Give me a bloody break ! I agree with Alex. DO YOU have a globally-respected and accomplished SYNTHETIC ORGANIC CHEMIST in your NON-ROYAL family. One thing the Thai royals are NOT, is idle. Any one of them could choose to spend their lives in Monaco, and not become world-renowned Architects and Organic Chemists (not a field overfilled with Southeast Asian women). It is most of the BS posted above that needs to be buried, not given any life in print.
Has this focus on the CP been a distraction from the referendum ? Very interesting, that for the first time, some Thai mainstream media is now focusing on links between the wide democracy struggle and deep South troubles – eg.http://www.bangkokpost.com/news/politics/1047717/charter-campaign-on-religions-a-lie. And THIS at the very same time Daw Aung San Suu Kyi is making efforts to revive her father’s federalist vision, via renewed dialogue with the Wa Army.
His wife, the mother of his four children, (none of whom are particularly well-educated, talented, attractive or accomplished)…
Do you really know them? Get your facts straight!!! The 3 female children are well-educated, talented and definitely accomplished in their area of expertise, especially Sirindhorn and Chulabhorn!!! They even have international awards and can speak several languages!!!!! How about you?
Not sure there was or is any debate between Dr Grey and myself. We live in quite different worlds and in my case – although perhaps not in her case – there are a lot of “smoking mirrors”. However, not being legally entitled to own land in Thailand has not stopped some non-Thais, often with the collusion of Thais, thinking they own land. Actually I don’t find this to be a major existential issue. But what I do agree with – at least in part – are narratives or discourses or call them what you like that dis-empower the “Other” (in this case Dr Gary’s exploited and oppressed Thai woman). No doubt there are exploited and oppressed Thai women as there are women the world over or indeed many men, although gender hierarchy as against “class” or “ethnic” hierarchies make it even worse for women. However, to generalize about the nature of gender relations as Dr Gray does without acknowledging how even seemingly “dis-empowered” Thai women push back, finding ways and means to utilize “weapons” that the “weak” can effectively utilize. I think it is fortunate for Thai women that they don’t wait for academics or indeed anyone else – not just Dr Gray – to unshackle them or else they will be shackled forever.
Ms Duke’s questions are based on the assumption that the President thinks deeply about human rights, wrestles with the issues and understands the appalling cruelty being inflicted on all involved in this evil. Then there’s the damage being done to his nation’s reputation. Sadly evidence supporting such an assumption has yet to be revealed.
One of the most interesting aspects of the conflict is why the Chinese régime is prepared to push this foolish claim and back it up with bluster and military threats. A possible explanation is that they are attempting to ingratiate themselves with their own military. Given that an economic crash is almost inevitable, that it will very likely be on their watch, and that they are likely to get the blame, they will probably need every bit of military support they can muster in order to save their own skins.
The most devastating threat to the fishermen in and around the South China Sea is not from China, nor from the United States, but from typhoons. In this regard, all parties, including China and the United States, can cooperate on issues such as meteorological stations, data sharing, typhoon early warning systems, and joint research on climate change.
Re.” If they sink enough of each other’s fishing boats, “
The sinking of fishing boats certainly is not a regular occurrence.
The US, the strongest power in the region, prefers dialogue. Beijing and Washington are aware of how valuable close military cooperation can be for mitigating risk, and both will be reluctant to jeopardize it. The United States is trying to persuade nations that have claims in the South China Sea to avoid acting rashly.
Never fear, Lydia. The US is about to elect a President who respects and admires a far bigger war criminal, and is heartily backed by a sitting President who has made assassination not only legal but yet another “globalized” commodity.
Hypocrisy? You must be joking!
Sometimes a cigar is just POTUS’ way of saying s/he loves you.
Permit me to comment on the assertion that: “The UK and Australia, already engaged in a low intensity military conflict with Indonesia, extended their propaganda in support of the hate propaganda spread by the Indonesian army inciting the mass killings.”
