placnx

2 hours ago, Jeffr2 said:

The lawsuit isn't really about anything.  As said in the OP, it's a mess.  It's Trump pandering to his base so he can get more donations from his cult members.

 

Have you donated yet?

 

This lawsuit campaign will keep the followers in Georgia engaged long enough to go out and vote for 2 Senate seats on January 5th, plus it is raising millions to contest those elections, perhaps????

12 hours ago, tonray said:

Nah...I'd bet Russia...China's strategy usually is more espionage or steal secrets related for the purpose of making money or gaining advantage....Russia has a long history of aggressive and dabgerous actions toward foreign diplomats...just to stir the pot if for no other reason than to cause distress and take advantage of any confusion afterwards

I believe that microwave can detect conversations by the vibration on windowpanes. Maybe the operators were focusing on vocal cords in these egregious cases?? Just speculation.

16 hours ago, NanLaew said:

 

It's called trafficking. Probably a regular, illegal cross-border affair with Thai women working in Myanmar's border casinos bars and karaokes. All enabled by money being paid to facilitate numerous authorities on both sides of the border to look the other way. Passports and work permits aren't needed.

 

It appears a cluster of infections caused the Myanmar authorities to either close or impose night time curfews in Tachileik. With little chance of making the same money as before, as soon as some of them got the symptoms, they came home.

Thanks for explaining why this is happening.

On 12/1/2020 at 6:40 PM, Dcheech said:

 

Whilst Loh Kroh sounds good, make it 79 on Kampang Din. 

It was close to Khampaeng Din, true.

2 hours ago, KhaoNiaw said:

Even if they could get into Myanmar legally, they presumably wouldn't want to do the quarantine period there either. 

OK. I just looked at this link, where it's claimed than Burma implemented border surveillance after notification from WHO January 4-5 re Wuhan pneumonia! The timeline shows that 14-day quarantine at border March 22-24, but entry was banned from all countries on March 31st. Interesting....

https://www.brookings.edu/blog/future-development/2020/12/01/myanmars-response-to-the-covid-19-pandemic/

Further down in this analysis, the status of health care in Burma shows why any sick, rational person would head for Thailand!

On 12/3/2020 at 6:35 AM, ThailandRyan said:

Number of infected Thai women who crossed illegally and did not quarantine is now up to 10.wonder how many more they will find that crossed illegally Nd are positive.  Looks like a superspreader convention happened at the bar in Myanmar

https://www.google.com/amp/s/medicalxpress.com/news/2020-12-thai-coronavirus-cluster-myanmar.amp

Perhaps Ubonjoe could answer this: Is the reason that these people cross illegally - because they don't have passports, so can't stay in Burma very long, or that they have no work permit there? Then, since they entered Burma illegally, they cannot come back to Thailand through a border checkpoint.

23 hours ago, Odysseus123 said:

Sure....

Actually I don't think (and have never said so) that any power is intrinsically "benign and friendly"  and on that score I side with Count Metternich and Henry Kissinger (amongst others) with the concept of realpolitik.

 

And within that framework I decline to go tilting at windmills for either the American right and it's exceedingly intellectually impoverished cousin, the Australian right.

After the last four years we've had enough of transactional diplomacy, but really Kissinger/Nixon in 1972 was not much different, just by another name: Realpolitik. After Tienanmen, another gagged story, George HW Bush ignored what had happened. The message should have been clear that liberalization was out of the question. It was time to take a new tack. Now we have the gagging news on top of other signs of coverup such as the market sanitization.

But here, Australia has gotten the message: A serious independent investigation is necessary. Various questions need answers, so that we can proceed to the question of how the Chinese environment, natural and scientific, can be monitored to prevent further viral threats to the World. 

On 11/29/2020 at 4:27 PM, placnx said:

Sorry no time to read all these pages, but antigen testing at the border would at least find the ones who are currently infectious. There is such a huge problem from the ease with which people can enter from Burma without going through a border checkpoint and so can avoid the time and expense of quarantine. So maybe we need spot checks of people in towns in proximity to the border to get advance warning on outbreaks, but how much would that cost?

An antigen test takes about 15 minutes, will detect people with high viral load, i.e. infectious. This is not PCR, which is time-consuming, expensive, and will also detect people who are no longer infectious. Antigen tests can be around 85% accurate, so there are false negatives, still better than nothing.

1 hour ago, moe666 said:

Why is that been in Chiang Mai 11 years and not involved is a shooting yet

I remember back in 1979 I was in Fascination on Loi Kroh Road (A Mueang), and somebody pulled out a gun. Everybody tried to shelter somehow. The offending person ran out the door with the gunman in pursuit. Fortunately a silor was right there, the person got in back and sped off as the gunman fired a shot in the air. Just another evening.....

49 minutes ago, RocketDog said:

I don't need anything to link to. I made my call on the CCP years ago. It's a blatantly repressive regime that gets worse everyday.

How much information does someone need to come to the obvious conclusions? China blinds, gags, and deafens it's citizens daily and has nothing to export but more of the same. There is absolutely no reason to believe this will change. 

China goes through phases. In the 80s there was a seeming trend to more open society, but then there was Tienanmen in 1989. It was never the CCP's intention to be more democratic. Rather it was more to accommodate the delusions of public intellectuals in the West and to aid the agenda of Boeing et al who wanted to enrich China to the point that they could sell a lot of planes, etc. It was a very unequal tradeoff.

Basically, the structure and bias of Chinese culture and society will favor an authoritarian boss, currently Xi Jin Ping. For the West, Xi Jin Ping was an accident waiting to happen, as was the current pandemic. The technology to repress the Wuhan docs and everybody else was gladly transferred from Europe.

