Dreary October in Kampot

 

 

It’s been a dreary October so far with rain every day for almost three weeks. Some people are getting that old cabin fever feeling, except it’s so warm, getting out and wet seems no big deal. It’s not like when you were a kid and purposely went out to wade and splash in the heaviest rain, but once you’re out there caught in a torrent, What the hell? Of course having lived in western Oregon where it’s cloudy and/or rainy and cold – well, cool anyway – for at least six months a year and worked outdoors for much of that time, I barely notice the rain. Paradoxically, while it’s warm enough to not mind the rain, it’s generally cool compared to other seasons, so quite comfortable, even if humidity is very high.

Since I’ve become Kampot’s official, unofficial weatherman, I’ve taken on the burden of reporting from the web and keeping track of local stats. To that end I have a simple five dollar plastic rain gauge to measure precipitation. It can’t go wrong, not like one digital gauge I had which read way off. I’ve got a weather station with indoor and outdoor temperature and humidity and barometer. In order to get an accurate outdoor temp I have what’s called a Stevenson box. It’s a wood box with louvers on all sides to allow air to flow through. It’s painted white to reflect all sunlight and has a small roof over it to prevent direct overhead sun and it’s 1.3 meters off the ground to prevent radiant heat from the ground affecting the reading. I caught a lot of flack for my (incorrect) readings before I got the Stevenson.

I generally use Weather Underground website for predictions, not because it’s necessarily more correct, but because it’s easier to use and the site goes into technical details about big storms and such, not that I understand all that much about the science, but it’s just

kinda interesting to get a glimpse of the deeper aspects of the game. It’s easy enough to get an accurate anemometer – wind gauge – but I’m lazy about getting it high enough to get a proper reading.

The Weather Underground Kampot page frequently says ‘station offline’ anywhere from 1 hour to 70 hours. In fact, we do have a station here but it’s inoperable, so where then do they get their information from? I assume Phu Quoc since it has the closest functioning station, but being an island, the weather, especially temperature and wind speed, is going to be much different than Kampot which is about 9 kilometers inland. Large bodies of water moderate temperature. When it’s hot, Phu Quoc will be a little cooler than Kampot, which will be a little cooler than inland. When it’s cool the opposite happens, locations on or near water will be a little warmer.

Every year is strange or different or exceptional when it comes to weather: no two years can ever be the same. Still, this year so far has been an odd one. There was an exceptional drought until May when we got 300mm. June and July were relatively light, but August was very heavy at 378mm until the 22nd when a 2 week very hot dry spell began. Then September came in at the lowest since May. Very odd. October is charging back. On October 17 we received nearly 90mm in less than 2 hours and more than 100 overall that day. It was a record, at least since I got my rain gauge three years ago. October’s on track to be the heaviest month.

I’m currently trying to manifest a couple more rain gauges to place around town since other people sometimes report much heavier rains than I do, but since they don’t have regulation gauges, it’s all anecdotal and impossible to confirm. Better yet would be to have personal weather stations hooked up to Weather Underground’s international network. For a ‘mere’ $450 – the cost of a semi-professional Davis weather station – Someone here could put Kampot on the weather map.

There is great confusion as to Cambodian climate, even official publications sometimes get our climate all wrong. I have a map put out by a government agency which has a graph that shows August as the rainiest month nationwide with September half as much and October almost nothing, when in fact the latter two are generally the heaviest months. In Phnom Penh and other points north it’s October which is the heaviest month. Even here in Kampot, different websites have diverse statistics. Like one says August is heaviest and another October.

It’s hard to pin down variables by month with so many differing numbers but annually, they’re relatively consistent. Phnom Penh receives about 1.4 meters of rain a year, most areas in the north a bit less. Kep gets 2.2 meters, Kampot 2.4 meters. Sihanoukville gets 3.5 meters and Koh Kong beats all with 3.8 meters a year… soggy town.

I’ve become the go-to guy for predictions since I’ve become Stan the Weatherman, but I’m not a meteorologist, I just report what I see or read. However you don’t need a weatherman to know that stormy conditions are ahead around the region and the world.

Thailand’s king has died after years of spending most of his time in the hospital. Next in line, the crown prince has said he wants to wait a year before he takes up his responsibilities (he’s too busy being a royal playboy and ass). As opposed to Bhumipol who was revered, Vajiralongkorn is widely reviled, hardly anybody likes him, but because of Thailand’s very strict Lese Majeste law it’s not possible to comment in public. Criticizing anyone in the royal family is an easy 15 year sentence and the current military government has been very zealous in finding and prosecuting offenders. If I were in Thailand, having made the above comments, I might be in for rough times.

Many people I talk to here are concerned about or are predicting unrest. The generals seem to have the situation under control, but intense anger remains in the opposition camp over having their consistent electoral wins hijacked by the military, which is backed by the Bangkok elite. The opposition reds fought hard: they haven’t gone away and neither have their grievances, though the elite is starting to catch on to the need to serve the whole population. For instance, a loyalist interviewed on radio, when referring to Taksin’s low cost health care for villagers, said, It’s a bitter pill but we have to swallow it, referring to the need to adopt the same policy. The guy was in agony over having to match Taksin’s generosity to the peasantry: it was no longer politically possible to ignore the wider people’s needs.

The military got its new constitution passed, partly because no campaigning against it was allowed. It gives the military virtual veto power over legislation and it included an electoral system which makes it hard for a single party to win a majority. Taksin was the first and only leader to receive an absolute majority in the history of Thai elections and he or his party did it multiple times. Many expats who’ve spent time in Thailand despise Taksin and insist that he only won by buying votes, but I don’t buy it. He might’ve been the country’s richest person, but the Bangkok establishment aren’t exactly paupers either. What’s more, buying votes is a long Thai tradition. When I lived there, it was common knowledge that all the parties did it.

