One person's move to Cambodia in an attempt to make trade fair -- fair wages for producers and fair prices for consumers. Bloom eco-friendly bags are recycled bags hand made by fairly paid workers in Cambodia that are sought after by ethical consumers everywhere.
The other day Kagna was reading Angkor Thom magazine, a bestseller in Cambodia. I had written a "review" of one of the issues last June where I described the stories published. I see things have not changed...
This story features a pair of albino brothers. Here is Angkor Thom's version: The brothers are reincarnated white people (!!!)
The monk was the first discovered reincarnated white person in that neighbourhood. The story is that he was a Russian who died in Cambodia and then re-incarnated in Cambodia (or some rubbish like that).
The extended family - all brown skinned except the boy. So how do you explain the way he looks? How do you explain a brown-skinned mother giving birth to a white-skinned boy?
He was re-incarnated of course.
In a way I don't blame the rural people. How could they have any idea about albinism (a congenital disorder in which persons have an absence of pigment in the skin, hair and eyes because of a defect in an enzyme that is responsible for producing melanin). You would try to explain the situation somehow and a Russian plane crashing into the village and the Russians being re-incarnated, bursting out in their next life, as a whitish Khmer, would be one way...
But really, the publishers of Angkor Thom should know better - and I suspect they do. They just publish such nonsense in order to sell their rag. The thing is, Kagna actually believes the story, even after I explained about albinos to her and how they are found all over the world.
Here is a photo of an albino boy taken from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albinism. I explained how I knew an albino boy in primary school in Singapore and he had to keep out of the sun because lack of pigmentation makes people more susceptible to sunburn and skin cancers. The sun also hurt the boy's eyes.
Kagna said this was not the case in the Khmer-white boys, they can play in the sun and have no problems with their eyesight. Therefore, they are not albinos, but re-incarnated white people. Q.E.D.
Sigh.
I wish Angkor Thom would be more responsible and make use of its wide reach to teach people things instead of writing rubbish. They could use their influence to really educate the population, teach them things about nature and the world. Albinism is fascinating in itself. Why not write about this?
Then again, even supposedly educated USA has rags that talk about women giving birth to three headed monsters and this:
"A Cambodian-born accountant has been jailed for life in the US for plotting a failed coup attempt against the Cambodian government 10 years ago.
Chhun Yasith, 53, was found guilty by a court in Los Angeles in 2008 of four charges relating to the failed attack.
Dozens of armed men attacked government buildings in the Cambodian capital, Phnom Penh, in a bid to overthrow Prime Minister Hun Sen.
Chhun is a naturalised US citizen who fled Cambodia as a refugee in 1982.
He grew frustrated with the lack of free elections under Hun Sen, a former member of the Khmer Rouge under dictator Pol Pot, said Chhun's lawyer Richard Callahan.
"He saw Hun Sen as on an even par with Pol Pot," Mr Callahan said.
Chhun also wanted to avenge the death of his father, whom he witnessed being beheaded by Khmer Rouge soldiers, Mr Callahan added."
"This is Chauncy Morlan, and around 100 years ago his obesity was so shocking that people would pay money to see him as he toured the country as a circus “fat man”. I find the unremarkableness of his size to be a telling sign of how we’ve pushed the limits of obesity in the past 100 years. Imagine, if you will, what society would look like if 100 years from now if what passed as spectacularly obese today would not even turn heads at the mall."
Michelle Obama brought fat back into the picture with her plans to fight childhood obesity. The US is the fattest developed nation, and Americans consume on average 2,700 calories a day - about 500 calories more than 40 years ago, more than what Cambodians consume today. (Does that mean Khmers are tinier than Americans 40 years ago?)
In 2008, 68 percent of American adults were overweight, and 34 percent were obese; roughly one in three children and adolescents was overweight, and nearly one in five was obese. By 2015, a shocking 41 per cent of Americans will be obese.
"Beating Obesity" is a thoughtful article on the subject. Written by Marc Ambinder and published in the Atlantic, Ambinder himself was obese, and chose the US$30,000 bariatric surgery. He lost 85 pounds (38.6kg).
"But why did the obesity rate accelerate in the United States beginning in the 1980s, setting us apart from our peers in other developed countries? (Though the Mexicans and the British come close.)," asks Ambinder. "Did Ronald Reagan’s declaration that “it’s morning again in America” prompt us all to start eating bigger breakfasts?"
