Ivan the terrible

55 minutes ago, nampla69 said:

Daily Express ...........  ........... used to be a Fleet Street newspaper once upon a time. 

wonderful street next to my alma mata ///many a discussion over a curry

1 minute ago, Stillearly said:

To the smallest female officer .. 

fucking disgraceful

have they no shame

2 hours ago, thumper63 said:

The GF says to me that these 3 trees/bushes have grown so much that they are blocking the view

 

Not a problem I say. Out comes the clippers and the chain saw and it was " off with their heads "

Just need to do some cleaning up around the ears and itll be all better. 

There's nothing to make ya feel more like a real man than to fire up the chainsaw and attack a living thing

f**k..that is  so beautiful...can i see the bush lol

4 minutes ago, boydeste said:

I can switch to most shorts after wine or beer. BUT I still ain't got any FFS, lol

PPP LOL

1 minute ago, boydeste said:

I agree but I haven't got any.

School boy error, my bottle of Bombay seems to be empty.

dont know how anyone can switch to gin after beer...whatever floats your boat mate

on special 

bowmore single malt only 20 sterling ...bargin

not a bad drop

18 minutes ago, Glasseye said:

Maybe we can meet for a beer before I depart and you can tell me all about it,

 

i would relish that

not that it changes anything...go in eyes wide open 

Thailand is one of the most Racist countries in the world....so are its populace...you should have learned more in your 20 years and talked to a few TGs

13 hours ago, fatbhoytim said:

A good article on how fuckwit Boris and his merry men are doing exactly as they please without any scrutiny.

Hello, I am David Allen Green and I am a legal commentator for the Financial Times. I have been asked to talk about the quarantine regulations in particular, but also statutory instruments in general. What prompts this talk is that the government has introduced quarantine regulations which provide for strict obligations on what to do if you arrive in England. Those regulations are in the form of a statutory instrument. A statutory instrument has the same effect as an act of parliament. It is equally the law of the land as anything which is contained within a bill passed by parliament, but there are a couple of differences.

One is that a statutory instrument has to be authorised by an act of parliament. You can't just have an SI, as it's abbreviated, free standing. You always have to track it back to which act of parliament the SI has come under. The second is that, at least in theory, SIs are challengeable in court on the basis that they don't actually fit in with what the act of parliament provides for. But subject to those two points a statutory instrument is as much of the law of the land as an act of parliament. But in practice they are used in a slightly different way to an act of parliament.

An act of parliament has to go through both houses of parliament and be voted on before it becomes part of the law. SIs, on the other hand, are issued effectively by government departments subject to usually only nominal parliamentary supervision and scrutiny, and become part of the law of the land fairly swiftly. SIs can also be seriously consequential in that they can create criminal offences, powers of arrest, and detention. They are also, in inverted commas, 'flexible' and they are increasingly being used by governments to legislate almost by department without the inconvenience and slowness of going through parliament.

In particular, the current government is in the habit of issuing statutory instruments during this coronavirus pandemic. And although there was a need for emergency legislation at the beginning of this pandemic there is certainly no need now. And for government's use of SIs for coronavirus and other things is actually a worrying trend. Government is, in effect, bypassing parliament. Traditional constitutional theory has it that it is parliament which is the legislature and the government is merely the executive. But with the use of SIs it is more meaningful to say that it is government legislating.

I am now going to give a guided tour of the quarantine regulations. And at this point I would like to acknowledge the work of Professor Tom Hickman on these, on whose work I draw in this guided tour. The Health Protection, brackets, Coronavirus, International Travel, close brackets, brackets, England, close brackets, Regulations 2020. A bit of a mouthful, but that is not unusual for statutory instruments because a number of them can be made under one parent provision. And so they all have to have detailed titles. You will see from the title, however, that this only applies to England and this is because Wales, Northern Ireland, and Scotland have her own coronavirus legislation.

You will see that the regulations were made on the 2nd of June, laid before parliament the day after, which was just before a weekend, and then came into force on the 8th of June, which was a Monday. This was quite swift legislation. You will also see that the secretary of state is making the regulations under the same 1984 Public Health Act that all of the other regulations on coronavirus have come under. The statutory instrument is quite a dense piece of legal work. It goes for 22 pages in a PDF, but it does have shape and structure. The essence of the regulations is a creation of two obligations.

