Bangkok Post newspaper commits the best headline of the week.
Good morning to the hordes of Fishwrap readers around the globe.
This is the Bulldog (early) edition for Sunday January 7, so start scrolling.
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We've ordered a chicken and an egg from Amazon. We'll let you know what comes first.
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Embrace the Chilly Season
I wonder if the frost loves the trees and fields, that it kisses them so gently? -- Lewis Carroll
THAILAND TRUE STORY
The fortune-tellers do soccer
a) Thailand, Group F, begin Asian Cup play on February 16 in Qatar, agains Kyrgyzstan.
b) Thailand will be eliminated straight off, in that Group Stage.
c) Japan will win the Asian Cup for the fifth time, by beating Iran in the final.
https://www.bangkokpost.com/sports/2718466/
And now that headline and story lede:
The number of generals at the Defence Ministry will be cut in half within three years.
Sutin the defence ministry, which he oversees as minister, will soon introduce an early retirement programme, and the number of generals is expected to go down sooner than 2027.
(Forgetting accidentally or on purpose that all general-rank officers are appointed by the king, for life.)
Two possilities:
1. The government, Prime Minister Srettha Thavisin and advisers gave zero thought and tried to pacify noisy activists.
2. They planned a policy to cut the numbear of (2,000) general officers while knowing full well there is exactly no chance they will do so.
PHOTO: Defence Minister Sutin Klungsang (second from left) speaks to MPs at parliament on Friday before the House of Representatives vote on the draft budget for the 2024 fiscal year.
https://www.bangkokpost.com/thailand/general/2719014/
Something else the Srettha government claims to be planning but has no details to offer the public.
Military camps (no idea how many) will become centres of drug rehabilitation
Hospitals inside the chosen camps across the country will be repurposed to treat addicts,
Prime Minister Srettha Thavisin wrote on Friday on his Facebook page:
 Security authorities have agreed to accept drug addicts for treatment at military camps.
 Drug addicts will be taken from villages, separating them from their communities.
https://www.nationthailand.com/thailand/general/40034432
Yes, there are rainstorms and a lot of flooding in the deep South of Thailand.
In the past two (2) days, flooding has forced ten (10) hospitals to evacuate patients and shut down.
The thing is... it's annual. And the other thing is... the new government under the Thaksinesque Pheu Thai Party has no idea what to do about it.
https://www.nationthailand.com/thailand/general/40034432
VIDEO by NationThailand.com:
THAILAND OPINION ANALYSIS
Thailand's best public expert of Thai and East Asia affairs is Professor Thitinan Pongsudhirak of Chulalongkorn Univrsity. He's looking ahead to
 Prospects at home and abroad in 2024
https://www.bangkokpost.com/opinion/opinion/2718646/
PHOTO: No analysis of Thailand's future is complete without Thaksin Shinawatra, seen here with two daughters including Panthongtarn, aka Ung Ing (right, in white) leader of the latest iteration of the ruling Pheu Thai (for Thais) Party.
For Southeast Asia, the worsening geopolitical environment augurs more instability, which Asean will prove increasingly inadequate to manage or mitigate, much less resolve.
 Chief among the many challenges the region will face is Myanmar's deadly civil war, whereby the military is losing battlefield prospects to a combined force of ethnic armies, local youths, and civilian leaders and politicians.
 The crumbling of Myanmar's military could well be the most surprising and spectacular outcome in Thailand's neighbourhood this year.
Pro-terrorist Team Hamas USA and other defenders of the Jew-baiting president ex-president of Harvard are predictable. They decided to mess with someone's wife and, well, FAFO.
 Bill Ackman is a lifelong liberal whose political donations have been to Democrats.
 But, as a Harvard alumnus and a Jew, he was appalled by Claudine Gay's incompetent and borderline anti-semitic testimony to the U.S. Congress.
 Not to mention her lack of any body of original scholarship.
 So for the first time, he stepped into the cultural and political fray.
 The Left responded predictably, by attacking his wife, Neri Osman, who is brilliant.
The story, with mass-sourcing at Powerline: https://t.ly/vpgFh
OPINION JEW-BAITING INCOMPETENT GAY
When you've lost Newsweek...
https://t.ly/U62q6 Harvard graduates have nothing to be proud or virtuous
Claudine Gay made a career of attacking black scholars. Don't defend her for being Black
She has an incredibly long list of Fs-for-Failers on her Race Card CV.
To Be Fair
A Gay Chorus: https://shorturl.at/jtuL7
Also fair: Martin Hackworth: Claudine Gay: the great DEI grift exposed.
Up until noon Saturday (Bangkok Time UTC+7) no one is defending her. Oopsie! Yes, there are thousands hundreds of thousands at a minimum because, you know, Team Hamas USA really believes every possible calumny that anyone ever thought of for Jews; including killing them all.
