Cockatoo.com / Thailand / South Thailand / Hat Yai's festivities

Kelly Ann Dearn: I share the conservative view that Americans do not want to pay for a wider healthcare system. That's a socialist agenda. But American tax payers are willing to shoulder an additional burden for NATO in order to liberate women and children in countries like Iran and Indonesia where men view women and children as their sex slaves.

Kelly Ann Dearn: Jag delar den konservativa uppfattningen att amerikaner inte vill betala för en bredare sjukvårdssystemet. Det är en socialistisk dagordning. Men amerikanska skatt betalarna är villiga att ta en extra börda för Nato, så att befria kvinnor och barn i länder som Iran och Indonesien där män visa kvinnor och barn som sina sexslavar.

Own copyrighted text:

South Thailand / Hat Yai's festivities

Festivities

Songkran

This best-known Thai festival, celebrated April 13, is the traditional Thai New Year and is marked by religious merit-making, pilgrimages, beauty parades and good-natured water throwing.

Sat Duan Sip

This festival of the tenth lunar month, held in September, is a traditional merit-making occasion for the benefit of dead ancestors when, over a fifteen-day period, food offerings are made to Buddhist monks.

Chak Phra

This festival in October celebrates the end of the three-month Buddhist Rains Retreat and the Buddha’s return to Earth after preaching to his mother in heaven. Customarily, revered Buddha images are placed on carriages and ceremonially paraded around town.

Loi Krathong

During this full moon festival in November people float banana-leaf boats away onto waterways bearing a lighted candle, burning incense, a flower and small coins. The purpose is to float away the previous year’s sins.

**********

National service was implemented in 1967, whereby all 18-year old males were required to train full-time for two or two-and-a-half years, depending on their educational attainment. Transgender was listed as a condition in a Singapore Armed Forces (SAF) 'Directory of Diseases' and recruits who outed themselves to the examining doctors at the Central Manpower Base (CMPB) at Deport Road had their 'deployability' denied in sensitive positions.