Gaccha

I did it in October (at Trendy). It took 9 days (!) from the moment I handed over my old passport to the moment I was notified the new one had arrived for collection.

The western section of the Orange Line has an update of sorts. The location for the planned Siriraj stop is inside on the lower floors of a planned new hospital building on the exact spot of the old Thonburi railway station from 15 years ago. Until 2 weeks ago this land was simply being used as a car park as can be seen in this Wikipedia photo: But it has just recently been cordoned off by a high metal fence. On the fence, the building plans are posted. It would be reasonable to speculate that the construction will commence soon.

I'm in disbelief. You obviously did not read the link that I provided to the gold standard of medical care. "People who have any warning signs should see a doctor right away. Such people typically need immediate testing and often admission to a hospital. People without warning signs should call the doctor if the fever lasts more than 24 to 48 hours." You have long surpassed 48 hours so you should already have seen the doctor. One warning sign is a fever of 40° C. You were 0.2° C short of that. You should treat your case as urgent. The fact that you are old complicates matters, and there is a special section in the link I've provided to tell you more.

If you want to know the full extent of possible reasons, especially the unusual ones that are not detected at any future preliminary screening then read this Merck medical manual link; this is the gold standard. Doctor's often use the Professional version.

Nobody makes phone calls nowadays; that's just a boomer thing. An online chat is much better because the evidence of the parties' interactions is clearly laid out, and it's very easy to minimise disputes, simplify matters, reward good businesses, and punish bad customers etc.

If only there was a website outside of government hands that was able to leak such truths to the public... A kind of Wikipedia of Leaks...

I'm not sure if you are a scholar of history, but the link I provided is a response to the very attack by the dancing monkeys of the American government that you quote, and he still in that response dismantles the Swedish case. But you would have known that when you copy and pasted the Wikipedia article. Instead of writing scurrilous apologetics for the CIA, I recommend reading his book published in 2022 which utterly demolishes any suggestion that Sweden was interested in the rule of law or justice.

Let us take a look at Professor Nils Melzer, the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture, dismantling of the Swedish allegations.

He's already departed Bangkok! Bon Voyage.

The CIA and American elite have a long and innoble history of smearing antagonists as "conspiracy theorists".

You sweet summer child. The CIA has a long and innoble history of smearing targets with sex crime accusations.

At the land sale meeting at the synagogue, one piece of land was in the illegally occupied West Bank. This is a remarkable provocation. Assisting in the occupation of territory illegally occupied under international law and doing so, so brazenly in a time of war, where Israel has destroyed vast swathes of Gaza, is truly bad taste. But more important than bad taste, Israeli civilians in the West Bank are occupiers, and it is part of Israeli military policy to use Israeli citizens to assist in the occupation. This means they can be designated as military targets. Obviously synagogues, in contrast to churches, are more like community halls rather than simply places of worship*. So a land sale meeting there is not particularly surprising. *For the less sharp readers among you, of course I recognise that synagogues have worship in them.

Gloriously, Thailand will play a small part in this rare glimmer of good news:

Hopefully buys him a bottle of champagne. How can you possibly be a "traitor" when he is not an American citizen and not part of any military or an alliance network related to America... The sheer arrogance of Americans to pin this label on him makes them all the more revolting.

This is genuinely fantastic news. The sheer malevolence and cruelty of the American Empire was displayed in the treatment of this man. He simply showed the world who America is, and America did not like it. Americans have been subjected to years and years of propaganda against Assange, so they will recoil at this news. For everyone else, this is the day where freedom of speech has actually triumphed.

I'm not going to specifically check English Law, but the Canadian courts faced the identical issue, and allowed historical offences to be charged using the buggery law: '...historical sexual offences, such as section 159's predecessors, gross indecency and buggery, can still be used in historical cases, as long as the conduct amounted to sexual assault or child sexual abuse.' [link] If it relates to new charges laid, then that could well be shoddy journalism. As an ex-lawyer I know that journalists are almost always wrong on the legal procedures and issues of cases, so I struggle to get stressed over these things. It's complex.

This rather depends on whether Kanchanburi has changed its policy in 2024, in line with Bangkok Immigration and others, so that every time you return from abroad you must do a 90 days in person. If you never leave Thailand this will not matter, but if you do, you are certainly not going to have 364 days trouble-free...

To quote Mr Marx, "society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic." I love the idea of having the free time to go fishing after having a good argument at dinner, but I get a bit of a spine chill because Mr Marx is dangerously vague on how the state will be doing the regulating. It sounds like they ("society") will be regulating others, coercing others. The only way I can see to achieve this is "fully-automated luxury communism", where humans are no longer the slaves of the production mechanism but instead robots and AI do all the work. And I don't think this is a pipe dream. It would be absurd to imagine that capitalism will last another 500 years, so why not imagine this fully automated communism instead. I just don't believe it's possible yet.

I think the economy of the world is inevitably changing with profound social changes. Many people speak of Technofeudalism (rentier capitalism), and I don't really think this can be stopped. The world is set to be a very cruel place with a few winners and a lot of losers. I think in America the situation in a sense is totally hopeless and totally fantastic. The American people are absolute believers in the beauty of capitalism. They really think that if somebody fails it is their own fault. Yet the inequality of America is clearly structural (rampant nepotism and trustafarians etc), more so than Europe. This same mindset which guarantees a country of great cruelty also guarantees the country will be very wealthy, as we can see with America's remarkable economic success compared with Europe over the last 15 years. I think the only real credible ameliorating change is the introduction of Universal Income (basic income) across the developed world. I know that South Africa is right now about to introduce it.

