Reference: 52 abuse victims per day, Bangkok Post, November 26, 2008

The Thai government's advice to women "not to walk through dark and isolated areas alone at night" as a way of combating violence against women and children appears to be strangely disconnected from the data. The data show that most cases of such violence occur at home and that "most of the abusers were people whom the victims loved and trusted" (52 abuse victims per day, Bangkok Post, November 26, 2008). Staying away from dark and isolated areas is necessary but not sufficient and it does not address the issue of domestic violence.

Cha-am Jamal

Thailand

Reference: Hindus seek peace, Bangkok Post, November 24, 2008

It is reported that a two-year ritual is to be held in India involving thousands of priests chanting ancient religious verses and lighting a ceremonial fire in order to keep the world from going into economic recession (Hindus seek peace, Bangkok Post, November 24, 2008). At a time of relative weakness and vulnerability of the Western economic system it may seem that the time has arrived for Asia to take the lead as global economic powers. Yet, deep down in the foundation of Asian societies we find goofiness and superstition that are so profoundly congealed in the Asian psyche that the Western economic powers need not fear real changes in the global economic hierarchy any time soon. 

Cha-am Jamal

Thailand

Reference:Malaysia's Muslims told not to practice yoga, Bangkok Post, November 23, 2008

Yoga is a form of stretching and slow motion sustained movements of the human body that has been shown to have enormous health benefits. It is not a religion. Foribidding Muslims to participate in this healthful activity simplly because it is thought to have been derived from another religion is cruel and ignorant if not sinful. The alternatives to yoga proposed for Muslims - cycling, swimmming, and eating less fatty foods - though certainly healthy, and possibly good complements for yoga, are not by any stretch of the imagination substitutes for it. Muslim clerics who eschew helpful knowledge from sources deemed unislamic are cheating themselves and their brethren. One can only hope that sanity and rational thought will eventually prevail down there in Malaysia and Muslims there will be allowed  to take advantage of all proven healthful practices, even those that did not originate in Islamic culture. 

Cha-am Jamal

Thailand

Reference: Fantastic green rally 2008, Bangkok Post, November 23, 2008

Driving a car with the "pedal to the metal" means that the accelerator has been pressed all the way down and that the car is travelling as fast as it is capable. This kind of driving is not fuel efficient and creates road hazards besides. There is nothing green about it. Incidenally the word in this phrase is pedal as in the gas pedal and not peddle, a word that refers to sellling trivial items or things that require salesmanship. 

Cha-am Jamal

'Thailand

Reference: Uproar over drilling leases next to US parks, Bangkok Post, November 19, 2008

The reason for the uproar by environmentalists over the leasing of government lands in Utah for oil drilling is reported in the Post as follows: "If you are standing at Delicate Arch, like thousands of people do every year, and you're looking through the arch, you could see drill pads on the hillside behind it" (Uproar over drilling leases next to US parks, Bangkok Post, November 19, 2008). The irony is that all of those thousands of arch viewers drove oil fueled automobiles for hours through the moonscape of Utah to get there. Without oil they would not be there in the first place. Since they have bought into the oil economy they may as well get a glimpse of the activity  - many kilometers away - that made it possible for them to see the blessed arch.

Cha-am Jamal

Thailand

Reference: Glaciers falling faster into sea, Bangkok Post, November 18, 2008

Mt. Erebus along with most of the mountains in Antarctica are volcanic mountains and it is now known with certainty that volcanic activity under the ice there is causing great amounts of ice to melt and to form gigantic masses of liquid water under the ice that would naturally cause glaciers to flow faster. The attempt by global warming protagonists to represent these events as climate change phenomena (Glaciers falling faster into sea, Bangkok Post, November 18, 2008) is fraudulent and inconsistent with the data that were made available to Bangkok Post readers earlier this year (The fire below, Bangkok Post, April 28, 2008). 

Cha-am Jamal

Thailand

Reference: Crime does not pay, Bangkok Post, November 17, 2008

The story reports that shoplifters are fleecing the average household to the tune of 1,879 Baht per year. These data show that crime does in fact enrich the criminals and therefore that crime pays, the title of the story notwithstanding. 

