Live free; Ride hard

I got this vespa for my birthday two weeks ago:


I was going to join the Black Rabbits, this local motorcycle gang:


The moto came with a pink seat and pink handlebars. But it didn't come with a license plate, and we didn't realize that meant we couldn't ever get a license plate for it — ensuring inevitable confusing, awkward, hand-flapping run-ins with the local bribe-happy cops who care about that sort of thing.

So after riding it just a handful of times (including one long, glorious dash through countryside backroads during which I ran out of gas in the middle of a rice farm), we sold it back yesterday to Dong — the guy with the motorcycle shop in our front yard.

I never even named it. The Black Rabbits approve of my municipal obedience.

Can design save newspapers?

This guy thinks so..



The world needs good newspapers, but won't notice when good reporting is gone.

Malaysia (no. last one)

...has Islam.


Featuring—hijab in a parachute:

and... BURQA ON A JETSKI:

Monies

Great article in SI last week about athlete fiscal incompetence, with a bunch of alarming stats:

"• By the time they have been retired for two years, 78% of former NFL players have gone bankrupt or are under financial stress because of joblessness or divorce.

• Within five years of retirement, an estimated 60% of former NBA players are broke.

• Numerous retired MLB players have been similarly ruined, and the current economic crisis is taking a toll on some active players as well. Last month 10 current and former big leaguers—including outfielders Johnny Damon of the Yankees and Jacoby Ellsbury of the Red Sox and pitchers Mike Pelfrey of the Mets and Scott Eyre of the Phillies—discovered that at least some of their money is tied up in the $8 billion fraud allegedly perpetrated by Texas financier Robert Allen Stanford. Pelfrey told the New York Post that 99% of his fortune is frozen; Eyre admitted last month that he was broke, and the team quickly agreed to advance a portion of his $2 million salary."

And some incredible anecdotes that..well.. explain it:

"A few years ago, Butowsky recalls, he met with a former high-round NFL pick whose adviser, also a former player, said that he couldn't reveal how much he was charging to manage the athlete's tax-exempt municipal bonds "because of the Patriot Act." According to Butowsky, he was taking $146,000 every year."

"About five years ago, Hunter says, he invested almost $70,000 in an invention: an inflatable raft that would sit under furniture. The pitch was that when high-rainfall areas were flooded, consumers could pump up the device, allowing a sofa to float and remain dry."

Malaysia (no. 6)

... has lanterns.

Malaysia (no. 5)

... has grown-ass men in sunset water fights (they're just like me!).






More Batu Feringgi pictures here.

Malaysia (no. 4)

... has stiff penalties.


*also notice the 90 day entry stamp. we came to malaysia to apply and fork over a bunch of money for a 3 month visa back into thailand. malaysia gave us three months just for showing up. we're considering a move...

Malaysia (no. 3)

... has color.

Malaysia (no. 2)

... has Chinese hotels that seem haunted when it rains.

Malaysia

...has the Straits of Melacca.

Siamese Marie (and Dave) No. 3

They gave us a new camera, which produces huge photos, which take three weeks to upload over Thai internet.

Here's the full slideshow.

Trazzler

I am an "Editor and Community Manager" for this travel site, started in part by the guys who started twitter. And I am (edit: was until a couple days ago I just noticed) the featured writer this month.

It's a fun site with a different spin on web-based travel guides, and it's been a nice to write just a little bit about a lot of what I've gotten to see/do while running around the world for the past couple years. So.. look around.

The trips I've written are listed here.

Lamborghini dichotomies

From a development perspective, I've found Thailand to be a great example of both the potential and the problems that come with a high-growth emerging economy.

There's a well-developed infrastructure, good rural roads, consistent power, some social safety nets, a growing middle class and a very-visible high society (featuring all the modern touches — Lamborghinis and Ferraris for sale in a Bangkok mall — that come with them). But there's also a large chunk of the population living on a couple bucks a day, plaguing political turmoil, corruption and mistrust, abhorrent treatment of refugees and minorities and a huge slum in the shadows of the Bangkok high-rises.



