PeterRS

N95 masks? I think you are wrong. Let's also recall that while bird flu may be limited at present to birds and non-flying birdlike creatures - I can recall when Hong Kong culled hundreds of thousands of chickens due to bird flu - serious illnesses do spread from animals to humans. The clear example here was SARS in 2003. That was first discovered in Hong Kong and was traced to a visitor from Guangdong Province who had been sneezing in a hotel lift. Before then, it had appeared in China with some 300 or so infections and five deaths. It was then reported to the WHO. Although the number of deaths was relatively small - around 770 - and largely confined to Chinese communities in China, Hong Kong, Canada and Taiwan, there were many thousand non-lethal cases. I can recall returning to Bangkok on a TG flight and being very concerned about a passenger two rows in front of me who spent the entire flight coughing. It was no pandemic, but it caused a great deal of concern around the world. SARS was discovered in animals and had jumped the species barrier.

Oh! You clearly are soooo much younger than I thought! Have you learned how to work it now? 🤣

News today that former President Biden has an aggressive form of prostate cancer that has already spread to his bones. While we will all wish him well in such difficult times, there is one issue I find somewhat baffling. As I understand it, prostate cancer is a slow growing cancer. Even so, it is the second highest form of cancer death in the USA. As it is one of the most common cancers in men, generally men over a certain age (is it 50?) are recommended to have regular prostate cancer checks through either physical examination or simple PSA blood tests. How often did the White House doctors check his for this cancer? How did the cancer develop so quickly? Surely it had to have been identified at least in an early stage when he had his last White house medical check. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/biden-prostate-cancer-symptoms-treatments/

Yet as a conciliator, Biden did not have a clean record. After the shambles of the Robert Bork nomnation for the Supreme Court under Reagan, there was a lot of pressure on Bush I to ensure his nominee to replace Justice William Brennan sailed through the process. David Soutar, a judge with a great deal of experience at several levels, won the seat by acclamation. Yet within a year the civil rights icon on the Court, Thurgood Marshall, announced he was standing down. Bush nominated Clarence Thomas as "the best person for the job", a description that has come to haunt him as much as Thomas. Based on his extensive inexperience Thomas clearly was very far from the best person. But he was black and an ultra-conservative and Bush and his cohorts pressed ahead. The nomination process was a near shambles. A former exacutive who had worked under him came before the Senate Committee, Professor Anita Hill, and accused him of sexual harassment. There were three other ladies waiting outside the court to back up Hill's claim. Professor Hill took a lie detector test and passed. To give Thomas time to refute the allegations, he was given a day before exonerating himself before the Committee. I happened to be living in Tokyo at that time and was having supper with friends that evening but we were riveted on the television to see how Thomas responded. Instead fo rebutting Ms. Hill's claims, Thomas resorted merely to what can only be described as a vicious angry rant against a system that failed "uppity blacks" like him. I turned to my friends and misquoted Shakespeare, "Methinks he doth protest too much!" Bush had been warned by his Attorney General that any attempt to replace one of the most revered liberal Justices with an ultra-conservative idealogue with little experience could backfire, just as the Bork nomination had backfired on Reagan. After hearing Thomas's vituperation, the Committee failed to call the three other women to back up Ms. Hill's claim, and Thomas was voted in as a Justice by a very narrow margin. The Chairman of that Judiciary Committee was -Joe Biden. Given the degree of controversy, I do not believe that committee led by Biden should have approved the Thomas nomination. It was a prime example of Biden the conciliator and it backfired with serious consequences, even if we only take into consideration the examples of Thomas's ethics violations in recent years. That the US has a system where Justices are political appointees, where there are no stringent ethics rules for Justices and, worse, that Justices are on the Court for life is, in my view, some form of madness. Either there should be a mandatory retirement age like the UK, or the appointment should be for a fixed term, like a President although for considerably longer.

In which media outlet was that quoted?

Since I stopped going to gay venues in 2019 . . .

