Links to my articles on bangkokpost.com (will open in new tab)

Do you owe income tax in Thailand?
If you stay more than 180 days in any calendar year in Thailand, you are considered a Thai tax resident, and since the beginning of 2024, any money you remit, or bring into the country, is assessable for income tax.

Why Thai-Cambodian border conflict still festers
Duelling civilisations going back 1,000 years and a poorly drawn colonial map are to blame, says scholar

Thailand weighs casino legalisation
Lessons from Singapore, Las Vegas and beyond as uncertainty surrounds the stalled Entertainment Complex Bill

Aid cuts could affect US itself
“Armageddon” is the word veteran human rights campaigner Phil Robertson uses to describe the sudden shutdown of most of the US’ aid programmes around the world.

Vaping a way to cut smoking death toll?
Over the past 20 years, fewer than 100 people worldwide have died from vaping, while more than 100 million people have died from smoking regular cigarettes. In Thailand, the tobacco death toll is 71,000 people each year, and from vaping – zero. So why are cigarettes available in every convenience store, while e-cigarettes are banned?

‘Humans to blame’ for devastating floods in Northern Thailand
Campaigner Pianporn ‘Pai’ Deetes identifies three specific causes of the problem: deforestation, dams, and encroachment

Explainer: Thailand’s new visas
Details of the new 5-year ‘Destination Thailand’ visa, the 60-day entry stamp, and more

Reforestation seen as only viable smog solution
Animal agriculture, not fossil fuels, is becoming the biggest driver of climate change worldwide

New cannabis bill ‘restricts freedoms’
Activist rejects claim of many complaints

Ban wildlife trade to prevent next pandemic: campaigner
Freeland founder Steve Galster says trafficking in wildlife, both protected and legal, spreads zoonotic diseases

Respect nature, pleads wildlife trafficking cop
A deeper dive into Thailand’s illegal trafficking of wild animals, a lucrative industry worth US$20 billion

Bitcoin booms and crypto conundrums
Bitkub CEO ‘Topp’ Jirayut Srupsrisopa outlines the pitfalls and potential of blockchain-based assets

‘Superpimp’-turned-whistleblower won’t give up fight
Chuvit Kamolvisit, who says Thailand is corrupt to the core, advocates legalising gambling and sin taxes to top up junior police salaries

Fighting Thailand’s ‘scamdemic’
Industrial-scale online crime in ‘lawless’ border areas in neighbouring countries is growing in volume and sophistication

Feeding the beast: Chiang Mai smoke seen as world’s climate change problem
From Chiang Mai air pollution to global climate change, animal agriculture is the elephant in the room — and biochar one way to tame it.

Slaughtering the planet — on a farm
Many scientists say animal agriculture is a bigger driver of climate change than fossil fuels, contrary to popular belief (with video embeds)

How has Thailand kept the lid on Covid?
A panel of experts discusses how Thailand, the first country to record an infection outside China, managed to bring Covid-19 under control (with video embed)

Economist calls for ‘blanket rescue’
Bangkok Bank’s chief economist outlines his suggested response to the coronavirus pandemic (with video embed)

Dictating the internet
A new report unveils how governments manipulate tech laws to assault free speech

Reporter’s Notebook: Hong Kong protests – behind the barricade
My reflections after two months in Hong Kong (with video embed)

QuickWrap Newscast
A short summary of some of the week’s top stories (with video embed)

Exclusive interview with ILO director-general Guy Ryder
International Labour Organization chief waxes knowledgeable on everything from fishing slavery to AI (with video embed)

Exclusive interview with Thanathorn Juangroongruangkit
I spoke to the Thai billionaire opposition leader before the 2019 election (with video embeds)

Exclusive interview with Abhisit Vejjajiva
I spoke to the former Democrat leader and Thai prime minister a week before the 2019 election (with video embed)

Political explainer: Thailand’s Senate
I describe the complicated, carefully engineered appointment mechanisms for the Thai Senate (with video embed)

China’s heavenly nature
My ‘B’ magazine cover story about Mount Qingcheng, a verdant wonderland known as the historical birthplace of Taoism (with video embed)
See print story

Prachuap Khiri Khan by big bike
I joined a motorcycle tour of one of Thailand’s most beautiful provinces
See print story

Jungle Aid
A Hua Hin-based NGO provides a lifeline to poor Karen villagers

Rabies epidemic is ‘fake news’
Animal activists decry hysteria

Festive skydining
Paid advertorial for a Bangkok restaurant (under pseudonym)

Europe tightens curbs with economic toll worsening: Virus update
An example of how I use embeds to enrich wire stories

The post Bangkok Post stories appeared first on Dave Kendall.

