PeterRS

"Jo Ferrari" has turned himself him. He claims the reason for the killing was his attempt to "destroy the drug trade" - not extortion! Well, I wonder how many actually believe that! Could he believe that since Thaksin got away with around 2,500 extra-judicial killings in his war on drugs, he was made in same mould? That would really be a joke! It was extortion pure and simple and it went wrong! Will he get prison? Now that really is the question! https://www.bangkokpost.com/learning/advanced/2172159/jo-ferrari-turns-himself-in

An interesting insight into Biden's policy from a biography of the diplomat Richard Holbrooke whom Biden knew well. In the book he is quoted as saying that America has no obligation to the many Afghans who were then working alongside the Americans and placed their trust in the US to get them out once the war ended. "Fuck that, we don't have to worry about that. We did it in Vietnam, Nixon and Kissinger got away with it." So much for the empathetic President. Anyone who would even consider uttering such dreadful words was of course going to get out as fast as possible. "Fuck" the tens of thousands of Afghan helpers! To me that a disgrace! https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/aug/27/joe-biden-afghanistan-kabul-airport-bombs

I was amazed - there were lots. If you look at the last photo of the Udon Festival, the boys carrying the beauty queen all look great. At that time Udon had a gay sauna quite close to the river. Not busy when I was there, but the other patrons seemed to enjoy the company of a farang! Not sure if it still exists.

Now that is a very positive outlook. Bravo! Remember also that in addition to cities and sights, Thailand has some amazing Festivals. We all know about Songkran and Loy Krathong, but I wonder how many have ever ventured to the Candle Festival in Ubon Ratchathani or perhaps the most famous of the Ghost Festivals in Dansai in Loei Province. Loei itself is a fascinating Province to explore as it hardly seems like Thailand: lush, green, hilly, it even has a vineyard. These two Festivals coincide with the start of Buddhist Lent in the summer and the dates are often not confirmed until about 6 months in advance. Also Dansai is a small village of only around 10,000 people. There is only one good hotel that is within walking distance, the Phunacome up in the hill behind the town. It has an excellent shuttle service if you don't want to climb the hill. But there are nearby hotels that provide transport to and from the Festival. The Candle Festival is not a Parade of people holding candles! Every temple n the city has artisans spending a month beforehand decorating trucks and lorries with wax carvings, mostly of Buddhist scenes. The Parade is so long and encompasses not just the 40 or so trucks but also various other traditional activities. Lots of cute guys there! The Ghost Festival is spread over 3 days but I found the day of the Parade the most fascinating. I throughly recommend them as fantastic days. Udon Candle Festival Loei Ghost Festival

A lot of interesting comments from a variety of former generals and, importantly in my view, US and British vets, arising from the terrorist bombing at Kabul airport yesterday. Almost all is criticism of the Biden administration for not having started the evacuation, particularly of the Afghan assistants, interpreters etc. and there families much sooner. Others have asked why the US, knowing well in advance of the size of the exercise in getting many tens of thousands of Afghan helpers and their families out, did not also hold on to the heavily fortified Bagram Air base so that there were two exits from the country. Bagram could also handle the large aircraft which use Kabul and it's far more defensible! One, though, questioned whether the issues of war can be left to a President as Commander in Chief. Of course each President has a large body of military and other experts surrounding him. But he does not have to obey them - as far as I know. This pundit pointed out that Bush was determined to go into Iraq to finish what his father had started - come what may. His immediate coterie of conservative neo-cons were with him. Many others were not, at least hoping he would wait until the UN weapons inspectors presented their final report and the UN passed a second resolution. As usual, the spin doctors were immediately at work - who can forget Condoleeza Rice's comments about mushroom clouds if Saddam was not stopped (one of many lies)? - and a spider's web of tales were fabricated in support. After 9/11 virtually all of Congress and the country was behind him. Biden has been against the adventure in Afghanistan for well over a decade and was determined to get out. Unlike Bush, we are told he overruled many of his immediate advisors and military chiefs in his haste to announce a date. He stuck to much of Trump's agreement made with the Taliban (made with the Mullah Pakistan/the US had incarcerated for 8 years) and went ahead with his decision without consulting his NATO allies, those very allies he had pledged to consult after Trump had paid virtually no attention to them. And then during the four months leading up to the August 31 date the US administration sat on its hands for much of that time. The vets are the most angry that many of the guys who helped them and who were promised that they and their families would be looked after are now stuck in a Taliban controlled country, many likely to die despite Mullah Baradar's sweet words.

