Carib

next topic..........................when filling fuel do I pay attention to the DIESEL ONLY sticker? ;-)

OMG!   just imagine sitting next to someone with verbal diarrhoea, and unable to stop talking for hours on end..

It's bad enough on trains and buses, but an international flight!   I'd be making serious enquiries about flying with that particular airline.

the plane was the last place to be without mobile phone or internet ..... is it really necessary ? I would rather prefer them to upgrade they lousy business class .... Can you imagine those Hi-So thai talking with their friends during the night and distrubing others ? not sure its a great idea .. on a flight from Korea to Bkk , one thai guy was on his blackberry and his Iphone at the same time disturbing all the cabin because he was talking so loud ....

"I'm bored because my exotic Thai-Chinese girlfriend has gone to spend a few days at a temple."
"Does your girlfriend or wife ever stay in temples? If so, why? And how does it help or benefit her?"
It probably benefits her coming to total relisation that she has hooked herself up with a total unexotic  plonker, & planning the "perfect escape"

Here , here, I have never seen a more bloviating  outpouring pile of gobiligook than this presented by the master of nonsensical , Khun Kavi.
As an American and a lover of Thailand , it disgust me to read of all the negativity presented by him as facts. The average Thai citizen would have absolutely no idea wtf he is talking about.

Seems like everyone is venting their spleen over the burning in Northern Thailand so why not me.  What I have noticed is that everyone seems to have their own limited perspective on the problem.  Most rant on about the government and lack of enforcement, while few have any recommendations that don’t border on the ridiculous.

One guy suggested that all you need is a couple of helicopters flying around full-time to douse the fires before they get out of control.  Okay that takes care of his village, now what about the rest of the region and our neighbors.  In a search for simple solutions we focus on overly simplified explanations of the problem.

Some say all the smoke comes from Burma and Laos.  Others blame big agribusiness and the growing of corn in areas like Mae Chaem.  Some say it is the rice farmers who are the culprits or perhaps the slash and burn hill tribe people.  Yet others blame their neighbors for burning their trash.  Some seem to think it is all the government’s fault, due to greed and corruption, or the educational system is to blame.

A few foreigners have cobbled together a poorly thought out petition to demand the end of the burning.  I am sure it made them feel less impotent but I am equally sure it will have no effect.  I heard of one guy who got perhaps a little too vocal in his criticism of his Thai neighbors and their penchant for burning so his wife took him for a holiday down south to avoid the linch mob coming over in the middle of the night.  She seemed genuinely concerned.

Composting of all the waste has been suggested but we are not talking of kitchen scraps here.  There are literally mountains of vegetation leftover after the harvest.  The corn harvest leaves not only stalks on the steep mountain slopes but also mountains of discarded husks at the processing sites.  Some say plow the stubble back into the ground.  Unfortunately many of the hillsides are far too steep for heavy equipment.  Even the hiring of the larger tractors necessary to plow waist high rice stubble back into the earth is expensive and would make the growing of rice even less profitable for small farmers.  Many indeed argue that burning helps control pests and disease, leading to a better crop.

As it is, villagers in my area can’t make a living growing rice but do it based on a longstanding tradition that one must grow your own rice.  It is okay for city people to buy rice from the store but it is not the done thing in the village.  To make a living they must go to find work in the cities and scavenge what they can from what is left of the natural environment.  Each year they encroach a little more into the forest.  They strip the streams and reservoirs of fish.  They burn the undergrowth in hopes of stimulating an abundant crop of wild mushrooms that can be harvested and sold at roadside stands.

The locals are quite ingenious in searching out leaves, bugs, frogs, crabs, snakes, fish, mushrooms and countless other edible delectables to supplement their diet without adding to their financial burden.  The environment ends up paying a price though.  Villagers are not immune to the seduction of modern conveniences and want what we all want.  They want transportation, communication, entertainment, electronic conveniences, a better house and perhaps a leg up for their children by sending them to better schools.  Everything costs money and the rural populace have limited options compared to their big city brethren.

As bad as things are in our village they continue to burn daily.  People will complain about the smoke in a very general way and then go off and light another fire.  Around here fires are not started by faceless figures in some remote location but by friends and neighbors.  Pointing fingers at individuals is only done in extreme cases as one cannot afford to do anything that could lead to being ostracized from the community as a whole.  The extreme interdependency in the village is the adhesive that bonds them together and makes things work.  At the same time it is what often holds them back when it comes to making changes.  They are mired in tradition and superstition unable to step over the threshold into a truly modern world.

One villager for example lost seventy rubber trees, by his estimate, due to his neighbor’s burning which got out of control.  He asked for something like 70,000 baht but I heard they may have negotiated that down to around 30,000.  Chances are the firebug doesn’t have the money so will try to avoid payment or he will have to borrow the money and go even deeper into debt.  That will lead the culprit to further disregarding rules and regulations in an effort to scrape together a few more baht here and there.

As you can see I am not claiming to have the answers to this problem.  I suppose I am suggesting that foreigners who think they have the answer are a bit more daft than I am.  I’m sorry guys but we are guests here and what we think or want carries very little weight.  Punitive measures focused exclusively on the poorest members of society, especially when they are the backbone of that society, are in the very least counterproductive and potentially destructive and destabilizing.

Until someone can come up with affordable alternatives that don’t further burden the poor and take into consideration the complexity of what leads to this yearly burning and the resulting pollution, we are destined to suffer with this problem for years to come.  In my estimation, the talk and histrionics will continue until the rain comes.  Hopefully that will be soon.  The little we got yesterday didn't make a dent.

