YouTube – Ian Collins & Woman that Set up Raoul Moat Facebook Page.

Listening to something like this makes me wonder who is worse, the uneducated  woman who actually does have the right to free speech (and to vote) or the idiot DJ for trying to make himself sound like he has morals.

Aussie Murderer Given Kings Pardon Over Violent Shooting

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An Aussie man has been given an early release from prison for the murder of an American tourist 2 years ago following a royal pardon from His Majesty the King.

Thailand, the 12^th of June 2010 [PDN]: The mother of an American man, gunned down in the Northern Thai province of Chiang Mai two years ago, has voiced her outrage at the early release of his Australian murderer this week.

Controversy has surrounded the case from day one, with allegations that he bride any number of officials to be given a lenient sentence, special treatment in prison and an early release, which consequently ended up coming by way of a royal pardon on Tuesday.

After being sentenced to just two years and nine months prison, William Thomas Douglas [62] was due to be released in December of this year, however was given a royal pardon this week in a wave of 6 months off his already lenient sentence.

Mr. Douglas admitted to shooting American tourist Gary Bruce Poretsky [46] three times in a Chiang Mai restaurant following an argument regarding Australia’s involvement in the Vietnam War. Asked why he shot Mr. Poretsky he said, “because I don’t like Americans”.

Douglas served in the Vietnam War as a non-conscripted infantry soldier and is believed to have had a nervous breakdown after his second tour of duty. Before Poretsky’s murder, Douglas had lived in Thailand for more than two decades and was receiving a pension.

Sandra Fall, Mr. Poretsky’s mother, stated that his early release and lenient treatment in general raises questions about the Thai judicial system. “I am angry with the Thai government and also my own government for not doing more to put Douglas away for more than the sentence he received.”

At present it is believed the Mr. Douglas is resisting deportation procedures in order to remain in the kingdom where he is married to a Thai woman.

Som Tam salad(Pok Pok) is made from:
a) The leftovers of yesterdays meal
b) Green Papaya , Chillis , Tomatoes etc.
c) Potatoes and chives with green peppers
d) Grass cuttings from the front lawn and soi dog hairs
In Thailand traffic drives on the:
a) Left
b) Right
c) Hard shoulder
d) All the above plus pavement
In Thailand, building an extension on a terraced house is:
a) Optional
b) Compulsory
c) Permitted provided it looks like an ugly wart on the front of the property
d) For opening a drygoods shop only
A short time hotel is for:
a) Those who can’t afford the 24 hour price of an ordinary hotel.
b) A place to hide your car from the repo company.
c) A hotel that was built in a hurry and that might fall down.
d) A place to take someone for sex without spending more than necessary.
The maximum number of passengers allowed on a motorcycle:
a) 2 sloths
b) 2 adults and 2 children
c) 3 adults and 3 children
d) At drivers discretion providing the tyres don’t blow.
The country has a comprehensible legal system based on:
a) Trial by Jury
b) Trial by judges hand picked by ruling political party
c) A sophisticated ducking stool.
d) Verdict by gratuity
The practice of giving policemen money is called:
a) illegal
b) Common sense
c) Tea money
d) Bar fine
In Thailand, drivers use their vehicle indicator lights:
a) rarely
b) to congratulate themselves for having successfully performed a turn
c) to confuse all other motorists
d) completely randomly
The Thai girl in the soap opera who is shrieking like a spastic crackhead, is actually saying:
a) I’m tired
b) I’m hungry
c) I’m a twat
d) I’m skint
When unable to find an item in a supermarket or department store you will turn to one of the uniformed persons who has been following you around for the last 15 mins to ask where the wanted item is. The reply will be:
a) Mai mee kha
b) Mai mee kha
c) Mai mee kha
or
d) Mai mee kha
When you answer your telephone in Thailand, the caller (who has dialled the wrong number) will:
a) Keeping saying Hallo? Hallo? Hallo? Until you hang up
b) Hang up without saying anything
c) Blabber something over and over again in the hope that you mutate into the person they wanted to talk to
d) Bay to someone else at their end farang! And then hang up without acknowledging your existence. Then they’ll call you back and repeat he process
Before applying to your local immigration office for a visa extension, you should consider:
a) Appropriate clothing and a respectful manner.
b) An appropriate financial amount as a gift.
c) Drinking and whoring like it’s your last night in Thailand.
d) A country that wants you as a resident
You would like to open a shop on a busy road with lots of potential customers. Several shops already operate along the road. You think for many days about your business plan, seeking the advice of village elders and monks. You decide to sell:
a) The same thing as everybody else
b) The same thing as everybody else
c) The same thing as everybody else
d) Something different
The locals are celebrating Songkran. Everyone is completely soaked and having a great time. Then it starts to rain. What happens next:
a) Everyone carries on as they are already saturated
b) Everyone puts a plastic bag on their heads
c) Everyone seeks shelter and waits for the rain to pass

