Alternative Viewpoints: the big bad world through daniel's glasses

Some political commentary today:


there was that andrew kuan hooha awhile ago, and i don't think anyone needs further details about that. with all honesty i am going to say that andrew kuan would not have made a good president, and i would not vote for him ever. there was a time when people with imperfect pasts became President - Devan Nair spent a few years in Changi Prison for his communist sympathies and for agitating against the colonial government - but even he was a man of substance and of passion, and inspired people because of that. since the President spends much of his time being a figurehead, what matters more really is not so much the guy's CV, but that he has the persona and a kind of aura. he must look Presidential. Mr. Nathan pulls that stunt off. not andrew kuan, no way!

my main gripe is actually that mysterious council that gives out the only free COE in the land. (although it is also the most difficult to get.) the three men of the PEC are all appointed by the PAP. now MM Lee says that the rationale for having the Elected Presidency is so that the guy can stand in the way of any "rogue government"(i like the way he says that, like a government can be a bunch of bandits or something) that wants to spend the hard-earned reserves. (which are no joke at around S$160-180 billion, or about one year's worth of GDP). and the strange thing is that the PEC that approves - i am tempted to use "selects" but i shall toe the official line - the candidate(s) for the Presidency is itself chosen by whatever government is in power.

so the fact is that the government still has quite a grip over who gets the "elected" Presidency. the "rogue" government can simply place cronies in the PEC - no one really knows who is on it anyway - and get another crony to run for President and have the crony PEC kick out everyone else. and they raid the nation's coffers with the President's consent.

that's the danger with the system as it is now. and it is made much worse by the vagueness and lack of transparency associated with how the PEC is selected, how they make the decision, and the fact that they are not required to explain their choice. with Andrew Kuan vs SR Nathan they merely released a statement saying that they felt Mr Kuan did not satisfy the criteria, even though to a large extent he did. because no one knows what's going on inside the PEC, and it doesn't have to entertain public scrutiny, it can do anything it wants - that includes pandering to a "rogue" government.

the President is supposed to be a check on the government. but how can he be one, if he has to be approved by the government in the first place? not very smart you see. i may be missing something though - and i hope i am.

conclusion: the PEC exists because the PAP doesn't trust us to make totally well-informed decisions. and no voter possibly can, therefore some means of screening Presidential candidates must be in place; the Presidency is after all the highest office in the land, and a very powerful one with regards to the economy. but the PEC's members, processes and decisions must be made transparent and accountable to the citizenry who earned the reserves the President guards. something like the US system of public hearings would be good, especially for controversial cases like Mr. Kuan. we cannot let them get away with giving the one-line explanation they gave the last time, for at this rate they may one day get away with putting an evil President in the chair.



On the international front:

israel just dragged its settlers out of the Gaza Strip. that was quite an achievement actually - they have always been very protective of their settlements. but the reaction was decidedly mixed. people worried about israel never ever pulling out of the West Bank, which is the main bone of contention between them and the palestinians. now most people seem to hate israelis and think they're evil. they have good reason - the israelis indeed have killed innocent palestinian women and children, and taken steps to hinder the palestinians from progress. but what makes them any worse than the palestinians, hamas, islamic jihad et al, who deliberately target israeli civilians; buses, nightclubs and weddings. (oh imagine someone bombing chinablack on friday night, that'll be so bad, think about it.) most israeli kills of innocents occur as collateral damage during terrorist hunts in the palestinian territories. it is not deliberate targeting at all.

and all the people whine about it, saying israelis are murderous, deprive the palestinians of freedom and prosperity, blah blah. that is true...


But we must all remember, that in the not too distant past, the arabs were the aggressors right from the start in 1948. the israelis may kill the occasional palestinian child, but from the day of israel's founding the arabs had sworn to annihilate the State of Israel and drive all the Jews into the mediterranean sea. it would have been the ultimate holocaust. and at that time the arabs had tremendous numerical and military superiority. but israel against all the odds redeemed its existence, through brilliant campaigns, sheer grit and some say divine providence; this will show through a study of the 1948, 1956, 1967 and 1973 arab-israeli wars. when Singapore became independent LKY shed a few tears. but the israelis paid for their freedom with men, blood and lives against arabs hellbent on their destruction.