Repression only works so long, especially with a people so used to demonstrating and voicing their opinions. And with no king to calm things down, to prevent conflagration and confrontation, there may be some fireworks ahead on our western border.

As a lifetime lefty, I give Taksin a lot of credit for thinking about the masses. People who hate him say he only did it to gain power, that he really didn’t care. That may be true but regardless, he’s the first one to take their needs into account. Taksin haters should hate the ruling class; i.e., themselves, for being so stupid and clueless that it never occurred to them to think about the needs of the proletariat and the electoral advantage that would give them.

Taksin on the other hand was thoroughly corrupt: he had a special law enacted to allow him to sell his billion dollar telecom empire without paying taxes. He was also a mass murderer. The focus now is on Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines for extrajudicial killing of ‘drug dealers’ but Taksin wrote the playbook on that one. 2500 people were killed in the first few months of his administration. Say what you will about the awfulness of drugs and the need to suppress their use and distribution if you believe that’s appropriate, but when 2500 people die without benefit of a fair trial and the ability to defend themselves, you can be absolutely certain that somewhere between 5% and 20% were either innocent or guilty of crimes so insignificant they would at most net a short stint in jail or rehab in an advanced country. So then, how many good guys is it okay to kill for every 100 bad guys removed from society? Is there a point at which the sacrifice of good guys goes too far? What’s acceptable? One innocent for every 100 guilty? Ten for every 100? Twenty?  Is any number acceptable?

When Obama cautioned Duterte about his killing spree, the latter told Obama to butt out, said the Philippines wasn’t America’s colony anymore and called him what’s variously translated as a son of a bitch or son of a whore. In another tirade he told Obama to go to hell. He also said he didn’t care if 3 million died. Wow, only Hitler could claim a bigger genocide than that. The country’s drug office estimates there are 1.8 million addicts in the Philippines, not even 2% of the population. All that spilled blood for 2%.

Duterte toned down his murderous rhetoric very quickly after the head of the International Criminal Court suggested she was going to look into the situation there. Suddenly he didn’t know anything about it. Mass murder is a crime against humanity. Brought to trial he would likely spend the rest of his life in prison, and deserve every minute of it.

When a government spokesperson was asked, What about alcohol and gambling? He could only muster a blank stare. As if alcohol doesn’t cause more problems than illegal drugs. Besides it’s the illegality of drugs which causes most of the problems associated with them. If they were legal they’d cost a lot less and people who need them wouldn’t have to commit illegal acts to get their fixes. There’d be no gangs and mafia to run the trade. Gambling has destroyed many lives, turned many families into paupers. How about arresting people for being fat, obesity takes years off your lifespan.

America has its own Duterte, aka, Trump. And he could easily have become US president if he weren’t so much a boor, buffoon and serial abuser. I know I’m making an assumption here in the third week of October, but the composite polls have Hillary with a 96% chance of winning. She was at less than 60% chance about a month ago, but his awful first debate performance followed by his grossly inappropriate bragging about sexual abuse started the dive. The only other presidential candidate in the history of polling to achieve Trump’s abysmal approval ratings is Clinton, though she fares just a bit better, so if he were just halfway plausible presidential material he could’ve had it. Now with him whining about the election being rigged by the media and vote stealing by Hillary, thus firing up his base with barely veiled calls for violence, there could easily be turmoil after the election. Democrats were angry enough after Bush stole the 2000 election but liberals aren’t the type to take up arms.

Fact is, Hillary did steal primary elections: In the Massachusetts primary every precinct with hand counted ballots went for Bernie, every precinct with machines that can be manipulated went for her. In a state with more than 7000 precincts, astronomical odds. Anyway in a close race, she would’ve needed those thieving skills, because of the Repugs long history of election theft. The first Repug to steal an election was Chuck Hagel, senator from Nebraska. Leading up to the election the Dem was ahead in all the polls and was ahead in exit polls on election day. But he won in a landslide, even winning by a large margin in the state’s few African-American precincts, which had never voted Repug before. After the election it turned out he was part owner of the company that ran the election. Many elections in the US have been outsourced to the private sector. All the companies who run elections are owned by Repugs. Their machines leave no paper trail and the software code is proprietary so the people aren’t allowed to see how the machines work or if anything is amiss. A perfect scam and the decider of many recent elections.

As for the accusation of media bias, that’s rich coming from a candidate that was showered with free time during the primaries. ABCs nightly newscast devoted 82 minutes to Trump in 2015, while giving only 20 seconds to Sanders, even though Sanders drew more people to his events than any other candidate on either side. The CEO remarked that Trump might be bad for the country but he was great for the company’s bottom line, so he was happy to pump up Trump on prime time.

The good thing is Trump is destroying the Repug party, pitting the know-nothings against the batshit crazies. Some Repugs think it’ll take a decade for the party to recover. Democrats will also be in turmoil after putting in office a person in the top job who’s widely reviled and despised. If you think Obama’s divided the country and brought gridlock to congress, she’ll be a lightning rod of anger, vitriol and discontent. The Dems could’ve had someone who was loved and respected across the board, but they chose old-style status quo politics, just what supporters of both Bernie and Trump were railing against. Being a corporate whore, she’ll be bad for the country, but still far superior to Trump. At least she’s presidential material; he’s an upchuck of mental diarrhea.

There are a lot of reasons to dislike her and her politics, but if there was one reason, if there was only one reason to vote for her it’s the supreme court. Justices are appointed for life. Considering the present make up of the court and that two of the oldest members are liberals, if she gets in there’ll be a 5 to 4 majority of liberals. If Trump were to win it’d be 7 to 2 or 6 to 3 conservative and the country would be set back at least a generation.