We're on the train to Bangkok
Aboard the Thailand Express
We'll hit the stops along the way
We only stop for the best
We are not boarding that train anytime soon. Of that, I am pretty sure. You can thank the orange monster for his colossal incompetence for that. And even though Soi 6 is reopening in Pattaya, my lonely ass will not be there for a while.
It’s now been over 4 months since I have traveled anywhere. That’s probably the longest I have been without making a trip, domestically or internationally in over 25 years. As a bonafide travel addict and adventure seeker – it sucks the big one.
Of course, even if there were an airplane to take me somewhere, the list of available destinations is rather limited.
ALL THE PLACES YOU CAN GO 1. Albania | 15. Lebanon 2. Antigua and Barbuda | 16. Maldives 3. Aruba | 17. Mexico 4. The Bahamas | 18. North Macedonia 5. Barbados | 19. St. Lucia 6. Belize | 20. St. Maarten 7. Bermuda | 21. St. Vincent & 8. Croatia | 22. Serbia 9. Dominican Republic | 23. Tanzania 10. Ecuador* | 24. Turkey 11. French Polynesia | 25. Turks & 12. Ireland* | 26. Ukraine 13. Jamaica | 27. UAE* 14. Kosovo | 28. UK* 29. South Korea**14 day quarantine required, not included in map. Korea is apparently accepting Americans with a quarantine, but that's not in the source article. I have (now) included it here.
There are some good places to go on that list – but trust me, even though the government is allowing the diseased Americans in, the residents don’t really want you there.
Janet Cavanagh, whose electric bike tour company offers a guided glimpse of western Ireland’s windswept landscape, saw her business come to a swift halt — along with nearly everything else — as the coronavirus pandemic forced the country into lockdown.
She recently reopened her doors, eager to restart business and make up for lost time as restrictions eased.
But she and a number of other business owners say that Ireland faces a new and unexpected threat: Tourists, particularly American ones, who flout Ireland’s quarantine rule.
With the pandemic still raging unabated in much of the United States, unlike in Europe, Americans are among those most likely to be infected. They aren’t the only tourists ignoring the requirement that people arriving in Ireland isolate themselves for 14 days, but most of the public complaints involve Americans.
Just a reminder, there were 77,000 new cases in the United States today. But sure, go on your vacation you twit.
You can find similar sentiments all over the internet. Where I live, they have been much stricter about enforcing a two week quarantine – although people have still tried to ignore it. When the state does catch someone, they make a point of publicizing their ejection and $5000 dollar fine they have to pay.
In short, these days, an American passport – once a ticket to VISA free travel just about anywhere, is useless. Worse than useless – it’s poison.
The point of a passport is that a sovereign power vouches for its bearer, but America can’t vouch for the health of its citizens at all. America’s public health regime is far less trustworthy than Liberia’s (which is actually quite good). Its sovereign is mad.
At the same time, you can’t trust Americans. Americans have poor hygiene (low masking rate) and at least 40% of the population can’t be trusted to even believe that COVID-19 exists, let alone to take it seriously. They’re likely to refuse testing, not report symptoms, break quarantine, and generally NOT follow rules. Americans have a toxic combination of ignorance and arrogance that makes them unwelcome travelers.
They have a lot of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with them. Some of them, I assume, are good people, but it doesn’t matter. It’s a plague passport. Return to sender.
The worst part of this? It was all, completely avoidable. Had the United States not squandered the months of January and February, solely because our dipshit President did not want to spook the stock market, we would be like Europe and New Zealand and slowly be returning to normal. Having idiot southern governors who rushed to reopen, long before it was prudent, out of an insane desire to both avoid unemployment payments and cater to the stupid people in their midst created not a second wave – but an explosion of the first one.
The nation with the world’s highest Coronavirus death toll — where the first wave hasn’t even plateaued or slowed yet — reopening already. Seeing new spikes across half its states. What the?
America is about to show the world what a worst-case scenario for Coronavirus looks like.
The Trump administration has bungled Coronavirus unbelievably badly. Drinking bleach, it turns out, isn’t a cure. But it’s about to get so, so much worse.
In America, Coronavirus hasn’t slowed one bit. See that line above? In Europe, it’s flattened out. But in America, the worst case scenario is now about to come true. Since states are reopening, since the government has no plan, and as a nation, America seems to simply have… given up on it…Coronavirus is going to do three things. One, explode, just like it is in states like Arizona, Texas, and Florida, to name just a few. Two, go on rising for far, far longer than elsewhere, or than it needed to. And three, it will take much, much longer to flatten out, too.
