Persistent Visions

Hindu gods can’t trade in shares – court
AFP July 17, 2010 4:47PM

AN Indian court has ruled that Hindu gods cannot deal in stocks and shares, after an application for trading accounts to be set up in their names.

Two judges at the Bombay High Court yesterday rejected a petition from a private religious trust to open accounts in the names of five deities, including the revered elephant-headed god, Ganesha.

“Trading in shares on the stock market requires certain skills and expertise and to expect this from deities would not be proper,” judges P.B. Majumdar and Rajendra Sawant said, according to Indian newspapers.

The trust, owned by the former royal family of Sangli, in western Maharashtra state, of which Mumbai is the capital, brought the case after successfully securing income tax cards and savings accounts for the deities.

But National Securities Depository Limited rejected the trust’s application for permission to open trading accounts, arguing that it would be difficult to take action against the gods in the event of irregularities.

“Gods and goddesses are meant to be worshipped in temples, not dragged into commercial activities like share trading,” the judges said.

Ganesha, also known as Lord Ganpati, is one of the most popular and well-known gods of the Hindu pantheon and is worshipped widely in Mumbai and Maharashtra.

According to the Hindustan Times,

The deities of the Sangli-based trust Ganpati Panchayatam Sansthan are Lord Ganesh, Chintamaneshwardev, Chintamaneshwaridevi, Suryanarayandev and Laxminarayandev.

Now we know. If you are a god, you can have income tax and savings accounts, but not stocks trading accounts.

I saw two pieces of news this week. What was rather funny was that these two articles came one day after the other.

[Digression: You may wonder why I am interested in sex education. The interest started due to some unfortunate incidents that happened to a friend. I do volunteer sex education work. Knowledge of sexual health here is terrible. So I am concerned...very concerned.]

First of all, is the news that AWARE, the women advocacy NGO, has stopped its sex education program.

The Straits Times

Tue, Feb 09, 2010

Aware bows out of sex education for now

By Irene Tham

In the latest twist in the long-running saga over sexuality education, the Association of Women for Action and Research (Aware) says that it will not offer its programme to schools for now.

Called Comprehensive Sexuality Education (CSE), the programme was the subject of a huge controversy last year as it was found to have gone beyond the guidelines set by the Ministry of Education (MOE).

Click here to find out more!

Aware president Dana Lam told The Sunday Times that it ‘has not offered CSE to the MOE’ for vetting.

She said that the programme has been ‘badly misrepresented by a few people who have had no experience with it’.

However, she added: ‘We hope that the discussions generated on related issues would mean that other vendors are now more aware of and more prepared to address the real needs of the young.

‘We are happy to leave it to them, and to focus our energies on other pressing gender issues that are not receiving sufficient attention now.’ These include sexual harassment, violence against women and unfair dismissal of pregnant women.

The basic instructor’s guide for CSE had contained lines which condoned homosexuality and stated that anal sex was ‘healthy’ if consensual and done with a condom.

An outcry among concerned parents prompted the ministry to suspend all programmes run by external groups like Aware in May last year and to start vetting these groups.

One parent, who wrote to the ministry last year to protest against Aware’s programme, is glad that it will not be taught in schools.

‘We should know what our children are getting. I am happy that Aware’s programme is not in,’ said Madam Chen Fei Huang, 39, mother of two children aged 12 and 10.

But Ms Lam said that Aware will ‘continue to keep a lookout for what needs might arise’ in the area of sexuality education.

Schools, which used to have the autonomy to hire external vendors of sexuality education programmes, now have to choose from a list from MOE.

The ministry said it is finalising the list, which is slated for release early this year.

Prior to the suspension, about five organisations including Aware provided external programmes to schools.

These agencies were the Singapore Planned Parenthood Association, Family Life Society, Fei Yue Community Services and Focus on the Family Singapore.

Their materials supplemented MOE’s own sexuality programme, which is incorporated into science, health education and civics and moral education lessons for upper primary to junior college levels.

Although some of the groups are religion-based, their programmes are tailored for children of all backgrounds.

Some teach children that homosexual acts are wrong while others take a more neutral stance.

A spokesman for Family Life Society said it has submitted its programme ‘as is’ to MOE but declined further comment.

