#eric ellis

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Bury Your Dead

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Art by Eric Ellis for The M.A.R.S.H. Project.

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How To Make $100 Per Day YOUTUBE Affiliate Marketing

How To Make $100 Per Day YOUTUBE Affiliate Marketing

We won Doddie Doddie. What’s going on family, regardless to your CEO Bulls, Academy, calm, D, wolf of marketing and in this article we’re going to be showing you how to make $ 100 per day on YouTube. Now, if there’s anyone who can go ahead and show you guys how to make money on YouTube, it’s your boy right here, right literally YouTube has paid for this bodily Villa.

It is paid for my lifestyle…

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“Just Do It” bike series by illustrator Eric Ellis

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St. Maarten - P3 outfits emergency Dispatch Center with hurricane shutters

St. Maarten – P3 outfits emergency Dispatch Center with hurricane shutters

Public Private Partnership for a Safer St. Maarten

GREAT BAY—The newly launched organization; Public Private Partnership for a Safer St. Maarten (P3), yesterday made a donation to the Justice Department to cover the cost of completely outfitting the new Emergency Dispatch Center with hurricane shutters.

P3 which was launched just over a month ago said their aim is to establish a platform that…

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Eric Ellis Cover Design

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The Smugglers' Prey

By Eric Ellis, The Global Mail

What does a Sri Lankan would-be asylum seeker look like? Many look like this man. His name is Gnanaseelan. He’s 32. He’s a Tamil, though never a Tiger. A father. A widower.

He lives in this desperate shanty outside the seaside hamlet of Mullaitivu, on Sri Lanka’s war-ravaged north-east coast, with nine relatives, six of them motherless children.

Gnanaseelan and his family were caught in the crossfire of the last murderous days of Sri Lanka’s civil war between the Tamil Tigers and the mostly Sinhalese government forces in Colombo, which ended in May 2009 on a blood-soaked spit of sand about three kilometres from here.

He was maimed when his leg was struck by a random shell. Four years on, Gnanaseelan is an itinerant, unskilled labourer, taking a day’s work whenever he can find one, which isn’t that often. His limp and his ethnicity are hard to disguise and the Sinhalese contractors building new roads around here, on deals from government friends in distant Colombo, prefer their labour to be able-bodied and of their own kind.

On the rare occasions that Gnanaseelan does snare some work, he’s paid some 1,000 rupees a day (around $A8.35), and a rice-and-curry meal if the employer is feeling generous.

Gnanaseelan – and thousands of Tamils like him – is an innocent victim of Sri Lanka’s lethal ethnic politics. Tamils have endured decades of misrule under the Tigers, a calamitous civil war, the devastating 2004 tsunami, the horrendous bombardment of 2008-09 and now post-war persecution by a menacing Sinhalese military. It’s hardly surprising that Tamils here have a fatalistic saying: “The dead are lucky.”

Unsurprising too, that the promise of safer harbours abroad beckons these people. Of course now, if Gnanaseelan somehow managed to gather the minimum $5,000 it costs to be smuggled on a rickety Australia-bound boat, his prospect would be for a life in Papua New Guinea, if he didn’t drown en route.

Asylum seekers once looked like John Nguyen, the Australian Liberal Party’s election candidate for the middle-class Melbourne seat of Chisholm. In 1979, he and his grandparents fled persecution in Vietnam – by boat, in the wake of war. Nguyen’s boat landed him in Malaysia, before he was accepted by Australia.

Today, a generation and another Asian war on, Nguyen is hailed in Australia as a refugee success story, and has been re-born as an Australian politician – who’s now campaigning on his party’s hard-line ticket to “stop the boats” of refugees coming from places such as northern Sri Lanka.

Asylum seekers today might look like Rajani. That’s him sitting on the knee of Indra Devi, his aaya, or maternal grandmother. Rajani is five, about the same age Nguyen was when he fled Vietnam, and clings tightly to his aaya, perhaps much as John Nguyen clung to his own grandma on that terrifying boat journey in 1979.