d) Everyone rushes to their transport, panicking because the rain will kill you, and adds to the carnage on the roads by riding home very quickly to avoid getting wetter
In Thailand, pavements (sidewalks) are for:
a) Parking your vehicles on
b) Setting up stalls on
c) Putting pot plants and advertisements for Game Online on
d) Planting concrete poles on to support unstable electrical equipment
When marrying a Thai citizen you may become economically responsible for :
a) Your new spouse and children from previous partner
b) Your new partners immediate relatives ( up to mother and father )
c) Their extended family and all livestock owned by them
d) A village in the boonies
If you need to ask for directions from a stranger in Bangkok:
a) Go in the diametrically opposite direction indicated in the answer
b) Forget it. In Thai culture this is a bizarre question. Why don’t you hire a guide?
c) Before asking you should try to make yourself look smaller so as to minimize the fright, shock and embarrassment and the general shame that you bring upon the nation you will cause by this frankly indiscreet request for information
d) You should first try to appear highly distraught, and confused, disoriented or mentally retarded with a kind of quivering nervous condition so as to gain the famous Bangkok sympathy for the less fortunate and downtrodden and then with very wide open bugged out eyes, get very close to the person and ask for directions in a very loud shrill voice so that the person’s attention doesn’t waver. “Mee a go go bar tai-ohnee, mai?” Rolling your r’s as in Spanish or a Scottish brogue is a much esteemed feature and achievement and helps. Then, once you are past this primary stage and the question has been asked, you need to take the next step and apply basic principals of mesmerism and hypnosis to assure that your question sinks in to a secondary level in which it can receive the required attention necessary to answer it. One way to make deep level hypnotic contact with your new friend on Silom road or Sukhumvit is to hone in on the breathing pattern of your interlocutor and attempt to match it with your own while making sustained and intense eye contact so as to utterly and completely rivet the person’s attention, or else again they may lose interest and focus and simply say, “Yes.” If you fail to get through at this stage, you will have to be prepared to make many vigorous and dramatic gestures, thrusting the feet and hands, pointing the fingers or even doing pantomime in order to make your point. Familiarity with some of the great artists of the ballet such as Nureyev has provided me with the inspiration for highly effective movement for your making my point. However, if after that, the answer you receive is again the highly popular non-sequitor answer to all questions in English, “Yes,” which may well happen, try raising the pitch of your voice even higher. Do not hesitate to go into a kind of tourettes syndrome like pentecostal tornado of falsetto shreiking and jabbering punctuated with foot stomps and table banging which will all work together to supply rich and fascinating kind of percussive and melodic improvisatory milleu that will fecundate the kind of rhizomatic nodal mergings that bring together singing and percussive movement and infuse your implorings for directions with fascinating counterpuntal auroras that shimmer and irridesce and bring out the child like sense of wonder and joy that many Bangkokians seem to have lost due to over-exposure to lost tourists and expats like yourself. They will appreciate how you have reawakened them to the happiness to be found in simple things like attempting to give directions to a lost stranger, something I’m sure the wise patriarchs of old Siam would smile upon.
d) Mai loo! Up to you!

Chok dee khap!

nWEB – Bangkok – May 19, 2010 – Somtow Sucharitkul’s Opinion On Foreign News

Tuesday, May 18, 2010

I have been composing a long, day by day account of the “troubles” of the last three days, which I have not yet posted. The reason is that I’ve been getting a lot of mail asking me to explain “the truth” to people overseas. A lot of people here are astonished and appalled at the level of irresponsibility and inaccuracy shown by such major news sources as CNN, and are imputing the most astonishing motives to this, such as suggesting that they’re in the pay of Thaksin and so on.

I don’t think this is really what is going on. Rather, I think that there are two basic problems: preconception and language.

CNN first became a force to be reckoned with during the “People Power” movement in the Philippines. The kind of coverage we had for this was amazing. There was a camera in every camp, and we could follow this exciting revolution every step of the way. We knew exactly who to root for: the oppressed masses led by the widow of the iconic Aquino, and we knew that whenever President Marcos appeared he was Darth Vader, the symbol of an evil empire. The arc of the story was simple and inexorable. A whole new way of looking at the news was born, with all the excitement of a TV miniseries and, prophetically, a reality show as well.

Of course, many of the little details of the story were conveniently glossed over. Reality was not never is so black and white. But there are three important things about this story: first, in its essentials, there was a lot of truth. And all the protagonists spoke English.

