The protests by women working in a bra factory in Tak’s Mae Sot district reignited today and has grown to include more than 3,000 protesters according to the Bangkok Post. The more I read about this protest, the more I have to believe that news reports are actually describing separate incidents.

More than 3,000 female Burmese workers at a bra factory in Tak’s Mae Sot district again went on strike on Monday over an assault on two of an employee’s relatives by four security officers.

On Friday, workers from Top Form Brassiere (Mae Sot) Co Ltd gathered in front of the plant and demanded that police show them the two Burmese victims, Awor and Korla, whom they earlier suspected had been killed after the assault.

The protest ended on Sunday after police showed the angry workers that Awor was alive, while Korla returned to Burma to receive medical treatment.

The protest resumed on Monday. The workers demanded the plant owner rehire sacked Burmese workers and provide them with the welfare benefits they were entitled to under the law.

Yes, I know that many of these TED For The Holiday videos are repeats here at Have Coffee Will Write. But I’m including them for two reasons: first, they’re part of TED’s For The Holidays series and well worth watching again, and second, TED has made them all available via audio download to put on your laptop, mp3 player or phone for you — to keep at-the-ready on your laptop or iPhone for those times when the only other options are mass market paperbacks.

0748: I”ll concede that this is funny (but they”re still has-beens).

What Ta-Nehisi said…

I could never bring myself to forward all the email jokes, cartoons and other Internet comedy that land in my inbox. But then I started posting the ones my dad sends me. Judging from my comments and emails, my dad has become one of my greatest blogging assets. So for your morning blog chuckle I present: From My Dad.

Someone asked the other day, “What was your favorite fast food when you were growing up?”

“We didn”t have fast food when I was growing up,” I informed him. “All the food was slow.”

“C”mon, seriously. Where did you eat?”

“It was a place called ‘at home,” I explained! Mom cooked every day and when Dad got home from work, we sat down together at the dining room table, and if I didn”t like what she put on my plate I was allowed to sit there until I did like it.”

By this time, the kid was laughing so hard I was afraid he was going to suffer serious internal damage, so I didn”t tell him the part about how I had to have permission to leave the table. Continue Reading »

Found in my electronic chapbook.

The narrator of Toby Stein”s All The Time There Is confides that she vowed on turning thirty-five never to finish a book merely because she had started it, and I submit that that”s a good vow to make and a reasonable time in life to make it. p. 55

From Telling Lies for Fun and Profit: A Manual for Fiction Writers by Lawrence Block.

My total word count remains at 21,380.

One sure way to defeat a political movement is to out live it, to litterally watch your opposition go geratric and disappear. The State Peace and Develompment Council (aka, Myanmar’s military dictators) have done a good job, so far, of implementing such a stratedgy. Aung San Suu Kyi has other ideas.

From AFP:

Myanmar’s opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi faces an urgent challenge to shake up her party’s ranks, analysts say, after a rare meeting with her colleagues exposed a weak and ageing leadership team.

Faced with national polls next year and their leader still in detention, members of the National League for Democracy also need to resolve ideological differences within the party, they said.

The military junta, which has ruled Myanmar with an iron fist since 1962, allowed the democracy icon to leave her prison home Wednesday to pay respects to three ailing senior members of her political party, and she used the opportunity to ask their permission to ring in changes.

Party chairman Aung Shwe, 92, secretary Lwin, 85, and central executive committee member Lun Tin, 89, approved Suu Kyi’s unprecedented request to “reorganise” the CEC, Lwin said.

At 64, Suu Kyi is the youngest of the 11-member committee, while nine are in their 80s and 90s and most of them are said to be in bad health.

Suu Kyi clearly understands the challenge, and under the cover of visiting with sick friends, she was able to let her elders know that the party can no longer afford to rely on their leadership, that new blood is needed.

“At the moment there’s an amazing lack of vision and knowledge when it comes to the economic situation, the ethnic issue — all the key Burma challenges,” said a Bangkok-based European diplomat on condition of anonymity, using Myanmar’s former name and referring to tensions with minority groups.

Suu Kyi has spent most of the last 20 years in detention and calls for changes have been coming ever since her first period of freedom 14 years ago, said Derek Tonkin, chairman of the UK-based Network Myanmar.

“Since then a lot of people say she ought to have applied herself to the reorganisation of the party more than political campaigns,” he said.

But Win Min, an activist and scholar in the northern Thai city of Chiang Mai, said new membership had been stifled by fear of the authorities.

“It may be difficult to recruit new blood at the grassroots level because of the restrictions and intimidation by the military,” he said.

Tyrants always fall. The question is simply when.

Roldo Bartimole writes:

Steve Litt is back on the front page today promoting another supposed uplift for Cleveland”s despondent condition: this time another redo of Public Square.

He writes: “City planners have dreamed for decades of doing something to resolve the conflict between vehicles and people in the square and to restore the sense of the town commons implied in the 1796 street plan that gave downtown its form.”

I wish he”d name the city planners doing this dreaming.

I hate to break it to Steve but Cleveland even by 1815 was a village and hit a population of 500 only by 1824. Maybe these people, who likely knew most of each other, (and even lived in the city) could amble about a public square and find out the latest news and gossip. A true community public square. What Sunday fun!

But now we have the Plain Dealer, television news and something called an internet. They give us the gossip, insipid as it may be.

