Johpa

Often it is useful to understand something by reversing the game.

What would Thailand think it it s major company, Thai owned, was having its drug stolen by the United States or a European government? Of course Thailand would be outraged. They would be right to be angry and retaliate by refusing to sell those nations new drugs.

If you buy stock in a company, why would you continue to own it if governments were stealing from the company and the company stopped making profits? You would not. Companies would die and no drugs would be made.

No profit--no new drugs.

End of story

I know you from the left will never give up your hate for those who make more money than you but even you know that the governments are very poor at running businesses.

Why is it the communist Cuban government has not made your new drugs?

I suspect that the reason that "communist Cuba" has not devleoped new drugs is for the same reason that countless smaller and poorer "capitalist" countries in the same economic bracket have not developed new drugs; they simply do not have the resources. By the way, you might want to contrast health care in Cuba with its peer countries in the Caribbean such as Haiti or the Domincan Republic before you go trash talking Cuba's healthcare system. And no, that comment does mean I am a huge fan of everything Fidel has said over the decades, a conclusion to which, I fear, your right wing histrionics, blended with your leaps of logic, might make. You know, the same false logic (FOX logic) that would cavalierly connects a criticism of large corporations with an imagined hatred or jealousy of individuals.

BY the way, I do make a significant contribution in taxes to the US government which funds the National Institute of Health (NIH), a government agency which is the primary sponsor of research into developing new drugs. When do I as a taxpayer get to see a return on that investment?

I have to agree 30,000 is a huge number, ......

Far more remarkable is not a single one of those 30,000 are anything more than low level street dealers and hard luck users. The financiers in Bangkok are still smiling over their successful strategic switchover from heroin to meth and it certainly pays for daughters tuition at Vasser.

"(24 Karat gold is pure gold with no alloy - 100% gold) "

i most humbly beg to differ Honourable Sir, Esq.;

producing 100% pure gold is something next to impossible. the "finest" gold available is 99.99%. by the way, i lived for several years in a country where the authorities would have cut off one hand of a jeweler if he had dared to sell 18k as "gold".

So Thailand must be a pretty liberal regime as they do not even fine those who take 22k or 23k (it varies a bit) gold, AKA baat gold, plate it around a different base metal, and then sell it as gold jewelery. No problem with the stuff as long as you buy or sell it in-country, but selling it to an Asian gold shop elsewhere can leave one a bit miffed.

The answer is easy, I will give you a hint who it is not,

It’s not Al Gore.

It May Be Global Warming Bush

Then why does his Mansion use 20x the ave am household, and he is telling everyone to conserve??

A hiprocrit, just like Michael Moore, who owns stock in Halliburton.

The issues are not those of personalities, nor their eccentricties, nor their alledged hypocrisies. These are the lame ad hominem attacks that FOX news and others use to avoid debates upon serious issues and mislead the less educated masses.

I have had numerous Thai people say 'my friend you' to me, every time, without exception they meant 'your friend', refering to a third person.

Seconded. Simply speaking, in Thai pidgin English, for some reason "my friend" is one word, meaning 'friend'.

And as has been said, the description follows the thing being described...

Why people add a 'my' in front of friend I don't know. It is not a direct translation from any proper Thai expression. My guess is it started with Thai people listening to foreigners mentioning 'my friend' and thinking it meant เพื่อน - Thais often do not specify with possessive pronoun unless it is necessary.

I think it is now being perpetuated by Thais learning from each other. Thais who have studied English formally would not use this, it is something you hear in the bars and tourist areas.

I reckon it is just an example of common bar-girl English entering a more widely based lexicon.

I don't think I'm going too far out on a limb here when I say that there is nothing the terrorists would rather see than for a massacre of sympathizers or neutral Moslems. And we'd be wise not too play into their hands (using we to mean the government).

The problem here is that by being neutral, a Muslim is showing sympathy towards the Jihadists. And make no mistake, despite there being bonafide grievances down south, the insurgency and the violence is part of the global Jihad, a declared war against Dar El Harb, the world that is non-Muslim. It is not an easy battle when the protagonists have embraced death, which, almost by definition, is the embodiment of evil.

