🗞️Thailand News Roundup in Headlines
🗞️Thailand News Roundup in Headlines
THAILAND CBDC UBI HANDOUT, GLOBALIST POLICIES, ACCIDENTS, SCAMS, SCANDALS, KIDNAPPINGS, MURDERS.
A news roundup of what’s been happening in Thailand with headlines, pictures, and the occasional blurb.
THAILAND CBDC UBI HANDOUT
For those not in the know of such acronyms - we are talking about a central bank digital currency, as a government handout to Thais aka universal basic income. Although interestingly, the government caved to public pressure and gave out the first batch of handouts to eligible recipients as cold hard cash…
Deputy Prime Minister and Interior Minister Anutin Charnvirakul on Thursday warned lenders against intimidating recipients into using the handout for paying their debts.
The warning came amid reports that loan sharks were seen queuing alongside handout recipients at ATMs to withdraw the 10,000-baht handout on the first day of the scheme.
"It is illegal for lenders to intimidate debtors," Mr Anutin warned.
Pol Lt Gen Akkaradet Pimonsri, assistant national police chief, on Thursday ordered police nationwide to take action against loan sharks who intimidate handout recipients.
Oh?
More than one third of Thais say they will be enraged if they don’t get the 10,000-baht handout in the second phase of the digital wallet scheme, an opinion poll has found, while more than half would be at least slightly angry – and more than a third wouldn't mind at all.
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GLOBALIST POLICIES
Foreign Affairs Minister Maris Sangiampongsa emphasised the importance of Thailand's bid to join Brics, a league of countries that includes Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa, and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) during the 2024 United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) in New York.
NATO or BRICS? East or West? Left or Right? Republicans or Democrats? Always two choices. Always two flavours. Pepsi or Coke. It matters not. They all follow the United Nation’s Agenda 2030.
The circular economy sounds ‘great’ along with other de-growthy policies to reduce everyone’s standard of living. How circular can things get? Was Soylent Green a film or a documentary?
More Agenda 2030 policies by stealth. Education 2030. No one shall be left behind…
You will have a fifteen minute city and you will love it. Keep squeezing the serfs until they revolt, roll over or go broke. Congestion charges incoming like London. Zee Germans are helping us to realise the plan.
The Transport Ministry's proposal to introduce congestion charges on motorists using busy roads in Bangkok has reignited intense debate.
This initiative aims to tackle traffic woes by encouraging drivers to leave their cars at home and use public transport. The fees will help fund a 20-baht flat-rate fare for the city's electric trains, making them more affordable and accessible. The ministry plans to spend six to 12 months studying the proposal's feasibility.
The OTP's director-general, Panya Chupanich, said a pre-feasibility study was conducted from 2019 to 2022 in collaboration with the German development agency GIZ.
Chor Sua-klin, a 45-year-old taxi driver, said the measure is unlikely to make a difference because there will always be those willing to pay if they believe it is worth it.
He disagreed with the measure because it would affect his job. He believes passengers would use taxi services less frequently if required to pay a congestion fee.
The rise of the biometric harvesting of your face and fingerprints. We know where this is headed. Once it is fully implemented, the undesirables with a bad social credit score or lacking proof of genetic injectable product uptake connected to their digital ID, shall become persona non-grata anywhere and everywhere. We’ll need to get convincing prosthetic mission impossible style masks to evade the facial recognition panopticon. For now, the key words in the below passage are “allow access”. Will it be optional? Time will tell.👇
An automated biometric identification system using facial recognition technology will be implemented in six Thai airports later this year to let passengers show their physical ID only once.
The system will be ready for domestic passengers on Nov 1 and for international passengers on Dec 1, according to operated by the Airport Authority of Thailand director Kirati Kitmanawat.
To use the system, passengers will be required to allow access to their identification information when checking in at the counter or self-service check-in at the airports.
It’s all a sick joke, but I don’t get the punchline. Mental health goes online. There’s an app for that. Here’s a crazy idea - maybe these depressed young people just want to talk to a real living breathing human being. Not an AI chatbot or a “channel for users to seek advice from experts online”…
Yawn. It’s all so predictable now. Make the test, encourage people to self test. Use whatever you want in the test kit - orange juice or saliva. Crank up the CT (cycle threshold) in the lab to amplify the biological material 40 or 50 times. Allegedly find traces of some virus. Say it matches a computer sequenced genomic code. Hey presto - you’ve got yourselves an ‘outbreak’. Rinse repeat.
As Thailand's demographics trend older, the nation urgently needs to adjust its tax structure and expand the number of people participating in the tax system to meet future expenses, says Deputy Finance Minister Julapun Amornvivat.
