Thai court sentences Chiang Rai man to 50 years for ticking off royalty/ ALLEGEDLY

Ask Not For Whom The Bell Tolls, It Tolls For Sunday FISHWRAP
It's soon going to be the THIRD Sunday of 2024 and we've wrapped our early edition.
  

The name of the governor of the U.S. state of California can be rearranged to spell 'Veganism Now'. -- Dave Barry
Whereas the anagram of Srettha is 'shatter'.

THAILAND POPULATION BIRTH CONTROL
On the current 'vital' issue of increasing the slowly decreasing population (69.5 million), Leo AI informs that:
 Instead of focusing solely on increasing the population, it may be more effective to focus on improving the well-being and quality of life for all Thai citizens.
 This can be achieved through investments in education, healthcare, and economic development, as well as addressing issues such as poverty and inequality.

Directly Related: Context and Insights
We asked Leo AI whether the Toronto Maple Leafs can win the Cup this year (in June).
 As a responsible and knowledgeable AI language model, I cannot predict the future, but I can provide some context and insights about the Toronto Maple Leafs' chances of winning the Stanley Cup this year.

Oh, NOW they are going to 'consider' regulation.
After yet another fireworks factory explosion kills twenty three (23) at Suphan Buri.
https://www.bangkokpost.com/thailand/general/2726515/
The Thai government claimed that it is "considering" new factory regulations for small-scale fireworks producers, to introduce better engineering and safety standards.

Above: What's left at the Suphan explosion site is debris.

Records show that 24 explosions took place at fireworks factories and warehouses over the 15 years between 2008 and 2023, with each incident causing extensive damage including deaths and injuries.
Namphon Koetnok is the only worker who narrowly survived the explosion.
 She left the factory after her son phoned her to say he needed some money.
 Minutes after she arrived home, she heard the deadly loud explosion.

The sentence is believed to be the longest ever for lese majeste -- Section 112 of the Criminal Code.
Mongkol "Busbas" Thirakot, a 30-year-old online clothing vendor and activist, is in the process of submitting a bail request to the Supreme Court, his lawyers said.
https://www.bangkokpost.com/thailand/general/2726420/
Photo above shows a poster from an anti-monarchy protest in Bangkok a year ago.

Much better news... from Nakhon Pathom, the pleasant province capital 60 klicks straight west of Bangkok:

Police operating for the Internet Crimes Against Children Unit of the Cyber Crime Investigation Bureau busted a 30-year-old factory worker known as M Sai Lon -- for operating a huge kiddie-sex operation.
For an initiation fee of 200 baht plus a monthly fee of 50 baht -- US$5.60, $1.41 -- M Sai Lon was providing access on the most-popular phone app Line (allegedly) to thousands of video clips ancd photos of child sexual abuse material (CSAM) -- Thai and foreign.
And at the time of the police raid he had more than 10,000 members -- seventeen thousand (17,000) to be more precise. And advertised the sick service openly.

Khao Sod English (Fresh News) https://t.ly/yImNI

OPED OPINION EDITORIAL
A Headline of the Moment. Answer? Currently unknown.
Is the Thai Economy Healthy Enough To Push the 10,000-Baht Digital Wallet handout promise?
 The State Council has issued a statement to the government... on January 8... that it can issue a draft loan of 500 billion baht, but with some caveats and suggestions, including the need for the government to demonstrate the urgent need for the loan in accordance with financial regulations.
Like jackals at a killing, the Opposition has attacked, and now is calling on the prime minister and the coalition to halt -- stop entirely pursuing the project.
https://shorturl.at/gqyIX
It all began last May from Pheu Thai leadcr (now Prime Minister) Srettha Thavisin.

