I, personally, have been very impressed by the PMs performance to date, she has conducted herself with no political malace whatsoever. Abasit, on the other hand, swans off to the Maldives for a short break even though he denied this. Unfortunately for him, a pic. appeared of him with the President of the Maldives , unearthed by a British journalist.
I find your writers piece full of half information. The main sluice gate was ordered to be opened. It was then admitted that it was stuck, and had been fore some time. Ting uk then ordered a crane and it was opened. Two hours later it was closed again. The operator said that his order to close it had come from on high – The Mayor, I presume. Yingluck then invoked section 118 which would make anybody who obstructed the governments order liable to.criminal charges. Please, tell the whole story.
As a personal witness to the killing of the unarmed students residing at the corner of Latha and Canal street Hostel, as well as subsequent anti Chinese riot, there are only a few lessons to be learned.
1) Asian leaders be it Chinese, Burmese, Indian, Thai etc do not tolerate western style incivilities, period.
The student at the hostel were gunned down in cold blood and the building fire boombed, only when they refuse to evacuate and began to taunt the armed man with such in Burmese that ‘all the combined education of the soldier as well as Ne Win does not come close to one of the students’. The building was left as a reminder unkempt until recently.
This unjustifiable atrociousness of Ne Win set the tone for the subsequent bloody encores.
Making his personal statement “Burmese soldier shoot to kill” a shameful legacy.
Does the west even cringe in anyway then?
2)There are specially trained armed elements that will shot anyone on command in Myanmar, Periad.
As proof subsequent riots during Ne WIn’s BSPP era, very similar to the recent so called Saffron Revolution, when these forces were trucked in an out to shoot down none provoking unarmed civilians resulting in the dead of Thousands, not Hundreds mind you. The monks were made to defrocked imprison or beaten to dead.
Does AI, UN or any other faux Human right entities that speak so loudly and empty during SLOR/SPDC even raise an objection or High light the atrocious behaviors?
40+ years of western chosen neglect as well as useless careless intervention has allowed the Military to hone its capability, in holding on to power, by any means, to near perfection.
Any talk or actions that neglect these 2 lessons will prolong this “Ground hog Day” situation in Myanmar. The only difference is the real price of continuing tragedies is extracted from among the citizenry especially the most vulnerable ones.
I wonder how Montesano comes to notice the political strategy between Yingluck’s and the King’s camps while sitting in Singapore. In the last couple of months, although lately the political scoring has started, it still scatters. Mainly all sides of Thais have tried to figure out how to fight with the large volume of water. Thailand’s watchers should put down politics as well at least for now.
“Amnesty in any form is good locally”.
Looking the gift horse in the mouth by yahoos among New Mandala posters prove “never enough” attitude towards present Myanmar government action.
Because of this amnesty x # of families will be happy.
If AI and leery individuals can not see and appreciate this benefit to the citizenry then what do they really stand for in the arena of “HUMANITIES”?
I turned up a few books that had “disappeared” within Laos in 1975 by searching archives in Thailand. One was (memorably) printed at the absolute last minute before the revolutionaries took over the capital (something like 1974?) but had the ancien régime promoted on the cover, title page, etc. etc. …and despite the fact that its contents were Buddhist, the book as a whole looked like such an absurd piece of propaganda (for the pro-American government that had just disappeared) that I could hardly blame them for taking it off of library shelves (circa 1975).
The copy of that book (that I found and brought back from Thailand) was reproduced by photocopy in a plain cover –omitting the illustrations and insignia (i.e., that did not contribute to the content of the book, but reflected the political patronage that paid for it pre-1975). It is now, thus, available in Vientiane.
The Communists didn’t do all that much book-burning in Laos, compared to China (to the north) or Cambodia (to the south), but the mean spirit of censorship remains strong among some in the party elite. Leafing through books at the National University will reveal that many have specific pages torn out… and I was assured that this was not done by students accidentally, but by individual professors and Party Members who take the time to do this (i.e., without being paid to) so that the students can’t read whatever they consider ideologically unacceptable.
The original National Library of Laos was burned down by the Japanese, and the current library is housed in what used to be the French colonial era “public security” building, where people were tortured (or “interrogated”) in sheds around the back. Presumably, a large part of what was lost in the Japanese conquest would have been the French Colonial administrative records… but I have never read a study of this question.