An account of this “War of Words” is contained on Pages 94 + of “Shadow of a Revolution” by Roland Challis who was the South East Asia Correspondent for the BBC from 1964 to 1969. Western correspondents in Singapore at the time knew perfectly well that they were being fed a line, but rather like the US Military Five O’Clock Follies in Saigon during the Vietnam War, what correspondents were told they set against their other sources of information and their own judgement.
As Professor Robert Cribb has noted in “The Indonesian Killings of 1965-66 Studies from Java to Bali” : “We know surprisingly little about the massacres which followed the 1965 coup attempt. There were many reasons for this shortage of information. First, there were relatively few journalists or academics in Indonesia at the time, and those who were present often depended on the military for access to sources and stories. Travel was difficult and often dangerous.” Vietnam was to be the first true propaganda war fought out on television. It took time for the news to percolate out of Indonesia in 1965 and 1966.
In this context it should be noted that the report by the British Ambassador to the Foreign Office dated 18 February 1966 and reproduced as Document D1.b(ii) of the IPT Report drew essentially on episodic accounts from almost entirely non-British sources and that the estimate by the Swedish Ambassador at the time of the total number of victims was “formed, of course, by projecting over a huge population proportions roughly authenticated in small towns, and areas; but the supposition that similar events did take place over wide areas is one which is on the surface not unreasonable, though it requires to be tested.” [The report was not a telegram, but a letter, and it was not sent to the Head of the Far Eastern Department, but to the Assistant Under-Secretary of State responsible for Indonesia.] Roland Challis has a point however that foreign correspondents based in Singapore would have welcomed such modest and imprecise nuggets of information to relieve the tedium of the ideological anti-communist propaganda diet served up by an overzealous section of the Singapore UK Establishment.
It is significant that in a Secret and Personal letter to the British Ambassador in Jakarta dated 18 July 1966, the prime architect of the UK’s propaganda policy, Political Counsellor Norman Reddaway in Singapore, complained of the lack of support from the Foreign Office in London for his activities. “The political side in London” he wrote “has been hostile most of the time, and at best neutral”. (Churchill Archives Centre Cambridge Gilchrist Papers GILC 962 13/Kiii). The charge of UK “complicity” in the mass killings because a section of the Singapore establishment, without any encouragement from London, might have gone overboard in its anti-Communist propaganda and because the British, who were doing what they could to bring konfrontasi to an end, used the situation not to take military advantage of the Indonesian military, seems to me to be rather far-fetched.
“The political side in London” fortuitously provided in 2001 a more balanced account of these events. The report at http://tinyurl.com/np27kj9 put US, UK and Australian involvement in an objective historical perspective. This account is important as it comes from a London FO insider, with whom my wife has admitted an especially close relationship since 1952.
Maung Zarni though will be delighted to learn that my genocidal activities covered not only Myanmar, Cambodia and South Africa, but extended even to Indonesia as well.
Australia, being already a “Police Country”, is closing in.
If Australia’s citizens are keeping their brains switched off, ears; eyes and mouths closed, then we don’t need to imagine what Australians will face in the near future.
Marteau thanks for posting all that information about guns. However, it is not me but Andrew MacGregor Marshall who you should be asking about ever having handled a Colt.45. If you read that article which he says summarises “some of the most compelling evidence : https://medium.com/@zenjournalist/thailand-s-saddest-secret-f99179fa8e9#.5oj96oi1s“, you will see that AMM writes “The Colt is a relatively heavy handgun, weighing more than a kilogram when fully loaded, and to be fired it requires considerable pressure to be placed not just on the trigger but also simultaneously on a safety panel on the back of the butt.” I merely took AMM’s premise to show that a very different conclusion could be reached.
Indonesia just appointed cabinet minister someone declared guilty of human right violations by a UN-backed court. Any effort to enforce the international tribunal decision will seem hypocritical, at best.