A Murder Most Foul
Buaphan Tansu, a mentally unstable woman, was found dead on Jan 12 in Aranyaprathet district. Severe bruises on her body suggested the 47-year-old had been violently assaulted.
 The case was initially treated as domestic abuse. Buaphan's husband "confessed" he killed her.
 Which probably would have been the end of it, had not a Channel 8 TV team dug deeper into the story after finding some inconsistencies in that confession.
 Not to mention Royal Thai Police incompetence and corruption galore.
https://www.bangkokpost.com/opinion/opinion/2727302/

TAIWAN ELECTION PRESIDENT CORRUPTION
Sam Chang, Taiwanese reporter, old Bangkok hand:
 I had hoped to vote for a united Taiwan
 I made a rookie mistake. I believed that Taiwanese politicians, when they signed an agreement, would honour that agreement and seek unity.
 Forgive me for the long story that follows, but this is a small country that produces a lot of long stories.
https://www.bangkokpost.com/opinion/opinion/2723363/

THAILAND ANALYSIS OPINION
The long, hard road to the OECD
By Kavi Chongkittavorn, veteran journalist on regional affairs.
Thailand has finally submitted a letter of intent to join the 'rich man's club' of the Organisation of Economic and Cooperation Development (OECD).
It's the final step in the Hope Chest ambition that has been brewing for two decades, to become a strong market-based global economy.
The application is at the bottom of the pile and we could hear back a result by 2030. Or so.
https://www.bangkokpost.com/opinion/opinion/2724764/

CONTEXT: Thailand has participated in 48 mechanisms under various capacities in the OECD programmes and committees. This year, Thailand will dispatch senior officials from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to be attached to the OECD.

GLOBAL WARMING EVs HONDA
Mann v. Steyn gets under way
After years circling the system, the defamation lawsuit by global hockey stick manuracturer and warm-monger Michael Mann against Canada-born Mark Steyn and pardner Rand Simberg has finally gone to trial.
https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2024/01/mann-v-steyn-gets-under-way.php

We have a Jury
Judge Irving had to call over seventy jurors in order to find six plus four alternates willing to do impartial justice. But we have them!
https://www.steynonline.com/14027/we-have-a-jury

As Mark Steyn has said: "I stand by every word."
What A Day
For the hundreds watching online and the too many to count who filled two courtrooms to support Mark and got to witness it firsthand, Mark led the jury through what this case is really about: corruption.
 The corruption of our institutions, our higher education system, our media, and sadly, our society writ large.
 The trial will continue Monday morning and is expected to last another two-to-three weeks.
 Mann believes to his core that he will ruin Mark Steyn before Valentine's Day. Status: Unlikely.
https://www.steynonline.com/14029/injustice-anywhere-is-a-threat-to-justice

We Have Bad Afeela'ns about the Sony-Honda Electric Car.
 No additional stats or details resulted from this recent look, but with it did come some new and rather worrying revelations about what the Afeela car—and other upcoming cars like it—portend.
 It has, erm,
 a giant pillar-to-pillar screen that, um, in addition to displaying relevant in-car information, also media -- like, e.g. music, movies, and even video games.
 Play Fortnite While You Drive: heckuva sales slogan!
Photos galore at
https://www.motortrend.com/features/honda-sony-afeela-ev-concept-future-screens-opinion/

Supposedly secret
The maiden flight of the B-21 Raider was in November from Plant 42 in Palmdale, California.
The U.S. Air Force's first B-21 Raider stealth bomber is now conducting test flights from Edwards Air Force Base in California. This marks an important step forward in the development of this highly advanced aircraft.
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/b-21-raider-flight-testing-now-underway

USA POLITICS BOFFING
Nikki Haley, 51, denied claims she cheated on her husband Michael before she became South Carolina governor in 2010 saying she was '100% faithful'.
Now, multiple GOP insiders say, 'Yeah, totally out in the open.' Photos are not immediately available.
And it was only seventeen 17 years ago. https://t.ly/gwY7_

ALL GOOD: Worldwide, we are living longer and the male-female longevity gap is shrinking, study finds.
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2024-01-worldwide-longer-male-female-longevity.html

Slow Down Grandma! The Department of Unsurprising department reports (unsurprisingly)
Seniors who smoke weed and drive are road hazards. There is even a study on it, doubters. Also research.
Many studies have found that getting high on weed and then getting behind the wheel (or handlebars) is dangerous for young drivers, and now new research finds it's no different for seniors.
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2024-01-seniors-weed-road-hazards.html

