Kerryd

2 hours ago, StayinThailand2much said:

And?? What is carcinogenic about it, the fish, the herbs and spices, or the lemon juice?

The fish.

The Liver Fluke lives in klongs and paddies and ponds.
Fish eat the Fluke larvae in the water. People catch the fish and eat them (or turn them into fish paste).

The larvae get into your blood stream and when they get to the liver or bile duct they attach and grow into adult Flukes.
That is what gives you the cancer. (Though you could be infected with them for decades before getting cancer.)

The grown Flukes deposit eggs into the liver (or bile ducts) which get flushed out with your poop.
In Isaan (and other areas) people will crap in the paddies or their "septic" tank outflow is simply a pipe draining out of the tank - often at ground level.

When the monsoons come, the septic tanks flood, the paddies flood, the ponds and klongs flood and all those Fluke eggs get scattered around.
They start to grow and get eaten by the fish. People catch the fish and - you know the rest.

It seems the lifespan of a Liver Fluke can be up to 25 years. However, if you are living in Isaan and eating raw fish paste (and anything else harvested from the klongs and ponds that isn't washed and cooked, like watercress) you are probably going to get infected many times over that time.

I avoid fish here like the plague. Even cooked fish makes me wary. Same for the small raw crabs they put in the Papaya Salad. 

(Coincidentally, Cholera is usually spread the same way. Cholera is spread by contact with infected feces (normally).
People infected with it poop (wherever) and the poop ends up in the water. People come in contact with the water (or eat stuff that was in the water) and end up getting Cholera. It's purely a coincidence that Cholera is more prevalent in countries that "use the left hand" or "a bowl of water" to clean themselves. In countries that use the "wipe it with toilet paper till it's clean" method - Cholera is (generally) not an issue.) 
 

The West doesn't want to sell Thailand their technology now because they know it will be in Chinese hands within days.

Thailand is sliding deeping into China's pocket and so long as they keep electing officials that are more concerned with becoming "unusually rich" instead of doing their job, it's only going to get worse.

But no politician is going to do away with the very laws that are protecting them now, like the Defamation laws. And no politician is going to crack down on the Prosecutors and Judges that keep letting (rich) criminals get away with their crimes.

So Thailand is going to end up just like Cambodia soon. And then just like Myanmar a little later.

I'm actually a bit surprised that the military Junta didn't go full "Hun Sen" when they had the power. Guess they were worried they didn't have complete control of their own military and were worried their heads would be on the block if they tried.

But there's always next time......... especially if China is willing to back your play and keep the West from interfering.

Waiting for news about the police rounding up all sedan-driving "kung fu" foreigners and denying their Visa extensions (or just plain deporting them) like they said they were going to do with all (foreigners) wearing 1% patches on their motorcycle vests.

I guess it's hard to appy for a royal pardon when you are still running from the law.

However, in light of a recent case, it seems one just needs to come back, spend a day in jail, move to a private hospital suite and then apply.

Funny how Interpol just can't seem to find this guy though !

Wow - it's like you all think that poor girls with Grade 8 educations from poor villages should automatically know all the cons of the world and be able to do detailed internet searches to detect possible scams.

And think they should be automatically suspicious if a "friend" tells them of an opportunity where they could make huge money and they meet another Thai who no doubt spins them a tale as well and fills their heads with dreams of easy money.

Decades ago, Nepal stopped allowing their women to leave the country to go work elsewhere. 
I wondered why (in Afghanistan) we could hire Nepalese men but not women. Turns out that Nepal had a problem with INDIAN men promising Nepalese women big money for working menial jobs like maids and waitresses.

But of course, once they entered India their passports would be stolen by their employeers and they'd be thrown into a brothel. If they were lucky, they might be able to escape after a couple years.

It was happening so often because most Nepalese women have little or no education and even less experience dealing with foreigners. The lure of making 3-5 (or more) times the money for doing the same job is pretty strong when you are living below the poverty line.

The "brothel" scam has also been going on for decades here as well. A friend of mine told me she'd been offered a "modeling" job in Indonesia (back around 2008) and it supposedly paid huge money compared to what she was making. I cautioned her and showed her some recent news stories about Thai women rescued from brothels in South Korea and other places that had also been offered "modelling" jobs.

Same deal - it was a "friend" who told her about the deal. Some pimp pays a Thai woman to scout out possible victims and probably pays her a fee for each one she convinces to take the job. The girls think the woman is just being nice and trying to help them out like an older sister or aunt.

Even in Canada. I knew a girl (early 20s), not overly attractive. She was telling me her sister had been offered a job teaching in Japan. As soon as I saw the sister's photo I knew it was a scam. She was HOT.
She may have been magazine material even (good mags, not the cheap sleazy kind). If there had been OnlyFans back then, she'd have been a star.

