There’s more to Thailand than the smile
A few years ago it was quite a pleasant paper to read, but the Nation has sunk to such atrociously low levels of partisan reporting that it is most suited as toilet paper these days. It seems their circulation is not doing too well. I am not surprised.
The expressway tolls might be going up soon. That’s after a regrettable 20% rise in the price of cake from Secret Recipe last week. What’s a Marie Antoinette to do if even cake becomes too expensive?
I’ve often wondered myself about the lack of curiosity and analytical skills of the Thai people I meet, even ones with a university education. Now here’s a fine article that explains it all by digging in to the dismal state of Thai education.
In the West there are constructs in social life so that we can easily pigeonhole people with terms like straight and gay. In Thailand things are different. Sexuality is more like a mood. Sometimes a guy might prefer another guy, but sometimes a girl. The same goes for girls. It’s like sometimes you want to eat pork and another time beef. And then there is the whole ladyboy phenomenon.
Does it all make sense?
According to an article in Wikipedia the king of Thailand has the most honorary degrees in the world:
Bhumibol set a world record for receiving the greatest number of honorary university degrees (136) in 1997. … Most of his degrees came from Thai universities: for instance, Kasetsart University awarded him ten honorary doctoral degrees at once.
To put this in perspective, here is an interesting article about the value of honorary degrees. It starts thus:
If an honorary degree lacks value to begin with, does withdrawing it deliver a rebuke to the recipient? Is whatever honor that comes with the distinction embedded in the fancy paper, or is it wholly in the eye of the degree holder? Was Jacques Barzun right, years ago in The American University, when he suggested dumping all academic giveaways to government leaders?
And here’s another item from Adam Goodman about an honorary degree the king received from Penn university…
for the tremendous hospitality he showed to a certain Penn professor in allowing him to investigate Thailand’s, uh, astonishing culture.
Interesting stuff. 
If you care what life in prison is like it may be worth to have a look at Thai Prison Life. It details the life of a drug offender and is quite an interesting read, although it has not been updated in a while. It shows how government can destroy the lives and families of regular people when government tries to control what we put in our bodies. When we put something in our bodies that the powers that be don’t like, those powers have to no option send us to prison. The follies of prohibition.
The fabrications in Thailand about who owns Preah Vihear, a temple that straddles the Thai-Cambodian border, are quite amazing. The temple has belonged to Cambodia since forever. But now the Thais claim the soil underneath it is theirs. Huh?