Johpa

I can read the headlines now: Worlds Largest Plane breaks new airport's cracked runways, Thai(s) forced to reopen Don Muang.

Ah-ha the technically challenged !

It will be landing light as it will not be carrying any great loads.

I don't know the LCN(Load classification number) but looking at the undercarriage

I doubt whether there will be any problems.

The A380 flies very well. It has just done some crosswind trials in Iceland.

It dealt with a 43 knot! crosswind without any trouble.

I still can't figure out how Airbus got their knickers in a twist over the wiring?

Or their wiring in a twist over their knickers?

Did you ever own a Peugeot 405, or Citroen ZX with the full electric pack? If so, you have answered your own question...

Thanks for the memories. I owned a Peugeot 504 and it was the most comfortable car to drive when it was not in the single shop in the city that would even bother to work on the ever troublesome wiring. I even remember walking into a respected shop closer to home only to be greeted by a sign "We do not work on Peugeots."

I still can't figure out how Airbus got their knickers in a twist over the wiring?

Or their wiring in a twist over their knickers?

Europeans have always tended towards being a bit kinky.

Sounds like your at the end of the road man. Your not a teacher by any chance are you?

On the theory that those who can, do, and those who can't, teach?

One thing I do very much like about Thai culture is the relative high social status it bestows upon teachers and the associated concept of bun khun between teacher and student. It is a shame the neo-sahibs enjoing the good life in Thailand are not able to appreciate this cultural aspect of Thai culture, although I doubt they are capable of appreciating much of anything apart from their own gluttony.

Not at all, but just wanted to see if you are taught properly. Just don't want you guys to learn the wrong words But if you are happy with how we use ' R ' and ' L ', it's fine by me

There is no single "proper" pronuciation of many Thai words regarding /r/ and /l/ although at some point the words were codified in writing. Only the most retentive academic souls fron Bangkok, and there are many, would make an effort to correct another Thais pronuciation on the matter, mainly in order to attempt to boost their own social standing. At least the Sankrit based words have an older written history pointing to one pronunciation over another.

The two letters represent, from a phonetic perspective, a fairly close pronunciation. Many languages will incorporate one or the other sound to be used phonemically, that is used to create meaning. A few languages like English will use both for phomemic purposes allowing word pairs like row/low to differentiate meaning. You can look up just about any language on Wikipedia to get a list of permitted consonants for that language.

I don't know the history of the Tai languages well enough to know whether both phonemes existed prior to contact with the South Asian languages, but I do know that the Thai people I have known over the decades have no issues with many words being pronounced either way. And as others have noted, other Tai languages in Thailand such as Kham Muang spokeb up north have other changes, such as /r/ ----> /h/, leading to one of my favorite Thai-English pairs "hot-hawn" when the weather gets really hot.

So well known that you never read or hear about the Nana family? Did you read`the earlier posts about the Nasrula family?

Perhaps there were several influential Thai families who got together to develop the area, such as the Na Ayuttayas, the Na Chiang Mais for example. And once the area plans were developed, they decided to shorten the development name to Nana.

The politician who stands head and shoulders above the rest (that I have heard anyway) in terms of sheer quality of English is the rising Democrat Korn Chavakanij.Abhisit's also very good but they I suppose have both had the advantage of being educated at elite schools in England.

I recently attended a speech by Sondhi Limthongkul, and his English was nearly fluent, even at the idiomatic level. Although he claims he is not a politician, if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck........

The people who own NEP are incidentially the Narula family. A Sikh Thai family who also own the Sheraton Grande, 'The hotel that Nana built'.

Now that would make sense as before it became a second Patpong bar scene destination, Nana Plaza was primarily filled with businesses that had a South Asian connection. There are still a few Indian tailor shops out front.

Same thing in Mexico. Textbook Spanish, spoken by literate Mexicans, is reasonably clear. Folks who never finished sixth grade, and have spent their life out in the village, sure. They always understood my castellano, but I missed a lot of the poorly enunciated local lingo.

Besides, some old folks have lost our teeth!

I dare say that their local "lingo" is enunciated with 100% perefection and they are able to communicate to perfection within their social universe. It is your less than 100% grasp of their particular language that is the issue as you are the outsider.