I think the basic problem in the USA is that the vast majority of the population neither travel outside the USA nor have much interest in what happens outside the USA. That is why too much faith is paid to Congressmen and Senators - and to a certain extent Presidents and their teams - whom, people believe, know more than them. If only they realised the truth! The USA has made so many foreign policy mistakes since WWII, there are many experts around the world, not a few legal, who believe that people like McNamara and Kissinger should be tried for genocide. Kissinger's record, despite the spin he and his company worked hard to create, in many parts of the world is responsible for many millions of deaths. As McNamara admitted in his 'mea culpa' book, he and his Presidential colleagues "thought" they were doing right in Indo-China! Britain's Tony Blair also "thought" he was doing right by backing Bush II in the Gulf War. Like McNamara he finally offered a public apology. I don't recall Bush II ever apologising for anything, not even 9/11! Undoubtedly the mega-mistake was Afghanistan. I seem to recall that the withdrawal had in fact been agreed by the Trump administration. If so, Biden was left with a big problem. The way he went about it, though, was disastrous, not least for the Afghans who had taken a hugely risky gamble wth their lives to help the USA and the other alllied powers. I know from the arguments in the UK, that the way the withdrawal occurred and its speed was a huge folly. Why did the USA keep open the Kabul airport when the air base at Bagram was far better defended and far more suited to a mass evacuation? The USA secretly withdrew its large number of troops and handed the base back to the government in Kabul on July 2. Yet the Afghan governement troops could not hold it and the Taliban took over on 15 August. I have yet to see any logical reason why it was not kept in US hands and used for the evacuation. And as in the UK, many Afhghans who had filed the relevant paperwork to ensure their evacuation never got approval. The US civil servants were inundated and the process hideously slow. I happen to have spent my life in a business that deals with deadlines. We know two years agead of time what must happen on a certain date and a certain time. Our planning is geared up to ensuring that all along the way we meet a very extenisve series of secondary deadlines. We never once failed to meet a major deadline! Biden's people had more than 18 months - much of it clearly wasted. He could easily have used his Executive powers to speed up the Immigration process. He didn't. The fact is that the Taliban had not been beaten. Nor had they submitted to foreign demands. They merely realised that the best way of achieving their ends was partially to withdraw and make it seems as though this was permanent. Then they nodded ther heads and told all who would listen they had changed. The USA was totally taken in by the Taliban - as of course all the world now knows. The counter-argument I have read is that this could have resulted in mass attemped evacuations. I find little validity in this. The US and its alllies had a very specific duty to get its front line troops out. It got some. It left many behind. And the evacuation itself was somewhat similar to that in Cambodia nearly half a century earlier - all last-minute and virtually unprepared for. Israel/Palestine is another mega-disaster. Instead of being statesmanlike, lambasting Hamas and offering sympathy to israel, by not sitting on the fence at the outset and making known his own absolute support for Israel at every turn, he alienated much of the world. Certainly Israel deserved a lot more than sympathy after the Hamas attacks. But continuuing for so long to agree with israel's position and to back a murderer and crook like Netanyahu made it all worse. And when we know that nearly 50,000 Palestinians have been murdered, many women and children, and the remainder are close to starvation due to Israel's actions, and that the Gaza strip will require many billions to become remotely habitable again, Biden's backing has backfired spectacularly. You could count Ukraine as one of his partial successes but not when you consider that Ukraine's first requests and needs were met only after very, very long delays. I blame Biden for this. He has always regarded himself as the great conciliator. In times of war, time is crucial. Had he been faster off the mark and used his Executive powers, Ukraine might have been better off than it now is. I can't speak much for the situation within the USA, but the appointment of Merrick Garland was a mega-disaster. That this judge moved at a pace slower than a snail to nail Trump for his many excesses was a complete disaster. Trump could well have been in a far worse legal position in the run up to the election and the volume of his crimes might just have persuaded some of his on-the-fence supporters not to vote for him. And for Biden to sit back without pressing Garland at every turn to 'get moving fast' on Trump will not be a positive in his legacy. The President leads a team. He is responsible for the team. He failed most of his team and he failed most of the Americna people - in my view.