The Philippines, as Filipinos never tire of telling me, is the third most populous English speaking country in the world. We will leave the definition of “English-speaking” to another blog, but it’s very important that the various sides in this conflict were able to articulate their viewpoints in a language which CNN well understood.

The third important thing about the story is that it fulfilled a vision of history that is an inseparable part of the inheritance of western culture, that is so ingrained in western thinking that it is virtually impossible for an educated member of western society to divorce himself from it.

It is a vision of history as a series of liberations. From Harmodius and Aristogeiton throwing off the tyrant’s yoke to the removal of the Tarquins and the establishment of the Roman Republic to the failed rebellion of Spartacus, from Magna Carta to the Bastille to the American Civil War to the Russian Revolution, there is this Platonic Model against which these big historical movements are always compared. There is a bad guy often a dictator who can be demonized. There is a struggling proletariat. The end comes with “liberty and justice for all”. This is Star Wars. The dark times. The Empire.

The “People Power” coverage was riveting, compelling, and contained all the emotional components of this mythical story arc. Finding another such story, therefore, is a kind of Holy Grail for the international media. When a story comes that appears to contain some of the elements, and it’s too much hard work to verify those elements or get all the background detail, you go with the Great Archetype of Western Civilization.

Now, let us consider the redshirt conflict.

Let’s not consider what has actually been happening in Thailand, but how it looks to someone whose worldview has been coloured with this particular view of history.

Let’s consider the fact that there is pretty much nothing being explained in English, and that there are perhaps a dozen foreigners who really understand Thai thoroughly. I don’t mean Thai for shopping, bargirls, casual conversation and the like. Thai is a highly ambiguous language and is particularly well suited for seeming to say opposite things simultaneously. To get what is really being said takes total immersion.

When you watch a red shirt rally, notice how many English signs and placards there are, and note that they they are designed to show that these are events conforming to the archetype. The placards say “Democracy”, “No Violence,” “Stop killing innocent women and children” and so on. Speakers are passionately orating, crowds are moved. But there are no subtitles. What does it look like?

The answer is obvious. It looks like oppressed masses demanding freedom from an evil dictator.

Don’t blame Dan Rivers, et al, who are only doing what they are paid to do: find the compelling story within the mass of incomprehensible data, match that story to what the audience already knows and believes, and make sure the advertising money keeps flowing in.

A vigorous counter-propaganda campaign in clear and simple English words of one syllable has always been lacking and is the reason the government is losing the PR war while actually following the most logical steps toward a real and lasting resolution.

If the foreign press were in fact able to speak Thai well enough to follow all the reportage here coming from all sides, they would also be including some of the following information in their reports. I want to insist yet again that I am not siding with anyone. The following is just information that people really need before they write their news reports.

– Thaksin was democratically elected, but became increasingly undemocratic, and the country gradually devolved from a nation where oligarchs skimmed off the top to a kleptocracy of one. During his watch, thousands of people were summarily executed in the South of Thailand and in a bizarre “war on drugs” in which body count was considered a marker of success.

– the coup that ousted Thaksin was of course completely illegal, but none of the people who carried it out are in the present government.

– the yellow shirts’ greatest error in moulding its international image was to elevate Thaksin’s corruption as its major bone of contention. Thai governments have always been corrupt. The extent of corruption and the fact that much of it went into only one pocket was shocking to Thais, but the west views all “second-rate countries” as being corrupt. Had they used the human rights violations and muzzling of the press as their key talking points, the “heroic revolution” archetype would have been moulded with opposite protagonists, and CNN and BBC would be telling an opposite story today.
[I would not put money on that]

– the constitution which was approved by a referendum after the coup and which brought back democracy was flawed, but it provided more checks and balances, and made election fraud a truly accountable offense for the first time.

– the parliamentary process by which the Democrat coalition came to power was the same process by which the Lib Dems and Tories have attained power in Britain. The parliament that voted in this government consists entirely of democratically elected members.

– no one ever disputed the red shirts’ right to peaceful assembly, and the government went out of its way to accede to their demands.

– this country already has democracy. Not a perfect one, but the idea of “demanding democracry” is sheer fantasy

– the yellow shirts did not succeed in getting any of their demands from the government. The last two governments changed because key figures were shown to have committed election fraud. They simply did not take their own constitution seriously enough to follow it.

– the red TV station has a perfect right to exist, but if foreign journalists actually understood Thai, they would realize that much of its content went far beyond any constitutionally acceptable limits of “protected speech” in a western democracy. Every civilized society limits speech when it actually harms others, whether by inciting hate or by slander. The government may have been wrong to brusquely pull the plug, but was certainly right to cry foul.It should have sought an injunction first. Example: Arisman threatened to destroy mosques, government buildings, and “all institutions you hold sacred” … a clip widely seen on youtube, without subtitles. Without subtitles, it looks like “liberty, equality, fraternity”.

