EyesWideOpen

Red Shirts are going for the puppet master. Let's see how this will play out.

Who is "the puppet master"?

Prem.....

There is a Cambodia saying. When elephants fight, only the ants die. Sadly I think this will certainly be the case here, as this is a pretty major fight among the pigs at the feeding trough. Hmmmm.

Think I will wait until Thaksin's flee Thailand. Then I will head over to Laos...... :-)

I personally am a bit confused by the size of the army here. The King of Thailand signed a defense pact in the late 1950s with America , meaning in essence that America will open a can of whoop ass on whoever decides to invade Thailand. Wait.......oh I get it now. To understand Thailand, just follow the money... Endless generals, and new military toys with contracts that are heavily padded. The capper really was the subamarine they wanted. Hope the guy who thought that one up is in a inactive post somewhere.....

I had the exact same thing happen to me. I had a cataract operation by a very well known eye doctor in Los Angeles, at their special eye clinic. Operation went fine, and I could see perfectly. Three days later, it felt exactly like someone was pushing a red hot poker into my eye, and I could no longer see. Had an emergency appointment to see the original doctor, who had a terrified look on his face as soon as he examined my eye. He immediately sent me to see his fellow doctor, who is one of the top retina doctors in America. He gave me shot of antibotics directly into the eye which had me throwing up from pain. I used to think a needle in the eye was a figure of speech...... :-)

That did not stop the infection, and I had an emergency surgery the following morning which barely was able to save my eye. All the gel is taken out of the eye, and replaced with saline solution. It turned out to be a staph infection, which occured in the operating room with the cataract operation.

A retina specialist was needed to save my eyesight. These poor Thais had no chance at all for a surgical solution to their problem. I remember at the time I was not very happy about the possibility of losing the sight in one eye.........

I had purchased a condo in Chiang Mai. As the standard hot water heater was looking pretty tired, I decided to change it. I carefully turned off the shower heater breaker, and started to disconnect it from the wall. Next thing I know I am getting the shit shocked out of me.... After a moment of astonishment, I took the panel cover off the breaker box. It turns out that whoever had wired it up had put the breakers on the ground side, instead of the live side. So the breaker would in essence turn the device off, but there was still live 220 power being supplied to it. Might be something for everyone to check.

This fire makes me sick to my stomach. I have lived here ten years, and I see time and time again that Thais in power, either governmental or the wealthy are rarely punished for anything. It is no wonder that this kind of shit happens time and time again. Why wouldn't it, since there is no punishment that occurs. If they took all the principals involved in this tragedy, including the government officials that were in it up to their necks, stripped them of their wealth to help pay for the lives they have destroyed , then threw them all in jail for 40 years, you can bet the other pub owners would pay very close attention.

The Santika fire is in fact a repeat of the Route 66 nightclub fire that occured in Pattaya a couple of years ago. To the best of my knowledge no one was punished over that fire as well, which killed several employees. So I guess we can simply wait for the next nightclub fire to happen.

I recall a few years ago in Patong there was another silly crackdown on closing hours, part of the government's push to insure tourists will visit temples in the morning. The bar owners had had enough of this nonsense, so they organized a strike by simply closing all the bars during regular hours. The tourists were angry, made it known to local officials, and the following day there was no more talk of early closing. Moral of the story?? Don't kill the golden goose. In fact as a general rule do not even mess with the golden goose.........

Regarding the late closing bars, when I lived there in 2001 the running joke of the town was to watch which bars were open every time there was a religious holiday and the bars were supposed to be closed. ( hint...) There bars that were open raking in money were all either police owned or controlled........

In 1888, writer Joseph Conrad was a first mate on the steamer Vidar.

He wrote, "Anchored off Bangkok, awaiting customs to row out and collect the Char Money"

Nothing changes, corruption is endemic.

Are you sure that the novellist, writing in 1888, referred to corruption when he mentioned the collection of Char Money? What gave you that impression?

--

Maestro

Here it is. What we know of today as tea money. It is good to know that corruption has been around a long time. Guess that also means

it is not going away anytime soon............ Sort of sad really.

Char was a common slang term for tea throughout British Empire and Commonwealth military forces in the 19th and 20th centuries, crossing over into civilian ...