It's healthy democracy and capitalism next to Burma, Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam, but waste and inefficiency next to Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan and Hong Kong.

And it's why the sex trade is so bad here — Thailand is poor enough to make it a "sending" country (poor girls to fuel the trade) but rich enough to have a robust business/expat/tourist "receiving" community (men to buy them).

Our pastor in Bangkok wrote a good post illustrating life on both sides of the divide after an encounter with a Lamborghini:

I pulled up right beside him and passed him. As I went by I looked over my shoulder as if to say "eat my dust".

How you might ask did this happen? He was stuck in traffic on Rama IV road and I was on a motorbike which can (carefully) weave in and out of stopped traffic.

We live in a world where generally the wealthier you are, the faster you go, the higher you climb, the less dust you have to inhale. What surprised me was how satisfying it was to pass the guy.

....

The motorbikes have a kind of camaraderie. There is an unspoken bond over and against the car drivers. Motorbikers of the world unite! Again, what's amazing to me is that I didn't really know about this world until I drove a bike myself.

Jesus over and over again said that one way to "test" the authenticity of our faith is to see how we treat the most vulnerable people around us. (See Matt 25 for example) So I'll take my encounter with the Lamborghini this morning and the feelings it stirred up as a reminder of how different the world looks depending on whether you are on the top (luxury cars), in the middle (Motorbikes) or on the bottom (traveling on foot or by bus).

I'm not ready to say that all Christians need to join the bottom (sell our cars and motorbikes). Although there are stories about Jesus that suggest that wouldn't be such a bad idea. What we are obligated to do though is to pay attention, be sympathetic and offer friendship and help to those who struggle to meet life's basic needs.

Read the whole post here.

Stewart v. Cramer

Extraordinary interview here with Jon Stewart grilling Jim Cramer, if you don't watch the Daily Show. It's just delicious.

The failure of journalism (especially cable news, which.. I guess.. is journalism) in the current financial crisis is all too similar to its failure in the run up to Iraq, and indicative of a much larger cultural problem. Stewart's genius — and public service — is that he gets this.

Watch the whole thing (un-cut-for-TV) here.

James Fallows, who I respect, describes it this way:

"Yes, it is cliched to praise Stewart as the "true" voice of news; and, yes, it is too pinata-like to join the smacking of CNBC.... But I found this -- the Stewart/Cramer slaughter -- incredible.
I thought Stewart, without excessive showboating, did the journalistic sensibility proud.

Just before leaving China -- ie, two days ago -- I saw with my wife the pirate-video version of Frost/Nixon, showing how difficult it is in real time to ask the kind of questions Stewart did. I know, Frost was dealing with a former president. Still, it couldn't have been easy to do what Stewart just did."

art!; "the weight of glory"

the butterfly's name is c.s. lewis.

Siamese Marie No. 2

elephants.

Siamese Marie No. 1

My mom and dad are in Thailand. Took mom to a market where they slaughter frogs, which scream before getting whomped upside the head by this lady. Something squirted out of one, hitting mom in the eye.

Here she is in a public place, in a foreign land:

David Brooks speaks to Americans as if they were adults*

I'll read every column David Brooks writes, and this is why:

In the age of Rush and Hannity, here's Brooks explaining his careful opposition to the economic approach currently being taken by Obama, without belittling, demonizing or polarizing those he's criticizing.

These experiences drove me toward the crooked timber school of public philosophy: Michael Oakeshott, Isaiah Berlin, Edward Banfield, Reinhold Niebuhr, Friedrich Hayek, Clinton Rossiter and George Orwell.

These writers - some left, some right - had a sense of epistemological modesty. They knew how little we can know. They understood that we are strangers to ourselves and society is an immeasurably complex organism. They tended to be skeptical of technocratic, rationalist planning and suspicious of schemes to reorganize society from the top down.

...