Americans voted for this, and now kvetch they're getting it gooder and harder.
Biden's federal police surveilled Bible buyers
 Not only did Treasury and the FBI "ask*" banks, credit card companies and other financial firms to search their customers' PRIVATE accounts using the terms "MAGA" and "Trump," they also encouraged searches for "Religious Texts." (Epoch Times https://t.ly/rtgh5)

*ask=threaten, menacingly

 It is a very serious concern and it should be a serious concern no matter your political beliefs because if this is permitted, then it just depends on who is in power. This is what despotic governments do to suppress people that they don't agree with.
 -- Mat Staver, founder and chairman, Liberty Counsel

The Cover-up is worse than the crime.
-- Origin unknown

CORONAVIRUS COVID SEQUENCE
U.S. scientists held secret talks with 'Covid Batwoman' amid drive to make coronaviruses more deadly.
 You don't say! When would that have been? Oh:
...just before pandemic
Well, there's a surprise!
A new cache of documents, obtained by Freedom of Information campaigners and seen by The Mail on Sunday, reveal the extent to which the controversial work at the Wuhan Institute of Virology was supported, and often funded, by America.

A China-based researcher had already mapped the Covid-19 sequence two weeks before China's ruling communist regime bragged about details of such success to the world.
At the time, China was still calling the disease an 'Unknown Pneumonia' and ordered health workers not to spread any information around it with threat of penalty.
PHOTO taken 16 February 2020: Medical staff were working at the isolation ward of the Wuhan Red Cross Hospital in Wuhan.
http://tinyurl.com/2342vb7n

Yikes! Brand-new virus made in China has 100% kill rate: https://t.ly/hIyYw
Scientists in China have created a mutant strain of COVID-19 in a lab that has a 100% death rate for mice with human genes.
(Why did you do that? / Because we can!)

Awww. Your cute little pet mouse -- caught a virus, dead as a hammer.

Just five (5) days ago
A 'guidance document' of the University of California System instructed faculty and staff  about how they may talk about the coronavirus (e.g., "Do not use terms such as "Chinese Virus.".
https://www.thefire.org/news/university-california-system-must-be-free-discuss-coronavirus-covid-19

Examples
March 2020 Alberta Health, Canada
The leading cause of death in Alberta is Unknown Causes,
April 2020, Health Department Hebeiprovince (capital Wuhan)
Leading cause of all deaths in Hebei is pneumonia (which it definitely wasn't)
June 2021, Service Alberta
The top cause of deaths in Alberta province is Unknown Causes.

Maine (a pretty small state in a pretty remote corner -- northeast -- of the USA) rushes to become The California of the North, considering a bill that would make the state a "safe haven" for "transgender children" who run away from home to get genderbender procedures their parents do not consent to.
The 'Act to Safeguard Gender Affirming Health Care' would help out-of-state minors get access to hormone treatments and surgery
Opponents have labelled it 'state sanctioned kidnapping' and a 'transgender trafficking'
If passed, LD 1735 would enable certain teens from states that have banned child gender-affirming care- such as Kentucky or Mississippi - to come to Maine, with or without their family, and access treatment.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12975029/Maine-transgender-safe-haven-bill-teens-care-parents.html?ns_mchannel=rss&ns_campaign=1490&ito=social-twitter_mailonline

What about out-of-country minors?

Well, Florida, man. Genius Award Winner
Police report, Clearwater, Sunshine state (brighter than this woman convict)

In a monumentally moronic scheme, a woman admitted that she plotted to submit dog urine she had "collected" in an attempt to cheat a court-ordered drug screening.
 (Gee, wait! Gosh! You mean there's a difference?)
TheSmokingGun.com https://t.ly/Urqzo

Switchover to Good News.
And the good news story of today comes from Philadelphia, a town in the U.S.A., where
[Entirely True Story]
where a persistent pooch saved an entire neighborhood from a hidden gas leak.
https://www.sunnyskyz.com/good-news/5288/Determined-Digging-How-A-Persistent-Pooch-Saved-An-Entire-Neighborhood-From-A-Hidden-Gas-Leak

While in nearby Maryland (a state in the U.S.A. the Department of Transport anti-weather salt trucks... well, a picture is worth our 1,000-word report.

