Kampuchea Crossings

Bump to baby on the beaten expat track

My consumption impact

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From American Public Media:

The Earth coudn’t support its 6.6 billion residents if everyone lived like a typical American. Consumer consequences will tell you how many planets it would take to support your lifestyle on a planetary scale and share some ideas for making your “footprint” a little smaller.

This formula has been making the rounds of the blogosphere, news and ads. The game walks you through some lifestyle questions such as the energy usage, transportation, food and shopping, and results show how many “Earths” worth of natural resources it would take to sustain all 6.6 billion humans if we all lived just like you. In my case, we’d need 3.5 planet Earths :-(

a magazine “for people who give a damn”

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Above is a great series of videos from the YouTube GOOD channel. This one was taped last year, and is quite timely for starting this year’s holiday season.

I love data visualisation blogs. There are so many infographics published every day, and these data scientists critique the transparency and fairness of the data, as well as the presentation of the message. One of the blogs I came across is GOOD, which is a quarterly US general-interest magazine founded in 2006 with a focus on social issues, politics, and sustainable living. Check out their website. It’s chock full of questions and features to stimulate dialogue and collaboration for solving some of the world’s biggest problems.

Billed in its first release as a “free press for the critical idealist”, it was launched in 2006 by Ben Goldhirsh, son of the creator of Inc. Magazine. Departing from the normative industry strategy, Good’s subscription fees go entirely to charity, and their marketing budget go to throwing block parties in large cities rather than to direct mail. While critics charge that this model is not viable– it has yet to break even after two years– the magazine has attracted a lot of attention and press, particularly from NPR, Foreign Policy, Washington Post and NYTimes. It’s also been nominated for several national magazine awards.

I’ll be giving a subscription to some friends this Christmas, before I leave again for Cambodia.

the Khmer side of SE Asia’s politics..

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Young journalists and bloggers are not plenty in the Kingdom, but they are gaining in numbers and spine. From just a few bloggers you can count on one hand in the early 2000’s to, literally, hundreds today, these guys are now lending a decidedly Khmer voice to the contentious politics of Cambodia, the ongoing belligerence with Thailand and shrewd maneuverings with Vietnam.

Events have traditionally come from a skewed Western or Thai perspective. So I’m glad to see the increasing articulation of the Khmer point of view.

Here are two new bloggers I just found. Worth a watch? We’ll wait and see.

More fodder for hate

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The nationalist fodder continues, tit for tat…

THE government took control of the Thai-owned aviation firm Cambodia Air Traffic Services (CATS) on Thursday and banned its Thai employees from the offices after the arrest of one of their co-workers on suspicion of stealing the flight schedule of fugitive Thai former prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra during his visit to Cambodia last week.

The move, which is likely to further damage diplomatic relations between the two countries, comes amid accusations by a Thai opposition leader that Thailand’s foreign minister ordered the theft.

from the Phnom Penh Post

So CATS is now in the “caretakership of a Cambodian government official”. I might just have to delay my flight back into the country.