There is a huge and quite exciting rupture going on here between the "people from somewhere" and the "people from nowhere" (technocratic, globalist, cosmopolitan, neoliberal, socially liberal). The latter are trying quite desperately, in their final death throes, to hold on to their monopoly of power across Europe. In the UK the Blairite domination of government is overwhelming. The best possible outcome for the People of Somewhere is, ironically, a destruction of the Tory party; this would scare the Labour Party more than any other possibility because they will appear to lack legitimacy if they have no real opponent. With the rise of a new party (I don't have much hope for the neoliberal Reform party), the socially conservative and economically liberal (unquestionably the majority of the UK public) could finally get a voice. Blair was a member of a Trotskyist group at university. This was only revealed a few years ago but it is very significant to understand him. The Trotskyist aim is to enter and co-opt the system from within. The Tory party has been a model demonstration of success of Blair on his influence of UK politics. The Tories have had 14 years to reverse the Blairite excesses, such as the Equalities Act and the Human Rights Act. They haven't done so because they truly believe in them. After all, it is the Tories who had the first woman prime minister, the Tories who had the first minority leader of government, and it is the Tories with the huge number of members of parliament who have committed acts of sexual degeneracy. They are true believers just as many of us are. After all, I like the idea that gays are not murdered on the streets of the UK, or that women don't have to wear hijabs. In fact I have a lot of sympathy for these Trotskist values. The Tories at their best are exemplified by Spiked Online magazine, which was formally the Trotskyist 'Living Marxism' magazine. It stands for true free speech, a distaste for the feminine risk-aversion afflicting modern society, and libertarian values. But the authoritarian tendencies of both parties have tended to prevail. They went too far. What we are seeing now is the parties quite radically moving to the right ("putting the Woke away") but not doing it quick enough to satisfy the electorates across Europe. For example, Starmer, straight out of the playbook of Blair, just a week ago, accused the Tories of being too "liberal" on immigration. Just 5 years ago this would be regarded as fascist and yet here we have the Labour leader saying it. All parties of Europe have a problem. There are far too many Boomers. As a huge and powerful voting bloc they always get their way. And that means voting for themselves very nice pensions and low taxes. In the UK for the very first time pensioners' incomes are greater than the wages of workers on average. This is unsustainable. There is no magical remedy except the importing of huge numbers of migrants. The extra migrants in the UK was the equivalent of 4p off income tax. How do you square this circle? The indigenous population is dying off. The accusation of "far-right" has clearly lost its rhetorical impact. Fascism is, if we consider it carefully, simply "capitalism without capitalism"; that is, having the appearance of traditional values but with the capitalists continuing on behind the scenes. Since capitalism always creates social frictions the far-right government tend to opt to blame people for these frictions: Jews, the Lizard Council, Freemasons, Muslims, aliens. It appears from the election of far- right Meloni in Italy, and the exceptional extent she has been invited into the inner core of Europe, that the leaders of Europe have resigned themselves to the lurch to the right. They will then do what they always do: some agitation against migrants. They are going to reopen the playbooks of fascism-lite until things cool down. Ironically, this is true democracy in action: forcing the technocrats to act on behalf of the people. We can expect lots of borders closing, economic suffering, and then with the gradual death of Boomers, finally some economic resurgence, possibly in 10 to 15 years.

Correct. It is an astonishing and absolutely exasperating change. A real setback, reminding me of the pre-online days. The people hit the hardest will be those leaving Thailand around 2 to 4 times a year.

I think you are exactly right. Unless they are connected up to the airports, they could no longer track us. Obviously, the logical thing would be to get connected with the airport immigration system. But that would require time and effort on their side. Much easier and cheaper for them is to place the workload onto all of us. But ultimately they also lose in that regard, because there is now a huge increase in the number of people at the A1 counter at Bangkok Immigration. I can recall going and finding only 10 or 15 people ahead of me in the lines before COVID. When I went this week there were over 350 people in front of me (and I tried to time my trip to avoid the crowds). By 7 pm you could see the staff snapping. They made everyone remaining stand up in a line to try and rush through the process. There were two staff on the lines simply badgering each "customer" to put down a name for their apartment (they seemed obsessed with this issue). Forcing us to stand up in a long line reminded me of the dark days during the floods of 2011 when we got to experience the immigration offices where the "Three Nationalities" (Burmese/ Lao/ Cambodian) are made to go; they are treated like cattle made to stand in long lines for hours on end. The Thai Immigration staff treat them with contempt.

It's interesting that they have started to give reasons in the rejection emails. The rejection I received simply made no sense because it was based on an entirely new policy which I had not heard anyone else speak about (that Bangkok immigration now requires an in-person application after every travel abroad). What they need to do is include a part in the application for us to explain some anomaly or provide extra information.

Big News The policy at Bangkok Immigration has changed. I checked with the Immigration Officer today. Every fresh entry to the country requires an in-person visit. Online has now become impossible. To anybody who travels 2 or 3 times a year using a re-entry permit, this is a major inconvenience. It is unprecedented. The Officer said they were receiving complaints about this new policy every day.

I think Sheryl recommends the BIDC. Another decent, cheap alternative is the St Louis.