It's a complicated issue and fat people may be lacking the FTO gene. Which is not to say people do not have a responsibility to try to gain control of their weight.
I for one applaud Ms Obama for having the guts to tackle this issue, because in this PC (politically correct) age, you can be accused of "fattism". Governments can and should do more.
Ambinder writes: “[I]f you go with the flow in America today, you will end up overweight or obese,” Thomas Frieden, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, told me when I met him at an obesity conference in Washington last summer. “This does not absolve individuals of the responsibility of trying to get more exercise and eat healthier. But it suggests a synergy between policy intervention and personal efforts to lose weight.”
The US government should also pay attention to obesity because it is costs the country's coffers billions of dollars. According to the Surgeon General the total annual cost of obesity in the United States was $117 billion for the year 2000.
A more recent 2008 study by The Conference Board found the cost to the US economy in lost working days and extra healthcare costs is a US$45 billion a year. Also in today's WSJ Marketwatch: "If you don't lose weight your finances will".
So I wish Michelle Obama well and hope she fares better than the Naked Chef Jamie Oliver did. Oliver was reduced to tears trying to convince Virginians to eat better.
"I never thought that non-US citizens can join the army, but then I met my recruiter and came to know about this programme." Rohan Pasricha, now a US citizen.
He and others will have to serve a minimum 5 years to keep their citizenship.
"The man from family planning liked to prowl around the mountaintop village, looking for diapers on clotheslines and listening for the cry of a hungry newborn. One day in the spring of 2004, he presented himself at Yang Shuiying's doorstep and commanded: 'Bring out the baby.'"
"Since the early 1990s, more than 80,000 Chinese children have been adopted abroad, the majority to the United States...
"Parents who say their children were taken complain that officials were motivated by the $3,000 [about six times the annual income in rural China and usually handed over in new $100 bills] per child that adoptive parents pay orphanages.
"Our children were exported abroad like they were factory products," said Yang Libing, a migrant worker from Hunan province whose daughter was seized in 2005. He has since learned that she is in the United States."
The US government stopped allowing its citizens to adopt from Cambodia since 2001, citing concerns over Cambodia's "child welfare" (read: "child trafficking") system. Here is a 2007 update from Cambodia adoption connection:
"Cambodia has begun this process with its accession to the Hague Convention on Intercountry Adoption in March 2007. However, the U.S. Government continues to wait for Cambodia to take further steps towards Convention implementation as well as to make progress on updating its overall child welfare system. The U.S. Government will continue to urge Cambodian officials to develop significant and much needed reforms that could eventually lay the groundwork for a resumption of intercountry adoptions between Cambodia and the United States."
One of my friends is unable to go back to the US with a few of her adopted Cambodian children because of this ban on Cambodian adoptions.
Members of Congress are not prohibited from insider trading and their returns beat the average investor by 12% annually. Source: marketplace.
Alan Ziobrowski is a business professor at Georgia State University. Using hundreds of personal financial disclosures from the 1990s, Ziobrowski analyzed more than 6000 stock transactions by members of Congress going back up to 15 years.
ZIOBROWSKI: The real danger here, of course, is that you are going to have in some cases congressman that will literally vote or act against the interests of their constituents in favor of their portfolio. And right now there is virtually nothing that would stop them from doing that.
Thanks to sunkid via reddit. Here is a relevant article:
"Corruption takes many forms in different countries and locations. Here in the United States it may not be as common to pay off a judge or a customs official as it is in most low- and middle-income countries, but we do have quite a bit of legalised bribery, especially in the form of electoral campaign contributions. The most obvious current case is that of healthcare reform, where the powerful insurance, pharmaceutical and other lobbies are in the process of vetoing some of the most important parts of the healthcare reform that most Americans want and need."
[...]
"Some are doing remarkably well – Goldman Sachs, a recipient of billions of dollars of taxpayer assistance, is expected to pay bonuses averaging $700,000 each to 30,000 employees. The vastly over-bloated financial industry that brought us this calamity has shrunk by only 7.7% in terms of employment, far fewer than the percentage of jobs lost in manufacturing (14.6%) or construction (31.6%), since the recession began.
This is blogger Rosemary Port, who ran an anonymous blog calling model Liskula Cohen (below) a "ho" and a "skank". (Photos and story from NY Daily News).