Cha-am Jamal

Thailand

Reference: The dream is still alive, Bangkok Post editorial, Bovember 6, 2008

The editorial says that, given a new administration, the US should "no longer shirk its responsibilities when it comes to climate change". It is probably for good reason that the phrase "global warming" has quietly morphed into "climate change" since evidence for warming is becoming harder and harder to come by. The world has not warmed since 1998 and in recent years we have seen a steep cooling trend, steeper than the pre-1998 warming trend. If we accept the Kyoto Protocol hypothesis that mankind is able to micromanage the planet's climate change phenomenon by changing fossil fuel consumption - decreasing consumption to cool down the planet and increasing consumption to warm it up - exactly what action do you propose that the new US administration should take now that the earth has entered a sustained cooling trend?

Cha-am Jamal

Thailand

Reference: India's hidden fragility, Bangkok Post, November 6, 2008

The nation of India has been a stable secular democracy of great cultural heritage and diversity since independence from Britain in 1947 wthout any non-democratic interventions in government. India is home to more people, more ethnic groups, more languages, more religions, both home grown and imported, and more cultural traditions than there are in North America and Europe combined. India's size and diversity are two of many measures of its greatness and importance in the global community of nations. Cultures often clash in this immense collage but the nation endures and that relationship is not a measure of India's fragility but of its robustness. The vicious negative spin put on India's diversity from an extremely narrow perspective (India's hidden fragility, Bangkok Post, November 6, 2008) appears to be blind to these more important global realities that India represents.

Cha-am Jamal

Thailand

Reference: A hope named Obama, Bangkok Post, November 1, 2008

The oped piece on the US presidential election first paints George Bush as the root of all the evil in the world and gushes effussively about Obama as the coming messiah who will deliver the world from evil (A hope named Obama, Bangkok Post, November 1, 2008); and immediately thereafter recants saying that it is not George Bush but the "political and economic establishment" in America that is the root of all evil in the world and that "one must not succumb to irrational hopes" or "entertain illusions" with respect to Obama. To that I would like to add that one must not write opinion pieces until one actually has an opinion.

Cha-am Jamal

Thailand

Reference: The Sepoy Mutiny of 1857

What we know today as "India" is a British invention and historians who ignore this detail and try to trace the history of India beyond its creation risk reading too much into isolated and unconnected events as Indian history. Such is the case with the Sepoy Mutiny of 1857. It started as a labor dispute. Indians serving as armed soldiers for the East India Company resorted to violence when they were denied certain pension and promotion benefits that they had demanded and things came to a head when the initial mutineers were dealt with very harshly and when a rumor was spread that the Enfield rifle bullets that the soldiers were required to bite into contained objectionable substances. In the melee that ensued, outsiders such as the heads of princely states and the senile and irrelevant heir to the Moghul empire tried to use the mutiny for their own selfish advantage. All of this came to nought precisely because there was no single coordinated war against British rule but a cacophony of selfhish and localized actions within the context of British rule. Much too much has been made of these events. It was not India's first war of independence and it did not lead to partition in 1947 nor to the rise of Isamlic extremism, the Taliban, and Al-Qaeda.

Cha-am Jamal

Thailand

On the matter of assisted suicide in Switzerland, October 2008

Darwinian thought paints a scary picture of who we really are. Suppose that there were once more rational human able to choose between life and death and between reproduction and celibacy using nothing but pure cold logic. After many generations we would find that nature had weeded these people out of the population simply because the mathematics of natural selection favors the unlimited desire to cling to life and to mate. Natural selection does not promote rational thought. It selectively breeds crazies like us and we are who we are because of that. Nature selectively breeds insanity until the insane take over and then they get to make the rules that discriminate between sanity and insanity.

Cha-am Jamal

Thailand

Reference: The chance to bring about an Asian Century, Bangkok Post, October 15, 2008

By the time the dust settles in the global financial crisis, we may find that Western supremacy has weakened and that the door has opened for China to take the lead in the global economy and to usher in the much anticipated Asian Century.