This unfortunately is a situation created by the West, first by Kissinger/Nixon in 1972, later by the rush of greedy companies that handed over their technology for ephemeral profits, only to see their markets grabbed worldwide by subsidized erstwhile joint partners in the not-too-distant future!

As long as the CCP is in power, the China Rise chauvinism will continue in whatever guise.

11 minutes ago, PatOngo said:

China has had aspirations to retake Taiwan since 1949 but shake in their shoes when contemplating the response they will get from the USA. They are very good at intimidating smaller, weaker nations! Paper tigers!

Obama people were asleep at the switch as China was creating facts in the sea, i.e. those fake islands for "peaceful purposes" in the South China Sea. (Please rename "Southeast Asian Sea".) US forces will now have to stand off pretty far from Taiwan if things heat up.

1 hour ago, PatOngo said:

Cant see that happening, as much as they'd like too, they have'nt had the gonads to take Taiwan back from the Nationalist and are still sabre rattling 70 years after the fact! Wolf Warriors.....No.....Wimp Warriors!

Taiwan did a fantastic job containing Covid so far, and their VP is an epidemiologist. Xi Jin Ping has announced his intention to take Taiwan by any means necessary, so Taiwan has done well to prepare for a viral epidemic, since this would be an efficient and deniable way for XJP to disable Taiwan's defenses.

On 11/26/2020 at 11:00 AM, ubonjoe said:

That is not mandatory unless they have a OA or OX visa entry.

What about the Elite Visa - 5 years? A friend in Singapore aged 74 wonders whether she can come here now on that visa.

39 minutes ago, welovesundaysatspace said:

They (or their representatives) need to figure out what the best treatment is for them. The mental issues of all the nutjobs this world has ain’t my business. 

If you lived in America, it should be your business. Consider that a lot of nutjobs are carrying concealed weapons. I think that a lot of politicians have to self-censor and vote by party line since someone might otherwise take offense. So we just see more and more extreme behavior. It would be sensible if people with mental issues would be banned from carrying guns, but no......

58 minutes ago, thaibeachlovers said:

I don't think that is correct. Far as I understand it if the election is cancelled it eventually goes to the congress where states have one vote each. If that happened Trump wins as apparently more states voted for Trump than for Biden.

I can't see them running another election.

You're right, because Montana gets the same say as New York!

1 hour ago, welovesundaysatspace said:

I think the last time I talked about a dead Mexican president conspiring with the Gates foundation, Russia and China to manipulate a voting software was when I was talking in my sleep after reading a comic book at the age of 6. 

 

I don’t think anyone is trying to convince anyone. You wouldn’t go to a nuthouse and try to convince those poor souls that they’re not really secretly being followed by little dark creatures trying to kidnap them. You just let them live in their fantasy world and let them believe their bullshít while you get on with your life. 

Maybe we have to try conversion therapy on them?

1 hour ago, Jingthing said:

Why would he change now?

Counting the days until this American nightmare presidency ends.

The sad thing is that after January 20th his tweets will continue to delude too many, perhaps to promote the "vision" of his 2024 candidacy. Like the sequel of a horror movie, this will  continue.

Even if he ends up in jail, and that could take years with the appeals, he can have surrogates do his tweets as he manipulates people from the background. America will have its Dowager Empress as it was at the end of the Qing Dynasty.

24 minutes ago, candide said:

On top of it, the law in question has been voted by a GOP led legislature, so he basically filed a complaint against himself. ????

These Republicanistas rate #1 for hypocrisy and opportunism!

11 minutes ago, AKJeff said:

Although I agree with the point you are making, the 1918 flu probably didn't come from America. Here is just one story published in 2014 by a Canadian historian that traces the origin of the 1918 pandemic.   

 

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/news/2014/1/140123-spanish-flu-1918-china-origins-pandemic-science-health/

For a while the source of the 1918 pandemic has been assumed to have been China, due to cultural and environmental factors. The idea of a source in the US must be a conspiracy theory!

The genome of the 1918 flu has been reconstructed from frozen Eskimos, but that probably happened after the National Geographic article from 2014.

4 hours ago, Sheryl said:

Actually it is not only Chinese who at bats. There are roadside venders selling bat meat in parts of Thailand and Cambodia.

 

In the case of COVID there is speculation that it crossed into humans from pangolins, who are considered a delicacy and often eaten in China (and becoming endangered as a result). COVID infection has been documented in captive pangolins. Presumably somehow gets from the bats to them.

 

SARS and MERS also crossed from wildlife into humans and for that matter so did HIV and Ebola.

 

The message is clear: stop wildlife trafficking!!!

 

Otherwise this is but the beginning. There are thousands more viruses we have no immunity to in horshoe bats alone.

But are Thais and Khmers eating horseshoe bats? I have seen comments that these bats are not sold in food markets, rather that the larger fruit bats are eaten, in China anyway. It is not necessary that the virus passed through an intermediate species. At the beginning of the pandemic when the Wuhan market was claimed as the source, there was talk of intermediate species. For now, the initial transmission to humans has not been reported, whether or not it is known.

1 hour ago, RichardColeman said:

Wonder if premium tourists could tell the difference ? 

Yes, fake monks are quite common in China. I don't think that locals are fooled

6 hours ago, Expat Explore said:

By my first visit in 2011, residents and devoted long-stay travelers seemed to know what was is in store for the boomerang-shaped island they loved. I like to think that I saw some of the last breaths of an older and mellower Ko Lipe during that trip, a moment before mass tourism tightened its grasp.

We went in 2010. The corals were the best I've seen in Thailand, since I don't scuba, just access by snorkeling. Back then there was one modern newly built group of bungalows and mostly sandy trails. The simple grilled seafood went so well with the laid back ambience. There was already an unpaved walking lane with Thai standard, burgers, and breakfast shops running across the midline of Lipe.