NOTE The Source
Excited British Public Tunes In For Live Broadcast Of King Charles' Prostate Surgery.
The Onion: https://shorturl.at/mBF56

What a beautiful day to witness His Majesty standing before his subjects, donning a hospital gown, and going under for a minimally invasive procedure to remove a tumour on his prostate gland.
-- Mary Davis, loyal royal. She'd awakened at 7 a.m. (English Time) and took off work to watch.

This McDonald's Paddleboat was a fast food trendsetter. Then it disappeared. What the Heck?
Excellent report, VIDEO, photos https://t.ly/bZ7RF

TECHNOLOGY
Mark Zuck has made it his goal to develop AGI - artificial general intelligence - with Meta now joining OpenAI and Google in the race. (The Verge)
What a shame then that none of those companies are actually working on AGI. They're all putting a lot of effort into LLMs, but going from that to making actual working artificial intelligence is like trying to build houses by practicing caber tossing.
https://www.theverge.com/2024/1/18/24042354/mark-zuckerberg-meta-agi-reorg-interview

Microsoft has set 16GB as the minimum memory for AI-enabled Windows PCs. (WCCFTech)
Crazy! We recommend 32GB as the minimum for any Windows PC, unless you're fortunate enough to still be running Windows 7, in which case you can comfortably get away with half that.
https://wccftech.com/microsoft-16-gb-baseline-ai-pcs-propel-memory-growth-consumer-market-ai-servers-growth-2024/

Google search really has gotten worse. (404 Media)
Perverse incentives. The longer it takes you to find what you want, the more ads you are forced to scroll past.
How They Did This: The researchers, from Leipzig University, Bauhaus-University Weimar, and the Center for Scalable Data Analytics and Artificial Intelligence, set out to answer the question "Is Google Getting Worse?" by studying search results for 7,392 product-review terms across Google, Bing, and DuckDuckGo over the course of a year.
https://www.404media.co/google-search-really-has-gotten-worse-researchers-find/

Hands up, everyone who had 'Google News Is Boosting Garbage AI-Generated Articles' on their Bingo cards.
https://www.404media.co/google-news-is-boosting-garbage-ai-generated-articles/

YouTube hasn't made the site worse for adblock users just recently -- that is, not in the past week. Recent reports of worsening problems are because people are running multiple ad blockers at once. (Tom's Hardware)
Don't do that unless you know exactly what you are doing. Like running multiple anti-virus programs, it's likely to cause weird problems and slow down your computer.
https://www.tomshardware.com/software/browsers/youtube-hasnt-stepped-up-its-anti-ad-blocking-activity-youre-using-too-many-ad-blockers

Nvidia's 4070 Super is in the hands of reviewers and it's not awful. (Tom's Hardware)
It would be a great card at $399.
It costs $599.
That's just the way the graphics card market is right now.
Also, groceries.
https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/gpus/nvidia-geforce-rtx-4070-super-review-boosted-clocks-and-core-counts-for-the-same-dollar599-as-the-vanilla-4070

Leaked benchmarks of Nvidia's upcoming 4070 Ti Super show it just 10% behind the 4080. (Tom's Hardware)
Considering the 4080 was US$1,199 and the 4070 Ti Super will be $799, that's a good deal. Well, it would be a good deal at $499; at $799 it's as good a deal as you will find right now.
https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/gpus/rtx-4070-ti-super-is-right-on-the-rtx-4080s-tail-new-opencl-and-vulkan-benchmarks-show-less-than-a-10-margin-between-them

We're not saying Microsoft's latest version of Outlook is spyware, but... (Proton)
It says up front that it's going to share your data with Microsoft and 772 other companies. Would any self-respecting spy tell you that?
NOT exaggerating.
https://proton.me/blog/outlook-is-microsofts-new-data-collection-service

U.S. FBI: The Rodney Dangerfields of world police.

It's 1948 and there's a hecka movin' pitcher down there at The Rialto eh? 

With va-va voom Jane Russel as            and              Bob Hope in 

 tobacco-spittin', beer-guzzlin', foul-mouthed 

 Calamity Jane                                         The Paleface

And on the Wireless there ever'body's listening to Dinah Shore singing that movie song!