Readers of this column know that I am a great admirer of Barack Obama and those around him. And yet the gap between my epistemological modesty and their liberal worldviews has been evident over the past few weeks. The people in the administration are surrounded by a galaxy of unknowns, and yet they see this economic crisis as an opportunity to expand their reach, to take bigger risks and, as Obama said on Saturday, to tackle every major problem at once.
...

If Obama is mostly successful, then the epistemological skepticism natural to conservatives will have been discredited. We will know that highly trained government experts are capable of quickly designing and executing top-down transformational change. If they mostly fail, then liberalism will suffer a grievous blow, and conservatives will be called upon to restore order and sanity.

It’ll be interesting to see who’s right. But I can’t even root for my own vindication. The costs are too high. I have to go to the keyboard each morning hoping Barack Obama is going to prove me wrong.

Humble. Introspective. Respectful. Intellectually curious. Willing to be wrong. Aware of the limits of his understanding about the world. THIS IS HOW POLITICAL DISCOURSE SHOULD BE.

Read the whole thing. Thanks to Trey for the link.



*To steal from Jon Stewart. Seriously.. quit watching cable news, folks.

Everything is amazing. Nobody is happy.

I loved loved when, upon landing in both the Dominican Republic and Liberia, everyone on the planes cheered.

India

Scott and Jenni, who spent a week with us this month after two weeks playing plumber in India, put up some gorgeous pictures from their trip to the subcontinent (know on this blog as "The Most Interesting Place in the World").



'


Full slideshow here.

Smokes

Phayao really is a perfectly beautiful place, and I love the mountains around our town. Unfortunately, it hasn't rained since October and there are like a billion forest fires burning throughout the north. Add in that most of the rice farmers (I think) burn their fields around this time of year.. and suddenly the mountains are gone.

September (gorgeous!):


Two weeks ago (gone!):


I spent a lot of time apologizing to both the Japanese and Scott and Jenni (our friends here two weeks ago) and explaining the pyro rice farmer dilemma. I don't think anyone blames me for making the mountains disappear, but I do it anyway.

It's also going to be 100+ all week, which is odd since the lack of rain has all the leaves turning red. So it looks like October and feels like June and smells like camping (it's like a dream!).

So.. sorry Mom and Dad (visiting in less than a week). Actually — they live in Houston but grew up in Northern California, so whether we get smog or mountains, they'll feel right at home.

Moral Hazard

I think a lot of people have been struggling (myself included) with the "moral hazard" of the gov bailing out of those who either perpetuated the banking crisis and those who took on risky mortgages who had no business doing so. Obviously no one wants to reward mismanagement, stupidity and greed. And no one wants to enable or encourage such repeat behavior with prescedent for future government intervention.

But no one wants the entire system to collapse either, and this isn't an individual economic crisis.

So.. with housing plan and bailout II debates heating up, here are a couple good ones from over the weekend that added a bit of clarity to this.

David Brooks (more or less a conservative) who says dwelling on punishment isn't the answer:

Our moral and economic system is based on individual responsibility. It’s based on the idea that people have to live with the consequences of their decisions. This makes them more careful deciders. This means that society tends toward justice — people get what they deserve as much as possible.

...

Personally, I hate the idea of 10 guys sitting around in the White House trying to redesign huge swaths of the U.S. economy on legal pads.

But at least they seem to be driven by a spirit of moderation and restraint. They seem to be trying to keep as many market structures in place as possible so things can return to normal relatively smoothly.

And they seem to understand the big thing. The nation’s economy is not just the sum of its individuals. It is an interwoven context that we all share. To stabilize that communal landscape, sometimes you have to shower money upon those who have been foolish or self-indulgent. The greedy idiots may be greedy idiots, but they are our countrymen. And at some level, we’re all in this together. If their lives don’t stabilize, then our lives don’t stabilize.