Robert, the Lao government’s re-appropriation of the nationalist discourse of historical kings (and the raising of new monuments to them) is a recent chapter of history that has been well-researched and widely written about. If you’re reading the high-school level history books (in Lao, by the Lao government) you will see that these kings are now valorized as one stage in the nation’s “material dialectic” of progress… a trope that was not at all unusual in Leninist states rewriting their pre-modern histories (although, in Laos, it did follow after a brief period of rejecting all of that history as “feudal”, and therefore having nothing good in it, etc.). This is to say that even feudal kings can now be celebrated as stages in a struggle for national liberation, that culminates with the Communist Party. This point is not too subtle at the Army Museum in the outskirts of Vientiane (where most of the visitors are themselves members of the military, but foreign tourists are also welcome to attend). The military history of the country there does indeed start with remote Lao kings… and progresses to the more recent wars against the Americans and the Thais. Of course, more generalized Marxist concerns like slavery and the oppression of the poor have largely disappeared from this latest stage of the re-writing of Lao Communist history, while other themes such as the historical borders of Laos having been larger than they are now (etc.) still have a place of prominence in the story as it is now told.
With all of these things, N.F., the question soon becomes what is anyone going to do about it now?
In terms of extant literature of/from/in Laos, a large part of it is in Pali (or demotic Pali mixed with old local dialects) that almost nobody can read… and another large part of it is in very well-bound books printed in Moscow that nobody does read.
Many of the Soviet-era translations of the Marxist canon into Lao were completed too late into the 1980s to be influential within the country (although they are written in impeccable, high-quality Lao translation…). I’m saying this of “canonical” works (like Das Kapital itself, etc.) –I’m aware that there was also a strange literature of in-classroom pamphlets of the Communist era that was more influential (and these have been surveyed in a few conference papers, etc., in recent years). Some these canonical works were translated from Russian, but many were translated directly from German, resulting in dictionaries (etc.) for both languages (rather better than the Lao-English dictionaries, etc.). During a period of two and a half years in the country, I did not meet a single Lao person who considered Lenin and Marx to have been two different people, as they had learned this as a hyphenated name (as per “Marxist-Leninism” in English).
The current generation of in-classroom propaganda, I note, was paid for by the government of Australia, and deserves to be the subject of its own critique in turn.
In Laos, I never met one person who really read Pali; conversely, I never met one person who really read Marx. They’ve had several successive waves of “canonical literature” created and then lost… or that they’ve simply lost interest in.
However, still today, the Communist Party provides an education (and access to literacy) to a far smaller number of students than the Buddhist temples do… and somewhere out of the mixed influence of those temple-schools and Thai soap-operas, the next generation of the Lao intellectuals will emerge. Whether or not any of them will take an interest in the work of Grant Evans remains to be seen; but, for better or worse, it is possible that Evans will be more influential than Karl Marx and the Pali canon combined (and yet, far less influential than Thai soap-operas…).
My criticism towards Chalerm’s role in this crisis is as followed:
As Deputy Prime Minister in Social Affairs, his main responsibilities when he took office were crimes, narcotics and justice. Before the flood he was very active in this role, in particular his pursuit of justice for the 13 deaths in last year’s Bloody May.
Since early October, after cabinet meeting in which FROC was established, Chalerm was tasked with 2 major responsibilities during the floods: 1) public safety and 2) traffic. His job is to provide safety both during and after the floods. He would be commanding the police. http://www.matichon.co.th/news_detail.php?newsid=1319537700&grpid=&catid=01&subcatid=0100
I find his unusually low-profile highly worrisome given he is tasked with ensuring “public safety” during the floods. This is a serious matter.
The few interviews I found of him outlining his responsibilities during the flood crisis and his responses to concerns re: looting, robbery, and other safety concerns have me convinced he’s not on top of the situation.
When reports of looting began to emerge he said “looting happens. People do bad things when they haven’t enough to eat.”
When asked if he had dealt with previous reports of looting he said that he told the police to work with the provincial administration to deal with public safety during flooding, which is actually “the responsibility of the Interior”.
When asked about reports of food and donations not getting to those that needed them he said “I thought of using a chopper to drop donation bags but then we might miss the spot. I’ll get the police to investigate the route.” When asked further to clarify his immediate and long term plan on provision of public safety he refused to answer.
While normally I don’t like to rely on one interview to judge someone’s character, this particular interview is one of very few Chalerm gave regarding the flood in the first 3 weeks of October. And none of the answers he gave to the public provides any reassurance that he is taking his responsibilities seriously.
