Thread: The politics behind Thailand's floods

So Sukhumbhand Paribatra wears yellow boots and pink underwear.


enough said.

http://desmond.yfrog.com/Himg857/sca...=640&ysize=640

Originally Posted by DrB0b

Amazing how part of the sticker appears to be floating just off the surface of the boat and how it's perfectly flat on a curved surface. Also pretty impressive how they took the time to get the sticker made up, considering. Just sayin', like.

Good photoshoping though DrBob almost as superior to SD selective cut and paste

Oh, here we go.

Photograph evidence of something that puts the government in a bad light simply must be photo-shopped. No doubt this is also the point where we learn that some posters are experts in photoshop and know all there is to know about it.

You just have to love the straight edges they left when they cut and pasted....

Originally Posted by Moonraker

Oh, here we go.

Photograph evidence of something that puts the government in a bad light simply must be photo-shopped. No doubt this is also the point where we learn that some posters are experts in photoshop and know all there is to know about it.

Some will always insist to finding some sort of conspiratorial activity in most everything. Especially if those in question are blinded purely by fabricated political notions, less socially connected ones.

Originally Posted by Moonraker

Oh, here we go.

Photograph evidence of something that puts the government in a bad light simply must be photo-shopped. No doubt this is also the point where we learn that some posters are experts in photoshop and know all there is to know about it.

Sorry Moonraker, it is a bad fake!

Originally Posted by DroversDog

Originally Posted by Moonraker

Oh, here we go.

Photograph evidence of something that puts the government in a bad light simply must be photo-shopped. No doubt this is also the point where we learn that some posters are experts in photoshop and know all there is to know about it.

Sorry Moonraker, it is a bad fake!

Looks just like a photo to me.

Five years from now (or whenever) when all the 'mourning' is finished and time comes for the jek-amart extended families to finally pay the piper, you can bet the media will be priority number-one in the firing line of the masses who want to 'left' the wrongs.

Originally Posted by Moonraker

Originally Posted by DroversDog

Originally Posted by Moonraker

Oh, here we go.

Photograph evidence of something that puts the government in a bad light simply must be photo-shopped. No doubt this is also the point where we learn that some posters are experts in photoshop and know all there is to know about it.

Sorry Moonraker, it is a bad fake!

Looks just like a photo to me.

Yes a photo which has been edited. The straight edges between where it clearly blended and non-blending is a dead give away. The stickers

Despite SD earlier denial that Abhisit was not in the Maldives Abhisit has suddenly admitted he was there.

Abhisit admits to going to the Maldives – but he is telling the truth about the reason?



Come on SD why didn’t Mark announce his “official” visit before he left?

Will he be publishing his findings on Maldivean flood control?

Why the evasiveness?

Why the secrecy?



Was he there officially?

Not according to President Office SEE HERE


seems like little Veji does not stop lying

[QUOTE=DroversDog;1916584]You just have to love the straight edges they left when they cut and pasted....

very nice evidence.

^^

Fuck me drovers, you might really be onto something there.

Who have thought that a photo of a straight line would show as a straight line close up. Fuck knows how that happened there, surely it should shows curly swirls or hexagons or something.

I really think you should present your findings to Stephen Hawking and Michio Kaku because you seem to have hit on something that defies the laws of physics and this will blow open the world of quantum physics. This is ground breaking stuff.

A photo of a straight line appearing as a straight line, who'da thunk it eh!

Originally Posted by Scaramanga

Abhisit admits to going to the Maldives – but he is telling the truth about the reason?

I'm sure there's an explanation. He probably wanted to witness, first hand, what it's like to be surrounded by water. Since his home on Soi 31 ain't about to be flooded anytime soon. Fat Boy will make sure of that. It's his "holy duty".

Originally Posted by Moonraker

^^

Fuck me drovers, you might really be onto something there.

Who have thought that a photo of a straight line would show as a straight line close up. Fuck knows how that happened there, surely it should shows curly swirls or hexagons or something.

I really think you should present your findings to Stephen Hawking and Michio Kaku because you seem to have hit on something that defies the laws of physics and this will blow open the world of quantum physics. This is ground breaking stuff.

A photo of a straight line appearing as a straight line, who'da thunk it eh!

Try getting your camera to do that

There is a straight line which lines up with the edge of the picture and not the surface it is supposed to be on!

Ok - can't resist. Couldn't it just be a sticker with white letters and a transparent rectangular background? Same as the other one (which isn't transparent)? The red one looks blurred deliberately to me though.

Originally Posted by Tom Sawyer

Ok - can't resist. Couldn't it just be a sticker with white letters and a transparent rectangular background? Same as the other one (which isn't transparent)? The red one looks blurred deliberately to me though.

