The Economist: Thailand's Prospects Look Bleak

An editorial in this week's Economist says the new Thai constitution is designed to make it hard for larger parties to get a majority of seats in Thailand's parliament. (The old 1997 constitution, by contrast, had been designed to allow large parties to attain majorities so that Thailand could have strong elected governments). Of the new order, The Economist editors write:

This would suit the military-royalist elite. They could go back to running the country from behind the scenes. But there is a risk of stagnation. Thailand's economy is already growing slower than its neighours' in part because of the continuing political uncertainty. . .

The army may have doomed Thailand to further cycles of constitution, crisis, and coup. . . . The next flashpoint may not be far off. Hundreds of Mr. Thaksin's former MPs have regrouped under the banner of the People's Power Party (PPP). . . . But the generals will surely do their damnedest to thwart a Thakinite restoration.

Kalmykia Update

It's time for a Kalmykia update. Jotman previously reported on Kalmykian involvement in oil and gas exploration in Myanmar. Recently, Britain's Independent newspaper probed the personality of Kalmykia's leader:

Mr Ilyumzhinov's office set three interview dates but cancelled them all at the last minute. As a substitute, it provided a copy of his 1998 autobiography,The President's Crown of Thorns, a strange mix of cod philosophy and stream-of-consciousness reminiscences. One chapter is entitled "Without me, the people are incomplete". Another is charmingly headed "It only takes two weeks to have a man killed".

Among the stranger claims of Mr Ilyumzhinov is his insistence that he was abducted by aliens in September 1997. "I was taken from my apartment in Moscow to this spaceship," he said in a recent television interview. "We went to some star. After that I said, 'Please bring me back' because the next day I had to go to Kalmykia and then to Ukraine, and they said 'No problem, Kirsan, you have time'." He rejects the idea that these claims make him appear to be a few pieces short of a full chess set. "I'm not a crazy man. From the United States every year more than 4,000 people are contacted in such a way. It's an official statistic."

Thailand Rumor

A rumor seems to be going around Thailand. Apparently related to this rumor, some blogs are apparently being blocked. Speculation about the nature of the rumor and the question of blog censorship posted here and here.

The Case for John Edwards

Re. the US presidential race: I can't help but like what I hear coming from John Edwards, who is running in third place for the Democratic Party nomination behind Hillary Clinton and Obama. He talks about the need to take on media consolidation and the pharmaceutical firms. He has named two of the most powerful forces that continue to undermine American democracy. From a recent speech:

It's not just that the answers of the past aren't up to the job today, it's that the system that produced them was corrupt -- and still is. It's controlled by big corporations, the lobbyists they hire to protect their bottom line and the politicians who curry their favor and carry their water. And it's perpetuated by a media that too often fawns over the establishment, but fails to seriously cover the challenges we face or the solutions being proposed. . . .

For more than 20 years, Democrats have talked about universal health care. And for more than 20 years, we've gotten nowhere, because lobbyists for the big insurance companies, drug companies and HMOs spent millions to block real reform. Instead, they've grudgingly allowed incremental measures that do nothing but tinker around the edges -- or worse, they've hijacked reform to improve their own bottom line.

Frankly, Democrats are not going to rescue American from its current trajectory unless they take on Big Media. But if you resolve -- like Edwards has -- to take on the media during your election campaign, will they not sabotage your election bid? I'm not impressed that Hillary Clinton accepted a campaign contribution from Fox News owner Rupert Murdoch. Here's another paragraph from the recent speech:

It’s time to end the game. It’s time to tell the big corporations and the lobbyists who have been running things for too long that their time is over. It’s time to challenge politicians to put the American people’s interests ahead of their own calculated political interests, to look the lobbyists in the eye and just say no.

It's a strong message, one that will could score points with the public in a debate: Imagine Edwards looking sternly at Hillary (or the Republican nominee) and asking, "Why couldn't you just have said no?"

Why does Bottom Trawling Continue? Blame Canada (seriously)

Are you against whaling? So am I. But there are worse activities than whaling. Top of my list would be "bottom trawling."

The world came very close to banning "bottom trawling" in the fall of 2006. Australia, New Zealand, Brazil and the United States tried hard to get the UN General Assembly to ban this destructive fishing practice.

How destructive? It's unbelievable, you can read about it here.

