robaus

I have seriously tried googling: Abhisit PDRC reforms. But I can’t find any concrete examples of a single reform. About a week ago I got onto a Thai pro PDRC site (can’t find it now) with some reforms mentioned. I obviously had to use Google Translate to view. It was still all vague...of course that could be the fault of the translation. Please could you explain in simple but concrete terms what the reforms are, or point me in the direction of a site where they are explained Are they: .. rules to exclude certain politicians .. realignment of electoral boundaries ..set quotas of unelected politicians in the Senate or Parliament ..anti corruption/vote buying measures ..some form of proportional representation, along the lines of Australia, Israel, Netherlands, Spain, Canada http://en.wikipedia...._representation Almost 30 people have died so far...for what? Give us a clue.

>> Suthep Thaugsuban, secretary general of the People's Democratic Reform Committee, announced today if not enough people come out to join his rallies to pressure the 24 remaining ministers to resign by May 26, he will surrender to police on the following day. He said if over one million people do not come out to support his campaign, he would stop the fight on May 27. ...Ah, there’s his Get Out Of Jail free card. The bloke’s had more “final all out†performances than Sinatra. >> On Monday, the demonstrators will be dispatched to various ministries or the residences of remaining ministers to demand them to submit their resignations. Suthep said the people would hound the 24 remaining ministers wherever they go to demand them to resign. He would welcome tips from the public about the whereabouts of the ministers. ...This is obviously where McCain, Palin, and Romney went wrong...they should’ve got the NRA to lay siege to Obama and Biden’s homes until they withdrew their candidacy.

Make sure you have 2 inches by 2 inches photos. (Check!) I thought I had dotted all the i's etc but the bastards caught me on that last one....but they happened to have an expensive photo machine outside the office for your convenience. I am full bottle on India travel ...been there many times from Kashmir to the tip of Cape Comorin. If you need any advice, PM me.

The Perth consulate takes two business days to issue visa. I don't want to leave it till the last minutes in case of the unforeseen, so I get visa 2 weeks before I leave. She writes on visa both entries must be activated 3 months from issue date. The clock is already ticking... get visa 2 weeks before I leave + 2 months 1st entry = just 2 weeks left to travel other places I enjoy...Nepal, India, Philippines, Cambodia..before I have to dash back to Thailand before the original 3 months activation expiry kicks in. There must be quite a few other long term travellers touring SE Asia in the same boat. Maybe I should try one of the other consulates in Aus or the embassy in Canberra. See if they will give me 6 months to use the 2 * 60 day entries. Such is life!

I am exactly in the position that Munch mentions. I don't work, and don't want to retire in Thailand, and I certainly don't want to marry a Thai...had a Thai de facto once, but she ran off with my best friend.."Whoever he is?" (Thanks for the joke,Tommy Cooper). A double entry 60 day tourist visa would do me fine, if only they'd make the activate by period 6 months from date of issue.

Som nam na for the stupid way Thais react to a problem. Target the main overstaying, illegally working nationalities, at the same time being more liberal towards the least offending nationalities, as Malaysia and Singapore do. Target workplaces. Make 2 month tourist, retirement and non immigrant O visas easier to obtain. Help not hinder visitors who want to be legit. Rather than forcing visitors down the visa run path, make money out of them! Charge them 3,000-5,000 baht for unlimited 2 month visa extensions at the local immigration office. Their coffers would be bulging with fees, sufficient to employ more clerical officers and illegal migrant enforcers. Instead there’s some bureaucratic joker in charge who thinks of the most stupid, petty way of throwing the baby out with the bath water. TIT

So if you buy a $250? Cambodian business visa valid for a year, as of 2015 you could technically come and go as you please into Thailand?? Wouldn't it be a wonderful way of giving Thai immi the finger...Cambodia gets all the money;Thailand gets all the punters gratis for whom they make it difficult to obtain a visa. TIT.

There used to be a very friendly little consulate in Perth, Aus that gave me non immigrant O visas, when I showed the Aussie lady secretary my Pattaya condo title deeds. I have never worked in Thailand and never overstayed...only ever spent money there. Then the consul himself retired ..he was in his 70s I think. The consulate was closed for a couple of years. Now reopened...the new broom and jobsworth, a Thai woman, wouldn’t give me a non immigrant O. She said they are only available to applicants with a Thai partner. Is she correct? So I requested a double entry tourist visa. I genuinely wanted to visit some friends in Cambodia for a couple of weeks then return to Thailand. I got the visa but she advised to be careful about the dates because it was only valid for 3 months activation from date of issue. I pointed out very politely that in the past a single entry was valid for 3 months activation and a double entry should be valid for 6 months activation. She didn’t take too kindly to criticism, and wouldn’t extend activation period. Is she correct? So I had to cut my Cambodian visit by a week and just scraped in on the day to activate my second entry. If they want visitors to apply for full visas why make it so hard to obtain and use them? Of course we all know the next knee jerk move when tourist numbers fall will be free visas just like they did after protesters closed the airport. TIT.