we wonder, then, how the israelis came to be in control of the West Bank and Gaza. well, the israelis won them in the aforementioned wars - ironically started by the arabs themselves! the occupied territories were also paid for with the loss of israeli blood and lives - the highest price that can be paid, and the return of the Gaza Strip has to be seen in that light. amidst all the modern-day talk of giving dispossessed people their rights to a nation and blabla, the fact is that the occupying power, having won the area in war, retains the right to do as it pleases in the land, and to actually give it away for nothing in return is laudable. when the brits first gave the State of Israel its territory, one of the reasons was that Jews had made an invaluable contribution to the Allied effort on World War II. what have the palestinians ever done for the israelis? other than kill them with bombs. just because you have a right to your own homeland doesn't mean you deserve it.

look at the administrative fiasco in the gaza strip now that the israelis are gone. the palestinians can't maintain the infrastructure and order the israelis established. i think that through all these years the real heroes are the israelis, for standing up for their own existence and having built a prosperous developed country in spite of living with neighbours keen on their destruction and launching the occasional war and suicide bomber.

i may seem one-sided, but the truth is that what we hear about the israeli-palestinian conflict is biased towards the latter. this is merely what it is: an alternative viewpoint.



then there's the iranian nuclear issue. iran has the second-biggest oil reserves in the world, but insists on developing expensive nuclear power technology. their rough explanation: "we want to develop peaceful nuclear technology, so as to preserve our oil and gas for export."

now THAT has got to be the biggest bullshit i ever heard! it is very very lame. what about all the resourceless countries like singapore? we have zero oil for our own use, so we have even better reason to build a nuclear power plant - but no, we spend good money to import the oil we need, as do most other countries. nuclear technology is a very dangerous thing and a very big responsibility, that's why most countries are unwilling to take it up. if advanced nations like singapore, malaysia and the aussies think they can't, what makes the poor backward iranians think they can? when they are the ones that need it the least.

and i'm not saying anything about suspecting they actually mean to build nuclear bombs, although i (and most informed observers with a brain) really think they do, and that they are well on the way to building one.



there'll be more later.

Petrol from Plants!

there was a very interesting feature in the Aug 8 issue of Newsweek. by the way, i consider myself very lucky because we get TIME, Newsweek, The Economist and the Far Eastern Economic Review at home for free. daddy brings them from the office a week late, but still very good reading. so the article was: -

"Green Gold: After Years Of Hype, Biofuels Are Starting To Fill The World's Gas Tanks"

They are basically making petroleum-like, hydrocarbon-based fuels like ethanol(booze), something called biodiesel, and stuff like that. and they don't pump it out from the ground like oil. they extract the fuels from plants. what? yeap, from plants!

the ethanol is made from corn and other starchy grains. the corn is ground up and soaked, then dunked with enzymes to turn them into sugar. then they put in yeast to ferment it to get the ethanol. the pulp is filtered out, and the remaining ethanol is distilled(whee!) to 200-proof - that's 100% alcohol - and then distributed to gas stations. it's basically a 100% version of vodka and the stuff we get in bio lab.

as for biodiesel, it comes from crops like rapeseed(think peanut butter) and soya beans. plant oil is extracted from the plants under "high temperature and pressure"(remember your chem?) and the fat-filled oil is heated to purify it. then they add methanol and some catalysts to break down the oil to form glycerol and esters. the esters form the biodiesel.

damn i should have kept my chem.

now what's so good about so-called biofuels? the most magical thing about it is that you can use them in car engines just like petrol. if you mix ethanol or biodiesel with the stuff from Shell or Caltex the engine roars along just fine. if you want to use it pure you do have to vary the compression ratio in the engine cylinders but that's easy to do. there've been many proposed solutions to replace petrol - from battery-powered cars to clean coal to hydrogen - but with every single one of them you need new technologies and new cars and new engines and new "petrol" stations. that's very inconvenient and the costs involved will overtake the savings from not using petrol. so if you can keep your car and still use the new fuel and save money and save the earth, i think that's the best of both worlds.

another thing is of courses the usual environmentalist lines. biofuels produce less carbon dixoide, nitrogen and sulphur oxides, and less of the smoky shit in general. it's called "cleaner-burning". and they don't worsen global warming(ie. atmospheric CO2 concentration) because - and read this - every atom of carbon that comes out of a biofuel exhaust pipe was extracted from the atmosphere already by the plants that gave their lives for your fuel grew to adult size. (if you didn't know already, plants get their food from turning CO2 into glucose.)