Only eleven nations have high-seas bottom trawling fleets -- Denmark, Estonia, Iceland, Japan, Latvia, Lithuania, New Zealand, Norway, Portugal, Russia and Spain.

But thanks in large measure to the efforts of the Canadian government, we are back to the status quo:

Supporters of the ban said Canada's stance compromised prospects for stronger UN protections. . . . Canada has a fleet of bottom trawlers operating within Canadian waters. Its concern has been that a moratorium on the high seas could later be expanded to cover areas within national jurisdiction.

Basically, Canada worked hard to get a compromise proposal that ruined the chance of securing a world-wide ban on this destructive fishing practice. As this Greenpeace report indicates, Spain was also an major obstacle, but Canada -- because they did not even have a deep sea bottom trawling industry to defend --bears the fullest moral burden for having allowed this barbaric practice to continue.

This video was made prior to the vote last November at the UN. In case you missed it, it's hilarious.
A vote and an opportunity may have been lost -- thanks largely to Canada -- but the issue needs to go straight to top of the global agenda. The first time round, this urgent issue never received a fraction of the publicity it deserved.

Ban Bottom Trawling

It's just as serious but more urgent than stopping global warming, but nobody talks about it. It's time we all educated ourselves about"bottom trawling" -- a despicable fishing practice that causes untold ecological damage. Greenpeace puts the strong case against it in blunt terms:

We are campaigning for an immediate halt to high seas bottom trawling. If allowed to continue, the bottom trawlers of the high seas will destroy deep sea species, before we have even discovered much of what is out there. Think of it as driving a huge bulldozer through a lush and richly populated forest and being left with a flat, featureless desert. Think of it as beef farming by dragging a net across entire fields, cities and forests to catch a few cows. It's like blowing up Mars before we get there.

Apparently it's even uneconomical (the major bottom trawlers operate on state subsidies)! Greenpeace has more information about bottom trawling. I will be exploring this issue in future posts.

Thailand Referendum: Thais Vote "Yes" for a New Constitution

Yesterday the Thai people voted in a referendum on their new constitution. The constitution would appear to have passed. Across the Kingdom, about 58% voted in favor and 42% voted against the draft constitution, with a majority of Thais supporting the constitution in all regions except for the northeast. In the northeast province of Isan -- the stronghold of deposed former Prime Minister Thaksin -- two thirds of the people voted against the new constitution. Bangkok Pundit has been live-blogging the returns.

Padilla Verdict, Reflections on the US Media Reaction

US editorials on the Padilla verdict have generally neglected to emphasize the scant evidence on which Padilla was convicted of terrorism. I found one exception, this newspaper editorial from Daytona Beach. Florida:

He now faces the possibility of life in prison even though the case against him was circumstantial. Federal prosecutors never proved he was in Afghanistan or that he was planning actual acts of violence -- only that he had handled a training camp application and may have filled it out. As his lawyer said, "not everyone who attended the camp had the intent to murder." But guilt by association is a powerful tool in terrorism cases. Wasn't that what had ensnared Padilla in the government's web of assumptions to start with -- assumptions that by the government's own reversal over the "enemy combatant" status, were baseless?

Thursday's verdict leaves that snare intact. The Supreme Court never addressed Padilla's original designation as an "enemy combatant." That means the president can still at any point declare any American citizen, on the president's say-so, an enemy combatant and strip that individual of all rights, indefinitely. So the question following the Padilla verdict isn't whether we're safer from terrorism. The question is whether we're safer from our own government. The answer is a persisting no.

By contrast, The New York Times editors -- like most others -- took it for granted that Padilla's conviction on the terrorism was justice served. The Times' editors may know otherwise, but chose to base their opinion on the fictional standpoint that "the jury is always right."

This fiction is grounded on a reasonable belief: that on the whole, over the long haul, juries deliver justice -- better justice than could be achieved other means. But to assume the jury is always in every case delivering "justice" is simply a practical myth -- one that saves people from agonizing over every verdict.

It sounds elitist to challenge the myth. Besides, the old assumptions about "the people" have generally held. In the past, you could assume the best of American People: fair-minded, equitable, decent. Your typical American was even-keeled; he or she was good jury material.