Yes but that is the nature of all movements of this type: the your'e 'either part of the solution or you are part of the problem" sort of mentality. But when the 'neutral person', is abused by the big enemy-the 'real' enemy- he can quickly become seen as a martyr for the cause- even though only hours previous he was regarded as part of the problem. And if there's one thing that must be avoided if at all possible- it is martyrs. Don't you think so?

Martyrdom is a very subjective view of death as is "the big enemy" or "the real enemy." There are two common methods for avoiding perceptions of martydom: one can either attempt to avoid deaths or one can make death so commonplace that martyrdom non longer has meaning. As Coppala's version of Colonel Kurtz would say "the horror,....the horror".

If it was your children mudered in that van down south, would they be martyrs? Would you be willing to engage in conversation with the killers? What happens when the non-Muslim world, the Dar el Harb, accepts the Jihadi challenge of battle? There are no easy answers nor clear solutions. The horror, the horror. Which is your preferred choice of horror?

I don't think I'm going too far out on a limb here when I say that there is nothing the terrorists would rather see than for a massacre of sympathizers or neutral Moslems. And we'd be wise not too play into their hands (using we to mean the government).

The problem here is that by being neutral, a Muslim is showing sympathy towards the Jihadists. And make no mistake, despite there being bonafide grievances down south, the insurgency and the violence is part of the global Jihad, a declared war against Dar El Harb, the world that is non-Muslim. It is not an easy battle when the protagonists have embraced death, which, almost by definition, is the embodiment of evil.

There is a book ('National Identity and its Defenders: Thailand Today', edited by Craig J. Reynolds, published in 2002 by Silkworm at Chiang Mai) in which various academics, as the blurb says, look at the formation of Thai identity from the perspectives of history, political science, anthropology, linguistics, social psychology, human geography , and media and religious studies.

Also Niels Mulder in 'Thai Images: The Culture of the Public World' (Silkworm, 1997) goes into what lies behind these campaigns by the Culture Ministry.

Since we liked what we found here, and decided to stay, I think we should do our bit towards fitting in, even if it does mean a bit of dressing up that wasn't our way in the West.

There is an outstanding book called "100 Myths About the Middle East" that touches on a some very similar topics. Yassir Arafat's white+black headdress goes back a full 100 years to European army outfits. Still gets the job done in affirming a national Palestinian identity!

Its a very interesting subject, that. One of the things leading to the Pax Roman was Caesar Augustus establishing a Roman identity where there really wasn't one before ... writing books, building temples, imcorporating people into a shared history that wasn't exactly shared before J. Caesar subjugated them...

As far as books to read on the subject of creating national identities, I highly recommend Southeast Asian scholar Benedict Anderson's now classic Imagined Communities.

Go back 20 years and at least it was still acceptable for men to hang out in their home wearing a phakama.

At around that time i have discovered this utterly convenient and traditional pan-Asian dress, and declared it acceptable for me at home.

No other dress allows you to blissfully scratch your nuts with less effort.

There is a rubicon to be crossed for many males of the unrepentent heterosexual persusion (as well for some males of other persuasions) when it comes to wearing a phakama, but once crossed it is by far the most liberating item of clothing imaginable. Although you newbies be warned, tying the knot correctly does take some practice, so best to start by wearing something decent underneath.

Most of these laws/rules/regulations/drives are not aimed at the upcountry poor. They can continue to wear their farming/factory/construction garb and their kids will also still be able to purchase and drink alcohol at a ripe young age. These moral edicts are more aimed at the young urban dwellers with a bit of cash whose lifestyle many of the aging moralisers do not approve of.

I would assume such critcisms by aging moralizers would include the drinking of cheap imported alcohol at a ripe young age by said young urban dwellers.

Actually I would greatly appreciate traditional Thai garb becoming fashionable or even merely acceptable again. Go back 20 years and at least it was still acceptable for men to hang out in their home wearing a phakama. But I do hope they ban that silly sua karatchakan, AKA sua Prem, the shirt with the silly collar favored by haughty academics and mindless foreign diplomats.

Gotta look at the source of this information.

Its not a balance report, but an emotional outburst against the traditional enemies of the left, the USA, business and anybody with any money.

Without business and profit from previous drugs, there would be no new drugs of this kind for anyone at any price.

Not trendy, but it is true! Sorry

Not true since the VAST majority of R&D for AIDS meds are publicly funded ... not funded by Abbott Merck and Phizer etc

Not just AIDS drugs, most truly new and innovative drugs are initially finded by public money. Big Pharma spends the relatively small amount of their R&D budgets developing me too drugs for which there are less public funds available for R&D. Abbott, Merck and Phizer are primarily marketing companies, not research companies.

