Dogmatix

PT deliberately did a feeble job in the accusation of graft in the vaccine procurement which everybody knows was the case. Their only point seemed to be that the purchases were B2 billion less than the budget which the government said was padded in case of price hikes, forex changes or increased shipping costs. There was no hard or even soft evidence - pathetic. If they were worried about the budget for vaccines why did their MPs support the government and vote for Prayut to get a B16 billion special budget to use at his personal discretion without parliamentary scrutiny? It is all BS with Thaksin, PT and the red shirts actually cosying up to the government for personal gains while pretending to do their job as the opposition for show.

Is Moderna including the black specks of rubber that have been found in batches of Moderna in Japan and could make the needle break off in your arm?

The credibility of the revised autopsy report may be challenged but it will be hard for the defence to do the usual thing and pay another pathologist to do another autopsy with a completely dfferent result without a corpse. The pathologist could be persuaded to resort to his original opinion but that is difficult without changing the results of drug tests.

Can't wait for them to arrive!

Prosecutors will no doubt readily accept the narrative of the honest crime buster ardently protecting the nation's youth once they get their brown envelopes. After the verdict and acquittal or suspended sentence any criticism will be silenced with the contempt of court and defamation laws.

This is clearly first degree murder, a mandatory death sentence, under the Penal Code. It is first degree murder due to the use of torture to kill the victim. Without the torture and without premeditation it could be second degree murder with a penalty of 15 to 20 years or perhaps even manslaughter with a 3 to 20 year penalty. There is a recent precedent in the Supreme Court which upheld a conviction of a policeman for attempted murder by asphyxiation with a plastic bag on the grounds the cop clearly knew that the plastic bag torture could result in death. But perhaps that cop didn't have the huge financial clout and big shot cop connections of Ferrari Jo.

No. Only suspended. The media have erroneously used the English word "fired".

Thaksin has instructed PT to pull its punches against PPRP by excluding Pravit from the no confidence debate and voted for the huge central budget fund for Prayut in the hope of getting a slice of it as a reward. He has also paid Nattawut and Sombat to jump on protest band waggon to increase his leverage to join the government in case coalition parties defect. It looks like he will be disappointed again, although it is always wise to be prepared for sudden changes of allegiance in Thai politics. The coalition ministers are making great money in this anything goes corruption environment and no one feels the need to hand their punch bowl to someone else on principle. If they had principles, they would be in the government.

The points system allows for minorities (ชนกลุ่มน้อย) to qualify with a minimum salary of 20,000 a month. My understanding is that ชนกลุ่มน้อย have to be born in Thailand. If not, all foreign born foreigners could be regarded as ชนกลุ่มน้อย. I guess it would be unusual for a Burmese born roti seller coming through the SB naturalisation window. I would think it would be hard to get a WP as retail is reserved for Thai citizens and the special exemptions given to migrants to do labouring jobs under the MOUs doesn't apply to retail jobs. I think restaurants that hire migrants apply for them to be labourers or domestic servants. Are you sure he applied via SB and didn't somehow apply as local born minority through a distict office with a bit of baksheesh?

I think that the lower salary hurdles are only for minorities born in the Thailand. I don't think children of migrant workers are eligible and I am pretty sure the migrant workers born in their home countries are not.

Thailand is a rather backward country in many ways. But most of us who have obtained citizenship are still amazed that the law allowed for it at all and that we were able to make the cut without being super wealthy or well connected. There is a lot of tolerance for LGBTs relative to other regional countries like Malaysia for examle where same sex relations are illegal. I am sure civil partnerships will come and they have already been discussed publicly without great push back. But it will take some time and more time after that before the change may be recognised in the Nationality Act which is normally only amended once or twice in a generation. As for migrant labourers from neighbouring countries, I doubt that will ever happen under the existing legal framework. Most of them come under temporary bilateral Memoranda of Understandings (MOLs) with the neighbouring countries that have to be regularly renewed. Thailand still regards them as a necessary evil to import as a plug to alleviate temporary shortages of labour. It would take a major shift in thinking to regard them as a permanent fixture and provide them with a pathway to citizenship. If Thailand continues its current trajectory of poor education, economic underperformance and uncompetitiveness, within a generation the process may reverse anyway with Thai labourers having to go and work for low wages in more prosperous neighbouring countries like Vietnam which is outperforming Thailand on all measures of FDI and export competitiveness, as witnessed by Kamala Harris not bothering to touch down in Thailand on her way to Vietnam.

Of course reform is ongoing. It has been ongoing for 7 years and will be ongoing for many more years to come.

Protecting him is synonymous with protecting their franchise which depends on corruption and brutality with impunity. Not only that but he has big money available to pay for favours. A no brainer.

I think we will see a George Floyd defence for Jo - he actually died from drugs and the 5 plastic bags and beating were not contributory causes of death. And a Nuremburg defence for the murderous side kicks - I was only following orders. The difference is that a combination of corrupt cops, prosecutors and judges will accept this garbage, laughing hilarously all the way to the bank. Add the BS narrative that he was a heroic cop interesting only in saving the youth of Nakorn Sawan. The widow who is already scared sh1tless will gladly say whatever they tell her to in court. The whistle blower will have a nasty accident very soon. The murderers will all be out on bail in a couple of weeks to give them the chance to destroy evidence and witnesses and deliver brown envelopes pledged to those on high. Soon they will be reinstated at the trough with back pay, promotions and bonuses and placing wholesale orders with plastic bag manufacturers again.