Cohen sued to have Google (which owns blogger) release the identity of the anonymous blogger in order to pursue a defamation suit. New York state supreme court judge, Joan Madden ruled in Cohen's favour and Port was outed. Now the 29-year-old Fashion Institute of Technology student plans to file a $15 million federal lawsuit against Google.
Of course there are many instances when anonymity is important to blogging, like when you write in country ruled by a repressive regime. How else would we find out what was really happening in Burma, Tibet or Iran? But why should the law protect someone who anonymously goes after another? We're not talking about a one-off insult. This woman had an entire blog dedicated to slamming another person. In my view the judge did the right thing.
As for trying to sue Google - nice try at trying to save face, Ms Port. *Rolls eyes*. Another great example offrivolous American lawsuits , wasting yet more taxpayer money.
“More than any other single person of this age, he has helped provide bread for a hungry world,” the Nobel committee said in presenting Dr Borlaug with the Peace Prize. “We have made this choice in the hope that providing bread will also give the world peace."
Dr Borlaug was 95. He is an inspiration, walking away from a promising job at DuPont to help farmers in Mexico improve their crops. His advances led to spectacular success in increasing food production in Latin America and Asia.
Among his discoveries was a gene found in a wheat strain. The gene could shrink the wheat plant creating a stubby variety whose head did not shrink. This means a small plant could produce a large amount of wheat. "On the same amount of land, wheat output could be tripled or quadrupled. Later, the idea was applied to rice, the staple crop for nearly half the world’s population, with yields jumping several-fold compared with some traditional varieties."
It wasn't all smooth sailing, as people took time to accept his ideas.
At the invitation of the Indian and Pakistani governments, Dr. Borlaug offered his advice. He met resistance at first from senior agricultural experts steeped in tradition, but as the food situation worsened, the objections faded. Soon, India and Pakistan were ordering shiploads of Dr. Borlaug’s wheat seeds from Mexico...Harvests soared: the Indian wheat crop of 1968 was so bountiful that the government had to turn schools into temporary granaries.
Dr Borlaug was not without critics:
"In a characteristic complaint, Vandana Shiva, an Indian critic, wrote in 1991 that “in perceiving nature’s limits as constraints on productivity that had to be removed, American experts spread ecologically destructive and unsustainable practices worldwide.”
Dr. Borlaug declared that such arguments often came from “elitists” who were rich enough not to worry about where their next meal was coming from. But over time, he acknowledged the validity of some environmental concerns, and embraced more judicious use of fertilizers and pesticides. He was frustrated throughout his life that governments did not do more to tackle what he called “the population monster” by lowering birth rates."
Only in the US. Associated Press article. Imagine if this happened in Cambodia.
The US is well-known to be a litigious society, with Americans suing for even the minutest thing.
"Americans collectively spend twice as much on civil litigation than they spend on new automobiles – and more than any other industrialised country. As a fraction of GDP, litigation expenditures in the United States are three times greater than those in the UK; 3.3 tort suits are filed in the United States for each 1,000 inhabitants compared with only 1.2 per 1,000 in England."
"The key difference is that under the British and continental European systems, the loser in a suit has to pay a substantial portion of the winner’s legal fees, while under the American system, each party pays their own legal fees.
The ‘all pay’ nature of the American system explains why the United States has been dubbed the ‘litigious society’. While the American system results in lower legal expenditures on a per trial basis, the incentives to go to trial are much higher under the American system than under the British and continental European systems."
Some people in the USA are learning what most of us already know.
"Those who were living at the at the top of the heap and who have fallen to the bottom, they don't know where to go for help, they don't know how to get that help. There's anger and frustration and a sense of entitlement," says Corky Senecal, who heads emergency housing services for Neighbor Impact, and has 30 years experience of providing services for the poor.
"The middle class is where it's really been decimated," she says.
Seven and a half million Americans have lost their job since the start of the recession.
Photo of tankless water heater from Wikipedia. This is the way we heat water in homes in Cambodia and in Singapore and I have never experienced any problems of hot water running out, which apparently is the main concern for US home owners.
"They look at the unit, and it's so small compaired to a tank water heater, and they can't comprehend that it will produce enough hot water for them to take multiple showers at a time," EZ Tankless employee Mike Pavuk told wlfi.com. Pavuk adds "tankless technology has been around for 50 years, but it hasn't been widely available in the United States."
