Stallone explained, why he chose Burma for his latest Movie

Friday, 18 January , 2008, 14:45

Action star Sylvester Stallone did not want to use Afghanistan or Iraq as a backdrop for the latest in the Rambo series, which he also directs, because he did not want to offend troops stationed there right now.

Thesun.co.uk quoted him as saying: “I thought it would be an insult to the men who are fighting, to think that a fictional character could come and change everything. I thought Burma would be more real.”

The movie is titled Rambo and it finds the protagonist leading a solitary life in the mountains and jungles of northern Thailand. But he has to return to action when a group of human rights activists find him and plead with him to guide them to Burma to deliver medical supplies. Rambo has to rescue them when the Burmese army captures them.

“You have one small area with peasants being overwhelmed by this brutal military force. They are picked out because they are Christians and Rambo is an atheist at this time and he had lost most of his humanity. I wanted to do something more spiritual and visually interesting,” he said.

Source

http://sify.com/movies/hollywood/fullstory.php?id=14591098

Metered Taxis in Rangoon soon?

A Rangoon taxi behind an over-crowded bus

According to Irrawaddy News all the taxi owners in Rangoon are instructed to Install the meters on their taxis .

There are, eight thousand plus taxis for a city of more than five million people. For the most of the world’s cities this news is not the news at all, as taxis are always fitted with the meters.

However, In Burma, with the current diesel and patrol price, this blogger is amazed that these old reconditioned taxis are still seen on the roads of Rangoon

The cost of repair for the old cars, in Burma are expensive as most of the taxis in Rangoon are used and reconditioned Japanese car with the average age of 15 years or more.

These taxis are, often the targets of corrupt Rangoon traffic police for extra income.

The cost of a unit of meter for a taxi is 200,000 kyat. Few companies with the link to the authorities are the distributors of these compulsory meters for Rangoon taxis.

So, in near future, if you do not see taxis over the Rangoon streets don’t be surprised.

A taxi driver, acording to Irrawaddy news said “Even right now, for me is very hard to pay seven thousand kyat a day to the owner of my taxi. Once the taxis are fitted with meters how are we going to survive as situation in our country is quite different from other countries”

A daily income of a taxi driver is between 5000 kyat to 10,000 kyat. After deducting the cost of petrol,CNG, diesel, and owner fees, these taxi drivers get around 3000 kyat a day.

Sorry for the taxi drivers of Burma.

Sit Mone

Going back to past in time machine; I Love Burma !

Is that the past ?

Seems to be so fast..

Sit Mone

Blogger’s Code of Conduct

The Blogger’s Code of Conduct is a proposal by Tim O’Reilly for bloggers to enforce civility on their bloggers by being civil themselves and moderating comments on their blog. The code was proposed due to threats made to blogger Kathy Sierra^[1]. The idea of the code was first reported by BBC News, who quoted O’Reilly saying, “I do think we need some code of conduct around what is acceptable behaviour, I would hope that it doesn’t come through any kind of regulation it would come through self-regulation.”^[2]O’Reilly and others came up with a list of seven proposed ideas:

1. Take responsibility not just for your own words, but for the comments you allow on your blog.
2. Label your tolerance level for abusive comments.
3. Consider eliminating anonymous comments.
4. Ignore the trolls.
5. Take the conversation offline, and talk directly, or find an intermediary who can do so.
6. If you know someone who is behaving badly, tell them so.
7. Don’t say anything online that you wouldn’t say in person.

In later comments, O’Reilly gave a tacit endorsement of Jon Garfunkel’s Comment Management Proposal ^[3]: “Jon, your post at Comment Management Responsibility: A Proposal is very detailed and thought provoking, as well as way more comprehensive than anything I’d thought so far.”

Source Wikepedia

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blogger%27s_Code_of_Conduct

This blogger feels that all the Burmese blogger writing for the Freedom of Burma should be exempted from Code of Conduct No 7.

Sit Mone

Burmese Junta’s unlucky number 8.8.08

China has been striving to make certain that Aug. 8, 2008, the start of this summer’s Olympic Games in Beijing, will be an auspicious date. The Communist authorities have even set the start of their gala for 8 p.m. on 8/8/08.

On that same day, victims of the junta ruling Burma will commemorate the 20th anniversary of a popular uprising against military dictatorship that was violently suppressed. Leaders of that movement, known as the 88 Student Generation, were among the first to be arrested when Buddhist monks led popular protests against the junta last September, and they are among the 700 protesters still incarcerated.

The numerological coincidence of China’s Olympic gala and Burma’s mournful memory will serve a positive purpose if it reminds the world of Burma’s agony in the two decades since Aug. 8, 1988 and of the shameful symbiosis between China’s government and the Burmese junta. Beijing has been the principal arms seller and commercial partner of the generals in Burma, and the threat of a Chinese veto in the UN Security Council shields the junta from an international arms embargo.

