Eleftheros

Agreed, the most widely circulated Covid variant over the past 3.5 years has been BS.24/7.

And there you have the tolerant, humane values of the Covid zealots, in one neat sentence.

Looks like the Thai Olympic Committee has discovered ChatGPT.

The total bill will be 20K baht, according to an accounting firm I deal with. First, the Commercial Department sends a letter warning you to complete the financial year statement. If you ignore that, the police send you a letter saying you have been fined 16,000 baht. There is an extra 4,000 baht payable to the Revenue Department on top of that.

North Korea has had strict mask mandates for 3 years, not lifted until July this year. https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/north-korea-appears-lift-covid-mask-mandate-reports-say-2023-07-04/ So it all depends on whether, from your own political perspective, you consider North Korea to be "far left" or not.

There is a new Covid variant known as BA.2.86 (not BS.24.7, that's been circulating for 3 years), which the US CDC recommends you get vaccinated against. On the other hand, they note that people who have been vaccinated before are more likely to be infected by this new variant. "BA.2.86 may be more capable of causing infection in people who have previously had COVID-19 or who have received COVID-19 vaccines." That adds an interesting new slant to the word 'vaccine'.

Books are - or were - some of the most targeted items to carry. Vietnam Customs disappeared 4 of my books when I entered the country some years ago, and when, out of curiosity, I asked which books they had confiscated, they refused to answer on the grounds of national security. I worked out later that one of the books they had taken was "The Hunt for Red October", but whether they took it for ideological reasons or entertainment reasons, I don't know.

The breakdown in July was Asians (75%), Europeans (15%), Middle East (5%), North/South America (4%) and a bloke called Craig from New Zealand. I'm not sure whether the 5% of the total who traveled from Cambodia and Laos were tourists in the generally accepted sense, but they're added in anyway. Biggest single countries were China (16%), Malaysia (15%), Korea (6%), India (5%), Vietnam (5%), From Europe, the biggest sources were Russia (2.5%), UK (2.3%). Americans made up 3% of the total, and Australians 2.5%. Data is available at Thai Ministry of Tourism & Sports.

They're just gearing up to make Long Covid into a new growth industry. Long Covid means nothing more than “anything bad that happens after you’ve had Covid.” Since billions of people ultimately got infected, this includes a sizeable number of strange occurrences—even unexplained tooth loss was blamed on Covid. Most of the studies carried out relied on self-reported symptoms, which could (and most certainly did) introduce bias. In fact, I see the the US government has already started laying the foundations of this bureaucratic industry with its Office of Long COVID Research, part of the Recover initiative, which starts off with a modest $1.15 billion in funding. Even they admit that Long Covid is simply "long-term symptoms following infection by SARS-Cov-2" and that it includes more than 200 symptoms, i.e. almost anything that people care to report could be classified as Long Covid. The only long thing about this is the long time that it can be expected to run and run....

It beggars belief that a well-known scientific body would throw this paragraph in at the end of its report, as though it were an afterthought. Nobody doubts that if you keep people isolated, they will find it harder to infect other people. That's been known since biblical times, But any sane policy must consider both benefits and costs. But due to the hysterical monomania of Covid, this was not done. The only thing considered was "battling" Covid, even though the downside of policies proved to be far greater than the benefits. "Future assessments", indeed. What self-serving cr*p. The assessment has already been done, and it is clear that lockdowns were a financial, economic, health and social catastrophe.

And if some country is foolish enough to think about re-introducing lockdown, perhaps they might consider the downsides of such actions. Taking Australia as an example, the country has seen overall deaths above a baseline average by around 10-12% for well over a year, very few of which can be attributed to the Covid virus. What killed off an excess of over 20,000 Australians in 2022, and what is causing overall 13.2% excess mortality in 2023? Now, we are repeatedly told that these deaths are not attributable to the vaccines, data show they are not due to Covid, so what are the changed situations which are killing off citizens of all ages at such a high rate? Most of the "explanations" that have been proposed, such as, lack of access to timely medical care, an increase in unhealthy habits, despair and depression, can be plausibly linked to the insane lockdown policy. So only an idiot would think of trying to do this again, which is perhaps what prompted the OP.

Because scientists do not consider viruses to be a form of life, given that they do not metabolize and cannot exist independently, but have to rely on invading a cell and hijacking its resources. https://www.sciencenews.org/article/viruses-alive-coronavirus-definition But given the many life-like traits that viruses possess, this is not a hard and fast view and it remains a matter of considerable debate.

