Keep movin' on...

Next week we leave to carry out our primary mission.

The men have promised me that on deployment they will always be the best they can be.

Its difficult, no doubt. But its a task we have to do.

With grim determination and attitude...

Million Dollar Baby

My god, this is one hell of a depressing show. Never thought it would be that bad. Its a good show, but the ending is fucked up. So much for happily ever after.

Thinking of the old times...

Starship- Nothing's Gonna Stop Us Now...

Looking in your eyes I see a paradise
This world that I've found
Is too good to be true
Standing here beside you
Want so much to give you
This love in my heart that I'm feeling for you

Let 'em say we're crazy, I don't care about that
Put your hand in my hand baby
Don't ever look back
Let the world around us just fall apart
Baby we can make it if we're heart to heart

Chorus:
And we can build this dream together
Standing strong forever
Nothing's gonna stop us now
And if this world runs out of lovers
We'll still have each other
Nothing's gonna stop us, nothing's gonna stop us now

I'm so glad I found you
I'm not gonna lose you
Whatever it takes I will stay here with you
Take it to the good times
See it through the bad times
Whatever it takes is what I'm gonna do

Let 'em say we're crazy, what do they know
Put your arms around me baby
Don't ever let go
Let the world around us just fall apart
Baby we can make it if we're heart to heart

And we can build this dream together
Standing strong forever
Nothing's gonna stop us now
And if this world runs out of lovers
We'll still have each other
Nothing's gonna stop us, nothing's gonna stop us

Ooh, all that I need is you
All that I ever need
And all that I want to do
Is hold you forever, ever and ever, hey

And we can build this dream together
Standing strong forever
Nothing's gonna stop us now
And if this world runs out of lovers
We'll still have each other
Nothing's gonna stop us
Nothing's gonna stop us, whoa
Nothing's gonna stop us now, oh no

Hey baby, I know, hey baby, nothing's gonna stop us
Hey baby, woo, nothing, hey baby
Nothing's gonna stop us now yeah


....................
Love this song. so much hope, so much commitment. Me and you against the world. *sigh*

Why am i Wasting My Life?

Jerry rammed home a point today. We were talking on the train about what next weekend would entail. I pondered: What was i going to do?

I realised that i didnt have a clue.

Where were the carefully laid out plans that i wanted to do? Where are the goals that i want to achieve in the rest of the year? Not even that, where are the goals i want to achieve for the next month? I had foundered, and lost my direction. Drifting aimlessly across the seas of life.

Its time to take action. Noone is going to prompt me to do anything. Im sick of just letting things happen. Its about time i took my life in my own hands.

Steps:
1. Set my 1,3,6 month goals.
2 Get a game plan out.
3. Put the plan somewhere i can see everyday.
4. work towards goals.

By the way this is personal, not about my platoon, not about my unit. Just me. Me, me, me. For once.

Morality and Medicine

Extracted from www.atlasshrugs.blogspot.com
From The Wall Street Journal

Killing Terri
By JAMES Q. WILSON March 21, 2005; Page A16

Terri Schiavo is not brain dead as far as anyone can tell. If you are brain
dead, you have suffered an irreversible loss of all functions of the brain. If
agreed to by at least two physicians, that means you are legally dead, such that
your organs can be harvested to help other people.
Instead, Ms. Schiavo is in what many physicians call a "persistent vegetative state" (PVS). That means that she lacks an awareness of her self or other people, cannot engage in purposeful action, does not understand language, is incontinent, and sleeps alot. To be clinically classified as being in a PVS, these conditions should be
irreversible. But from what we know, some doctors dispute one or more of these
conditions and believe that it is possible that whatever her symptoms, they are
not irreversible.
Her condition is hardly unique. In 1995, when the American
Academy of Neurology published its report on people in a persistent vegetative
state, it found that there were as many as 25,000 adults and 10,000 children in
this country who suffered from PVS. Based on the best studies the Academy could
find at the time, some adults in a vegetative state 12 months after a
devastating injury or heart failure could recover consciousness and some human
functions. The chances that such a recovery will occur are very small, but they
are not zero.
If they are not zero, then withdrawing a patient's feeding
tubes and allowing her to die from a lack of water and food means that whoever
authorizes such a step may, depending on the circumstances, be murdering the
patient. The odds against it being a murder are very high, but they are not
100%.
* * *
Many people, myself included, have allowed life-support
systems to be withdrawn from parents who have no hope of recovery. My mother was going to die from cancer, and after all efforts had been made to help her, my
sister and I allowed the doctors to withdraw the devices that kept her alive.
She was dead within hours.
My case, and that of countless other people who
have made that decision, differs from that of Terri Schiavo in two important
ways. First, the early death of my mother was certain, but no one can say that
Ms. Schiavo will die soon or possibly at any time before she might die of old
age. Second, all the relevant family members agreed on the decision about my
mother, but family members are deeply divided about Terri.
These differences are of decisive importance. When death will occur soon and inevitably, the patient does not starve to death when life support ends. Since there was no chance of our mother living more than a few more days, what my sister and I did
could not be called murder. When death will not occur soon, or perhaps for many
years, and when there is a chance, even a very small one, that recovery is
possible, people who authorize the withdrawal of life support are playing God.