Once gay tourists return, there will surely be an increase in demand for bars, massage spas and saunas. But those which are presently closed due to the lockdown are still having to pay rent and some staff costs. Pre-lockdown, reports on this forum suggested that outside of Bangkok Soi 4, there were few customers at the other venues. Once the lockdown and curfew eases or is cancelled, some patrons will return. But few tourists are likely to do so if only because there are so few of them around. So the chances that those which do manage to open can make up their losses in the medium term most surely be almost zero. Their financial situation will remain fragile. For those which have closed permanently, presumably the managements have given up the leases and have stopped paying rent on their premises. Without a sudden flood of new tourists, is it realistic to expect they will have sufficient available cash to find other premises, pay advance rent and key money, pay all the costs of renovating to provide proper services and pay some basic staff costs? My gut feel is that those which have closed will remain closed. They will not move elsewhere. After all, long before the pandemic, long-term popular and centrally located spas like Albury and Aqua closed because they just could not make ends meet. This may have been a result of rent increases or in the case of Albury a failling customer base after it moved from Suk Soi 11. But if they could not continue operating when tourism was still pretty high, what chance is there those who have closed with tourism almost zero when it is probably also true that the managements have substantial unpaid debts.

I was wrong and am pleased to admit that. I had misquoted the Reuters article which I linked. But even that has proved massively wrong.

If that is the case, then there are many dozens of posts if not 100s where news media articles are printed along with the link. My understanding is that along as the link is added, there is no issue with material printed in a public source. NYT articles have also been printed in whole or in part. That's fine for you. Not for me, thank you. I have little interest in most of the US news included in the NYT. Sometimes I will check the International NYT which has some its major articles. But try finding a copy in Thailand during lockdown!

Another perceptive article in today's Guardian newspaper. It still leads with the chaos and catastrophe of the US and NATO powers departure from Afghanistan prompted by Biden's screwing up by rushing out so disastrously. But this focuses much more on those warmongers and especially the media which gloried in the invasions of Afghanistan and also of Iraq. Why the media? "Because to acknowledge the mistakes of the men who prosecuted this war would be to expose the media’s role in facilitating it." Excerpts from an article in The Guardian 26 August - https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/aug/25/blame-afghanistan-war-media-intervention Any fair reckoning of what went wrong in Afghanistan, Iraq and the other nations swept up in the “war on terror” should include the disastrous performance of the media. Cheerleading for the war in Afghanistan was almost universal, and dissent was treated as intolerable. After the Northern Alliance stormed into Kabul, torturing and castrating its prisoners, raping women and children, the Telegraph urged us to “just rejoice, rejoice”, while the Sun ran a two-page editorial entitled “Shame of the traitors: wrong, wrong, wrong … the fools who said Allies faced disaster”. In the Guardian, Christopher Hitchens, a convert to US hegemony and war, marked the solemnity of the occasion with the words: “Well, ha ha ha, and yah, boo. It was … obvious that defeat was impossible. The Taliban will soon be history.” . . . Everyone I know in the US and the UK who was attacked in the media for opposing the war received death threats. Barbara Lee, the only member of Congress who voted against granting the Bush government an open licence to use military force, needed round-the-clock bodyguards. Amid this McCarthyite fervour, peace campaigners such as Women in Black were listed as “potential terrorists” by the FBI. The then US secretary of state, Colin Powell, sought to persuade the emir of Qatar to censor Al Jazeera, one of the few outlets that consistently challenged the rush to war. After he failed, the US bombed Al Jazeera’s office in Kabul. The broadcast media were almost exclusively reserved for those who supported the adventure. The same thing happened before and during the invasion of Iraq, when the war’s opponents received only 2% of BBC airtime on the subject. Attempts to challenge the lies that justified the invasion – such as Saddam Hussein’s alleged possession of weapons of mass destruction and his supposed refusal to negotiate – were drowned in a surge of patriotic excitement. So why is so much of the media so bloodthirsty? . . . An obvious answer is the old adage that “if it bleeds it leads”, so there’s an inbuilt demand for blood . . . Another factor in the UK is a continued failure to come to terms with our colonial history. For centuries the interests of the nation have been conflated with the interests of the rich, while the interests of the rich depended to a remarkable degree on colonial loot and the military adventures that supplied it. Supporting overseas wars, however disastrous, became a patriotic duty. For all the current breastbeating about the catastrophic defeat in Afghanistan, nothing has been learned. The media still regale us with comforting lies about the war and occupation. They airbrush the drone strikes in which civilians were massacred and the corruption permitted and encouraged by the occupying forces. They seek to retrofit justifications to the decision to go to war, chief among them securing the rights of women. But this issue, crucial as it was and remains, didn’t feature among the original war aims. Nor, for that matter, did overthrowing the Taliban. Bush’s presidency was secured, and his wars promoted, by American ultra-conservative religious fundamentalists who had more in common with the Taliban than with the brave women seeking liberation. In 2001, the newspapers now backcasting themselves as champions of human rights mocked and impeded women at every opportunity . . . You can get away with a lot in the media, but not, in most outlets, with opposing a war waged by your own nation – unless your reasons are solely practical. If your motives are humanitarian, you are marked from that point on as a fanatic. Those who make their arguments with bombs and missiles are “moderates” and “centrists”; those who oppose them with words are “extremists”. The inconvenient fact that the “extremists” were right and the “centrists” were wrong is today being strenuously forgotten.