Agreed. But he had no agenda because he really did not expect to win. When Hillary blew it, he had to make one up very quickly and depended on others to feed him his policy nuts. Then he realised that he'd picked a group of idiots whose only error was they did not like him or what he was doing. So he started on the "You're fired!" trail. This time he absolutely knew he would wipe the shithouse with Biden. Not even Harris was going to affect his second coronation. So he had his plans and his allies all lined up behind him, ready to wipe his ass whenever he wished. How anyone in the Democratic Party seriously thought Biden could actually beat Trump needs a huge investigation. I can't speak for his policies within the US, but his actions overseas were desperately poor and basically ineffective. In the eyes of this outside observer, he was a rotten President. One might hope that some intelligent person would get their legal semi-automatic out of its case, send the secret service in all wrong directions and end the Trump turmoil once and for all. The problem with that, though, is Vance may end up an even more idiotic and senseless leader. The USA willingly got itself into this mess. They must now suffer the consequences.

I'd have thought that was a great idea. Then at least the boys might at least dance energetically. From my last bar hopping days, most of the guys seemed to care little about dancing or nothing other than chatting to each other - and their phones

Totally agree. Not only do they help others either planning a trip to the a Nang area or they may spur some to consider Da Nang whereas it has not been on their radar before. I have bared my soul a few times in this forum and it is amazing how understanding members here are.

Fair point, but not easy to distinguish in the dark when there seemed to be no light in the taxi! I found over many years that this only works if you are in one or two other countries - unless you have the conversion already in your head. On one of my many round-the-world trips, I found myself in seven countries. I would have a good idea of the Thai baht values in £ and US$, but with Euros, Hungarian forint, Danish kroner, Japanese ¥ and South Korean won I could not have survived without constantly checking exchange rates. And honestly, I have no idea how any young Thai who has never travelled to another country will get the hang of Vietnamese currency without constantly checking. Most other Asian currencies are relatively simple. Not so Vietnam with all those zeros.

My nomination from NPR - Pope meets Sinner As if the Pope does not meet sinners every day of the week LOL (Sinner in this case was of course the Italian Jannick Sinner, the World No. 1 mens tennis player, and the Pope is a tennis fan. https://www.npr.org/2025/05/15/nx-s1-5399048/pope-leo-jannik-sinner-italian-open

The XEC variant of covid19 is back in Thailand with more than 71,000 infected and 19 deaths this year - so far. The XEC is a variant of the Omicron strain first identified in Germany in June last year. Numbers in Thailand spiked significantly during the Songkran period. Symptoms appear to be similar to those of the other strains of covid. As with that original covid strain, wearing masks, maintaining distance, frequent washing of hands and self isolation if symptoms appear are recommended. I for one will start to wear masks again. https://www.nationthailand.com/news/general/40050055 This is old news worldwide but there had been few if any cases in Thailand until recently. An article in the Yale Medicine website dated December 20 last year suggests that although it is now the most common covid strain, indications are that symptoms are no more severe than earlier ones. Another article suggests booster vaccinations are advised, but I do not know of any medical facility in Thailand yet offering them. https://www.yalemedicine.org/news/3-things-to-know-about-xec-the-latest-covid-strain

I recall my first trip to Istanbul when there were something like 600,000 Turkish lire to $1. Having travelled extensively to many countries in the world I was very used to different currencies. A taxi back to the Hyatt hotel cost something like 5.4 million. It did not surprise me, although it should have, that the driver did not take me directly to the front door, instead stopping outside the entrance gate. I handed him a 10 million note. In a flash he turned around with a 5 million note in his hand and said I still owed him 400,000. I was certain I had given him 10 million, but assumed he had to be right. Having to count all those bloody '0's on the notes every time I paid for something was getting to me. So I coughed up. It was only when walking the short distance to the front of the hotel that I went through the transaction again in my head and realised I had been 'had'! Being conned out of little more than $8 was merely annoying and I was a lot more careful when another taxi tried the same trick. But when someone has spent all of a young life dealing with basically one currency, working out the Thai value of a seeming sackful of Vietnamese dong can't be easy!