We’re talking years, now, by the way. Coronavirus is now all but guaranteed to be a catastrophe that wracks America in a uniquely terrible and singularly disastrous way: striking it longer, harder, and worse than almost anywhere else in the world.
The American Idiot has succeeded in erasing any competitive advantage the United States of America possessed. And even now – when its apparent to the rest of the world and to the majority of Americans also that the country screwed up its corona virus response terribly, idiots like Brian Kemp are sticking to some kind of a principle. Public safety it would seem, no longer has a place in the writing of state or national law. It’s sheet lunacy.
And then there is this:
Rather than step up and do the right thing from a public health standpoint, Trump – desperate to put the entire pandemic behind him -still clings to the illusion that things are just business as usual now. Even worse are the completely evil people going along with it.
I’m with Abramson here. I’m appalled at the depths of depravity supposedly sane people have sunk to.
I need a vacation. Except where could I go to?
You are an idiot.
I want you to improve.
Read instapundit for a month.
You live and surround yourself in a world utterly devoid of reality. It may be time to welcome it back.
Your hate for Trump, Hate Bush, Hate conservatives, hate rethuglicans is not just old it’s a reflection of a man who does nothing but hate.
I have hate for terrorists of all stripes but hate isn’t me as it appears to be the be all end all as it with you.
You should really work on getting your passionate hate under control.
If you still wonder why there is a certain discord in America it’s because that is the way it was designed at the outset. The founders sat down and agreed to things that they could share as a commonwealth of states. You’re the worst thing they could have imagined. You hate and hate and hate and you won’t compromise and so you hate and hate some more.
It’s getting old.
Grow up. The rest of us despised Biden, Clinton, the lightworker etc but we never gave in to shear unadulterated hatred as you have.
just sayin. was cruising the years old blogs most of which have gone dark over the last few years. You’ve been hating since I read you on Lex’ blogroll.
Ah, the old “H” word – which is just a convenient dodge for actual discussing the merits of a particular issue at hand. Furthermore, you ignore the fact that events have proven me to be correct on most of the issues I was arguing with the teabagger slime over at the supposedly “welcoming front porch” of Lex’s group of resident bullies.
You also are dodging the issue that some issues deserve righteous anger because they are clear cut. If you support Trump- you deserve to be hated and you need to pay a price for freely embracing evil. To knowingly embrace that evil is to abandon one’s duties as a citizen. “One can argue about whether to call him a fascist or an authoritarian populist or a grotesque joke made in a nightmare shared between Philip K. Dick and Tom Wolfe, but under any label Trump is a declared enemy of the liberal constitutional order of the United States—the order that has made it, in fact, the great and plural country that it already is. He announces his enmity to America by word and action every day. He makes his enmity to American values clear when he suggests that the Presidency holds absolute power, through which he will be able to end opposition.
Hitler wasn’t Hitler—until he was. At each step of the way, the shock was tempered by acceptance. It depended on conservatives pretending he wasn’t so bad, compared with the Communists, while at the same time the militant left decided that their real enemies were the moderate leftists, who were really indistinguishable from the Nazis. The radical progressives decided that there was no difference between the democratic left and the totalitarian right and that an explosion of institutions was exactly the most thrilling thing imaginable.
The American Republic stands threatened by the first overtly anti-democratic leader in its modern history—an authoritarian with no grasp of history, no impulse control, and no apparent barriers on his will to power. The right thing to do, for everyone who believes in a liberal democracy, is to gather around and work to defeat him on Election Day. Instead, we seem to be either engaged in parochial feuding or caught by habits of tribal hatred so ingrained that they have become impossible to escape even at moments of maximum danger. ”
And if he is defeated, then there will have to be a reckoning with the Afrikaners who betrayed their principles and any shred of decency by supporting him. There can be no redemption for anyone who supported Trump because it’s a free choice to embrace evil. That’s not hate – its a strongly held moral position of righteous anger.
It’s also not a strong point to cite Glenn Reynolds for anything – it shows how much an intellectual cripple the person citing it is. Many far more reputable authors have pointed out numerous times just how pathetic, dishonest, and thin-skinned Glenn Reynolds (aka Instapundit) is. Search my post about the Liars Club to see the proper fisking I gave him.