For most of us the NYT is behind a firewall. I don't live in the USA and a subscription is therefore rather a waste. Would you be very kind and copy and paste the article? Thank you.

Tony Blair has gone much further in his denunciation of the withdrawal from Afghanistan. Speaking to broadcasters, he claimed the decision to withdraw was made ". . . in obedience to an imbecilic political slogan about ending 'the forever wars'". "In terms of what was imbecilic, frankly it was the strategy that was followed for 20 years, which was to try to build a highly centralised state in a country that was as diverse - geographically and ethnically - as Afghanistan, and to engage in a counterinsurgency strategy without a local partner and the local partner was corrupt, ineffective, illegitimate," he said. He added that coalition partners "never seriously tried to address the corruption that was prevalent from the top", acquiescing in "fraudulent" Afghan elections, and trying to fit facts into a predetermined strategy, "rather than having a strategy that was based on the facts". Boris Johnson's Defence Secretary has also come out against the way the withdrawal has been planned and executed. Defence Secretary Ben Wallace said the West's exit from Afghanistan was "unedifying" and would have "consequences for us all for years to come". https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-58295384

John Smyth was a British barrister and Queen's Counsel, an office conferred only on senior barristers by the Crown. A moral crusader and staunch believer in the Anglican Church of England, Smyth fought legal battles for "Christian values" in Britain's courts of law. He acted for Mary Whitehouse, a Christian morality crusader, in her 1977 action against Gay News for its publication of James Kirkup's poem The Love that Dares not Speak its Name. As we have heard before, those who are publicly among the most ardent adherents of their faith are sometimes those who use it for ulterior sexual and other series motives. A new book Bleeding for Jesus: John Smyth and the Cult of Iwerne Camps by Andrew Graystone highlights a life of serial sadistic abuse inflicted by Smyth mostly on young men studying at Britain's elite private schools, most coming from the prestigious Winchester College. Smyth encouraged male pupils from elite schools to come to his home. He had first started his disgusting activities around 1970 after meeting young students attending sessions of the Scripture Union. Once there, they would be stripped naked and viciously beaten. Thereafter they would be kissed, stroked and fondled as if to contrast with the brutality and trauma of the beating they had just experienced. One boy, Andy Morse was given a "special beating" to mark his 21st birthday. After thousands of lashes and beatings over 5 years, he attempted suicide. A Report not compiled until 2017, over 30 years after the first formal allegations about Smyth's abuses were made, claims that three officials of the Scripture Union were aware of the allegations but did nothing about them. This report states that the abuse by Smyth was extreme and physical with "clear and continuous sexual framing." Soon Smyth had started up a Trust. The objective of the Iwerne Trust was to run holiday camps which would recruit and develop the brightest and the best from elite backgrounds as Christians who would go on to become dominant leaders in the Church. According to Graystone "the Iwerne project, in line with most cults, relied on three pillars: conversion, conditioning and coercion. Recruits had to 'declare total allegiance to Jesus' follow certain codes and practices, and observe 'sexual purity'. He said it was 'highly exclusive – this was not a movement for the poor. It accrued huge amounts of power, influence and wealth.'" Perhaps surprisingly given the abuse suffered by almost all the pupils, the Trust had no small measure of success. Some of its "graduates" became among the most prominent conservative evangelical leaders in the Church of England over 40 years. Smyth was Chairman of the Trust Board but rarely took other members seriously. He did what he wished. One victim was the late David Sheppard who went on to play cricket for England before becoming Bishop of Liverpool. Another was the present Bishop of Guildford, Andrew Watson, who described his beatings as "violent, excruciating and shocking." The present Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, worked for the Trust briefly in the late 1970s. Earlier this year Welby made "a full personal apology" to Smyth’s victims, saying: “I am sorry this was done in the name of Jesus Christ by a perverted version of spirituality and evangelicalism. I continue to hear new details of the abuse and my sorrow, shock and horror grows.” Eventually Smyth's activities became known to the headteacher of Winchester College. Instead of contacting the police, Smyth was informed that he must never in future have any contact with the College and its pupils. As the author points out, Smyth was effectively "the Church of England's Jimmy Savile . . . we learned from Savile that abusers can only abuse in a culture that enables it." For those not aware of the Savile scandal, Sir Jimmy Savile had been a pop singer, radio and television host and one of the most popular entertainers in the UK. He was also big on philanthropy. Hospitals for the mentally disabled were one of his pet charities. One even gave him a room for his permanent use whenever he visited the hospital. Soon after his death, rumours began to surface that Savile was not the kindly man everyone assumed him to be, He was unmasked as one of the UK's most serious sexual abusers with over 450 victims (those that are known) ranging from young girls and boys to adults. His knighthood was quickly withdrawn. That no one was aware of his abuse is hardly credible. Some people certainly knew but kept it quiet. After a secret Report in 1982 described his "horrific" beatings of teenage boys, Smyth saw the writing on the wall and moved to Zimbabwe. Again he started up camps and again he was accused of serial abuse of young boys. In 1992 he was arrested in connection with the murder of a 16-year old boy, but was acquitted. He then moved to South Africa. Extraordinarily, Smyth's activités were not brought officially to the attention of the Church of England until 2012/13. The CoE then wrote to the Church in South Africa to warn them about Smyth and his abuse of boys. The text of that letter has never been published. Indeed, it is not known if it was in fact sent. In South Africa he campaigned against gay marriage. He also ran the Justice Alliance of South Africa (JASA) for some years. JASA describes itself as "a coalition of corporations‚ individuals and churches committed to upholding and fighting for justice and the highest moral standards in South African society." In February 2017 the Board asked him to stand down. No reason has ever been given. This sadomasochistic abuser of schoolboys died in South Africa in August 2018, allegedly of a heart attack. In England, the name of his iwerne Trust was changed to The Titus Trust. Little seems to have changed, though. At the top of the first page of its internet site there is the statement, "Providing Christian activity holidays for children and young people at independent schools." The CoE has very belatedly commissioned an independent report on Smyth's abuses. But with many of Smyth's victims now in a position of power within the Church, publication of the alleged independent Report on Smyth has already been delayed by a year. Will it ever appear? Bleeding for Jesus" John Smyth and the Cult of Iwerne Camps by Andrew Graystone is published in the UK on September 2 https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/aug/21/bleeding-for-jesus-book-tells-story-of-qc-who-pitilessly-abused-young-men