To my thinking a gogo bar in which the boys are fully dressed is not a gogo bar!

You clearly exude so much charm and charisma! 🤣

I apologise. In my post I had meant to concentrate more on the problems i had experienced when starting out running my first company after a long period as an employee. I had not intended for you to respond to each little item as that is essentially your business. Still, I wish you the best of luck - in business and romance. I might perhaps add that when I arrived in Asia, I was frantically busy for my first couple of years and only had the very occsional passing sexual fling - apart from starting week-end trips to Bangkok. Certainly no time for romance. And then as if in a flash I saw him. A young man whom you would not call beautiful but who had tremendous charisma and personality, oozed charm, with a wide circle of friends and loved by almost everyone. That he should then fall for me I felt was staggering. But there was a problem. He lived in Japan and I met him on only my third visit when I was not at all used to the highways and byways of life in that country. However, he was essentially working freelance, spoke fluent English (his grandmother had been a Filippina) and wanted to see me again. Thereafter once a month I took the regular Friday Pan Am flight to Tokyo (still flying then and the tickets were cheap!), returning on the Sunday evening. I also took a 10 day holiday there and he came to spend 3 weeks with me in Hong Kong. Within six months we had started talking about finding a way to live together. And then it all came crashing down. No need to explain why. Faults on both sides, but I eventually came to realise many more on my side than his. He had been my first real love and he awoke in me a passion I had never experienced before. I was heartbroken. Yet I should have realised that with my work schedule and his living 3,000km away, whatever chance there might have been of being together was ultra-slim. It took me a good 8 months before i really got over that break-up. Yet some years later, he got in touch with me. He hoped I did not still feel angry and that we could perhaps become friends. By this time he was living much closer to me and we did meet for a lovely dinner. A lot was said and a chapter was closed. We continued to meet from time to time. He was very sadly to die quite young and i was pleased that his partner invited me to the funeral. I still think of him and smile every time.

I was under the impression that the 777X aircraft which form part of this package were firm orders from QR a couple of years ago.

