Thailand has a monarch problem?

 NY Times:

Amid Thailand’s Protests, a Feared Tool to Protect the Monarchy Returns

The country’s lèse-majesté law, which makes insulting the king punishable by years in prison, is being used against the movement’s leadership for the first time.

Several years ago, I was visiting my daughter and her family in Bangkok.  Walking back to my hotel from her house I had to cross a main road and was stopped by a policeman.  In broken English, he informed me that all traffic on the road was blocked and pedestrians could not even use the overhead crosswalk because a member of the royal family was being driven down the road.  It was like the city came to a standstill for a car to pass.  If you have ever seen the traffic in Bangkok you would understand what a big deal that was.

Overall I liked Thailand.  The people were polite and the restaurants were good.  It helped that my daughter spoke fluent Thai when she was taking me to some of the sites.  We even did one of the unusual water taxis where the boat captain handled a V-8 from an auto like it was an outboard motor.  I recall a chase scene from one of the James Bond movies where that type of craft was used.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Should Republicans go ahead and add Supreme Court Justices to head off Democrats

Washington Post: Some Democrats eye adding more justices to the Supreme Court to change its ideological bent The once-remote idea has gained the attention of liberals angered by the GOP push to remake the federal courts. Probably the easy way to defeat this court-packing scheme is for Trump to propose doing the same thing now.  It would lead to Democrat denunciations and claims that it would be wrong, thereby blowing up any attempt by them in the unfortunate event of Democrats winning a presidential election.
Read more

29 % of companies say they are unlikely to keep insurance after Obamacare

Conn Carroll: A new survey of 368 midsize to large companies found that 29% of them are considering terminating their active employee health care plans when Obamacare is full implemented in 2014. Only 71% of employers surveyed said they did not expect to drop their health coverage, while 20% said they did not know and 9% said they were planning to exit. The latest survey, conducted by Towers Watson, echoes an ealier survey by McKinsey & Co. finding that 30% of private-sector employers were planning to drop their employee health insurance coverage by 2014. When the Congressional Budget Office crunched Obamacare's spending numbers, they estimated that only 7% of employees currently covered by employer-sponsored plans would lose their plans. ... This means the cost of the health care fiasco will be hundreds of billions more than estimated by the CBO and Congressional Democrat. It is also clear that Obama's pledge that you could keep your health care plan if you wanted t
Read more