Eleftheros

New tourism experiences includes closed shops and restaurants, mothballed hotels, degraded public transport, roads falling into disrepair, and grumpy locals even more desperate to hoover up whatever baht are going. What's not to like?

Covid Crisis Theater - now in its 3rd Fabulous Year! It's going to run longer than Phantom of the Opera.....

Soon we will be warned of a new 'stealth' Covid variant where you test negative and get no symptoms .....

The 'mask mandates' are probably the silliest of all the silly ineffective mandates put in place during this thing. Sitting down in a restaurant without a mask was considered OK, but the moment you stood up to leave, the mask has to go back on. That is beyond illogical - it seems deliberately designed to disorient and demoralize the citizenry.

To call it a 'surge' is a bit of a stretch. International arrivals to Thailand reached 1.47 million in October, according to the Ministry of Tourism and Sports, up from 1.31 million in September. So, just over 10% increase. These numbers are still less than half of the ones recorded pre-Covid. Pedaling hard with a following wind, they may just reach 10 million for the whole year, which will be celebrated, no doubt, with lavish bonuses all round.

If they're wearing masks, they're safe, aren't they? Or do the masks not work?

Well, you and I both know it is not the zombie apocalypse, but there are still huge numbers of people who have never updated their perception of covid throughout the last 3 years. They haven't changed their view on the virus itself, masks, lockdowns, travel bans, vaccines, anything covid-related, which is astonishing given the huge amounts of data and research which has been published. Some commentators have estimated it will take perhaps 8 years more before effectively everyone has abandoned the zombie apocalypse outlook.

What's next? "Man possibly infected with athlete's foot found dead near Bang Na"?

England invented football. If we accept the Scottish origin, we would have to rename it footsheepsstomach.

The claim was being made that it is a given that "vaccination equalled protection from severe illness." in a particular individual case. That is illogical nonsense, even if you accept that overall and on average vaccinations do work to reduce severe illness.

Except for the poster who recently wrote: "Yeah, I had 4 injections then I got covid. Fortunately the vaccine protected me from getting really ill." That's exactly the claim that is being made.

No, it's illogical nonsense. Even if you accept that overall, vaccination on average reduces the severity of Covid infection in the population, that doesn't mean it works equally for everyone in every individual case, because people are individual and different. It is logical fallacy in action.

Yes, extreme thinking in any direction leads to poor outcomes. Which is why I get tired of reading nonsense like "I've had six Covid jabs, got Covid last week, not feeling too bad. Thank heaven I got vaccinated it would have been much much worse!!!!"

Everyone knows that the 'vaccines' don't stop you catching Covid. But for any particular individual to claim that being vaccinated definitely stopped them getting sicker from a Covid infection than they would otherwise have been is evidence-free nonsense. How can anyone possibly know that the vaccinations helped them in their particular case? It makes no sense, yet people are claiming this the whole time. I can admire their loyalty to the government cause, but not their logic.

"They did what they did at the time with the information they had." If that were to be the case for the defence, it would be a very weak one. 1. They relied on information from a notorious and time-proved bungler in Neil Ferguson, whose rotten predictions had already cost the UK billions of pounds in earlier disease outbreaks (notably swine flu). 2. They spoke to an actual doctor, an acknowledged expert on the transmission dynamics of infectious diseases (Dr Sunetra Gupta) and then ignored her advice. 3. They threw away, in a single afternoon, a Pandemic Preparedness Strategy which had been created carefully a decade before for just this sort of situation. It was a display of astounding cowardice and incompetence which has caused generational damage to the country they had been entrusted to govern.

Excuse me, they could have avoided all those problems by not locking down the whole economy in the first place, and focused on looking after the extremely vulnerable. That's what their own Pandemic Preparedness Strategy, which had been developed over 10 years, recommended. Instead, they locked down healthy people (for the first time in recorded history), following the example of China, and launched the country into a comedy of murderous errors whose effects will persist for decades and be mainly felt by children and future generations.

I wonder if the above expenditure might be causing the UK to struggle to some degree? Will anybody be held accountable? No. So what's to stop them making the same colossal blunders next time.

This sounds like misinformation from the Australian Government. After all, the CDC and MSNBC told us clearly that the vaccines were safe and effective, as did Anthony "I represent the Science" Fauci. I think we should wait and see what the NZ Government says, because they are in possession of the Truth. As PM Jacinda Ardern said recently: "We will continue to be your single source of truth. .. [D]ismiss anything else." https://caldronpool.com/jacinda-ardern-we-will-continue-to-be-your-single-source-of-truth/ There you have it, straight from the horse's mouth. Follow the Science(TM). The debate is settled. No further applications will be accepted.

All trainers will be fully armed with GT200 bomb detectors.

Or how about Iran vs Saudi Arabia? That's a match which could go off with a bang. The whole tournament, from the selection of the host to the building of the stadiums and now the changing regulations has been a tawdry farce, perfect in character for the times we live in.

I appreciate the human failings of politicians very well, which is why I described the brainless censorship of accredited experts as a "contributory factor" rather than the whole reason for the comedy of murderous errors which comprised Covid policy. The myriad failings of politicians are too big a subject to be tackled here, so I will stick to my limited point that having ignorant self-appointed 'fact-checkers' censoring experienced and well-credentialed scientists is not a recipe for success for society - or for science, or for trust in institutions.

She claims she was just crawling along.

When Xi speaks, people sit up and listen more closely than when any of the hollow Western windbags say their piece. I particularly enjoyed his exchange with that arrogant puppy Trudeau, when Xi sent Trudeau tottering away like a whipped soi dog.

Well, it's not such a strict binary as that, is it? It is possible to be skeptical of self-appointed media fact-checkers and also be capable of reading original research in scientific journals such as BMJ or Nature. Where it starts to get silly is when you have a spotty teenage intern at Twitter claiming they know more virology than a man who has spent 30 years studying that science and has several patents for work in that field, while the interns insist they have grounds for banning the scientist for "disinformation". A society where the ignorant censor the wise cannot possibly flourish, and this brainless censorship is certainly a contributory factor to the appalling train wreck that was - and is - government Covid policy across much of the West.

Organizations call themselves 'fact-checkers' for the same reason that North Korea calls itself a "Democratic People's Republic".