What do you get when you combine a billion people under coronavirus lockdown with an unprecedented range of cheap or free software tools to make and record music, and shoot and edit video?

You get a welcome relief from the dismal drumbeat of deaths and infections with an epidemic of hilarious and quite brilliant coronavirus-themed song parodies. Here are five to help you quench your querulous quarantine quest for a belly-laugh.

No. 5: Nick Savino’s version of MC Hammer’s “U Can’t Touch This” was made entirely with health products he stocked up on.

No. 4: Randy Rainbow has reworked Julie Andrews’ “A Spoonful of Sugar” in honour of Donald Trump.

No. 3: Whodathunk a Lady Gaga song was the perfect way to send an antiviral message?

No. 2: With a disco light ordered from Amazon, you’ll stay fit too.

No. 1: It was a feverishly hard decision, but this mutation of a Queen classic was always destined to, umm, go viral.

The post Five corona-themed song parodies to cure your quarantine blues appeared first on Dave Kendall.

Combination image from https://th.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E0%B9%84%E0%B8%A7%E0%B8%A3%E0%B8%B1%E0%B8%AA%E0%B9%82%E0%B8%84%E0%B9%82%E0%B8%A3%E0%B8%99%E0%B8%B2 and https://pixabay.com/photos/california-adventure-roller-coaster-886581/

Speaking to Dr Sanjay Gupta on April 14, CNN anchor Chris Cuomo, who is suffering from a relatively mild case of Covid-19, said “the virus gets in your brain”. He was talking about the physiological impact of the novel coronavirus on the emotions — but whether or not we’ve contracted it, the virus is already “in our brains”. 

A paper published in the The Lancet Psychiatry on April 15 describes a severe impact on mental health, with experts predicting rises in anxiety, depression, suicide, alcoholism and substance abuse.

The crisis has had a profound effect on our collective psyche and set us on a rollercoaster of feelings and thoughts. Here are the some of the emotional twists, turns and freefalls I’ve observed and experienced.

Fear of uncertainty

US President Trump’s current attack on the World Health Organisation and China’s lack of transparency is at least partially motivated by a desire to deflect blame from his own early complacency and dissembling. But it emphasises how little any of us knew, and still know, about the course the virus would take. In a world overwhelmed with data, it is shocking how little we have regarding SARS-CoV-2. We still don’t know how far and how fast it spreading, and how lethal it really is, because there has been no blanket testing. On one hand, Sophon Iamsirithavorn, chief of Thailand’s Communicable Disease Division, in March estimated that anywhere between 400,000 and 37.4 million Thais would be infected with the virus – in the worst case scenario, more than half the population. Using the World Health Organization’s projected fatality rate of 3.4%, 1.27 million Thais could die. On the other hand, Stanford professor John P.A. Ioannidis believed the actual death rate is likely to be closer to 0.3%. He cited a study of the Diamond Princess cruise ship — one of the only places where 100% of people were tested, but with a large proportion of elderly guests — and applied the statistics to the age structure of the general US population. That produced an estimated death rate of only 0.125%.

From uncertainty comes confusion. As a journalist, is my responsibility to tell the truth or perform a public service? When I report the daily number of infections and deaths for Bangkok Post and see a declining trend, I don’t know whether to highlight this (truth) or emphasise that infections are still rising and limited testing means we have no idea how many of them there really are (responsibility). As a journalist, I seek to present the facts, the objective truth, but the way these facts are presented, and the context provided, completely changes their impact on the reptilian brain that arguably drives human behaviour far more than the cerebral cortex.

Before he was forced to change course, partly due to pressure from other European leaders, Boris Johnson seemed to favour a managed pursuit of herd immunity, isolating those at risk of serious illness and death — the elderly and those with underlying health conditions – while letting the virus spread among those less at risk, such as children. Can we be sure that wasn’t the better option? We may not know for years, and it will depend on whether the virus comes back in waves before we’ve developed a vaccine.  