Fei Yue Community Services declined to comment on its programme, which is still pending approval from MOE.

Singapore Planned Parenthood Association and Focus on the Family Singapore did not respond by press time.

Ms Josie Lau, 49, former president of Aware, declined to comment.

She became president of the group on April 15 last year. But she and her new executive committee – with members from the same church Ms Lau attended – were unseated after a vote of no confidence at a stormy extraordinary general meeting on May 2.

They were accused of taking over Aware in a stealthy manner. The new members had disapproved of the organisation’s sexuality education programme, saying it promoted homosexuality.

The reason AWARE stopped their sex education was because they got astroturfed. Their sex education program did not condemn homosexuality and premarital sex as immoral, and instead classified such activities as “neutral”. Certain interest groups got upset because they considered this as promoting homosexuality and premarital sex. Suddenly, there was a rash of letters and feedback to the Ministry of Education (and probably various feedback sites) from “concerned parents”.

I find this pretty funny because normally you can barely get two or three letters from the public regarding controversial topics. Singaporeans are an apathetic lot, and Singaporean parents a very stressed and busy bunch. If the “concerned parents” are serious about astroturfing, they really should change their letters to make it read more like different concerned parents than cut-and-paste jobs. Have some imagination, people!

Immediately after the article was posted, a stream of comments appeared.

solobear

February 07, 2010 Sunday, 09:02 AM

“She (Dana Lam)said that the programme has been ‘badly misrepresented by a few people who have had no experience with it’.”

====================

Dana, please be reminded that it was AWARE that misrepresented to young girls that anal sex and homo are normal. Take responsibility for your own doing and stop blaming others.

In any case, wasn’t AWARE complicit in crime, encouraging young underage girls to have sex?

BPLforever

February 07, 2010 Sunday, 09:44 AM

No more anal sex education for our children! Boy, this is good news.

AWARE should do more to help pregnant women discriminated by employers here.

Why is AWARE not doing much to help pregnant women and single mothers?

pappy

February 07, 2010 Sunday, 09:53 AM

Keep AWARE out of reach of our children. We don’t want them to lead our young astray!

I don’t know why these peopl are so concerned about anal sex. They can’t stop thinking and talking about anal sex! Anal sex is the last of my concerns when I think about sex education. Stopping teenage pregnancy and spread of sexually transmitted infections are what I’m concerned about. Who’s going to teach the kids sex education now? Stuffy teachers who stammer when they say “condom”?

So there was a sense of irony when the next day, I saw this article:

My Paper

Tue, Feb 09, 2010

More girls under 14 having sex

BY RACHEL CHAN

MORE girls under the age of 14 are having sex illegally and willingly, according to statistics released by police at the Annual Crime Brief yesterday.

There were 83 reported cases of statutory rape last year – a 36 per cent jump from 61 cases in 2008. The youngest victim was 12.

About 93 per cent of the victims were students; the rest were not schooling. Boyfriends, friends and acquaintances – in other words, people with whom the girls already had a relationship – continue to form the majority of culprits, said the police.

Under Singapore law, statutory rape is defined as sex with a girl between the ages of 12 and 14, whether or not she is a consenting party.

The figures have crept up more than two-fold in the past four years. In 2006, there were 38 cases of statutory rape, and in 2007, there were 57 cases.

It is a worrying trend that will continue, said Senior Assistant Commissioner of Police Ng Boon Gay, who urged “parents, schools, voluntary welfare organisations and whoever comes into contact with young people” to pay attention to the problem.

SAC Ng attributed the trend to changing moral values and lifestyles, as well as wider exposure to acquaintances “with ill intentions” via the Internet.

He said that because of the wider reach online, “people make lots of friends…the more the merrier, and that’s where the potential danger lies”.

Mr Nicholas Gabriel Lim, executive director of psychological-services provider iGROW, said young girls who choose to have sex come from both rich and poor backgrounds.

“As long as they don’t have role models, a positive environment to grow within, values, guidance…they can turn wayward,” he said.

The psychologist said he has seen cases where teenage girls first had sex when they were only nine or 10. He explained that, with minors, “it’s like a friend thing”, where two people in a close relationship trust each other and are comfortable enough to allow the intimacy to develop to a sexual stage.

