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Hi everyone,

Having just written "most faces are maskless" here in Cambodia, I noticed many masked faces today, as I walked around Siem Reap. Had I misread the situation, or have more Cambodians just decided to wear masks again? If they have, it's because there has been much hype in the Cambodian press about the mass return of Chinese tourists, starting, well, yesterday!

At this point, it's probably more accurate to say "the majority" of Cambodians are maskless, instead of "most."

During the last 30 days, there have also been news items here about the "Kraken COVID-19 subvariant," with Hun Sen himself urging Cambodians to get booster shots.

Since this is a very hot country with eating out in crowded restaurants a favorite pasttime, even Cambodians who wear masks often take them off. This mask wearing business, then, is a total joke, as is just about everything else in our farcical world.

Linh

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Hi everyone,

Yesterday, I suggested that many Cambodians are wearing masks again because Chinese tourists are returning. This anxiety is also felt in Thailand.

Here's an excerpt from an oped in the Thai website, Khaoso, from 1/8/23:

"Short of physically blocking and shutting down all the major international airports in Thailand or overthrowing the government, there is nothing that will stop the influx of Chinese tourists back to Thailand starting today. Those who fear that Chinese tourist re-spread coronavirus will have no choice but to take better care of themselves, wear masks, get a booster shot, and avoid crowded tourist venues, hoping for the best for Thailand in the weeks and months ahead [...]

"Like it or not, Chinese tourists are now back, and the number will likely grow in the weeks ahead. To them I say, welcome back to Thailand, and hope you will understand the anxiety suffered by some Thais about your arrival (because they do not trust your government’s low COVID infection and death figures).

"Thus, it would be kind of you, Chinese tourists, to make sure that you are not infected before traveling to Thailand so as not to burden yourself and the host country. Also, please wear sanitary masks while traveling on public transport in Thailand. (No need for Hazmat suit unless you want people to stare at you.) Most of us are not racist and we are happy to have you back as long as you take necessary sanity and health precautions.

"For Thais who are anxious, I hope you all remain as calm possible as the majority of the Thai people have been vaccinated. This is the real new-normal life, filled with uncertainties, that we all have to deal with."

Linh

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Reading you is one of the few unadulterated pleasures left to me. I would join you and heartily eat any and all of the 'disgusting' dishes at Li La. I just won't travel as long as the insane Covid restrictions and the poison shots last. I don't want to be surprised by newly imposed vax requirements if I am overseas and some new varmint 'variant' is released/announced/fabricated. Pilot could die of cardiac arrest during flight. I swear my immune system is fighting off attacks from the $pike Protein (TM) after every one of my excursions among the Jabbed Normies. Most people where I live have mutated into Genetically Modified Organisms, their Pod Person bodies mass producing the $pikes. So to get on a plane surrounded by them? Ugh. I'm going to wait longer, and by the time I am ready to travel overseas, I will need to steal a sailing yacht from some abandoned Marina. There won't be any commercial jets flying, but maybe I'll be able to salvage a wrecked Chinese Espionage Airship.

Speaking of White Slavery, there used to be a trend in European art (porn?) of depicting plump, mostly naked, white women as slaves in 'Turkish' harems, based on the real practice of the Ottomans (and Arabs) of keeping white slaves. The concept was known as 'odalisque.' It was a fetish. I wonder if the modern Arab prefers his white slave wench to be covered with tattoos, pierced in her nose and elsewhere, fat, and with rainbow dyed hair? Please ask Max sometime?

As to American pedos, I keep wondering what happens to all the unaccompanied children that are crossing the border. An employee of the Inspector General of the US Border Patrol (I may not have the agency name right, they keep changing it) blew the whistle last year about how unaccompanied children were being released to the care of the cartels within the US. She was in a border town on the US side, and showed how one man was listed as the sponsor of the released children, under several addresses in the same town. The kids conveniently disappear within a day or two after release. (MSM killed the story, of course.)

