PeterRS

You are indeed the exception! And thankfully so otherwise we would not have been able to read such detailed reports on other parts of the region.

We all know that the Holy Spirit is not what moves the Cardinals as they sit in the glorious creation that is the Sistine Chapel. They meet days in advance, engage in what are essentially political dialogues and encourage others to vote for their favoured candidates. They form cabals! Today CNN provides evidence of a large dossier handed out to cardinals. Titled “The College of Cardinals Report,” it offers profiles on around 40 papal candidates, including a breakdown on where they stand on topics such as same-sex blessings, ordaining female deacons and the church’s teaching on contraception. The subtext: Choose a pope who will take the church in a different direction to Pope Francis – whose progressive reforms angered some conservatives. The project has been led by two Catholic journalists, Edward Pentin, who is from Britain, and Diane Montagna, from the United States – both of whose work appears on traditionalist and conservative Catholic news sites. Montagna has been handing the book to cardinals entering and leaving the pre-conclave meetings, Reuters reported . . . The report was compiled in association with Sophia Institute Press, a traditionalist-leaning publishing house based in New Hampshire, and Cardinalis, a magazine based in Versailles, France. Sophia Institute Press publishes the radically anti-Francis “Crisis Magazine” and in 2019 published the book “Infiltration,” which claims that in the 19th century, a group of “Modernists and Marxists” hatched a plan to “subvert the Catholic Church from within.” Meanwhile, Cardinalis regularly features articles on prominent conservative cardinals. https://edition.cnn.com/2025/05/06/world/cardinals-pope-conclave-dossier-candidates-intl

But Hong Kong has no postal codes!

Nice story but pretty certain it's apocryphal. The opera at Bayreuth builds its own scenery in Bavaria! There is also the true story of London Bridge which was discovered to be sinking with one side sinking more than the other. Someone on the Council had the idea of trying to sell it. An American entrepreneur from Missouri decided to buy it, paying US$2,460,000 for it in 1968. It was reconstructed in Havasu Lake City. Arizona in 1971. Rumour at the time assumed the entrepreneur thought he was buying the more famous Tower Bridge and not any old common or garden bridge! That's a small number! The Scottish city of Aberdeen has 29 city namesakes around the world including 18 in the USA, one in South Africa, one in Hong Kong and 2 in Jamaica. Confusing!

Headline on today's BBC website - Americans used to be steadfast in their support for Israel. Those days are gone https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cr4n90g6v9qo Given Israel's actions against the general population in Gaza and elsewhere, is that surprising? 52,000 murdered in Gaza - a great many being women and children. Major preventions re aid for the general population. No more need be said.

The weather is often so bad they usually swim! 🤣 No anthrax reported from what I read.

1. No. I've been there a few times since 1983 but could never live there. And i still think that few retirees there spend much time each year jetting around elsewhere. 2. Same as you - I'm generally a big city guy. But for quite a few years I also loved travellng around, often to smaller places both in Thailand and other countries. Much less so now. But then I'm happy to do so being based in Thailand. I would not be happy doing so were I based in Bali. I've never been keen on travelling in other parts of Indonesia.

It looks like Trump is trying to do almost what Japan has been doing basically since the Meiji Restoration. After the fall of the shoguns, Japan had to open up to trade. This meant accepting some foreigners. This increased as it employed specialist skills from overseas in building up its military forces. The start of the economic boom in the 1960s and 70s also saw a need for foreign labour, most permitted temporary resident status only for five years. But it has almost always been temporary. It's hard for many peoople to accept that a country which was closed off for a quarter of a millennium should be concerned about cultural differences. But this is certainly one reason why successive governments have been concerned about balancing its cultural identity with opening its doors to foreign workers. When I worked there in the early 1990s, I was the only foreigner in a company with around 45 Japanese. Even though it was the branch of an American company and all the managers spoke pretty good English, little things were always being put in my way to make it clear that although I was working in a Japanese office, I was not Japanese. I had a good friend who happened to be the CEO of the UK textile company Courtaulds. One evening I invited him and his wife to dinner. I explained my frustration at these little niggling annoyances. He said I should pay no attention to them as it was just part of Japanese business culture. Even he in his very senior position was subject to the same frustrations! Japan very quickly has to do something to cope with its very low birth rate and rapidly ageing population. The government cannot sit on its thumbs and hope the situation will just go away.

