Not Assigned To A Category
Bangkok Democracy Monument April 10
Malaysia Visa Run
Sunday (probably your Saturday) I spent 12 hours ferrying onto the mainland and going in a van 400km to Malaysia and back for new visa stamp. I have a multi-entry year long visa that cost me $120 ($54US) but they still make me leave every three months! Three caravaned vans with 10-12 people in each…and there are companies all over Samui that offer the same runs. I thought I would get 3 more months but they gave me only 2 because it is all up to the particular border office what they will give you! Now if I wanted to stay a third month I would have to go to the local Samui immigration office and pay 1800 baht ($54US) for 1 more month! Imagine how many expats all over Thailand or people on long-term stays who are doing the same thing! Way to bring money into Thailand! I think if I had flown out and back in I would have gotten 3 months. But I’m leaving before the third month anyway.
The run was quite an experience as my son Doug who lives here warned me. I think the Austrian trip leader belonged to the gestapo in another life! Maybe even a cousin of Hitler’s! :)) Driving 150km an hour (90mph) with only a half dozen near misses, we got only two 5-minute potty stops on the way and on the way back. And at the border there was a HUGE local week-end market where we were told by the gestapo NO TIME FOR SHOPPING! But some of the guys (and they were ALL guys) sneaked some food. And on the way back at the last stop we only got 2 minutes because the gestapo wanted to make the 3pm ferry to Samui instead of waiting until 4pm. At the border office we got yelled at because we were standing as a group, as we had been told NOT to do, and not lined up one after the other like the SS. Wonder what would happen if he tried to do this in China! :)) Oh well…it was all quite organized. He knew all the border guards and did a good job greasing the whole thing for us. And wonder of wonders he pronounced my last name (Goetz) right! I told him it was the first time ever! Usually people who don’t know me say Go-etz or Goats instead of Gets! Ha! But had never been on the Thai side of the Thai/Malaysia border so it was nice to see how tropical it was. Southern Thailand has been racked in recent years by a Muslim separatist movement but like with all the negative media attention in Oaxaca…no bombers were seen! Ha!
The pony-tailed gestapo trip leader had visited most of the States and worked for two years in Florida as a tour guide. “Did you know Central Florida is the second largest beef cattle producer in the States?” No! I exclaimed. This is an interesting phenomenon. Often foreign tourists know more about the sights than the local people.
I was tucked into the very back seat (seats were assigned by the gestapo) with a young guy from The Netherlands who at one time had a band in NYC…writing the lyrics and producing the music and who now was writing a book about Thai culture and the law to be entitled “RESPECT” targeted to all the young Western guys who are here for “Happy.” Since he was married to a Thai, I asked how long he had been living here. “16 months,” he says. Oh, good, I thought! And you are writing about Thai culture! Guys don’t realize how dangerous it can be here, he says. Give a Thai the middle finger, he said, and you will be killed. And of course everyone should know what happens if you are caught with drugs of any kind. And 8 people are killed every week on the sandy ring road around Samui. Well, it will be better for young guys than reading “Bangkok 8” so it may do some good. I hope.
The Enemy That Almost Isn’t
Iran: The Enemy That Almost Isn’t
Posted: 23 Feb 2009 02:00 PM PST
Crooks And Liars.com
“One of the things that I’ve found most disconcerting about American news coverage of Iran is the complete disconnect between what our own (and international) intelligence reports say and the almost rapturous assurance by the media and public officials that Iran is heading full bore towards our nuclear annihilation. Sean Paul Kelly @ The Agonist:
The Financial Times is reporting today that Iran has enough uranium for a bomb! Oh dear. Except their reporting is very, very lacking in the physics and engineering department.
Here’s what El Baradei recently said about Iran and the bomb:
SZ: In your report it says that Iran is gaining an ever greater mastery of uranium enrichment. Can the USA and Israel accept the fact that Iran is on the threshold of becoming a virtual nuclear power?
ELBARADEI: The question is, what can they do? What are the alternatives to direct negotiations? As long as we are monitoring their facilities, they cannot develop nuclear weapons. And they still do not have the ingredients to make a bomb overnight.
How hard is it to google this sh*t?
Update: As Paul Kerr, from Total WonKerr, just wrote to me in an email: “Here’s the number of weapons you can make with LEU: zero.” Any questions?
Hurts your “Oooh…be scared of the bogeyman” fear-mongering when you inject actual facts and science into it, doesn’t it? Whirled View and my buddy Cernig look further.
Douglas Saunders at The Globe and Mail looks at how the way we view Iran affects our attitude towards them:
What if the world’s biggest threat, instead of growing in size and menace, simply vanished?