Now, maybe the cartels are simply offering a transportation service, and the kids are taken to wherever their Mom or Dad is plucking chickens or landscaping within the USA. But I wonder, especially as there are so many signs in American culture of insatiable hunger for children, figuratively and literally. Why would Hollywood bother to portray the drug Adrenochrome in several movies, most remembered by me as Johnny Depp portraying Hunter S. Thompson? It's rumored to be a source of long life, extracted from human adrenal glands while the living subject is under torture. We know that the elites are obsessed with living forever. It's all very sick, and this is all speculation, but there is this obvious source of unprotected children, incentivized to cross a dangerous border without parents. I think a portion of them are being consumed, at least for sex, if not harvested for their gland juice, or hey, how about their organs? Or their skin?

I try not to think of Cambodia, though reading you it seems an attractive place to visit. I studied the place while in college. I know people from Vietnam, but I don't know any Khmer people. I am astounded that Hun Sen is still in power. I wonder what he's feeding upon.

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Interesting comment. Cambodia has basically been administered by the UN since 1990, after the VN army pulled out. US and EU sponsors then took over, mostly as "NGOs". It never really reached any level of independence. It then became a hub for human trafficking and all sorts of gambling and dope business. It's a failed state, but it's "OUR FAILED STATE".

A young, bright journalist wrote a book about Cambodia in 2006 if I remember, called "The dark side of NGOs" (in French, probably not translated). She was a trainee in the largest Phnom Penh French language daily paper. The day after her book was published, she "jumped out" of the 2nd floor window of the newspaper HQ. Nothing to see here.

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I couldn't find any trace of that story. I did find that there are a lot of female academics who have written about Cambodia, esp. with a focus on sex trade, trafficking, etc. Like it's a feminist intellectual fetish or something. Was the journalist who committed suicide French? A Cambodian? Some mixture? Too bad. I have decided, for myself, that I won't support any international aid organizations of any kind. It all strikes me as some kind of Imperialism. I think we should adopt a policy like the 60's Star Trek Prime Directive. (But don't let Kirk travel and "teach them how to love.") Trade, information exchange, but no interference. I give the Chinese credit for sending engineers in, and actually building stuff. They actually deliver something for the exclusive contracts to the rare earths and other materials. I don't really know what I'm talking about, I was just dismayed when I learned a few decades ago how the IMF and World Bank and basically all the UN stuff was a big fat corrupt hoax that kept the Third World the Third World.

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Check out the Barbara May Foundation as a genuine aid organization.

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Hey, I did the research again on this (quite old story), it took me about an hour because strangely Duckduckgo didn't bring anything so I had to reluctantly Ggl it.

Although I haven't read the book, I got the same chills as 15 years ago when I first read about the story.

TBH I don't wanna post the details here for quite obvious reasons, so I'm sending an email to Linh and he will do whatever he wants, whenever he wants with that info.

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NGOs have a long and troubled history. "The Crisis Caravan" describes how they worked in Africa 20 or 30 years ago. Axelle Kabou takes a swipe at them in "Si l'afrique refussait le developement?" Carleton Gajdusek "rescued" hundreds of New Guinea boys, some of whom I met in Bethesda 20 odd years ago. They are a sick phenomenon.

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Thanks, I don't know much about Africa but it looks interesting!

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That’s horrible. I will look up that story. Second floor defenestration is usually not fatal. Good Lord

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Siem Riep was indeed normal when I was there in 1970 with Bill and Bob, two other Americans working in Saigon. The two best hotels were booked up, so we stayed in a small Chinese-run place.

Bob put his passport under his pillow just to be safe. When we got back to Saigon he realized he had forgotten it. Strange country, strange language, no diplomatic relations. Catastrophe!

I used my French to contact Royal Air Cambodge. They phoned Siem Riep, which sent a courier to the hotel, picked up the passport and put it on the next flight to Phnom Penh. We had an extra day in Cambodia out of it.

If only normalcy had ever been as nice as this.

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"but it’s hate speech to name the culprits"

Well, this is how things usually happen, at least in America. Things are touted as "safe and effective", Big Pharma makes tons of money, then, 20 year later, all the rotten stuff comes out, they start to be sued, but by then most people died anyway.

