Eleftheros

Don't forget the drooling nitwits who put their motorbikes on their stands, and insist on revving the engine in place for half an hour .....

And what, do you think, is the deep reason that we feel we need to protect women and children? And what is it about men that makes them 'disposable'? Just think about it.

Let me first echo your generous sentiment by saying that you are entitled to your opinion, but I think you are engaging in some first-class catastrophising here. I don't think there is any data to show that children being allowed to go about their normal routine would have caused the virus to "rage and kill a whole load of people" or that that in any way equates to a policy of "let the adults die". Certainly that was not the experience in Sweden, where a short closure period for higher education was brought to an end in June 2020 because "it would not be an efficient and effective measure to stop the spread of the virus". As for online learning, that may work to an extent for some families in richer countries, but it does not adequately replace the full experience of attending school.

Then it's even worse than I thought. If it was a misguided attempt to save the children themselves, I could tolerate that. But punishing children to try to save adults? That is truly awful and soulless. There is a reason they shouted "Women and children first!" before lowering the lifeboats on the Titanic - these people are quite simply the future of the race. Shouting "Geriatrics first - children to the back of the queue!" is neither a sensible nor, I would argue, a moral policy.

Well, I am glad that you think you can read my mind so clearly. My position on masks for adults is, as I said, neutral - they don't appear to do much good, or much harm. Masks for children are a different story entirely. First, children do not generally get sick from Covid. More importantly, children desperately need a normal and safe environment in which to grow and develop, and it is bound to be detrimental to them to deprive them of important social and educational development cues, the lack of which they can probably never fully recover from. I'm all for "saving Granny" from this virus, but not at the expense of our children's futures.

I've been shilly-shallying about this for 10 years already. I love the idea of solar, and benefited hugely from a small installation in my house in Australia, but in Thailand, it seems more problematic. I have ample roof space here, and even a quite high electric bill, what with air conditioning and pool pumps, but have never managed to make the mathematics work. That is, I've always thought that about 250K of solar could save me 3K per month, declining over time as the panels deteriorate, which doesn't add up unless I can sell the excess back to the grid, which involves masses of paperwork. Are my figures way off?

Generally, the Thai women's volleyball team punches above its height. I think the core of the team has been together for quite some time, and they compensate well for their relative lack of height, but up against the very best nations, usually fall short, so to speak. Definitely an admirable group of athletes.

There are several large-scale scientific studies that do suggest that masks were, if not useless, then marginally effective, notably those from Denmark and Bangladesh. They certainly did not find evidence to suggest that mask-wearing was an effective barrier to infection. The downside of wearing masks is fairly limited in adults, but in developing children, who use facial cues as a primary way of making sense of the world and developing, the effect is little short of catastrophic, and even UNICEF, as far back as September 2021, was begging schools to reopen after losing a total of 1,826,402,916,679 school hours, (though that plea was aimed more at general lockdown principles than masks in particular.) Were masks beneficial in adults? Inconclusive. Were they beneficial in children? Quite the opposite.

Thailand lost 3-0 (25-17, 25-17, 25-17).

Remember that these mRNA vaccines have a fairly short shelf life, so this is likely to be something like a clearance sale, "Everything must go." Either they stick the stuff in people's arms or they chuck it in the bin.

If anyone's interested, there is YouTube video of her 147 - type in something like 'High End Mink 147', and you should get it. Needless to say, she doesn't put a foot wrong throughout.

Because the definition of a vaccine always used to be, according to the CDC itself: “a product that stimulates a person’s immune system to produce immunity to a specific disease, protecting the person from that disease.” That definition was conveniently changed by the CDC in September 2021 to read: "A preparation that is used to stimulate the body’s immune response against diseases.” Once more, the official Covid narrative requires that we must rewrite history.

She has a fabulous cue action, honed by many years growing up in her parents' snooker club. Her only limitations seem to be related to her small size - some shots on the huge 12x6 are quite challenging for her, and she lacks some cue power. But she is a tremendous player - she won a professional match on the Men's Tour last month against a player ranked 70 or so. She could be a real force in snooker for the next decade, if things go well.

I kind of like not being sick or dead, so I avoided all the shots and boosters that are recommended by the "experts". My strong suspicion is that those who avoided the vaccines, opposed lockdowns and mask-wearing, stood up for the UN's Universal Declaration on Bioethics and Human Rights are going to be seen, in the near future, to have been on the right side of history.

They made huge mistakes in the beginning of the pandemic, for a variety of reasons (listening to their pet experts rather than the people who knew best, for example) and once it was clear that they had blundered hugely, they couldn't back down. Politicians of all stripes would rather gargle battery acid than admit to such a colossal set of errors. Plus, as you say, control was handed to them on a plate, and they found, to no one's surprise, that they hugely liked it.

When discussing vaccination, I think we have to take into account that the equation has changed considerably since 2020. I have great sympathy for people who queued up for the vaccine as soon as it was available, as the publicly reported Covid mortality figures looked alarming, the powers-that-be said categorically that if you got vaccinated you would not get Covid, and that widespread vaccination would halt the pandemic in its tracks. Add to that the threat of being stripped of your livelihood if you weren't vaccinated, no wonder people complied. In 2022, things have changed - the virus is much less virulent, the vaccines have not prevented breakthrough infections, and so the risk/benefit balance is not the same. That risk/benefit shift is going to continue in the same direction barring the unlikely appearance of a rogue variant of greater virulence. And even in that case, the unvaccinated can always bite the bullet and get a course of vaccines. But the vaccinated can never become unvaccinated, which may become a cause for regret for some of them.

Have you heard of a viral disease called 'measles'? It is more infectious than Covid, and can be spread by people up to 4 days before any symptoms appear, as the CDC notes.

This is probably the first time in history that the failure of a vaccine to completely prevent the spread of an infection has been blamed on the people who didn't take the vaccine.

The only thing now is to tot up the cost of these disastrous policies over the past 2.5 years. Australia has just done that, with the venerable Institute of Public Affairs estimating that anti-Covid measures cost the taxpayer A$938 billion (about US$620 billion) and were a catastrophic economic and social failure.

Why would he want to work out the "real tally of patients" when it appears that most of them now have mild or no symptoms? What's the point? Concentrating on healing the sick would be a better strategy.

There seem to be a large number of people, especially in bureaucracies. ready to tell us that "Covid is not the same as flu", and in the next breath tell us to get yearly vaccine boosters, the same as with the flu. Curious, to say the least.

I would say it is the exact opposite - i.e. it is a retreat from the desperation of Thailand's futile efforts to insulate itself from Covid by shutting the place down completely with no thought of the long-term collateral damage that would inevitably be caused to the economy and employment.

No. But Thai politics is what we are discussing.

I would suggest that any discussion or attempt at debate on board the ship of fools which is Thai politics is unworthy of attention for more than, say, three-tenths of a second. Whatever decision they come up with will be the product of ignorance combined with arrogance and personal vanity, and the chance of a generally beneficial outcome is vanishingly small.

It can be much more entertaining to be stuck in traffic for 90 minutes on a bus than it is in a taxi. The bus network is very extensive and often convenient, and you at least get to experience something of local life and color.