Fortunately, since Yingluck provoked section 31, he seems to be coming around. I have seen more of his communication with the public of his concerns of the now widespread reports of looting and robbery. That is a move in a right direction.
“her poor record in managing people has led to policy missteps” – Mandala
Can the author point us to evidence showing Yinglucks poor record in managing people? I assume he means before the floods? Or should it be rephrased to “her mismanagement of officials has led to policy missteps”?
I didn’t think you include three time helicopter’s fall because of making royal rain. They try to protect the rest of forest from capitalist. We have lesser area of forest to absorb flood water now.
Malaysia’s Prime Minister finally elaborates about how the Malaysia Solution will break the traffickers business model.
I wonder why if he is so concerned about the refugees, that he can’t sign the 1951 UN Refugee Convention or enact local laws to protect refugees.
“This deterrent effect was not about Malaysia being a ”bad” place, somewhere migrants should be scared of ending up. The simple fact is that Malaysia is not the country that boatpeople heading for Australia want to settle in – and more often than not that is down to economics rather than fears of how they might be treated. Because, despite what you may have heard from those who chose to attack my country, Malaysia is not some repressive, backward nation that persecutes refugees and asylum seekers…”
Can anyone direct me to an English language account of the Royal Projects in agricultural and meteorlogical areas during the reign of the present King, please.
This all smacks of corruption, especially by those civil servants (ha!) supposedly running government departments.
As ever, it seems that the Thai people suffer because of a these apparently ill-informed and poorly managed projects, budget waste and sheer incompetence.
But, you know, I don’t think this is incompetence. With such vast budget theft opportunities at stake, to mismanage on this scale has to be planned. To set up and run so many useless projects and misappropriate the budgets has to take a special kind of skill and planning.
I am not being sarcastic. It simply cannot be possible for all of this to happen by accident.
Someone has to be responsible for this.
Footnote to my post 12.
Department of Disaster Prevention and Mitigation – Total Budget 2003 – 2010 = 15,492,930,300 Baht
I have seen this before in many places. This is not a fair use of the information. This outdated news (published on 6 April 2011) is behind the ungrounded rumor that royalists let water flood the red-shirt people.
So, I strongly disagree with “Doesn’t look like the royal rain-makers had received forecasts that 2011 was going to be an exceptionally wet year!”
Sure when I read the news I wanted to know “How long did their operations last?” I have tried hard to get the info but didn’t get anything. If you know the answers to Andrew’s questions, please share your though here.
Having said that, I personally don’t think that rain-making process works. Proven scientific experiments will work anywhere in the universe given you do the same thing under the same physical condition. Rain-making seems to work only in Thailand for cultural reasons.
My commonsense speculates the following:
1. There was no rain in the targeted area (It may rain elsewhere.) so the rain-making process had to start. [April?]
2. It didn’t work. To make rain under the prescribed technique, you have got to have enough cloud and moisture in the air.
3. Then the monsoons came. It rained a lot. They might initially claim some credits for it, but I think they were wise enough to stop that claim when rainfall got out of control.
patsan: you make a fair point, but such actions are common to politicians of all stripes, seeking to gain attention and claim credit. Likewise, NGO’s, and Aid Agencies, both local and international, will always advertise their presence and activities, although I suppose this they can justify on security grounds, sometimes. Corporate donors too will always have their logos prominently displayed.
But does it matter? I do not think that the recipients of much needed supplies will be too concerned about such ethical issues.
Ralph Kramden: It’s an interesting report. It is a pity that the red shirt Asia Update TV is subscription only and not available through government channels, so it only reaches a limited audience. Obviously they will put their own slant on things, but they are spending a lot of time refuting misleading or false reports about red shirt activities.
Facebook 
Twitter 
Soundcloud 
Youtube 
Rss
Managing people harder than managing water
I, personally, have been very impressed by the PMs performance to date, she has conducted herself with no political malace whatsoever. Abasit, on the other hand, swans off to the Maldives for a short break even though he denied this. Unfortunately for him, a pic. appeared of him with the President of the Maldives , unearthed by a British journalist.
I find your writers piece full of half information. The main sluice gate was ordered to be opened. It was then admitted that it was stuck, and had been fore some time. Ting uk then ordered a crane and it was opened. Two hours later it was closed again. The operator said that his order to close it had come from on high – The Mayor, I presume. Yingluck then invoked section 118 which would make anybody who obstructed the governments order liable to.criminal charges. Please, tell the whole story.