Do you have a moment? I'd like to share these thoughts with you....

I think you'll find that many of the above problems were created by the GFC and the recession...and we all know who caused that! You can't wave a magic wand and cure the mother of all economic fuckups instantly. Obama is getting there as the DJI chart below shows I think this chart of the Dow Jones Index speaks volumes. It’s the net worth of the top US companies. It represents a nation’s prosperity, and your life savings in pension funds. On the left is Dubya’s term in office where he recklessly encouraged a market bubble deliberately unregulated by his cowboy financial advisers Greenspan, Rubin and Summers (recommended viewing “The Warning†http://www.pbs.org/w...e/warning/view/) If Mc Cain had won the 2008 election that trough would have continued down because Republican policy was “let the banks and car industries etc go bankrupt†along with your life savings. We would have had a decade long depression. Fortunately Obama won and the market clearly reversed from the moment he took office in 2008 and is still rising today, despite obstructionist Republican politics who put their self interest and hatred of Obama before the welfare of their country. If Americans united on economic recovery, (plus peace in the Middle East..no more futile costly wars!)...we could all have a new golden age of prosperity.

The whole Arab world has agreed to recognise Israel in return basically for a few acres of land swaps equal in area to land occupied by Israel illegally since 1967 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2002_Arab_League_summit and reindorsed in 2007 in Riyadh Israel’s reply is to greedily hold onto stolen land and grab even more. How can peace exist when someone occupies your land? Hamas was not created from a vacuum. I hope Obama can knock a few heads together to create a peace agreement in his second term. Without a just peace , violence will escalate and it might come to the shores of Israel’s chief backer the USA, same as the IRA did with the UK...$300 car bombs that cause $2b worth of damage in every major US city. With spoilt brat friends like Israel, who needs enemies?

Israel has its fair share of Jewish nutters who want to ethnically cleanse Christians and Muslims from a racist Jews only state. JERUSALEM -- A Jerusalem monastery, built on the spot where tradition holds the tree from which Jesus' cross was made, was defaced with graffiti bearing the hallmarks of militant Jewish settlers, police said on Tuesday. "Death to Christians" was daubed in Hebrew on the outer walls of the Monastery of the Cross, an 11th-century fortress-like holy site situated in a valley overlooked by Israel's parliament. Army Radio reported that "Maccabees of Migron" was painted on the monastery, too, The Associated Press reported. Maccabees were ancient Jewish heroes, and Migron is an unauthorized settlement facing a court-ordered evacuation. Such acts originally targeted West Bank mosques but have recently expanded to include a mosque inside Israel, Israeli military bases, and now, a Christian holy site. Police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld said the words "Price Tag" were also painted overnight by the vandals, who damaged two cars parked outside the monastery in the attack, according to Reuters. The slogan, used by Jewish settlers in vandalism attacks on mosques and Palestinian homes in the occupied West Bank, refers to the retribution they say they will exact for any attempt by the Israeli government to curb settlement in the territory. Israeli settlement building up 20 percent, watchdog says http://worldnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2012/02/07/10339856-death-to-christians-suspected-jewish-extremists-deface-monastery?lite

>>Live and let live ...it's a pity the Christian USA and UK didn't display the same attitude in Iran when the CIA and MI6 orchestrated a coup to boot out the democratically elected Prime Minister Mosaddegh to replace him ultimately with the Shah to help fill the coffers of US and European oil companies. Or prop up royal family dictatorships through the Gulf for the same reason. Or Guatemala in 1954 Or Indonesia in 1958 Or Cuba in 1959 Or Congo in the 1960s Or Iraq in the 1960s, 90s and 2003 Or Dominican Republic in 1961 Or Vietnam in 1963 Or Chile 1973 Or Nicaragua 1981 ...and the good ole Christian folks are still at it today, buttering us all up for another war against Iran ..the 3rd war in 10 years fought on Israel’s behalf...but you can bet your bottom $ Israel won’t be sending any troops.... just as they never have in the past. Let the Americans, Brits and any other mugs fight it on their behalf. Suckers!

Here's the UK, Canadian, NZ and Aus Head of State and her 2 successors hiding behind her bullet proof Harry Potter cloak of invisibility...speaks volumes about our comparative lifestyles, eh!