And the New Yorker's James Surowiecki, who says the moral hazard isn't as big a risk as you might think:

Why might the effects of moral hazard be smaller than expected? To begin with, most bailouts aren’t like deposit insurance, which is certain and quick. Financial bailouts are uncertain and messy, and they typically occur only after institutions have already suffered extensive damage. Bear Stearns, for instance, was “saved” only after its shares had fallen almost ninety-five per cent from the previous year, and it seems unlikely that either its laid-off workers or its battered shareholders came out of the experience anxious to engage in more foolhardy behavior.

....

The patchiness of the moral-hazard argument doesn’t mean that we should simply rubber-stamp another bank bailout; that may be both unjust and a poor strategy for whipping the financial sector into shape. But it does mean that the failure of Lehman Brothers was an unnecessary and costly sacrifice to moral-hazard fundamentalism. It also means that we should not sit quietly by because we fear that government action today will lead to reckless market behavior years from now. Moral hazard has its costs. But, so far, our fear of it has proved much more expensive.

Anyway.. discuss.

About time..

No. No. Not my first haircut since August.

NATIONALIZATION.

Way more exciting. May or may not be the solution, but it shouldn't be a taboo part of the conversation.

Discuss..

I'm all for this

Measures like this one (more backstory here) and efforts to restrict bottled water in nations that don't need it... even if the punishment seems a bit harsh.

Delhi to outlaw plastic bags

Customers and shopkeepers in India's capital face jail sentence or stiff fine for using polythene bags

Carry a plastic bag in Delhi and you could be imprisoned for five years. Officials in India's capital have decided that the only way to stem the rising tide of poly­thene is to outlaw the plastic shopping bag.

According to the official note, the "use, storage and sale" of plastic bags of any kind or thickness will be banned. The new guideline means that customers, shopkeepers, hoteliers and hospital staff face a 100,000 rupee fine (£1,370) and a possible jail sentence for using non-biodegradable bags.

Delhi has been quietly filling up with plastic bags in recent years as the economy boomed and western-style shopping malls sprang up in the city. There are no reliable figures for bag use but environmentalists say more than 10m a day are used in the capital every day. Not only are the streets littered with them, but polythene takes hundreds of years to decompose and creates demand for oil, which is used to make plastics.

At first the ban will be lightly implemented, giving people time to switch to jute, cotton, recycled-paper and compostable bags.

Newspapers in India quoted city officials as saying that the authorities did not "want people to be harassed and no prosecution will take place immediately; [once they] understand that by using plastic bags they will be in contempt of court, they will start using other material". The first targets in Delhi will be the industrial units that manufacture the plastic bags in the capital, which officials say will be closed down.

Civil servants said that punitive measures were needed after a law prohibiting all but the thinnest plastic bags – no thicker than 0.04mm – was ignored.

Although the government had originally concluded that plastic bags were too cheap and convenient to be disposed of, the authorities appear to have been swayed by environmentalists who pointed out that used bags were clogging drains and so providing breeding grounds for malaria and dengue fever.

I remember signs discouraging plastic bag use around downtown Delhi. Here in Thailand (relatively clean) they give you a bag and a straw with every bottled coke you buy at a 7/11. It just gets habitual, so in a place like Delhi overflowing with trash — good for them.

Living/traveling through smoggy emerging economies does make me both thankful for a strong environmental lobby in the US, and realize just how much of America's industrial pollution has simply been pushed overseas.

high-five inauguration

Via Mike..

My Heart is Like a Cabbage

Happy Valentine's from India..

As a Valentine's Day card smoldered, more than 100 members of the Hindu extremist group Shiv Sena gathered in central New Delhi chanted "Death to Valentine's Day" and "People who celebrate Valentine's Day should be pelted with shoes!"

...

This is a conspiracy to misguide the young people of our country," said Jai Bhagwan Goel, chief of the Shiv Sena's north India branch.

In his hand the card, with its image of a Victorian couple pictured in a tepid peck under a parasol, went up in flames.

"We have come to know that in America, even unmarried girls as young as 11 or 12 years have become mothers ... and every second man there is divorced," Goel told reporters after reducing several greeting cards to a small pile of ash. "This is their culture - it cannot be accepted here."

