MINING DATA

South Coast, NSW, Australia

I'll smash you, the man said; and Michael misted up briefly when he read out loud a piece about every person having the right to live without being bullied. And on the news a boy had suicided after being bullied at school. It barely seemed bullying at all, the way the story was told, but these things could be as subjective as they were objective. Those who pass judgement on others only judge themselves, or some such slogan, was graffitied across a brown shop wall, on one of the shops that was still open down, although he never saw any customers in there. Hobbies. Maybe people didn't have hobbies anymore. Or the man kept the shop on not for financial gain, but to stay away from his wife during the days, to postpone retirement. To maintain a pretense. To be a person amongst persons, a man amongst man, a shop owner in a deteriorating climate.

Up the road was a shop selling recycled washing machines; with even the signs promoting bargains faded with age. Michael never saw anyone in there either. The two biggest shops in the street sold recycled clothing. The hairdressers were small; and gave off no scent of glamour. The dentist looked grim, the doctor grimmer. Not even the lawyer's office looked like it had seen any money for some years. Although people kept dying, and sometimes he would glance at the obituaries. If there was a faded joy. If there was some reason for being here. If it was meant to be a recovery from bullying, it was not. Stir crazy and forlorn, sometimes he did stupid things for no reason. Or hit brick walls with the work he was supposed to be doing. Or pined to be back in his own life; instead of living a pinned down life under perpetual surveillance; as had gone on for so long.

There were reasons for it, bro, the man said, and Michael nodded briefly. He already knew. He couldn't care less what they thought, or anybody thought, it had gone on too long and if sometimes, like a rat in a glass box, he could think of no way out but in, and he did stupid things, he couldn't care less about that either. "I don't give a fuck man," his acquaintance down by the water said, as they watched the creeping sea. It was flat here, not the waves of where he grew up, but many things were the same. The same bored youth hanging on headlines. The same scenes. The same personality types. There wasn't much data to mine here, folks, and if there was a reason for being here that was it. Deliberately so. Or perhaps not so deliberately, we were all washed up on secret beaches at times. At times faraway.

The Magic Faraway Tree had been a significant feature of many of their childhoods. At one point in the school week, in the early years at Primary School, the teacher had read the book out loud to the class, and he, for one, had been entirely in there with every word. Now too much time had passed; and already it was obvious how short-lived a species they were. "I'm flying, wasted," a man said in the hotel toilet, slumped against the basin. Michael took in the tattoos, could hear the people the man was drinking with outside, and didn't dally. An old man on the loose, a random particle. Emerging into the light. "We're interfering with a natural process," one of the voices said, an early morning radio perhaps. He just let them go, tired of his own head, tired of of his circumstance, lonely is as lonely does. "You're not from around here, are you?"

THE BIGGER STORY:

https://twitter.com/RichardBarrow/status/407495329349525506/photo/1

In Thailand, a Drone’s Eye View of Protests

By CHRISTINE HAUSER

TheCyberJom, a YouTube account, posted video of street protests in Thailand that were recorded by a drone.

Thailand’s news media outlets have been increasingly using small, unmanned flying gadgets that give them a bird’s-eye view of the protests in the streets of their capital. As my colleague Thomas Fuller writes, the miniature drones have circulated videos of the battles, including one between riot police outside the prime minister’s office and protesters attacking the barricades.

This is the first time that drones have been used so widely during protests in Thailand, which is now in the throes of its deepest civil unrest in three years.

Video of protests at Government House on Dec. 1.

Footage of a street in the protest area and apparent evacuation of an injured protester.

Used sporadically in Thailand to take images of floods, festivals and of previous unrest, the tiny drones fitted with cameras are particularly handy now that some of Bangkok’s streets are choked with tear gas and punctuated by gunfire.

They take off vertically and are powered aloft by helicopter-type rotor blades — not unlike the drones Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s founder, floated as possible delivery vehicles. In Thailand, many local news organizations use the drones to grab new angles or to get some perspective on the rioting crowds, which either stretch down broad avenues or cluster in small groups.

While always hard to pin down, protest crowd numbers are an important estimate that can range broadly and imprecisely. In general, they can be greatly exaggerated for propaganda purposes in any conflict, even to the extent that still photography images are altered to make demonstrations look better attended than they really were.

It is not yet clear what, if any, effect the drone coverage is having on the course of the protests.

On the street, some journalists have been mingling with the protesters unimpeded, while others have been confronted and beaten, as a Human Rights Watch report published last week said.

It noted that journalists were being attacked by opposition groups, citing one example of when they surrounded television stations or attacked a photographer:

The protests have targeted journalists considered supportive of the government. On November 25, opposition protesters assaulted Nick Nostitz, a German freelance journalist, after remarks by a speaker at a mass rally. According to witnesses and news footage, a former Democrat Party member of parliament, Chumpol Junsai, announced to thousands of protesters in front of the Bangkok Metropolitan Police headquarters that Nostitz was affiliated with the pro-government United Front for Democracy against Dictatorship (UDD), known at the “Red Shirts,” and urged them to chase him out.

Several protesters immediately attacked Nostitz, punching him several times in the face, until police officers intervened and rescued him. Shortly thereafter, a pro-Democrat Party cable TV station, the Blue Sky Channel, posted Nostiz’s profile on its Facebook page, and his photograph has been spread widely on antigovernment social media sites, raising concerns for his safety.

Richard Barrow, a writer based in Bangkok, wroteon his website last month about the use of drones to augment his travel writing in Thailand using thePhantom, a device which can be fitted with a GoPro or built-in camera.

Mr. Barrow wrote in a recent post that the devices have also been used in reporting on floods and festivals, in addition to the latest unrest for which he recirculated an aerial image of protest crowds at Bangkok’s Democracy Monument last month.

As the protests intensified over the weekend, at least three people were killed, and as of late Monday, the government reported that the total number of people injured since Friday had risen to 201, Mr. Fuller reported.

On Monday, Mr. Barrow and others shared on Twitter a sense of the difficulties of working in Thailand.