) Look After The Elderly
Apparently three generations living under one roof was once typical in US, but 20th century America has become a mobile and rootless society. Interestingly, due to shrinking availability of land for nursing homes and sheer economic necessity, home care for the elderly will most likely make a comeback in the US.

4) Save More
In China the household savings rate exceeds 20%.  After the personal savings rate dipped to zero in 2005, American households decided to set something aside for a rainy day, currently at 4%.  Obama will have a tough job convincing the Chinese to spend more, consume more, for the sake of the economy,  American,  that is.

5) Look Over The Horizon
Once a rural backward society, China is suddenly forward-looking, and frenetically so. Quoted an American who lived in China for many years, “China is striving to become what it is has not yet become.”  Look West instead of Look East? Mao Zedong must be rolling over in his mausoleum.

So what did Time miss out?  “The Chinese people are not interested (in democracy),” bellowed Lee.  He says their primary concern is with achieving the standard of living they saw in the more developed Asian economies. In the Gospel According To Harry, the students who laid down their young lives at Tiananmen were probably not bona fide Chinese, but foreign troublemakers.  “You got your pro-democracy activists, but do the Chinese people worry about their vote and freedom of speech?”  That last quip only makes sense if you are familiar with this guy’s definition of democracy. Thomas Jefferson, please move to the back of the class.

On Learning Chinese

Since the communist proclamation of the People’s Republic in 1949, modern China has wrestled with the problems of mass illiteracy, hampered by a language that has more than 400 dialects in continental China alone.

A dictionary published in 1959 contained 49,965 characters, while in 1986 a Chinese dictionary listed a staggering 56,000 characters. How can anybody in China learn to recognise 56,000 characters? The simple answer is nobody can. According to Prof. Lu Bisong, President of Beijing New Asia University, one can read non-technical Chinese publications, such as the daily newspaper, if he has a command of about 3,000 characters or around 8,000 words, a word being a construct of several characters. A graduate with a primary degree may know about 8,000 characters, but will be unable to read ancient manuscripts. That kind of specialist knowledge is left to scholars of ancient history and language, who devote a lifetime to the pursuit.

To achieve its goal of mass literacy the communist government during the 1950s set up a commission of linguists to simplify written Chinese. Hong Kong and Taiwan kept to the old script, which was taught to the baby boomers of Singapore.

In 1958 the revolutionary government introduced Pinyin, the new Chinese Phonetic Alphabet, to replace the old Wade-Giles system of Roman alphabet transliteration designed to help foreigners to learn Chinese. Pinyin removed the inaccuracies of sound reproduction by Westerners, often considered pidgin by native speakers. With the arrival of the new system in 1958 Soochow became Suzhou and Peking became Beijing. Singaporean names with the Hokkien “Hock” and the Cantonese “Fook” became a generic “Fu”, foreshadowing initiatives that will mandate the demise of dialects, and render grandparents unable to communicate with their grandchildren.

The teaching of Mandarin in the Ministry of Education (MOE) was also a work in progress. The first born of a friend had to deal with textbooks containing only simplified Chinese characters, rendering the parent practically illiterate since he was of the traditional school. One year later, second daughter had books with Pinyin printed below the Chinese script. Dad felt a bit less impotent. The third child, also one year part, read in Pinyin first, below sighting the first Chinese character. Suffer the little children, while the “experts” dabbled in waters way above their heads.

From all appearances MOE still hasn’t figured out how to teach the language. Minister Mentor Lee Kuan Yew blamed it on the MOE officials, “They were basically two groups of people, one English-speaking, the other Chinese-teaching.” He claims that it was wrong to insist on ting xie (dictation) and mo xie (writing down compete passages committed to memory). Never mind what time-honoured educators have to say of its value: “[Dictation] ensures attentive listening; it trains pupils to distinguish sounds; it helps fix concepts of punctuation; it enables pupils to learn to transfer oral sounds to written symbols; it helps to develop aural comprehension; and it assists in self-evaluation.” Lee now wants to emphasize listening and speaking, and dismiss writing. Webster defines literacy as “the ability to read and write”. The writing is on the wall, the future of Singapore will be 50% literacy.