You would not see a straight line, perfect 90 degrees corner and another straight line which both are parallel with the edges of the image at that camera angle and with the shape of the boat.

Originally Posted by Bettyboo

Actually, I hate the army more than any of them, but Prayuth has controlled his mouth well and seems to have focused his attention on the floods (yes, there are problems still, and they are political; we don't see them, but they are there...) rather than politics, well overtly anyway.

Its a good example of whats been part of the military-political doctrine on the UK since the UK last coup, just after the civil war. If you keep the army occupied and busy, they are happy and stay out of politics.

Given the lack of serious external security threats to thailand, they really should try keeping a decent fraction of them overseas doing UN peacekeeping. But then you would need to convince the UN they would not go running home the minute someone started shooting at them.

The Associated Press: Asia pays watery price for overdevelopment

Asia pays watery price for overdevelopment

By DENIS D. GRAY, Associated Press – 50 minutes ago

BANGKOK (AP) — As millions of urbanites living a modern lifestyle fear that torrents of floodwater will rage through Thailand's capital, some in enclaves of a bygone era watch the rising waters with hardly a worry — they live in old-fashioned houses perched on stilts with boats rather than cars parked outside.

"No problem for them. They'll be safe," says boatman Thongrat Sasai, plying his craft along some of the remaining canals that once crisscrossed Bangkok, earning it a "Venice of the East" moniker.

Like most of monsoon-swept Asia, the city and its environs have experienced periodic floods since it was founded more than two centuries ago. But recent decades have witnessed dramatic changes — from intense urbanization to rising waters blamed on climate change — that are turning once burdensome but bearable events into national crises.

"In a sense traditional society had an easier coexistence with water and flooding," says Aslam Perawaiz, an expert at the Bangkok-based Asian Disaster Preparedness Center. "Now, with such rapid development there's a much bigger problem."

Across Asia, areas of high population density are also those most prone to flooding and other water-related disasters, according to an Associated Press analysis of recent U.N. maps. When overlaid, the maps show such convergence in a wide arc from Pakistan and India, across Southeast Asia, to China, the Philippines and Indonesia.

This isn't mere bad luck. Historically, agrarian societies settled in the continent's great river basins, including the Ganges in India, the Mekong in Southeast Asia and the Chao Phraya in Bangkok. The gift of the rivers was fertile land, but it came at the price of almost annual flooding during the monsoon rains.

By providing sufficient food for growing populations, these rice bowls in turn spurred the rise of some of Asia's largest cities from Bangkok to Kolkata, India. The concentration of national resources and wealth means even smaller disasters can have a big impact.

Severe flooding this year has killed more than 1,000 people across Asia this year, and economic losses are running in the tens of billions of dollars.

Thailand, suffering its worst flooding in 50 years, offers a prime example of the perils of centralization and man's fractured bonds to the natural environment. Floodwater has spilled into outlying parts of Bangkok, and the government is scrambling to try to prevent the inundation of the city center.

The basin of the Chao Phraya, the River of Kings and its headwaters in the north, is home to 40 percent of the country's 66 million people. Bangkok is Thailand's industrial, financial, transportation and cultural heart, contributing more than 65 percent of its gross domestic product.

Growth, outward and upward, has been stunning. Bangkok's greater metropolitan area now covers nearly 3,000 square miles (more than 7,700 square kilometers) and continues to gnaw away at a surrounding countryside that once acted as a natural drain for water from northern mountain watersheds — themselves shedding more water because of widespread deforestation.

Highways, suburban malls and industrial parks, many now swamped and sustaining crippling losses, create dangerous buildups of water or divert it into populated areas rather than along traditional paths toward the Gulf of Thailand.

In Bangkok itself, streets where today's middle-aged residents used to play with water buffaloes as children are studded with towering, cheek-by-jowl condominiums and office blocks. The ratios of green space to population and area are among the lowest of any major city in the world.

To this add extreme and erratic weather, said to be triggered by climate change, which has increasingly buffeted Asian countries with storms, typhoons and floods. These include ones such as Thailand with a historically mild tropical climate.

Further, the legal and illegal pumping of underground water faster than it can be replaced has compressed water-storing aquifers, causing Bangkok to sink between 0.8 and 2 inches (2 to 5 centimeters) each year.

Scientists say the rise of waters in the nearby gulf as a result of global warming could combine with the sinking land to put Bangkok under water much of the time by mid-century.

Similar subsidence and sea-water encroachment is occurring in Jakarta, Ho Chi Minh City and Manila, where a typhoon last month triggered the worst flooding in the Philippine capital for decades.

