Older blog entries for gregf (starting at number 9)

11 Jun 2001 (updated 11 Jun 2001 at 19:23 UTC) »

Its been a while now since last post :( -

I seem to be realy busy with myself atm. I dont seem to find the time to do the things I want to do! Im currently occupied rebuilding my web-site, transforming apache to handle a mySQL/php user interface for my own auction site Its been full on since my return from holiday. I dont have a very heavy workload @work. I guess its because of the holiday season. But I find myself occupied with my private life just now. Im having a good time playing football, and golf, and fishing occationaly, and going away at weekends to motorcycle racing circuits to watch my friends race, and sometime lend a helping hand (when I can be bothered to get my hands dirty;) - Also I get quite alot of VIP hospitality tickets to various event such Chelsea football club and Twickenham Rugby Stadium. Although im not a great fan of Chelsea, I dont mind watching them play, and I did once sit next to Dennis Wyse on a train back from Manchester. He was a little angry because the train was 30 minutes late.
Anyhow for thou's of you who know me? Why not check my auction site and if there is something you may be interested let me know and i'll make sure you get extra discount ;-)

11 May 2001 (updated 20 Jun 2001 at 10:10 UTC) »
April 16th onward -

An article in several parts composed of the following headings and subheadings:-

Historical/Cultural Perspective.

Thai's don't hide sex - but we do.

Thai acceptance of gay and transexual people.

What effect does media depiction have on Thailand?

What effect does media depiction have on The Industry?

Are foreign female journalists simply neurotic about sex?

Kidnapped Children bonded in Slavery

Profile of Typical Sex Tourist

Description of Sex Venues

Patpong

Nana Plaza

Pattaya

The Sex Market - who works it and why.

Industry Economics.

Does anybody make the money?

Does the government make the money?

Do the workers make the money?

The Police, the Army and the Thai "Mafia".

p> The Americans

The Europeans

The British

Farang Cultural Perceptions - The Good Wife.

Sex and drugs and rock'n'roll. Life on the darker side of the street.

AIDS, Hepatitis, VDs - Old Friends of The Industry

Guns, death and bodybags - Old Friends of The Industry

Conclusion.

Preface

This is the inside story of a very controversial topic. The writer has no affiliation with any newspaper groups or political parties and so can write freely without editorial pressure to "not mention that part please".

The writers opinion is just that - opinion. But remember, there are no facts in the world, just illusions and opinions. Nobody is right - Nobody is wrong. This is just the writers point of view. And it would not hurt you to adopt it.

First thing that happened:-

I sent an Email to a friend the other day asking if, during his forthcoming visit to Europe, he was going to stop over in Thailand on his way from Australia and visit me. If you could turn up your nose in Email - he would have done so.

He replied "I don't just want to hang out in bars with prostitutes you know, I want something interesting when I go for my holiday so I am sticking to Europe".

Yeah! - well!... No, I don't speak to him anymore. But his attitude is common. His total ignorance is common. Ask most Westerners what they know of Thailand and they will answer "lots of girls over there, lots of go-go bars and brothels, massage parlours, so on and so forth..."

Second thing that happened:-

I asked Rod, the publisher of Generator 21 Online if there were any particular stories he'd like me to write for the magazine. Rod said "yeah, why's Thailand always depicted as a sex destination by the media?" This came just a day after my friends Email. It all tied in.

What I want to do here is just hand over another perspective. I hope it is a more impartial and clearer view of why Thailand is depicted thusly - why Thailand kind of IS a place where you can "get laid" easily.

But there is far, far more to Thailand than fast and easy sex.

Ask most Westerners where the best sex destination is and they will tell you "Thailand of course".

Why do Westerners have this perception of Thailand being nothing much more than a place for cheap sex? Is the perception correct? Why have the media persisted in depicting Thailand in this manner? What effect has this perception on Thailand and it's people? These and other related questions are what I want to deal with in this series of articles. For starters let's get back to the beginning.

Historical/Cultural Perspective.

Thai's don't hide sex - but we do.

Long before Westerners (Farangs) came to Thailand the country and the culture embraced sex as simply another required bodily function. Sex was not "dirty" or "foul" or "shamefull". Yet this is what I was taught as a child in Australia. Have no doubt, I was taught literally that sex was a thing of horror, filthy, something to hide away behind locked doors. Sex was violence, blood, bad smells and big troubles.

In Thailand past and today, they do not teach that to children, they do not indoctrinate their population with creeds of sin and shame. More than 90% of Thailand's people are Buddhists. Buddhism is a philosophy of acceptance of life. Christianity is a socio-political control perversion.