Connection Has Its Privileges

The reporter had queried whether disciplinary action would be taken against two pharmacists involved in a procedural mistake with chemotherapy infusion pumps. Mr Khaw said investigations were ongoing, although they were both “very personally traumatised.” If the response demonstrates a lack of empathy with the health givers, remember this is the Minister who was once accused of being heartless for contemplating sending old folk away to die in foreign shores.

What is there to investigate?  The infusion pumps issued by the KK Women’s and Children’s Hospital (KKH) could be easily programmed for dispensing drugs at hourly or daily rates. It was an administration error waiting for disaster to strike, like a loaded gun without a safety catch. The hospital has since replaced the variable pumps with dedicated ones for hourly or daily application – more expensive, but safer. The husband of Mrs Yip, who had five days’ worth of 5-fluorouracil (5-FU) pumped into her body in just five hours, thanks to the hospital’s oversight, had already said he did not want the pharmacists involved to get into trouble, since errors do occur, “So long as they can fix what has been broken, we’ll be happy.”

Mr Yip Yew Keong’s admirable spirit of forgiveness is critical. In Singapore, when someone (without the right connections) is in trouble, he faces a double whammy: (1) a potential civil suit from the victim; (2) a criminal suit from the cops, ever enthusiatic to “set an example” for future transgressors.

If Mr Khaw is really keen to investigate the kink in his health services portfolio, he should query the role of the CEO of KKH, Mdm Ivy Lim Swee Lian, a.k.a. wife of Minister for Education and Second Minister for Defence Dr Ng Eng Hen. Somehow her name is not even mentioned in the mainstream media reports about this instance of complacency.  Not that a spot of unwanted limelight will get her into trouble, just look at how Home affairs Minister Wong Kan Seng breezed through the Mas Selamat debacle.

Sheriff Ignored

Barack Obama was seated just four chairs away from General Thein Sein during the ASEAN-US summit meeting at a Shangri-La Hotel ballroom on Sunday. The US President used his first encounter with the Prime Minister of Burma to good effect, stating publicly the steps that the government of Burma must take: freeing political prisoners, freeing Aung San Suu Kyi, ending violence against minority groups, and moving into a dialogue with democratic movements there.

Instead of a direct response, Prime Minister Thein merely deflected the unprecedented US demands by expressing his “appreciation for Washington’s new policy of engagement.” Even Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak was disappointed with the lack of reaction from Burma, “We expected a bit more, but it was not forthcoming.”  The showdown at high noon had fizzled out to an unsatisfactory conclusion.  All that lavish wining and dining for nought.

The Burmese general probably knew ahead his ASEAN pals would not let him down. The joint statement released after the ASEAN-US summit did not include the call to release political prisoners held by the Burmese junta.  According to Associated Press (AP), the US had wanted it to be included in a previous draft of the statement, but it was dropped in the final draft.
 
When BBC South East Asia correspondent Rachel Harvey chaffed Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong by reminding him the red carpet was rolled out for the generals in Naypyidaw seeking medical treatment in Singapore, Lee snapped with the repartee: “You can inflict personal indignities on a leader, but is that the way to change and influence a country’s policies?” Added Lee,”They are in it for regime survival and for personal survival,” making it crystal clear that even tyrants deserve the best of medical science to perpetuate their fascist authoritarianism.

Learning From Deng Xiaopeng

Minister Mentor Lee Kuan Yew has repeatedly told this tale ad nauseam: Deng Xiaopeng congratulates him on Singapore’s progress, Lee tells him China should be able to do better as “We are the descendants of the lenders, peasants of South China. You have the literati, you have the top brains, you have the poise, the artists”.  According to the latest retelling to the APEC audience, Deng did not deign to answer, Deng just looked at him, and went back to his food.

Did it ever cross Lee’s mind that Deng may not have shared his pet theories of eugenics? Immeasurable harm was wrought on Singapore families with his Graduate Mothers’ policy, wherein he beheld that only graduates beget graduates.  Princess Anne hinted to him strongly during her visit to Singapore, “We tried it with horses you know, it doesn’t work.”  Higher powers were less subtle, demonstrating the folly of his superior genes hypothesis by bestowing him an albino and an autistic for grandsons.  Recently he confessed, after 30 years of misconception, he was wrong to believe intelligence was linked to flair for learning languages.  Although he claims her neurologist daughter confirms his epiphany, he did not reveal why, during the three painful decades for Singaporean parents with school going kids, he didn’t listen to his own daughter.  Deng’s famous remark, “Whether a cat is black or white makes no difference. As long as it catches mice, it is a good cat,” uttered during one of his feuds with Chairman Mao over economic policy in the early 1960s, affirms he was no fan of genetic supremacists, the likes of Adolf Hitler and similar.