I suppose Christ Beale is the Thai royal family’s SIAMESE!!! I am Thai. I am certainly don’t want to be Chulalongkorn’s SIAMESE. It’s connoting that I’m his slave or one of his many hundredth concubines. Most Thais now know the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly of Rama 5 and his descendants. So, I am not sure if his good deeds will hold the Thais together. In Chulalongkorn’s time, the state was “far less excessively centralised”. To you, maybe. I choose to think that it was because of limits in transportation systems and conditions of the geography of the time. The king is and was the only person who has power.
This is a well-balanced statement that has attracted wide support from Indonesian foreign policy specialists and will no doubt attract even more support.
Its appearance on New Mandala coincides with Jokowi’s latest cabinet reshuffle. The statement would have had a better chance of being adopted by the Jokowi government as an action plan had he taken the opportunity the reshuffle offered him to dump his lacklustre foreign minister, Retno Marsudi. It would have been a further blessing had he also escorted Ryamizard out the door at the same time, but let’s not ask for the moon.
Instead of the moon, Indonesia gets Wiranto back in a key coordinating portfolio, specifically tasked by Jokowi with reforming the justice system. Who thought that Indonesian presidents aside from Gus Dur had no taste for irony?
In the moments that this former Soeharto trusty can spare from reforming justice, he will be overseeing Retno Marsudi, the issuer of bland and insipid statements calling on all the children to behave themselves, both school-yard bullies and teachers’ pets.
We know, alas, more about Wiranto’s former attitude to East Timor than about his current attitude towards the South China Sea. Presumably his predecessor, Luhut Panjaitan, now demoted to the maritime affairs post just vacated by blowhard Rizal Ramli, acquired considerable expertise in South China Sea issues.
It is unclear that whether Luhut will be able to use that expertise in his new job, where he gets to oversee not demure and diminutive Retno, but live fire-cracker Susi Pudjiastuti.
As Wiranto tries to work out how to impose limits on the bribes that judges can accept before deciding cases brought before them, somebody will have to keep an eye on the South China Sea.
Chris, I am not taking sides on the question of whether it was an accident here because I have no idea what happened but I wonder if you have ever handled a Colt .45? It has two safeties, one on the slide, near the rear sights, and one below the beaver tail on the back of the grip. Neither needs considerable force to release. This was a designed as a combat pistol which the user could draw from a holster in the cocked and locked position while releasing the slide safety with his thumb and fire in a split second. The beaver tail safety releases automatically when you grip the gun. Also there has always been a school of thought that prefers not to use safeties at all and I bet their are a large number of single action pistols like the Colt .45 cocked and unlocked on American night stands as we speak. Many SAS officers in Northern Ireland under cover carried their Browning Hi-Powers (essentially the same mechanism as Colt .45 but with no beaver tail safety) cocked and unlocked in shoulder holsters, as they feared fumbling to get the slide safety off in an emergency more than the risk of accidentally shooting themselves. In fact the current fad in the US is for concealed carry pistols with no slide safety at all, just a trigger safety to prevent the gun from going off unless the trigger is pulled. What definitely gives a Colt .45 the impression of being safe, however, is a live round in the chamber while the magazine has been removed. Unlike guns such as the Browning Hi-Power, there is no magazine disconnect to prevent the gun from firing in this position and the slide can also be pulled back to cock it without a magazine in place or it can be already loaded and cocked with a full magazine which is later withdrawn. Countless accidents have occurred as a result of unwittingly handling a pistol with a live round in the chamber without a magazine in place. That is the reason that the Browning Hi-Power, designed by the same team after the Colt .45, has a magazine disconnect.
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A crown prince and German affairs
Give me a bloody break ! I agree with Alex. DO YOU have a globally-respected and accomplished SYNTHETIC ORGANIC CHEMIST in your NON-ROYAL family. One thing the Thai royals are NOT, is idle. Any one of them could choose to spend their lives in Monaco, and not become world-renowned Architects and Organic Chemists (not a field overfilled with Southeast Asian women). It is most of the BS posted above that needs to be buried, not given any life in print.
