Airports closed by protesters in BKK

Nov 27, 2008

First of all, don't believe everything you hear or see. I am surprised at the biased coverage on BBC and CNN, showing the anti-govt PAD protesters in the worst possible light. The scene inside the airport is calm and stable. Pro-govt anti-protesters are getting impatient and angry at the stalement and the impact on the rest of the country. [More photos]

This is a very sad time for Thai people and for their economy. They are a peaceful people and this kind of aggression of Thai against Thai is very disturbing to them. Many people believe that ". . . it is becoming clearer that the powers that be, the ones with uniforms/tanks/guns don't really wish to stop this." Many locals are actually worried about a civil war. A coup is certainly a possibility but not sure this would be bloodless like the last one was in 2006. Every day it is predicted that the PM "will resign within 24 hrs."

Please be assured that this is is an internal political issue targeting Thai nationals and not foreigners.

Has this damaged Thailand's reputation? Yes absolutely. It's not just about tourists and tourism. It's about Thailand being able to act on a global level, politically and economically.

Former PM Thaksin was overthrown with the tacit approval of the beloved King in a military coup 2 years ago. A new govt was "elected" but the PAD believed winning votes were bought; the next PM Samak was considered a puppet of Thaksin who has been keeping things stirred up ever since he left and considered by most to still be running the country from outside. He has been found guilty of corruption and sentenced to two years in absentia. Samak had to go and was finally ousted earlier this year on a silly but true charge of illegally taking money for hosting a cooking show.

The current PM, Somchai, is Thaksin's rather ineffectual brother-in-law. [He looks like a Thai Wally Cox.] It is with the intent of forcing Somchai out that the PAD protesters took over the airport Tuesday night - Somchai was due to arrive Wednesday returning from APEC in Peru. He landed in Chiang Mai instead where he still is. ToWhen and where he does land, he will probably be meeting with General Anupong - the military who are caught in the middle and reluctant to use force either to end the airport blockade or remove the current government.

The weakened PM Somchai is still in Chiang Mai, afraid to return to BKK. In the Sunday papers, there was a story titled "PM Teed Off" and I thought to myself, "Well, that's about the extent of his reaction." Then I read the story? He went golfing Sunday.

There is no danger here but I am glad I do not have to deal with traveling at the moment and Jim isn't due to be BKK for 3-4 weeks and is creative enough to find a way here without flying into BKK.

Here's a link to some photos of the PAD at the airport.

Scavenging as a Virtue

Written by Donna Schaper as seen on www.huffingtonpost.com, 11/22/08.

I have learned to be cheap. You could call me frugal but the truth is I am cheap. I carry my own vodka in water bottles if I go out. I have a lovely if shabby wardrobe and haven't bought outside of a thrift store or a yard sale for years. My favorite activity is to go book shopping at the Amherst, Massachusetts Town Dump Book store. It is just a large, often cold shed where people bring books they no longer want to dust. When at the dump, I also like to pick up some mulch for the garden and a few clean Tupperwares for my other adventures. In addition to the book-recycling shed, there is an even larger shed for what can only be called orphan stuff. My best scavenge there was a pair of cross-country skis, second-best an old bowling alley lane that made a great countertop.

I also habituate Free Cycle, a site that rivals E-Bay for obvious reasons. There is nothing like Tuesdays on the Upper East Side in New York. There you can scavenge designer couches and tables - but you have to have a truck, which involves money, a definite drawback in the life of a scavenger. My worst fear about the economic crisis is that less good stuff will show up on the street.

I have been known to keep chickens and to feed them dumpster dived food. Trader Joe's is often excellent. Thus I have eggs that have a certain ethnic flavor, owing to the odd kind of union free food Trader Joe's imports.

Scavenging things has helped me scavenge people and institutions. I specialize in what other people throw out. Right now I work mostly with people about to be deported. Formerly my "specialty" was abused women. Before that it was alcoholics and drug addicts. I also work with "normal" people even though I doubt openly that they are as normal as they would like to convince me they are. Just because they can buy a new blouse for $79.99 at Bloomingdale's does not make them normal.