The first is an obligation under regulation 3 to provide information when you enter England. But the core of this SI is regulation 4 which you will see is the requirement to self-isolate. And within regulation 4 the crucial provision is sub-regulation 2, where you will see that a person must remain in isolation from others in accordance with this regulation. Everything else in regulation 4 is to put meat on the bones of the provision in sub-regulation 4-2. You will see just above that it applies to somebody who arrives in England from outside the common travel area, which is essentially the British Isles.

But if they were already in the British Isles and travelled to England these regulations apply for 14 days. And if you move down regulation 4 you're seeing sub-regulation 7, that a person, on their arrival in England, must go straight to where they are to self-isolate for 14 days. So that is the key obligation. You must self-isolate, and you must do that for 14 days. Then under sub-regulation 9, you have some exceptions. You will see that this is an exhaustive list, by which I mean sometimes you can have the word "including," which means that there can be some other basis for an exception.

So for example, in the restrictions on movement under the old coronavirus regulations there were a list of exceptions. But there was a more general provision saying that you could have a reasonable excuse. Here, there is no reasonable excuse exception. There is no exception for leaving the house for exercise. And if you go down to G you will see that it is only in exceptional circumstances that you can leave the house for basic necessities such as food, and only when it is not possible to obtain these provisions in any other manner.

This is a very tight regime, tighter than the old coronavirus regulations on the restricting movement. This is, in effect, house arrest. If you were to legislate deliberately for house arrest in England using a statutory instrument or even an act of parliament this is how it would be set up. You would have a prohibition, and then you would have very, very tight exceptions. We now move on to the bottom of regulation 4. Almost hidden away, you will see regulation 13D, if a person is as described in schedule 2.

Not a great deal is made of schedule 2 on the face of the regulation, which is odd, because if you do now turn to schedule 2, you will see that it starts on page 11 of a 22-page PDF. That means that half of this statutory instrument is devoted to further exceptions to the requirement to self-isolate, not just the exceptions under sub-regulation 9, but as you will see as you scroll down, page after page after page of exceptions. Some of them seem quite sensible and distinct, and then we get increasingly esoteric ones.

For example, under paragraph 21 there is an exception for a person carrying out a critical function at a space site or a spacecraft controller. And then as we get towards the end of schedule 2 we come to very general exceptions, such as paragraph 37, a person who is pursuing an activity as an employed or self-employed person in the UK and resides in another country to which they go back once a week or vice versa. So anybody who commutes from England to outside the common travel area or vice versa is completely free of these regulations, such as the other people in all 38 paragraphs of the schedule.

This is a concerning combination. We have, on one hand, a very strict obligation, which on first glance looks as tight as can be, and is as much of a control on freedom of movement as could ever be imagined in English law. And then is subject to what at first glance again looks like tight exceptions. But if you look carefully you will see that the exceptions become more and more wide to the point where it could almost be said that the exceptions to the rule are more numerous than the cases that would be covered by the law.

But if you don't come within one of these exceptions you are then caught by the offence under regulation 6. So if we go back up to regulation 6 you will see that a person who contravenes regulation 4, and you will see there's no reasonable excuse exception there, commits a criminal offence. That means a criminal record. It may mean here a fine, but that doesn't make the criminal liability any less. Somebody will be blighted for life with a criminal record just because they walk outside their own home without being able to point to any of the exceptions in this SI.

The ease with which a government can legislate wide criminal prohibitions which go to the very core of what you can do, including whether you can leave your own house, without any real parliamentary scrutiny is worrying. Governments like SIs. Governments like being able to legislate without the bother and inconvenience of getting parliamentary approval. When SIs first were introduced they were seen as technical documents, allowing government ministers to just fine tune as and when necessary. But now we can see that the widest possible criminal prohibitions and the sanctions for enforcing them can be done effectively by ministerial diktat.