Royal ink
Has this focus on the CP been a distraction from the referendum ? Very interesting, that for the first time, some Thai mainstream media is now focusing on links between the wide democracy struggle and deep South troubles – eg.http://www.bangkokpost.com/news/politics/1047717/charter-campaign-on-religions-a-lie. And THIS at the very same time Daw Aung San Suu Kyi is making efforts to revive her father’s federalist vision, via renewed dialogue with the Wa Army.
A crown prince and German affairs
His wife, the mother of his four children, (none of whom are particularly well-educated, talented, attractive or accomplished)…
Do you really know them? Get your facts straight!!! The 3 female children are well-educated, talented and definitely accomplished in their area of expertise, especially Sirindhorn and Chulabhorn!!! They even have international awards and can speak several languages!!!!! How about you?
A crown prince and German affairs
Thanks for the post Shane. If it waddles like a duck, swims like a duck, quacks like a duck, then it is a duck. Same with debates.
A crown prince and German affairs
Chris
Not sure there was or is any debate between Dr Grey and myself. We live in quite different worlds and in my case – although perhaps not in her case – there are a lot of “smoking mirrors”. However, not being legally entitled to own land in Thailand has not stopped some non-Thais, often with the collusion of Thais, thinking they own land. Actually I don’t find this to be a major existential issue. But what I do agree with – at least in part – are narratives or discourses or call them what you like that dis-empower the “Other” (in this case Dr Gary’s exploited and oppressed Thai woman). No doubt there are exploited and oppressed Thai women as there are women the world over or indeed many men, although gender hierarchy as against “class” or “ethnic” hierarchies make it even worse for women. However, to generalize about the nature of gender relations as Dr Gray does without acknowledging how even seemingly “dis-empowered” Thai women push back, finding ways and means to utilize “weapons” that the “weak” can effectively utilize. I think it is fortunate for Thai women that they don’t wait for academics or indeed anyone else – not just Dr Gray – to unshackle them or else they will be shackled forever.
ASEAN’s South China Sea ulcer
Not sure President Xi would agree with your assessment of him or he would even believe you are just joking but………
Dear Jokowi: are you sure?
Ms Duke’s questions are based on the assumption that the President thinks deeply about human rights, wrestles with the issues and understands the appalling cruelty being inflicted on all involved in this evil. Then there’s the damage being done to his nation’s reputation. Sadly evidence supporting such an assumption has yet to be revealed.
ASEAN’s South China Sea ulcer
Naturally, it never occurred to the always insightful Mr England that President Xi Jinping is criminally-insane.
ASEAN’s South China Sea ulcer
One of the most interesting aspects of the conflict is why the Chinese régime is prepared to push this foolish claim and back it up with bluster and military threats. A possible explanation is that they are attempting to ingratiate themselves with their own military. Given that an economic crash is almost inevitable, that it will very likely be on their watch, and that they are likely to get the blame, they will probably need every bit of military support they can muster in order to save their own skins.
ASEAN’s South China Sea ulcer
The most devastating threat to the fishermen in and around the South China Sea is not from China, nor from the United States, but from typhoons. In this regard, all parties, including China and the United States, can cooperate on issues such as meteorological stations, data sharing, typhoon early warning systems, and joint research on climate change.
ASEAN’s South China Sea ulcer
Re.” If they sink enough of each other’s fishing boats, “
The sinking of fishing boats certainly is not a regular occurrence.
The US, the strongest power in the region, prefers dialogue. Beijing and Washington are aware of how valuable close military cooperation can be for mitigating risk, and both will be reluctant to jeopardize it. The United States is trying to persuade nations that have claims in the South China Sea to avoid acting rashly.
A statement on the South China Sea ruling
Never fear, Lydia. The US is about to elect a President who respects and admires a far bigger war criminal, and is heartily backed by a sitting President who has made assassination not only legal but yet another “globalized” commodity.
Hypocrisy? You must be joking!
Sometimes a cigar is just POTUS’ way of saying s/he loves you.