Really this another downtown plan by the same downtown interests as always. Their real interest is keeping certain people off Continue Reading »

0726: Black Bible Belt

0722: Five Years

I could never bring myself to forward all the email jokes, cartoons and other Internet comedy that land in my inbox. But then I started posting the ones my dad sends me. Judging from my comments and emails, my dad has become one of my greatest blogging assets. So for your morning blog chuckle I present: From My Dad.

COLD (REALLY THE ABSENCE OF HEAT) IS A RELATIVE THING…

65 above zero:
Floridians turn on the heat.
People in WV plant gardens.

60 above zero:
Californians shiver uncontrollably.
People in WV sunbathe.

50 above zero:
Italian & English cars won’t start.
People in WV drive with the windows down.

40 above zero:
Georgians don coats, thermal underwear, gloves, wool hats.
People in WV throw on a flannel shirt. Continue Reading »

Found in my electronic chapbook.

Try to read your classmates” efforts in manuscript. Seeing beats hearing when it comes to teaching yourself how prose and dialogue work on the page. p. 51

From Telling Lies for Fun and Profit: A Manual for Fiction Writers by Lawrence Block.

My total word count remains at 21,380.

[Update — 20 December @ 1351: From The Nation:

Some 2,000 Burmese female workers ended their strike and resumed works Sunday morning after the authorities located a relative of a worker, who was earlier thought be killed by security officers of the factory.

This still does not clear up what Radio Free Asia was reporting.]

There are worker protests and large involvement of security forces in Yangon sometime Friday. That much the two stories I’m reading agree on. After that, the reasons, locations and size of the protest, or protests, gets murky. I’ve done a check around the web, but found no additional information as of Sunday afternoon.

From The Nation:

Some 2,000 Burmese workers protested in a bra factory in this northern province late Friday night.

Some 300 police and military officers and defence volunteers were deployed to control the situation inside the Top From Brassiere Mae Sot Factory in Mae Sot district.

The workers became angry that two security officers of the factory injured two female workers.

The protesters demanded to see one of the injured female workers because they heard rumours that she had been killed.

The Radio Free Asia story seems,at first glance, to be reporting the same protests, but too many details are different.

Burmese authorities sent a large number of security personnel into a western suburb of the former capital, Rangoon, after rare protests by more than 1,000 workers in a dispute with management at a Malaysian-owned garment factory, protesters said.

Workers who took part said deputy labor minister U Tin Tun Aung and deputy military divisional commander Brigadier Kyaw Kyaw Htoon visited the factory, along with northern divisional deputy inspector-general of police Ko Ko Aung.

“Police Inspector-General Khin Zaw Oo from the 7th police battalion came with his troops to maintain security in the area,” said one worker, who declined to be named.

“In the end, [management] agreed to our demands. They signed an agreement today that they will accede to our demands.”

Another protester said the deputy minister met with factory manager Ma Soe Soe and 28 representatives of the workers and their leader, Ma Khin Thandar Oo.

Workers at the Wong Houng Hand factory say foreign supervisors have been mistreating workers and forcing them to sign “confessions” of alleged wrongdoing.

More than 1,000 (later reported as 1,300) rather than 2,000 workers, foreign supervisors mistreating workers and forcing them to sign “confessions” of alleged wrongdoing rather than injured female workers with on possibly murdered, and finally The Nation places the protest at the Top From Brassiere Mae Sot Factory in Mae Sot district and RFA puts it at Wong Houng Hand factory.

The story smells of managed faux news.

From Radio Free Asia:

Roldo Bartimole writes:

The discussion on Bill Moyers show last night on PBS between Robert Kuttner of the American Prospect and Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone offers insight into the difference between youthful smarts and elder wisdom.

Taibbi would vote to kill the health reform bill. Kuttner would hold his nose and vote for it.

We know that at least temporarily (who can tell what will happen) the Democrats have welded together 60 votes in the U. S. Senate to pass the bill out of that body.

Many of us don”t like the bill. Some of us, me included, will take even a watered down bill with hope of improving it in the future. Lack of a bill would not leave open the possibility of future process and improvement.

The discussion presents the stark difference, I think, between the youthful desire for real change and the older wisdom of taking some change as a step toward more change.

I could never bring myself to forward all the email jokes, cartoons and other Internet comedy that land in my inbox. But then I started posting the ones my dad sends me. Judging from my comments and emails, my dad has become one of my greatest blogging assets. So for your morning blog chuckle I present: From My Dad.

ATTORNEY: Doctor, before you performed the autopsy, did you check for a pulse?
WITNESS: No.
ATTORNEY: Did you check for blood pressure?
WITNESS: No.
ATTORNEY: Did you check for breathing?
WITNESS: No.
ATTORNEY: So, then it is possible that the patient was alive when you began the autopsy?
WITNESS: No.
ATTORNEY: How can you be so sure, Doctor?
WITNESS: Because his brain was sitting on my desk in a jar.
ATTORNEY: I see, but could the patient have still been alive, nevertheless?
WITNESS: Yes, it is possible that he could have been alive and practicing law.

Attributed to Disorder In The Court.

Found in my electronic chapbook.

The specific facts learned in a classroom , the content of the required reading, rarely lingers in the mind too long after graduation. But the stimulation of intellectual interchange with an exciting and exceptional mind is something which will be with you forever. p. 51

From Telling Lies for Fun and Profit: A Manual for Fiction Writers by Lawrence Block.

My total word count remains at 21,380.