<deleted> - read that one book by Marcia Angell have you and think you are informed?

You are more than welcome to establish your credentials here and counter the arguments put forth in Marcia Angell's book. Dr. Angell's credentials read: "Marcia Angell, M. D., is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School. She stepped down as Editor-in-Chief of the New England Journal of Medicine on June 30, 2000. A graduate of Boston University School of Medicine, she trained in both internal medicine and anatomic pathology and is a board-certified pathologist."

And since when has reading books been considered the road to becoming ill-informed?

Gotta look at the source of this information.

Its not a balance report, but an emotional outburst against the traditional enemies of the left, the USA, business and anybody with any money.

Without business and profit from previous drugs, there would be no new drugs of this kind for anyone at any price.

Not trendy, but it is true! Sorry

Not true since the VAST majority of R&D for AIDS meds are publicly funded ... not funded by Abbott Merck and Phizer etc

Not just AIDS drugs, most truly new and innovative drugs are initially finded by public money. Big Pharma spends the relatively small amount of their R&D budgets developing me too drugs for which there are less public funds available for R&D. Abbott, Merck and Phizer are primarily marketing companies, not research companies.

In the bigger picture, Thaksin's greatest legacy to Thailand is; CORRUPTION AND LIES GET YOU RICHER. In a country that worships money at least as much as anything else, Thaksin's immense wealth and power were enough to cement his exalted status. He's influenced at least one generation of young people in to believing that no amount of wealth is too much, and that it doesn't matter how its acquired.

That corruption and lies pave the road to wealth in Thailand has been a cornerstone of Bangkok society since the days of Thaksin's birth. Thaksin's legacy was simply that if you try to over-monopolize wealth and power to the point of rising above all the other members of the elite, including but not limited to the First Estate, then those people will collectively pool their power together and have you removed. After that, it will be back to business as usual.

Even the most corrupt elements of the Bangkok elite adhere to the maxim of that great American Prophet, Lenny the Bruce, here paraphrased for the sakes of the Mods: There is some doggy doo doo I shall not eat.

The survey must have been conducted over the course of last year when Thailand still had Thaksin as the prime minister. So I'm not surprised by the result. His administration was generally considered the most corrupt ever in the entire Thai history.

Anyway, I believe there will be less corruption in the country once the new constitution goes into effect.

:D :D

And some belive in the Easter Bunny and the Tooth Fairy. Someday Thailand will grow up and mature like the United State or Britain and learn that all propper corruption is much better off being hidden under the smoke and mirror guise of corporate lobbying, let the laws of the land steal for you and nobody cares.

By the way, news story going around today on some Mexican version of Thaksin, Mr. Slim (and I kid you not) whose monopolies are about to let him overtake Billy Boy Gates as the worlds richest man. Like Thaksin, he monopolized telecommunications after privatization of that public entity in Mexico.

I guess the Chemical salesman are real happy to eat pork.

What they feed the pigs is worse than what they sell in the market to people.

We passed fields that were ablaze with flames rising to 4 or 5 metres, and naturally there was no one present to supervise these "clearing" jobs. This inane burning, rather than cultivating of the land should be a criminal offence and should be heavily punished.

This "inane" burning is the time-honored and preferred method of cultivating and clearing fallow fields on slopes that are too steep for tractors and plows, items that locals have no chance of affording in the first place. So for some foreigner to come into Southeast Asia and conclude that the locals should be punished for doing what they have been doing for centuries is complete lunacy; yet it is such a wonderful example of the neo-sahib mentality.

That being said, with the combination of increased population, increased cultivation, and global warming, there may indeed be need for research into more controlled methods of burning that could be utilized by farmers, or for alternatives to burning. But this issue crops up on online discussions each year as surely as the sun rises in the east. Perhaps this year has a bit more burning and smoke than average years due to perhaps the reported large out-of-control burn in Burma, but the whining seems to be increasing at an even higher rate.

I find the the tune quite helpful when suffering from mild constipation. But I must be careful not to have cao chiwit hear me humming it whilst in the loo.

I have lived in Malaysia (KL and Sarawak), Vietnam (Hanoi and Saigon), Myanmar, and Laos.