Yet the other rising power in Asia, democratic India, has shown a decent respect for international opinion by halting arms sales and transfers to Burma’s military dictators. As 8/8/08 approaches, the world must see to it that when it comes to propping up the Burmese junta, Beijing’s number is up next.

Full text

International Herald Tribune

http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/01/14/opinion/edburma.php

New Year Celebration in Yangon

၂၀၀၇ခုႏွစ္ု၏ ဆည္းဆာသို႔ ေရာက္လုုနီးသည့္အခါတိုင္းတြင္ လာမည့္အနာဂတ္ကာလေလးတြြင္ new year ဟူသည့္ႏွစ္သစ္က လက္လွမ္းလို႔ႀကိဳဆိုေနစၿမဲပါပဲ။ ထုိႏွစ္သစ္ကုိ ေရာက္မည့္အခ်ိန္သည္ ဒီဘက္ႏွစ္ေဟာင္း၏ ဆည္းဆာကို ေက်ာ္ျဖတ္ရမည္မွာ အမွန္ပင္ျဖစ္သည္။

ထိုသို႔ ဆည္းဆာကို ေက်ာ္ျဖတ္ရာ၌ တစ္ခ်ဴိ႕လူႀကီး၊ လူငယ္၊ လူရြယ္တို႔သည္ ညလံုးေပါက္မအိပ္ဘဲ အေပ်ာ္ႀကီးေပ်ာ္ခဲ့ၾကေပသည္။ ထိုသို႔ေပ်ာ္ခဲ့ၾကရာတြင္ အရက္ေသစာေသာက္စားမူးရူးၿပီး အုပ္စုဖြဲ႕၍ လမ္းမႀကီးတစ္ေလွ်ာက္ ေအာ္ဟစ္သီခ်င္းဆိုကာ အေပ်ာ္လြန္ခဲ့ၾကသည္္။ ဤတြင္မက ရန္ကုန္ၿမိဳ႕၏ ထင္ရွားသည့္ ရပ္ကြက္တစ္ခု ျဖစ္သည့္ တကၠသိုလ္ရိပ္သာလမ္းထဲတြင္ ႏုိက္ကလပ္ႀကီးတစ္ခုဖြင့္လွစ္ထားသည္။ ထိုႏႈိက္ကလပ္ကို နိုင္ငံ့ေခါင္းေဆာင္တစ္ဦးက ပိုင္ဆိုင္သည္ဟုဆိုပါသည္။ ထို႔ေၾကာင့္ ၄င္းႏိုက္ကလပ္တြင္ အေစာင့္အေရွာက္မ်ားစြာ ရွိသည္ဟု သိရပါသည္။ အဆိုပါညက ထိုႏိုက္ကလပ္သို႔ တက္ေရာက္လာေသာ မိန္းမေယာက္်ားမ်ားသည္ အရက္ကို အလြန္အကၽြံေသာက္ကာ လူပံုအလယ္၌ မရွက္မေၾကာက္ တစ္ဦးကုိတစ္ဦးေပြ႕ဖက္ကာ အေနာက္တိုင္းအကျဖင့္ကေနၾကသည္။ အထူးသျဖင့္ မိန္းခေလးမ်ားသည္ ၀တ္လစ္စလစ္ျဖင့္ ကေနၾကသည္မွာ ယိုသူမရွက္ ျမင္သူရွက္ဆိုသကဲ့ပင္တည္း။ တစ္ဦးလွ်င္ ၃၀၀၀၀ က်ပ္ေပးျခင္း ျဖင့္ ႏိုက္ကလပ္သို႔ တက္ေရာက္ခြင့္ရၾကသည္ဟု သိရပါသည္။