Instead, homes in the US typically use the storage water heater system (Drawing and text from the US Dept of Energy, linked here):
"It operates by releasing hot water from the top of the tank when you turn on the hot water tap. To replace that hot water, cold water enters the bottom of the tank, ensuring that the tank is always full. Because water is constantly heated in the tank, energy can be wasted even when a hot water tap isn't running. This is called standby heat loss. Only tankless water heaters—such as demand water heaters and tankless coil water heaters—avoid standby heat losses."
The US Department of Energy says tankless or demand water heaters are up to 24%–34% more energy efficient than conventional storage tank water heaters. This is how the tankless system works:
"When a hot water tap is turned on, cold water travels through a pipe into the unit. Either a gas burner or an electric element heats the water. As a result, demand water heaters deliver a constant supply of hot water. You don't need to wait for a storage tank to fill up with enough hot water. However, a demand water heater's output limits the flow rate."
To encourage home owners to switch, the US federal government offers a 30% tax credit for people who purchase a tankless water heater, according to the wlfi.com article linked above.
I'm a fan of Al Jazeera's Witness documentaries and this is one reason why. "Forty Acres and a Dream" traces the vanishing history of black-owned farms in the US. The title is a play on the phrase "Forty Acres and a Mule", based on
"General William T. Sherman's Special Field Order Number 15, issued on 16 January 1865, which set aside a thirty-mile tract of land along the South Carolina and Georgia coasts for former slaves and promised the army's help securing loaned mules. In addition, the Freed-men's Bureau initially was authorized to divide abandoned and confiscated lands into forty-acre tracts for rental and eventual sale to refugees and former slaves. Despite the efforts of Radical Republicans during the Reconstruction period, however, significant land redistribution measures ultimately were abandoned, and virtually all southern lands were returned to white owners. The resulting sharecropping system left the social and economic structures of slavery essentially intact in the South."
(Lori Askeland, Dictionary of American History, found on encyclopedia.com).
In "Forty Acres and a Dream", documentary photographer John Ficara sought to capture the stories and struggles of black farmers before that way of life dies. Notes from the documentary: "Black owned farms peaked in the early 1920s with an estimated total of 15 million acres and over 900,000 farmers. Today there are only 2.2 million acres owned by black farmers. These farmers are losing their land three times faster than white family farmers and a recent study by the university of Michigan predicts that within the next ten years there will be virtually no black owned farms."
It was while watching "Forty Acres and a Dream" that I learnt about the farming cycle. At the start of planting season, it is crucial to have funds to purchase seeds. This is one area where odds were stacked against black farmers who say they were often turned away from banks because of their colour.
This led me to think about farmers in Asia and how they cough up the money for seeds. This is a good summary of the farming cycle:
"The debt cycle is as follows - in the beginning of the season the farmer goes to moneylender to borrow money for seeds, fertilisers, pesticides. The moneylender is also the shopkeeper so not only does he lend money at an enormous interest, he also charges more than the market rate for the seeds etc. Additionally, he enters into a contract with the farmer that the entire produce shall be bought by him at the end of the harvest. The price for buying the produce is fixed by the moneylender which is invariably less than the prevailing market rates. In order to further secure his money the moneylender mortgages the land."
This explanation, posted on changemakers.com, is by Paromita Goswami, who founded Shramik Elgar (The Marching Army of Working People), a 6000-member union of rural workers in India. Goswami also founded the Elgar Women's Credit Co-operative Society and is also an advisor to the board of Global Integrity, which produces information on governance and corruption trends around the world.
One popular focus on breaking the poverty cycle for farmers is getting rid of the middlemen along the supply chain (sometimes called "value chain") in food production. The idea is that if only farmers were linked to markets, they would be able to profit.
"However, increasing the efficiency of a value chain does not automatically result in benefits for poorer farmers," notes Gertjan Becx, director of Resilience, a consultancy firm based in Wageningen, the Netherlands. He bases this on the experience of more than 1200 smallholder farmers in Ghana in West Africa who were interviewed for his study, which he talks about in June's issue of Leisa Magazine, the magazine of ILEIA, or the Centre for Information on Low External Input and Sustainable Agriculture.
Says Becx:
“In our Ghanaian investigation we discovered four clusters of interconnected constraints that restrict entrepreneurial development of smallholder farmers. The first cluster includes constraints related to production and processing. Lack of capital, little access to (micro-) credit, poor soil or seed quality, lack of water, uncertainty about land entitlement, shortage of adequate labour, lack of traction, and lack of knowledge and technology, all hamper productivity increases. Moreover, because of chronic hunger, people are mentally and physically weak, so they cannot work to their full capacity." (my italics, because this is something people tend to forget).