Luttwak is correct. I had never heard of him but there was indeed a Sino-Indian mini-war - they called it a skirmish - in 2020. In fact there had been previous border skirmishes in 1962 and 1967. In all, soldiers on both sides had been killed, although I can find no confirmation of Chinese deaths in 2020. When I first flew to take up my first job in Hong Kong at the start of March 1979, the Air France 747 could not fly the last sector Bangkok to Hong Kong via the usual route over Laos and then Da Nang in Vietnam. The reason was some weeks earlier there had been a border war/skirmish betwen Vietnam and China and Vietnamese air space was closed. And all this illustrates a point I suggested or implied earlier: the Chinese are ultra-sensitive about their country's borders. Hence, however much we may loathe how they have gone and are going about it, Russia, Tibet, Xinjiang and Hong Kong. And hence the sensitivity over the Taiwan issue. Re the latter, if American politicians would just forget about Taiwan and not make rabble rousing visits like Nancy Pelosi's, there would be no need for Beijing to get all jumpy. The idiot Mitch McConnell has called these skirmishes - and the others that are not reported - as "salami slicing", encroaching on to small parts of a neighbour's territory to keep it as its own. That is also basically nonsense because no part of India or Vietnam is now in Chinese hands - although the problems now arising in the South China Sea over a number of small islands, some man-made, and disputed by several countries do cause some concern. In the west we tend to forget that the Chinese call the century from the Opium Wars onwards the "century of humiliation". Rotting from within, the Imperial system was collapsing, famine was rife, rents and taxes were skyrocketing, opium was finally openly sold condemning well over a million to long slow deaths, foreign powers were carving out parts of the country's coats where Chinese law would not apply, and following in the wake of the troops came the missionaries. With the aim of winning souls for a Christian God of whom the Chinese knew next to nothing and paying no heed to the concepts of Confucionism, Daoism and Buddhism, tens of thousands of missionaries roamed the countryside handing out leaflets about how Jesus would save China etc, etc. The only way out of poverty in those days was to win one of the coveted government places following the annual Imperial Examinations. One Han Chinese peasant who had failed the exam no less than four times, Hong Xiuquoan, picked up one of these leaflets. He had been seeing visions and began to believe that he was the brother of Jesus Christ. Under a Christian missionary, he studied the Bible in Guangzhou. The missionary refused to baptize him, calling him a burleque performer. But Hong would not be stopped. Thanks to the desperate poiverty around him, he soon had more than 10,000 folllowers for his Taiping religion. They formed an army. Thus began the Taiping rebellion, a 14-year civil war in which between 20 and 30 million were killed before the Imperial army won the day in 1864. As if that was not enough, foreign armies were to inflict on China an event that even to this day arouses deep-rooted passions unique in Chinese history. As the Taipei Rebellion started French and British troops marched on Beijing with the intent of opening up more of the country to trade. Forces of the Qing Dynasty captured and tortured a small group of British and French soldiers. 19 died as a result. In a fury, the leader of the English forces Lord Elgin ordered his men to destroy the old Summer Palace in the northeast of the city. It took 3,500 British troops to set it ablaze and the fire lasted three days. Beforehand, much of the Palace treasures had been looted. The Palace had boasted the most extensive and invaluable art collection in the country. That attack is regarded to this day as the worst act of vandalsim in modern Chinese history. One of the huge number appalled by this act of wanton destruction on one of the great glories of Chinese civilisation was the novellist Victor Hugo. He wrote, "We call ourselves civilised and them barbarians. This is what civilisation has done to the barbarians.” Whatever we in the west may think, for all Chinese around the world the destruction of the Summer Palace remains to this day the deepest, unhealed and most entrenched historical wound. Western nations should always bear this in mind in dealings with Chinese officialdom.

I am sorry that I am going to be critical. Your former boyfriend - who may become your boyfriend again in future - has started a company. You had advised him what to do and how to do it. It seems clear from what you write that he took little or no notice. Yet, although the business still has no customers, you are happy for him to come to spend 15 days with you in Da Nang. In the meantime one of his close friends will look after the "business." You tell us this same good friend is already working alongside your BF. The reason for my curiosity - if the good friend is already helping out in a business that makes (virtually) no sales, how is that friend going to increase business when there in reality is no business? I recall when I started my first company - like your BF's, basically a one man band, if you like, with very occasional help from friends. Because I was then a lousy businessman and only really wanted to promote what I wanted to promote, I very quickly lost a great deal of money. But at least I stayed around in the office and every day did all I could to reverse the trend, which did eventually happen, thank goodness. Would you not be much better advised not to fly your friend to Da Nang but instead to alter your own plans and return to Pattaya, spend those two weeks sorting out the business problems and yourself making sure he and his friend know exactly what they are doing and how to do it. Sure, you will be interrupting your 185 or whatever number of days outside Pattaya. But surely you can make those days up with a cheap trip somewhere else? I may be wrong but I do not believe the number of days outside Thailand has to be consecutive.

The low season should not start till July. In my experience, this amount of rain over such a long period is very unusual at this time of year.

There is both the amount of cash involved and the precise length of visas. After all, as stated in the CNN report, this is merely a recommendation to the government. It is not yet policy. So the next question should be: when will it go before the government? And we also should recall that Vietnam did have long term visas in the past only for that policy to be revoked - as an Australian friend of mine discovered after he had sold his Chiang Mai apartment and bought a beach-side villa near Danang. He ended up returning to Australia. From my reading of @bkkmfj2648's earlier report, 90 day visas can be virtually connected as all that is needed is 24 hours out of the country. If that is the case, why wait?