It happened with talidomide, it happened with Oxycontin, and it will happen with the mRNA vaccines, but perhaps 10 or 20 years from now, when many people will be already dead and Mr. Bourla will be enjoying his retirement in a gay nudist beach in Tel Aviv.

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Tel Aviv will be a ghost town, the uptake of the $pikeshots was nearly total saturation.

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There's media out there of the prince/king sauntering around in tight jeans and a cutoff tank top, a bizarre spectacle (I think I might have seen here first). He and his siblings give the unfortunate appearance of typical royal inbreeding, they all look like monkfish.

The sisters *seem* like decent people, though. One is a chemist. One has a degree in developmental education; he had her ankles broken, supposedly over an argument. One sister announced her candidacy for prime minister, but that was ended with a pronouncement by the manboy king. Oddly, she had to abdicate her royal title on marrying a commoner, but the king did not.

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I raised a young male macaque monkey and I named him "Hui Xen", a gentle pun about the Cambodian leader. Linh will get this pun, few others will. I wanted to have a military outfit tailored for him, but never got a chance.

Before anybody asks: Hui Sen was poisoned by neighorhood kids feeding him a battery full of heavy metals. See, batteries have no smell, so why not taste it? He suffered an awful death but just lasted 24 hours.

So I've been keeping my monkeys away from the street and kids since. Less freedom but more security and fat. After all, isn't fat what we are all designed to look after?

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You didn't happen to run a guesthouse/restaurant on the riverside, did you?

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Nope.

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Thanks Linh!

Just had the best sweet (and fish sauce) pork and tofu stew in my 45 years existence.

Just walking out of my house to get beer, the landlord's younger brother convinced me to have a few beers. He pulled out that delicious sweet sauce pork and I ended up having 5 beers with him and informing him about the war in Ukraine. Surprisingly; in the wake of one of the most deadly wars of the 20th century, they have some tools to understand the stakes really quick: how corruption can lead a country into chaos, give way to foreign intervention, etc.

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Those crazy ass rich mother fuckers. damn them.

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Not sure if this already posted. Don’t see it. Trying again:

You’ve got a poet’s eye for language. Two of them! Jewish has in our lifetime been a disparagement from both within and without. From within, it was faint praise: Jew-ish. Now of course a neutral word, or one that carries either pride or rancor. I try to stick with the noun, Jew. Now, of course, that is also a Nazi manner of speech, so given my other affiliations, appearance, and name, it has sometimes given pause to my audience. If you really want to howl, I suggest yid. That is the word in Yiddish. It is what the most observant call themselves while from the goyim it is a slur on the order of you-n.-what. Go figure.

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Dear Linh, a stimulating postcard as ever. As far as the Thai Royal Family goes, Clif High reports that there is movement afoot among martial arts assassins in Thailand.....something to do with Pfizer executives.....and Ed Dowd has pointed out that any contract can be voided if it can be proved that fraud has taken place, which it quite definitely has in the non-reporting of the alarming results of its own trials before Pfizer released its vaccines on the world. So in the fullness of time any country that signed one of those contracts should be able to withdraw from it and Thailand may be the first of many. Thanks for your column again.

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Hi Isha,

The Thai government has sent assassins into Cambodia to murder dissidents, but I seriously doubt they can get anywhere near Bourla or any top Pfizer exec. As for that squirming weasel caught on tape, he's not a worthwhile target.

Imagine waking up one morning to this headline, "Bourla, Savior of Humanity with his Miracle Vaccine, Has Just Been Defenestrated!"

Linh

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You've got to have a dream!

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Hi Linh thanks for the article. Always look forward to your new writings. I took my father to Angkor Wat around 7 years ago. Siem Reap is a good place to be. I'm certain that slave masks are more prominent in Asia whether or not we have Chinese tourists around. Still see people on back beach in VT in medical looking masks. On a positive note, my wife visited a gov't office in Saigon this week to apply for a new passport and there were maskless people in the office.

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With you! I'd read that book if I had the French title or the author's name.

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