Bangkok, some experts half-jokingly say, may well return to what it was in the 19th century: a water world where almost all its 400,000 inhabitants lived on raft-houses or homes on stilts. "The highways of Bangkok are not streets or roads, but the river and the canals," wrote British envoy Sir John Browning in 1855.

A century later, on advice of international development agencies, Bangkok began to fill in most of its canals — excellent conduits of floodwaters — to build more roads and combat malaria.

Sumet Jumsai, a prominent architect and scholar, says that Bangkok's early development "evolved with nature and not against it." But, he adds, by the early 1980s the city had become "an alien organism unrelated to its background and surroundings, a great concrete pad on partially filled land that ... must succumb to the flood every year."

Dikes and drainage pipes have been built, but nature appears to be keeping several steps ahead of manmade defenses.

"Of course this year the flood is maybe too great to stop, but all in all it was better in the old days," says Fairest Klatlek, sitting atop a poorly erected concrete flood wall through which water rushed into the first floor of her home. She and her electrician husband, like most of their neighbors, had built a ground-hugging, modern house along the Bangkok Noi canal.

Sumet is designing modern, functional buildings, including a university campus, built on stilt columns and proposes a revival of floating houses, promenades and markets.

"The underlying philosophy is the return to living with nature like in Bangkok of yesteryear," he says.

But Aslam, the disaster expert, says, "I don't think we can go back to living in harmony with nature as in the past. What is now necessary is huge investments and long-term planning by governments to mitigate such flooding."

FROC draws flak as civic network quits; supplies remain untouched - The Nation

FROC draws flak as civic network quits; supplies remain untouched

Kornchanok Raksaseri
The Nation October 26, 2011 1:08 am


The Flood Relief Operations Centre (FROC) now does not just have to handle the flooding situation, but it has the additional task of managing the donated supplies.

Now that ThaiFlood, a large civic network, has pulled out, the media and the public are left wondering what will be done with the donated supplies.

Paramate Minsiri, chief of ThaiFlood, said his group had pulled out because FROC was refusing to tell the truth about the situation. FROC, on the other hand, said in a statement that ThaiFlood pulled out because its representatives were not allowed to take part in all the meetings.

However, Paramate countered that ThaiFlood was being discriminated against when it came to distributing supplies. He said that his group of volunteers did their best to hand out flood relief items to victims, they had to queue up for a long time, while the red-shirt groups were able to get their supplies much faster.

Sombat Boonngam-anong, leader of a red-shirt faction which, is helping distribute supplies, said his group would continue helping people regardless of their political affiliation, adding that the blame game should be set aside until the crisis has passed.

Meanwhile, many people have turned to members of the media like the Nation Group, Thai PBS and Channel 3 to either make donations or ask for necessities instead of contacting FROC.

One volunteer contacted an editor at The Nation asking for flat-bottomed boats.

Yesterday, a reporter publicised photographs of unused boats and piles of stocks being kept at the FROC headquarters in Don Mueang Airport. In response to this, a volunteer, who owns boats and trucks, contacted FROC offering to distribute the items to victims in hard-to-access areas. Initially, the volunteers were only given 100 sets, though more items were released after some strings were pulled.

In addition, people have also been questioning the morals of Pheu Thai politicians, after photographs showed trucks carrying banners promoting certain politicians and implying that the supplies had come from them and not the people.

However, MP Karun Hosakul, who is in charge of distributing the supplies donated to FROC, denied that any such banners had been put up. He said the distribution operation was transparent and simple, and that the distributors only had to identify the area and the group of recipients.

However, the media will continue to keep a close eye on the flood-relief process for as long as such banners are seen and the donations remain untouched.

Well guys

How'r we doing?

How's the media attack and onslaught going this morning, using this crisis to chase Ms. Y and this ill-begotten Govt - elections.

They got 'em on the run yet?

I wont be able to comment on their agenda for awhile.

Heading out to a village, with signs attached to both sides of the pick-up.

As I understand it, we will drive through an adjoining village, following a sound truck.

The signs read something to the effect,

"Please donate water, rice and dry food to help flood victims - UDD (name of our city)

We are due there at 6:30, so gotta run

Listen, if there is any media slippage, and they accidentally say something off-agenda, positive about Ms. Y and this ill-begotten Govt., warn me OK?

The shock could be problematic.

Originally Posted by DroversDog

You just have to love the straight edges they left when they cut and pasted....

The photo is likely to be tampered, but it would not make any sense to tamper with this part of it, as its just a name.

The white sticker is the one that says for red shirts only, but in the close up you show these so called 'give away' straight lines extend to the right of the sticker under the rim of the boat as well. The difference in pixelation looks as its just to do with dealing with changes of colour in the picture, and occurs throughout it.

Nil point.