There was no way she was being recruited to teach English in Japan. Especially not for the crazy amount of money she was apparently being offered.

But it seems the idea of not even having to be a qualified teacher in order to get a very high paying job in a school in a foreign country was too good to be true.
(I never did hear if she took the job.)

So it's not just dumb farm girls that get lured into scams like this.



 

No folding chairs were harmed in this incident.

1 hour ago, Dan O said:

Tourist visas are fairly easy to obtain  as long as you have the appropriate info required. I've never understood the few that post how difficult it is to get a tourist visa

They used to be easy.
It seems the new "online visa" program can be annoying to say the least. (For some people it seems.)

Last year my buddy finally gave up on trying and just got the 45 day stamp when he arrived, extended it (by 30 days), did a border run to get another 45 days, another extension (for a total of 150 days) and flew home.

So he ended up actually staying as long as he had planned to anyways (about 5 months during the dead of winter) and only had to do one border run, just like he would have had to do if he'd gotten his normal tourist visa.

I'm waiting to hear if he's had more success with the online program this year. I even set myself up on it so I could review the process and guide him through it (up to a certain point). There's only so much you can do before it gets tricky (as in, applying for a Visa when you are already on an Extension of a different Visa type).

Obviously a 90 Day Exemption Stamp would be awesome, even if you could only extend it by 30 days before having to do a border run. That would be literally 8 months of stay for the cost of one border run and two extensions. 

Although the idea of having to do 3 border runs and 3 extensions in order to stay for 1 year would be too much for a lot of people who would still complain about it and use agents to do it for them anyways.

Makes you wonder how people survived back in the days when they used to have to do a border run each month to get another 30 day stamp. I knew a guy (from the UK) that was living off of money he'd borrow from one guy, then the next month he'd borrow even more from someone else so he could pay the first guy back and still have enough to live on for a month before trying to borrow even more from someone else.

And he would pay an agent 6,000 baht to do a border run for him once a month ! I couldn't believe it. I was between contracts and paying 2,500 to do a border run once a month (with 2 free meals even). He was living off of money he was borrowing from friends and couldn't be bothered to spend half a day, once a month, to do a border run that would have saved him 3,500 baht.

I swear, if Thailand came along and offered 1 year, no hassle, Visa Exemption stamps with no 90 Day report requirement, people would STILL whine. 
And still hire agents to do a "once a year border run" because it's "too much hassle" to do it themselves.

 

Gawd - even when they announce they are considering 90 Day Visa EXEMPTION stamps to replace the 30 days stamps currently given - people are still complaining !
Waaa - I already bought a Tourist Visa.
Waaa - it won't go into effect until after I've already arrived.
Waaa - the gov't will lose money.

All the "permanent" tourists will be rolling on the floor in glee, along with the digital nomads who'll be cancelling their "Ed" visas in droves. You can bet a lot of people on marriage/retirement extensions will cancel as well if they can get away with doing a border run once every 3 months.

It certainly would cut down - immensely - on the Immigration lines around the country. And put a crimp in the Visa Agent's business, though as we already know there are a lot of people who are too lazy to do a 90 day report and certainly won't do a border run every 90 days either so the Agents will still get some business.

The hilarious part will be when all those people cancel their Visa/extensions and empty their bank accounts - and then 6 months later find out the 90 day exemption stamps are reverting back to 30 days (after high season).

Only takes them a couple weeks to make the decision and a few more to have it "gazetted" and it becomes fact.
 

Seems odd a]that the CCTV would be that selective that it only showed the end of what happened and not how the woman (and man) ended up in that position.

Lol - he claims that "for some reason" they wanted to look at his phone and then wouldn't give it back, which lead to the altercation.

And at the police station the "transgenders" reportedly intimidated a reporter into not filming them and wanted to press charges against the tourist for assault.

However the police determined that both sides had mutually agreed to fight and the police could charge and fine both sides so the transgenders decided not to press charges and left the police station.

The tourist refused to go to the hospital to have his injuries looked at and was returned to his hotel.

An NO, why on earth would ANYONE think "he should have known better" ? He might have been in the country for a day or two on the only trip he's ever made outside of his home country.

Just like I'm sure none of you had any clue what Thailand - and Pattaya in particular - was really like until after you got here. And if you met someone at a bar on your first night and they told you to take a stroll on Beach Road at night - you'd have probably thought you had just landed in heaven - until you found out most of those "girls" had a lot more "down below" than you did.

I used to walk from Soi 7 to Walking Street in evenings. Friends of mine had a band that played in a bar on the top (#2 road) end of the soi and when their gig ended I'd walk down to Beach Road and then to Walking Street. (Helped sober me up a bit.)

Used to pass all manner of katoeys and freelancers. Never had a single problem.