Other fears

We humans go to great lengths to pretend the one inevitable thing in our lives, our death, is not going to happen. A lot of our culture – not to mention our religions – is based on the idea that we’re all sailing forward to ever-greater happiness and achievement. When death strikes – the actual death of a loved one, or the possibility or certainty of our own imminent death — it is usually a very individual, isolated experience, because others are not willing or able to confront it. With Covid-19, the fear of death has become more real and more shared. Many of my American Facebook friends have reported deaths of parents, colleagues, friends – and I dread news of someone I know personally.

There is the also fear of the future. Many jobs have been lost, particularly in service industries, and some of them will not come back. If the novel coronavirus becomes endemic, what will become of tourism, and the roughly 20% of Thailand’s gross domestic product that depends on it?

My own profession, journalism, was already in sharp decline and is facing further disruption. Journalism depends on freedom of expression, and the limitations enacted by governments in Asia do not bode well for the future – authoritarians never met a crisis they didn’t like, or at least didn’t seek to turn to their advantage. Just as 9/11 was used as a justification for unprecedented mass surveillance, so the coronavirus emergency is introducing mass geo-tracking as “the new normal” – led, of course, by China, which is adding locational data to its suite of social credit monitoring tools. Google – banned from China, but a rival in data collection and aggregation –  is playing ball; how long will its tracking data remain “anonymous”?

Loneliness and claustrophobia

Lockdowns and social distancing have radically changed the ways humans interact. On one hand, couples have spent far more time with one another – and hardly anyone else – than ever before. One Japanese short-term apartment rental company is offering temporary accommodation to stave off “coronavirus divorce.”

Millions of others are alone. Loneliness is a powerful emotion with deep psychological roots; our need for social interaction is embedded in our DNA, partly because our primitive ancestors did not survive if they were ejected from their social group.

Anger

The natural human response to fear is anger. If we can blame something or someone, it makes us feel less helpless – and there is no shortage of targets for our palliative rage.

The Chinese government for suppressing early information about the virus – and for many millions prone to simplistic racial prejudice, the entire Chinese nation. Donald Trump for his complacency and lack of preparation. Government officials round the world for slow responses. Politicians and hoarders for using the crisis to pursue their own self-interest. Wildlife traders for enabling the first animal-human transmission that probably started the pandemic. Real estate developers and government economists for encouraging encroachment on natural habitats and co-mingling of domestic and wild species. Globalists for making the world so inter-connected. There’s plenty of people to blame and vent our frustrations upon.

Bravado

Another natural reaction to fear is bravado. You could see it in the pre-curfew pick-up truck drinkers before the booze ban and the groups of Westerners walking past a shuttered Nana Plaza, laughing loudly. I have noticed it in myself in moments of madness: questioning whether I would be better off getting the virus and “getting it over with”; – I am not young but relatively healthy, and I will have no contact with the elderly for the foreseeable future. I will be helping build herd immunity. The world is overreacting. Look on the bright side: the number of regular flu victims has dropped through better hygiene habits and social distancing.

Maybe more lives have been saved by the pandemic than lost: Forbes estimated the lockdown saved 77,000 lives in China by reducing pollution. There are reasons to be cheerful if you’re desperate enough.

Guilt

Guilt is an emotion that some are more prone to than others. I am vaguely aware of the guilt feeling of the survivor (thus far); many have contracted the disease, many have died. I am also aware of how fortunate I am compared with others. I still have a job, for now. I have access to water, food and medical treatment. I am at home in a comfortable environment. 

As usual in any crisis, the poor suffer the most. Many who have lost their jobs can’t pay their rent, their mortgages and other bills. In parts of South Asia and Africa in particular, a lockdown means limited or no access to basic necessities, including food and water. In many countries, the death toll from virus control measures could be worse than from the virus itself.

Empathy

I have never lived through a war, but I imagine the sense of shared suffering and a common enemy must be similar to this. The sense of “we’re all this together”, as a common email signature goes, is quite uplifting. The competitive nature of capitalist society with its barrage of advertising images designed to maintain us in a consumer frenzy, and the cultural pressure to put on the happy face and pretend we’re doing well – the constant the “I’m so cool, I’m doing great’ Facebook posts – has seemed to wane. It’s become acceptable to say that we’re sad and we’re frightened. There is a palpable sense of unity among humans that is quite refreshing.