Taiwan Historically I think it is important to put the Taiwan issue into some kind of context. Just as Britain colonised Malaya and Singapore, the Dutch Indonesia and so on, Chinese had started to colonise the island of Taiwan in the 1600s, effectively becoming the sovereign power in 1661 when it beat out some early Dutch colonisers. From then until 1895 - 234 years- China ruled the island until it was defeated by the Japanese who then took over sovereignty. In 1943 there was a Conference in Cairo attended by Roosevelt, Churchill and Chiang Kai-shek, then the ruler of China (although only because he was propped up by the USA). After the end of Imperial rule in China, Sun Yat-sen was the father of Chinese independence. But he died too soon, leaving a battle for the leaderhip of his party, the Kuomintang (KMT). Chiang, a gangster and a crook, won out partly - and then later much more so - with the help of the Green Gang in Shanghai. The Green Gang controlled virtually all the extensive vice in Shanghai - gambling, prostitution, drugs, opium dens etc. The Cairo Conference was to reach agreement on what to do with the Pacific countries which had been invaded and taken over by the Japanese. All agreed such countries would revert to their previous rulers. Thus, although the British were colonisers in Malaya the country was given back to them much to the anger of Malayan separatists. Similarly, since Beijing had ruled Taiwan for far longer than the British had Malaya, Taiwan reverted to Chinese rule. During WWII Chiang's party had entered into an alliance with the young Chinese communist party run by Mao Tse-tung to join forces to fight against the invading Japanese. Following the war, once again despite huge injections of cash from the USA, Chiang lost the resultant civil war. Chiang and around 2 million of his followers fled to Taiwan which was already inhabited by 6 million indiginous Taiwanese and Han Chinese while Mao declared the new China as The People's Republic. No nation was more furious at this outcome than the USA. The corridors in Washington reverberated to the question "Who Lost China?" Then the question became, "Which is China?" Chiang declared that as leader of the KMT and with the KMT now in charge of Taiwan he remained the legitimate ruler of China. Few apart from the USA agreed. The last thing Washington wanted on its Pacific doorstep was two massive communist powers. It therefore tried to overturn the terms of the Cairo Agreement by calling a formal Peace Conference in San Francisco in 1951. There it attempted to prove that Chiang had been the legitimate ruler of China and so the communists were usurpers. Its purpose to try and arrange for the Japanese to return China to the KMT failed, although there remains an unsettled issue in international law. Many major powers did not agree - notably the UK which stated firmly that the country of China was now ruled by Mao and his troops. Chiang never believed that it would be his destiny to die in Taiwan. With a great deal of American cash, he reformed his troops and hatched his plans to retake the mainland. It was all pie in the sky. It would never happen. And then Nixon made his totally unexpected trip to meet Mao in 1971. Chiang's dream was dead. His party the KMT continues as a political force in Taiwan but without the aim of reconquering the mainland. Since I was based in Hong Kong for nearly four decades, I have visited many parts of China many times. I have friends there. It is true that some, especially of the older generation, regard Taiwan as Chinese and feel strongly about this. By far the majority whom I know and have had business dealings with, frankly, could not care less. They are basically happy with the status quo. I am certain most would not like to see an independent Taiwan. On the other hand, virtually none want to see Chinese fighting Chinese. So the views I get are basically let's keep the status quo. To this day I hear arguments that the communists usurped power and that the real nation of China is Taiwan. They add that Beijing is now the capital of a new nation The People's Republic of China. This is utter b/s. The fact is that nations the world over change their governments, some by revolution, most by an electoral process. Nations also change their names without its having any effect on their international status. We no longer talk of Northern Rhodesia and Southern Rhodesia. These same lands are now called Zambia and Zimbabwe!

