<p>This year&rsquo;s Royal Birthday Speech included another call for unity, echoing previous years&rsquo; addresses as well as pronouncements from just about everybody with a claim to some form of national leadership. A call for disunity would hardly be helpful, so this all seems to be perfectly acceptable, if a little anodyne.</p> <p>Until some of them demonstrate that by unity, they in fact mean uniformity.</p>

<p>In the days before the channel tunnel and Ryanair, most travel in and out of the United Kingdom was by ferry. &nbsp;So fogs in the English Channel seriously disrupted communications between Britain and the rest of Europe. &nbsp;One pea-souper gave rise to the probably apocryphal London headline: &lsquo;Fog Isolates Continent&rsquo;. &nbsp;<br /> &nbsp;<br /> Prime Minister Cameron has just done the same thing.<br /> &nbsp;</p>

<p>On 14 December 2011, Sittisak Wanachakit, Justice Court spokesperson, made an extensive comment, published on <a href="http://www.bangkokbiznews.com/home/detail/politics/analysis/20111214/424435/news.html">กรุงเทพธุรกิจ</a>, on the case of Ah Kong, the 61-year-old man recently sentenced to twenty years in prison under Article 112 of the Thai Criminal Code (the les&egrave; majest&eacute; law: &ldquo;<em>Whoever defames, insults or threatens the King, Queen, the Heir-apparent or the Regent, shall be punished with imprisonment of three to fifteen years</em>&rdquo;) and the 2007 Computer Crimes</p>

<p>&nbsp;And you got worried when the Minster of Information and Communication Technology said that hitting &lsquo;like&rsquo; or &lsquo;share&rsquo; on a potential l&egrave;se majest&eacute; posting on Facebook would land you in court. That should be the least of your worries, as a recent prosecution reveals.</p>

<p>Following the example of communities who suffered from the recent floods, ordinary Thais are resorting to direct action to dismantle barriers that block the free movement of wealth, which is artificially bottled up among the elite.</p>

<p>In a verdict that shocked many for its severity, the Criminal Court yesterday sentenced a former high-ranking government official to 20 years in jail for being unusually poor.</p>

<p>He was born normal,<br /> neither physically nor emotionally disabled. <br /> He can love and be loved,<br /> He can hate and be hated,<br /> as an ordinary man.</p>

<p>On 23 November 2011, <a href="http://prachatai.com/journal/2011/11/37991">Ampon Tangnoppakul</a> was sentenced to 20 years, the longest known sentence to date under the Computer Crimes Act of 2007. His alleged crime? Allegedly sending four SMS messages with allegedly anti-monarchy content to the personal secretary of the former prime minister, Abhisit Vejjajiva. As Prachatai has reported, the sentence was delivered via videolink as flooding made it unfeasible for Ampon to be brought to the Criminal Court to hear the sentence.</p>

<p>I am beginning to lose the plot.</p> <p>John Terry, captain of Chelsea and England, is an all-round typical football hero. He has bonked a team mate&rsquo;s girl friend, demanded cash payment for access to Chelsea&rsquo;s training facilities (which he donated to charity when he was found out), and has now been accused of racially abusing Anton Ferdinand when Chelsea recently played Queen&rsquo;s Park Rangers. The allegations are being investigated by the Football Association and the Metropolitan Police.</p>

<p>Whenever Mrs Hilary Clinton visits any country, a meeting with those leaders is always a must in her programme. Normal practice for others too, courtesy call by foreign minister to a leader in the visited nation is a good protocol reflecting close and good relations between the two sides.</p>

<p>This is unjust.</p> <p>In flood-ravaged Bangkok, I am able to live comfortably with minor disruptions. The electricity works, the piped water runs clear and the phone lines stay connected. I can get to the post office, the bank and the doctor&rsquo;s, where services are more or less normal. The newspapers are delivered on time, if a bit thinner than normal, and I can still order a pizza to the door, though some items are temporarily off the menu.</p>

<p>Prachatai has monitored the <a href="http://www.prachatai.com/english/node/2826">case</a> closely, writing that &quot;the Thai-born American citizen was arrested by the Department of Special Investigation in late May this year for allegedly translating the banned book &lsquo;The King Never Smiles&rsquo; and placing links to download the translation on the internet, violating the l&egrave;se majest&eacute; law and the 2007 Computer Crimes Act.&quot;</p>