Once in Chicago, we were running a homeless shelter in an old church. It gets really cold in Chicago. We knew some people were living in one of the dumpsters in the back of the church because the shelter was overcrowded and we couldn't take everybody in. Someone brought in a dead and frozen baby. She had died in the shelter and been put in the dumpster. No parent was to be found. Why tell you that story? Because things like that happen all the time and we should scavenge their memories. Otherwise we don't know what is normal about life, or at least regular. We can easily become the kind of people who throw away things as though they don't matter. We can easily imagine that the Bloomingdale's buyer is normal and the shelter dweller not.

Nothing drives me crazier than college campuses on the day students leave. Whole department stores of half worn clothing litter the hallway. Bicycles are abandoned. Electronic equipment, much of it never dusted or kept clean, dirty now in that way that microwaves get dirty, with centuries of reheated coffee cup circles dunging their insides, sit around.

To be frugal the way I am frugal it helps to also have a deeply compulsive streak. I do. Weekends in my neighborhood, near Union Square in New York, people often buy new shoes in designer shopping bags. I love to pick up these bags and carry them around as long as they last. I have had to stop picking up the shoeboxes. Last week I walked right into a slightly used size 8 pair of leather boots inside a large boot box inside a large shopping bag. The owner had recycled her old ones and walked off in her new ones. You should see how good I look in these boots.

Sometimes I think I would like something spanky new and squeaky clean. But then I remember what happens to things in the laundry and realize I am only losing one layer. Everything, and everyone, loses shine over time. Why not pre-own the shine?

I have a near inability to walk by a garbage can without at least noticing what is in there. Often I clutter myself with things I don't need because I just can't leave them stranded. Gleaning has both cluttered and outfitted me. It is not easy to be this compulsive about waste.

My favorite bookstore is in Montague, Massachusetts advertises itself as "Books you don't need in a place you can't find." The fun of scavenging is to glean fun as well as objects. Some people say they are shop-a-holics. I am a glean-a-holic.

Gleaning has its virtues except for the way it tempts us to brag. I have not learned respect for those who don't treasure things the way I do. I get mad at people who leave nice sweaters behind in restaurants. I wonder how they can be so careless.

Scavenging is a low-cost form of personal entertainment. It's not just consumerism on the cheap. I glean the garbage because it's fun. I just can't stand being useful all the time. Women, especially clergywomen, are garbed in utility. We should all the time always be helping someone. That gets more than a little tiring and squeezes the juice out of life. I squeeze the juice into life by my little feasts, frequent scavenges and big frugalities.

Frugality is not always the best route. Dare I send the Christmas letter by email? What is the etiquette of the sacred message in a slick and quick package? Especially since I have gone more global as a soul, I should at least hand address a note once a year to people who have touched my life. I probably won't. Efficiency joins frugality to keep this scavenger going.

Frugality can be me internalizing capitalism - or it can be trying to beat it, sneakily, like people beat fear in the seventh grade by acting like they are not afraid. Scavenging clearly keeps us in the market looking for things at an advanced pace.

My favorite charity is Accion International, a micro-lending organization. It is a scavenger itself. It gives small loans to people so they can build their businesses. One man told the congregation the story of his being able to buy a power washing machine so he didn't have to rent it every day. That meant he could do homework with his son in the evenings. Instead of working 12-hour days, he could work 10-hour days. You see what an investment that $500. was. It scavenged a couple of lives and put them back in business.

Call scavenging an underground economy - except that we who scavenge do so in the light of day. Call it compulsive - although it can be done with a great spirit of relaxation. I did throw away, actually recycle, all those shoe boxes I couldn't really use. Or just call it spiritual fun, an easy participation in death and resurrection. You don't even have to wait for Easter to do it.

Arrival Thailand Nov 2009

Arrived in Bangkok, 13 November, 2008, after a long flight exacerbated by a few incidents like my seatmate dumping glass of OJ in my lap. Sticky all over plus it looked like I had wet myself. Ever change clothes in airplane bathroom? Had to wrestle my pack out of the overhead bins, fumble through to find clean pants while squatting in narrow aisle. But hey - it could've been hot coffee or a whole can of (wasted) beer, right? [This is a photo of my room in the Sri Ayutthaya Guesthouse in Bangkok.]
 