Hong Kong The reason for the breaking the rules was basically an indirect result of of the 1992 General Election in the UK. This was the first after Margaret Thatcher had been booted out and her party, the Conservatives, were expected to lose. The party Chairman was a man named Chris Patten who was an MP. By a stroke of extremely good fortune, Patten steered the Party to a small victory, but in the process lost his own parliamentary seat. The Prime Minister, John Major, wanted to elevate him to the House of Lords. Patten declined. He was offered a number of senior cabinet positions in the House of Commons. He rejected these as well. Somewhat exaxperated, i expect, Major asked him what he did want. "To become the last Governor of Hong Kong," was the reply. That Major agreed to this is staggering. Ever since the British took over Hong Kong following the Opium Wars, the Governor had always been a senior civil servant. Since WWII at least, all had spent time serving in the British Embassy in Beijing, all spoke Mandarin Chinese and knew - and were known by - the Chinese leadership. Patten was a self-serving politician. He had never served in China. Knew no Chinese and none of the country's leaders. He also had a particular disliking of the British Civil Service! Hong Kong had had no democracy of note until a Democratic Party was formed in 1994. Its membership was small and it never gained more than a few seats in elections. In Hong Kong the Governor was all powerful, in fact wielding more power than the British Prime Minister in the UK. Successive Governors had squashed the idea of democracy. And with the 1984 signing of the Joint Agreement on Hong Kong's future after 1997 and the subsequent Basic Law agreed by both parties in 1990, neither party wanted any furtherance of democracy - in the short term, although the Chinese promised under the Agreements gradually to expand the democratic franchise over the following decade (whch incidentally they did). Patten arrived in Hong Kong without the usual pomp and ceremony of the arrival of Governors. But he had a secret agenda. He was going to be Hong Kong's saviour by immediately extending the electoral franchise to root democracy so firmly the Chinese could not unravel it. To do this, he gathered around him a very small group of like-minded officials who spent a year going through the Joint Agreement and Basic Law with a tooth comb to pick apart every phrase and comma to find a means to achieve his end. Far worse than this being in secret, he had an old pal of his, the highly respected BBC journalist Jonathan Dimbleby, secretly come to Hong Kong several times during to film him devising this new future for Hong Kong. The resultant book and TV series The Last Governor came as a complete surprise to the people of Hong Kong with whose lives he was playing. When the Chinese heard what was going on, they were - as can be expected - fury personified. Since there was no way they would agree to Patten breaking the Agreements, he held a media conference and announced them himself, all but daring the Chinese to oppose them. Not surprisingly, the Chinese broke off all negotiations and informed the British that the "through train", the political term for the continuation of the form of British administration after 1997, would be abandoned. They would put in their own legilature and other political machinery. Patten had gambled with the lives of amost 6 million people - and lost. I will leave the last word with one of Patten's predecessors in the government of Hong Kong. This is an excerpt from a Huffington Post article. The late John Walden, director of home affairs in the colonial government until the early 1980s, lived through this British hypocrisy most of his life. Calling the late introduction of democracy to Hong Kong a "grand illusion." he added "If I personally find it difficult to believe in the sincerity of this sudden and unexpected official enthusiasm for democratic politics it is because throughout the 30 years I was an official myself, from 1951 to 1981, 'democracy' was a dirty word. Officials were convinced that the introduction of democratic politics into Hong Kong would be the quickest and surest way to ruin Hong Kong's economy and create social and political instability." Very sadly, how right he proved to be!

Just for information, as many readers are aware I post unattributed photos of nude guys in the photo thread. In purely legal terms, pornography on the internet is banned in Thailand. Yet the vast majority of my pics are non-pronographic. Yet the sites keep being banned. The latest one that I have been using I discovered has been banned from today. According to CTN News on May 11, 22% of sites allegedly showing pronigraphy are banned in the Kingdom. https://www.chiangraitimes.com/tech/internet-censorship-in-thailand/