...

Weather intervened to stop Hindu extremists in the northern city of Lucknow from carrying out their threats to beat couples found kissing, hugging or even holding hands in public. With torrential rains pouring down, young lovers stayed out of the parks where the usually seek privacy.

Still, even if some lovers stayed out of sight, they made their desires known, placing ads on special Valentine's Day pages in newspapers.

"My heart is like a cabbage," declared a man named Manoj to some lucky lady. "Divided into two; the leaves are for others and the heart for you."

Scott and Jenni, world-class canoodlers who just spent a week with us in Thailand, spent Valentine's in Mumbai. Hope they're ok.

"As an atheist, I truly believe Africa needs God"

During church in Chiang Mai today, a pastor mentioned this article from The Times of London subtitled "Missionaries, not aid money, are the solution to Africa's biggest problem — the crushing passivity of the people's mindset."

"But travelling in Malawi refreshed another belief, too: one I've been trying to banish all my life, but an observation I've been unable to avoid since my African childhood. It confounds my ideological beliefs, stubbornly refuses to fit my world view, and has embarrassed my growing belief that there is no God.

Now a confirmed atheist, I've become convinced of the enormous contribution that Christian evangelism makes in Africa: sharply distinct from the work of secular NGOs, government projects and international aid efforts. These alone will not do. Education and training alone will not do. In Africa Christianity changes people's hearts. It brings a spiritual transformation. The rebirth is real. The change is good."

The author (obviously an atheist) writes from experience throughout southeast Africa about the charitable work done by missionaries, but also (more interestingly) the large-scale psychological affect Christians can have on rural communities.

It's fantastic. I love the way this guy thinks. Read the whole thing, but here's an excerpt:

Anxiety - fear of evil spirits, of ancestors, of nature and the wild, of a tribal hierarchy, of quite everyday things - strikes deep into the whole structure of rural African thought. Every man has his place and, call it fear or respect, a great weight grinds down the individual spirit, stunting curiosity. People won't take the initiative, won't take things into their own hands or on their own shoulders.

How can I, as someone with a foot in both camps, explain? When the philosophical tourist moves from one world view to another he finds - at the very moment of passing into the new - that he loses the language to describe the landscape to the old. But let me try an example: the answer given by Sir Edmund Hillary to the question: Why climb the mountain? “Because it's there,” he said.

To the rural African mind, this is an explanation of why one would not climb the mountain. It's... well, there. Just there. Why interfere? Nothing to be done about it, or with it. Hillary's further explanation - that nobody else had climbed it - would stand as a second reason for passivity.

Christianity, post-Reformation and post-Luther, with its teaching of a direct, personal, two-way link between the individual and God, unmediated by the collective, and unsubordinate to any other human being, smashes straight through the philosphical/spiritual framework I've just described. It offers something to hold on to to those anxious to cast off a crushing tribal groupthink. That is why and how it liberates.

Those who want Africa to walk tall amid 21st-century global competition must not kid themselves that providing the material means or even the knowhow that accompanies what we call development will make the change. A whole belief system must first be supplanted.

Once again.. read the whole thing. Here.

Cepilla Los Dientes

It's not that we don't have a bunch of friends/relationships/kids following us around in Thailand. It's just that with the nature of Con's foundation/my job/the culture here/our speaking Spanish instead of Thai.. well.. ok we don't. And it's definitely not the integrated, dynamic community we had in the Dominican Republic.

So.. with that in mind.. our dear friend Robin, who runs things in the DR, set up some Skype time (her pictures here) with the kids we miss most from last summer.



And Ruben, about whom I will one day publish a short story:




It kills. We hung up and wanted to cry.

Paul Krugman..

.. on the stimulus after Obama struck out with the GOP :

"Aren’t you glad that Obama watered it down and added ineffective tax cuts, so as to win bipartisan support?"

Anyway.. here's a good back and forth about the stimulus, featuring one of Con's professors.