With the government’s focus being primarily on the floods there will be no money allocated to the burning in my estimation.  If we are lucky some flood related initiatives could help stem the encroachment into the mountains as there is an overlap there between the burning and the floods.  The wife and I suffer from the smoke just like everyone else but I dare say we are not so simple as to think there is a simple solution to this problem.  So there you have my take on the burning of paradise.  Nothing will happen.

cgphuket, on 2012-04-01 10:15:30, said:

Not quite.

Islamic jihadists/extremists, have murdered just under 300 people in Europe over 30 years since 1982. The main incidents were the El Descano bombing, Spain,1985 (18 dead); 1995 Paris Metro bombings (8); 2004 Madrid train bombings (191); 2005 London bombings (52); and Merah's brutal spree, 2012 (7).

By comparison during the same 30 year period 1227 people were murdered during the conflict in Northern Ireland, even though it officially ended with the Good Friday Agreement in 1998 (1220 died 1982-1998).

Therefore over 4x as many people were murdered by socialist/catholic/"loyalist"/protestant extremists in 16 years just in a corner of the UK, compared to the number of people murdered by muslim extremists across the whole of Europe in 30 years.

You could do a similar exercise comparing murders by Islamic extremists in N. America (including 11th Sept 2001) over the same 30 years, with the drug war in Mexico since 2006 for another cold dose of reality. To give you an idea the casualty figures in the Mexican drug war currently stand at somewhere between 47,000-60,000 dead in less than 6 years, and Mexico was the bloodiest conflict in the world last year. Over 30 years islamists/islamist-inspired murderers have been responsible for the death of 37 people in the USA plus the 2977 killed on 11 September 2001. An average of almost 10,000 dead a year ( or 8000/year to take the lower estimate) in Mexico, against 100 a year killed by islamists.

I have no desire to belittle terrorism or murders committed by any group, but just seek to put things in context and perspective, otherwise demonization of any group only serves to further the terrorists intentions and help create their desired clash of civilizations.

If the murderers who committed these crimes in Pattani are really all about domination and taking control, please name me a single non-Muslim nation that has been been "captured" by jihadist/extremist muslims since the heyday of the Ottoman Empire in the 18th Century.

Claiming that the conflict in the southern provinces is solely to do with religion is as credible as saying that the conflict in N. Irleand is solely about religion. It certainly plays its part, but there's a lot more to it.

geriatrickid, on 2012-03-30 22:53:07, said:

You cheer & I complain
Balance is good in life.

Except you like many other zealots have it wrong.....We are not bashing Israel
We are asking them to get the hell out of our pockets.....Stand on their own two feet & make peace.

Don't make us an even bigger target by association & be begging billions EVERY YEAR off us when we are in the process
of financial collapse.

We now return you to the topic

BTW do you & your crew really need to turn every friggin thread into an Israel thread?
Have you noticed hardly anyone likes to even post here anymore?

Colin Yai, on 2012-03-27 10:51:07, said:

But they weren't sent there to help the people were they. The excuse for the invasion, more than ten years ago, was to capture Bin Laden and close down terrorist training camps. As to what has been achieved, the answer has to be, not a lot! I just feel so sorry for the servicemen, used as expendable pawns by Western politicians. In ten years nearly three thousand of them have lost their lives, countless thousands more coming home with horrific injuries, loss of limbs, blinded, deafened etc. Plus probably tens of thousands of civilians meeting the same fate. And this is bound to accelerate during the build up to the stated withdrawal in 2014. Imagine being so stupid as to tell your so called enemy the date you will pack it all in, and leave them to it! Unbelievably naive. Within a short space of time things will be as they were ten years ago, the Taliban back in charge. The useful idiot Karzai will have to hot foot it to the West, to spend more time with his bank accounts. It has been reported that negotiations have already started with relevent parties, including the Taliban. So after all these thousands of deaths and maimings, not to mention the billions of dollars wasted, this is how it ends. Not with a bang, but with America and its allies falling to their knees, and the Taliban slowly unzipping their fly.

My pet peave ? People who knew it would be different but want it to be the same as home in some way.

Why concern your self with what  other people consider acceptable risk?
If it seems unsafe to you than your don't have to do it. This is a different place where people are allowed to judge for themselves how much risk they will take, and if they screw up they can't hit the state up for damages or make a big law suit. It is simply sum num na.
This society has not yet learned to be outraged at how their neighbors go about their business, but sure enough they will one day be submerged under regulations and taxed to death like everyone in the west.

This has me seriously very interested. I produce a lot of compost. Rice straw and husks contain lignin which is hard to breakdown, and I though maybe the shiny surface on the quill end of the feathers is sort of the same? Hard to break down the surface so the feathers can germinate.

Just a thought but worth a little experiment. So I got a feed bag and stuffed it with feathers. Then I added a little rice bran and EM so the feathers would ferment and hopefully the germinate. Normally this sort of Bokashi composting takes a few days so I waited and waited.

I looked in the bag and nothing had happened, so I waited some more. Looked again, still no change...

Finally I got tired and laid down for a snooze resting my head of the sweet smelling but non germinating bag of feathers. I give up, try to germinate feathers and end up with nothing more then..... a pillow.

Cute indeed

But bring back the 'real' Cinquecento with the 500cc 2 cylinder air cooled 'motorcycle' engine. Super little car, and yes, it was possible in the back seat (I have a son to prove it).

Mosha, on 2012-03-24 22:23:15, said:

Good point, you might be on to something there.

But one question though ... how do you tell the female feathers from the male feathers once they have been plucked?

What would happen if you planted two male feathers together?

Considering that this is Thailand ... is there hermaphrodite feathers?

I'm no expert but if the soil is not right for the seed-feathers to germinate you might try cuttings from an established chicken.