If you enjoyed the read, please feel free to share itMe & My Mirror turned 2 today! Still makin’ a...
Read MoreIf you enjoyed the read, please feel free to share...
Read MoreIf you enjoyed the read, please feel free to share itCan’t seem to stay away. ‘The Kingdom of Wonder’, some call it ‘The Kingdom of Blunder’ is calling me. They’ve had some big bumps in the road there In Cambodia, biggest of which were the national elections which, by unanimous consensus, were a Tin Pot charade of shadowy (or not-so-shadowy) pressure and threats, Fascist bombast and plain ol’ ballot stuffing. Grade School stuff, but, Voila! Hun Sen, his Imelda-esque wife and their bottomless pool of cronies, bootlickers and profiteers are in for another spell. I’ll leave it here, cuz I’m totally uninformed, but it’s very sad and the only uplifting part, for Cambodia’s future and Khmer people, is that it was close, there is a Huge amount of resistance, and something big and populist will undoubtedly rear up formidably soon. It’ll be ugly though. There is also the auto-carnivory … the incredible facility with which the Kingdom seems able to devour itself: the land grabs, the resource rape, the Orphanage ‘Business’, the eternal obsequies to AID; the bottomless claque of little guys in sunglasses and big fancy trucks packing heat and alibis. I’m goin’ anyway and I will talk about allthat next post … meantime I need to book a ticket. Stay...
Read MoreIf you enjoyed the read, please feel free to share...
Read MoreIf you enjoyed the read, please feel free to share it I’m re-activating everything, man. Those who know me or have followed the blog even a little will know that I spent a handful of months in Cambodia on my mission last year. Well, Mission Unaccomplished! I’m going back February 12th. So I got through to hundreds of people, well, there are well-over 100,000 amputees in SE Asia alone. I ain’t even started yet. There’s trauma too, and lots of it; it’s palpable, and I’m going to shake that up a bit as well. Many of the oldsters in Cambodia and, I beg to say, many of their relatives and many, too, of their descendants are what the Khmer Rouge themselves charmingly called ‘The Persons Left Over From Death’ … well I maintain that they are, in fact, ‘Persons Ignitable By Life’! And I aim to go in there, with a dry clear eye (this time) and kick a little ass. Because, if I learned anything on my last (extended) visit, it is that these people don’t need or want compassion, in a way compassion has been killing them for decades. They need a cuff upside the head, a kick in the pants: just the way you and I do when we lose the plot. We all need to take our well-being into our own hands, fend for ourselves and derive pride from what we do every day. Your up-country Cambodian amputee fisherman is no different, nor, for that matter, is your Afghan, your Somali, your Sri Lankan or you Serbo-Croat – no matter how many limbs he’s got and no matter how much free shit is being thrown at him. So just ‘Say No’ to hand-outs and say ‘Hell Yes!’ to a firm hand-shake, a long look in the eyes and a giant gift to improve your life with exactly one itty-bitty string attached. That string, I’ll tell each amputee, is ‘YOU. You gotta do the work. It’s the ONLY WAY’. That’s a signal change in my approach for this venture and success is already singing in my chest. So how could you resist me? Here I come to you, on my own steam, on a bicycle. I’ve...
Read MoreSocial Media