သည္တြင္မက ၿမိဳ႕တစ္ၿမိဳ႕၏ တကၠသိုလ္ႀကီးတစ္ခုတြင္ တကၠသိုလ္ဆရာမအခ်ဳိ႕သည္ အရက္ေသာက္ကာ ေက်ာင္းသားမ်ားႏွင့္ ေရာေႏွာၿပီး ႏွစ္သစ္ကုိ ႀကိဳဆိုခဲ့ၾကပါသည္။ အမွန္ကား နုိင္ငံ့ေခါင္းေဆာင္တို႔သည္ တိုင္းသူျပည္သားတို႔ ၏ ေရွ႕ေဆာင္လမ္းျပျဖစ္သကဲ့သို႔၊ တကၠသိုလ္ဆရာ/ဆရာမမ်ားဟူသည္ ေက်ာင္းသား/သူမ်ား၏ မေကာင္းျမစ္တာ ေကာင္းရာညြန္လတ္ ေရွ႕ေဆာင္လမ္းျပမ်ားျဖစ္ပါလွ်က္ အက်င့္စာရိတၱေဖါက္ျဖစ္ကာ လမ္းမွားလိုက္ေနၾကမည္ဆိုပါလွ်င္ လမ္းညြန္မႈမေကာင္းေသာ တိုင္းသူျပည္သားမ်ား ေရွ႕ေဆာင္မႈမေကာင္းေသာ ေက်ာင္းသူေက်ာင္းသားမ်ားသည္ မည္သို႔ ရွိမည္နည္း၊ ႏွစ္သစ္မွသည္ ေနာင္လာမည့္ အနာဂတ္ကာလအတြက္ ေတြး၀ံ့စရာမရွိေပ။ မိသားစု ျပည့္စံုရန္သာ သိၾကၿပီး နိုင္ငံအတြက္ တာ၀န္မဲ့ေသာ နိုင္ငံ့ေခါင္းေဆာင္ဆိုသူမ်ား၏ အက်င့္စာရိတၱပ်က္ျပားမႈ၊ တကၠသိုလ္ဆရာ/ဆရာမမ်ား၏ အက်င့္ပ်က္ျပားမႈတို႔ ေၾကာင့္ ႏွစ္သစ္ကူး၌ မွန္ကန္၍ တန္ဘိုးရွိေသာ ေပ်ာ္ရႊင္မႈမ်ား ေပ်ာက္ကြယ္ခဲ့ရသည္။ သည္အတိုင္းဆိုလွ်င္ ၂၀၀၇ ခုႏွစ္၏ ဆည္းဆာမွသည္ ႏွစ္သစ္ဆီသို႔ ျဖတ္ေက်ာ္ရာတြင္ အဓိပၸါယ္ရွိေသာ ျဖတ္ေက်ာ္မႈမဟုတ္နိုင္ေတာ့ေခ်။

ေျပာလိုသည္မွာ-

ႏွစ္ေဟာင္း၏ ဆည္းဆာမွသည္ ႏွစ္သစ္ဆီသို႔ ေက်ာ္ျဖတ္ၾကေသာအခါ အဓိပၸါယ္ရွိေသာ ေက်ာ္ျဖတ္ျခင္းျဖင့္ ေက်ာ္ျဖတ္နိင္ရန္အေရးႀကီးေပသည္။ ထိုသို႔ ေက်ာ္ျဖတ္နိုင္ရန္အတြက္ တိုင္းသူျပည္သားတို႔၏ ေရွ႕ေဆာင္လမ္းျပျဖစ္ေသာ နိုင္ငံ့ေခါင္းေဆာင္မ်ားႏွင့္ ေက်ာင္းသား/သူမ်ား၏ ေရွ႕ေဆာင္လမ္းျပျဖစ္ေသာ တကၠသိုလ္ဆရာ/ဆရာမ်ား၏ အက်င့္စာရိတၱႏွင့္ ျပဳမူေနထိုင္မႈတို႔ကုိ ျပဳျပင္ရေပမည္။ တာ၀န္သိသိ သစၥာရွိရွိျဖင့္ ထိန္းထိန္းသိမ္းသိမ္း ျပဳမႈက်င့္သံုးေနထိုင္ သြားၾကမည္ဆိုလွ်င္ တိုင္းသူျပည္သား၊ ေက်ာင္းသား/သူမ်ား၏ အက်င့္စာရိတၱေကာင္းမြန္လာနိုင္ပါသည္။ ထိုသို႔ ေကာင္းမြန္ျပည့္စုံမွသာလွ်င္ ႏွစ္ေဟာင္း၏ဆည္းဆာမွသည္ ႏွစ္သစ္ဆီသို႔ အဓိပၸါယ္ရွိစြာ ေက်ာ္ျဖတ္နိုင္မည္ျဖစ္ပါေၾကာင္း ေရးသားတင္ျပလိုက္ရပါေတာ့သတည္း။

This blogger has decided this post copied from Hit Taing, not to be translated into English.

Sit Mone

Copied from Hitaing News http://www.hittaing.org/letter/

 

 

 

 

 

Burmese Boxers fight for survival in Thailand

Harsh conditions in Myanmar result in residents crossing the border into Thailand in search of a better life.

One of the ways for young men to make money is to put their bodies on the line in boxing contests.

Source

Aljazeera News

http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/73B34486-9703-4A5B-8536-9630AF60A8AB.htm

 

King keeps his vow,and man keeps his promise

Famous proverb in Burmese saying ” The King has to keep his vow just as the ordinary man has to keep his promise.

This is called ” Law Ka Par La” in Sanskrit which translates into ” Shame” and ” Fear” towards the wrong doing by oneself.

This blogger would like to present the real account of a Burmese King in today’s post. This is an example of how a Burmese king kept his vow, following ” Law Ka Par La” or “Shame” and “fear” of his own responsibility.