And David Brooks articulates.. I guess.. how I'm feeling about it.

Throughout 2008, Larry Summers, the Harvard economist, built the case for a big but surgical stimulus package. Summers warned that a “poorly provided fiscal stimulus can have worse side effects than the disease that is to be cured.” So his proposal had three clear guidelines.

First, the stimulus should be timely. The money should go out “almost immediately.” Second, it should be targeted. It should help low- and middle-income people. Third, it should be temporary. Stimulus measures should not raise the deficits “beyond a short horizon of a year or at most two.”

Summers was proposing bold action, but his concept came with safeguards: focus on the task at hand, prevent the usual Washington splurge and limit long-term fiscal damage.

Now Barack Obama is president, and Summers has become a top economic adviser. Yet the stimulus approach that has emerged on Capitol Hill abandoned the Summers parameters.

Updike

John Updike died yesterday. He wrote with "a journalist’s sociological eye and a poet’s gift for metaphor."

Here's a good poem he wrote about a dog that my dad read to us at dinner once:

Dog's Death

She must have been kicked unseen or brushed by a car.
Too young to know much, she was beginning to learn
To use the newspapers spread on the kitchen floor
And to win, wetting there, the words, "Good dog!
Good dog!"

We thought her shy malaise was a shot reaction.
The autopsy disclosed a rupture in her liver.
As we teased her with play, blood was filling her skin
And her heart was learning to lie down forever.

Monday morning, as the children were noisily fed
And sent to school, she crawled beneath the youngest's bed.
We found her twisted and limp but still alive.
In the car to the vet's, on my lap, she tried

To bite my hand and died. I stroked her warm fur
And my wife called in a voice imperious with tears.
Though surrounded by love that would have upheld her,
Nevertheless she sank and, stiffening, disappeared.

Back home, we found that in the night her frame,
Drawing near to dissolution, had endured the shame
Of diarrhoea and had dragged across the floor
To a newspaper carelessly left there. Good dog.

The [Middle] of Poverty

The history of foreign aid and charitable giving is riddled with examples of well-intentioned westerners making things worse. NYU economist William Easterly has made a career out of pointing this out, highlighting in two books I've (um.. halfway) read about how giant, top-down, state-based aid pushes that get a ton of attention are lazy, ineffectual and often harmful (he supports grass roots, bottom-up approaches instead).. and are essentially reincarnations of messianic colonial motivations.

And now Easterly has a blog:

Today, I foist a new blog called Aid Watch on the blogosphere. The objective is to be brutally honest when aid is not helping the poor, but also praising it when it is.

...

We fiercely debate domestic spending bills that waste affluent taxpayers’ money with a few millions on a bridge to nowhere, so why should we be NICE when the head of the world’s premier aid agency outlines virtually zero accountability for helping the world’s poorest people?

He's an important voice in an interesting conversation.. and he at least partly makes sense.

It makes people feel good when the UN launches a program to cut poverty in half, or when rock star economists like Columbia's Jeffrey Sachs travel the world with Bono and Angelina Jolie touting books like his famous The End of Poverty. People want to believe in big ideas and pushes, especially if someone else (governments) does the dirty work for them. But it doesn't necessarily mean the big ideas work. Every ten years poverty becomes trendy, someone puts on a big concert, countries pledge big money to meet big goals, and planning starts for the next inevitable big concert ten years down the road.

But Sachs is undeniably a heavyweight, and makes several salient counter-arguments. And the debate touched off an ongoing, somewhat contentious (albeit important) back and forth between the two. Other respectable economists we read in development classes jumped in (Jagdish Bhagwati thinks they're both wrong, Amartya Sen thinks Easterly makes good, but overblown points).

The result, if you follow it casually, is a bit dizzying and dismaying. If the world's smartest people can't agree on clear actions for attacking poverty, and if misguided (even if well-intentioned) action can only make things worse, why try?

But at least the blogosphere is making these debates more accessible and dynamic.. and a lively exchange of ideas seems like the right place to start.

