Alien Thoughts

20 Dec 2018
Well I never.  One Facebook post and some questionable statistics (ultimately from the Bank of Thailand) and suddenly economic equality is the new buzz.  Thailand is, according to just one source, Number One in the world for economic inequality.  And the powers that be are not happy. Before now, almost every comment on the national economy health and well-being has been couched in terms of GDP.  A random sample of recent articles in One Of The Bangkok Newspapers reveals how.
18 Oct 2018
On the morning of 9 August, a bus stopped in the market area of the town of Dahyan in northern Yemen, close to the border with Saudi Arabia.  People at the scene reported that warplanes had been circling the area for an hour or so, a common occurrence.  The area was crowded with civilians.  Well, it is a market.
15 Sep 2018
The tourist had left his mobile phone in a Bangkok taxi.  This kind of thing happens on a daily basis so you would think that when he reported it to a police station, they would have a procedure in place to deal with it. And they do.  But it’s not what you might think. First there is the rigmarole of the bai chaeng khwam, the police report.  Did you note the licence number of the taxi, which is helpfully stencilled inside the cab?  Of course not.  Did you note the driver’s name on the dashboard card?  Even less likely.
7 Sep 2018
So who are we talking about?
27 Aug 2018
There is growing linguistic turmoil in academia. To understand why, you need to recognize the growing importance of academic publications, both for individual scholars and for educational institutions. The average workaday university teacher has two major academic responsibilities: teaching and research.  Good teaching, which you might think was the core competence of a teacher, is difficult to measure in a reliable way.  Student ratings quickly become beauty contests and measuring by exam results can be skewed by the incompetence, or recalcitrance, of the students.
20 Aug 2018
The concern of the Department of Land Transport for the safety of road users can be gauged by the ‘training’ component in the process of getting a driving licence.  60-70 applicants are seated wall-to-wall in a room to watch an hour-long video.  And to make sure no one skips the ‘training’, the official locks the door on the way out. If ever there was a fire, it would be a death trap. The video itself is very informative.  Not about how to drive safely on Thailand’s roads (that seems to have been abandoned as a lost cause) but about how Thai society works.
10 Jul 2018
The Good Samaritan may soon be extinct in Thailand if the police response to a recent road traffic accident becomes the norm. It all started with a run of the mill hit-and-run. A tinted-window Mercedes (is there any other kind?) side-swiped a bicycle that was dutifully trundling along in the gutter, bringing down both rider and machine. Nothing life-threatening and the bike was damaged but repairable. Not that the Merc driver knew. He was long gone.
30 Mar 2018
Stephen Hawking got to the Pearly Gates only to discover that entry control had been outsourced to a Thai company. The entrance to heaven had been transformed into an excessively curlicued arched gate as rococo as any you’ll find in a gated community in a Bangkok suburb, connected on either side to a nondescript wall adorned with razor wire, broken bottles and hastily scrubbed out graffiti of a black leopard’s head.
28 Feb 2018
News item: National Security Council (NSC) secretary-general Wallop Raksanoh has “pledged to go after those who are financially supporting pro-election activists”.  General Wallop pledged to “hunt down those who are the backers of the group,” saying that the “activists would not pose such a major problem if people were not egging them on.” The scene:  A meeting room at the National Security Council, where the Egging On Investigation Team is reporting its findings. So, have you interrogated all the suspects? Yes, sir.  59 of them.
13 Feb 2018
They are a staple of social media. The latest that I received warned against a ‘new’ scam when you check into a hotel.  You’ve handed your credit card to the reception desk who take from it a deposit against which they will debit any extra charges for wildly overpriced miniature booze in the minibar or the laundry fee for your unmentionables.  You get your card back and go to your room.
2 Feb 2018
To judge from the cracks and potholes, the soi hasn’t been resurfaced in decades.  Maybe not since the emergency makeover when a daily motorcade of Mercs began transporting royal offspring to the school nearby.
16 Jan 2018
Pandemonium reigned in parliament yesterday after the vote to choose a new Prime Minister descended into farce. After the House had failed to choose a Prime Minister from among the candidates declared before the election, the appointed Senate was constitutionally required to join the House in voting for any candidate, including persons who had not stood for election.  Predictably, the incumbent Prime Minister and leader of the 2014 coup d’état Gen Prayut Chan-o-cha was nominated.

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