King Min Htee of Yakhine ( Rakhine) was the perfect example of a king who kept his vow in Burmese history. During his reign, people working in the palace had the habit of betel chewing. Then they would usually clean their dirty fingers by swiping the gilded pillars of the palace. Because of this habit most of the pillars of the palace were dirty and stained with the red color of chewed betel .

King Min Htee circulated an order among the palace staff including the Ministers and princes. The order said that,”Whoever used his fingers to stain the pillars with chewed betel, would have his index finger cut off immediately”.

After the king’s order everybody in the palace followed the order strictly as no one wanted their fingers to be cut off .

Unfortunately, the King himself, accidentally used his finger to wipe off the chewed betel and stained a pillar in his palace.

Few days later the King noticed that the palace was being repainted to prepare for the arrival of a foreign diplomat. He asked why the Palace was being repainted.

Everybody kept quiet as they did not know how to answer the King’s question. Then a brave staff of the palace answered that the culprit was the King himself. To prove his point, he showed a detailed ” date, and time” record of the incident.

The King immediately took his sword out of the sheath and cut off his finger in front of the shocked Palace Staff.

“THE KING MIN HTEE WAS THE KING WITH COURAGE AND SHAME.”

According to the Burmese Historian U Pho Kyar, there is a statue of a King in a place called Laung Kyet in Burma. The statue’s hand had only four fingers, which strongly suggests that it was King Min Htee.

This blogger’s point here is that the old Burmese kings kept their Vow, and left a legacy in history. What about our new king in Nay Pyi Daw ? Does he keep his Vow?

Sit Mone

Another towering lady of Burma ” Dr Cynthia Maung”

This blogger has another un fulfilling job shouldered upon me. That is a long overdue post for “Dr Cynthia Maung”

In this weblog this blogger has posted “Towering Ladies of Burma”. This list of ladies will never be completed without mentioning ” Dr Cynthia Maung”

She makes proud to all Burmese ladies, especially for her ethnic Karen Minorities of Burma. Almost everybody who knows Burma aware of who she is.

She is a medical doctor graduated from Institute of Medicine 2 Rangoon in 1985. After her graduation and after 1988 uprising what has happened to Dr Cynthia became the part of the history of Burma.

“Very dignified, quiet , humble, firm and sincere” these are the words who were trying to describe Dr Cynthia’s personality.

Nobody can deny that Cynthia has sacrificed most of her life in the Malaria infested dangerous border of Thailand and Burma. She has created a safe heaven called ” Mae Tao Clinic” for those who were dire need of medical help.

Those who were suffering life threatening Malaria, HIV/AIDS to other common illness commonly associated with refugees , displaced people and poverty were seeking Dr Cynthia’s help.

After reading this post, please do visit Dr Cynthia’s clinic .You can find the link on the right column of my blog.

Following is the brief biography of Dr Cynthia Maung

Dr. Cynthia Maung (born 6 December 1959) is a Karen medical doctor who since 1989 has lived in Mae Sot, on the Thai-Burmese border. She left Burma (now Myanmar) after the 8888 Uprising and has since run a clinic treating Burmese refugees, migrants and orphans at Mae Tao Clinic in Mae Sot on the Thai-Burmese border, together with 100 paramedics and teachers.

She received Southeast Asia’s Ramon Magsaysay Award for community leadership and she was listed as one of 2003 Time Magazine’s Asian Heroes. Altogether she has received six international awards for her work. In 1999, she was the first recipient of the Jonathan Mann Award, sponsored by US and Swiss health organizations.

Source Wikepedia

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cynthia_Maung

Please vist Dr Cynthia’s Mae Tao Clinic at

http://www.maetaoclinic.org/

We all are proud of you, Dr. Cynthia !

Sit Mone

Burmese Embassy in South Africa recieves panties!

A popular South African women’s magazine has joined the global call for people to join the “panty protest” against Myanmar’s regime by sending women’s underwear to the junta’s embassy in Pretoria.

Marie Claire’s current issue calls on its readers to send their knickers to the embassy as a form of protest against human rights abuses.

Thein Win, chairperson of the Free Burma Campaign South Africa, said: “It is an excellent idea. Send more panties to sap more power so that they know people do not support them.”

The worldwide protest started late last year after Lanna Action for Burma, a pro-democracy group based in Thailand, urged supporters around the world to join its “Panty Power” campaign.

source

Yahoo News

http://www.iol.co.za/index.php?from=rss_South%20Africa&set_id=1&click_id=13&art_id=vn20080112083044115C349950

This blogger was amazed to read this news. South Africa is thousand miles away from Burma in a different continent. However, South African people said Loud and Clear that they knew what the Military Junta has done to its people.

Sit Mone