I can proudly say that I saw the deflation of the housing bubble in the US on the horizon in 2006. I don’t recall the exact month, but it was probably sometime during late summer. I was talking with a fellow bandmate at some big band dance date, and he told me that he planned to sell out of his steady service business and focus on real estate investment – basically flipping properties. With neophytes like my friend jumping into the real estate market, I knew the end of the bubble was near.

(Update 9/17/2008 at 12am: Looks like John Carney of Dealbreaker experienced a similar moment.) 

That prediction, however, was a lucky guess based on my experience of the mania surrounding the previous speculative bubble in the US, the dot-com craze of 1999-2000. I had no clue about the deep structural problems in the US financial system. Like many people in the US, I’m learning more and more as the crisis progresses. Unfortunately, I suspect that we’re all going to continue learning since most of the savvy, well-researched and thoroughly analyzed accounts of the crisis I have found during the past two days point to more bank failures, a steep recession and not just months but years of economic misery in the US.

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The first I heard of the financial crisis back home in the US was in the evening of Monday, Sept. 15. I heard a story on Fox News about the collapse of Lehman Brothers and the distressed acquisition of Merrill Lynch by Bank of America. By that time, the New Stock Exchange (NYSE) had been open for a couple of hours and had recovered about 100 points on the Dow Jones Industrial Average of the 300-point drop at the beginning of the trading session.

The magnitude of the meltdown didn't hit until the following morning when I got to the office and read the news feeds after the media had a full day to digest the news and gauge the severity of the reaction on Wall Street. Since I've been out of the country for the past two years, I haven't had a strong feeling for the depth of the financial crisis that has stemmed from the subprime mortgage crisis. But Paul Krugman's column in today's New York Times gave me an immediate sense of the crisis when he compared the Black Sunday failures of Lehman Brothers and Merrill Lynch to the bank failures of the Great Depression:

The new system was supposed to do a better job of spreading and reducing risk. But in the aftermath of the housing bust and the resulting mortgage crisis, it seems apparent that risk wasn’t so much reduced as hidden: all too many investors had no idea how exposed they were.

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I first came acros George Lakoff during the 2004 US general election, when Bill Moyers interviewed him about "framing" in political discourse. A cognitive scientist from the University of California at Berkeley, Lakoff analyzed how political strategists use both visual and language imagery to shape the terms of public discourse to their favor. A supporter of the Democratic Party, Lakoff noted that Republicans have mastered the technique and that Democrats have struggled to put out their messages as a result.

Heady stuff, and Lakoff makes a persuasive case. I eventually read his book Don't Think of an Elephant, and it changed the way I understand political speech. Lakoff since 2004 has continued to work with Democrats on developing expertise in framing, and this year with Presidential nominee Barack Obama's campaign, the Democrats seem to have learned some of his lessons.

The thing that caught me off-guard, however, was that idea that Vice-Presidential nominee Sarah Palin, a Republican, represented a potent frame not because of her beliefs or her policies but merely because of her persona and her personal history. The implications that flow from Lakoff's insight are staggering.

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The restaurants at Koh Maprow (Coconut Island) all live on floating platforms in a small inlet between Laem Hin and the island. They're a magnificent spot for a sunset dinner, with the sun sinking slowly behind the hills to the west. I traveled out there with Richard, Colin and Duk last week after Colin had invited us for a working dinner. We left at 5:30pm, and after a 20-minute drive from the office, we pulled up in the dirt parking lot at Laem Hin pier and hailed a longtail boat to ferry us out to one of the four restaurants. (The restaurant paid the boatman, a cost that I assume was passed along to our dinner check. Still, the total bill to stuff four people with a great deal of seafood was 1,890 baht. Quite reasonable.)

The tiny village is incredibly beautiful, and on the drizzly Tuesday evening we were there, I didn't see anyone else on any of the restaurant platforms. The place we stopped looked to be run by a Muslim family of three generations. The deck had netted pens for fish, eels, lobster and other edible ocean-dwelling creatures. Duk was more than a little distraught as Colin, Richard and I all looked over the pens to decide what we would like to have for dinner. He couldn't eat any of them, he said. That would violoate his Buddhist precept of not killing other living things.

We ended up having some excellent giant prawns, an incredible white snapper, a shellfish omelette (Thai-style, of course, not Western), shrimp fried rice and a plate of Chinese morning glory (one of Duk and my favorites). The sky opend up and started pouring halfway through the meal, but not before I had a chance to take a bunch of photographs with my new Olympus e420 camera. Unfortunately, I forgot to switch the shooting mode to raw. The shots came out nice anyway, and I developed them a bit with some creative post-processing.

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Nature abhors a vacuum, and a vacuum is what the political scene in Bangkok looks like to my unexperienced eyes right now. Political parties and the protest group the People's Alliance for Democracy are moving quickly to shore up support for a new government.