Aung Gyi’s letters to Ne Win
To #1
As a personal witness to the killing of the unarmed students residing at the corner of Latha and Canal street Hostel, as well as subsequent anti Chinese riot, there are only a few lessons to be learned.
1) Asian leaders be it Chinese, Burmese, Indian, Thai etc do not tolerate western style incivilities, period.
The student at the hostel were gunned down in cold blood and the building fire boombed, only when they refuse to evacuate and began to taunt the armed man with such in Burmese that ‘all the combined education of the soldier as well as Ne Win does not come close to one of the students’. The building was left as a reminder unkempt until recently.
This unjustifiable atrociousness of Ne Win set the tone for the subsequent bloody encores.
Making his personal statement “Burmese soldier shoot to kill” a shameful legacy.
Does the west even cringe in anyway then?
2)There are specially trained armed elements that will shot anyone on command in Myanmar, Periad.
As proof subsequent riots during Ne WIn’s BSPP era, very similar to the recent so called Saffron Revolution, when these forces were trucked in an out to shoot down none provoking unarmed civilians resulting in the dead of Thousands, not Hundreds mind you. The monks were made to defrocked imprison or beaten to dead.
Does AI, UN or any other faux Human right entities that speak so loudly and empty during SLOR/SPDC even raise an objection or High light the atrocious behaviors?
40+ years of western chosen neglect as well as useless careless intervention has allowed the Military to hone its capability, in holding on to power, by any means, to near perfection.
Any talk or actions that neglect these 2 lessons will prolong this “Ground hog Day” situation in Myanmar. The only difference is the real price of continuing tragedies is extracted from among the citizenry especially the most vulnerable ones.
Floods and political ideology
I wonder how Montesano comes to notice the political strategy between Yingluck’s and the King’s camps while sitting in Singapore. In the last couple of months, although lately the political scoring has started, it still scatters. Mainly all sides of Thais have tried to figure out how to fight with the large volume of water. Thailand’s watchers should put down politics as well at least for now.
Burma amnesties
“Amnesty in any form is good locally”.
Looking the gift horse in the mouth by yahoos among New Mandala posters prove “never enough” attitude towards present Myanmar government action.
Because of this amnesty x # of families will be happy.
If AI and leery individuals can not see and appreciate this benefit to the citizenry then what do they really stand for in the arena of “HUMANITIES”?
Starting points: Laos in 1975
I turned up a few books that had “disappeared” within Laos in 1975 by searching archives in Thailand. One was (memorably) printed at the absolute last minute before the revolutionaries took over the capital (something like 1974?) but had the ancien régime promoted on the cover, title page, etc. etc. …and despite the fact that its contents were Buddhist, the book as a whole looked like such an absurd piece of propaganda (for the pro-American government that had just disappeared) that I could hardly blame them for taking it off of library shelves (circa 1975).
The copy of that book (that I found and brought back from Thailand) was reproduced by photocopy in a plain cover –omitting the illustrations and insignia (i.e., that did not contribute to the content of the book, but reflected the political patronage that paid for it pre-1975). It is now, thus, available in Vientiane.
The Communists didn’t do all that much book-burning in Laos, compared to China (to the north) or Cambodia (to the south), but the mean spirit of censorship remains strong among some in the party elite. Leafing through books at the National University will reveal that many have specific pages torn out… and I was assured that this was not done by students accidentally, but by individual professors and Party Members who take the time to do this (i.e., without being paid to) so that the students can’t read whatever they consider ideologically unacceptable.
The original National Library of Laos was burned down by the Japanese, and the current library is housed in what used to be the French colonial era “public security” building, where people were tortured (or “interrogated”) in sheds around the back. Presumably, a large part of what was lost in the Japanese conquest would have been the French Colonial administrative records… but I have never read a study of this question.
Robert, the Lao government’s re-appropriation of the nationalist discourse of historical kings (and the raising of new monuments to them) is a recent chapter of history that has been well-researched and widely written about. If you’re reading the high-school level history books (in Lao, by the Lao government) you will see that these kings are now valorized as one stage in the nation’s “material dialectic” of progress… a trope that was not at all unusual in Leninist states rewriting their pre-modern histories (although, in Laos, it did follow after a brief period of rejecting all of that history as “feudal”, and therefore having nothing good in it, etc.). This is to say that even feudal kings can now be celebrated as stages in a struggle for national liberation, that culminates with the Communist Party. This point is not too subtle at the Army Museum in the outskirts of Vientiane (where most of the visitors are themselves members of the military, but foreign tourists are also welcome to attend). The military history of the country there does indeed start with remote Lao kings… and progresses to the more recent wars against the Americans and the Thais. Of course, more generalized Marxist concerns like slavery and the oppression of the poor have largely disappeared from this latest stage of the re-writing of Lao Communist history, while other themes such as the historical borders of Laos having been larger than they are now (etc.) still have a place of prominence in the story as it is now told.