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tea - Cached - Similar -

In Calif. where I used to live there was a small beach town with limited parking that issued many parking tickets every year.

Some bright bulb in city hall decided one day that if they double the parking ticket price from $ 20 to $ 40, they could make twice

as much money. The reality of what happened is that the total revenue fell dramatically. The price has reached the pain/annoyance

level, and people moved their cars instead of getting tickets. So they changed the price back to the lower level, and revenue went back up.

It is a bit like for me in Thailand. I travel extensively and have been to many many national parks.When they jacked the park price to 400 baht for a foreigner to see a crummy waterfall somewhere, and also add in the double pricing, that is just insult to injury. So I have reached

the pain / annoyance threshold as well, and no longer stop at national parks. But Thailand will never see this lost revenue, and having lived here

9 years I fully understand they do not care either........

I am amazed that Thailand and surrounding countries are foolish enough to allow China to build invasion roads from China down into SE Asia. Thais of all people know there is no free ride. If China is handing out money, there is a reason. And I can guarantee the final beneficiary will be in fact China. But this is Thailand, so I guess the thought of the endless potential corruption money from a project of that size is too tempting..........

18,000 security people ? Wow...... Is it only me that sees the joke of saying >>>>

" The prime minister reiterated that the upcoming summit will prove to other nations that situation in Thailand has returned to normal and the country can organise international meetings.

and then at the same time having 18,000 people guarding the meeting ?? To me that is a bit like having a Russian friend who says Moscow is a safe place to visit, and when you arrive at the Moscow airport he has assigned 10 body guards to you.

Seems like they would be better off with a couple thousand tough guys, instead of a massive swarm of soldiers.......

Am amazed to see a bunch of Thais kicking ass on a couple of people. I thought that was special behavior reserved for farangs that insulted a Thai....... But it seems odd, since only a Thai knows how vengeful another Thai can be. Meaning after the bouncers finish playing football with the heads of the former patrons, they then come back later with weapons...Wait, maybe that is too much forward thinking for the bouncers.

This is a terrible trend , setting up stings to catch the BIB. My god if they kept this up pretty soon there would be no police officers left in Thailand..... Who would man the checkpoints ?? Who would catch evil farangs throwing cigarette butts on Sukumvit ???

What an odd question......Everyone who has been around the block a few times know that the darker the skin of a woman, the hotter the sex. At least that is what I tell the girls in the bars when they keep asking me the exact same question about why farangs seem to like dark skin.

I almost have to hand it to JJ. First he works over the Brits for 35,000 baht. Then a few days later in another video he is working over some American servicemen for 40,000 baht. Man, I need to start a jet ski business......... However for me the most sickening part of the video was watching a fully uniformed Thai policeman carefully assisting JJ in the milking process. Guess the American guys actually thought that if the policeman was there , the whole thing must be legitimate. Wrong again........

Wow this really is Amazing Thailand.....JJ must have the only scoped BB gun in the world..I really love the Thai attempts to re spin news. In fact it was real gun, what the hel_l else would he pull out to try to frighten the farangs into paying?? Also got a bit of laugh out of the full moon party girl.

When I lived in Samui, it was a well known joke that at the full moon parties the police would work in partnership with drug dealers. Meaning you buy a small amount of some drug, then the dealer gives the secret signal to a policeman nearby. You make it about 10 steps before the cuffs are snapped on you.

Then it is now extortion time at the police station. I agree she was an idiot, but hard time in a Thai jail is a bit punitive for minor drug possession.

I think Thailand has spent a lot of its good will coin in the last couple years. All these endless scams are going to extract a price in the future, and I think we are already starting to see the effects. But in essence shooting the messenger is actually going to make things worse. If the position of Thailand is to aggressively track and punish people who create harm to the image of Thailand, they need to look no further than the government officials who allow these endless scams to go on endlessly. The gem scam is alive and well after many many years...........

A fairly interesting conclusion after 19 years of investigation......Son of Ali ??? Made all the more amusing because anyone who has spent a long time in LOS knows that with virtually all the serious contract killings here, the BIB have a finger in it somewhere.... The Sondhi case is simply yet another example.