Don't feel too bad. Having been taught Central Thai in college and having been taught, to a less formal degree, proper Chiang Mai City Kham Muang, I still can not follow 100% the casual talk of many of my neighbors and inlaws in the village. This is especially true of the men who tend to more frequently lace their conversations with a coarse slang, much of which reflects even older local linguistic attibutes no longer commonly heard in the Kham Muang spoken in the city.

The gas project earns the regime hundreds of millions of dollars every year.....ut maybe NOT for much longer....

However the global campaign now being run against the TOTAL Oil Company is the largest international campaign ever mounted against any company working in Burma... ....and...

Unfortunatly, this leads to nowhere.

If it hasn't been Total in the past, it would have been a US oil company...

And now, a chinese one. With chinese funds. They are in the starting blocks. Burma is their "back yard".

China is doing already a lot of business with Burma, especially on the wood. It's illegal. But who cares. The generals are ready to sell every piece of rock of "their" country. And Bejing has a lot of fun.

So this campaign is very sweet, I support it, but it won't change a dime. And worst : it will serve the chinese interests.

Asean is guilty too, and weak. Thailand and UN too. Nobody cares.

The only solution would be a "regime change", american way : military. Let's invade Burma ! At one point, we have to aknowledge that it leads nowhere to "speak" with criminals, thiefs, thugs.

The Munich spirit is so strong in the world. It's so convenient to hide behind "international laws". Darfour, North Korea, Burma you name it. This world is a s**t hole.

I take it you are not a big fan of Dr. Pangloss?

Oh, <expletive deleted>, impossible workload and budget constraints. Must be horrible that suddenly now all those rural poor actually go to the hospital when they are sick. Wasn't it nice before, when health services were so expensive that these poor only went to Mor Boran.

Many of the poor still depend upon traditional mor boraans and many can still not afford the cost of visiting a doctor, if available, at the local Amphoe unless neighbors "loan" some money or pool some resouces together. In the minority villages up north where I use to live, most residents have had some government subsidized health care for at least 20 years. Certainly not all the rural folks are in such dire economic circumstances, but such folks are not rare, especially amongst the elderly whose children have left the area to find employment.

Of course even those who are well off by rural standards will still visit a mor boraan. My brother-inlaw, a former village headman and owner of a 6-wheel truck (hok lor) insists on visiting a mor boraan for curing his chronic ills. And even my wife had old Lung Moon hold a riak khwaan cremony and Uey Khiow blow some of that old time K'mu medicine (basically chanting over a bottle of water and then spray it) when my son was very young and quite ill after the first hospital visits failed to cause an immediate cure.

The word วาจา is from Pali/Sanskrit, it means "utterance, spoken words." It's one word, and a noun, and it's unrelated to ว่า. So, for example, วาจาสุภาพ would be "polite words/speech." I'm virtually certain (though I haven't seen it claimed anywhere else) that จา is clipped from วาจา.

พูดจา is a sort of semantic pair that are always said together. พูดจาไม่เพราะ "He speaks impolitely." If I'm right about จา, then it's shortened from พูดวาจา.

In some areas จา is being taken up as a verb, though, meaning to speak, tell, talk, etc. จากันทั้งวัน "They talk all day long." Not sure how widespread this usage is, though.

As for ว่าจา, I don't think that's used. I've never heard it, but maybe someone else can attest to it.

If memory serves me correctly, วาจา is used as one of the basic tenants of Buddhism in the phrase saamaawaajaa, correct speech, part of the eight-fold path.

Yes, my wife combines all the vulgar and offensive English words she can think of when she wants to give me a telling off for something. She doesn't understand how strong it is, but as I didn't know any nasty Thai words, I just lived with it. I'm just dreading my 3 year old daughter giving her granddad a stream of &lt;deleted&gt;, s**t and other profanity...

Yea, my wife really lays down the English cuss words when she gets upset. I am often referred to as "dummy f*** stupid", using the "f-word" as if having the same force as the other two words. My son now laughs at it too.

