People vs. posterior polishers?

A lead story in the Bangkok Post is about the cremation of the dead king, as it has been for some days.

The competing headline story is the massive flood bearing down on Bangkok after all the diversions that converted rice lands – the dead king’s monkey cheeks notion – into deep swamps has failed, yet again.

As far as we can tell, the military dictatorship is so focused on its campaign promise to have a really big and expensive funeral that it couldn’t care less about flooded farmers, villagers and others.

But back to the really big story of the funeral. It is reported that the king (the live one) has ordered “the government to allocate more areas for people to watch the royal cremation ceremony at Sanam Luang.”

A bit late you might think, but then Vajiralongkorn is not all that bright and it may have taken a while for him to understand the propaganda value of having people show up rather than just groups of official butt brushers and royal relatives.

The deputy national police chief Pol Gen Detnarong Suthichanbancha let it be known that a “total of 9,420 square metres will be added to accommodate 18,800 more people, he said, adding the areas previously allocated can accommodate about 171,000 people.” That means less than 200,000 can attend, at about 2 persons per square meter, usually considered the safe limit for crowd control.