Not nearly a valid comparison, in my view. Bangkok is a huge city compared to anything in Bali - population well over ten times the size of Denpasar. Sure, it also probably has at least ten times the number of tourists. But you cannot compare a major city in a very large country with a far smaller one on a relatively small island. Also, my own view - I'm sure not shared by many others - is that I would primarily be interested in Bali, its landscapes, its people and basically its Hindu culture which is quite different from the rest of Indonesia. I would not wish to retire to Bali and then spend my time jetting to other parts of Indonesia. Do most retirees in Pattaya spend a lot of time jetting around to other parts of the region?

I was only in that part of Vietnam for 10 days in 2020 before everything closed due to covid. But the moment I arrived in Da Nang airport, I had approaches from the apps. As I was going immediately to Hoi An and then Hue, I was not able to meet a guy in Da Nang for a week. But he was amazing. Mid-20s, liked westerners, knew the area like the back of his hand, spoke near perfect English, wanted to come to the hotel - and we had a great time for my remaining two days. He even came to the airport to see me off! He was not an MB. Just a guy trying to run a small business who enjoyed sex. He wanted no money. All I bought were coffees, simple lunches and dinners and some lovely cocktails in the hotel bar. If there was a long term visa, I am certain I would really enjoy retiring to that area of Vietnam. But I would plan on learning some basic Vietnamese.

35 or so years ago I would have jumped at the chance of selecting Bali as a retirement haven. That was before I saw the unfortunate changes as a result of mass tourism in 2005. It remains a beautiful island with over 4 million inhabitants but only has around 30,000 foreigners living there - and some of these are from Java. That's a big enough pool to make friends. But selecting the place to find an apartment or small Balinese house for me would be the most difficult. Personally I would loathe Denpasar, Nusa Dua or Kuta and other built-up areas as a place to which to retire. I'm also not sure i would like to be on an island that annually attracts nearly 6.5 million tourists with the majority coming from Australia (by far the largest) and India.

Land ownership is different in the cities and the countryside. In the former, ownership of land is not possible. In the latter, special land cooperatives own the land. In effect, though, Chinese can only own the property built on the land. I believe the lease period for residential ownership is 70 years. Property prices have skyrocketed since the government started to permit private ownership only around 30 years ago. Gradually that set off a boom in home construction, one which spiralled out of control partly due to demand. House prices in some cities are now mega. An 80-square meter apartment near the centre of Shanghai will set you back US$886,000. Down payment requirements can often be s high as 80%. On the outskirts of the city, the price plummets to $200,000. In Beijing, the average price across the whole city is around $310,000. Perhaps surprisingly, mortagages are not popular in China. Only 18% of buyers tap into the mortgage market. In 2012 whereas the Chinese mortgage to GDP ratio was just 15%, in the USA it was 81.4%. Even though average wages in China are well below western standards, families and other social connections provide the finance to enable home purchase. Despite their high price, something like 90% of the country own their own homes. One reason is that Chinese are among the highest savers in the world with a savings rate that equates to almost 50% of GDP. This is one target of President Xi's government as it tries to get the economy back on track. Get people out and spend more of their savings! https://breznikar.com/article/how-people-in-china-afford-their-outrageously-expensive-homes/1781

I'm not sure he ever had much of what we would term sense. As I have written in another thread, his mentor from the time he started in business was the ghastly Roy Cohn. Described as "one of the most reviled men in American history," Cohn was a lawyer of the most notorious kind, a tax cheat and swindler who counted mobsters as well as Presidents among his clients. He was indicted four times for stock-swindling, obstructing justice, perjury, bribery, conspiracy, extortion, blackmail and filing false reports. Three times he was aquitted and the fourth ended in a mistrial "giving him a kind of sneering, sinister sheen of invulnerability." Trump is following the Cohn playbook virtually to the letter. "Deflect and distract, never give in, never admit fault, lie and attack, lie and attack, publicity no matter what, win no matter what, all underpinned by a deep, prove-me-wrong belief in the power of chaos and fear."