Sex in Thailand is not something to be ashamed of. Sex is like eating, breathing, shitting and sleeping. It's just one of those things that your body has to do now and then. There are rules, there are social mores. But no Thai I've ever met has any perception of shame in sex.

Long before Farangs arrived here the houses of comfort were doing a good trade. Father's took their young sons to be educated about life and sex. Business people went to forget their worries. Workers saved their meagre wages and attended for fun or relief. The houses were attended by both male, female and cross-gender staff. These houses of comfort have existed in Thailand for hundreds of years.

And unlike Western countries, Thailand had no cultural mores that said "do that shit behind closed and locked doors". Oh no! Thailand's sex industry has always been right out front. On the street. Open. Visible. Accessible.

Per capita equiv of prostitutes in Australia, the Americas and the EEC

I feel that I can speak with some small authority. I have friends who work in the sex industry in Australia. Pornography shop workers, Prostitutes, Bouncers, Madams. My own mother ran several girls from a mining town hotel in the 50's when she got sick of being harrassed by horny miners in a no-girl town. I have worked the industry there myself redecorating and renovating one of Melbourne's more popular parlours. And yes, I have even taken some comfort in such houses when I was lost and lonely.

Although no research body (to my knowledge) has actually counted the amount of prostitutes per capita in Australia, the Americas or the EEC - I feel that I KNOW that there are as many if not more prostitutes per capita in Australia than in Thailand.

I think I can fairly assume that the same goes for the AMERICAS and EEC. More prostitution than Thailand and a cultural more that says "put it behind the door, lock the door, don't let anybody see that filthy shite!".

Child Prostitution - More in Australia, the Americas and the EEC.

I worked for several years for Save The Children Fund in Melbourne, Australia. I took care of a large group of "turnkey" children (parents not home until late at night - kids left alone). Two of these kids, around age 12, worked as prostitutes to get money for their parents drug habits. I know their story from the street level. I met their friends, all involved in selling sex to old farts. I could not believe how many of them worked the streets. Large parks were their main venu, but some told me of clubs too. Fancy clubs with Mercs and Limos out front and dying old men inside.

King's Cross in Sydney literally crawls with sub-teens. One of the world's biggest child-prostitution rings was run from the central computer of Melbourne University until they caught red-handed the creep running it. Then something odd happened. The news was suppressed - it never made the papers. The creep was not prosecuted. The information was removed by the police and nothing was ever heard about it again.

I met one of the police officers involved with the case. He informed me that on that computer system was a list of names. BIG names. Famous people, politicians, TV folk, judges and lawyers. Names of men and women involved in a world-wide distribution network/club for old farts with too much money who like to tamper with children.

A friend of mine is serving life in prison. He shot his girlfriend in the head with a shotgun, right in her office in front of her father. My friend had discovered that they were involved with the distribution of child pornography. He told her and her father to stop it. But they made a lot of money out of the business and did not want to stop it. He took some heavy drugs one day, freaked out, took his gun and killed her. He got life, nobody gets life for murder in Australia but he got life. The family's involvement in child pornography came out in court of course. The father was not prosecuted. Why not? And why did my friend get life? Because the judge was one of the family's best customers.

Child prostitution is accepted by the Australian authorities by way of their total lack of commitment to end this business. Child prostitution is backed up and supported by the same people who make the laws against it. It's just like the marijuana industry in Australia - do what we say, not what we do. Same people make the laws profit on the black market.

Thai government, people and culture do not now and have never supported child prostitution. Yes there are child prostitutes in Asia. In Thailand, The Phillipines, Japan and elsewhere. Yes it happens here too. But it is far more insidious and broad-spread in Western countries. Look, the kids ARE here in Thailand if you want them. The kids are all over the world. The customers are the problem - and the customers are not Thai. So how about the world cleaining up their own back yards before they point the finger at Thailand?

All I know is that if you ask me right now to take you to a place where you can tamper with kids, I'd have to send you to Melbourne or Sydney because after years of street-life here, I still don't know and have never heard of any central point for such activities in Thailand. But I can tell you EXACTLY where to go in Australia if you want to mess up a kids life.

Again, I think I can fairly assume that the situation is the same in the AMERICAS and EEC. What? You going to try to tell me there are no child prostitutes on the streets of New York, Amsterdam, Brazil? Are you serious? No way!

Thai acceptance of gay and transexual people in Thailand

Sex and sexual issues are simply more acceptable in the culture and society of Thailand than in any Western countries that I know of. Gays, Cross-Dressers, Transvestites and others who deviate from the sexual norm walk proud and free of fear in Thailand.