Hope

We all love happy endings – no sniggering, please – and since we don’t know if we’re going to get one in real life, I’m putting one in this article. While the pandemic has isolated us from one another physically, it has brought us together emotionally – and who knows, maybe even spiritually. It is also giving us a chance to question some of the choices we’ve made as a species, particularly regarding our attitude to our environment and other living creatures. Many believe that our pursuit of greater wealth, greater weaponry and greater dominion over the earth has put us on a path of self-destruction, with climate change a compelling example. In The Matrix, Agent Smith says humans are a disease, a cancer of the planet…a virus. As we’ve learned, our scientific know-how is breath-taking on one hand, and deplorably limited on the other. Can we use it to re-engineer our DNA?

The post The emotional rollercoaster of Covid-19 appeared first on Dave Kendall.

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On Christmas Day, 2019, Typhoon Phanfone pummelled the Philippines and left a trail of destruction across the resort island of Boracay. I arrived the following day to witness a scene of devastation.

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The post Gallery: Typhoon batters Boracay appeared first on Dave Kendall.

A collapsed building is seen on the Boracay Mount Luho Road in the wake of Typhoon Phanfone, on Boracay, Aklan, Philippines, on Dec 26, 2019. (Photo: Dave Kendall)

In psychology, “learned helplessness” is the result of repeated exposure to an aversive event, rendering a person unable to control their environment even when the tools are available.

The learned helplessness of technology, however, has taken away the tools.

On December 26, 2019, the day after what Filipinos call the Christmas Typhoon, the stretch of road from Boracay’s Bulabog beach up to Mount Luho looks like it’s been carpet-bombed. Many of the houses are piles of rubble or broken timber. Utility poles stand at crazy angles, cables dangling across the street. Fallen trees are everywhere – on the beach, across the road, on top of the remains of dwellings. Across the island, few buildings remain unharmed. Isla Kitesurfing no longer has a roof or a front.

Workers repair a building belonging to Isla Kitesurfing next to Bulabog Beach in the wake of Typhoon Phanfone, on Boracay, Aklan, Philippines, on Dec 26, 2019. (Photo: Dave Kendall)

A Filipino US army veteran is hunting in vain for a working ATM. He tells me he was disabled by an IED in Afghanistan, but that despite all he’s been through, this storm “was real scary.” Leya, a freelance massage therapist, says her children would have been killed if the tree had fallen on her rented house rather than the outhouse. The roof is gone anyway, and she and her kids are sleeping under the stars.

She’s not just traumatized, she’s scared. The door is broken, and if someone breaks in, she can’t switch on the light – the electrical grid is down. There’s no way to call the police – there’s no phone service. She can’t send a message to her mother because there’s no way to get online. She’s worried people will turn to crime: with all the ATMs offline, the tourists can’t get the cash the locals depend on. She has no customers herself, and she has little money for food.

My problems pale in comparison, but still I begin to feel helpless. I don’t know if my hotel still exists, and I can’t message or call them – I don’t even have the address because everything is online. It’s too dark to see how much cash I have left. I’m out of my comfort zone and worst-case-scenarios flicker through my mind. Fear of crime. Fear of starvation. I don’t know how to hunt, I don’t know how to grow food, I don’t know how to build shelter. I have no weapon and no combat training. I have no friends, no allies, no support network. I have become utterly dependent on technology, and nature has just pulled the plug.

A collapsed building is seen on the Boracay Mount Luho Road in the wake of Typhoon Phanfone, on Boracay, Aklan, Philippines, on Dec 26, 2019. (Photo: Dave Kendall)

“Critical information information infrastructure breakdown” is the eighth biggest risk in terms of impact according to the World Economic Forum’s 2019 ‘Global risks report’, ahead of man-made environmental disasters — and, poignantly enough amidst the coronavirus pandemic, the spread of infectious diseases. The relentless march towards greater technological sophistication and systems globalization is driven by economic and psychological forces, the desire for greater comfort, convenience, wealth, bragging rights, national security. But the Internet of Things means we are losing manual control over everything. Only electrical engineers and computer programmers can fix cars and planes. The Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas in January showcased the latest gadgets; you use your voice to turn a shower on, set the temperature you want and play the music of your choice from the showerhead speaker.  