Though the urgency of the protest movement seems to have died down, PAD leaders have tried to keep their cause alive, adopting a wait-and-see attitude toward the formation of a new government. One of the leaders yesterday told the Bangkok Post that if deposed Prime Minister Samak Sundaravej is returned to leadership, the protests would continue. Phuket Gazette reports that the message from PAD-offshoot protesters in Phuket has been much the same:

The PAD will not leave Saphan Hin. Although Samak and his Cabinet must go, the government is a coalition with many corrupt members. We cannot accept a caretaker Prime Minister from Samak's coalition; our country needs a neutral person to be PM, someone who can punish all those who have done wrong.

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Thailand's Constitutional Court has delivered its verdict, and Prime Minister Samak Sundaravej must step down because he got paid to make appearances on two cooking shows. The big question is whether the dissolution of Samak's government and subsequent new elections will end the protests that have rocked Bangkok for months and, lately, Phuket. The ruling doesn't seem in any way to address the underlying cause of the protests since it doesn't address the People's Alliance for Democracy's calls for a rewrite of the constitution.

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Shortly after the beginning of the workday today, thousands of secondary school students joined People's Alliance for Democracy (PAD) protesters at Phuket Provincial Hall for a march to the Saphan Hin complex south of Phuket City. Our driver, Khun Lek, got caught in traffic jams that resulted from the march, and he estimated about 2,000 people were on the streets as part of the protest.

PAD-related protesters had occupied the grounds at Phuket Provincial Hall during the past week in a laid-back demonstration against the government of Prime Minister Samak Sundaravej. Local leaders of the protest had promised to leave almost a week ago and relocate to Saphan Hin.

After some initial enthusiasm, the protests seem to have lost steam, and for the most part the business of Phuket continues as usual. Local officials and tourism business leaders continue to discuss ways to mitigate the public relations disaster of PAD's shutdown of Phuket International Airport. This story is still developing, as hoteliers in Khao Lak meet today to address promoting tourism in the wake of the airport shutdown. 

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I had read rumors that Google was working on a browser. So last week's news that Google acknowledged the project and posted a beta version for a public trial wasn't much of a surprise. Plus, Google's long-term strategy to deliver a full suite of productivity tools, like word processing, spreadsheet, calendaring, etc., would surely be helped if it had a browser product that could be tweaked to optimize user experience. Creating a Google browser made a lot of sense.

When I first considered traveling the world last year, I looked around for the best ways to manage all of my data-crunching needs while I hopped on and off of cruise ships and wandered around Europe (and later, Asia). I ended up shifting all of my email and documents to Gmail and Google Apps. After a few months I found myself totally happy with the (free!) services. Recently, as I've settled down in Phuket, Thailand, I've expanded my use of Google, so taking a look at Google's browser, called "Chrome," was a no-brainer. I put aside my usual reluctance to play with beta software and downloaded it the day after its release.

I'm very glad I did. After only one or two days of using it, I switched the settings on my Windows Vista laptop to use Chrome by default. I'm a longtime and completely satisfied user of Firefox. But Chrome does everything I want from a browser very elegantly, and somehow it manages to stay completely out-of-the-way. Like everything Google, it has a minimal approach and maximal intelligence. And it's fast!

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Looking at American politics from afar, I sometimes wonder what's happened to my country. During the last Presidential election cycle, I remember watching as the campaign descended into shares-our-values politics rather than any serious discussion of the huge issues facing the US and the world. This time around, after seeing the nomination of Alaska Governor Sarah Palin as Senator John McCain's running mate, my despair over American political culture has reached a new low.

Comparing the circus of the American Presidential campaign to the local situation makes me realize what a threat values politics poses for America. Thailand's political culture has some very large problems, and it was surreal to witness the hyperpartisanship of recent political conventions against the backdrop of serious protests against the government of Thailand's prime minister. There's a real feeling among the Thais I know that the protests have provoked a constitutional crisis. Prime Minister Samak Sundaravej has held on to office even despite what seems to me to be nearly universal condemnation from Thai citizens--whether allied with protesters from the People's Alliance for Democracy (PAD) or otherwise. Thai people yearn for a stable democracy and long to support smart leaders who can guide the nation as it modernizes and grows in global trading power.

By contrast, the US has arguably the world's most stable democracy, yet a large proportion of Americans seem to think that an education in the mechanics of government and a lifetime of public service are liabilities in a national politician. These voters, who typically have lower-than-average educational and income levels and who typically live in suburban or rural areas, think the country is better off with someone like them, rather than a person from a city who has advanced degrees or a lifetime of experience with public policy. That's how the US ended up with George Bush as President, and the poor result of his years in office shouldn't surprise anyone.

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The Bangkok Post has a brief article about national efforts by the Tourism Authority of Thailand (TAT) to downplay the People's Alliance for Democracy protests and to encourage continuing tourism. We're tracking local efforts to target tourists to let them know that it's still safe to come to Thailand. Around Phuket, we've identified efforts by the Phuket Tourist Association in conjunction with the local office of the TAT. Also, an association of hoteliers in Khao Lak, which is about 30km north of Phuket, is likewise trying to get the word out.

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