There is a very perceptive article in Friday's edition of the UK's Guardian newspaper. Written by Simon Jenkins it delivers a blistering attack on British and American lawmakers. The article was written before Tony Blair, the British Prime Minster who had given his Ambassador to Washington in 2001 instructions to "Crawl up Bush's ass and stay there!", published a 2,700 word article on his website in which he claims "The abandonment of Afghanistan and its people is tragic, dangerous, unnecessary, not in their interests and not in ours,” This from a discredited Prime Minister who went in front of the nation in 2016 to apologise for his errors in taking part in the invasion of Iraq! "I express more sorrow, regret and apology than you can ever know or believe." From The Guardian Friday 20 August 2021 (the use of bold face is mine - it is not in the original article). Britain’s MPs this week uttered one long howl of anguish over Afghanistan. Their immediate targets were Joe Biden and Boris Johnson, politicians who just happened to be on the watch when Kabul’s pack of cards collapsed. But their real concern was that a collective 20-year experiment in “exporting western values” to Afghanistan had fallen into chaos. MPs wanted someone other than themselves to blame. A politician is never so angry as when proved wrong. Like their fellow representatives in Congress, MPs somehow hoped the end would be nice and tidy, with speeches and flags, much like Britain’s exit from Hong Kong. Instead, tens of thousands of Afghans who had lived in an effective colony under years of Nato occupation had come to believe the west would either never leave or somehow protect them from Taliban retribution. They were swiftly disabused. In 2006 I stood at dusk on a castle wall overlooking Kabul with a young UN official. He had just heard the Kandahar road was no longer safe. “Why,” he sighed, “can’t Afghanistan be more like Sweden?” I tried to see if he was smiling, but he was grimacing. For another 15 years, armies of western soldiers and civilians hurled stupefying amounts of money at the country. They created a wildly corrupt western dependency, where some 50,000 Afghans have links with the west that are now lethal. As for the “western-trained” army, one of its trainers told me it was mostly for show. An occupying power could not possibly motivate local youths to kill their fellow countrymen who might soon be ruling them. He rightly predicted: “They will just walk home.” It is now 22 years since Tony Blair gave a speech in Chicago lecturing the US on his doctrine of international intervention. He wanted the west to invade countries across the world not in self-defence, but to save people everywhere from oppression. It was a reformulation of Alfred Milner’s Victorian concept of moral imperialism. British politicians on both the left and the right have long been uncomfortable about the abandonment of Milnerism as the acceptable face of empire. Global policing is somehow embedded in Britain’s political DNA. All Blair’s wars of aggression were cheered on in the House of Commons. Many people have spoken this week of the “decline of the west”, lamenting the collapse of US moral authority. Yet these theories are beside the point. The belief that our moral values are somehow meaningless unless they are enforced upon those who do not share them is imperialist bigotry. It also leads to absurd biases. Iraq is now thought of as “bad interventionism”, as opposed to Afghanistan’s “good” version. The virtue of the latter invasion led President Obama in 2009 to bless the war in Afghanistan with a “surge” of soldiers, taking the US total to 110,000, mere target practice for the Taliban. American gunboat diplomacy, initially supposed to salve the wounds of 9/11 in 2001, opened the door to fake morality and a trillion-dollar nation-building fantasy. The catastrophic return of Taliban autonomy became its inevitable conclusion. The US – with Britain as its lackey – committed liberal interventionism’s cardinal sin: half-heartedness. The craving to intervene is always followed by a craving to withdraw. Traditional empires at least pretended they would never leave. As it was, Afghanistan replicated departures from India, South Africa, Hong Kong and Iraq. If you invade and conquer an alien state, you own it, but must then disown it. Western rule has killed an estimated 240,000 in Afghanistan since 2001, more than the Taliban ever did. It has not left morality, just a mess. We must assume strategists in Washington and London are now planning interventions in Taiwan and Ukraine against possible Chinese and Russian expansion. If you ask taxpayers to spend billions on defence, you need something to show for it. So you pretend, as Johnson did in his bizarre conversation with Biden this week, that “gains” were made in Afghanistan. You accuse non-interventionists, as did the former Tory leader William Hague, of demonstrating “the enfeeblement of the western mind”. In a recent column, Hague called on Britain to continue invading foreign countries when “our common humanity demands it”. In doing so, he sounded like Pope Urban summoning the First Crusade. more at https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/aug/20/west-nation-building-fantasy-afghanistan-boris-johnson

I hope no one torments any other person near the moment of death for something they did or did not do. It should surely be a time for comfort and peaceful preparation.