In most likelihood, there were other reasons why Deng didn’t bother with a reply. Born in 1904 to a prosperous landowner in a village 65 miles from Chongqing in the south-central province of Sichuan, Deng’s origins were anathema to Mao’s revolutionary slogan, “better to be poor under socialism than rich under capitalism.” Reminding Deng of his bourgeoisie roots must have brought back memories of when he was once denounced as a “capitalist roader,” held under house arrest for two years, paraded in a dunce cap through the streets of Beijing and forced to wait tables at a Communist Party school. When the Cultural Revolution was in full swing, elites were hounded, and Deng later said only a personal security team supplied by Mao protected him from being killed.

Deng was wise to focus on the food served. The Economist, 14th to 20th November 2009 issue, wrote that Lee surprised his (Washington) audience by raising concerns about China’s naval buildup, something South-East Asia’s leaders rarely talk about in public. Worse, he was reported by Financial Times to have said in private, “You guys are giving China a free run in Asia.”  Prudence is care, caution, and good judgment, as well as wisdom in looking ahead, or as the Bard put it, “The better part of valor is discretion”.

The Truth In Comics

Working Hard For The Money

According to Newsweek magazine, Barack Obama will be the first U.S. President to make a visit to meet leaders of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) when he attends the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) gathering at Suntec City. It represents a break with his predecessor’s foreign policy of focusing almost exclusively on the big players like China and India. Condolezza Rice had skipped two out of four ASEAN meetings.

A last minute change, to attend a memorial service for Fort Hood victims, resulted in his cutting short the 9-day Asia trip to Japan, Singapore, China and South Korea. “We head to Japan, spend the same amount of time there, one day fewer in Singapore, and then pick up as previously scheduled,” White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs announced on Monday. That means Obama will not be making the keynote address at the APEC CEO Summit. “We have been informed of the changes and are studying the implications,” said a statement from APEC’s organising committee.

What’s there to study? Japanese opposition to the Marine Corps Futenma Air Base in Okinawa has led U.S. officials to declare they cannot move forward with a bigger effort to reshape their footprint in the Pacific as long as the future of the base is on hold. Never mind Lee Kuan Yew’s scary speech in Washington about the display of military might at China’s recent National Day Parade. Echoing the sentiments in Shintaro Ishihara’s bestseller “The Japan That Can Say No“, a senior member of Mr Yukio Hayatoma’s party has set the tone: “It is good for Japan to discuss this thoroughly and squarely, rather than being a yes-man, as it used to be.” Meanwhile, the first naval clash in 7 years has just broken out between a North Korean patrol ship and a South Korean naval vessel. And in Afghanistan, General Stanley McCrystal is pestering him for 40,000 more troops – based on General Petraeus’ counterinsurgency formula of one solder for every 50 square miles. Who has time for cooked crab, served cold, with mango salsa and caviar, or lobster baked in a rendang crust? Who gives a damn about the Sinigapore Evening at the Esplanade and the Waterfront Dinner for summit leaders?  Especially when some of the crowd are so deep in bed with the Burma military junta, the bunch that kept Ms Aung San Suu Kyi, Nobel  peace laureate, under house arrest for more than 11 of the past 20 years.

Unlike local politicians, real leaders have a job to do. These are the types who, drawing a salary one fifth of the Singapore counterpart, can answer the BBC question honestly and without embarassment: “Are you worth all that money?””

On Worth Of Humanity

Imprisoned 22 months for protesting against unfair elections in Nigeria, this man has personal knowledge of human rights being denied and abused.  Mr Wole Soyinka, 75, Nobel Laureate 1986 for Literature, was the guest of National University of Singapore (NUS) to commemorate the 80th anniversary of the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences.