Indonesia’s 1965 genocide is a global affair
Permit me to comment on the assertion that: “The UK and Australia, already engaged in a low intensity military conflict with Indonesia, extended their propaganda in support of the hate propaganda spread by the Indonesian army inciting the mass killings.”
An account of this “War of Words” is contained on Pages 94 + of “Shadow of a Revolution” by Roland Challis who was the South East Asia Correspondent for the BBC from 1964 to 1969. Western correspondents in Singapore at the time knew perfectly well that they were being fed a line, but rather like the US Military Five O’Clock Follies in Saigon during the Vietnam War, what correspondents were told they set against their other sources of information and their own judgement.
As Professor Robert Cribb has noted in “The Indonesian Killings of 1965-66 Studies from Java to Bali” : “We know surprisingly little about the massacres which followed the 1965 coup attempt. There were many reasons for this shortage of information. First, there were relatively few journalists or academics in Indonesia at the time, and those who were present often depended on the military for access to sources and stories. Travel was difficult and often dangerous.” Vietnam was to be the first true propaganda war fought out on television. It took time for the news to percolate out of Indonesia in 1965 and 1966.
In this context it should be noted that the report by the British Ambassador to the Foreign Office dated 18 February 1966 and reproduced as Document D1.b(ii) of the IPT Report drew essentially on episodic accounts from almost entirely non-British sources and that the estimate by the Swedish Ambassador at the time of the total number of victims was “formed, of course, by projecting over a huge population proportions roughly authenticated in small towns, and areas; but the supposition that similar events did take place over wide areas is one which is on the surface not unreasonable, though it requires to be tested.” [The report was not a telegram, but a letter, and it was not sent to the Head of the Far Eastern Department, but to the Assistant Under-Secretary of State responsible for Indonesia.] Roland Challis has a point however that foreign correspondents based in Singapore would have welcomed such modest and imprecise nuggets of information to relieve the tedium of the ideological anti-communist propaganda diet served up by an overzealous section of the Singapore UK Establishment.
It is significant that in a Secret and Personal letter to the British Ambassador in Jakarta dated 18 July 1966, the prime architect of the UK’s propaganda policy, Political Counsellor Norman Reddaway in Singapore, complained of the lack of support from the Foreign Office in London for his activities. “The political side in London” he wrote “has been hostile most of the time, and at best neutral”. (Churchill Archives Centre Cambridge Gilchrist Papers GILC 962 13/Kiii). The charge of UK “complicity” in the mass killings because a section of the Singapore establishment, without any encouragement from London, might have gone overboard in its anti-Communist propaganda and because the British, who were doing what they could to bring konfrontasi to an end, used the situation not to take military advantage of the Indonesian military, seems to me to be rather far-fetched.
“The political side in London” fortuitously provided in 2001 a more balanced account of these events. The report at http://tinyurl.com/np27kj9 put US, UK and Australian involvement in an objective historical perspective. This account is important as it comes from a London FO insider, with whom my wife has admitted an especially close relationship since 1952.
Maung Zarni though will be delighted to learn that my genocidal activities covered not only Myanmar, Cambodia and South Africa, but extended even to Indonesia as well.
Indonesia’s 1965 genocide is a global affair
There you go.
Australia, being already a “Police Country”, is closing in.
If Australia’s citizens are keeping their brains switched off, ears; eyes and mouths closed, then we don’t need to imagine what Australians will face in the near future.
ASEAN’s South China Sea ulcer
If they sink enough of each other’s fishing boats, the fish might stand a chance.
The King is (nearly) dead: long live the King?
Marteau thanks for posting all that information about guns. However, it is not me but Andrew MacGregor Marshall who you should be asking about ever having handled a Colt.45. If you read that article which he says summarises “some of the most compelling evidence : https://medium.com/@zenjournalist/thailand-s-saddest-secret-f99179fa8e9#.5oj96oi1s“, you will see that AMM writes “The Colt is a relatively heavy handgun, weighing more than a kilogram when fully loaded, and to be fired it requires considerable pressure to be placed not just on the trigger but also simultaneously on a safety panel on the back of the butt.” I merely took AMM’s premise to show that a very different conclusion could be reached.