These quarantine regulations are worrying. They are a combination of being illiberal and being ludicrous. They are illiberal in respect of the core crucial provision of self-isolation, which is effectively house arrest, but also ludicrous in just how wide the exceptions go. It is indicative of a botched policy because often laws which don't read well are because of policies which have not been thought through. What we have here is worrying for wider reasons. The current government is getting a taste for legislating, even on the widest possible basis by statutory instrument, creating criminal offences which interfere with fundamental rights.

There is no good reason for the government to be doing this. These regulations have only come out in June in respect of a pandemic which has been going on in the United Kingdom since at least March. A government should not be doing illiberal legislation like this without express parliamentary votes in primary legislation. And so it may well be that these quarantine regulations are not enforced or are not enforceable.

It may well be that they are revoked quite quickly. But the very fact that the government thought that it could go ahead and legislate in such a way with very little parliamentary scrutiny or control, and in doing so interfere with fundamental rights, is something which is greatly concerning. This is not what a government should be doing with statutory instruments.

 

fucking hell is that what we have to do...black and white ....what a FUcking nonsensense...they will never be happy/appeased...fight with all your being against this fascistic construct

5 minutes ago, Kathmandu said:

How about the open it up f**k wits protesting w/o masks weeks and weeks before the George Floyd murder. No culpability? 

What's good for the goose is good for the gander...no.

they were fckwits too...but the BLM protests are many orders of magnitude greater in terms of numbers

And ...no ...neither group should have done it

Just now, lazarus said:

Yep. Cannot stay on lock down forever. However, wearing a mask and other actions can slow down and/or stop the virus. This is already proven to be in other countries.

From indications thus far in the US, outdoor protesters are not the risk for spreading the disease. It has been more than two weeks since the initial police brutality protests. There has been no data yet that shows this is where/why COVID-19 infections in the US are on the rise.

There is little if any supportive data from clinical studies that outdoor spread is happening to any significant degree anywhere. Unless you know of some?

Epidemiologists are saying that COVID-19 is primarily spread indoors -- e.g., by family members, at social gatherings, in churches, at large family events, workplaces & offices, etc. COVID-19 spreads most efficiently when there is close proximity in a closed environment over an extended period of time.

Its true outdoors is much less of a risk ,however there were hundreds of thousands at the Washington protests all shoulder to shoulder...still too early to tell as to the outcome,the youngsters will mostly just get a cold...its when they go visit their grandparents and secondary spread ..there will be a lag 

17 minutes ago, lazarus said:

The US is going backward fighting COVID-19...nice summer weather, though. 😎

 

“Totally predictable”: State reopenings have backfired

...Covid-19 hospitalizations are rising in Arizona, the Carolinas, Utah, Arkansas, Texas, Tennessee, and perhaps Florida. Those states are also seeing higher numbers of positive Covid-19 tests, as well as increases in the percentage of tests that come back positive. This indicates that the higher case counts aren’t simply due to more widespread testing finding milder cases...

...Simply put, reopenings have led to more infections because more people are coming into contact with each other while there’s still a lot of virus around. Mask use is inconsistent, and even when they’re worn properly, masks are not 100 percent effective at preventing transmission...

https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2020/6/12/21288009/new-covid-spikes-arizona-florida-carolinas-texas

 

 

So be it ..cannot stay in lockdown forever

However people who fail to socially distance aka BLM  are the most culpable ,never mind being mind numbingly stupid  self indulgent threats to their elderly relatives and the wider population...total fckwits 

On 6/4/2020 at 5:18 AM, Evil Penevil said:

This is a thought-provoking opinion piece from the Post Magazine, a supplement to The South China Morning Post of Hong Kong.  I don't think it will happen before I'm making my excuses to St. Peter,  but I can envision a day when plain-vanilla farang tourists will be told by door staff that WS go go bars are for members only.

It's hard for me to put myself outside of my own skin, but if I were a Thai and read hundreds of posts on the Internet that state Thailand is a "third-world shith*le'" and the only reason to visit is because f*cking 18-year-old girls is cheaper than at home,  I'd get fed up and pissed off as well. It's would also be very insulting to read that every time Thais raise prices or want more for services than they got 20 years ago, it's a scam. fraud, cheat, rip-off, etc. that should be resisted by foreign tourists.