I sorta screwed up in Seoul where I had ten hours to kill. Took a little rest on a comfy couch in the Transit lounge for long layovers, reorganized my stuff, freshened up, ate some of my food, etc. then walked around a bit, found my gate and settled in. While waiting for boarding time to start, I lay down again just for a sec with my head on my pack on three seats and promptly crashed. A flight attendant came over to wake me and see if I was going on the BKK flight as everyone had boarded and the plane was ready to take off - yikes! Luckily, there were a lot of empty seats on that particular 6-hr segment, so I continued my nap stretched out on three seats and landed in BKK not totally exhausted as one typically is. Trudi had made reservations for me at a nice guesthouse for two nights there which was fairly easy to find after taking the bus from the airport. The next day I walked around the neighborhood, listening to Thai conversations to stimulate my vocab memory from last year, and smelling lots of street food everywhere. It felt really good to be back here again altho anxious to be getting further north where it is cooler and less hectic in Chiang Mai.
NOTE: In retrospect, I was supremely lucky to arrive November 15th and escape the shutdown on the BKK airports nine days later on the 24th.

The world's verdict will be harsh if the US rejects the man it yearns for.

Written by Jonathan Freedland
September 10 2008
The Guardian
guardian.co.uk

The feeling is familiar. I had it four years ago and four years before that: a sinking feeling in the stomach. It's a kind of physical pessimism which says: "It's happening again. The Democrats are about to lose an election they should win - and it could not matter more."

In my head, I'm not as anxious for Barack Obama's chances as I was for John Kerry's in 2004 or Al Gore's in 2000. He is a better candidate than both put together, and all the empirical evidence says this year favours Democrats more than any since 1976. But still, I can't shake off the gloom.

Look at yesterday's opinion polls, which have John McCain either in a dead heat with Obama or narrowly ahead. Given the well-documented tendency of African-American candidates to perform better in polls than in elections - thanks to people who say they will vote for a black man but don't - this suggests Obama is now trailing badly. More troubling was the ABC News-Washington Post survey which found McCain ahead among white women by 53% to 41%. Two weeks ago, Obama had a 15% lead among women. There is only one explanation for that turnaround, and it was not McCain's tranquilliser of a convention speech: Obama's lead has been crushed by the Palin bounce.

So you can understand my pessimism. But it's now combined with a rising frustration. I watch as the Democrats stumble, uncertain how to take on Sarah Palin. Fight too hard, and the Republican machine, echoed by the ditto-heads in the conservative commentariat on talk radio and cable TV, will brand Democrats sexist, elitist snobs, patronising a small-town woman. Do nothing, and Palin's rise will continue unchecked, her novelty making even Obama look stale, her star power energising and motivating the Republican base.

So somehow Palin slips out of reach, no revelation - no matter how jaw-dropping or career-ending were it applied to a normal candidate - doing sufficient damage to slow her apparent march to power, dragging the charisma-deprived McCain behind her.

We know one of Palin's first acts as mayor of tiny Wasilla, Alaska was to ask the librarian the procedure for banning books. Oh, but that was a "rhetorical" question, says the McCain-Palin campaign. We know Palin is not telling the truth when she says she was against the notorious $400m "Bridge to Nowhere" project in Alaska - in fact, she campaigned for it - but she keeps repeating the claim anyway. She denounces the dipping of snouts in the Washington trough - but hired costly lobbyists to make sure Alaska got a bigger helping of federal dollars than any other state.

She claims to be a fiscal conservative, but left Wasilla saddled with debts it had never had before. She even seems to have claimed "per diem" allowances - taxpayers' money meant for out-of-town travel - when she was staying in her own house.

Yet somehow none of this is yet leaving a dent. The result is that a politician who conservative blogger Andrew Sullivan calls a "Christianist" - seeking to politicise Christianity the way Islamists politicise Islam - could soon be a heartbeat away from the presidency. Remember, this is a woman who once addressed a church congregation, saying of her work as governor - transport, policing and education - "really all of that stuff doesn't do any good if the people of Alaska's heart isn't right with God".