The US jury system is predicated on the assumption that jurors will be drawn from a society of freedom loving souls -- not timid, fear-ridden, scared consumers of media distortion. After six years of hearing the Bush Administration trumpet the fear of terrorism at every opportunity, are Americans more scared of terror or more passionate about justice? If the answer is the former, what kind of juries -- and justice -- will the society render?

The Padilla verdict may be a hint of something rather troubling. Bush's hyperbolic "War on Terror" may well have inflicted more severe damage on American psyche than many of us had imagined. To me, that's the question posed by the Padilla verdict.

The New York Times editors seemed to be happy about the verdict because, to them, it proved the institutions of justice work. They saw the trial as a vindication of the constitutional system of justice -- which the Bush Administration had certainly undermined in its initial handling of the Padilla case. But the Times editors overlook the fact that the there is more to justice than its mechanisms. As important as upholding the institutions of justice is a public grounded in facts about their world, a certain reasonableness of the people.

Thinking about the Padilla verdict, a passage from a book review published in last week's Economist came to my mind. It was from a review of Robert Gellately's Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler: The Age of Social Catastrophe:

Mr Gellately busts another myth too: that Hitler seized power by fear and force. The combination of anti-Jewish and anti-Bolshevik rhetoric played well with the German public. People felt humiliated by defeat and impoverished by recession, and Hitler blamed “the Jews” for both.

Hitler's rise to power was made possible not because Germany's institutions had been broken, it was that the Germans were a broken people.

Forsaking the US Constitution may not be the worst thing the Bush administration has done to the United States. In a country that emphasizes the lawyer's legalistic perspective at every turn, this may be a difficult thing even for newspaper editors to recognize.

(Another) innocent black man goes to jail

As you may have heard, Padilla was convicted by a Federal Court on charges of terrorism. To me, one thing is certain about the case: the evidence that the US government abused Padilla's constitutional rights is stronger than the evidence of his supposed involvement in any terrorist conspiracy. Here is a defense attorney's summary of the Padilla case from the Washington Post:

Padilla is a U.S. citizen who was arrested in Chicago in May 2002, pursuant to a warrant to testify before a grand jury. . . . President Bush declared Padilla an "enemy combatant." At that point, Padilla was whisked out of the civilian justice system and imprisoned in a South Carolina military brig. Then-Attorney General John Ashcroft held a news conference to announce that the government had thwarted a plot by Padilla to set off a radiological "dirty bomb" in an American city.

The government later dropped the dirty bomb accusation. The evidence against Padilla was flimsy. The prosecutors tried to freak out the jury by playing Bin Laden videos during his trial. The case suggests that all prosecutors need to do is whisper "terrorist" in the ears of jurors and conviction is assured. Especially if the defendant is a person of color -- like Padilla. More from the article:

The charges brought in Miami contained none of the allegations about the dirty-bomb plot, the apartment buildings or even Padilla's presence in Afghanistan in late 2001. Instead, the government alleged that Padilla had conspired in the 1990s to provide support to overseas jihadists in Bosnia and Chechnya. Commentators called even this weaker case notably thin, but Padilla was found guilty.

US commentators say that the verdict proves the US court system is capable of dealing with terrorists, and extra-constitutional measures -- such as Padilla was subjected to -- are unnecessary. Yet the only people who had been advocating the use of extra-constitutional measures against terror suspects were die hard supporters of the Bush White House. Their ideas didn't make any sense in the first place, so that they have been finally "proven" wrong is not interesting -- and certainly it's nothing to celebrate. To conclude that the verdict vindicates the US justice system is an abhorrent conclusion.

Perhaps the real lesson of this trial is something altogether more ominous: that no man can be assured of a fair trial in a US court today if the US government decides to paint you as "a terrorist." I say this because the evidence against Padilla was so scanty. How a jury found the man guilty "beyond a reasonable doubt" is hard to fathom. But the American public may be so conditioned by Bush's fear-mongering about terror threats (echoed by the media), that juries have trouble looking at the evidence against a defendant in a terror case dispassionately.

US to use spy satellites to spy on its own citizens

The US government will give local law enforcement agencies access to its powerful spy satellites, according to a report in the Washington Post:

But civil liberties groups quickly condemned the move, which Kate Martin, director of the Center for National Security Studies, a nonprofit activist group, likened to "Big Brother in the sky." "They want to turn these enormous spy capabilities, built to be used against overseas enemies, onto Americans," Martin said. "They are laying the bricks one at a time for a police state."