I now live in Thailand by choice and have no plans on moving on, even if Thailand continues to have the worst beer in the region!

Believe me, if you have problems here you will only find them bigger elsewhere.

Methinks his problem of being a 60 year old w##k#r in need of cheap younger women have little to do with location.

But this year it is worst than ever or as long I have been here, 5 years.

It is time for someone to tell Thai people that this is not good and try to stop it.

Someone that Thai people listen to.

Maybe with your anger you should join that crazy man down on Patong.

People in the region have been burning fallow fields in the hills and valleys in the region for alot longer than your five years in-country. Perhaps you can come up with a more economical method for clearing and fertilizing land.

Coke nung khuat one bottle of coke

vs

coke khuat nung a bottle of coke

In both languages the phrases have the same meaning.

thailand has no colonies in its history because it was never powerful to do so competively against the western powers of the world. i think you under estimate its conflicts with bording countries. Thaiand is like every other country on planet, it took as much land as it was capable of taking. That said, I consider you a gentleman and an intelligent bloke for your comments and love of Thailand. Age/Loc? Would you consider being apart of a documentry Im working on? Do you have a Thai Wife Age/Loc?

I do not underestimate the historical regional conflicts, but I do not classify them as being motivated by Imperialism. One might argue that the Khmers at Anchor Wat had established an empire as they were taxing people far from the Khmer homeland, including most of present day Thailand, but the region was rather sparsely populated at the time and the bands of Tai in the region had not yet coalesced into more than small muangs. Some historians have also classified the early Mon polities as Empires, but they really were not imperialistic as the term is used tday. The victors of these regional conflicts were more likely to carry off and relocate popuations closer to their own capitols than to bother administering vast tracts of thinly populated lands.

I am not intersted in appearing on camera, whether it be on the local TV news (I am not based in-country these days) nor in a documentary. Rule of life #42: never appear on camera when someone else is doing the editing. Just because one has a video camera and one is young enough to have been exposed to post-modernism and thus feel capable of deconstructing and then reconstructing history, does not quite make on a documentary film maker. Some of your thoughts are not yet quite right:

many farang over 40 are retiring in thailand, driving up price of real estate, corrupting issan culture, creating an economy where many thai women are chasing quick money in the tourism industry, etc.

also, the enviroment is getting slaughtered in phuket, etc. i am working on a documentry about this stuff.

The Farangs who are retiring here only have a limited impact upon local real estate, mainly in specific tourist ghettos and housing estates. Real estate has also soared in scores of areas that have few, if any, Farang residents. If you want to look at corrupting influences on Isaan culture, then I would focus upon Bangkok and whatever may be the Bangkok equivalent of Madison Avenue. Au contraire, many Farangs hold in high esteem local ethnic traditions that are scorned by the Bangkok folks, ranging from traditional Isaan music to traditional hilltribe arts and crafts. And assuming that "chasing quick money in the tourism industry" is a euhpemism for the sex trade, please remember that only 10% of the women and men working the sex trade are invloved with farangs, the majority are involved in the far larger local and regional aspect of the trade. And although the environment in Phuket is indeed being slaughtered and Phuket is indeed a tourist ghetto with a very high Farang population, there are just as many others areas of Thailand where the environment is being equally eviscerated, areas where there is little Farang presence. The corruption in the Forestry Department alone is responsible for more environmental madness than all the tourist projects put together.

You may be making the same logical mistake as those who conclude, for example, that Farangs are responsible for the child sex trade in the area. No doubt there are Farang pedophiles in Southeast Asia, but there are far more locals involved who are only too happy to see the attention and blame diverted to the few folks attempting to hide in the corners.

"Phom yaarge tum (or kin) dauy (kon) khrap" ผมอยากทำ (หรือกิน) ด้วย (คน) ครับ

Sorry, but I don't recall hearing "คน" (transliterated as khon) used in the above manner where it is neither being used as a pronoun nor a classifier.

Maybe I have been out of country too long, but it strikes my Farang ear as being ungrammatical.

"have never seen anything emanating from Thailand that might even remotely be thought of as imperialism"

try cracking open a history book.

And pray tell where shall I look, as I have read extensively on the subject of Southeast Asian history. Either you have read something that escaped me, perhaps a a Thai empire or perhaps a Thai colony elsewhere on the planet that I missed? Or, more likely, you define imperialism in a far different manner than I.