Your hypothesis is wrong.The drain of doctors to the better paid private sector long predates Thaksin, and has nothing to do with the marketing of Thailand as a medical destination for foreigners (which in any case is a relatively small niche market in the context of the health sector as a whole).A related issue which dates back to the 1950's is the unwillingness of Thai doctors to work upcountry, though this is changing as the country has become more prosperous

Certainly around the globe medical doctors have long prefrred to live in larger, culturally robust cities rather than practice in rural areas. This is nearly universal and rural health care is a concern even in the western countries. But with health care costs skyrocketing in the west, especially in the US, Thailand, along with India, has only recently been marketing their private health services to foreign patients. Every doctor who moves to a medical facility targeted at foreigners, all of which are located in major cities (Phuket should be seen as a major city) opens up another position in a city-based facility that caters to locals. This new trend most certainly exacerbates the paucity of doctors serving in the rural areas by opening up even more positions in the major cities.

It would be nice if the government would tax this new market with the proceeds going to rural medical care, but I know that will not happen nor would the proceeds make it to the rural areas if such a tax was imposed.

I live in a rural village and the soon to be lifted martial law has no visible effect around here. Who is affected by it and what are the effects?

Chownah

I lived in a rural village for over a decade and rarely saw any "law" at all. The only policemen we saw either arrived after a serious crime, usually murder, had been committed in the tamboon (sub-district), or when my pal Ai Deng would show up in uniform drunk while visiting family. What little government presence exists in the villages I am familar with, excluding the local kamnaan, tended to be teachers and the occasional "development" or health outreach worker.

Sondhi could have always swallow his pride and go on with business as usual, as everyone else done before him, yet he choose to confront Thaksin. That is not a sign of greed but convictions and idealism.

Only in the post "Greed is Good" over exuberance of the 1990s can we find those who would argue that greed can manifest itself as "conviction and idealism. Yet you may be correct and perhaps greed, as an ideal and conviction, is the impetus for so many of the world's great religions to embody a need to address and attempt to place limits upon this most human of emotions. My own personal belief, you know, like believing in the tooth fairy or Jesus, is that greed is the Achilles' heel of capitalism.

And yes, I am a bit cynical that there are any current political options that are much different than Taksin, better than Taksin for sure, but better only in degree and not in kind.

Declaration

By Dr. Plodprasop Suraswadee

Assistant Minister at Ministry of Natural Resources and Environment

Director, Administration Officer of Chiangmai night Safari Project

.............5. Chiangmai night Safari is itself a good project for public affairs. It might have little flaws. Please be optimistic and do not merely judge other people being worst than you.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Perhaps there is a need to further publicize the fact that this Night Safari Park has perhaps overtaken Nong Buak Hat Public Park and other well-known locations for the practicing of affairs in public during the darker hours. Opens up a potential new line of tour opportunities.

I would, on the other hand, and did, purchase a brand new house just outside of Chiang Mai for 2 mil for a three bedroom house in a gated moobahn. I bought it to live in, not for an investment, unless you call passing it along to my kids as an investment in the future. Swiming pool, restaurant, a 24 hour guard who is awake to open the gate to those with the proper ID. Visitors must call ahead to drive in. No leaks in the pipes. The electricity only goes out in very severe storms, no parking problems (the house as a two car portico) and above flood levels. In all fairness, there aren't enough big trees. But I'm sure in 10-15 years all the small ones that were planted will grow nicely.

I'd invite you over for a BBQ, but you aren't the sort of people we like to be around.

The Fly Fisherman

I have been reading this thread for entertainment purposes and I have no opinion on the Hillside Plazas nor even what or where they be. But the bad bews is that, from my observations over the past many years, most of these Thai muubaan jatsaans, gated housing developments, do not improve with age over time, unless of couse things have turned around over the past few years I have not been able to visit. The trees may indeed continue to grow upward, but the neighborhoods tend to go downhill.

Perhaps Thaksin's system of government is better described as fascism, not communism.

Just look at this definition:

"A system of government that exercises a dictatorship of the extreme right, typically through the merging of state and business leadership, together with belligerent nationalism." --American Heritage Dictionary (Boston:Houghton Mifflin, 1983)

Really now, neither Taksin, nor his predecessors, nor his opponents such as Sondhi, have any ideology at all other than to maximize their own profits, line their own pockets, from taking political office. None of these people care about human rights violations or about avoiding taxes. One might think they are capitalists, but they really don't believe in a totally free market as Thailand is a country that seems to love monopolies, a direction that capitalism seems to inevitably favor at times. Taksin was no fascist as is usually associated with the term and certainly no communist. If anything, his overriding ideology was greed. He became too greedy and finally began to take such a large slice of the pie that all the other diners, those who kin muang, began to worry about a Taksin dynasty, a family that always has access to the largest slice of the pie to dine upon, and that is not a scenario that the other diners would tolerate. Imagine if Bill Gates were to use his money to both buy Halliburton and run for the US presidency.