I couldn't agree more. This is outrageous.

Other thoughts: Will a judge have to approve the use of satellites (issuing the equivalent of a search warrant)? Will juries get to see spy the satellite images (such images have been regarded as national security secrets in the past)? Next I suppose the US government will approve predator drone flights over Chicago.

I have a hunch this kind of proposal is just about enough to set off a firestorm of outrage. I don't think I'm alone in finding this plan absolutely and utterly unconscionable.

Australia to Send Nuclear Fuel to India

From Australia's Herald Sun:

The National Security Committee of federal cabinet decided last night, after more than two hours, to allow the uranium shipments to India, despite the subcontinental nuclear power not signing the international Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

Last week I shot this video clip of an anti-nuclear protest in happening in downtown Melbourne, Australia. Between 1,000 and 2,000 citizens marched to protest the Howard government's pro-nuclear agenda.
Australia sure picked a good time to offer Pakistan's nuclear rival, India, a present. Because Washington DC sent a very different signal to India today: "The US State Department said today it would scrap a landmark nuclear deal with India if New Delhi conducted an atomic weapons test."

The US-India nuclear deal was a bad deal. The editors of the The Economist seem to think the deal came about because the US thinks it needs a security hedge against China. But China's military poses no great threat to US interests -- and won't for a long, long time. So why make a mockery of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty over a meaningless security hedge? Why, when the greater threat is nuclear proliferation?

One thing seems clear: under Prime Minister John Howard, Australia is not about to put global security before profit.

A Spontaneous Biography of Thaksin

The origins of a new biography of deposed Thai Prime Minister Thaksin are unusual, to say the least. The author of the biography, Sunisa Lertpakawat, is an enlisted member of the Thai army working as a reporter at an army-run TV station (mentioned in a previous Jotman post). From the NY Times story today:

She pursued Mr. Thaksin for her first book, she said, because “I think Thaksin’s life is interesting, and because I am nobody, and it is hard to get people’s attention.”

Ms. Sunisa said she spent about $3,000 on her foray, flying to London on a budget airline and staying with a friend. She said she staked out Mr. Thaksin’s apartment for hours until he appeared, then pounced.

“My heart was beating really fast, my hands were shaking,” she writes in the book. “My brain was only thinking about the first words that I should say to him. I picked up my backpack, grabbed a video camera and ran toward a deep blue Rolls-Royce.”

Six hours later, she had the interview material from which she wrote her book.

A Thai Jotman Reader's Response to the Previous Post

Referring to last post, a Thai Jotman reader points out an error:

Thank you for writing sth. on the new Thai Constitution and the polling. But, the polling date is supposed to be on Aug 19th not Aug 20th. Aug 20 is declared a public holiday so that all eligible voters would be able to go to vote esp. people who live in the provinces. They wouldn't have an excuse of not going to vote, because they have to work on Monday.

And the reader added these words of criticism:

You were not being fair to the Thai government. The Thai Government has been very open-minded when it comes to expressing one's point of view as evidenced in a number of rallies that can still be staged in Sanam Luang areas.

Thais to vote on a new Constitution

On August 20 Thais will vote on a new draft Constitution. To increase voter turnout, the day will be a national holiday. But there is concern about the vote. The government hasn't allowed a fair debate on the issue and those who oppose the constitution have been silenced.

And what of the constitution itself? The biggest problem seems to be that it puts too much power in the hands of an unelected judiciary. Bangkok Pundit has even coined a term -- judiocracy -- to describe this exotic Thai novelty.

Stars and Stripes blogger discusses the constitution here.

Update: A Thai reader writes that the vote is actually going to be held on 19 August.

President Bush may have Lyme Disease

Today we learned that Bush may have contracted the mysterious and controversial Lyme Disease (Source: Forbes). Apparently he was treated for it last year, and now he's all better (claims the White House).

An undeniably odd -- ominous? -- coincidence surrounds the location and timing of the emergence of so-called Lyme Disease. From a letter to a US Congressman, we have a concise summary of some speculation surrounding the origins of the illness the US President has apparently contracted.

According to former Justice official John Loftus, Nazi bio warfare scientists, including Erich Traub, were hired under the top secret U.S. government Operation Paperclip,[4] and they experimented with ticks and a variety of other common bioweapons on Plum Island, which lies a few miles directly opposite Old Lyme, Connecticut, and is currently under the jurisdiction of the Department of Homeland Security.