And the uncle was supposed to be one of the good guys! If a professionally trained cop does a dopey thing, what chance have the general public got against nutters who can buy an assault rifle at a gun fair without even a police check. In the UK that tragedy couldn't have happened, since the regular police don't carry guns, and in Aus I'm pretty sure cops have to leave their weapons at the police station which they collect when they arrive for duty. The US mayhem continues... Two US volunteer firefighters have been shot dead and two injured while responding to an emergency call in the town of Webster in New York state. http://www.bbc.co.uk...canada-20838925

What they really need is a gun store in every school so that the infants can protect themselves. The NRA suggested creating a database of the mentally ill ...perhaps they should use their own membership list for starters In the week after the Sandy Hook shootings, more than 500 more Americans have been killed by guns, most of them committing suicide, around 200 murdered and about 20 killed accidentally. What I find so weird is that a country with such similar values and morals to the rest of the civilised world and that produces more Nobel Prize winners than the rest of us put together can be so dumb when it comes to gun control. Americans seem impervious to the facts. Doesn’t the average American notice that the murder rate in the US is four times what it is in the UK? Do they notice that London, one of the world's biggest cities, is about to record fewer than 100 homicides a year for the first time in decades? Do they, blase as they are to news reports of shootings, notice the death of a three-year-old in Oklahoma who shot himself in the head last weekend with a gun he found in his aunt 's house, that belonged to his Highway Patrol uncle? Americans obviously love their guns more than their lives and their children.

What they really need is a gun store in every school so that the infants can protect themselves. The NRA suggested creating a database of the mentally ill ...perhaps they should use their own membership list for starters In the week after the Sandy Hook shootings, more than 500 more Americans have been killed by guns, most of them committing suicide, around 200 murdered and about 20 killed accidentally. What I find so weird is that a country with such similar values and morals to the rest of the civilised world and that produces more Nobel Prize winners than the rest of us put together can be so dumb when it comes to gun control. Americans seem impervious to the facts. Doesn’t the average American notice that the murder rate in the US is four times what it is in the UK? Do they notice that London, one of the world's biggest cities, is about to record fewer than 100 homicides a year for the first time in decades? Do they, blase as they are to news reports of shootings, notice the death of a three-year-old in Oklahoma who shot himself in the head last weekend with a gun he found in his aunt 's house, that belonged to his Highway Patrol uncle? Americans obviously love their guns more than their lives and their children.

Like it It really is quite possible and pleasant too to live in a society where guns are kept well away from the general no-need-to-own population. I apologise to Americans on this forum I previously called weirdos. I was angry at the preventable slaughter of innocent children. Personally, I would like to see zero ownership. But perhaps make a start by banning all weapons that a farmer or a hunter would find unnecessary..such as [semi] automatic rifles and handguns. I have a good Canadian friend who hunts with a crossbow to give the game better odds and himself more skilful sport.

Like they did in Australia. Cash buy back for guns and destroy them. Include amnesty for illegally owned weapons. Just get them out of circulation. Allow 6 months leeway period. Thereafter, massive fines and imprisonment for possessing a gun.

“People kill people, not guns. Knives, cars, baseball bats can kill too†etc ..is all bullshit blah blah blah. Yes, of course nutters all over the world will find ways to kill if they really want to, BUT not with so much ease as they seem to find in the USA. Look at the stats. http://en.wikipedia....ted_death_rate 36 times more deaths related to firearms per 100,000 than in UK 9 times more than in Australia. Don’t you Americans realise that it is actually possible to experience normal peaceful non violent entire lives without having access to firearms? More than half the world’s population does it every single day. Some people live in countries where they never ever even see a gun! You are the weirdo exceptions, shaking you heads in shock and confusion when the simple truth stands out like dogs' balls.You're still clinging mindlessly to some outdated legislation of your founding fathers. Yes, you can always find exceptions...Dunblane, Port Arthur etc but that’s the point..they are exceptions. American once a month copycat massacres now seem to be the norm. Most people in the civilised world want to lead average peace loving lives. WTF you Americans desire to live at the extreme stupid edge of the bell curve beggars belief. Well, it doesn’t really ..it’s just gutless politicians who mouth platitudes and shed tears when these obscenities happen... but go back to the polls in silence when it comes to election time to cover their arses for fear they’ll upset the powerful NRA. 20 innocent 5-6 year old children a few days ago looking forward to their Christmas treats who are now dead is disgusting and was preventable. Just imagine your grief if they were your own children or grand children. You obsessively gun loving Americans are almost as mad as the lunatic who murdered them, for allowing this to happen. Until you get your fucking act together, we’ll read these same headlines again and again. If 99.9% of the population find it incredibly difficult, if not impossible to own a gun, then you won't feel the need to own one either. The only gun control should be zero ownership. If you want to practise marksmanship, join the army!

Hilary for President 2016 http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/hillary-clinton-steps-down-but-can-she-ever-step-up-8360465.html

The usage of Myanmar is quite controversial... the military dictatorship's attempt to change the brand name while they were changing the constitution. http://en.wikipedia..../Names_of_Burma

....same as they were in 1836. Where's Jim Bowie and Davy Crockett when you need them:-)

Obama should send a gun boat to Charleston, same as last time this happened :-)

Thanks for the info, FM... I didn't know that. btw.. Fox News reports Obama winning the popular vote too...and they never lie! hehe Obama 54,166,024 Romney 53,367,097