The Bright Side

From The Bangkok Post..

Council defends circumcision error

The Medical Council of Thailand has come to the defence of a male nurse at a clinic who mistakenly circumcised a boy who wanted to have an abscess in his mouth removed.

On Thursday, Rattanaporn Manaschuen, the mother of the 12-year-old boy, complained to the Public Health Ministry after her son was circumcised at a clinic in Samut Prakan's Phra Pradaeng district on Monday. She said the boy actually went there for treatment of an abscess in his mouth.

Acting Medical Council president Somsak Lohlekha said it was a case of miscommunication.

Dr Somsak said the doctor at the clinic correctly diagnosed the boy with a mouth abscess and did nothing wrong. The doctor wrote "excision" on an order assigning the nurse to perform the operation.

But the male nurse confused "excision" with "circumcision" and proceeded to cut off the boy's foreskin.

Dr Somsak said the mistake was unintentional.

He said the doctor was not to blame, although the matter would go before a council panel on medical ethics.

"Usually, a circumcision is a minor operation and a doctor can assign a nurse to do it," Dr Somsak said. He said looking on the bright side, the accidental circumcision would help the boy keep his genitalia clean and lower the risk of cancer.

Tous les morts-nes forment une armee

Haiti is a bit of a haunting place. Once while there, we climbed up to a fort atop a mountain to gaze down and try to understand the UN tanks, bribe-hungry cops, colorful culture and charming (if glassy-eyed) people — and to stop and ask what the hell went wrong.

Then I left my camera in a taxi.

Thankfully our friend Chris didn't, and just sent us this picture:

identify please

found in our bathroom:


there are cobras, vipers and kraits all over northern thailand. it would be a good story to have a pet king cobra living in our bathroom, but, sadly, i don't think this is one of them.

first person to identify gets our pet mongoose when we come home.

me too, bro

Weekly Kristof

Nick Kristof on trafficking again, this time with a small bit of good news:

I just returned again to Ms. Khorn’s brothel to interview her, and found something remarkable. It had gone broke and closed, like many of the brothels in Poipet. One lesson is that the business model is more vulnerable than it looks. There are ways we can make enslaving girls more risky and less profitable, so that traffickers give up in disgust.

....

Virgin sales are the profit center for many brothels in Asia (partly because they stitch girls up and resell them as virgins several times over), and thus these sales are their economic vulnerability as well. If we want to undermine sex trafficking, the best way is to pressure governments like Cambodia’s to organize sting operations and arrest both buyers and sellers of virgin girls. Cambodia has shown it is willing to take at least some action, and that is one that would strike at the heart of the business model.

Sexual slavery is like any other business: raise the operating costs, create a risk of jail, and the human traffickers will quite sensibly shift to some other trade. If the Obama administration treats 21st-century slavery as a top priority, we can push many of the traffickers to quit in disgust and switch to stealing motorcycles instead.

Note about nick: He mentions in this column his experience buying and liberating a pair of sex workers (actually when I first remember reading his column). You can read that riveting series of columns starting here.

In my last column, I described the sex trafficking in places like Cambodia as a modern form of slavery, and I believe that. But the scene that unfolded next underscored the moral complexity of a world in which some girls are ambivalent about being rescued and not all brothel owners are monsters. Some brothel owners use beatings and locked rooms to enslave their girls, but most use debts and ostensible kindness to manipulate them -- and the girls are often so naïve, so stigmatized by everyone else and so broken in spirit that this works.

test

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Noble Beast

You can stream Andrew Bird's new album on NPR here.

Red Shirt Rumble

The New Mandala, an excellent blog I follow, has an interesting post up about the recent red shirt protests. It sheds light on some key differences that emerged in the most recent unrest, and it's semi the kind of post I went to the October 7th protests to write (if only I had had more than an ounce of understanding of Thai politics then, plus a better camera and a blog worth reading. But still.. indulging curiosity about how movements happen and how societies function and fail).