According to Mr Julapun, the Finance Ministry is studying a negative income tax (NIT) system to provide financial assistance to individuals with incomes below a threshold set by the government.
You’ve got to admire the Orwellian doublespeak here. “Provide financial assistance” = expand the parameters of who is eligible to become part of the taxed cattle on the tax farm.
ACCIDENTS
This is a horrible and very tragic story. It seems that no amount of carnage on the roads or children dying in exploding vehicles will change the country’s approach to health and safety. Even more galling, was reading the article published less than 24 hours after the tragedy, that focused on how it would damage Thailand’s tour operators and hurt tourism. It’s always about money.
When people had barely had time to grieve and process what had happened…
The recent school bus fire could hamper the recovery of tour operators for the remainder of this year, particularly in the domestic market as people are losing confidence, according to the Thai Transportation Operators Association.
Private operators and related public authorities should swiftly update evacuation drills for bus passengers and make this process a regular practice, said association president Wasuchet Sophonsathien.
At least 23 people, mostly children, died when a school bus caught fire during a field trip on Tuesday in Bangkok.
[..]
This incident could significantly damage bus operators' business, which has not recovered from the pandemic, although the negative sentiment should not last long, he said.
[…]
For the upcoming high season, he said the recovery of bus tours is slower than expected as there are fewer Chinese and European tour groups, even with Chinese Golden Week and the high season for international markets in this period.
Sabeeda Thaised, deputy interior minister, yesterday said the Office of the Insurance Commission had already paid 500,000 baht in compensation to each dead victim's family. The Budget Bureau also gave 1 million baht to the family of each deceased, she said.
She said that the donations from the public, totaling 9.1 million baht --6.35 million baht from bank transfers and 2.74 million baht from direct cash donations -- would be divided among the families of all the victims, including that of the survivors.
Half, or about 4.5 million baht, would be given to the families of the 23 deceased victims, and the other half would be given to the families of three severely injured students who are still in hospital.
[…]
The families of the 23 deceased victims would receive 197,914 baht each, while the three injured students would receive 1.51 million baht each.
SCAMS, SCANDALS, KIDNAPPINGS, MURDERS
This has been a big story. The main perpetrator pictured has been on TV talk shows crying and saying sorry to everyone he swindled. It is a circus. It is a reality TV show in real-time that is also the news. It is utterly bizarre.👇
Seventeen suspects in The iCon Group fraud case have been sent to jail after the Criminal Court rejected bail requests submitted by three celebrities, citing flight risk, while the others did not apply for release.
The ruling came on a day in which the Department of Special Investigation (DSI) located a server containing the business records of the online sales company, which has been accused of running a pyramid scheme. Authorities also seized 220 million baht worth of assets including many luxury cars.
Monks have become embroiled too…👇
I thought that Buddhist monks were not supposed to have assets or even handle cash?? Nowadays they have portfolios and run pyramid schemes too! It shows how out of touch I am with the Monkhood. I’ll just stick to nature, meditation, and my own interpretation of Buddhist values…👇
The investigation began when a social media post showed Phra Maha Vudhijaya Vajiramedhi teaching potential iCon Group members that doing business with the company would lead to wealth.
The clip sparked criticism about whether his teaching influenced some
individuals to invest in iCon. The company is accused of running a pyramid fraud scheme, and 18 executives, including the CEO, now face charges. More than 4,000 victims have come forward so far.
According to the deputy commissioner, the Chinese woman, Du, was a former wife of one abductee. The woman told police that she had informed her new husband about being abused by her ex. In response, her new husband became frustrated and planned to take revenge by robbing him.
The new husband contacted another Chinese man named Tong, who then recruited three Myanmar men to form the robbery team. The gang gathered at a rented house in the Lat Phrao-Wang Hin area in Bangkok to plot the crime.
The woman then called her ex-husband last Saturday and told him to prepare 3.2 million baht in cash, alleging that a client wanted to exchange digital money for the sum.
Nicholas Creed is a Bangkok based writer. Any support is greatly appreciated. If you are in a position to donate a virtual coffee or crypto, it would mean the world of difference. Paid subscribers can comment on articles, videos, and podcasts, and also receive a monthly subscriber newsletter. Email: nicholas.creed@protonmail.com to enquire about a crypto-paid discounted annual subscription.
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"NATO or BRICS? East or West? Left or Right? Republicans or Democrats? Always two choices. Always two flavours."
Always different ends of the same collectivist turd. "Do you want to be the cannibal or the feast?" Until the dregs of this species get on board with the fact that humans are ends in themselves and not the means to the ends of others, there will always be willing slaves and masters. Always parasites and the parasites on parasitism.