A repeat of tumblr. I wonder if anyone knows how many subscribers tumblr lost in the years after it banned pornography.

Yes @JKane was correct. I was referring to the Afghan President. I am all for Joe Biden as President even though I think he and his administration have made a disastrous mistake in the way the withdrawal from Afghanistan has been handled. And yes, the Afghan President did flee. But who put him there? Who attempted to introduce western style democracy into a country which has rarely ever been democratic throughout its history and whose loyalties are far more localised and not to a central government? And yes again, without the presence of western troops, there would have been no democracy, functioning or otherwise. So what did anyone expect to happen when those western troops announced months in advance that they would leave? Chaos and a return the status quo before they arrived.

I think you might have hit on an ingenious way of dealing with flooding and making the bars less expensive. Surely the owners could make bigger boats into bars? So as you float along, the boys will be closer to the customers. Short time rooms could be more fun, especially if the boat crashes into a wave or two from time to time! Come to think of it, there could be a fleet of large boats each offering different services. A bit like in the Hong Kong of olden days when you could have dinner on small boats floating around the Yacht Club. Other boats would come up to yours, each with different foods and drinks. It was a lovely rather cute way to dine. The only problem was that at the end of the meal as you left the boat, all the left overs and trash would be mindlessly thrown into the harbour! Not a good idea to have condoms and tissues floating around Bangkok's floods!

Am I right in thinking that Malaysia was the first to move much of the government from Kuala Lumpur to the then-new city of Petaling Jaya? The problem with transferring government offices is that these employ more than 700,000 people. Where in a smallish city like Chiang Mai do you find accommodation for them? I suppose you could also build new housing for them at the same time as the government buildings but how many would want to be relocated so far from family and friends? I am sure there must be a city a lot closer to Bangkok on higher ground and away from the Chao Phraya river.

Now that is a position I cannot agree with at all. Biden knew perfectly well he was going to withdraw all troops. It was a campaign promise. He knew of the deal Trump had made even though its detail was is some senses ridiculous! The Taliban really agreed to the CIA operating in parts of a Taliban controlled Afghanistan? Oh, please! So Biden is elected in early November. There was a ton of time between then and the withdrawal date he announced in April for all his various government departments and the CIA to work out and hand him a host of all the possibie outcomes and to start working on them. We know the CIA experts (experts?) told him the Taliban would be in a position to take over in between 6 and 12 months after the US exit. Others told him they would be in Kabul much more quickly. Whatever, it is the duty of all administrations to plan for all eventualities. Several very senior US military figures have in recent days roundly attacked Biden's lack of planning and the utter disaster of the last few days in Kabul. Why was there no scenario for a total collapse of the Afghan army? Was it because the USA had spent years and billions of taxpayers $$ building it up? Could it not admit to itself that it might just collapse with its personnel just giving up and returning to their home provinces? After all, what loyalty did that army have? To a President who was elected by less than 2% of the population? When that election itself was first delayed by five months and then as a result of feudal factional in-fighting a further delay of another five and a half months before being ratified? After the disasters in Vietnam and in Iraq, did the USA seriously believe that democracy can be introduced into a country based on a feudal system where loyalty is to tribe and clan rather than to a bloated, corrupt national government, something which has rarely worked before? What were the military fighting for? A US-backed President who fled the moment things began to look really bad? All that could and should have bewn put into at least one scenario presented to Biden. As should all the paperwork and agreements regarding the quick exit of all the Afghan helpers another families before the USA troops left. But none of that was done. It is a total disaster.