Plum Island, the U.S. Military and the Department of Homeland Security Plum Island lab directors have stated to Michael Carroll, author of the book “Lab 257: The Disturbing Story of the Government’s Secret Germ Laboratory”, that they kept colonies of the hard tick Amblyomma americanum, a known carrier of Borrelia Lonestari, on Plum Island. Carroll describes eyewitnesses as saying that infected animals on Plum Island were kept in open pens.[5]

Carroll also asserts that there was heavy two-way traffic between the U.S. Army’s biological weapons research lab at Fort Detrick, and researchers on Plum Island, also known as Fort Terry. One document uncovered a 1969 shipment, by military escort, of “Venezuelan Equine Encephalitis and antisera” to a Dr. J.J. Callis, from the Viral and Rickettsial Division, Army Biological Laboratory, Fort Detrick. [5]

Michael Carroll quotes former Plum Island lab director Jerry Callis talking about tick research on Plum Island: “Plum Island experimented with ticks, but never outside of containment. We had a tick colony where you take them and feed them on the virus and breed ticks to see how many generations it would last, on and on, until its diluted. Recently they reinstated the tick colony.” Carroll additionally cites a 1978 US Department of Agriculture (UDSA) document titled “African Swine Fever,” which further confirms the use of ticks as biowar vectors on Plum Island, noting that the report stated: “In 1975 and 1976 the adult and nyphal stages of Ablyomma americanum (the Lone Star tick) and Ablyomma cajunense (the Cayenne tick) were found to be incapable of harboring and transmitting African Swine fever virus.”[5]

Coincidentally, the Lyme disease outbreak was identified about the time of the Swine Fever tick study conducted on Plum Island. Also at the time of the Plum Island Swine Fever experiments, the Lone Star tick’s range was limited to Texas. Today it is endemic in New Jersey, New York State and Connecticut, and as Carroll states in Lab 257, no one can answer how the Lone Star tick migrated from Texas to New York and Connecticut.[5]

The long-suspected connection between biowarfare and Plum Island was confirmed in Cold War records declassified in 1993. According to the documents, when eliciting a biowarfare test in the early 1950s, the Joint Chiefs of Staff stated: “Steps should be taken to make certain adequate facilities are available, including those at Fort Detrick, Dugway Proving Ground [Utah], Fort Terry (Plum Island) and an island testing area.” [6

You can find a summary of the book Lab 257 here. I skimmed through that book in a store once; it seemed to me to have been well researched.

Perhaps the more urgent question now, is not the origins of the disease, but whether the US President may be experiencing neurological symptoms associated with severe cases of Lyme Disease. These days, I don't take any White House reassurances at face value.

Update: Bush may well have fully recovered as they claim. Perhaps the most troubling thing is that this apparently run-down and "leaky" germ research facility at Plum Island (and presumably others like it?) is now under the direction of Homeland Security, the very guys who screwed up the Hurricane Katrina effort.

Collier's "Bottom Billion"

Having lived in several developing countries in Southeast Asia, I find the present crusade to "save Africa" led by Bono and Columbia economist Jeffrey D. Sachs bewildering. Frankly, I think these guys are naive. The West is never going to solve the problem of poverty in the most corrupt countries by holding rock concerts and writing ever bigger checks. This approach has already been tried. Money is not the solution, because a lack of money isn't the fundamental problem these countries face.

In my view, Oxford University scholar Paul Collier has taken a much more intelligent approach to the diagnosing the underlying problem of the poorest countries (the "bottom billion") which has led him to propose solutions that strike me as having reasonable chance of succeeding. I haven't yet read his book, but the book review by Naill Ferguson in the New York Times is illuminating. (A post by Bangkok Pundit brought the article to my attention. Pundit asks whether Collier's thesis might lead one to question some basic assumptions about the root cause of violence in the southern-most provinces).

Ferguson explains:

The notion of the bottom billion matters because most of today’s development strategies (for example, the United Nations’ Millennium Development Goals) focus much less discriminatingly on all developing economies — what used to be called “the third world.” But the world is no longer (as it used to be) one-sixth rich and five-sixths poor. Thanks to explosive growth in Asia, it will soon be more like one-sixth rich, two-thirds O.K. and one-sixth poor. It is this last group, according to Collier, that we need to worry about. . .