At least Thailand has made some strides over the past century to have some democratic institutions involving the public vote. At the very least it forces all the candidates to give some notice to the 60%+ of the electorate that constitute the rural poor. This might at times simply show itself in the handing out some money for a vote (from the perspective of the rural poor: I am poor today and will be poor tomorrow and nothing anyone does in Bangkok is going to change anything in my life so I will sell my vote to the highest bidder) but more often that money goes through the traditional "patron-client" system, with funds being handed out by the Kamnaan or headman in exchange for a future favor. Or, as we have seen with Taksin, it shows itself as some sort of "populist" government program, programs that return money to those whom the Bangkok elite despise the most, the ethnic Tai and minority rural folks.

But now those in Bangkok, and their allies in the new ex-pat community, are bemoaning that these programs are bankrupting the country's coffers. Yet these programs represent a mere pittance relative to the money lost to the government by this same elite who avoid taxes and shift profits, both corporate profits and gray market profits, offshore. It is a bit of a conundrum for the likes of opposition leader Sondhi Limthongkul , who wish to maintain the democratic element in Thai politics but are repulsed by the need to somehow include the rural electorate into their political agenda.

but if you think there are only 2 % christians in the whole of indonesia, then good for you

i lived in jakarta and that is what the local people will tell you that christians amount to 35%.

but please try

www.jinsa.org

for facts on the southern movements

&lt;deleted&gt;?!? You belive that Christians constitute 35% of the population of Indonesia and then direct people to a link to an organization with neo-con tendencies for information on Southeast Asian politics? Giving credence to even one of the above seriously questions your credibility but believing in both lays to rest all questions.

That Handley character whose interview we've been encouraged to listen to wrote a book that has been banned in Thailand, and for good reasons. All references to it have been routinely deleted by the mods here, I don't know what they stance on it now. Maybe it's changed.

Is promotion of banned material finally allowed here?

It's the mass emailing effect. I've learned to stay out of these until around 100 posts have been made in order for the newly-joined and others to post and for precisely the other reasons you mentioned.

And regarding Handley. Yes, his book is banned in Thailand... and yes, for good reason. It violates one of the tenets of thaivisa as well regarding the Royal Thai Family.

Khun Plus, I did not promote any book in my reference to the Handley interview, banned or otherwise. The interview focuses on the recent coup and upon Taksin by an interested journalist. My post was well within the guidelines of these forums.

Your barking up the wrong tree chief! This insurgency is economic........... anybody deemed in bed with Bangkok is on the list, be they Buddhist or Muslim. The reason the Buddhist are taking so many hits is that they have the jobs in the public sector. The ethnic Malay population has been minimized by the past governments in Bangkok and want significant change.

As to your offer, I will be back home in January, and I will gladly go with you, If you have the balls! I am in a worse place in worse danger daily than anywhere in Thailand so this will be a stroll in the park. I only fly First class by the way!

The reasons for the insurgency are complex and include ethnic, economic, and religious dimensions. Jeez, the entire population of Thailand who reside outside Bangkok have been economically minimized to some extent, so pick a number and wait in line. To proclaim a single cause is too over simplify a complex world. It is such naive thinking that is probably the reason there is currently a need for you in Kandahar. And nobody gives a rat's derriere where you fly on an aeroplane or how large you imagine your kallam to be.

There was much to be disliked about this guy. His main opponents were what I call urban professionals. Their main complaint was that they were less than 20% of the population but were paying as much as 90% of the taxes to sustain the countries infastructure. Of course these numbers are approximate but the inferences are quite real. Thaksin acted pretty much like a Robin Hood in this matter. He took tax money and gave it to the poor. Sure he did it to get votes, he's a polititian and he is responsible to his party for votes for all TRT candidates for public office.

Your perceptions of the tax base are the arguments that unite Sondhi Limthongkul's polititcal movement, blame the poor along with Taksin. But often forgotten is that over the past many decades, the poor paid taxes indirectly, they are too freakin poor to pay taxes monetarily, by being paid slightly lower than market prices for agricultural products. And trust me, they got very little in return out of it.

