Thailand News Roundup: bioweapon booster push, minors arrested for Lèse-majesté, pride month gets political, CBDC Inthanon-Lionrock, US denies interfering with Thailand's elections
As there are lots of agendas in the air throughout Thailand, I’ve compiled several stories which I think are worthy of your attention. Both for the outside world peeking in, and for readers based in Thailand who might’ve missed something.
😷Scamdemic groundhog day prevails💉
You didn’t seriously think that we’d gone back to normal here yet, did you? Less people hiding from society behind their muzzles, and boldly pro-facing new frontiers of socialisation and human interaction? Think again.
Our will he / won’t he become the next Prime Minister - leader of the Move Forward Party (MFP) Pita Limjaroenrat is dutifully playing his part to keep the Rona fear pumping out harder than bitcoin in a bull market.
Here he is claiming he’s had six doses of the bioweapon, but has fallen sick, so has decided to isolate (free holiday). Maybe he got the saline shots, who knows.
If he didn’t get the saline and got some potent batch lots, perhaps the safe and effective gene “therapy” is working its ADE magic. It’s just so damn therapeutic! *I wish I had never used that word (gene) “therapy” in past articles, and will refer to the injections as bioweapons forthwith.
Quoting from the article:
“On Sunday I started having a few symptoms. After that, I could not go out in public,” the prospective prime minister and head of the eight-party coalition said in a post on his on Tuesday evening.
On Tuesday, he said, an ATK test confirmed he had the virus, and while he has received six doses of vaccine, he has elected to stay home.
*Sigh*🙄.
Since that article was published, I’ve noticed Bangkokians masking up harder and faster in duplicate and triplicate. A friend of mine who commutes to an office each day said he counted 33 pro-facers during his journey; a paltry number of humans living free out of the thousands one encounters when taking public transport across Bangkok.
This has all coincided “nicely” with the lovely Germans donating a million doses of the herd culling injections to Thailand.
Hot on the heels of this jab-jab-jabbery came our usual dose of propaganda from the Thai version of Fauci: Dr. Opas.
As an “expert”, this expert said:
The number of Covid-19 patients in Thailand is dropping while Covid-19 deaths are mostly people aged above 70 and the unvaccinated, according to the Public Health Ministry.
Show me the numbers! And show me the money!
What else doc?
For children aged six months to five years old who have not been vaccinated, Dr Opas said parents should get them vaccinated to avoid severe Covid-19 symptoms and death.
They keep coming for the children. I don’t like it. I wonder how many parents do. I guess that stockpile of gene juice needs depleting before expiration, along with the extra cool million doses we got from the charitable Germans.
Teenage girls arrested for Lèse-majesté
Thailand has some of the harshest laws enforced for criticism of the monarchy. The arrests and detainments of minors has caused an uproar.
A teenage girl from Phitsanulok has been released on bail after being formally charged with royal defamation, according to Thai Lawyers for Human Rights (TLHR).
The alleged offence took place when the girl, who is now 16, was 14 years and one month old, making her the youngest person ever charged under Section 112 of the Criminal Code, the lese-majeste law, the lawyers’ group said on Wednesday.
Police investigators said that the girl, identified only as “May”, used Facebook on the night of Nov 18, 2020 to post messages online making comments deemed insulting to His Majesty the King.
Another piece published on 25th June 2023 described a different teenage girl’s ordeal - “Yok” has now been barred from enrolling in a prestigious high school. She was previously controversially detained by the authorities for 50 days.
While opinion may be divided over the youngster's political leanings, big questions remain over the nature of her treatment by the government.
Heated online debate has seen netizens posting Yok's home address and trying to find her biological parents.
It is truly despicable to see hardline royalists trying to dox a teenage girl, not withstanding how she has been treated by the government and the education system. It seems dissent will not be tolerated, even at grassroots level, by children.
