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- current events - - so says the leader of Singapore, who evidently also believes that the election should be on local concerns, like how not to be ignored for taxpayer-funded upgrading I had to suppress a slight smile at this statement, which comes across as especially poignant with the uncle of his Hougang by-election candidate having once resigned as an MP right before pleading guilty to a cheating charge (which happens to actually be against the law, unlike knocking up a colleague), in response to which the PM praised him for doing the right thing - perhaps he expects the same plaudits for misbehaving members from his opposition counterpart? It so happens that this MP later got hauled up for taking some S$10k in bribes (which seems a little disappointing for a man of his pedigree), to which his former party has been conspicuously silent to the best of my knowledge. Not that the sins of the uncle should be visited on the nephew, who as our resident political analyst has sagely forecast back in February, will be the PAP's candidate. As the by-election has been set for May 26, with a 50 year-old veteran of six years being the WP's choice and other parties vowing to stay clear (disregarding those itching to lose their deposits), four of Herr Ahm's five predictions have come to pass; it remains to be seen in a fortnight whether Herr Ahm does the grand slam with a vote return of 63±3% for the WP. Tying up the loose ends, the court case on whether the PM does in fact have unfettered discretion on whether and when to hold a by-election has therefore been withdrawn, having done its job, which has probably allowed some of our best legal minds to sleep more easily. They might be called into action soon, seeing as to how the academic referenced in the previous post has stepped up his probing of supposed fundamental irregularities (known to be unproductive for locals with loudspeakers), even going as far as to answer queries on a popular local forum. Notch simpur, as regulars of that forum might say. Personally, I can easily buy the "enormous unreported holdings" a.k.a secret strategic reserves hypothesis, the existence of which is hardly classified. As to how much is actually in it... well, if we knew, it wouldn't be secret any more, would it? I won't be counting on more details from the horse's mouth anytime soon, and can only comment that the recurring furore over this issue is a matter of trust, in particular that citizens should trust without direct evidence that quasi-autonomous bodies will be scrupulously honest about the behaviour of extremely large, non-publicly-documented sums of money. Though they might as well, seeing as that they may not get the figures even if they get elected as President. Fact Follows Fiction The sabre-rattling between China and the Philippines over prime real estate in the South China Sea has gotten loud enough that the former has found it necessary to deny that it may start a war over the territory (while demanding protection for its nationals). While the outcome of a one-on-one armed duel is likely not in doubt, the situation is complicated by the Mutual Defense Treaty that the latter has with the United States, which the US has confirmed it will honour (to an appropriate extent) Now, Obama might view a khaki election as being to his favour (and he would probably be right), having milked his bin Laden success heavily, but the guys he'll be up against this time aren't bearded fanatics holed up in mountains, but a nuclear-armed adversary with a huge chip on its shoulder, a two million man army and their Walmart supplies, which should give his administration pause. As for the backstory, it's nothing new - the dispute over the area has simmered for decades, with Brunei, China, Malaysia, Taiwan, Vietnam and the Philippines having overlapping claims; as such, even desolate scraps of land such as the Spratly Islands (Nansha Qundao to the Chinese) have become bitterly contested. All this bother over blue water might appear a bit overwrought even by the standards of political ego, but for the possibility of oil and gas deposits. That explains a lot.  Competing claims illustrated (Source: wikipedia.org) From the graphic, China's claim extends a long way from its mainland, and would appear rather unsubstantiated had it not been bolstered by arguments of historical sovereignty over Nansha. Going further back, the oceans have seldom been a source of contention for their own sake, trade routes and privateering notwithstanding - mariners had enough on their hands navigating the vast featureless deeps, and rendering assistance to fellows in distress, regardless of nationality, is a time-honoured unwritten code among men of the sea (which might however be reconsidered if those fellows are waving rocket launchers about). Unfortunately, improved monitoring technology, the acknowledgement of fish as a limited resource and of course, offshore oil have turned all that on its head. Pure technocrats might think it elegant to simply allocate every patch of water to the country whose land it lies closest to (a Voronoi map [again] of sorts). It transpires that the regions above do roughly correspond to such an allocation - weighted by the military strength of each nation. As it pans out time and time again, if you can't keep it, it ain't yours. On to the fiction, something close to this very scenario has been covered in Dragon Strike (set in 2001), which I happened to pick up back in JC. Penned by two journalists, the book describes how a military resolution might unfold, although the opponents envisioned are the Vietnamese, not the Filipinos:
If only it could all be settled with evidence from a blog! Happily, Herr Ahm sees no big moves, but a lot of rhetoric, for the near future, after which China basically swallows it up. Full On Conspiracies! (More Spoilers!) I chanced upon Dan Brown's The Lost Symbol in the library, and learnt that symbologist Robert Langdon, after tangling with an Illuminati master (who wasn't really one, being actually the son of the Pope, whom he murdered by poison) through one novel, and an Opus Dei albino numerary (who also murdered his father for killing his mother) through another, comes up against a Freemason renegade. Somehow, I was not overly astonished when that renegade turned out to be the son of the 33rd Degree Grand Master that he had kidnapped to kick events off, although there is an inversion in that instead of trying to kill his dad, he instead wanted his dad to sacrifice him (shades of Isaac here)  Oh yes, Langdon gets one improbably attractive muse per book too (Source: thecomicninja.wordpress.com) Utterly predictable puzzle-geocaching plot structure aside, the writing style is an acquired taste often roundly shredded by critics, though it is worth considering all of them put together have probably not moved a fraction of Brown's 80 million copies - for all their complaints, being readable is an art in itself, and Brown, like Archer, has apparently mastered that. [N.B. I always wonder what our literary canon would be like if approached without preconceived notions - put a hundred otherwise well-adjusted students with no background in a well-stocked room, and I wonder if they would be able to pick out the classics. Same for art and music.] Picking controversial topics doesn't hurt either, and neither does taking some liberties [N.B. some supposed "errors" may not actually be errors] with facts, and one of Brown's best skills is blending them such that his inventions become plausible (was Newton's 33-degree scale influenced by Freemasonry?); some unlikely ones turned out true, such as the original meaning of atonement (to be "at one"), and George Washington depicted as ascending to godhood inside the dome of the US Capitol Building (his statue of the same has been relocated) - it may come as a surprise to certain sections of the population how many of the Founding Fathers were Deists or Freemasons (see case for Washington; then again, few begrudged future Georges their own secret society)  Presidents and their images may not concur (Source: cracked.com) Brown does make the good point that Freemasonry (mentioned in passing before) is hardly that shadowy, and indeed application for membership is generally open to all (males - in 1959, some 4% of the eligible US population were Freemasons!). Indeed, Singapore has lodges too, perhaps more of them than might be expected (in a wholly unexpected connection with the previous section, the Horsburgh Lighthouse Foundation Stone on the once-disputed Pedra Branca makes reference to a "Lodge Zetland"). He does also posit that there are "circles within circles", though. Another fact I thought he was certainly making up was that the Pigpen cipher is Masonic in origin, which it turned out to be. I suppose people weren't big on cryptanalysis back then (Poe did wow America with simple frequency analysis). A maybe-entertaining task for the bored: given a collection of valid (say, credit card) numbers generated by some scheme, design a method to postulate new numbers of the form (satisying any built-in checksums). [N.B. Note that this may be what keygen coders do.] Next: Finding Words
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