A pretty gay boy is more likely to be worshipped than beaten in Thailand.

A pretty gay boy is most certainly going to wind up beaten to a bloody pulp in Australia by some homophobe. Homophobia is something I am yet to see in Thai people.

Up-country in the village, if a household has four boys and no girls and one of the boys displays even the slightest effeminate characteristics, he will be allowed to grow up as if a girl. This is also common in South Pacific cultures. Mum needs help around the house, all the kids are boys, so what? Bring one of the boys up as a girl and she can help mum out.

Thais simply DO NOT freak out about sex. Farangs simply DO freak out about sex. Herein lies a major point in the search for an answer as to why the world appears to think that Thailand is one big brothel.

I guess that from a Farang perspective Thailand is, in some ways, a great big brothel. "Disneyland for Grownups" I have heard said.

A society that does not besmirch the act of sexual congress with images of filth, dirt, horror, blood and foul stench is likely as not to be targeted by the more "hung-up" societies as a "country of perversion" or a "sex destination".

Even if all this was true, I would not care less. So what if it was true? It is NOT true, but what if it was? Are you really THAT strung out about sex?

What if I tell you here that people only go to restaurants to drink coffee and that coffee is a dangerous drug?

What if I told you that restaurants represent a threat to society as I perceive it should be. I should try to convince you that people only go to restaurants to drink coffee.

Never mind the food, the newspapers, the toilets, the people working there. Never mind meeting your fiends there for a quick meal and a chat.

The only thing that matters is that they are unethical houses of ill repute because THE ONLY THING THEY DO IS SELL COFFEE!

Same attitude. Same absurdity. Same ignorance.

10 Apr 2001 (updated 11 Apr 2001 at 09:46 UTC) »

This week has been rather productive. I have been really busy configuring a Fujitsu siemens Primergy E200 for Chris Bidmead who writes the unix column in Personal Computer World.

I dicided to give Chris the E200 which is a mid-entry level server, very fast, and reasonablty cheap. The E200 superceeded the 470. But has had alot of major changes. Something I dont want to go into atm.

Im going to take the server over to Chris personally on Wednesday 11/4/00. I have installed SuSE-7.1 to his requirements. Seems to be working very well. Im quite impressed on the speed at which the server runs. I gave it a RAID 0 with no fault tollarence and stripping. Chris will bench test the server to its maximum ability, and print the results in his next article.

14 Mar 2001 (updated 14 Mar 2001 at 12:41 UTC) »
A trip to Augsberg
Thought id'e better write an entry. Haven't done so for a while.
I went to Germany 7/8/9-03-01, with the MD and Director of Fujitsu Siemens logistics. Left Heathrow london at 3:30, landed in Munich at 6:30 there time. Taxi was witing to take us to Augsberg. Arriving at the hotel for 8:05 and having Dinner booked for 8:15 didnt realy give me much time to shower. Nevertheless i managed it. We had food in an old cave, set in anchient German times like 400 years ago. The beer was great, and the food wasnt anything special, just raw veg. and meat. We all drank as much as we could, and traditionaly if you didnt obide by *there* rules you could end up in the block n shackles. I was a good boy, but Richard (MD) ended up in there for reason uknown to me? (I think he had a solitary drink). Richard is into his late night partying from what i could observe and we proceeded to some local studen bar, had a beer (rather quickly i must add) then ventured on to this cool nightclub. I drank cocktails of everykind, danced & danced away the night, until I was approached by this beutifull blonde German girl. She had like diamonds in the corner of her eyes, i thought the were unusual as ive never seen that befor. She was 19. Why do i alway attract the young girls? In a way she remminded me of my Ex girlfriend Victoria Ray. So I felt kind of at ease and happy with her. Drank some more danced a little more although starting to feel tied now. The watch says 3:45am. Time to go. I was the last one to leave ;-) but only quarter of an hour latter. Err, I got lost for 1.5 hours trying to find my way back to the Hotel. I had to be on the coach leaving for the factory at 8:15am. *nightmare* The day was intense, but i realy injoyed it. Most of all the factory tour was very impresive. A hugh factory producing everything from system boards to lifebooks, servers, proffession pc's, consumer pc's, hard drives, and much more!
A good trip
6 Mar 2001 (updated 6 Mar 2001 at 19:53 UTC) »

This week has been a busy one so far, and will continue for the rest of the week. The company has dicided to change software as an improvement to both knowledgebase and employee workload. It's called SAP. This is basicaly an SQL database will be used to create purchase orders, control billing, shipping, invoices etc. Directly linked with all Fujitsu Siemens Companies + Factories around the globe. It wont affect me as i'm technical and dont get imvolved with these aspects. However im obliged to learn the proccess regardless. So, training Monday and Tuesday and Wednesday, then on to Ausberg in Germany for Thursday and Friday. The weekend is my own, then im of snowboarding at the Three Valleys in France. Then back to work for further training.