Imagine if Iran, after years of extremism, found itself led by a president who had been elected on a platform of women’s rights, a free press, foreign investment and closer relations with the United States and other Western countries.
Imagine if, in response, the U.S. government made a public, formal apology for the 1953 Central Intelligence Agency overthrow of Iran’s elected government, the act that had sent the country on the path to extremism in the first place.
Imagine if the Iranian people then began holding pro-U.S. demonstrations.
And imagine if that moderate Iranian leader offered to accept peace with Israel, to permanently halt funding of Palestinian militant groups such as Hamas and to submit fully to inspections as it abandons any nuclear-weapons programs in exchange for better relations with America.
Ah, imagine. It could never be so easy. But wait. Don’t I recall something from my pile of newspaper clippings? Ah yes, here it is, and not even yellowed. Amazing how fast we forget things.
Mohammad Khatami, the pro-Western reformist, was elected in 1997.
Madeleine Albright, the U.S. secretary of state, issued the big apology to Iran in March of 2000. “Certainly, in our view, there are no obstacles that wise and competent leadership cannot remove,” she said. “As some Iranians have pointed out, the United States has cordial relations with a number of countries that are less democratic than Iran.”
The pro-American demonstrations, by all reports genuine (and unpunished), took place over several days in 2003. In that spring, Mr. Khatami sent a Swiss official to Washington to make the peace offer. In exchange for recognizing Israel, cutting off Hamas and proving it had abolished any nuclear-weapons plans, Iran wanted an end to sanctions, normal diplomatic relations with the U.S. and recognition of its role in the region.
So what happened? Well, nothing. George W. Bush was president, the Iraq war was just approaching the “mission accomplished” phase, and nobody in the White House thought it would look good to make peace with Iran, a country that only the year before had been made a rhetorical component in Mr. Bush’s “axis of evil.”
As one State Department official directly involved with the Iranian offer told me, “It was like we missed the biggest Middle East peace opportunity of the decade, just so we could keep saying ‘axis of evil.’”[..]
It was physicist Werner Heisenberg who found that the act of observing can affect the nature of the thing being observed. It is likely that simply by looking at Iran as a threat, we’ve made it one. Look again, and it might change.
Maybe it’s time to start looking at Iran a different way.”
Nobody In Charge in Thailand
Protesters have taken over the International airport and a smaller domestic airport in Bangkok and are demanding the Prime Minister, Somchai Wongsawat, resign, which he has refused to do even after months of demonstrations and violence in Bangkok. Protesters are refusing to negotiate with the government and have promised to stay until the “final battle.”
“A state of emergency has been declared at both Suvarnabhumi and the smaller, domestic Don Mueang airport, which the anti-government People’s Alliance for Democracy (PAD) have taken over.”
news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/7756050.stm
The previous corrupt Prime Minister, Thaksin Shinawatra, was overthrown in a military coup in 2006 and replaced with a “proxy” government. Thaksin has been indicted for massive corruption and last I heard he was in exile in China because the UK wouldn’t accept him.
What the BBC doesn’t say is that the new PM, Somchai, is Thaksin’s brother-in-law. He is holed up in Chiang Mai which is the Thaksin family home town and where he has a base of support because Thaksin doled out a few baht when he was PM to small farmers who now think he is wonderful.
However, the “elite” in Bangkok, who know what is going on, doesn’t think he is wonderful. The BBC says: “The PAD is a loose grouping of royalists, businessmen and the urban middle class opposed to Mr Thaksin.” Well, this is not a very good description. It also includes respected statesmen, university professors and students. And if the truth were known…probably the revered King who everyone thinks “whispered” his support of the 2006 coup.
“The BBC’s Quentin Sommerville in Bangkok says that Mr Somchai has already lost the confidence of his army chief, Gen Anupong Paochinda, and rumours of (another) coup are circling in the capital.” The head of Thailand’s powerful army has called for a dissolution of Parliament and new elections.
What the BBC doesn’t say is that the army is refusing to move against the protesters.
The chief of police has been demoted, the BBC says, “to what officials said was an “inactive post” in the prime minister’s office. No official reason was given for Gen Patcharawat Wongsuwanbut’s demotion, but government spokesman Nattawut Saikuar suggested to Thai TV that it was in connection with the protest crisis.”
Come on, I don’t think it would have been difficult to fact check why the police chief was demoted. Everyone knows anyway. So much for the BBC.
My husband, who lives in Thailand says: “Politically hot in Thailand. Nobody in charge. The PM (Thaksin ‘s brother-in-law) attempting to mobilize police and army to open the airport but they refuse to intervene. Can you imagine a head-of-state directing his armies to action and they refuse???? Big comment on the base of power.”
We Thailand watchers (my son and his Thai wife live on Koh Samui in the south) are fervently hoping this doesn’t end in bloodshed like the October 14, 1973 Uprising and the October 6, 1976 Massacre.