In 1993, Nigeria’s military ruler Sani Abacha sentenced him to death in absentia for treason.  So Soyinka fled his country for the United States, where he is a creative writing don at universities in Las Vegas and Los Angeles.  Quite accurately, he surmised what he saw of Singapore: “I find it well laid-out, very orderly with a kind of antiseptic atmosphere.”  His other observations are equally astute and thought provoking:

On dignity:
“Dignity is the capacity of every human being to feel that he or she is placed on equal basis with any other individual.  There is no dignity in citizenship under a dictatorship because the latter has taken away the right to choose.”

On globalisation:
“At the moment, Western powers have built up a tradition of commercial dictatorships with… the leadership of our very own societies, who find it very easy to collaborate. They become the darlings of their trading partners but, in fact, they’re degrading the collective worth of their own societies.”

On migration:
“If the government truly cares for its own people, it will realise that there’s a real problem if its own people are going out in droves.”

On bulllies:
“I’ve heard statements from so-called democratic leaders such as: ‘I know what is best for my people.’  That’s such an insolent remark.”

On anyone who defends bullies:
“Stop playing the game of  We versus Them.  The only ‘versus’ that has any meaning is freedom versus power.”

On the worth of freedom:
“Without it, people are caged animals and humanity has not yet progressed.”

Finally, he has this advice for aspiring human rights activists:
“What human rights activists need to do now is to impress on leaders that they shouldn’t wait for the world to declare, say, so-and-so, a criminal against humanity.  They should themselves take the lead and ostracise and impose sanctions on him., so they’re not pushed into a situation where, when  an international body declares this man an international pariah, they are forced to say, ‘No, no, no, you can’t come and tell us that.’  That for me is a fundamental point.”

Pondering The End

2009 is the bi-centennial year of Darwin’s birth (12 February 1809) and 150th anniversary of the first publication of “On the Origin of Species”.

In some circles Darwinism is a pejorative. If random processes churned out the accident known as humanity, then God the Divine Director and Cosmological Creator has officially left the building. Apparently this was the general consensus at “Evolution: The Untold Story,” a gathering of intelligent design (ID) and creationism proponents held on October 24, 2009 at the Villanova Conference Center in Radnor, Pennsylvania PA.

But the Christian understanding of how human beings came about shouldn’t send them tumbling from atop the pinnacle of creation, as Furton recognized. This editor of The National Catholic Bioethics Quarterly contended that relegating humans to sophisticated animals with no distinctive resemblance to God saps the great calling of the Christian moral life. “The teaching that we ought to treat others as we would like to be treated,” Furton said, “is incompatible with a philosophy of the survival of fittest.”

Accounting for what science reveals to theology, Steven Pope, a Catholic Aquinas expert from Boston College, said without hesitation that, “Evolution is God’s way of creating.”  The main point of creation is not that nothing exists and then suddenly—BOOMZ!—something exists. Instead, creation emphasizes the created’s dependence on the Creator. Without God, nothing exists.

Sciences can shed light on how this creation takes place. For twentieth-century Jesuit theologian Bernard Lonergan, God doesn’t give up custody of creation but is the Custodian of Creation. God creates through an ongoing process that Lonergan says is “the maintenance in being of all that ever was and ever will be.” According Lonergan’s concept of ‘emergent probability,’ simpler cycles set conditions for the emergence of more complex cycles (the ‘emergent’ aspect). As complex patterns emerge, these and other complicated patterns will become more common. So randomness is not an absolute but a relative condition. From an evolutionary angle, as nervous systems develop, the brain is more apt to intelligently react. And from Lonergan’s Catholic perspective, God uses emergent probability to create the world.

When you gotta go, you gotta go. In the queue for the little boys’ room a fellow lad-in-waiting mocked, “There’s an evolutionary explanation for this.”  “As long as they don’t have to explain anything or give any details,” another instinctively quipped.

Heady stuff, surely not what the Minister had in mind when he said Singaporeans should be prepared to discuss the End of Days (the eventuality, not the movie). Practical reasons abound: burial in land scarce Singapore is only for the rich – $315 fee for minorities like Bahai, Jewish, Muslim & Parsi, $940 for Christian, Chinese, Hindu. Cremation fee at Mandai costs $100, a niche there costs $500 (Selecting a final resting place different from one allocated costs $250 extra). Wonder what the NEA (National Environment Agency) charges for scattering one’s ashes in the sea or over the air.