There's no such thing as a free lunch...Or is there?

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It's official. The next president of Indonesia is former army general Prabowo Subianto. Quite how the next five years will pan out is anyone's guess but hopefully the foreign pundits who always bring up his dodgy human rights record will be proven wrong. Nonetheless, on policy making, Prabowo's popularist move to literally offer the poor 'a free lunch' every day of the week does not augur well for the future. Such a policy - if it ever came to fruition - would cost a phenomenal amount of money and likely lead to huge inefficiencies (food waste) and poor incentives (make people lazy). Another concern is Prabowo's strong nationalist bent. Thus, in the possible event that he finds himself with his back against the proverbial wall in the face of stern economic challenges, there is a big chance that he will simply scapegoat foreigners. But he will have to be careful. Construction of the new capital city, Nusantara, for example, is highly dependent on foreign in
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Warren Fellows: The Damage Done

More arrests in SE Asia in relation to drug trafficking. This time in Thailand. Two British men were arrested “on charges of possession of marijuana for purposes of trafficking, for which they face a maximum penalty of life imprisonment if convicted”. 

Madness. And with the drugs menace posing a large threat to Thai society, they’re not gonna get much sympathy from the Thai authorities at all. Thailand is pretty damn ruthless in dealing with druggies and the prisons there have a certain reputation to live down to. In fact, they are so bad they make the Turkish prison depicted in Midnight Express look like a Butlins holiday camp:

Convicted heroin trafficker Warren Fellows recounts some of his hellish experiences, like being locked in a "darkroom" for 23 hours and 55 minutes a day. The cell was so cramped there was not even enough room to lay down, and some of the prisoners, left there for months at a time, ate flattened cockroaches in order to survive. 

If that wasn’t enough, the sadism of the guards goes far, far beyond anything you could possibly imagine. In one particularly nauseating episode, Fellows (who was imprisoned there in the late 70’s) writes how a guard forced a bunch of the prisoners to stand in a septic tank, chin-deep in excrement for many hours, because they’d been playing a dice game in their cell.

Warren Fellows: The Damage Done Yuck! Warren Fellows’ legendary book The Damage Done: Twelve Years of Hell in a Bangkok Prison is a captivating read, and should be required reading for anyone thinking of dabbling in drugs while they are on vacation in this part of the world.

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