The second cluster is the uncertainties of the external environment such as climate, corruption and fluctuating markets. The third is the lack of incentives to invest. This is the case of farmers who do not own land and also of farmers who think the government, their extended family, or other patrons, will claim the bulk of the fruits of their labour.
The fourth cluster deals with the mindset of subsistence farmers: they tend to consume rather than think of the future. Importantly, subsistence farmers deeply mistrust their local, regional and national governments. “We found that poor farmers have difficulties with long-term planning, markets and profit as many of them have developed ‘coping strategies’ in response to difficult circumstances."
Many people point out this is the mindset of poor, uneducated and rural Cambodians: to think short term, rather than long; to spend what they have today rather than save and invest for the future. When I first came to Cambodia, the books I read and the expats I spoke to, all told me not to give a Cambodian money, as he/she would spend it the moment he/she can.
As you can see, it is not just Khmers, but it is the mindset of subsistence farmers everywhere.
“We concluded that agricultural entrepreneurship is necessary for small-scale farmers to escape the cycle of continuing poverty," says Becx. "But this will only be possible if they organise themselves into farmer-based organisations. Value chain development must take the constraints described above into consideration if they are to work for poorer farmers. Value chains can only overcome the cycle of poverty if they are deliberately designed to improve farmer livelihoods, so to be ‘pro poor’.”
"...if they organise themselves into farmer-based organisations". Paromita Goswami explains in her post on changemakers.com how a cooperative has helped farmers get out of the traditional farming cycle:
"The cooperative as a legal entity has multiple benefits. For example our cooperatives have procured licences as distributors for seeds, fertilisers and pesticides. This means that we will distribute these things to the farmers at the market rate plus carting costs.
Then, the cooperatives are registering with the Agricultural Produce Marketing Committees which means that they shall be able to buy the produce from the farmers at the prevailing market rates. Apart from this, the cooperative can raise upto 12.5 times its share captial through bank loans which an individual farmer cannot access."
Abercrombie & Fitch makes clothes in Cambodia. You can find this brand and Aeropostale, Hollister, Gap, J. Crew and H&M going for a few dollars at the Russian Market. They are smuggled out of factories. You can read how the factory workers do this and their bosses complaints here.
I love this quote by a poster on asiafinest.com: "Abercrombie and Fitch and stuff from Banana Republic also has clothes made in Cambodia, now i can dress in the style from the slavery of my people...INCREASE THE WAGES!!"
Anyway, for those of you who are Abercrombie fans, you may be interested to read on jezebel.com:
Just in case their racism, sexism, and general awfulness hasn't been enough to turn you away from Abercrombie & Fitch after all these years, here's another glimpse of the inner workings of the horrible store....
according to Riam Dean, she was forced to work in the stockroom, as opposed to on the floor, at Abercrombie's London flagship store because her prosthetic arm didn't fit the company's attractiveness standards. You stay classy, Abercrombie!...
She is now suing the company, which, by the way, already paid 2.2 million dollars to employees who felt that that the company was unfairly forcing them to buy Abercrombie's clothes in 2003. Oh, and did I mention they paid a 40 million dollar settlement in 2004, after being accused of discriminatory employment practices? Because they did!
I watched on CNN this morning an 88 year old White Supremacist opened fire at visitors to Washington's Holocaust Memorial Museum. A black security guard was shot at close range and died and the culprit was wounded in an exchange of gunfire with police.
I recently posted a video on the Ruby Ridge incident, after stumbling upon it when watching the BBC documentary "How mad are you?". The same poster also put up the Ruby Ridge documentary, which I found a revealing example of the US government's excessive use of force.
From there I watched another documentary, part of National Geographic's "Inside" series, called Inside American Skinheads. I found this one hard to watch.
I wonder how much the US government spends on suppressing these terrorists who are breeding and plotting on home ground, since it focuses so much on the "war on terror". How much money and effort does the US government spend cleaning up its own backyard vis-a-vis the rest of the world?
I was also interested to watch on CNN that it is not true hate groups in the US are mostly in the mid-west or deep-south. Rather, the groups correspond to population density. There are many in Florida and California for instance. This map shows the spread and concentration.