And in Terri's case, they are playing God when they do not have to.
Her parents have begged to become her guardians. Her husband has refused. We do not know for certain why the husband has refused. I doubt that he
wishes to receive for himself the money that still exists from her insurance
settlement and, apparently, he has offered to donate that money to charity.
Perhaps, being a Catholic, he would like her death to make him free to marry the
woman with whom he is now living. Or perhaps (and I think this is the most
likely case) he does not want his wife to live what strikes him as an
intolerable life.
The intolerable life argument has support from many doctors and bioethicists. They claim that a person can be "socially dead" even when their brains can engage in some functions. By "socially dead" they meanthat the patient is no longer a person in some sense. At this point their argument gets a bit fuzzy because they must somehow define what is a "person"and a "non-person." That is no easy matter.
By contrast, physicians have unambiguous ways of determining whether a person is brain dead. This means that brain death is a very conservative standard and, if it errs, it errs on the side of preserving life.
Some people believe that all of these issues can be resolved if everyone signs a living will that specifies what is to be done to them under various conditions. The living will is supposed to determine unambiguously when a "Do Not Resuscitate" sign should be placed on a patient's hospital chart. Terri Schiavo had not signed a living will. If she had, we would not be facing these issues.
* * *
But scholars have shown that we have
greatly exaggerated the benefits of living wills. Studies by University of
Michigan Professor Carl Schneider and others have shown that living wills rarely
make any difference. People with them are likely to get exactly the same
treatment as people without them, possibly because doctors and family members
ignore the wills. And ignoring them is often the right thing to do because it is
virtually impossible to write a living will that anticipates and makes decisions
about all of the many, complicated, and hard to foresee illnesses you may
face.This is a tragedy. Congress has responded by rushing to pass a law that
will allow her case, but only her case, to be heard in federal court. But there
is no guarantee that, if it is heard there, a federal judge will do any better
than the Florida one. What is lacking in this matter is not the correct set of
jurisdictional rules but a decent set of moral imperatives.
* * *
That moral imperative should be that medical
care cannot be withheld from a person who is not brain dead and who is not at risk for dying from an untreatable disease in the near future. To do otherwise makes us recall Nazi Germany where retarded people and those with serious disabilities were "euthanized" (that is, killed). We hear around the country echoes of this view in the demands that doctors be allowed to participate, as they do in Oregon, in physician-assisted suicide, whereby
doctors can end the life of patients who request death and have less than six
months to live. This policy endorses the right of a person to end his or her
life with medical help. It is justified by the alleged success of this policy in
the Netherlands.
But it has not been a success in the Netherlands.
In that country there have been well over 1,000 doctor-induced deaths among patients who had not requested death, and in a large fraction of those cases the patients were sufficiently competent to have made the request had they wished.
Keeping people alive is the goal of medicine. We can only modify
that policy in the case of patients for whom death is imminent and where all
competent family members believe that nothing can be gained by extending life
for a few more days. This is clearly not the case with Terri Schiavo . Indeed,
her death by starvation may take weeks. Meanwhile, her parents are pleading for
her life.
Mr. Wilson has taught at Harvard, UCLA and Pepperdine and is the
author of "The Moral Sense" (Free Press, 1997).

Highlights added by Atlas Shrugged, Citizen Journalist


My Comments
Who can be morally trusted to hold the rights to someone else's life?
I didn't hear much of this Schiavo case until today where i caught a glance on the papers. My GP teacher would go totally ballistic at the negligence of my general knowledge. But this incident would have provided grounds for many insightful articles and comments from students. I would not be surprised if this was one of the debate topics in my GP class in school.

I cant remember why i loved GP so much. I still do. The cut and thrust of opinion, the dazzle of debate, and the academic thoughts that dominate morality in an ideal world.

