Basket.

Hi, and welcome to this week's issue of "Ministers say the Darndest Things".

"MOE is not staffed by cold-blooded bureaucrats," -His Excellency Mr Tharman Shamugaratnam

It had me in stitches. Government apparatchiks not cold-blooded bureaucrats! They'll be claiming that the president actually has an important role to play in the Singapore government next! What stunning revelations await?

But seriously. The statement seems to imply that either a) MOE is not staffed by bureaucrats or b) The bureaucrats that staff our august Ministry are not cold-blooded. Yes, and I'm the bloody Queen of England. (a) is a distinct impossibility, given that i) This is Singapore and ii) IT'S THE BLOODY MOE WE ARE TALKING ABOUT HERE HELLO WTF. (b) is similarly unlikely as the species described within it has never, does not and will never ever exist on this green earth.

So, where does this leave us? Just one possibility, because I have no wish to touch a certain "L" word.

That possibility is that Tharman is actually right. Cold-blooded bureaucrats don't staff MOE, fucking stupid ones do. These, after all, were the people who foisted Social Studies upon us, approved Project Work as an A Level subject with guidelines on how to be creative and realised just last year how many students actually USE THE SCHOOL COMPUTERS TO PLAY COMPUTER GAMES DURING LESSONS INSTEAD OF DOING THE TASKS SET OUT FOR THEM. To perform such wonderful feats of mental gymnastics and come up with such magnificent education policies that are guaranteed to illuminate the talents of every individual student takes SKILL; it shows that the people concerned are either a gang of evil Masonic geniuses who secretly control the world, or a bunch of complete idiots whose combined IQ is equal to that of a can of tinned peaches. And since our minister has ruled out the former possibility, we can only consider the latter one.

If you find this insulting, sorry, the Minister left me with no choice. Then again, he and his ministry do that often enough.