Good morning,

The BBC has a story on the eradication of poppy fields in the so-called Golden Triangle area and contrasting the apparent success there with the failure to achieve the same in Afghanistan. There is a certain sense of superiority from the head of the Mae Fah Luang Foundation who compares the ‘Thai way’ of persuading people to grow other crops (backed by military force) with the ‘British’ and ‘American’ ways in Afghanistan, which are supposed to be too much concentrated on destruction of poppy fields. I rather suspect that this ‘Thai way’ was rather forced on an unwilling Thai military by the Americans during the period of the War in Vietnam and, had American air assets not been used to identify and destroy the fields, the Golden Triangle would be rather more productive today.

Today’s update on the ‘herbs are hazardous substances’ story: farmers dumped chillies and galangal on the ground outside parliament to bring the issue to public attention – it is a good photo opportunity and the government is being made to look rather foolish. Presumably it will have to backtrack at some stage. The order is being suspended until subsequent decisions are made: apparently, “gathering of public opinion would take between two and three months.” Indeed. A cynical person might think that this kind of high-profile story is being used to distract attention from more important matters.

The auto industry in Thailand is asking for a bail-out, which the government is considering. The issues are the same as in the rest of the world: vehicle sales have plunged and companies are in big trouble avoiding bankruptcy. Governments consider giving money to the companies because bankruptcy would lead to a large number of job losses and a poor return on all the money that was used to convince those companies to invest here in the first place.

My article on Friedrich Engels has been published at Socyberty, while my review of The Hidden Family by Charles Stross has been published at Bookideas.

Back tomorrow.

They have eaten all the birds, haven’t they?