Now to rephrase the first sentence of my comments:
Can you trust a person to be morally responsible and answerable to the lives of 27 men after less than a year of specific training?

Thats something only time will tell.

Kindred spirits?

RE: http://bayzone.us/blog/2005/03/darker-side-of-army-life.html

Looks like im not the only person who believes in this way. Why has life come to this? People call this maturity. I call this bullshit. If learning how to make other people do work so you don't have to do it even though you are responsible for it is a necessary life skill, im preparing to worship the next meteor in the hope that it will crash into Earth and reduce this society of selfish and narrow-minded people. On average, i believe that the decency and niceness quotient of the universe will rise. Or are selective meteors too much to hope for? I know a few people who deserve a whack over their head, at the very least.

Cidade de Deus

Gritty. Earthy. Leaves a faintly dirty taste in your mouth. Everyone who has too positive an outlook of life should see City Of God. Artistic stylewise its good, acting and narration is great, and the premise of the film is disturbing, to speak the least. Although the dirty taste was probably from my lunch.

Is IT fair?

Went the the IT fair at suntec twice this week. Crowded, noisy, and full of rude people who make it a point to push and knock other people as they pass.

Creative queue on saturday was unbelievable. about 200 people, forming a line that snaked around 3 corners, past 2 other booths, and i can almost bet the people at the end thought it was a line for free gifts. The Zen Micro is giving the iPod some real ass-whoopin this week.

Coincidentally, all of my friends who i went with bought mp3 players. Looking around, there were a much larger variety of players than i thought. About half of the booths there were hawking mp3 flash players, solid state players or hard disk players. the other half were selling cameras. Or both.

I went to the PacNet booth to make some noise, and i managed to get myself a free wireless router and some magazines and software. Ended up buying a DVD-RW drive and a wireless adaptor for my brother too. say goodbye to storage problems!

Worthwhile weekend. Oh yea, Zouked with friends last night. There was some fashion show on. The models got down to dancing after that though.... Some of them were all over the locals.... both guys and girls. hmmm....

Well, worthwhile weekend.

Friendstering for fun and profit

I don't get the point of friendster.

I always thought it was just a way to keep in contact with old friends. classmates.

why do people just add others who they think they have something remotely in common?

does the number of *friends* they have in their list actually mean anything?

Not that having 400+ friends on the list means anything.

How many people do you actually hang around with that have really made an impact on your life as a friend?

i have 116 people on my friendster account. I can honestly say that i can actually validate only about half of these people as those who have made a difference in my life.

Lets not dilute the value of friendship.

Miss Singapore Universe

Oh god, please don't tell me that these ladies are the best hope for Singapore's entry to this prestigious competition. I cant tell most of them apart. Has beauty has become so mass produced that the "model" look is so standardised? If this was the army, all the sergeant majors would be happy, for its an army of clones.

What happened to variety, and diversity? Why the hell do all those contestants look the same? And some of them are horrible. blame it on my taste, but i find it horrifying. I know people who look better than that. Too bad my ex-classmate is too short to participate... She'll kick their asses man.

What Dreams May Come

An inspiring book. Who knows what comes after the end known as death? Is death the end, or is it just another beginning?

Revelations

140205
Perhaps it was too much good coffee. Or it was weighing too much on my mind, I had learned far more than i ever thought i would know about this sordid affair. i knew i was unaware of a lot of things that happened in the platoon, but i had no idea exactly how much i did not know. What i learned tonight has effectively shattered my faith in the system. I had known for some time there was something drastically wrong in the school, what with the choice of SOMs for our batch. After hearing what i heard tonight, i feel , somehow, stained. All this malicious plotting and intrigue going on under the calm surface of a peaceful platoon was too much to believe.

I had always been an idealist. I always believed that hard work and perseverance would pay off. How can i help it? Its what i had been brought up on. The basic pillars of my moral foundation- Do what you think is right, treat others as you would want others to treat you, always do your best. The three sentences that form the core of my self-belief. If i was good enough, i would stand out and be reflected so. If i wasn't, well, I'll just be another cadet. Its good to be a bladerunner. Its worthy -I've always thought- to work for something that sets a standard and shows how good you are. Not that im saying that all who get it are evil bastards. I believed that SOH deserved his commendation. He earned all the respect and praise he got.

However , how much of this could be said of the other bladeholders?