We have talked about and been warned about global warming for decades - and have done precious little. But this year's disastrous fires in the US, Europe and elsewhere, the massive rains affecting Europe, Japan and elsewhere and the record heat levels in North America's north-west, in Sicily and elsewhere must surely have driven home the fact that the world is fast running out of time. California is on the front line and is danger of running out of water. This video on the BBC website illustrates the effect of drought on Lake Oroville, California's second latest reservoir. The photographer has been following the falling water levels since 2014. The result is frightening. It is now at its lowest level since 1977. The Lake's hydro electric plant serving 800.000 homes has had to be taken offline for the first time ever. https://www.bbc.com/news/av/world-us-canada-58232044 On Monday the US declared its first-ever water shortage in the country's largest reservoir Lake Mead and ordered water cuts for the Colorado River which feeds it. Water cuts will affect Nevada and its gambling mecca Las Vegas, Arizona and parts of Mexico which also receives water from the Lake. The lake serves the Hoover Dam. I took a helicopter trip to the Grand Canyon 14 years ago. First we flew over the Hoover Dam. Comparing a photo I took with one from Reuters taken two months ago you can make out the drop in water level. It does not seem much from the air but when you consider this is just an outlet for the massive Lake Mead, it is a lot. You can see the change in the water line on the left bank as you look closely at the photos. 2007 August 2021 June Pho Photo: Reuters I wonder when the Bangkok area will see a repeat of the record disastrous floods last seen in 2011. These badly flooded Ayutthaya, closed Don Mueang airport for weeks and flooded much of the city. The economic cost was estimated at around $47 billion! I have a friend whose house was unliveable for three moths as the ground floor was covered in almost 2 meters of black, stagnant water. October is usually the worst month when water from the north drains down the Chao Phraya river and meets the year's high tide coming up from the sea. They usually meet at Bangkok. I can recall when the Shangri La Hotel by the river had sandbags not only on its river wall but also around the swimming pool. That was in the 1990s! With the city still sinking at a rate of between 2 and 3 cms per year, most estimates suggest that parts of Bangkok will be permanently under water by 2050. One estimate even goes so far as to suggest 30% of the city will be under water by 2030 if nothing is urgently done to halt land subsidence. After 2011 there was talk that many government departments should be moved further up river. As far as I know, nothing has been done about this. Bangkok and Jakarta are two of the fastest sinking cities in the world. The Dutch research institute Deltares estimates that Jakarta is the fastest anywhere, sinking at 7.5 cms per year. In 2007 70% of the city was submerged by floods. At least the present government has announced the creation of a new capital 1,200 kms away from Jakarta on the island of Borneo. About 1 million people will be relocated and the cost is estimated at around $33 billion. Naturally it will end up being vastly more than this! https://asia.nikkei.com/Economy/Jakarta-and-Bangkok-keep-sinking-as-infrastructure-projects-stall

You are the eternal optimist @vinapu!

1. I am sure you are correct. But I do not agree he was boxed in. He still had a choice as to precisely when to leave. After all, Trump had said he would pull out everyone considerably earlier. Also, Trump did not invite the Afghan government to these talks. It was as though he were the pro-consul acting on behalf of the entire Afghan people. That said, though, Biden has to bear all the blame for the disasters of the last week. He has said on several occasions that he had full faith in what was in effect the US installed Afghan government and its armed forces which the US had spent years and billions of $$ training up. When he made his announcements in April, he had had months to consider it (after all, it as a campaign promise) and to obtain advice from supposedly the best experts in the world. The CIA estimated it would take the Taliban a minimum of 6 months to gain control and as much as a year. This is the same CIA which got things so wrong in Iran, so wrong in Vietnam, so wrong in Iraq! One wonders why there has not been a total clear out of many of its top officials in that agency. I have no doubt it does considerable good. but when it comes to the US disasters in its overseas invasions, someone has to be accountable. Amid all the Republican's trashing of Biden's mishandling of the departure, I I notice that the Republican National Committee has deleted a webpage hailing Trump's peace deal with the Taliban! But Business Insider still has a screen shot. Note that Trump's so-called agreement permitted the CIA to stay on in Taliban controlled Afghanistan! Did anyone seriously expect that would ever be allowed to happen? Trump's deal making another fiction! https://www.businessinsider.com/gop-removes-page-hailing-trump-taliban-deal-2021-8 2. That successive US governments have thought they had some God-given right to spread democracy around the world is one reason for its foreign disasters since the end to World War 2. Democracy means different things to different peoples. But you cannot impose it on peoples who for centuries have remained clan and tribe based and have little idea what the word means. It has to come from within. Hopefully all countries will pay heed to the this in future. The following is part of the webpage from the RNC which was taken down 2 days ago. PRESIDENT TRUMP HAS CONTINUED TO TAKE THE LEAD IN PEACE TALKS AS HE SIGNED A HISTORIC PEACE AGREEMENT WITH THE TALIBAN IN AFGHANISTAN, WHICH WOULD END AMERICA'S LONGEST WAR On February 2, 2020, the Trump Administration signed a preliminary peace agreement with the Taliban that sets the stage to end America's longest war. Under the agreement, the U.S. will withdraw nearly 5,000 troops from the country in 135 days in exchange for a Taliban agreement to not allow Afghanistan to be used for transnational terrorism. Time Magazine reported that other components of the agreement included an agreement that U.S. counterterrorism forces stay in the country, permissions for the CIA to operate in Taliban-held areas, and details of how the Taliban's promises to reduce violence will be monitored and verified. The deal has been called the " best chance to end this conflict ," a " decisive move " towards peace, and " the best path " for the United States. The war in Afghanistan is the longest in U.S. history, a conflict that has killed more than 3,500 U.S. and NATO troops and cost U.S. taxpayers nearly 900 billion dollars. As part of the peace agreement, the Taliban and the Afghan government recently began historic peace, talks which would end decades of war that Afghanistan has consumed. The negotiations will cover the terms of a " permanent ceasefire, the rights of women and minorities, and the disarmament of the country's many militia groups .