If Sarah Palin defies the conventional wisdom that says elections are determined by the top of the ticket, and somehow wins this for McCain, what will be the reaction? Yes, blue-state America will go into mourning once again, feeling estranged in its own country. A generation of young Americans - who back Obama in big numbers - will turn cynical, concluding that politics doesn't work after all. And, most depressing, many African-Americans will decide that if even Barack Obama - with all his conspicuous gifts - could not win, then no black man can ever be elected president.

But what of the rest of the world? This is the reaction I fear most. For Obama has stirred an excitement around the globe unmatched by any American politician in living memory. Polling in Germany, France, Britain and Russia shows that Obama would win by whopping majorities, with the pattern repeated in Africa, Asia, the Middle East and Latin America. If November 4 were a global ballot, Obama would win it handsomely. If the free world could choose its leader, it would be Barack Obama.

The crowd of 200,000 that rallied to hear him in Berlin in July did so not only because of his charisma, but also because they know he, like the majority of the world's population, opposed the Iraq war. McCain supported it, peddling the lie that Saddam was linked to 9/11. Non-Americans sense that Obama will not ride roughshod over the international system but will treat alliances and global institutions seriously: McCain wants to bypass the United Nations in favour of a US-friendly League of Democracies. McCain might talk a good game on climate change, but a repeated floor chant at the Republican convention was "Drill, baby, drill!", as if the solution to global warming were not a radical rethink of the US's entire energy system but more offshore oil rigs.

If Americans choose McCain, they will be turning their back on the rest of the world, choosing to show us four more years of the Bush-Cheney finger. And I predict a deeply unpleasant shift.

Until now, anti-Americanism has been exaggerated and much misunderstood: outside a leftist hardcore, it has mostly been anti-Bushism, opposition to this specific administration. But if McCain wins in November, that might well change. Suddenly Europeans and others will conclude that their dispute is with not only one ruling clique, but Americans themselves. For it will have been the American people, not the politicians, who will have passed up a once-in-a-generation chance for a fresh start - a fresh start the world is yearning for.

And the manner of that decision will matter, too. If it is deemed to have been about race - that Obama was rejected because of his colour - the world's verdict will be harsh. In that circumstance, Slate's Jacob Weisberg wrote recently, international opinion would conclude that "the United States had its day, but in the end couldn't put its own self-interest ahead of its crazy irrationality over race".

Even if it's not ethnic prejudice, but some other aspect of the culture wars, that proves decisive, the point still holds. For America to make a decision as grave as this one - while the planet boils and with the US fighting two wars - on the trivial basis that a hockey mom is likable and seems down to earth, would be to convey a lack of seriousness, a fleeing from reality, that does indeed suggest a nation in, to quote Weisberg, "historical decline". Let's not forget, McCain's campaign manager boasts that this election is "not about the issues."

Of course I know that even to mention Obama's support around the world is to hurt him. Incredibly, that large Berlin crowd damaged Obama at home, branding him the "candidate of Europe" and making him seem less of a patriotic American. But what does that say about today's America, that the world's esteem is now unwanted? If Americans reject Obama, they will be sending the clearest possible message to the rest of us - and, make no mistake, we shall hear it.

· freedland@guardian.co.uk

‘With a Few More Brains ...’

March 30, 2008
Op-Ed Columnist
‘With a Few More Brains ...’
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

Ten days ago, I noted the reckless assertion of Barack Obama’s former pastor that the United States government had deliberately engineered AIDS to kill blacks, but I tried to put it in context by citing a poll showing that 30 percent of African-Americans believe such a plot is at least plausible.

My point was that the Rev. Jeremiah Wright is not the far-out fringe figure that many whites assume. But I had a deluge of e-mail from incredulous whites saying, in effect: If 30 percent of blacks believe such bunk, then that’s a worse scandal than anything Mr. Wright said. It’s true that conspiracy theories are a bane of the African-American community. Perhaps partly as a legacy of slavery, Tuskegee and Jim Crow, many blacks are convinced that crack cocaine was a government plot to harm African-Americans and that the levees in New Orleans were deliberately opened to destroy black neighborhoods.

