LAZFEST Debate Competition 2012 [MOTIONS]

Prepared motions for the 2012 LAZFEST Debate Competition hosted by SMA Lazuardi in Indonesia from the 1 – 2 March 2012.

Religion
1. THW grant absolute freedom for the establishment of religious building
2. THW disband FPI
3. THBT true democracy can only be achieved by the means of secularism

Economy
1. THW impose high VAT
2. THBT Greece is better off outside from Euro Zone
3. THW use Yuan as the world main currency

[VIDEO] UWC AC by Jia Ying Teoh

Two quite funny and accurate depictions of what’s happened so far in term 3 at UWC Atlantic College by my Malaysian co-year – Jia Ying Teoh. Enjoy

ASDC 2012: Registration

Registration for the 2012 Asian Schools Debating Championship has begun. The championship is hosted by Sekolah Tuanku Abdul Rahman (AKA. STAR). The much awaited and rather delayed website is finally up at http://starasdc2012.org/

Registration
Pre-registration opens from February 21st – February 29th, 2012

Registration fees for debaters and adjudicators is RM 900.00
Registration fees for Observers is RM1250.00

The invitation letter:

Mock Exams

So it’s that time of year, when mock exams are eating up my days like nothing ever before. Finished two exams and have another 4 subjects to go before Wednesday. Two exams today, my only day with 2 subjects on the same day. The much-shrunk timetable is really killing me, but then again, at least I’ll be well used to the stress and work come real exams.

My day has essentially be reduced to breakfast, study, lunch, study, dinner, study, back to student house, study, sleep and repeat the next day. It’s a good thing I like my carrel unit =]

As a result, I have had little if any time to do much blogging and for that I apologies. You will notice that after a short madness with WSDC 2012, I’m back to posting every other day. With my final IB exams coming up and lots of other work creeping up on me, I think it’ll be a little ambitious to try for a post a day for 2012.

Time to get back to studying.

[VIDEO] LSE Open 2012 Grand Final & Results

Video of the Grand Final of the 2012 London School of Economic and Political Science’s Debate Open.
Thanks to LSE Debater and LPC Alumni, Abel Lam for the upload.

The motion is ‘TH Regrets the decline of Marxism in Western Liberal Democracies’

Champions: Fred Cowell and Jason Vit

Grand Finals:
OG: Arrest Warents – Daniel Warents (PM) & Lewis Iwu (DPM)
OO: Minority Quotas – Stephen Boyle (LO) & Harish Natarajan (DLO)
CG: Freddy v Jason – Fred Cowell (MG) & Jason Vit (MW)
CO: Crown Dom. B – Joe Roussos (MO) & Ashish Kumar (OW)

The Tab

Order of the Pheonix MUN Simulation

So a few weeks back we had AC MUN 2012 (1, 2, 3, 4) While organizing AC MUN 2012, we, the organizers, were inspired by the possiblities that non-UN simulations might have. We had quitely added the African Union, the European Union and even the International Court of Justice to our MUN conference, even though they are not all strictly UN bodies in the most traditional scenes. I was also reminded of a friend of mine who talked about having participated in a Lord of the Rings simulation.

That’s when we decided we simply had to have a Harry Potter MUN simulation before we left. And so we did, on Thursday last week since it was also AC’s Harry Potter Focus Week. At this point, I should probably credit Yale, Columbia, KCL and St John’s Prep whom we based our simulation on. It was an extremely fun MUN session and is a good sign for future ‘less serious’ MUN simulations.

Here are just some of the pictures of AC’s Order of the Pheonix Simulation.

AC MUN 2012 – Part 4

The 2012 edition of the annual Atlantic College Model United Nations conference was hosted last weekend. I was part of a gang of 5 that took up the task of organizing the conference, which had some 350 attendees. I had a sorta dual focus during organization of AC MUN 2012. On the one hand I handled most of the administrative tasks; the massive task of allocating all attendees to the right country and committee etc, talking to teachers to get rooms for committees, the website as well as a few other bits and pieces here and there. On the other hand, I also kept an overview of the conference, make sure that things were being finished.

Organizing the conference began well back in March when we learnt we had been given the mammoth task. Nonetheless, the pressure didn’t seriously turn on until we came back after Christmas. In hindsight, this probably wasn’t the best thing, but oh well. Although there were some frantic days and nights, we did manage to pull everything together and by-in-large I think the conference went better than it did last year. Of course, there are always areas we can improve on and getting prepared earlier is definitely one of them.

All in all though, AC MUN 2012 was fun and largely went quite well. Please, and now it’s time to catch-up on some sleep.

AC MUN 2012 – Part 3

One of the most interesting aspects of Model United Nations is the use of notes. At HKMUN where I started, we had internet access during the conference, which made communication quite easy. Nevertheless, we still had a significant amount of odd notes that got passed around, with the usual flirting as well as just odd notes. It was at HKMUN that I got into the practice of picking up all my notes just in case the Press Corp ever picked up anything. This time, at AC MUN 2012, I was not a delegate, so I made an effort of going round to pick up notes lying around. Some of the notes were published in MUNk, the Press Corp’s publication. There are of course numerous serious notes, but here’s a cool collection of those that haven’t been published which I found interesting nevertheless.

A Clean Dorm

Ok. This is really random, but I got chocolate for this so I’m on a little high. Our Dorm (Dorm 5) won Morgannwg’s weekly ‘Cleanest dorm’ award and we got chocolates. Quite pleased, at least my stomach is. Maybe not my training regime (of which there is none). Anyhow, a happy belly for me and a clean dorm (a rarity?)!

BTW: That’s a photo of the real chocolate, although it looks like it’s just images on a piece of cardboard. They (my dormmates) arranged them on top of the photo of each type of chocolate so it looks fake. It’s real! Just ask my stomach!

AC MUN 2012 – Part 2

The 2012 edition of the annual Atlantic College Model United Nations conference was hosted last weekend. Since I was organizing the conference, I wasn’t able to spend as much time in committee as I wanted to. Though on Saturday I got a full dose as I ended up co-chairing the Crisis committee. We simulated Iran closing the Strait of Hormuz (thanks RCNMUN 2012) and I realized in the process of making the news articles the evening before that the situation wasn’t that stimulative as one might have thought. It mostly consisted of copying and pasting a news article and changing words like threaten to have. That was all it took. A few word changes and the world could be up in smokes. What if a real news aggregator mistyped or accidentally sent out the news that Iran had closed the Strait of Hormuz?

The crisis committee itself was fun. I ended up creating a few extra news reports than I had anticipated. I had some other stuff to sort out after lunch, but I did go back to the crisis committee about half an hour before it finished, and ended up being North Korea, introduced a few ‘interesting’ clauses and then headed off to the closing ceremony. It’s the first time I’ve ever had a crisis committee (the simulation sort, not the ‘we only knew about the topic today’ sort) so not a bad first introduction overall.