Political pride
Thailand has been a tolerant and welcoming place for gays and transgenders for a long time. It has rarely been politicised, except for a push to allow gay marriage. Now the western celebratory pride euphoria has been firmly imported. Throughout June, just about every business in every shopping mall “celebrated pride” with rainbow colours. My local Tesco had pride stickers dotted about. There was even a giant screen on a building by Asoke junction advertising pride Cornetto ice creams.
Other businesses paid for the ‘PR’ content slot to grift and ride the rainbow wave of virtue signaling.
I could go on. You get the point. There were other stories of drag queen performances with children and teenagers in the audience (masked of course) eagerly cheering on the festivities. It made my mind go to a recent clip I’d seen from an NYC pride event in the US, whereby the participants chanted:
“We’re here, we’re queer, we’re coming for your children!”
You had better believe them.
Things took a more interesting turn when a trans rights activist representing the ever expanding acronym took issue with underrepresentation within politics.
Nikki Phinyapincha, founder of TransTalents Consulting Group, told the Bangkok Post that Pride Month, held in June, has been incorporated into companies' marketing strategies in a move she calls "rainbow washing".
Businesses use rainbow flags, logos and social media hashtags to promote their goods, she said, adding some have even produced special Pride Month edition goods to generate more income.
I have to agree with Nikki on this point.
Now we get into the copy-paste-cookie-cutter model from the inclusion and diversity obsessed west:
"They make us [into] merely a source of income. Pride was not originally a celebration but [a commemoration] of our struggle for not only civil rights but also socio-economic inclusion and empowerment, such as equal rights to employment, promotions and access to education," she said. "These rights are important as they improve our living conditions."
"The safe workplace for LGBTQ+ [people] is crucial, they need a place where they can express their sexuality freely," she said. "This could help increase their productivity as they will not need to be afraid for being who they are."
Call me old fashioned, but I don’t think the workplace is where people are supposed to express their sexuality. It is a work-place. A place for working. Not sexual orientation affirmation.
Here comes the crux of the demands:
She also supports the idea of having a minimum quota for LGBTQ+ and women politicians in parliament to help them advance their political careers. It would help diversify parliament because they would have a chance to voice their wants, she said.
There it is. The quotas. There were some interesting arguments in the comments section of this article. I think this poster summed up one position well. Oh wait, it’s been scrubbed by the Bangkok Post moderators already in the daily comment purge. It went something like “these activists are not just asking for equal rights, they are demanding preferential treatment.”
When corporations and then the political spectrum start building in these quotas for hiring, it does produce inherent biases, doesn’t it? Quotas need filling = hiring decisions will be based more on quota criteria, and less on job competence, skills, and qualifications.
It reminds me of a line from Orwell’s Animal Farm:
ALL ANIMALS ARE EQUAL
BUT SOME ANIMALS ARE MORE EQUAL THAN OTHERS
We do seem to be heading towards a employer / employee experience of positive discrimination on the back of the diversity equality inclusivity (DEI) drive and the more recent corporate equity index (CEI), whereby organisations are scored in points based on how well they adhere to the system. Points win prizes (who is closest to the correct political party affiliation, and / or the money printer).
Project Inthanon-Lionrock
Project Inthanon-Lionrock is a collaborative project between the Hong Kong Monetary Authority (HKMA) and the Bank of Thailand (BOT), using Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) for cross border fund transfers. I have read through their 90 page report on plans to introduce a wholesale CBDC between the two countries. There is a lot of word salad, abbreviations, and convoluted terminology. I won’t bore you with those details, although you may check it out yourself if you are so inclined.
Source link to PDF.
I was pleasantly surprised to see the report cede the growing adoption of cryptocurrencies, mentioned in the foreword:
Advances in financial technology has provided us new opportunities and, at the same time, disrupted our traditional ways of doing businesses. For central banks around the globe, the role of a sole supplier of money and a punch-bowl taker to safeguard financial stability have been challenged by the rise of digital currencies, ranging from cryptocurrencies to private stablecoins. These new technological evolutions aim to pursue wider public usage on a global scale where efficient cross-border funds transfers are out-of-reach or costly.