As mentioned in an earlier post, remember that May 1-5 was the main Chinese Spring holiday. I doubt if you will see anything like that number of Chinese tourists next week-end. We also have to remember that the Chinese economy is facing huge problems. The real estate market is a total disaster area and the government does not know how to solve this problem. Millions of ordinary Chinese are affected with vast numbers of apartments pre-bought but not completed and the developers are bankrupt. This goes for huge housing estates as well as smaller ones. Consequently a lot of Chinese are spending more on domestic travel than they usd to on overseas travel. And the real estate crash is not confined to China. The major Chinese developers expanded overseas. One example is the US$100 billion investment in Forest City in the south of Malaysia. Started in 2016 and hailed as the city of the future for 700,000 residents, it had the backing of the then Malaysian government. The developer was Country Garden, one of the top half dozen developers in China. In 2023 it defaulted on $11 billion of its overseas bonds and was declared bankrupt. Its total debts a year ago were estimated as $200 billion. Now Forest City has less than 10,000 residents. Many middle-class buyers, both Chinese and Malaysian, are saddled with unlivable properties and mounting debts. Commercial property sales in the development are all but zero. As all the media have reported, Forest Cty is quite literally a "ghost town". This is how Foreest City was advertised This from the BBC a year ago https://resident.com/real-estate/2024/12/01/forest-city-malaysia-a-100-billion-ghost-town-what-happened Youth unemployment is another disaster area, especially for university graduates. The last number quoted by the government was around 21%. Thereafter it has ceased issuing any figures at all. Granted, China is a very big country, but a big majority of Chinese are now worried about their savings.

When you purchase an Apple product you have the option of purchasing an AppleCare plan. These are often not cheap but they make repairs far cheaper than normal. I assume the Bt.3,300 would be the replacement cost IF ypur friend had purchased the AppleCare package.

Watched it and was mesmerised by it. Less by the machinations or indeed the unexpected ending, more as you mention by the acting and its superb direction. I do not think Ralph Fiennes and Stanley Tucci have given better performances in their long careers. And I loved the direction, especially the frequent holding of the camera for slightly longer than usual on questioning faces which only added to the indecision. In another thread I gave an instance of books about Popes which I found fascinating - both by the Catholic historian John Cornwell. The first is "Hitler's Pope: The Secret History of Pius XII" which argues that this Pope fatally undermined the Catholic Church with his endorsement of Hitler during his time serving as papal nuncio in Berlin and later as Cardinal Secretary of State . It remains a devastating condemnation of a man who used his influence to become Pope - even though during the war he did some good in sheltering Jews. A second edition mutes Cornwell's criticism, but only slightly. "A Thief in the Night", surprisingly has two different sub-titles in the version available on amazon - "Life and Death in the Vatican" and "The Mysterious Death of John Paul 1". With the world, especially the Catholic world, ablaze with rumours of skullduggery and even murder, the Vatican finally opened its archives to Cornwell in an attempt finally to dispel rumours about the sudden death of the smiling Pope only 33 days after his election. Cornwell found a plethora of instances of supreme and unforgivable inefficiency, but none of murder. I wonder if you have read much if anything about Pope Paul IV? This is part of an article I wrote ssome years ago - "By the mid-1500s the Catholic Church was an ambitiously corrupt and licentious organization. The Church had wavered massively from its strict, pious, moral, incorrupt principles. With the Renaissance almost at its height and more and more artists celebrating the male nude, one Catholic Pope realised he had some cleaning up to do. The decrepit, rigidly austere, authoritarian Pope Paul IV, tormented by rheumatism who had been elected to office at age 79 decided anything that looked immoral would just have to go. "Called by all who encountered him as 'God’s wrath incarnate', Paul was universally loathed. In his book 'Vicars of Christ: The Dark Side of the Papacy' Peter De Rosa, an alumnus of the Gregorian University in Rome, says of Paul IV, ”'His massive head was shaped like Vesuvius in whose shadow he was born. He, too, erupted without warning, spewing out destruction and death. His shaggy beard and craggy brow gave him a savage look; his cratered eyes, red and blotchy, shone like burning lava. His cracked voice, seldom free from catarrh, rolled and thundered, demanding instant, blind obedience.' "In what became known as 'The Fig Leaf Campaign' Paul determined that dicks on male nudes in the Vatican were out and plaster fig leaves were in. Not to be too hard (sic) on the male figures, the decision eventually extended to all genitalia, buttocks and woman’s breasts – all the fun bits, as one blogger nicely put it. Thus began the great cover-up . . . "Thanks to a succession of anti-dick Popes, all male statues in the Vatican and across European Churches were henceforth to become dick-less. In 1982 one Donovan Essen visited a newish building in the Vatican Museums where he was shown a wall of stone penises – over 100 limply hanging as if by a thread! Yet on his return in 2010 to show his wife this curious display, the exhibit had disappeared. When asked about its new location, the attendants professed no knowledge. Clearly this is a mystery which author Dan Brown could profitably take up. “'The Vatican and its Missing Male Members' might make an intriguing title!"