Today's incident comes just a few days after a Christian, Scott Roeder, murdered Dr. George Tiller, a physician from Wichita, Kansas, who performed late term abortions. And these people are terrorists, according to the USA PATRIOT Act:
Under current United States law, set forth in the USA PATRIOT Act, acts of domestic terrorism are those which: "(A) involve acts dangerous to human life that are a violation of the criminal laws of the United States or of any State; (B) appear to be intended— (i) to intimidate or coerce a civilian population; (ii) to influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion; or (iii) to affect the conduct of a government by mass destruction, assassination, or kidnapping; and (C) occur primarily within the territorial jurisdiction of the United States."
I struggle to understand people like these and can only conclude that the human species is a pretty pathetic one. Despite having the faculty of reason, there are still many people (perhaps most) who are just plain stupid, ignorant, superstitious, weak and despicable. I don't know what else to say.
3rd part of a Youtube upload. A documentary on Ruby Ridge - the site of a violent confrontation and siege in the U.S. state of Idaho in 1992. It involved Randy Weaver, his family, Weaver's friend Kevin Harris, federal agents from the United States Marshals Service and the Federal Bureau of Investigation. In 1994, the Weavers filed a civil suit against the U.S. government, which the government settled for $3.1 million. The incident was cited as a motivation for the Oklahoma City bombing of 1995.
In explanation of the 1992 hold-out, Rachel says, "It wasn't just Dad. It was our whole family. And we didn't want to go down because we figured they'd put him in jail for, you know, sawn-off shotguns and we'd rather, you know, stay on the mountain and live with our family, you know, happily than have it be torn apart. I guess that backfired."
Today I watched "Listening Post" on Al Jazeera TV. I really like Al Jazeera. Often you get documentaries about Asia and Africa and the Middle East, of stories you would never find on mainstream news channels. BBC and CNN and Singapore's Channel Snooze Asia are so homogeneous they've blended into one for me. BBC's saving grace is its documentaries, especially the excellent "Panorama".
"Listening Post" is a program that analyses how the media covers news. Today I was surprised to learn that the US has held journalists without giving them a chance at trials -- much like Iran and the well-publicised case of Iranian-American journalist Roxana Saberi. Unlike Saberi, who was released after 4 months in jail, the US held Al Jazeera cameraman Sami al-Haj for six years in Guantanamo with no trial.
al-Haj was imprisoned in 2001, during the US's "War on Terror". He was interrogated not about terrorism, but about Al Jazeera. He was finally released in 2007 but not before the interrogators asked him to spy on Al Jazeera. Of course, I was surprised because there was, and is, hardly any coverage of this case, one exception being columns by Nicholas Kristof (who has also written about Cambodia's human trafficking issues.)
Then, there is Associated Press photographer Bilal Hussein, an Iraqi, whom the US kept in jail for almost two years with no charges, after Hussein's photographs from the Anbar province directly contradicted Bush administration claims about the state of affairs there.
That behavior was far from aberrational for the U.S., as the Committee to Protect Journalists - which led the effort to free Saberi - documented: Hussein’s detention is not an isolated incident. Over the last three years, dozens of journalists—mostly Iraqis—have been detained by U.S. troops, according to CPJ research. While most have been released after short periods, in at least eight cases documented by CPJ Iraqi journalists have been held by U.S. forces for weeks or months without charge or conviction.
The US is still holding Reuters photographer Ibrahim Jassam Jassam after he was arrested at his home by US and Iraqi soldiers on 1 September 2008 and taken to the US military at Camp Cropper, near Baghdad airport. The Iraqi central criminal court ruling dismissing all charges against him and ordering his release was issued on 30 November but the US has refused to comply, says Reporters without Borders.
Of course, part of the reason for Roxana Saberi's heavy coverage in the media is the way she looks. As one journalist said on the Listening Post, you get more coverage if you look Western. Just like super models.
I laughed aloud at some of these quotes from the soon-to-be former President of the USA. It's incredible. If you get the chance, watch Idiocracy, a movie starring Luke Wilson, the "most average" US Army soldier in 2005 who becomes the smartest man in 2505 after he wakes up from his hibernation chamber. The movie is a cautionary tale of what the USA could be like if current trends of anti-intellectualism, commercialism and cultural dumbing down continue. I think George W Bush is himself a cautionary tale. More gems on the slices-of-life website.