I think that's a key point, nowadays categories like "third world" or "developing nations" are misleading. Economically Thailand bears little resemblance to Burma or Cambodia, for example. According to Collier the poorest countries have fallen into one (or more) of four "traps":

1. Conflict. ("Three things turn out to increase the risk of conflict: a relatively high proportion of young, uneducated men; an imbalance between ethnic groups, with one tending to outnumber the rest; and a supply of natural resources like diamonds or oil, which simultaneously encourages and helps to finance rebellion")
2. "The resource curse" -- for which he coined the term “diamonds are a guerrilla’s best friend."
3. The fact that ". . . landlocked countries are . . . dependent on their neighbors’ transportation systems if they want to trade."
4. And the biggest, most obvious factor, ". . . bad governance. "

Collier's two main prescriptions:

• "African manufacturers need some temporary protection from Asian competition. Rich countries should exempt products from bottom billion countries" from tariffs.
• "Reflecting on the tendency of post conflict countries to lapse back into civil war, he argues trenchantly for occasional foreign interventions in failed states. What post conflict countries need, he says, is 10 years of peace enforced by an external military force. If that means infringing national sovereignty, so be it."

Recommended Reading: "Zen and the meaning of poor people's debt in Thaksin's Thailand."

Bill Clinton's Commencement Address to Harvard Class of '07

Here is an extract from Bill Clinton's address at Harvard in June. As you can see, it puts some of the big issues of our times in a positive perspective:

The simple idea that our differences are more important than our common humanity.

When the human genome was sequenced, and the most interesting thing to me as a non-scientist – we finished it in my last year I was president, I really rode herd on this thing and kept throwing more money at it – the most interesting thing to me was the discovery that human beings with their three billion genomes are 99.9 percent identical genetically. So if you look around this vast crowd today, at the military caps and the baseball caps and the cowboy hats and the turbans, if you look at all the different colors of skin, all the heights, all the widths, all the everything, it’s all rooted in one-tenth of one percent of our genetic make-up. Don’t you think it’s interesting that not just people you find appalling, but all the rest of us, spend 90 percent of our lives thinking about that one-tenth of one percent? I mean, don’t we all? How much of the laugh lines in the speeches were about that? At least I didn’t go to Yale, right? [LAUGHTER] That Brown gag was hilarious. [LAUGHTER]

But it’s all the same deal, isn’t it? I mean, the intellectual premise is that the only thing that really matters about our lives are the distinctions we can draw. Indeed, one of the crassest elements of modern culture, all these sort of talk shows, and even a lot of political journalism that's sort of focused on this shallow judgmentalism. They try to define everybody down by the worst moment in their lives, and it all is about well, no matter whatever’s wrong with me, I’m not that. And yet, you ask Martin Luther King, Mother Teresa and Bono to come here. Nelson Mandela’s the most admired person in the world. I got tickled the other night. I wound up in a restaurant in New York with a bunch of friends of mine. And I looked over and two tables away, and there was Rush Limbaugh [LAUGHTER], who’s said a few mad things about me. So I went up and shook hands with him and said hello and met his dinner guest. And I came just that close to telling him we were 99.9 percent the same. [LAUGHTER] But I didn’t want to ruin the poor man’s dessert, so I let it go.[LAUGHTER]

After George Bush and I did the tsunami, we got so into this disaster work that Kofi Annan asked him to oversee the UN’s efforts in Pakistan after the earthquake, which you acknowledged today, and asked me to stay on as the tsunami coordinator for two years. So on my next to last trip to Aceh in Indonesia, the by far the hardest hit place, a quarter of a million people killed. I went to one of these refugee camps where in the sweltering heat, several thousand people were still living in tents. Highly uncomfortable. And my job was to go there and basically listen to them complain and figure out what to do about it, and how to get them out of there more quickly. So every one of these camps elected a camp leader and when I appeared, I was introduced to my young interpreter, a young Indonesian woman, and to the guy who was the camp leader, and his wife and his son. And they smiled, said hello, and then I looked down at this little boy, and I literally could not breathe. I think he’s the most beautiful child I ever saw. And I said to my young interpreter, I said, I believe that’s the most beautiful boy I ever saw in my life. She said, yes, he’s very beautiful and before the tsunami he had nine brothers and sisters. And now they’re all gone.