I'm not on any social media and so did not see the meme you refer to. As for sending shivers down one's spine, I would think someone is playing some sort of game here. The fact is that if found guilty of this law, the punishment is well known - up to 15 years in prison. Like it or not, that is the law. As far as I can recall, though, few foreigners found guilty serve more than a few months in prison. Usually their visas are revoked and they leave the country.

I think there is no need to be too sensitive about the lèse majesté law - other to avoid any criticism of it. The fact is it exists and we have to be fully aware of it. In Mr. Chambers case, the provincial prosecutors announced at the end of last week they would not prosecute him on the basis of the lèse majesté law. However this decision has also to be approved by the Commissioner of Police in that province. There are other lesser issues involved. Presumably these will be cleared up if the Commissioner of Police accepts the prosecutors' proposal. https://edition.cnn.com/2025/05/01/asia/thailand-lese-majeste-paul-chambers-intl-hnk

Perhaps Risibleus II

Not quite the same, but there is I believe still an organisation named the Long Yang Club with branches in various parts of the world. Mostly in Europe and the USA. In Australasia I note the website still lists Manila, Hong Kong, Bangkok, Sydney wiht a branch being planned for Taipei. When formed this was primarily for guys from each country to meet up in a social environment - drinks and eats - with either visitors who wanted to meet local Asians or foreigners living in the city. They are not hook up joints. Many years ago I once went with some friends to the Bangkok Club which was then based in Sri Bumphen - very close to the Malaysia hotel. Most people there seemed to know each other quite well but still were very welcoming to us. No idea what it is like now. The name Longyang refers to a nobleman in the Chinese Zhou Dynasty some 2,500 years ago or thereabouts. A beautiful young man he was the Emperor's favourite. This became an example of the openness of the Zhou courts to homosexuality. Since then, Longyang has frequently been used in Chinese literature as a euphemism for gay men. https://longyangclub.org/newsite/directory

May 1 - 5 is always a major holiday in China. The other fixed date one is National Day when everyone has a week off from October 1.

Ha! Yes, the English do things differently 🤣

I think anyone barring a Welshman would have difficulty with the longest village name in the world - Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch! Bear in mind that Scotland also has its own language and as you travel around you see many towns and cities with names in English and Gaelic. The capital city of Edinburgh is also known as Dùn Èideann. It's of little interest but New Zealand's similarly pronounced Dunedin was so named as its early settlers were mostly Scottish and felt it was the capital of the south! In general though, I often find knowing a litte of a language - especially if your pronounciation is good - can lead to problems. My knowledge of Cantonese, Mandarin, Japanese and Thai is very poor but I have quite a good ear and my pronounciation is generally similarly good. But this can lead to others in those countries who then think I can actually speak the language!

So? If you do not understand, then there is no point even tryng to enlighten you!

Now he has done it! Just days after saying he would like to be Pope, Trump has posted this AI photo on his social media site. Is there no depth to which this idiot will stoop?