“The war on terror involves Saddam Hussein because of the nature of Saddam Hussein, the history of Saddam Hussein, and his willingness to terrorize himself.” —Grand Rapids, Mich., Jan. 29, 2003
“Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we. They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we.” —Washington, D.C., Aug. 5, 2004
“My plan reduces the national debt, and fast. So fast, in fact, that economists worry that we’re going to run out of debt to retire.” —radio address, Feb. 24, 2001
“I know what I believe. I will continue to articulate what I believe and what I believe — I believe what I believe is right.” —Rome, Italy, July 22, 2001
“I’m the master of low expectations. I’m also not very analytical. You know I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about myself, about why I do things.” —aboard Air Force One, June 4, 2003
“If this were a dictatorship, it’d be a heck of a lot easier, just so long as I’m the dictator.” —Washington, D.C., Dec. 19, 2000
“There’s an old saying in Tennessee — I know it’s in Texas, probably in Tennessee — that says, fool me once, shame on — shame on you. Fool me — you can’t get fooled again.” —Nashville, Tenn., Sept. 17, 2002
“I hear there’s rumors on the Internets that we’re going to have a draft.” —presidential debate, St. Louis, Mo., Oct. 8, 2004
“We both use Colgate toothpaste.” —after a reporter asked what he had in common with British Prime Minister Tony Blair, Camp David, Md., Feb. 23, 2001
“You teach a child to read, and he or her will be able to pass a literacy test.” —Townsend, Tenn., Feb. 21, 2001
I actually met one of these "Returnees". He was a weird one. This Cambodian man said to me the first time we met in Phnom Penh that he never dates "Asian chicks", only white women. He had a short-lived marriage to a Finnish woman with whom he had a child. In the end the woman left and went home to Finland with the baby.
"One of the weirdest cases occurred when a Cambodian man was busted in Houston, Texas for urinating in public, which was interpreted as a sex crime similar to exhibitionism — taboo especially because children might see it. [By the way, urinating in public is a commonplace activity here in Cambodia].
Five years into a six-year parole for the crime, cops caught him again pissing in the street. Urinating in public was not a major crime, but his breaking a law while on parole was a felony.
So he was deported to Cambodia despite being a construction site supervisor in Houston.
At least 67 felons are currently in Phnom Penh and other Cambodian cities, including many who display street gang tattoos, baggy pants, colored bandanas and sweatshirts common in America but curiously freaky in Southeast Asia...
The felons from America are now either peacefully blending into Cambodia's traditional, Buddhist-majority society or establishing themselves as the newest, roughest gang in town.
Many find shelter at RAP, the Returnee Assistance Project recently set up by Bill Herod, 58, an American who has spent many years in Cambodia working on projects designed to mend this country's social wounds....
"There are 67 returnees in-country now and about 1,400 to come. We expect the U.S. to send 12 to 15 people a month for the next 10 years," Mr. Herod said.
On Sunday night, Chou Ung, a 28-year-old Cambodian woman whose family had escaped the Khmer Rouge regime and had started a new life in Houston, Texas, was shot and killed while filling up at a Chevron station.
This reminds me of the actor Haing Ngor, who was tortured and survived Pol Pot's reign, only to be shot and killed outside his home in Los Angeles. Haing Ngor was shot because he refused to hand over a gold locket containing his late wife's photo (she had died during the Pol Pot regime), even after he had handed over his USD6000 Rolex watch. The robbers were three Asian men, from the Oriental LazyBoy gang.
Whenever people say Cambodia is dangerous to my American friend John Weeks, he points out the violence in the US. He tells me, with good reason, it seems, he feels safer in Cambodia than in the US.
Americans and supporters spent the morning watching the election results at the Warehouse pub (my neighbour here in Siem Reap). Here they are watching Obama's victory speech. Why am I interested? Because it is everyone's business who becomes the leader of the most powerful nation in the world. Personally I am impressed. It says a lot about the American public and the USA. As John McCain said in his very generous concession speech "Americans are not afraid of history; Americans make history." (Contrast this with "The people have spoken—the bastards." --Dick Tuck's concession speech following his loss in the 1966 California State Senate election!)
The pressure on Obama will be immense. Let us not forget when Margaret Thatcher won the general elections in the UK in 1983, people said it was a milestone for a woman to become British Prime Minister. Well, she screwed up to such an extent that I think she's ruined it for other women candidates in the UK. If Obama fails to deliver, it'll be a long time coming for another black president in the US. Obama is nothing like Thatcher though, and I'm positive. (I'm actually wearing blue today...)
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