White readers expressed shock (and a hint of smugness) at these delusions, but the sad reality is that conspiracy theories and irrationality aren’t a black problem. They are an American problem.

These days, whites may not believe in a government plot to spread AIDS, but they do entertain the equally malevolent theory that the United States government had a hand in the 9/11 attacks. A Ohio University poll in 2006 found that 36 percent of Americans believed that federal officials assisted in the attacks on the twin towers or knowingly let them happen so that the U.S. could go to war in the Middle East.

Then there’s this embarrassing fact about the United States in the 21st century: Americans are as likely to believe in flying saucers as in evolution. Depending on how the questions are asked, roughly 30 to 40 percent of Americans believe in each.

A 34-nation study found Americans less likely to believe in evolution than citizens of any of the countries polled except Turkey. President Bush is also the only Western leader I know of who doesn’t believe in evolution, saying “the jury is still out.” No word on whether he believes in little green men.
Only one American in 10 understands radiation, and only one in three has an idea of what DNA does. One in five does know that the Sun orbits the Earth ...oh, oops.

“America is now ill with a powerful mutant strain of intertwined ignorance, anti-rationalism, and anti-intellectualism,” Susan Jacoby argues in a new book, The Age of American Unreason. She blames a culture of “infotainment,” sound bites, fundamentalist religion and ideological rigidity for impairing thoughtful debate about national policies.

Even insults have degenerated along with other discourse, Ms. Jacoby laments. She contrasts Dick Cheney’s obscene instruction to Senator Patrick Leahy with a more elegant evisceration by House Speaker Thomas Reed in the 1890s: “With a few more brains he could be a half-wit.”

Her broader point is that we as a nation will have difficulty making crucial decisions if we don’t have an intellectual climate that fosters an informed and reasoned debate. How can we decide on embryonic stem cells if we don’t understand biology? How can we judge whether to invade Iraq if we don’t know a Sunni from a Shiite?

Our competitiveness as a nation in coming decades will be determined not only by our financial accounts but also by our intellectual accounts. In that respect, we’re at a disadvantage, particularly vis-?-vis East Asia with its focus on education.

From Singapore to Japan, politicians pretend to be smarter and better- educated than they actually are, because intellect is an asset at the polls. In the United States, almost alone among developed countries, politicians pretend to be less worldly and erudite than they are (Bill Clinton was masterful at hiding a brilliant mind behind folksy Arkansas sayings about pigs).

Alas, when a politician has the double disadvantage of obvious intelligence and an elite education and then on top of that tries to educate the public on a complex issue — as Al Gore did about climate change — then that candidate is derided as arrogant and out of touch.

The dumbing-down of discourse has been particularly striking since the 1970s. Think of the devolution of the emblematic conservative voice from William Buckley to Bill O’Reilly. It’s enough to make one doubt Darwin.

There’s no simple solution, but the complex and incomplete solution is a greater emphasis on education at every level. And maybe, just maybe, this cycle has run its course, for the last seven years perhaps have discredited the anti-intellectualism movement. President Bush, after all, is the movement’s epitome — and its fruit.

Clueless in America

April 22, 2008
Clueless in America
By BOB HERBERT, Op-Ed Columnist

We don’t hear a great deal about education in the presidential campaign. It’s much too serious a topic to compete with such fun stuff as Hillary tossing back a shot of whiskey, or Barack rolling a gutter ball. The nation’s future may depend on how well we educate the current and future generations, but (like the renovation of the nation’s infrastructure, or a serious search for better sources of energy) that can wait. At the moment, no one seems to have the will to engage any of the most serious challenges facing the U.S.

An American kid drops out of high school every 26 seconds. That’s more than a million every year, a sign of big trouble for these largely clueless youngsters in an era in which a college education is crucial to maintaining a middle-class quality of life — and for the country as a whole in a world that is becoming more hotly competitive every day.