Have you ever wondered why money itself has never been “allowed” to be subject to competition in other forms and markets, aside from fiat currency? (Since Nixon took the US off the gold standard in 1971).
Let us also remind ourselves of what the big boned general manager for the Bank of International Settlements - Agustin Carstens said about CBDC appealing to his ilk:
We don't know who's using a $100 bill today and we don't know who's using a 1,000 peso bill today. The key difference with the CBDC is the central bank will have absolute control on the rules and regulations that will determine the use of that expression of central bank liability, and also we will have the technology to enforce that.
What is the difference between a wholesale CBDC and a retail CBDC?
Taken from our “friends” at the Bank of International Settlements (BIS):
Central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) can be divided into two categories: retail and wholesale. Retail CBDCs are issued for the general public and have the features of anonymity, traceability, availability 24 hours a day and 365 days a year, and the feasibility of an interest rate application. Wholesale CBDCs allow more room for central banks to impose KYC/AML regulations.
That last line is key.
The more ominous sections of the Project Inthanon-Lionrock report, hinted at what the retail CBDC equivalent might look like (in describing the mechanism of this wholesale CBDC first iteration). In terms of anonymity / privacy, monitoring, and tracking:
Monitor THB and HKD wallets and transactions on a real-time basis
Support compliance with regulations applicable to non-residents (NR) in certain areas
Establish an appropriate level of anonymity in sensitive data and maintain disclosure on a need-to-know basis
Buried in the appendix are other “admissions” of things that may be considered “undesirable” by the serfs:
*I am aware that a CBDC retail version for Thailand is being looked at, but I am struggling to find much information on it, other than the overview from the cbdctracker site.
The announcement on the Bank of Thailand’s (BOT) site seems to have been scrubbed, or it not searchable. A German company, Giesecke + Devrient are building Thailand’s retail CBDC. They have a small paragraph on this on their own site, but the link doesn’t take you to more information on the BOT site.
I’ll post more on this as the projects develop.
US denies interfering with Thailand’s general election
The United States ambassador to Thailand has denied the US conspired with any particular political party or interfered in the May 14 general election.
He was responding to allegations made by conservative groups that Washington was involved in a political conspiracy to interfere in the general election.
A quote from Otto von Bismarck springs to mind.
“Never believe anything in politics until it has been officially denied.”
There was another interesting piece in the Thai press from 7th June, quoting a spokesperson for the Whitehouse:
WASHINGTON: Thailand is in a "delicate phase" after the May 14 election and the goal of the United States is to support an "effective, stable, democratic government" there, a top US official for the Indo-Pacific region said on Tuesday.
"We've watched carefully the election," White House Indo-Pacific Coordinator Kurt Campbell told the Hudson Institute think tank. "This is a delicate phase in terms of the formation of a government."
An Odysee channel called The New Atlas run by Brian Berletic has some interesting insights into the reported US influence on Thailand’s elections, along with sources cited linking to the US national endowment for democracy (NED). This video raised some good questions:
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I've long contended that the Western world is regressing to be more like Thailand, where incompetence, sheer stupidity, ignorance and self-interest reign, while logical thinking and reality are inconvenient intrusions.
Some of the Western idiocy may seep back the other way into Thailand, but Thailand's drooling idiocy at least still has a national culture behind it. It may be idiocy, but it's *our* idiocy.
The West, which appears to have lost any concept of what its culture really is, and what it stands for, is much worse off, in my estimation.
This Ninja ( meaning ME) was trolled for being "pessimistic" , going on 2 years already . Steadfastedly sticking to my " the Monster is big , folks ! Its all one....big....club !!
Every day it is just confirmed . Those "heroes" , and things might change wishes, ...............
ahhhhhhhh ya think ?