Sondhi is correct that the new middle class pays a disproportionate amount of the total tax base. The real elite pays too little, if any, tax. Taksin is by no means alone in avoiding taxes, only the amounts were far greater than other members of the elite were able to get away without paying taxes upon. And nobody talks about the large amount of capital that the elite moves offshore. But Sondhi and his middle class movement (and note Sondhi Limthongkul, a member of the Bangkok elite, is playing the middle class just as Taksin played the poor) are (surprise, surpise!) attacking the poor instead of attacking the elite. Listening to Sondhi talk recently I thought he was playing rather close to an ethnic argument only thinly veiled by class as he kept making disparaging remarks about poor "Isaan farmers".

Bottom line, same-same.

Go back and listen to the interview I recently posted a link to. Handley makes a good point that it is all posturing by various factions of the elite in anticipation of the doggie doo doo hitting the fan in the near future. The coup had nothing to do with the killings or human rights violations, or really even the financial events, as these are things that have absolutely no importance to the main players and their factions. But they sure do, to my amusement, fire up many of you neo-sahib type ex-pats.

For what it is worth, here is a link to an interesting interview with author and journalist Paul Handley, author of a recent controversial book on Thailand. He has some interesting observations on the recent coup and upon specific failings of Taksin. The interview begins about 1/2 way through the audio file.

http://www.abc.net.au/rn/latenightlive/sto...006/1790433.htm

At the very least, mud will stick.

It's smoke and mirrors. The new government's popularity is waining and they are just deflecting the flack. All that is happening in Thailand has little to do with Thaksin and everything to do with the way the new government wants themselves to be portrayed, otherwise why would they have to setup their own PR agency?

I'm glad to see at least one other poster here who sees it all as just Thai politics as usual. Taksin has become the new bogeyman as people and political parties line up for the next election. Not that Taksin does not deserve to have become the new bogeyman, but Taksin is no longer the main issue.

Any nation fighting a drug problem (which would include, uhmm... ALL nations) have a criminal justice system whereby those suspected of involvement in the drug trade are identified and subsequently investigated. They might not all be called a blacklist, but then again... thousands aren't necessarily executed on the streets, either. Thaksin is the one man who distorted a common police practice and turned it into a murdering spree.

The issue of the failure to stem the drug trade in Thailand is the refusal and inability of the government to go after the primary players, some of whom over the decades have been high ranking members of the government and society indeed, including high sakdina holders. (I believe one of the tourist sites up at Mae Salong remains the villa of former PM Kriangsak.) The major players, financiers, and bankers in Bangkok are never challenged as they are part and parcel of the Bangkok elite. Thus it was when opium and heroin ruled the roost and thus it remains in the age of meth-amphetamines now that pressure by the US and the DEA has caused the substances to change. To get a better understanding of the larger picture one could read McCoy's opus The Politics of Heroin, just about anything by Achaan Phasuk, but specifically her book Guns, Girls, Gambling, Ganja, and look for more recent articles by Chiang Mai's own Bertril Lintner.

The extra-judicial killings were strictly symptomatic relief, with no pretense of rooting out the cause of the problem. Sort of like taking aspirin for a migraine headache, the symptoms go away for awhile, but the cause of the headache is not targeted. Nobody in the Thai politic wants this cash cow to be sacrificed. But the open selling of drugs to young teenagers in the schools had gotten so out of control in some provinces that I speculate it actually caused the major players in Bangkok to loose face and condone the action lest a public outcry forced them to confront a more serious challenge to their business model.

But now that some have totally misunderstood my personal position on the matter, l might as well take it up another notch for sake of the debate.

The extra-judicial killings, from the perspective of the local villagers, probably saved more lives than were sacrificed. Across the country, if the open drug trade had continued unabated, the death toll from accidents and crimes related to drug use would have certainly been greater than 3,000. And most of those fatalities, specifically traffic victims and victims of domestic violence would have been innocents. Now I know there have been many claims that some of those killed during the extra-judicial killings were not involved in the drug trade, but those individuals that I was told about who were killed were all acknowledged to have been involved. Now I am sure there were some older scores settled, but knowing Thai society, I would imagine that many of those who pleaded that their loved ones were innocent were doing so in order to save some face.