I don't think that is the "official" name. It was the title given to mainland China in 1912 after the collapse of the rule of the Q'ing Emperors. It remained as the ROC until Mao's forces overcame those of the then ROC ruler Chiang Kai Shek in 1949. When he quickly fled with around 2 million of his followers to Taiwan, he also took the ROC name with him for it was always his intention to his dying day that he would return to take back the mainland. I believe international law does not now recognise Taiwan as the ROC. Hence the renaming of Chiang's ROC as Taiwan. As for Taiwan absorbing the mainland, I assume that is merely a joke! China has an active army of around 2.2 million plus a massive amount of military hardware and nuclear weapons. Taiwan has approx. 10% of that manpower and some aircraft. 'Nuff said! LOL

I agree with much of your comment. But the whole point of going in to Afghanistan was to root out Al Qaeda because the Taliban government had given Osama bin Ladan and his murderers safe haven. Does the USA - does any government - believe that the Taliban has basically changed? It is a hard line group of Islamic militants that has been kept out of power for two decades only because the USA invaded and after about a decade finally managed to get rid of bin Laden - in Pakistan. Is not the presence of a few thousand troops (NATO in addition to the USA) along with some military hardware a small price to pay to ensure that they do not get up to the same sort of destabilising tricks again? Is the difference between Afghanistan and North Korea largely because South Korea is an ally and North Korea has nukes? I really am clutching at straws as I have no ready answer. As for the disasters of the last few days, I recall a line from one of Shakespeare's plays whose title it is allegedly bad luck to mention. Of the death of the Thane of Cawdor, the King's son Malcolm tells his father, "Nothing in his life became him like the leaving of it." With all the time to prepare for all eventualities, what is happening is all so sad and unnecessary.

I am less certain than you. I think China will face almighty international opposition if it takes Taiwan by force. It's likely to be a bloodbath since very few Taiwanese want to be ruled by Beijing. But then, the US and many countries signed up to the one-China policy 49 years ago. So it is yet another relic of the Cold War agreed at a time when I doubt if any countries considered that China would be anything other than a relatively poor nation half a century later. Although China was then keen on a bit of sabre-rattling and occasionally fired missiles at Taiwan's offshore islands, the thought that this could be serious was rarely considered. Now, of course, China is about to become a superpower and the rest of the world is screwed! And this is desperately sad for the people of Taiwan unless negotiators can come up with some formula that will satisfy Beijing and Taipei. Relations between the two were far better as recently as 10 years ago. Taiwan investors were ploughing countless billions into businesses on the mainland and China had for the first time permitted unlimited non-stop flights between the two. Until around then, mainland Chinese could only visit Taiwan on flights which transited first in another country/territory and vice-versa. With Hong Kong being the most convenient and fastest route, Cathay Pacific made a mint of cash with dozens of daily flights. But under President Xi, all that has changed.