With all of these things, N.F., the question soon becomes what is anyone going to do about it now?
In terms of extant literature of/from/in Laos, a large part of it is in Pali (or demotic Pali mixed with old local dialects) that almost nobody can read… and another large part of it is in very well-bound books printed in Moscow that nobody does read.
Many of the Soviet-era translations of the Marxist canon into Lao were completed too late into the 1980s to be influential within the country (although they are written in impeccable, high-quality Lao translation…). I’m saying this of “canonical” works (like Das Kapital itself, etc.) –I’m aware that there was also a strange literature of in-classroom pamphlets of the Communist era that was more influential (and these have been surveyed in a few conference papers, etc., in recent years). Some these canonical works were translated from Russian, but many were translated directly from German, resulting in dictionaries (etc.) for both languages (rather better than the Lao-English dictionaries, etc.). During a period of two and a half years in the country, I did not meet a single Lao person who considered Lenin and Marx to have been two different people, as they had learned this as a hyphenated name (as per “Marxist-Leninism” in English).
The current generation of in-classroom propaganda, I note, was paid for by the government of Australia, and deserves to be the subject of its own critique in turn.
In Laos, I never met one person who really read Pali; conversely, I never met one person who really read Marx. They’ve had several successive waves of “canonical literature” created and then lost… or that they’ve simply lost interest in.
However, still today, the Communist Party provides an education (and access to literacy) to a far smaller number of students than the Buddhist temples do… and somewhere out of the mixed influence of those temple-schools and Thai soap-operas, the next generation of the Lao intellectuals will emerge. Whether or not any of them will take an interest in the work of Grant Evans remains to be seen; but, for better or worse, it is possible that Evans will be more influential than Karl Marx and the Pali canon combined (and yet, far less influential than Thai soap-operas…).
Managing people harder than managing water
My criticism towards Chalerm’s role in this crisis is as followed:
As Deputy Prime Minister in Social Affairs, his main responsibilities when he took office were crimes, narcotics and justice. Before the flood he was very active in this role, in particular his pursuit of justice for the 13 deaths in last year’s Bloody May.
Since early October, after cabinet meeting in which FROC was established, Chalerm was tasked with 2 major responsibilities during the floods: 1) public safety and 2) traffic. His job is to provide safety both during and after the floods. He would be commanding the police.
http://www.matichon.co.th/news_detail.php?newsid=1319537700&grpid=&catid=01&subcatid=0100
I find his unusually low-profile highly worrisome given he is tasked with ensuring “public safety” during the floods. This is a serious matter.
The few interviews I found of him outlining his responsibilities during the flood crisis and his responses to concerns re: looting, robbery, and other safety concerns have me convinced he’s not on top of the situation.
When reports of looting began to emerge he said “looting happens. People do bad things when they haven’t enough to eat.”
When asked if he had dealt with previous reports of looting he said that he told the police to work with the provincial administration to deal with public safety during flooding, which is actually “the responsibility of the Interior”.
When asked about reports of food and donations not getting to those that needed them he said “I thought of using a chopper to drop donation bags but then we might miss the spot. I’ll get the police to investigate the route.” When asked further to clarify his immediate and long term plan on provision of public safety he refused to answer.
http://www.manager.co.th/Politics/ViewNews.aspx?NewsID=9540000130126
While normally I don’t like to rely on one interview to judge someone’s character, this particular interview is one of very few Chalerm gave regarding the flood in the first 3 weeks of October. And none of the answers he gave to the public provides any reassurance that he is taking his responsibilities seriously.
Fortunately, since Yingluck provoked section 31, he seems to be coming around. I have seen more of his communication with the public of his concerns of the now widespread reports of looting and robbery. That is a move in a right direction.
Managing people harder than managing water
“her poor record in managing people has led to policy missteps” – Mandala
Can the author point us to evidence showing Yinglucks poor record in managing people? I assume he means before the floods? Or should it be rephrased to “her mismanagement of officials has led to policy missteps”?