“We have one of the highest dropout rates in the industrialized world,” said Allan Golston, the president of U.S. programs for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. In a discussion over lunch recently he described the situation as “actually pretty scary, alarming.” Roughly a third of all American high school students drop out. Another third graduate but are not prepared for the next stage of life — either productive work or some form of post-secondary education. When two-thirds of all teenagers old enough to graduate from high school are incapable of mastering college-level work, the nation is doing something awfully wrong.

Ignorance in the United States is not just bliss, it’s widespread. A recent survey of teenagers by the education advocacy group Common Core found that a quarter could not identify Adolf Hitler, a third did not know that the Bill of Rights guaranteed freedom of speech and religion, and fewer than half knew that the Civil War took place between 1850 and 1900.

Mr. Golston noted that the performance of American students, when compared with their peers in other countries, tends to grow increasingly dismal as they move through the higher grades. “In math and science, for example, our fourth graders are among the top students globally. By roughly eighth grade, they’re in the middle of the pack. And by the 12th grade, U.S. students are scoring generally near the bottom of all
industrialized countries.”

Many students get a first-rate education in the public schools, but they represent too small a fraction of the whole.

Bill Gates, the founder of Microsoft, offered a brutal critique of the nation’s high schools a few years ago, describing them as “obsolete” and saying, “When I compare our high schools with what I see when I’m traveling abroad, I am terrified for our work force of tomorrow. . . . “By obsolete, I don’t just mean that they are broken, flawed or underfunded, though a case could be made for every one of those points. By obsolete, I mean our high schools — even when they’re working as designed — cannot teach all our students what they need to know today.”

The Educational Testing Service, in a report titled “America’s Perfect Storm,” cited three powerful forces that are affecting the quality of life for millions of Americans and already shaping the nation’s future. They are:
• The wide disparity in the literacy and math skills of both the school-age and adult populations. These skills, which play such a tremendous role in the lives of individuals and families, vary widely across racial, ethnic and socioeconomic groups.
• The “seismic changes” in the U.S. economy that have resulted from globalization, technological advances, shifts in the relationship of labor and capital, and other developments.
• Sweeping demographic changes. By 2030, the U.S. population is expected to reach 360 million. That population will be older and substantially more diverse, with immigration having a big impact on both the population as a whole and the work force.

These and so many other issues of crucial national importance require an educated populace if they are to be dealt with effectively. At the moment we are not even coming close to equipping the population with the intellectual tools that are needed. While we’re effectively standing in place, other nations are catching up and passing us when it comes to educational achievement. You have to be pretty dopey not to see the implications of that.

But, then, some of us are pretty dopey. In the Common Core survey, nearly 20 percent of respondents did not know who the U.S. fought in World War II. Eleven percent thought that Dwight Eisenhower was the president forced from office by the Watergate scandal. Another 11 percent thought it was Harry Truman.

We’ve got work to do.

Shattered Glass

See this lovely wine glass? A few days ago I had two of them. And then *poof* gone! The two glasses were part of a wedding gift to Jim and me 16 years ago from friends Joyce and John. They are only used on special occasions like our anniversary; I had brought them out when Joyce and John were here for dinner a few nights ago.

While eating dinner, one glass which was about half-filled with wine spontaneously exploded during dinner. It spewed tiny shards of shattered glass within 4-5 feet - in only one direction - and wine (of course, it had to be red) flew 5-6 feet away in the same direction - onto the carpet, on top of my desk, laptop, and manuscript I was working on. I've never seen anything like it. Quick-thinking Joyce poured a bottle of seltzer on the rug which helped keep the wine from staining. The only real loss was the one glass. :-(

I immediately googled exploded + glass so I could find out what kind of atmospheric, sonic or other conditions might have caused this. I found that there are several websites devoted to people reporting this phenomenon. For those of you that I saw online who are attempting to explain this, geographically or otherwise, this incident took place happened in southern Maine in March, at close to sea level, with normal temperatures inside the house and 40s outside. Wine at room temperature had been in the glass for an hour or two.