So I’ve been perusing the internets trying to find the safest bets. This list is NOT exhaustive. These are just some suggestions and guidelines, not necessarily an authoritative guide. So I’m not absolving you of responsibility to check for yourself, just pointing out where you can start.

What to look for:

• Look for organizations that already have people in Burma.
• Especially, look for the words “local partners”.
• I suspect, though I am being dismal, that giving money to US-based organizations will not be very effective. The junta will be more inclined to let in regional aid (india, thailand) than anything from the US, which has been pretty openly hostile to the government there.
• Look for organizations that are buying food and supplies in as local a market as possible. That will save operating costs. One commenter (it’s in there somewhere) pointed out that the aid packages being put together in the US contain cooking tools that people in Burma are not familiar with and don’t know how to use, on top of not being the most efficient use of money.

Below are some organizations that seem to be fairly effective. I’m including my sources, since I’m really just getting a lot of this info from the good people commenting over at the New York Times. My personal pick would be Avaaz.org, since they are working through the monks and temples in Burma, and those guys seem to have proven themselves quite helpful with cyclone relief efforts on the ground. But! Their website isn’t working at the moment.

from NYT article the first:

• international red cross seems to be in there already
• doctors without borders as well
• UN world food program is in, though they report that food has been seized by the govt.
• United Nations Childrens Fund (UNICEF) says they have not been having problems.

from NYT bloggy article, they have a list of organizations that are trying to help, but we don’t know how successful they are or whether they’re being let in at all. The most helpful stuff actually seems to be in the comments:

“The aid agency Direct Relief (dot org) is already in Burma, and are seeking donations to support their medical aid work there. It is one of the two featured charities that Google has up in the “support disaster relief” link.”

“Immediate help can be provided via Avaaz.org, who funnel donations to local monasteries, thus avoiding the Junta with its possible delays and diversions of donations. The monks will distribute the donations directly to the people.”

“it would be more realistic to send relief material through channels of or in cooperation with countries like China, Thailand and India.”

“So, donate money to any relief organization (like World Vision, Red Cross, World Relief, etc.) operating in Burma. Allow them to buy the necessary recovery and reconstruction materials in the local/regional market.”

“CARE has been working in Myanmar for 14 years.” (Though commenters are wondering how they can ensure that a donation there will actually go to Burma and not some other project.)

“Please add Pact’s name to your list and visit our website at www.pactworld.org. We have been working in Myanmar for the past ten years, have nearly 1200 local Burmese staff on the ground, 429 of which are in the Delta working primarily in a microfinance program that is in 1500 villages. We are one of the few American organizations on the ground and have greater reach than most. We are in seven of the ten hardest hit townships and have already been twice to the Delta with UNDP to do assessments.”

Global Giving has a long list. look for the words “local partners” or organizations that are already there.

Burma-Network also has a list of charities, which has a good amount of overlap with the list I’m presenting here.

* The debate over whether to call it Burma or Myanmar goes like this:
1) Myanmar is the junta’s name for the country, call it Burma till Aung San Suu Kyii says otherwise.
2) But Burma is the name given to the nation by British colonialists anyway. Myanma (without the r) would be a more accurate name, in line with what people actually called the place 600 years ago or whatever. Locals don’t want you to call it Burma.
I say: colonialism sucks, but replacing one evil with another doesn’t solve the problem, so I’m going with the pre-junta name until a democratically elected government says otherwise, or until I meet an actual local instead of hearing it through someone who visited Burma once.

At first blush, Thailand appears to be sitting pretty. The spot price of Thai fragrant rice is about $1,100 per ton, compared with about $320 at the end of last year. However, exporters make their contracts several months in advance of delivery, and Thai Rice Exporters Assn. President Chookiat Ophaswongse says several exporters face huge losses because they are buying rice from traders at today’s prices but delivering that rice to buyers at prices from early in the year, before the latest price spiral started. Some exporters have renegotiated, others have defaulted on their deliveries. Chookiat says higher prices will cause exports to fall 20%-25% in the second quarter, to about 780,000 tons per month, compared with the first three months of the year.

That article claims that there isn’t a global rice shortage so much as rising prices due to speculation. Exporting nations stop exporting because they’re panicked, but domestic speculators horde the stuff and make the prices rise at home anyway. But the scary thing is, there’s only not a real shortage yet. We’re consuming (or perhaps hording) more rice than we’re producing which means we’re dipping into the stockpiles. Not exactly sustainable. Prime Minister Samak has been proposing a sort of Rice OPEC, a pretty controversial proposition (exporters are liking the idea, importers are hating it, economists think it won’t be entirely effective).

It’s a bit frustrating watching people write about the debate the rice crisis from a macro-economic point of view, like some kind of abstraction, because, as usual, poor people (think rice-and-fish-sauce-for-dinner poor) will suffer the most from this. From Al Jazeera:

a rise of even a few cents can for millions mean a difference between surviving or going hungry.

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

“We hope that the Chinese government will reconsider its actions and the way they treat Tibetans. It is nothing big, but it is necessary.”

(From the Bangkok Post article.)