Nominated Member of Parliament and sociologist Paulin Tay Straughan said that the “positive portrayal” of pre-marital sex in popular culture, on top of parental neglect, played a huge role in the upward trend.

She said: “How many parents actually tell their teenage daughters that, ‘when you’re under 14, you’re not allowed to have sex, it’s against the law?’ We prefer to assume that our children will not engage in sex before marriage.”

Offenders who have had sex with a minor under age 14 can be jailed up to 20 years and fined, or caned.

Teenage boy offenders can be fined, sent for reformative training, given probation or jailed.

By the way, I find the article bizarre on its own merit. Often, teenagers have sex with their teenage boyfriend/girlfriend. If a 13-year-old girl has sex with a 13-year-old boy, why is the boy considered as “raping” the girl? Isn’t this what the article is saying? “Boyfriends, friends and acquaintances – in other words, people with whom the girls already had a relationship – continue to form the majority of culprits”

AsiaOne, Wed, Jan 13, 2010
Sexually transmitted infections on the rise in S’pore

Sexually transmitted infections (STIs), other than HIV, are on the rise in Singapore, with a 10.6% increase in recent three years.

Singapore citizens accounted for about 62% of the number of infections.

This was a written answer from the Minister of Health, Mr Khaw Boon Wan, in response to a question posed by MP for Sembawang GRC, Ms Ellen Lee Geck Hoon, as to how many cases of sexually transmitted diseases other than HIV (such as genital warts, herpes, venereal disease, gonorrhea etc) were seen in the clinics, public and private hospitals in past years.

The number of STIs increased from about 11,000 in 2006 to 12,300 in 2008. The three main STIs are gonorrhoea, non-gonococcal urethritis (NGU) and syphilis.

Based on statistics from STI Control Clinic, one-third of the attendances were new cases, with two-thirds as follow-up cases, but there was no breakdown of the cases seen at private clinics.

70% of the cases were young adults, in their 20s or 30s. For cases below 20, two-thirds were female. For those older than 20, two-thirds were male.

Sexually transmitted infections (STIs) are notifiable in Singapore. To protect patients’ confidentiality, STI notifications need not include personal particulars. A patient who consults several doctors will chalk up several notifications. Repeat visits to the same doctor for the same STI will however require only one notification by the doctor.

Those aged between 10 and 39 years accounted for the largest increases in STI notification rates. For those in their 20s and 30s, the rate per 100,000 population has increased by 67%, from 270 in 2000 to 451 in 2008.

But for those below 20, the rate is especially alarming, having more than doubled from 61 per 100,000 population in 2000 to 133 in 2008.

The overall rate of notifications per 100,000 population has remained quite stable, increasing only marginally from 250 in 2006 to 254 in 2008. However, while the rates have been relatively stable over the past 3 years, they are at a higher level than before. The overall rate of notifications per 100,000 population has increased about 1 1/2 times from 155 in 2000 to 254 in 2008.

The Ministry of Health has worked with several organisations to put in place several programmes to address the rising trend of STIs among youths.

The topic on STIs is included in the science syllabus and Ministry of Education has made it mandatory for schools to implement sexuality education. Health Promotion Board (HPB) conducts regular programmes for parents in work places, schools and community venues offering them information and tips on how to broach and discuss sexuality issues, including STIs, with their children. The safe sex messages in HPB?s educational campaigns for HIV also apply to the prevention of STIs in general.

The Singaporean government sells an image of itself as a practical-minded, no-nonsense government. In reality, it is a government ruled by faith and ideology, not by what works or not. People used to fundamentalism from a certain religion may not understand the “faith” and “ideology” that drives the Singaporean government, but the fundamentalism of the Singaporean government is not so different from fundamentalism of a single religion.

One of the holy cows of the Singaporean government is religion itself. Religion, not any religion, but the concept of religion. Religion is conflated with culture, with ethnic identity, with morality. They are binned together under the neat banner of “racial and religious harmony”. Respect for cultural and religious diversity becomes a gag order where culture and religion themselves cannot be criticised. Not unless you want to be charged with sedition (Sedition Act, chapter 290 of the Statutes of Singapore). There is no protection for inflammatory speech against secular humanists.