Those certainly are other words.

Well, foolishness has been the defining characteristic of the entire episode, all the way forward from January 2020 when the WHO was foolish enough to believe the Chinese Communist Party and tweeted out that there was "no evidence of human-to-human transmission" of SARS-Cov-2. Since then, we have experienced a conga line of foolish decisions such as sending infected people to nursing homes, inappropriate ventilation of sick patients, closing schools, lockdown mandates, mask mandates, vaccine mandates and the rest of the arrogant nonsense peddled by incompetent authorities. If they do mandate more lockdowns, that wouldn't be just foolish, that would be criminally foolish.

Me, too. Because it shows that whoever is touting this "6-7" times figure has forgotten, failed to mention, didn't understand, or never knew the difference between Relative Risk and Absolute Risk.

A futile comparison. Polio is an extremely serious disease for a significant proportion of people who catch it, and has a well-tried and tested, effective vaccine. Of course people take vaccines against polio. For every disease, there is a risk/benefit analysis - the more serious the disease, and the better the vaccine, the more likely people are to get vaccinated. For Covid, many people have looked at the data and concluded: "Vaccination? Not this disease, not these vaccines, and not these health authorities."

Oh, yes, the activists know everything already, with absolute certainty. They definitely don't feel the need to sully their minds with anything as grubby as "evidence".

That is a trivial point, given that the 'Global Warming hypothesis' is simply "Global warming is the current rise in temperature of the air and oceans. It is happening mainly because humans burn coal, oil, and natural gas; and cut down forests." I quote you directly. Who cares? What we need to know is: To what precise extent are humans responsible? Is this dangerous? Is there something we can do about it? Is the cure worse than the disease? The activists never answer those questions because they never ask them. It is left to independent scientists to figure out the answers, which generally don't get publicized because, by and large, they do not fit the activist narrative. You can argue about the answers to the questions except the third one: Is there something we can do about it? There, the answer is a straight No. If China and India do not curb their CO2 emissions (and they are not going to) then the whole CO2 reduction game is lost. Those countries (plus Brazil, Indonesia and other major emitters) will engage in some public greenwashing, for sure, but they won't take any action just because the UN tells them to. With that settled, it can quickly be seen that the continuing shrill activism is a pointless charade.

Yes, but think about it. When you get "water ingress", where does that water settle? At the bottom of the boat. That lowers the center of gravity of the boat and makes it harder to roll over and capsize. This is the principle of ballast, which many smaller boats use. They often use water in tanks for that purpose. I can't think of any situation where water pouring into a boat could possibly make it capsize rather than just sink.

In English, we would say: "The boat was sinking."

ChatGPT can be regarded as a natural-language front end for Wikipedia. It works efficiently and quickly, but on most topics you should not rely on its answers.

They already are deprived of increased access to the only reliable large-scale energy source, which is currently fossil fuels. The G20 countries pledged in 2021 to halt all financing for coal projects, and later that year the ban was extended to "all fossil fuel projects" overseas. Where do you think developing countries get their funds from? Instead, political posturing goes hand-in-hand with deliberately denying economic opportunities to the most needy.

I see your point. We have reliable electrical power, we're all right. Why should we let those backward peasants in the Third World have access to reliable power? Yup, the Green fanatics love the planet, and hate the people.

Proposing to eliminate fossil fuels within a short timeframe has already caused massive negative consequences. Apart from the ruinous "green" taxes which every Western consumer - and business - is forced to pay, or the vast amounts of taxpayer money thrown away on "climate finance", there is also the halt by banks to provide funds for power plants - especially in Africa - which would help lift hundreds of millions of people out of poverty. It is a characteristic of the radical Green/Left; they love the planet, but hate people.

Fair enough. Unfortunately, our political overlords - who generally speaking have no scientific training, poor critical thinking skills, and their own political careers at the forefront of their thinking - always tend to believe the most alarmist worst-case scenarios and act on those. So in their minds, a possible problem becomes a potential grand catastrophe, they enact policies to deal with that grand catastrophe that they have convinced themselves of, and so their policies are wildly at odds with the actual problem that exists. We saw that to ruinous effect in early 2020 over the Covid thing, and we have been seeing it for a long time on the climate front, for example with initiatives such as green taxes which punish poor families the most. It's only going to get worse.