Maybe you equate minor regional conflicts in Southeast Asia, where many wars were fought for populations rather than land, with what I consider imperialist powers such, for example, as Britain, the US, Russia, or China. Is there, or has there ever been, a Thai controlled political entity outside of

the contiguous borders of Thailand? Or shall we perhaps equate the early migrations of small bands of Tai folks into the region around the 12th and 13th centuries as Imperialism too?

[

Actually, I have some connections that are rather close to the KNU leadership, and despite what you might be reading, the realistic political objectives of the KNU are not full independence, although here and there one will see such bold propaganda statements.

I guess then you know that nothing in Burma is easy and simple, and as it is made out to be.

The KNU is not a shining bright light there. They have committed many gross human rights abuses, they also use forced labor, such as conscripting people from the camps as porters for ammunition to the front lines (at least in the times they were still controlling large areas in Karen state), they have executed POW's in rather gruesome fashion. The Christian leadership of the KNU has oppressed the Buddhist Karen, which has was part reason for the split, and the resulting loss of Mannerplaw.

Many battles on the border are not about freedom and democracy, but about control of the saw mills at the border. The KNU has done some incredible damage to the environment by massive deforestation, and by far not all money earned went into the fight, but ended in personal bank accounts of Bo Mya and the rest of the leadership.

The KNLA uses child soldiers in their combat units, some as young as 8 years old. Visiting their hospitals, where KNLA child soldiers lie with gruesome injuries, including amputations, is sobering.

It is often very difficult to confirm any of their claims, as they are as liberal with the truth as any other side in Burma.

I don't want to be mistaken here as pro junta, which i am not, their miserable human rights record stands. But that does not mean that groups such as the KNU and the many other ethnic minority groups are to be idealized.

They are increasingly part of the problem, and not solution. They pay public lip service to the idea of federalism in Burma, but when you speak in private with the leadership, their ideas are clearly independence. Which is illusionary.

What i am trying to say here is, that the problems in Burma are very complex, and seemingly easy solutions as so often proposed are maybe idealistic, but will because of neglect of uncomfortable realities never be feasible, and most likely would lead to the opposite - renewed fighting. Just because the junta is horrible, does not mean that their enemies are much better.

There is a lengthy list of documented "gross human rights abuses" over the decades by the ruling Burmese junta. I have not seen anything similar for the Karen leadership. I would not disagree that there are flaws within the leadership of the KNU and other groups. Clearly there are internal politics involved regarding control of the few commercial enterprises, whether they be mills or meth labs further north. And no doubt the late Bo Mya pocketed some cash for his homes outside the border areas. But for every Bo Mya, who was an angel by SPDC standards, there is a Ka Hsaw Wa.

Despite occasional lapses in judgement (and I have not seen or heard of any forced conscription by the KNU, nor seen any evidence that there is enough ammo to need porters, or that fornt lines even exist in the traditional sense) to equate minority group leaderships to the Burmese regime is way out of kilter. My contacts are primarily with the ex-patriated leadership in the west who represent both Burmese and minorities in opposition to SPDC. These groups work together and see some sort of Federalism as the correct solution.

As for the most recent reports from the camps that I have heard, the health situation has actually gone downhill as some of those trained as medics, and who worked as backpack medics, have received asylum and have relocated to other countries such as Canada and have not been replaced.

Absolutely! The carnage in the South is awful. Thailand's Northern Ireland-created by the Brits incompetence in drawing maps and borders, of course; and exacerbated by Thai imperialism..sanctity of the Thai state, integrity of the land of the Thais,..sounds just like UK Protestants...from the Battle of the Boyne to 20century Thai landgrabs.....

I have never seen anything emanating from Thailand that might even remotely be thought of as imperialism although you might weakly argue that the changing of the name from Siam to Thailand back in the 1930s echoed lofty thoughts of uniting a previously dispersed group of culturally and linguistically related Tai peoples under Bangkok rule. And as far as "sanctity of the state" and "integrity of the land" I dare say they are integral to the modern concept of the nation-state. Perhaps you could be so kind as to point out where a nation-state has willingly given up provinces to another nation-state. I can only think of the continuing mess down in Timor and Indonesia was no willing actor in that unfortunate saga.