When culture and religion are protected by ideology, and protected from criticism, their influences on practical matters like sex education are likewise protected by ideology and criticism. Where a practical matter of sex education should be judged by its efficacy, it is judged by moral ideology. The simple evaluation criterion of “does our sex education reduce STI and teenage pregnancy” is abandoned and replaced with evaluation of how “moral” the sex education is. Is it any surprise that STIs and teenage pregnancy are on the rise?

Take for example, the United States under the Bush administration and it’s abstinence-based sex education. Compare it with the Netherlands. By the logic of those people arguing for even more moral and abstinence component in Singaporean sex education, Dutch sex education should be promoting endless sexual diseases, pregnancies, and general moral dissolution. The United States should see plunging infection and pregnancy rates. The opposite is true — the Netherlands has amazingly low infection and teenage pregnancy rates. This pattern repeats itself everywhere, over and over again. Telling people not to have sex does not work. Sex is a basic drive like hunger and thirst. What remains is telling people how to have sex safely.

Until the government takes the moralising component out of sex education and focus solely on facts and prevention efficacy, STI and pregnancy rates will continue to rise.

联合早报 2010-01-02
上海世博双语指南引人发笑
学会了“古的猫宁” 能说Good morning 吗？
张从兴

（上海、广州综合讯）为提高市民的英语会话水平以迎接世博会的到来，上海有关方面别出心裁，编印了一份《卢湾区世博双语指南》，列举了许多日常英语用语的汉字发音，希望能够在外国朋友到访时，人人都能发挥沟通功能。但是这些“汉字标音英语”被扫瞄上网后，却令网友大吃一惊，纷纷惊呼实在太“雷人”（“吓人”之意）。

网友纷纷惊呼

“天雷滚滚”

据《南方都市报》昨日报道，这份指南出自上海卢湾区，全称是《卢湾区窗口服务与商业发展指挥部世博双语指南》。指南中列举了一些日常英语用语，除了中文释意，还用汉字在其后注音，而且不按单词将注音的汉字分隔开。比如，“Good evening”后的注音是“古的衣服宁”。最长的一句，“I’m sorry，I can only speak a little English”(对不起，我只能讲简单的英语)，注音是“俺么搔瑞，挨坎翁累丝鼻科额累偷英格历史”。

报道称，这么长的一串汉字，看上去着实怪异，以致网友纷纷惊呼“天雷滚滚”。

在上海的“宽带山”论坛里，网友“lili”说：“我也拿到这张卡了，真的无语啊，卢湾太牛了！”。不停地有网友拿“俺么搔瑞”（I am sorry）、“杰丝特哞闷特(just a moment)”来打趣。

也有网友支持这种做法，“这样最通俗易懂也学得最快，只不过不够标准罢了，对于我们有一定英文水平的人来说也许很好笑，不过对于那些老一辈，这样也许是最好的办法了”，“就是给居委会的大妈们看的”。

不过，也有网友不认同：“要完全按照中文能读下来的难度比直接读英语还高。”

上海东方网记者致电卢湾区窗口服务与商业发展指挥部，希望了解到《指南》“背后的故事”，对方工作人员迟疑很久后遗憾地表示，具体情况他们也不记得了。

(Translation of first paragraph: In order to raise citizens’ english standard and to prepare for the coming of WTO, Shanghai officials have been creative and printed a “(some region) bilingual compass”, with examples of how many frequently used english phrases are pronounced in chinese transliteration, in hope that everyone can use them to communicate when foreign friends arrive. However, after this “chinese transliteration of english language” was scanned onto the internet, netizens were shocked and call it too scary.)

This has to be one of the silliest and funniest pieces of news I’ve seen for a long time. The problem with this “Chinese transliteration” of English words, is that reading the transliteration is far more difficult than learning to pronounce the English alphabets. This isn’t from a vantage point of someone who is English-literate, but also the sentiment of Chinese netizens interviewed in the article above.

Chinese is not a phonetic language. The characters are not strictly ideograms because derivative characters sound similar to their root characters. Wikipedia calls the characters logograms. For a native Chinese reader, it is difficult to look at a string of chinese characters that are divorced from the meaning of the characters within. Personally this causes some difficulty for me when I read foreign names transliterated to Chinese. Fortunately, the such transliterations use characters that are by convention usually used for transliterating names, which are largely devoid of meaning by themselves.