Maybe reform needs to be pushed from the inside but Big Joke was allegedly a bag carrier for an influential person which was how he accidentally trod on the toes of a couple bag carriers for someone even more influential and got sacked from the police. He seems to have been deeply involved in corruption and influence peddling. So the reform thing is just a convenient hook to hang his hat on while it is a hot topic for a few days.

How does being vaccinated help when vaccinated people can still get infected and spread the virus about as easily as the unvaccinated, even if they don't get so sick.

They are always behind the curve which is how they imported delta. They waited several weeks while the delta wave of the pandemic raged in India, allowing arrivals from India to enter without quarantine and go all over the country. Many Indians with money fled to the UK to avoid the pandemic bringing it with them.

All the cops involved are accessories to murder, including the ones who walked into the room and watched without trying to intervene even if they were not part of the team but probably all were in the team. The doctor is an accessory after the fact. These are all criminal offences under the Thai Penal Code. There is also conspiracy to commit murder which Abhisit was unsuccessfully charged with re the 2010 crack down of red shirts. In that case it was impossible to prove that he deliberately targeted known individuals with the intent to cause death. In this case it should be easy to prove that they conspired to torture someone in a way that they knew was likely to cause death and were indifferent as to whether the victim might die. I think this is the same as premeditated murder. Being culpable of causing death unintentionally would be something like killing someone through reckless driving, with no particular victim in mind. They are all trying to use the Nuremburg defence that they were only following orders that they didn't agree with. That didn't work for the guys that got hung at Nuremburg and should not work here, although who knows with spineless Thai judges. They are obviously all thugs who were quite happy to torture and murder someone in the hope of a pay off.

We can all see the way this will go. The police chief has already make comments in support of the idea that the missing 100,000 speed pills were not actually seized and that it was not so bad because he was trying to get information rather than case out of the victim. There is a lot of money in this for senior cops and prosecutors and there are important businesses and franchises to be protected. They will all be out on bail soon intimidating witnesses, arranging for nasty accidents and destroying evidence. The trial will be delayed for at least 2 or 3 years until public interest has subsided. Then they will be acquitted for lack of evidence and reinstated with promotions and good service awards.

There does seem to be a clear implication that torture is fine to extract information (and presumably confessions). So why not bribes? The Kalasin case was particularly eggregious. A group of police colonels abducted a young boy, who was accused of stealing a motor bike, and they tortured, castrated and murdered him. Then they took him out into the woods and hung him to a tree to make it look like suicide. His aunt or grandmother, I can't remember which, campagned fearlessly for justice for him. The colonels were arrested after years of foot dragging. Then they were out on bail intimidating witnesses for about 8 years during which time all were reinstated into the police with back pay and promotions and given distinguished service cash bonuses before the case even went to trial. I think the female relative died before the case came up and they were all acquitted for lack of evidence.

Iguess that positives from ATKs will fall once they start importing the fake ATK tests from Lepu in China, as they reportedly had an unacceptable rate of false negatives which led them to be banned by the US FDA. I note that the importer that won the bid has only 5 million registered capital which may not be paid up and no corporate website but set up a dedicated website for these kits with hardly any information on it. The company shares an address in a residential neighourhood with another one product company that markets a pet deodoriser product. It is said in reports to be affiliated with a listed real estate developer that makes losses year after year but is not mentioned as an affiliate in that company's filings. I wonder what qualifications and experience are needed to win tenders from GPO. If bidders have no capital or assets, it will be hard to sue them for non-performance, if something goes wrong.

For sure he was involved in drug dealing and probably all or most Thai drug squads are. They don't have to run syndicates themselves. They just seize product from unaffiliated gangs and sell it on one of the gangs that are paying them to operate with impunity. Those gangs recruit small fry as dealers and couriers and shop 1 in 10 or so to the cops to get busted. So the cops have an easy life and act as middle men transferring drugs from one gang to another. In tourist spots like Koh Tao the cops allegedly do deal in drugs themselves. They sell to naive farang business owners, who are not doing well, to sell to their customers and then come along and bust them and get the product back for re-sale to some other mug.

This benefits only Palang Pracharat and Pheua Thai. Maybe they will form the next government together and bring home Thaksin after a massive offshore payment from him. In Thai politics there are no permanent friends or foes.

He acquired smuggled high end cars that had been seized. The collection also looks like he may have been trading in the cars. Some are very ordinary and may have been extorted from victims who handed over their cars in lieu of cash. For sure there is more than meets the eye in this collection.

When I was a teenager in Edinburgh I knew a slightly older guy who got arrested for possession of cannabis. I can't remember the details but he was really worried because the amount he had was just over the amount that would have been considered dealing and liable for a custodial sentance. But when they asked him to acknowledge the charge he was surprised to find that 75% of his stash had disappeared and he was only fined. The drug squad was known to be completely corrupt, although they didn't use plastic bags on suspects to my knowledge. But they were obviously doing the same thing on a regular basis and selling the surplus dope back into the market and allegedly consuming some of it themselves too. If that kind of nonsense can go on in relative rule of law jurisdictions, I would say the sky is the limit in Thailand. The product that is consigned for destruction must be small proportion of what is actually seized. In cases like this one where cops were intending the let the suspects off with an informal fine, they would obviously have taken the comoplete haul for re-sale. I would guess that all drug squads in Thailand are doing the same thing.