But then again, I wasn't stopping and gawking and trying to haggle any of them into lowering their prices (or going back to my hotel room where my 5 friends were waiting).
And I wasn't flashing enough gold to buy everyone in my home village a new cow.

But you can bet a lot of people on their first trip here wouldn't have a clue about the "dos and don'ts" and the "where not to go after midnight unless you are looking for something a little (or a lot) different".

 

Let's put it this way.
A Canadian criminal (Michael Karas) travelled to Thailand using "stolen" ID in 1995. A year later he murdered the woman he'd been living with, dismembered her body and threw the pieces in a local (Pattaya) swamp.

He then hopped on a plane (still using that "stolen" ID) and flew back to Canada before the authorities had identified him as the killer.
He was arrested in Canada (for violating his probation) and sent back to prison. Thailand requested his extradition. He confessed to some robberies he'd done that the police had listed as "cold cases". That added a few years to his sentence but eventually he was extradited back to Thailand.

He was tried and convicted and sent to Bang Kwan prison for life. (As per normal in Thailand, no public record of his trial or what sentence he was actually given at the time. However, if I recall from older stories, it would have been a death sentence for murdering the woman and another death sentence for mutilating her face and dismembering her body.

However, 5 years to the day later, his lawyer and some loser reporter at a Canadian newspaper (the Toronto Sun) concocted a story about how he shouldn't have been convicted of murder. They argued it should have been manslaughter at best. (They ignored that he'd mutilated her face to try and prevent identification as well as forgetting to mention he'd dismembered her body and threw it into a swamp.)
They claimed he'd been in prison for "half a decade" already - because that sounded worse than "5 years". Karas and his lawyer wanted Canada to approve his transfer back to Canada and decided that he should be released immediately upon arrival. 

The Liberal "Public Safety Minister" (Ralph Goodale) rubber-stamped the transfer, as he'd done with every single transfer that crossed his desk while in office.
Despite having been personally informed of who Karas was, his criminal record before going to Thailand and what exactly he'd been convicted of.

He had a flunkly from Corrections Canada inform me that Karas' case would be reviewed and he would be under "proper supervision" (ect ect, I still have their letter on file).

Less than 1 year later he was arrested in Winnipeg (Manitoba) for a string of bank robberies he'd done in Ontario. It seems that he was transferred (in secret) back to Canada within days of the transfer request being submitted and approved. He was then released, free and clear, within weeks of being back in Canada.

And he immediately resumed his previous career of robbing banks. (Seems he was given about 15 years in prison for those robberies. So he got more time in Canada for robbing a couple of banks than he did in Thailand for murdering, mutilating and dismembering a young woman.)

Keep in mind that whenever a foreigner receives a death penalty sentence in Thailand, it is usually immediately commuted to a Life sentence at the trial or when the next Royal Pardon is given.

So if Spain has a Prisoner Transfer agreement with Thailand, they could apply for a transfer, probably 5 years after conviction. As long as Thailand and Spain (and the prisoner) agree, he'd be sent home "to serve the remainder of his sentence". What happens after he arrives in his home country is up to the Corrections system there.

(In many cases of prisoner transfers, the felon may be released upon arrival as their crime may warrant a lighter sentence - or no conviction at all - in their home countries. As well, "home" justice systems may be more sympathetic and easier to $$$$, er, I mean, "sway" when it comes to sentences handed to one of their citizens for something they did in a foreign country.)

Lol - like increasing the amount needed for a Retirement Visa/Extension to 1.2 mil will somehow deter "criminals" from entering the country or staying here. All it would do is make things harder for the honest people, which make up the majority of the expats in the country (despite what some barstool proppers like to pretend).

And consider how many of the criminals don't have visas or valid passports to begin with. And if an "agent" can somehow get around the 400k in the bank all year, then I suspect they'd be able to get around any other new requirement as well.

Changing the rules won't solve a thing. If anything, it will just mean that there'll be even more criminals as they won't care about the rules anyways but the ordinary, honest expats will be forced to leave.

Can't say too much because Thailand has no "free speech" laws. Quite the opposite in fact. 

Even if you speak the truth about someone, backed up with facts and indisputable evidence, you can still be sued for defamation. That and the lese majesty laws have kept most of the rich from facing any real punishment for their deeds for decades.

And the mighty military government has done nothing to change that. Then again, by the time you reach General rank, you are more likely to be a part of the problem and not the solution to it so it pretty much was to be expected that they wouldn't actually change anything anyways.

Funny because in 2019 the number of "arrivals" was nearly 40 million.

Now they are saying it was only 10 million "tourists" ?

I guess the other 30 million "arrivals" were Thais coming back from holidays in other countries.

Makes you wonder what took him so long to realize he'd forgotten his "bag of valuables" if it was that important.

And by identifying the nationality of the passenger it certain cut down on the number of "just another privileged American" or "soused Brit" posts, didn't it ?