Trying to make entire sentence out of these transliterations are a different matter. They write “Good morning” as “古的猫宁”. To the Chinese reader, they cannot see where is the “good” and where is the “morning”. What they read is, “Ancient cat at peace”. “Good evening” becomes “Ancient clothes at peace”. Some of the transliterations are simply gibberish.

I don’t think it’s possible to learn a language through transliterations. A language is a system of thought, and it is not easy to grasp a system of thought. That is why although I have crude reading literacy in many languages, I can really only claim I am bilingual.

From Straits Times, Dec 10, 2009
1st eco-friendly supermart
By Tessa Wong

SINGAPORE’S largest supermarket chain NTUC Fairprice officially opened its first green supermarket at the eco-themed City Square Mall in Kitchener Road on Thursday.

Among other features, the store offers eco-friendly products like plates and forks made from corn, and biodegradable floor cleaner made from pineapples.

There are also biodegradable plastic bags and carrier bags partly made of corn which has a carbon footprint that is 70 per cent less than normal plastic bags. Shoppers who bring their own bags pay at dedicated checkout lanes, and customers can also put cans and bottles into a recycling machine.

The store uses 30 per cent less electricity, largely thanks to energy-saving lighting and refrigerators. At the back of the store, an organic waste disposal machine that uses little electricity decomposes expired food.

But shoppers seem slow to converting to the cause. Since the store’s soft opening in September, shoppers have been misusing the can and bottle recycling machine, throwing shampoo bottles, cardboard, and even McDonalds drink cups into it instead.

Customers carrying their own bags are also a rare sight. A cashier at the reusable bag lane said that she serves, on average, fewer than 10 customers in an hour, compared to 50 customers hourly at a regular lane. And while Fairprice has been enthusiastically pushing a new range of biodegradable household products by local company Envizyme, response has been tepid.

Read the full story in Friday’s edition of The Straits Times.

I don’t subscribe to the Straits Times, but the problem of people throwing garbage into recycling bins is very common. How to discourage people from throwing garbage into recycling bins?

My idea is this: make transparent recycling bins, and fill them quarter-full with recycling materials first. When you empty the bins, always start them out quarter-full of recycling materials.

(N.B. I managed to get off my a– and write a letter to NTUC about my idea. I also did a similar copy to NEA for their recycling depots.)

Dover Park Hospice fund raising project proves a hit for wrong reasons
Channel NewsAsia – Wednesday, November 18

SINGAPORE: Charity fundraisers are common in Singapore. But an initiative to raise money to help care for the dying has highlighted a less charitable side of the nation.

The sunflower is a symbol of palliative care and Dover Park Hospice began selling them at Raffles Place on Monday to raise funds.

Those who donate S$5 can either plant a flower nearby or take it away.

But on Tuesday morning, volunteers arrived to find empty grass patches as all the 1,000 sunflowers planted the day before had been taken away.

Stefanie Yuen—Thio, chairperson, Dover Park Hospice, Fund Raising Committee, said: “Singaporeans may not have known what this was about, they may have thought it was the gerberas from the kindness movement.”

There were no signs to indicate the sunflowers are part of a fundraiser, creating a moral dilemma for some.

Said one woman in the street: “If everybody is taking it, people will think that it’s free.”

But discreet tags on the flowers pricked the conscience of some who had taken them.

Ms Yuen—Thio added: “When some people who had taken it and read the little tag on the card, they found that the flowers were part of a fundraising effort. They felt really bad. A lovely lady who had taken it by mistake came back and she apologised, and she made a S$40 donation.”

To prevent the sunflowers from being taken again, they will be put up in the morning and removed in the evening, everyday, until the Dover Park Hospice walk on Sunday. — CNA/vm

Now the interesting thing about about this incident, is that if you are Singaporean, you will know that behaviour like this is absolutely, completely, blandly “normal”. As normal as the theft of 200 wooden cut-outs of cows used for Chinese New Year decorations.

Singaporeans like to complain about “foreigners” stealing metal grates or railings to sell, or picking fruits off trees in the park to eat. We are more sophisticated. Theft for money and food is just too low class. We apply our thievery to plastic flowers or wooden cut-outs.