Moreso in The Atlantic which was once one our favourite oceans:
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/01/claudine-gay-harvard-plagiarism/677007/
 [T]he biggest and most revealing part of the scandal is the lengths to which Gay's defenders chose to go in order to defend a person manifestly guilty of the charges of which she had been accused
Not to mention the Orwellian doublespeak of so many journalists and academics (who) are willing, are still willing, to redefine plagiarism to suit their politics.
VDH asks The Obvious
Will students who emulate Gay’s habit of copy-and-paste, failure-to-footnote, and misuse-of-data now be exempt from dismissal or suspension?
https://shorturl.at/uyDO2
Well if you can't believe the old propehecies, what can you believe?
 The 1896 Prophecies: 10 Predictions of America's Last Days
 A 127-year-old prophecy warns of America's last days should socialist philosophies be permitted, with modern-day commentary showing the parallels with current events.
 "What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the Sun," said the great King Solomon in Ecclesiastes.
https://www.amazon.com/1896-Prophecies-Predictions-Americas-Last/dp/B0CBHGRF24
New advances in misreporting- dezinformatsiya.
 A quarter of Americans believe that the FBI investigated the January 6 event at Washington, a survey by the Washington Post-and-University of Maryland finds.
 More precistly, 39 percent of Americans who say Fox News is their primary news source believe the FBI organised and encouraged that January 6 'attack'.
 More exactly: 34 percent of self-identified Republicans and 44 percent of Trump voters.
This Is
a) the portion of Americans who believe this, plus b) are also willing to say it to a pollster.
https://t.ly/t5qml
USA SEX-AND-TEENS
EDKH
Jeffrey Epstein did not commit suicide.
But he did tell friends that Bill Clinton "liked 'em young" which was apparently truthfully factual.
https://twitter.com/Techno_Fog/status/1742695232540672122
That's the same Bill Clinton who took a bribe from Friends of Pauline [Kanchanalak] to arrange a White House meeting with Charoen Phokphand chairman and multi-conglomerate Charoen Pokphand and multi-gazillionaire Dhanin Chearavanont.
TECHNOLOGY
Thank goodness that young cop in Slither had a thermite grenade, right?
A ship carrying 800 tonnes of lithium-ion batteries ran into a tiny spot of bother when the batteries did what batteries do, which is catch fire. (The Register)
They put the fire out.
https://www.theregister.com/2024/01/02/ship_li_ion_fire/
Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is Amelia Watson.
Yes, again, everybody's favourite Bri'ish time-travelling detective, Amelia Watson, is already shipping from Amazon.
Promising benchmarks of AMD's forthcoming desktop APUs continue to leak. (Tom's Hardware)
In this case the 8600G, showing graphics performance about 10% faster than its laptop counterpart, about equal with a desktop Nvidia GTX 1060. Perfectly adequate for light gaming.
https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/gpus/amds-upcoming-integrated-graphics-matches-seven-years-old-gtx-1060-in-geekbench-6-ryzen-5-8600g-igpu-benchmarks-leak
The 8700G will be interesting. It has 50% more graphics hardware, and we'll see whether the bottleneck there is power consumption or memory bandwidth. If the former it will be an amazing chip; if the latter it will be... still pretty darned good.
The "I" in LLM stands for Intelligence. (Haxx)
In which the author makes the very good point that the output of LLMs like ChatGPT can be worse than useless, because the entire model is designed to produce output that is plausible rather than true.
https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2024/01/02/the-i-in-llm-stands-for-intelligence/
Looking for an old-fashioned tube amplifier with a transparent OLED display? LG has you covered with the Duke Box. (Tom's Hardware)
Well, they'll be showing it off at CES, anyway. Whether it ever ships to consumers is another matter, let alone the price.
https://www.tomshardware.com/speakers/lg-shows-off-audiophile-vacuum-tube-dukebox-in-ces-teaser-combining-1950s-tech-with-a-modern-transparent-oled
Hutch has left the building. RIP.
 Starsky and Hutch actor David Soul dies, aged 80.
This is how it always begins
Bloomberg https://t.ly/9zOXw U.S., more than a dozen other countries warn Houthis against further 'unacceptable and profoundly destabilising' attacks in Red Sea
Reuters https://t.ly/K-Rsg The leader of Yemen's Houthis, Mohamed Ali al-Houthi, has warned cargo ships in the Red Sea to avoid heading towards Israel and the occupied territories, and to keep their radios turned on and respond quickly to Houthi attempts at communication.
S-o-o-o Just Askin'
Which kind of malaria would you rather have?
https://shorturl.at/pvFS0 Classifying the natural history of asymptomatic malaria
But there is some good news:
 New antibiotic zosurabalpin shows promise against superbug.
UPI Health: https://t.ly/XU_KK
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Florida is first state of the USA allowed to import drugs from Canada in bid to reduce costs.
https://www.wsj.com/health/pharma/fda-florida-prescription-drugs-lower-cost-428510fe