A statement on the South China Sea ruling
Indonesia just appointed cabinet minister someone declared guilty of human right violations by a UN-backed court. Any effort to enforce the international tribunal decision will seem hypocritical, at best.
Red and Yellow in Germany
I suppose Christ Beale is the Thai royal family’s SIAMESE!!! I am Thai. I am certainly don’t want to be Chulalongkorn’s SIAMESE. It’s connoting that I’m his slave or one of his many hundredth concubines. Most Thais now know the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly of Rama 5 and his descendants. So, I am not sure if his good deeds will hold the Thais together. In Chulalongkorn’s time, the state was “far less excessively centralised”. To you, maybe. I choose to think that it was because of limits in transportation systems and conditions of the geography of the time. The king is and was the only person who has power.
A statement on the South China Sea ruling
This is a well-balanced statement that has attracted wide support from Indonesian foreign policy specialists and will no doubt attract even more support.
Its appearance on New Mandala coincides with Jokowi’s latest cabinet reshuffle. The statement would have had a better chance of being adopted by the Jokowi government as an action plan had he taken the opportunity the reshuffle offered him to dump his lacklustre foreign minister, Retno Marsudi. It would have been a further blessing had he also escorted Ryamizard out the door at the same time, but let’s not ask for the moon.
Instead of the moon, Indonesia gets Wiranto back in a key coordinating portfolio, specifically tasked by Jokowi with reforming the justice system. Who thought that Indonesian presidents aside from Gus Dur had no taste for irony?
In the moments that this former Soeharto trusty can spare from reforming justice, he will be overseeing Retno Marsudi, the issuer of bland and insipid statements calling on all the children to behave themselves, both school-yard bullies and teachers’ pets.
We know, alas, more about Wiranto’s former attitude to East Timor than about his current attitude towards the South China Sea. Presumably his predecessor, Luhut Panjaitan, now demoted to the maritime affairs post just vacated by blowhard Rizal Ramli, acquired considerable expertise in South China Sea issues.
It is unclear that whether Luhut will be able to use that expertise in his new job, where he gets to oversee not demure and diminutive Retno, but live fire-cracker Susi Pudjiastuti.
As Wiranto tries to work out how to impose limits on the bribes that judges can accept before deciding cases brought before them, somebody will have to keep an eye on the South China Sea.
The King is (nearly) dead: long live the King?
Chris, I am not taking sides on the question of whether it was an accident here because I have no idea what happened but I wonder if you have ever handled a Colt .45? It has two safeties, one on the slide, near the rear sights, and one below the beaver tail on the back of the grip. Neither needs considerable force to release. This was a designed as a combat pistol which the user could draw from a holster in the cocked and locked position while releasing the slide safety with his thumb and fire in a split second. The beaver tail safety releases automatically when you grip the gun. Also there has always been a school of thought that prefers not to use safeties at all and I bet their are a large number of single action pistols like the Colt .45 cocked and unlocked on American night stands as we speak. Many SAS officers in Northern Ireland under cover carried their Browning Hi-Powers (essentially the same mechanism as Colt .45 but with no beaver tail safety) cocked and unlocked in shoulder holsters, as they feared fumbling to get the slide safety off in an emergency more than the risk of accidentally shooting themselves. In fact the current fad in the US is for concealed carry pistols with no slide safety at all, just a trigger safety to prevent the gun from going off unless the trigger is pulled. What definitely gives a Colt .45 the impression of being safe, however, is a live round in the chamber while the magazine has been removed. Unlike guns such as the Browning Hi-Power, there is no magazine disconnect to prevent the gun from firing in this position and the slide can also be pulled back to cock it without a magazine in place or it can be already loaded and cocked with a full magazine which is later withdrawn. Countless accidents have occurred as a result of unwittingly handling a pistol with a live round in the chamber without a magazine in place. That is the reason that the Browning Hi-Power, designed by the same team after the Colt .45, has a magazine disconnect.