– the army hasn’t been shooting women and children … or indeed anyone at all, except in self-defense. Otherwise this would all be over, wouldn’t it? It’s simple for a big army to mow down 5,000 [almost] defenseless people.

– since the government called the red shirts’ bluff and allowed the deputy P.M. to report to the authorities to hear their accusations, the red leaders have been making ever-more fanciful demands. The idea of UN intervention is patently absurd. When Thaksin killed all those Muslims and alleged drug lords, human rights groups asked the UN to intervene. When the army took over the entire country, some asked the UN to intervene. The UN doesn’t [and shouldn't] intervene in the internal affairs of sovereign countries except when requested to by the country itself or when the government has completely broken down.

– Thailand hasn’t had an unbreachable gulf between rich and poor for at least 20 years. These conflicts are about the rise of the middle class, not the war between the aristocrats and the proletariat.

– Abhisit, with his thoroughly western and somewhat liberal background, shares the values of the west and is in fact more likely to bring about the social revolution [bad choice of words] needed by Thailand’s agrarian poor than any previous leader. He is, in fact, pretty red, while Thaksin, in his autocratic style of leadership, is in a way pretty yellow. Simplistic portrayals do not help anyone to understand anything.

– the only people who do not seem to care about the reds’ actual grievances are their own leaders, who are basically making everyone risk their lives to see if they can get bail.

– the King has said all that he is constitutionally able to say when he spoke to the supreme court justices and urged them to do their duty. The western press never seem to realize that the Thai monarchy is constitutionally on the European model … not, say, the Saudi model. The king REIGNS … he doesn’t “rule”. This is a democracy. The king is supposed to symbolize all the people, not a special interest group.
[Unlike the president of a large western country we all know]

The above are just a few of the elements that needed to be sorted through in order to provide a balanced view of what is happening in this country.

There is one final element that must be mentioned. Most are not even aware of it. But there is, in the western mindset, a deeply ingrained sense of the moral superiority of western culture which carries with it the idea that a third world country must by its very nature be ruled by despots, oppress peasants, and kill and torture people. Most westerners become very insulted when this is pointed out to them because our deepest prejudices are always those of which we are least aware. I believe that there is a streak of this crypto-racism in some of the reportage we are seeing in the west. It is because of this that Baghdad, Yangon, and Bangkok are being treated as the same thing. We all look alike.

Yes, this opinion is always greeted with outrage. I do my best to face my own preconceptions and don’t succeed that often, but I acknowledge they exist nonetheless.

Some of the foreign press are painting the endgame as the Alamo, but it is not. It is a lot closer to Jonestown or Waco.

Like those latter two cases, a highly charismatic leader figure (in our case operating from a distance, shopping in Paris while his minions sweat in the 94° weather) has taken an inspirational idea: in one case Christianity, in the other democracy, and reinvented it so that mainstream Christians, or real democrats, can no longer recognize it. The followers are trapped. There is a siege mentality and information coming from outside is screened so that those trapped believe they will be killed if they try to leave. Women and children are being told that they are in danger if they fall into the hands of the government, and to distrust the medics and NGOs waiting to help them. There are outraged pronouncements that they’re not in fact using the children as human shields, but that the parents brought them willingly to “entertain and thrill” them. There is mounting paranoia coupled with delusions of grandeur, so that the little red kingdom feels it has the right to summon the United Nations, just like any other sovereign state. The reporters in Rajprasong who are attached to the red community are as susceptible to this variant of the Stockholm syndrome as anyone else.

The international press must separate out the very real problems that the rural areas of Thailand face, which will take decades to fix, from the fact that a mob is rampaging through Bangkok, burning, looting, and firing grenades, threatening in the name of democracy to destroy what democracy yet remains in this country.

But this bad reporting is not their fault. It is our fault for not providing the facts in bite-sized pieces, in the right language, at the right time.

Posted by Somtow Sucharitkul (S.P. Somtow) at 3:41 PM
Somtow Sucharitkul is an award winning Thai-American author and musician, radio commentator, etc. related to the Royal Family
http://www.fnweb.com/main/news.asp?id=92647&dailymail=Y (requires registration)
http://www.somtow.com/home.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S._P._Somtow

Well it was really a let down. I guess that because it was a Monday that very very few people showed up.
I had a trawl around but it wasn’t quite the same without Ralph.

Red shirts still polluting our streets in Da Big Mango and now our park too. Blood is coming soon although the peasants are saying that the soldiers are watermelons… Green on the outside but their inside is red. We certainly hope that this is not true!!!!!