How Do We Know The World?
March 12 update: This, of course, was before the crash.
A conversation with Zbigniew Brzezinski and Brent Scowcroft
Two former national security advisors look at how the world has changed.
September 28, 2008
This spring, two of the most respected figures in American foreign policy sat down to talk about the United States and its place in the world. Zbigniew Brzezinski served as national security advisor to President Carter. Brent Scowcroft was national security advisor to presidents George H.W. Bush and Gerald R. Ford. Their conversation was moderated by David Ignatius, a columnist for the Washington Post. The following are edited excerpts
* Ignatius: I want you to talk a bit more about the nature of American leadership in this very complicated world. First, is American leadership necessary?
Brzezinski: It can be a catalyst. Not for actions directed by the United States but for actions that the local community — maybe we can call them stakeholders in a global system — is prepared collectively to embrace. That kind of leadership is needed. But for that kind of leadership to emerge in America, we not only need very special people as leaders — and they do come up occasionally — but we need a far more enlightened society than we have.
I think Americans are curiously, paradoxically, simultaneously very well-educated and amazingly ignorant. We are a society that lives within itself. We’re not interested in the history of other countries.
Today we have a problem with Iran. How many Americans know anything about Iranian history? Do they know that it is a bifurcated history? There have been two Irans. And those two different periods, pre-Islamic and post-Islamic, dialectically define the tensions and the realities of Iran today. [Americans] know nothing about it.
Quite a few Americans entering college could not locate Great Britain on the map. They couldn’t locate Iraq on the map after five years of war. Thirty percent couldn’t identify the Pacific Ocean. We don’t teach global history; we don’t teach global geography. I think most Americans don’t have the kind of sophistication that an America that inspires, and thereby leads, will have to have if it is to do what this 21st century really will demand of us.
Scowcroft: I could easily just say amen. But again, this is a part of who we are and from where we have arisen. For most of our history, we’ve been secure behind two oceans, with weak neighbors on each side. Americans don’t have to learn foreign languages. They can travel as widely as most of them want and never leave the United States. So most Americans instinctively just want to be left alone. I don’t think they want to mess with the problems of the world.
Brzezinski: They want to enjoy the good life.
Scowcroft: They want to enjoy the good life.
Press Conference on Burma
Tuesday May 27 2008
Dr. Surin Pisuwan, Secretary General, ASEAN, reporting at the Foreign Correspondent’s Club in Bangkok Thailand on the donors’ conference Sunday with Gen. Than Shwe of Myanmar and UN chief Ban Ki Moon in Yangon. The key issue has been the loosening of strict controls on foreign aid workers pressing for unfettered access to the disaster zone. To counter Burmese fears of “hidden agendas” by Western workers, ASEAN has agreed to coordinate all relief efforts.
What has been achieved is far more than what was expected. A new humanitarian “space,” however limited, so that ASEAN with the support of the UN can engage with the Myanmar authorities. That humanitarian space needs political support because in and of itself it cannot be sustained. The secty general of the UN and ASEAN has asked for the full cooperation of the aid community.
Read More
Chinese Students Fight View Of Their Home
New York Times Article
By SHAILA DEWAN
Published: April 29, 2008
LOS ANGELES — When the time came for the smiling Tibetan monk at the front of the University of Southern California lecture hall to answer questions, the Chinese students who packed the audience for the talk last Tuesday had plenty to lob at their guest:
…….
As the monk tried to rebut the students, they grew more hostile. They brandished photographs and statistics to support their claims. “Stop lying! Stop lying!” one young man said. A plastic bottle of water hit the wall behind the monk, and campus police officers hustled the person who threw it out of the room.
Scenes like this, ranging from civil to aggressive, have played out at colleges across the country over the past month, as Chinese students in the United States have been forced to confront an image of their homeland that they neither recognize nor appreciate. Since the riots last month in Tibet, the disrupted Olympic torch relays and calls to boycott the opening ceremony of the Games in Beijing, Chinese students, traditionally silent on political issues, have begun to lash out at what they perceive as a pervasive anti-Chinese bias.
Last year, there were more than 42,000 students from mainland China studying in the United States, an increase from fewer than 20,000 in 2003, according to the State Department.
……..
As the U.S.C. session wound to a close, the organizer, Lisa Leeman, a documentary film instructor, pleaded for a change in tone. “My hope for this event, which I don’t totally see happening here, is for people on both, quote, sides to really hear each other and maybe learn from each other,” Ms. Leeman said. “Are there any genuine questions that don’t stem from a political point of view, that are really not here to be on a soap box?”
At that moment, the bottle hit the wall
Laughingnomad 