and if you're thinking, you'll also realise that since the fuel comes from plants its supply is unlimited. the day that we run out of biofuel is the day we run out of vegetables. we'll never have to worry about oil again!

lastly - and i'll keep this simple - it's much cheaper. just ask your dad how expensive petrol is now.


while the stuff we in Singapore put in our cars is still 100% crude-based petrol from Brunei and Saudi Arabia, the new fuels are catching on in many places. in Brazil for instance, with its massive agricultural output, all the petrol you get at gas stations is about 22 to 26% ethanol. and if you get your car modified to run on pure ethanol, you halve your fuel bill! the US and Germany are already producing lots of the plant-based fuels, with even more to come since they are cutting taxes on the new fuels to encourage their use. and in Austria - believe it - the public buses run on fuel modified from McDonald's french fry oil!

now that's an idea. i'll set up a biodiesel factory in Tuas or something and ask everyone to send me their used oil and turn it into petrol. this will be a real money spinner since i don't have to pay them to take their trash. interesting.

it seems that everyone is happy. fuel users - especially drivers - worldwide are happy at having something cheaper than normal petrol. farmers are excited at having a new market for their produce. and the treehuggers are pleased that biofuels are less pollutive and don't worsen global warming. investment in biofuels - building factories, setting aside more cropland, and upgrading petrol stations - is growing fast, and soon i believe it will come to singapore. you can even power aeroplanes and ships and power stations with the new fuels.

even Malaysia is growing more oil palms and building new biofuel factories. we won't be far behind.

and the technology is just going to get better. with the old-style biofuels - biodiesel for instance - you get a lot of pulp and other waste left over after the process. it's not a bad thing; the factories sell the waste off as fertilizer. the wonderful thing is that we can now make our own enzymes(remember in bio class you learnt we had to extract them from whatever natural organism secretes them) and even better, we can genetically modify the artificial enzymes to make them do whatever we want them to do! so some genius develops an enzyme that digests cellulose and turns it into sugar.

for non-bio students that's the stuff that makes up paper, trees and dietary fibre, and is actually made up of very long-chain glucose strands. that's how you can get sugar out of it. my first thought was to look at the trees outside the window and imagine throwing a pail of enzyme at it and turning it into a glistening sweet sugar tree just like willy wonka would do. that's magical.

the implication here is that you can turn an entire plant into sugar and then ferment it to make your ethanol. it's a very high level of efficiency that makes the whole process much cheaper - US$1.30 per gallon, much less than petrol is now. it reduces the area of land needed to grow the same amount of petrol as well - and means also that you can grow any type of plant whatsoever since they are all made of cellulose. even cactus!

since the big oil companies are getting into it as well, i think the only people who need be worried are the arabs. God help their economies when we stop buying their oil.

what actually bothers me though is the new fuels' impact on hydrogen power technology. if we have clean limitless energy from plants, why invest in hydrogen? that means things like hydrogen cars, fuel cells and nuclear fusion reactors won't get developed. experts in the article say that if we combine biofuels with improvements in natural gas technology and fuel efficiency and materials engineering, "we may not ever need the fuel cell at all". now in reality fuel cells and nuclear fusion are the cleanest and most efficient technologies - literally zero pollution, with high energy density impossible with any other fuel. they just need development. with biofuels we are just staying with 20th-century technology and fuels which have reached their maximum development potential. are we going to be stuck on hydrocarbon-based fuels forever?

i was an environmental geography student throughout RI, and am doing economics now in JC. but long before all of that i was a dreamer and a science fiction fan. i grew up on Star Trek and Gundam. and all the starships and mobile suits run on compressed hydrogen for power. so do Imperial Star Destroyers, X-Wing Starfighters and Death Stars. that's what we can do with hydrogen! we can never use biofuels in space, there's no oxygen for combustion. i have always believed that our destiny as a civilization lies in the stars, the Second Coming of our LORD notwithstanding, and plant petrol isn't going to get us there. for all the advantages of biofuels, a part of me will always be unhappy if we neglect our hydrogen research.