Background: During the previous administration, the yellow-shirted PAD didn't like the Takshin/Samak/Somchai prime minister succession and had a nasty habit of surrounding parliament and government houses and besieging airports in order to express as much. The previous government fell (some say by corruption charges; others by a judicial coup), which pissed off the red-shirted Takshin/Samak/Somchai supporters (who had democratically elected said PMs) and brought the red shirts out into the streets in full force (they had been counter-protesting for a long time.. but never really with the direct intention of stunting governmental procedure).

Last Tuesday, Constance and I attended a ceremony where the government apologized and gave compensation to the people injured in the October 7th PAD protest. The day before, the red shirts replicated the PAD's parliament siege in order to keep the new government from starting work, and the protest peaked on the Tuesday when we were nearby receiving our apology.

It made us nervous. I tried to keep Con away from TVs. Thousands of riot police were stacked up and pushing back against the thousands of red shirted protesters, and the whole thing just made me sick as I knew it could only escalate.

It didn't. From The New Mandala:

It was a welcome change to be walking away from a street protest without a feeling of disgust and sadness; without feeling on edge from the mess that I had seen and photographed.

The last day of the Parliament siege by the Red Shirts saw a few lightly injured people. Most of them had fainted during the pushing at the side gate of Parliament when the police unsuccessfully tried to open it.

We know about the potential for violence in any street protest group, including the Red Shirts. Yet this protest was very carefully controlled by the Red Shirt leadership. Violent incidents were the absolute exception, and were immediately stopped by the leadership who were constantly at the frontline. The rhetoric on the stages was a careful balance of edging people on, humour and constant reminders to stay within the confines of the law. At night, Red Shirt leaders took turns singing songs on the stage. The protesters sang along and danced.

I don't want to sink into red shirts are all good/yellows are all bad sentiment. Both movements have worthy complaints to bitch about, and both movements display all the maddening side effects of groupthink and moral absolutism and cultish/end times rhetoric. The red shirts are likely to restart their protests after the holidays, and violence could ensue.

But..

The police and the red shirts showed incredible restraint last week in ways that the PAD increasingly didn't as their various demonstrations escalated. And for that, the police and the red shirts should both be commended.

nick kristof tells the world like it is (updated)

a friend of ours in bangkok got to visit a brothel a couple weeks ago where the girls were locked and presented in glass cages. it really is this bad.

anyway.. here's kristof on sex slavery. watch the video attached to the article. sigh.

(update: i think i unintentionally implied that i'm friends with kristof. our friend in bangkok is not kristof.)

Yes, I know it’s hard to read this. But it’s infinitely more painful for Pross to recount the humiliations she suffered, yet she summoned the strength to do so — and to appear in a video posted online with this column — because she wants people to understand how brutal sex trafficking can be.

Pross was 13 and hadn’t even had her first period when a young woman kidnapped her and sold her to a brothel in Phnom Penh. The brothel owner, a woman as is typical, beat Pross and tortured her with electric current until finally the girl acquiesced.

She was kept locked deep inside the brothel, her hands tied behind her back at all times except when with customers.

Brothel owners can charge large sums for sex with a virgin, and like many girls, Pross was painfully stitched up so she could be resold as a virgin. In all, the brothel owner sold her virginity four times.

And from Kristof's previous column..

As in many brothels, the torture of choice was electric shocks. Sina would be tied down, doused in water and then prodded with wires running from the 220-volt wall outlet. The jolt causes intense pain, sometimes evacuation of the bladder and bowel — and even unconsciousness.

Shocks fit well into the brothel business model because they cause agonizing pain and terrify the girls without damaging their looks or undermining their market value.

After the beatings and shocks, Sina said she would be locked naked in a wooden coffin full of biting ants. The coffin was dark, suffocating and so tight that she could not move her hands up to her face to brush off the ants. Her tears washed the ants out of her eyes.

She was locked in the coffin for a day or two at a time, and she said this happened many, many times.