So the wife and the son excused themselves. And the father who had lost his nine children proceeded to take me on a two-hour tour of this camp. He had a smile on his face. He never talked about anything but what the people in that camp needed. He gave no hint of what had happened to him and the grief that he bore. We get to the end of the tour. It’s the health clinic in the camp. I look up and there is his wife, a mother who had lost nine of her 10 children, holding a little bitty baby less than a week old, the newest born baby in the camp. And she told me, I’m going to get in trouble for telling this. She told me that in Indonesian culture, when a woman has a baby, she gets to go to bed for 40 days and everyone waits on her hand and foot. [LAUGHTER] She doesn’t get up, nothing happens. And then on the 40th day, the mother gets up out of bed, goes back to work doing her life and they name the baby. So this child was less than a week old. So this mother who had lost her nine children is here holding this baby. And she says to me, this is our newest born baby. And we want you to name him. Little boy. So I looked at her and I said through my interpreter, I said, do you have a name for new beginning? And she explained and the woman said something back and the interpreter said yes, luckily for you, in Indonesian the word for dawn is a boy’s name. And the mother just said to me, we will call this child Dawn and he will symbolize our new beginning. You shouldn’t have to meet people that lose nine of their 10 children, cherish the one they got left, and name a newborn baby Dawn to realize that what we have in common is more important than what divides us. [APPLAUSE]

And I leave you with this thought. When Martin Luther King was invited here in 1968, the country was still awash in racism. The next decade it was awash in sexism, and after that in homophobia. And occasionally those things rear their ugly head along the way, but by and large, nobody in this class is going to carry those chains around through life. But nobody gets out for free, and everyone has temptations. The great temptation for all of you is to believe that the one-tenth of one percent of you which is different and which brought you here and which can bring you great riches or whatever else you want, is really the sum of who you are and that you deserve your good fate, and others deserve their bad one. That is the trap into which you must not fall. Warren Buffett's just about to give away 99 percent of his money because he said most of it he made because of where he was born and when he was born. It was a lucky accident. And his work was rewarded in this time and place more richly than the work of teachers and police officers and nurses and doctors and people who cared for those who deserve to be cared for. So he’s just going to give it away. And still with less than one percent left, have more than he could ever spend. Because he realizes that it wasn’t all due to the one-tenth of one percent, and that his common humanity requires him to give money to those for whom it will mean much more.

In the central highlands in Africa where I work, when people meet each other walking, nearly nobody rides, and people meet each other walking on the trails, and one person says hello, how are you, good morning, the answer is not I’m fine, how are you. The answer translated into English is this: I see you. Think of that. I see you. How many people do all of us pass every day that we never see? You know, we all haul out of here, somebody’s going to come in here and fold up 20-something thousand chairs. And clean off whatever mess we leave here. And get ready for tomorrow and then after tomorrow, someone will have to fix that. Many of those people feel that no one ever sees them. I would never have seen the people in Aceh in Indonesia if a terrible misfortune had not struck. And so, I leave you with that thought. Be true to the tradition of the great people who have come here. Spend as much of your time and your heart and your spirit as you possibly can thinking about the 99.9 percent. See everyone and realize that everyone needs new beginnings. Enjoy your good fortune. Enjoy your differences, but realize that our common humanity matters much, much more. God bless you and good luck.

I think what I clipped above -- the last part of the speech -- was the most inspiring part. You can find the whole speech here.

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Journalist?

In today's Thailand, you can be army officer and serve as a TV reporter, writes Bangkok Pundit:

We are not talking about a civilian defence staff member providing army spin or writing for an internal magazine, but an "army officer" seconded to work for a TV station. Yes, I know Channel 5 is army run,* but this case just highlights the issue on why army officers should not be seconded to work in a media organisation.

I'd say!

Dictionary of Urban Slang

Here is a cool concept. It's an evolving dictionary of trendy slang words where users get to contribute and evaluate words: urbandictionary.com.

Ousted Thai Prime Minister Thaksin's new website

Former Thai Prime Minister Thaksin, who was ousted in the September 19 military coup d'etat, has launched a new website. It's called TrueThaksin.com. (Via Matt)

The Thai peoples' memories of their last elected prime minister are surely growing fonder every day.