Is it possible to get more disrespectful than that?

Evil

Thailand needs tourism. The industry that brings travellers to the country’s beaches, back alleys and Buddhist temples employed almost 6 million people, raked in US$109.5 billion and accounted for one in every five baht spent in 2018, according to the World Travel and Tourism Council. But, according to a recent post on the website Pattaya Unplugged, which claims to be “the Number One Tourist info source in Pattaya”, the Land of Smiles is faking its warm welcome when it comes to visitors from the West.

The snappily titled opinion piece (“Ten reasons why Western foreign tourists are not wanted as badly by the Thai Tourism Ministry versus Indians, Chinese, Russians, Koreans, etc.”) catalogues why the Southeast Asian nation doesn’t care for Western visitors – understood here to mean those hailing from Europe, North America and Australia. Compiled by an American living in Pattaya, those reasons were gleaned from “many talks with people from many different backgrounds and cultures [...] not just the view from a barstool”.

Some points the writer makes are close to correct, if horribly elucidated. Ignoring the subtext of in-group superiority in the statement, “There are simply more of them then [sic] us”, statistics show that Thailand does receive significantly more non-Western arrivals than Western ones. According to Ministry of Tourism & Sports data, 27.3 million of the nation’s visitors in 2019 came from East Asia (including Southeast Asia), with 2.4 million from South Asia, while Europe, the Americas and Oceania accounted for 6.7 million, 1.6 million and 900,000, respectively.

Similarly, “We often don’t spend as much as people think” has some truth to it. In 2017, Chinese tourists each spent US$192.84 per day in Thailand. The next most extravagant visitors hailed from the Middle East, who dropped US$190.60 on average in a day. Taking up the rear as the tightest tourists were those from Europe, who each parted with just US$125.47 per day. However, Western tourists do tend to stay for significantly longer – Europeans for 17 days versus eight for the Chinese – and it all adds up.

Although it is not easy to quantify whether Western tourists do, indeed, “tend to complain more online, troll, write negative reviews and feedback and bicker”, it is possible that “Western foreigners are more demanding in person” with “more of a sense of entitlement than many other countries”. Certainly, beleaguered Barcelonans, who have been overwhelmed by travellers streaming in from France, America, Britain, Italy and elsewhere in Spain, can empathise. It is not the Chinese who have caused “touristphobia” in the Catalan capital, but an unsustainable influx of Westerners.

However, “They still like package tours” is not only ignorant, it is wrong. “Most of us westerners [sic] grew out of package and group tours decades ago,” explains the writer. “The Chinese, the Indians and some Russians have not. This makes them easy to bring from one high profit tourist attraction to another.” 

A recent Bangkok Post article reported that 60 per cent of Chinese visitors to Thailand are independent travellers; the image of a flag-following flock is becoming increasingly outdated (not to mention xenophobic). Similarly, Indian travellers, 67 per cent of whom choose to make their own way rather than participate in group tours, according to another Bangkok Post report, are courted precisely for their autonomy. Package deals might get the people in but they do not generate as much for the local economy as solo sightseers, something that the Tourism Authority of Thailand (TAT) has been aware of for some time. In 2016, TAT launched a campaign aimed at shifting the emphasis away from mass tourism to what it called “quality” experiences.

The 10th point on the Pattaya Unplugged list contends that most non-Western visitors are not sex tourists, which is not to say that all Westerners are, but, according to the writer, “Most Russians and Chinese have zero interest in the red light district and come with families”, a fact that apparently “angers many of the long standing visitors and fans of the red light district”.

“Some western [sic] foreigners would prefer to come and sit in a bar for two weeks s**tfaced [...] The tourists coming here for family activities and businesses are generally wanted much more then [sic] the barstool crowd.” Finally, some sense!
Ultimately, however, there is little value in applying an us-versus-them mentality to Thailand’s international arrivals, or indeed to weighing the worth of one nationality against another. In times like these, when the coronavirus outbreak is crippling Asia’s tourism industry, surely every visitor should be given a big, authentic smile.