How much of this years’ rain was royal?
When you say ‘rain making’, do you mean cloud seeding? Whether it works or not, I can see this quickly going hush-hush.
How much of this years’ rain was royal?
wonder if the royal rainmakers publish records of their operations and their claimed success?
perhaps they did see the forecasts this year and decided it would be a great opportunity to claim significant success
(to counterbalance some of the probably mediocre and patchy results over past years….)
Managing people harder than managing water
1) Kittirat also broke into tears and hugged a Japanese factory manager (before he travelled to China)!
2) In addition to #16, the same issue of Bangkok Post has this article:
http://www.bangkokpost.com/feature/environment/263397/flood-mismanagement
Floods and political ideology
Thanks for bringing my attention to this. Montesano’s work is very fine!
How much of this years’ rain was royal?
I didn’t think you include three time helicopter’s fall because of making royal rain. They try to protect the rest of forest from capitalist. We have lesser area of forest to absorb flood water now.
How much of this years’ rain was royal?
Crikey…quite a sticky wicket, this!
Refugee deal – a Malaysian view
Malaysia’s Prime Minister finally elaborates about how the Malaysia Solution will break the traffickers business model.
I wonder why if he is so concerned about the refugees, that he can’t sign the 1951 UN Refugee Convention or enact local laws to protect refugees.
How much of this years’ rain was royal?
Can anyone direct me to an English language account of the Royal Projects in agricultural and meteorlogical areas during the reign of the present King, please.
Managing people harder than managing water
After reading this, I wonder how much of this disaster is down to mismanagement, and not just this year’s heavy rainfall?
‘The Office of the Auditor General has found government agencies’ efforts to manage water in the country’s 25 river basins lacked unified direction.’
The rest is here:
http://www.bangkokpost.com/news/local/263352/water-management-a-fiscal-fiasco-says-oag
This all smacks of corruption, especially by those civil servants (ha!) supposedly running government departments.
As ever, it seems that the Thai people suffer because of a these apparently ill-informed and poorly managed projects, budget waste and sheer incompetence.
But, you know, I don’t think this is incompetence. With such vast budget theft opportunities at stake, to mismanage on this scale has to be planned. To set up and run so many useless projects and misappropriate the budgets has to take a special kind of skill and planning.
I am not being sarcastic. It simply cannot be possible for all of this to happen by accident.
Someone has to be responsible for this.
Footnote to my post 12.
Department of Disaster Prevention and Mitigation – Total Budget 2003 – 2010 = 15,492,930,300 Baht
How much of this years’ rain was royal?
I have seen this before in many places. This is not a fair use of the information. This outdated news (published on 6 April 2011) is behind the ungrounded rumor that royalists let water flood the red-shirt people.
So, I strongly disagree with “Doesn’t look like the royal rain-makers had received forecasts that 2011 was going to be an exceptionally wet year!”
Sure when I read the news I wanted to know “How long did their operations last?” I have tried hard to get the info but didn’t get anything. If you know the answers to Andrew’s questions, please share your though here.
Having said that, I personally don’t think that rain-making process works. Proven scientific experiments will work anywhere in the universe given you do the same thing under the same physical condition. Rain-making seems to work only in Thailand for cultural reasons.
My commonsense speculates the following:
1. There was no rain in the targeted area (It may rain elsewhere.) so the rain-making process had to start. [April?]
2. It didn’t work. To make rain under the prescribed technique, you have got to have enough cloud and moisture in the air.
3. Then the monsoons came. It rained a lot. They might initially claim some credits for it, but I think they were wise enough to stop that claim when rainfall got out of control.
How much of this years’ rain was royal?
😀
Sabai sabai
How much of this years’ rain was royal?
Oh dear.
Floods, hacks and the Nitirat effect
patsan: you make a fair point, but such actions are common to politicians of all stripes, seeking to gain attention and claim credit. Likewise, NGO’s, and Aid Agencies, both local and international, will always advertise their presence and activities, although I suppose this they can justify on security grounds, sometimes. Corporate donors too will always have their logos prominently displayed.
But does it matter? I do not think that the recipients of much needed supplies will be too concerned about such ethical issues.
Ralph Kramden: It’s an interesting report. It is a pity that the red shirt Asia Update TV is subscription only and not available through government channels, so it only reaches a limited audience. Obviously they will put their own slant on things, but they are spending a lot of time refuting misleading or false reports about red shirt activities.