CASE STUDY

Cadet MIKE is really worked up. He was assured a position as a military scholar if he gave up the chance for his other scholarship. Imagine his chagrin when he was not awarded the scholarship. So he felt really really sore. He swore to get back at Cpt CHARLIE for deceiving him, and decided to prove that he was worthy of the scholarship by standing out from his peers. But this developed into an obsession for him. He began to monitor the peer assessment rankings (secret) through underhand, devious, and above all, ILLEGAL methods. Not content with just being the top or near the top, he schemed to discredit and undermine his would-be competitors. Anyone who was too much in favour with his superiors, he would start spreading rumours and turning popular opinion against them. Thus he maintained lordship and dominion over his unknowing subjects, with the assistance of other unscrupulous cadets who were in cahoots with him. He would do anything to maintain his position in the platoon, even to the extent of suggesting to Cpt CHARLIE that perhaps some people do not really deserve to commission after all. Cpt CHARLIE listened, for cadet MIKE had always been his grapevine to the platoon's gossip, and saw through tinted lenses the life of the platoon.

Needless to say, when i first heard the stories, i was shocked beyond belief. I had never believed that this kind of Machiavellian intrigue and plotting could exist under such a smooth looking surface, much less in the premier institution that we train at. To me, being an officer was one of the highest honours, one that affirmed your ability, morality and ethics. To learn that people like this are not only commissioned but also exemplified as poster boys of our corps, it unplugs the cork at the bottom of a dwindling belief in the fairness of the system. Words cannot express the melange of anger, anguish and frustration i feel. That these kind of scum can meddle with the system, bend it to their own desire, and even try and deprive others of their fair chance to prove themselves, fills me with an anger that haunts my step, and dogs my waking moments. That furthermore, they are exemplified as the cream of the crop, makes me want to rip that bar off my shoulder and spit at the mockery of leadership they, through their actions, have twisted that bar to mean. Nine months of shit is not worth having to pay lip service to these kind of people as my betters. If you're good, you don't need to resort to this kind of underhand means to show your talent.


Footnote- After typing this out one and a half weeks after penning it down, i am surprised to see that the vehemence of my reaction is still as strong. So to those people who think that its their right to undermine a system for their own good, here's my two bits:
.
..
...
EAT S**T AND DIE YOU MOTHERF**ERS!
MAY YOU BURN IN HELL FOR YOUR SINS!
...
..
.
God give me the strength to be true to myself, my beliefs and my conviction. And please strike down these assholes with fire and brimstone. amen.

Backstabbing, plotting, and the heart of darkness

really, the title says it all. I learned a lot of things listening to a story on a bus, and words cannot express how my faith in the system has been smashed. Needless to say it validates my opinions of certain award winners i know...

i'm too pissed to make much sense now. i will rant another day.

Thats funny...

A Prayer for the Stressed
Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change.
the courage to change the things I cannot accept,
and the wisdom to hide the bodies of those I had to kill today because they got on my nerves.

And also, help me to be careful of the toes I step on today
as they may be connected to the feet I may have to kiss tomorrow.

Help me to always give 100% at work....
12% on Monday
23% on Tuesday
40% on Wednesday
2O% on Thursday
5% on Fridays

And help me to remember...
When I'm having a really bad day,
and it seems that people are trying to wind me up,
that it takes 42 muscles to frown,
28 to smile
and only 4 to extend my arm
and bitchslap someone in the mouth!

I like the sound of that.

HUMOUR

While my guitar gently weeps...

Firstly, to all the chinese people out there, Gong Xi Fa Cai, Xin Nian Quai Le, Bu Bu Gao Shen, Shen Ti Jian Kang, Nian Nian You Yu, Guo Tai Ming An! I'm playing on racial stereotypes and ignoring the fact that some chinese are lazy bastards and probably do not deserve the blessings of a new year, but its not too late for them to repent isn't it?

Went visiting today, did the usual rounds--- First to the temple where my father pays his respect to buddhism, and where i strikingly feel out of place. Its the worst time of the year to undergo a religious crisis... I seriously did not know what to feel or expect... i just mimed and went along with what they were doing... is that wrong? To me it is, my heart wasn't in it. It didnt feel good.

Then to visit both grandparents, and see my niece. I'm an uncle... well done! my cousin has a 11 month old baby. Still small and cute. Thats on my dad's side. on my mom's side, i've got an "aunty" thats 2 years younger than me, but generationally, she's my mom's dad's sister's daughter, so she's my mom's generation. What utter rubbish.

I finally got my electric guitar back. Music with Rocks In!!! Muahaha!!!!! Well, not exactly. Can't really think of many songs i would like to play that i want to learn. Maybe Offspring. Need to brush up on my technique. Or maybe i'll try selling it to my brother. =)