I wish I only spent 125US per day 😞 

23 hours ago, Ivan the terrible said:

the  hypocritical double standard contrasting the huge crowds which gathered at the weekend  for BLM  and the  ongoing business lockdown has pissed me off big time for sure..its a kick in the bollocks for the law abiding 

The Funerals thing is just sickening 

and so it proved......,a positive case at the Melbourne rally ,self indulgent leftie fuckwits put Australias health in danger having done magnificently so far.Contrast to the Anzac day commemerations ,dignified and safe in that instance.

I rarely wish people ill ...but...I would wish them worse if it wasnt such a danger to the wider community

While Chicago burned

36 minutes ago, Stillearly said:

They were all down the beach on the previous weeks ...

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-52754039

 

not by a long chalk "all"

11 hours ago, Krapow said:

All shops to open on Monday here in Engerland.

Then hopefully restaurants as sit down next, pubs, gyms etc in July. Getting emails from my gym saying how it's going to work. 

The High Streets around here are well busy again, only public transport is still down, massive queues at bike shops.

Even in Northern Ireland i'm seeing posts on  Facebook from people I know moaning about having to go back to work 😆  They should be lucky they have a job to go  back too, there's going to be carnage soon. 

People have had enough as well, especially when they see mass crowds at beaches or protests, outdoor raves or whatever. Thankfully it's pretty much passed in London, as no way would a 2nd lockdown be adhered to. People haven't been able to go to family funerals, missed the birth of their children or whatever, and are quite rightly pissed off with what's going on now. It's the hypocrisy from the leftie media that gets me, 2 weeks ago you were the devil if you went out, now it's laudable apparently!

Boris's limitations are also getting more and more exposed as this goes on. 

Vulnerable and children from a poor background are getting more at risk, with what to me anyway, it's the Unions trying to make the Government look bad re opening schools, children suffering. 

I'm happy it's opening up, but incredibly frustrated and pissed off with what's currently happening in the UK for a few reasons. 

 

the  hypocritical double standard contrasting the huge crowds which gathered at the weekend  for BLM  and the  ongoing business lockdown has pissed me off big time for sure..its a kick in the bollocks for the law abiding 

The Funerals thing is just sickening 

sounds bloody grim

2 minutes ago, Golfingboy said:

No apologies please. They locked the thread about the demoting of a few members. I was trying to make the point that we must all get along, even if we speak different tongues of English and you guys drive on the wrong side of the road
 

F—k me that Ivan dude was impossible to understand, no joke 

im barely intelligible in full flow 

my family...sat down to roast rib of beef,yorkshires and the works...great company,great food thanks to the missus

12 minutes ago, Golfingboy said:

Like I said though, missed quite a few bits and had to rewind and raise the volume, just could not understand it all. Still not as bad as the time in 2010 when up in Chiang Mai, a Brit named Ivan from my condo ran into me at a loud disco at 6 am.......never in my life have I just nodded for an hour straight and pretended to agree with someone 😂

Sorry! lol

On 5/21/2020 at 11:25 PM, Golfingboy said:

This came up in my recommended, really liked it. Had never heard of it before, but I’m sure you lads across the Atlantic have

 

good movie that

2 hours ago, fforest said:

Is kind of funny how all of these riots are happening just as the lockdown eases.......I coincidence   I think not...

BREAKING RIOT UPDATES - BLAZE TV   to many riots to list but this guy on twitter keeps up with most of them.....you can search for this name...

 

Here is just one example...

 

CHAOS: Police officers dragged through the street in Chicago

 

This is madness..

 

 

 

 

horrendous

5 hours ago, Nightcrawler said:

As I said, my Consultant has said I am fairly high risk. I have recently undergone cancer treatment and I am 68 years old. My risk is not equivalent to a 40 year old.  But at the end of the day we have to judge for ourselves what risks we should take or not take. I won't travel on public transport yet or go shopping in a busy high street when non essential shops open in UK. Hope that answers your question

it does mate...your personal isolation sounds entirely appropriate...hope it lifts soon for you