He sounds like he’s asking for a spot of cream to go with his coffee. Oh it’s nothing big, whenever you’ve got a minute.

Tibet aside, I’d guess that Thai people have plenty to protest.

On a lighter note, I was brave enough to take a (disposable) camera with me to Songkran celebrations, so pictures will come soon.

Under an internal security law adopted last week, the military will have the power to intervene in the political process without consultation with the civilian government.

Last August, as the law was being drafted, Human Rights Watch, which is based in New York, branded it “a silent coup.”

[from the first link]

That strikes me as just a bit more upsetting than a mere PPP victory.

From The Guardian:

The economic wisdom of those populist policies, including universal heath care and generous funds for village development, is hotly debated, but they empowered rural voters, for the first time planting the message that their vote directly affects their lives.

“I heard that if we vote for the People’s Power Party, Thaksin will come back. I want Thaksin to come back because he did a lot of good things for the country,” said 48-year-old La-aet Dansuk, who with her neighbors in Pen district in the northeastern province of Udon Thani makes shawls using natural dyes.

She recalls how her profits were boosted by a Thaksin-initiated project that brought wholesalers from Japan and Australia to her village. Now, she must travel almost 300 miles to Bangkok at her own expense to sell her goods, or deal with Thai middlemen who try to drive the price down. Sales have declined, she added.

Thaksin was an “agent of transformation,” said Thitinan, though he’s no admirer of the deposed leader. His party “awakened the silent majority in the countryside, and Thailand will never be the same.”

The turnout is estimated to be over 70%, which is kind of awesome, and the turnout for absentee and advance voting last weekend was record-setting. There’s still some doubt over what the military will do if (actually, when, if the exit polls are any indication) the People’s Power Party (basically Thai Rak Thai part 2, with a less catchy name) dominates, and The Economist is calling Thailand the Pakistan of Southeast Asia — which seems overly dire, really. Bangkok’s most trustworthy news source has some ideas, though.

… and good luck in the future.

I’m kind of glad they’re prosecuting him here first. I think it’s a good good thing to show the world that SE Asia doesn’t tolerate sexual predators, after decades of having an international reputation as a paradise for such characters.

I am fairly sure, as are the one or two commenters who aren’t knuckle-dragging troglodytes, that this video was shot in Khlong Toey. Bangkokians are the masters of creatively efficient use of space.

(Thanks to b for sending me this similar video clip.)

I adore Bangkok’s diverse and devoted eating culture. I like the unpretentious 20 baht noodles I can get down the street from my apartment, and I like that on the same block I can get something entirely pretentious that costs two order of magnitude more, and both will be delicious. I like the fresh fruit, I like the congenial atmosphere of the mid-range Thai restaurants, I like the local versions of Chinese and Japanese and Indian foods that I can get the same-but-different in the US. I like that exotic and morally problematic foods like shark’s fin inspire entire rows of restaurants devoted to their consumption.

The first time I ever set food in the food court at Siam Paragon, I wandered around and read the menu at every single food stall and restaurant, engaging in an odd sort of food voyeurism and strategizing future eating excursions. Afterwards, I compiled a list of ten things that really caught my attention:

1. Shark’s fin
2. Bird’s nest
3. Steak and kidney pie
4. Beard papa’s cream puffs
5. Marbled horse (raw)
6. Moussaka
7. Squid ink tagliatelli
8. Fois gras
9. Kentucky fried chicken
10. Whale

When my friend Steve visited for a couple days, I finally had a partner in crime to help me tackle some of the things on that list. Cream puffs fueled a couple hours of shopping (ok browsing), but once it was time for dinner, we decided to aim for the horse and the whale. This brought us to The Grill Tokyo, just a little bit down the hall from the huge food court, for a little “Japanese urban dining” or something like that.

It’s pricey (we spent about 2000 baht, with drinks), the sort of thing I would only do on a special occasion, but honestly, well worth it. The style is modern, but warm, and quiet, and freakin’ luxurious. We stuck to sushi and sashimi, and every thing we ordered was beautifully presented, perfectly fresh, simple, and like, the Platonic ideal of what that thing should be.

A plateful of specials (with an inexplicable pile of mealy-looking tomatoes teetering on the side) was explained to us, in great detail, as soon a we sat down. Actually seeing the pile of fresh seafood makes it very very hard to say no to any of it, but asking the price makes the job easier. We ordered the scallop sashimi, which did not disappoint.

Really fresh scallop tastes delicately sweet. I loved this, but I already love scallop. The yellowtail was also very good yellowtail, but again, I already really like yellowtail. The remarkable thing was that I actually loved the tuna, which I usually consider to be boring. This tuna melted, instead of having the sort of overly-lean texture I’m used to encountering.

The fact that the restaurant served both horse and whale (raw, as sashimi or nigiri) was what brought us in there, drawn in by the appeal of trying something entirely new. While the scallop was my personal favorite, the whale was Steve’s, followed closely by the horse. We’d basically walked in daring each other to eat something from my list, but in the end, the most memorable thing about that dinner was just that the taste, texture, and presentation of the food was really, really, endorphin-producingly good.