27 Feb 2001 (updated 28 Feb 2001 at 22:09 UTC) »

Still got alot of catching up to do, if I am to get right up to speed with C programing. So ive registered a project of my very own called Gdopewars .

Gdopewars: The front end is built using Glade (a free Gtk+ Gnome user interface builder) and the backend is programed in C. I am hoping that this will help develope my skills, and bring me up to where i should of been 1 year ago when i negleted my programming criteria to develope my networking skill to which I must say im running at full speed ahead. I've updated my HTML skills conciderably started writing XML, SGML. Sometimes alittle Java just for the sake of it. The initial concept of gdopewars was solen from my good friend Ross Golder when it was just a foetus in the making. Feel free to drop in on irc.gnome.org channel #techbot and talk to me Viper or Spectre. Any help will be much appriciated.

8 Feb 2001 (updated 28 Feb 2001 at 22:12 UTC) »

At last my cable connection is up & running well. So far i,ve achieved a 14.5hr uptime withhout any hitches. Still got to get it fine-tuned, and update my dhcpd.conf file. Im getting an error----->No subnet declaration for xxx.xxx.xxx. not a major problem. I just need to rewrite my dhcpd.conf file for my new card (eth1) + reconfigure my gateway machineTechnical info. Appart from that all is nice & sweet on the networking side & hopefully now I can get stuck into more devolpment work. Im going to create some modules for techbot based initially on the non-GUI GNOME libs (glib, libxml etc)

5 Feb 2001 (updated 8 Feb 2001 at 11:32 UTC) »

So it's Monday morning again...I had a rather busy weekend, sorting my old unwanted hardware at home out, and making space in my room for more clutter. I seem to have gathered nearly every piece of hardware possibly imaginable over the years, and looking at most of the stuff, I just havent had time to play with half of it. Router --> Switches --> RAID controllers --> I could go on forever....
Cable is still down, but apparently an engineer is on the way, Aah, as we speak I have just recieved a call from the engineer & he is on the way :))

I went to ross's leaving_party on Saterday night. spectre turned up from Nottingham on the train. Arriving at about 3pm with some time to hack for a few mild hours. I showed spectre my new laptop, and endeavoured to get the web-cam working. Because its a new piece of hardware, there are no supported drivers for it, we tryed a few generic drivers to no avail. I will have to try and build one myself.

Make : - Fujitsu Siemens.
Model : - FPCCAM04
P/N : - CP044236

I'll let you know if I make progress......out for now!

25 Jan 2001 (updated 25 Jan 2001 at 17:22 UTC) »

Having a pretty demanding day at work today. Everyone seem s to want to talk to me at the same time. Ive configured 4 Scenic L's, 1 scenic X, and a half dozen various lifebooks. Im worn out and cant wait to get home in front of the fire with a nice cool glass of beer! The B-Series lifebooks seem to be the worst. There an ultra portible laptop with minimal devices. Therefor everything has to be attached on the fly, and this can cause difficult installations. I had to create my own boot disk so as to enable a loadable module device driver for a pcmcia card bus.
I hope all the guys in development appriciate all my work. I seem to sort all there junk out for them....

12 Jan 2001 (updated 24 Jan 2001 at 10:24 UTC) »

Been devoting alot of my spare time @home upgrading all my hardware & bringing them all up to spec. Looks like i'm beginning to see the light at the end of the tunnel. Additionally i have updated my homepage (first time in nearly a year), which provides me with links and technical info. for my mc's :) So what's all this for? Well basically i'm plugging into NTL's cable network after many years dial- up at 56kbps. I WILL be keeping my old dial-up connection for backup, i've got static IP which is allways usefull. NTL doesn't provide static IP im not sure yet but i recon i'll be released every 4 hours by the DHCP server. I wounder if there is a way round it somehow, although the chances are i would be leased the same IP address. I've just called the support line and already i'm not happy with the service im getting from NTL! I called them on 18/01/01, gave them all my account details ofcourse, they in turn advised me an engineer will call me in three working days. It's been 6 days and they tell me that an engineer wasnt booked so now i have a fixed date on the 31/01/01 sometime between 8:30 & 12:30. Mmmm. I've then got to call the support line again with my MAC_ADDR and wait two hours for the DNS server to be updated......

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