Rajani’s lower left arm was blown off when he was just one, not even walking age, severed in the same shell attack that injured his father, the same shelling that killed his mother Asintha, who he doesn’t remember. Asintha’s husband and mother remember her – she was 26 years old when she was killed and “a beautiful woman” says her widower, Gnanaseelan.

Asintha’s mother, Indra Devi, recalls how, in early 2009, the family had retreated to a bunker on that now notorious killing field called Mullivaikal, after the Sri Lankan military swept through their village. Asintha was breastfeeding Rajani when a mortar struck the shelter, blasting her from behind. She died instantly, her body ripped apart, and Rajani was maimed.

The family’s nightmare continued for months as they became one of thousands of Tamil families caught between the last stronghold of the Tigers’ ruthless leader Velupillai Prabhakaran and the surging government forces desperate to kill him.

Indra Devi says that more than 2,000 Tamil civilians had gathered in the immediate area around their bunker. Gnanaseelan estimates there were about 150,000 people massed on the narrow sand spit.

Asintha was one of eight people killed by that single shell, and Indra Devi says it was impossible to tell which side fired the mortar because “both were fighting”. When the shelling stopped, Gnanaseelan, Indra Devi and little armless Rajani were allowed leave. They subsequently spent months being screened and ‘de-Tigerised’ in massive government camps before being allowed back to their devastated village, where this modest shack was built with foreign aid. Four years on, Indra Devi regards her family’s desperate plight as “fate”.

On the rare occasions Gnanaseelan does leave his family, he passes by the home of his neighbour, another Sri Lankan Tamil who could also be an asylum seeker.

The Global Mail

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Out Of The Haze, A Singapore Spring?

By Eric Ellis, The Global Mail (June 25, 2013)

When you are Singapore’s Lee family, and your clan has exercised absolute and uninterrupted control over its swanky specklet of Asia for 54 years, fellows like Kasiviswanathan Shanmugam are handy to have within your power court.

K. Shanmugam, as he’s less tongue-twistingly known, may have escaped the attention of those unfamiliar with the cosy connections that hold Singapore’s power elite together — a warm, clubby embrace that has kept them very wealthy.

But 54-year-old Shanmugam is a bigwig on the tiny island, which is currently being suffocated by pollution from the periodic burning of millions of hectares of palm oil plantations that have trashed the equatorial habitat of neighbouring Indonesia. That pollution from the illegal fire-clearing of these plantations has swept on eastward winds from Sumatra in massive clouds of smoke and ash to shroud and choke Singapore, southern Malaysia and large tracts of western Indonesia.

Call it blowback. Many of these plantations are owned by people with intimate connections to that same power court in Singapore, who helpfully provide them all manner of metropolitan usefulness, banking their billions and domiciling their empires while discreetly looking past, er, indiscretions that may have been perpetrated elsewhere.

Singapore has 101,000 millionaires officially resident on the island, their assets tucked safely away in the nation’s banks, property and share markets. Plenty of these plutocrats are normal Singaporeans who’ve done well in business. But many are not, like corrupt Indonesians on the run, or Burmese generals seeking safe haven. Singapore’s plutocratic ranks have been swelled in recent years by Europeans and Russians seeking relief from tax and the prying regulators of home, these exiles spending just enough time and money in Singapore to qualify for residency.

This, to many, is the useful point of Singapore, where Shanmugam – born in 1959, the very year Lee family patriarch Lee Kuan Yew began his three decades as ruler – has been an MP since 1988 for the Lees’ ruling People’s Action Party (PAP).

Shanmugam’s story, and there are many like it in Singapore’s political circles, neatly illustrates how power flows in Singapore, via an apparatus ironically made more visible by the haze crisis.

There have been five parliamentary elections since then in Singapore’s almost-democracy, three of them relatively leisurely affairs for Shanmugam; he and his PAP friends were untroubled by any other candidates in their constituency, Sembawang, an area perhaps best known for its US naval facility.

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