Cha-am Jamal

Thailand

Reference: Arctic to be ice free due to man made global warming

For over a year now global warmists have expressed a great deal of alarm with respect to their projection that the Arctic will soon be ice free because of man made global warming. Nature, however, appears to be marching to a different drummer. The data show that the summer melt of Arctic ice in 2008 was less extensive than the melt in 2007. The 2008 melt bottomed out earler than usual and the ice extent in the Arctic basin is now growing at a very rapid rate. Over the last month it has grown by 800,000 sq km. The IPCC has taken note and has revised its projection of an ice free Arctic first from 2008 to 2013 and then again from 2013 to 2030. The way things are going it may be revised again to the year 2100. They played the same game with their projection of sea level rise changing their proejctions to anything from 6 meters to 50 centimeters and the time frame from 2030 to 2100. And yet, they appear to retain a great deal of credibility with the media.

Cha-am Jamal

Thailand

Reference: Taiji's annual secret dolphin genocide, Bangkok Post, October 15, 2008

The word 'genocide' is used to describe an attempt to eliminate a human tribe or ethnic group by carrying out mass murder of the targeted individuals. Killing mammals for their meat - whether pigs, cattle, sheep, whales, or dolphins - cannot be described as genocide because these creatures are not human beings and also because the purpose of the kill is not to eliminate human beings but to sustain them with food. Individuals who find it shocking to see mammals being killed with knives and their blood being spilled should stay away from slaughterhhouses and they should stay away from Taiji during the annual dolphin hunt. 

Cha-am Jamal

Thailand

Reference: Smugglers of fake medicine target Thailand, Bangkok Post, October 13, 2008

Drugs that are chemically identical to patented brand name drugs but are sold under a different name as a less expensive substitute are generic drugs and may not be described as either counterfeit or fake. Drugs that are identical to patented brand name drugs in chemical composition, appearance, and brand name but made without a license by another manufacturer are counterfeit drugs and may not be described as fake as long as they work. Drugs that do not contain the active ingredients claimed and are either placebo or even harmful are fake drugs. These distinctions need to be made because fake drugs are a public health issue whereas countefeit drugs constiture nothing more than an issue involving patent violation or the infringement of intellectual property rights. Generic drugs are often beneficial to society because they offer a cheaper alternative to essential medication. A reference to all three of these categories of pharmaceuticals as "fake" is misleading (Smugglers of fake medicine target Thailand, Bangkok Post, October 13, 2008).

Cha-am Jamal

Thailand

Reference: West is accused of shameless blackmail, Bangkok Post, October 4, 2008

The government of Kenya accused envoys from donor countries of shameless blackmail and gross condescension because they blamed the head of the election commission there for mishandling the election held last December (West is accused of shameless blackmail, Bangkok Post, October 4, 2008). Yet, it is the not only the right but the duty of donor countries to ensure that their aid is not misused by the government of the people for whom the aid is intended. Aid recipient governments find themselves in this fix because they are corrupt and dysfunctional. If they wish to regain their sense of sovereignty they may do so by improving governance and balancing the budget without the use of foreign aid. Until then they must be held accountable by the donors. If it is colonialism then it is voluntary colonialism and the onus still lies wth the government of Kenya and not with the donors. 

Cha-am Jamal

Thailand

Reference: Sarah Palin's alternative universe, Sunday Forum, October 5, 2008

I think that Bob Herbert has been irrationally mean spirited in his condemnation of Sarah Palin, in effect declaring her a clueless bimbo from the hintenaland (Sarah Palin's alternative universe, Sunday Forum, October 5, 2008). His intimation that Sarah Palin has not offered a fix for the miliary crisis in Afghanistan, the financial crisis on Wall Street, and the unemployment crisis on Main Street omits the obvious observation that no one else has either. He is right that Palin likely did get the context wrong when she quoted Reagan, but what does that have to do with Afghanistan, Wall Street, or unemployment? Mr Herbert's partisan colors are showing.

Cha-am Jamal

Thailand