We are reliant on GPS technology and mapping software to tell us where we are, where we’re going and why we’re going there.  We don’t carry maps — it’s not even easy to find one any more – and we’ve forgotten how to read one, if we ever knew. We’ve lost the ability to do basic arithmetic because we can always ask Alexa. When our cars become autonomous we’ll forget how to drive.

With all the answers instantly available at the touch of a screen, we lose the ability to research, to experiment, to ask questions, to figure things out for ourselves – we just watch the ‘how-to’ video on YouTube.  Is artificial intelligence regressing our brains to the level of our hominid ancestors?

A broken power post is seen on the Boracay Mount Luho Road in the wake of Typhoon Phanfone, on Boracay, Aklan, Philippines, on Dec 26, 2019. (Photo: Dave Kendall)

As we become a cashless society, we are completely dependent on fintech. For now, we still carry a passport and a bank card, but their days are surely numbered. You can’t get on — or off — a Chinese train without passing a facial recognition scanner; the tech already exists to make all physical forms of identification obsolete. The connected machine can verify our fingerprints and scans our iris and face. It knows who we are, where we’ve been, how much money we have, everything we’ve bought, our behavioural patterns and our social credit rating.

And when the system goes down, we are nobody. No identity, no money, no assets. We live in the cloud. And the cloud can be blown away by a single glitch. The technological daisy chain has the fragility of a daisy.

Smart tech is making us dumb. In “The Terminal Self: Everyday Life in Hypermodern Times,” Simon Gottschalk writes: “The fewer skills we develop to accomplish everyday functions, the more we rely on the terminal. And the more we use the terminal, the less skilled we become. It’s a vicious cycle.”

In the aftermath of the vicious typhoon that buffeted Boracay, all the conspiracy theory-driven survivalists who hoard provisions and weapons and prepare for life off the grid suddenly seem a lot less crazy. I’ve learned how dependence on technology has made me helpless.

View photo gallery

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Bangkok Bank chief economist Burin Adulwattana speaks at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Thailand on March 18, 2020.  (Photo by Jonathan Head)

Handouts of “helicopter money”, blanket debt repayment postponements and massive fiscal stimulus programmes are needed to keep Thailand and the rest of the world afloat during the coronavirus pandemic, according to Bangkok Bank’s chief economist.

Speaking via a live stream at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Thailand in Bangkok on Wednesday, Burin Adulwattana painted a grim picture, predicting global growth could fall to 2.4% this year, and possibly as low as 1.5%, while Thai growth could slide beneath 1%.

Drastic interest rate cuts have failed to stop the free fall in markets worldwide and inject precious liquidity, he said. The service industry — a huge part of the Thai and global economy — is grinding to a halt as countries go into lockdown.

The level of uncertainty is unprecedented in the modern era, surpassing that of the 1997 Asian financial crisis and the 2008 global crash. The uncertainty is exacerbated by the hazy picture delivered by patchy health statistics: because testing has been so limited worldwide, we don’t know how quickly the novel coronavirus is spreading, let alone its future transmission rates.

For instance, Sophon Iamsirithavorn, chief of the Communicable Disease Division, this week estimated that anywhere between 400,000 and 37.4 million Thais would be infected with SARS-CoV-2, the novel coronavirus that causes the Covid-19 disease, by the end of 2021, with a death rate “of less than 2%”. But how much less? The actual figure, according to Stanford professor John PA Ioannidis, is likely to be closer to 0.3% or lower. The study looked at the only place where 100% of people were tested — the Diamond Princess, with a large proportion of elderly guests — and applied it to the age structure of the general US population. The resulting estimate for the death rate was only 0.125%.

If scientific projections of the deadliness of this disease vary so widely, how can we chart an economic course? We do know that the cost to the Thai, Asian and global economies has already been severe. Thailand, Mr Burin said, is a “3D” economy — beset by Disease, Drought and Delay in the budget. Some 20% of the kingdom’s GDP comes from tourism but arrivals have fallen by three-quarters, while those from China have dropped 85%. Private sector confidence is down, and because many factories have excess capacity as a result of the US-China trade war, he said, private investment will slow.

