Eleftheros

Exactly. Otherwise you get a kind of arms race, leading to metal detectors at the doors of every school, which doesn't do anything for children's feelings of innocence, freedom or, eventually, perceptions of their own society.

Well, plenty of seconds, anyway...

Not for health reasons, certainly.

Yes, he obviously dropped a clanger with this one .....

Higher oil prices = more expensive seats.

Did he lose control, and then lose control?

Yes, I have. I've got an open mind.

If they were investigating with an actual desire to find out something, the airwaves would be full of speculation, comments from marginally qualified people, interviews with local villagers (or fishermen, perhaps), radar tracks. If it was a story they liked, that fitted the narrative, if it was suspected that climate change had caused the pipes to burst, they would be all over it from every angle, 24/7.

It is not the aim of journalism just to wait patiently for a government report and parrot it unquestioningly. The job of the media is - or used to be - to do the investigative work by maintaining a range of contacts who could eventually connect them with the people who don the dive suits, and garner information and informed comment through that and other methods. But the media seems willfully uninterested. More, of course, is being made of the climate change effects that may be caused by the release of all this methane than on the sabotage itself.

The media is supposed to do more than release statements - it's supposed to investigate. Major stories like this would usually spawn a raft of questioning articles every day - but nowadays that only happens if it is a story that fits the approved narrative.

The Western media has gone extremely quiet on this story, which would hardly be expected if it could be pinned on Russia or its allies. Methinks they doth protest too little.

Right. All climate scientists who disagree with you are "verging on being crackpots". I assure you that if you can find the courage to look, you will find a great many well credentialed, widely published, respected and experienced climate scientists who are not convinced that the cataclysmic predictions of activist groups are even close to correct.

Perhaps a bit of ganja added to the formula would help it to sell even better.

One of the first tips you are given if you ask experts about online security is "Never allow your browser to save your passwords". In the Thai 90-day app, you can click the little 'eye' icon to the right of the password field to check that you have entered the right password.

I don't think there was any suggestion in the OP that they were breeding. In fact, on first read it seemed as if they had never met before.

The less funding the WHO has, the better. Nobody will forget their tweet from Jan 2020 ...

One media commentator has stated his belief that maybe 80% of people in the typical society are "NPCs" (an online game term for Non-Player Characters), as he calls them, who have no independence of thought and merely run mechanically on tracks laid down for them by 'the authorities' and their accomplices in the media. I think that Thailand falls into that category, so the nature of Thailand's progress after reopening will be entirely defined by bands of squabbling politicians.

Well, to confront the idea that your government is dogmatic, incompetent, controlling and often vicious, and shows no sign of caring about your health or livelihood, is psychologically very challenging for many people. Ignorance can be comfortable - for a while, anyway.

Whether we would be better or worse off healthwise I don't know - as you say, it's an impossible question to answer definitively. But I feel sure that we would be economically better off, and probably as societies, since all the political hypocrisy, propaganda, mandates and demonization of opponents, has surely had a toxic effect which will take time to dissipate.

Perhaps many unvaccinated people would be less likely to tell people about it if they had not for two-plus years been harassed, threatened, discriminated against, told that they would be treated as second-class citizens, or not even citizens at all, had their livelihoods threatened or taken away, fined and threatened with jail. I imagine they feel a sense of relief, rather like someone who has just been let out of jail tends to celebrate their freedom.

None of the above affects what I said: Deaths from causes other than Covid-19 in Australia (and many other Western countries) are up sharply this year, particularly in Australia for dementia and diabetes, slightly less so for other non-Covid respiratory diseases. I would think that an overall mortality rise of 17.1% in the population sustained over a 6-month period would be worth investigating for any government that cares about the health of its citizens. I'm quite prepared to believe that Australian federal and state governments don't care overmuch about the health of their citizens, given their behavior over the past two years, but I don't agree that there is nothing to see here, and that we should just move on. Something is going on - in Thailand also, it appears from the graph posted above - and it needs to be looked into.

I wonder if Thailand will avoid the excess all-cause mortality now hitting many Western nations. Australia's Bureau of Statistics reported that deaths from all causes from January to June were up 17.1% over the long-term average, which is a staggering amount. Only a small fraction of deaths were Covid-related; the biggest increases were seen in deaths from Alzheimer's disease (up 21.8%), diabetes (20.1%), and more recently, other respiratory diseases. For some reason, the Federal government doesn't seem keen to investigate the cause of over 13,000 extra unexplained deaths of its citizens in 6 months. That's why a comparison with Thailand would be interesting, as Thailand avoided the harsh lockdowns and hospital restrictions which may plausibly be contributing to this carnage.

Judges voted 6-3 for his ability to return, which doesn't make anything clearer.

Using the CDC figures you supplied above, the odds of dying in a given week from a Covid infection are about 50,000 to 1 against, and if you take a course of vaccines you can reduce those odds further to about 250,000 to 1 against. I think many people, especially those living in Thailand, take risks every week - even every day - that are higher than 50,000 to 1 against, given the state of the roads, the driving, the electrics, food hygiene and more. Doing the mathematics, you could take a 50,000 to 1 chance once every week for 664 years and still have a better than 50:50 chance of survival at the end of it. A tiny risk, truly.

No. The majority dying in the US are vaccinated, because the majority of the people in the US are vaccinated. In terms of deaths per 100,000, the rate among the vaccinated is about 0.4 per 100,000, and among the unvaccinated is about 2.0 per 100,000, according to the CDC. The CDC was unable to stop itself announcing that these tiny figures represented a 5X threat of death for the unvaccinated. In layman's terms, the chance of dying from Covid for the unvaccinated is vanishingly unlikely; the chance of dying for the vaccinated is very vanishingly unlikely.