Unlike the Asian financial crisis of 1997 and the global crash of 2008, this crisis did not emanate from the banking sector — but it could spread there, Mr Burin said.

“There’s a real possibility that the problems could move from tourism, travel and hospitality into the banking sector. It’s the opposite of 2008. The government has to put out the fire.”

Even if the virus is brought under control in the next few months, the economist said, the hit to the economy from lost services transactions is permanent: if you can’t get a haircut for four months, you don’t run out and get four haircuts when you can, and you don’t order multiple meals from a restaurant to make up for the ones you missed.

So what can the Thai government do? Mr Burin said he expected the Bank of Thailand (BoT) to cut its benchmark interest rate from the current record low of 1% to just 0.5% at its next meeting, although he thinks policy rates here will not drop to zero or even negative territory, as in Europe. But he pointed out that all the trillions of dollars in quantitative easing to boost liquidity around the world in recent weeks have failed to calm the markets.

“You can’t cut interest rates to kill the coronavirus epidemic. You can’t make people suddenly feel healthy enough to go out and spend and start drinking. That’s not going to happen.”

Mr Burin foresees a global scenario of empty shops, bankrupt shopping malls, closed-down hotels and insolvent airlines. Meanwhile a lockdown scenario, he said, could be catastrophic for ordinary Thais.

“What are we going to do if people are unable to leave their houses and go to work? What if you have mortgages? What if you are a shop owner and have to pay rent? What happens if you need income to pay for your credit card?

“No amount of interest rate cuts, no amount of liquidity is going to be able to solve this problem.”

The only answer, he said, is fiscal, not monetary — governments must open their wallets to help their citizens.

“When life comes to a standstill, the government has to play its part [and say] ‘Don’t worry about your debt payment now, all will be taken care of.'”

The Bangkok Bank expert said recently-issued BoT guidelines for major banks to offer piecemeal debt restructuring were too vague and would take too long to implement on a client-by-client basis. “You have to do a blanket rescue like they are doing in Italy or France. Better you save everyone for three months.”

Mr Burin said that unlike heavily indebted countries like Japan, Thailand’s relatively low debt-to-GDP ratio leaves room for fiscal stimulus. But despite the urgency, he sounded a note of caution, warning that debt relief and what he termed “helicopter money” giveaways can only be a short-term solution.

“How long can they keep on printing money and save the whole country? This is going to be a big problem over the next few months.”

The problem then, he added, would be weaning the population off government handouts.

Despite the bleak picture, Mr Burin believes the pandemic will end sooner rather than later.

He hopes that rising temperatures will mean the crisis will largely have passed by July. “As Churchill said, no point being a pessimist.”

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Tea Leaves: Typhoon highlights technology’s stranglehold
How what I call “machine-learned helplessness” lowers our survival skills

The post Nikkei Asian Review stories appeared first on Dave Kendall.

In 1998, he relocated to Los Angeles to develop an Internet strategy for Raygun Publishing, Inc., the Santa Monica-based publisher of Raygun and Bikini magazines.

 In January 2000, Kendall joined Soundbreak.com as Director of Content, and was soon promoted to Executive Director of Content Development, supervising a 20-person team of writers, producers, engineers and video editors.

His duties at Soundbreak included formulating and developing “Sweetspot” video interviews and an interactive music news show, conceiving a site redesign architecture, developing competitive analyses and viral marketing plans, and forming strategic alliances with Real Networks, Microsoft, Sonic Foundry/Juno, Earthlink and others.

Since 2017, Kendall has worked at the online division of the Bangkok Post, where he has created video and audio programming, and transformed text articles into interactive multimedia content.

Click on the “Web” dropdown menu for more.

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Links to stories in this week’s show:

• Insurgents attack security checkpoint in Yala, 15 killed
• Prosecutors arraign Bangkok bombings suspects in court
• Bank of Thailand cuts interest rate to record low
• More victims join fight against extortion by copyright agents
• Thai English skills dip for third year

The post QuickWrap podcast appeared first on Dave Kendall.

Links to the stories in this week’s programme:

• Supreme Court upholds death sentences of 2014 Koh Tao murders
• Prayut, cabinet members receive King’s message
• Teacher transferred over school lunch reinstated 
• Arrest warrants for two gold heist suspects
• Drug courier crashes pickup in heavy rain

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