PeterRS

Multi-national talks with Iran had been going on for years until Trump killed them in his first term. Now he reckoned a deal could be done with a country which loathes him in just 24 hours. What planet does he think he now commands? With J D Vance having failed miserably in both the objectives set for his recent trip - the reelection of the vile Orban in Hungary and getting a deal with Iran - I hope he realises that he is unikely to last long in Trump's orbit.

Thai banks - and I believe WU - will require a formal valid ID.

But as with Trump and some others, the real problem for any electorate is it does not know that when you first give them power! I see that following has spat with the Pope, Trump posted an illustration on his media platform of him as Jesus. After a torrent of anger from his Christian supporters it was taken down. But it is all over the media now. Interesting that a warplane features in the image!

Ah but the crows have finally disappeared. The anti-crow devices you get cheaply from several stores are remarkably effective. So he'd have to bring his own alarm clock 🤪 Seeing how hotel prices are going up, I now have to charge for the balcony, although as a member he'd get a very substantial discount on $908 per night LOL

A fascinating article with a new hotel for @Olddaddy - the US$908 per night Siri Sala Private Thai Villa! 🤪 Curious, though, that there is no mention of Bangkok still sinking. Already the city sits an average of only 0.5-1.5 meters above sea level. Largely due to the soil on which the city is built and the idiocy of the post WWII period when many of the khlongs were filled in with concrete to create wide roads, Bangkok is now sinking at the rate of 1cm - 2cm per year. Much less than during the 1970s but added to the effects of sea rise as a result of global warming, some experts suggest parts of the city will be under water within 30 years. As Professor Seree Supratid, the director of climate change and disaster centre at Rangsit Centre, stated in an aticle almost two years ago - "We cannot avoid such catastrophic flooding. This is not fortune telling, this is science." He added it was difficult to find politicians willing to fund construction projects that could take up to 20 years to complete. Normally they are not interested because they say, "I am elected for four years, I will not think for more than four years," so this is a big problem for us. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-08-11/bangkok-is-sinking-residents-warn-rising-seas-will-swallow-city/102559364 This Buddhust Temple in Khun Samut Chin Village is surrounded by water and only stands firm because the temple's monks arranged to have walls built around it more than 20 years ago.

I doubt the cost of living has much to do with it. The much weaker ¥ accounts for the present difference in prices. Japan used to be considerably more expensive than Hong Kong.

A very good and pertinent point in this discussion. To add to it: the war in Laos was a covert CIA operation that never had congressional approval. It was a secret war. Almost unbelievably, for an average of 9 entire years the USA dropped one planeload of bombs over Laos every 8 minutes. Think about that for a moment and take it in. This tiny landlocked third world country had more bombs dropped on it than the entire number dropped on Germany AND Japan combined during WWII. And the USA still refuses to pay for the destruction of the roughly one third of these cluster bombs that failed to explode, ordinance that has already killed 20,000 Lao people since the end of the undeclared war - mostly children as @zoomomancs points out. At the present rate it will take 100 more years to clear the country of this horrendous debacle. https://www.bbc.com/audio/play/p0fjwcjy https://www.bbc.com/audio/play/p0fjwcjy

Yet at the time he was awarded the top job both legally and constitutionally. I have written above how Iran has had no free and fair elections since the ouster of Mosaddegh in 1953 by the Americans and British. Since you have brought up Hitler, it is perhaps wise to recall that without the punishing reparations that totally crippled Germany at the Versailles Treaty, the groundswell which enabled AH to rise to power in the 1920s might well have shifted against him. Speculation, I agree. But when peoples had to take cash in wheelbarrows to pay for a loaf of bread, any lifeline out of such degradation can seem almost a miracle. And that holds good for Iran. We are told that having got rid of many of the leaders of the old regime, the Israelis and their allies the USA have ended up with an even more hard line lot. True or not, I do not know, but I believe that the more the USA tries to punish Iran, the more the people will hate that country. When will the USA realise that influencing the rest of the world with wars and interfering in other coutries' politics is just not in their best interests? Since 1945 the USA has lost almost every war it entered in a developing country. As former US Secretary of Defense Robert Gates states frankly in his 2014 memoir Duty: "the US is good at overthrowing governments but has no idea what to do when it comes to their replacements". Sending J D Vance into Hungary to support the despised Victor Orban was probably the final nail in his coffin as his oppponent won an astonishing two thirds majority. Trump and his merry band of yes-men cohorts should first sort out the sometimes horrible problems in their own country before interfering with others.

And Trump and his acolytes have zero idea of the lessons of history. Had he just looked at the quagmire of Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam, he would have kept well away from Iran. One look at the several major disasters from Bush 2's war with Iraq would have been another lesson. One reading of Robert McNamara's long mea culpa In Retrospect would have brought home precisely how the disasters and deaths happening in Vietnam were a direct result of the misguided and wrong policies which he and his Washington colleagues were actually advocating. He would have realised that the American Consul in East Pakistan was almost daily begging Washington to take action with West Pakistan to stop its monstrous bloodshed which they described as "selective genocide." Washington did nothing. No one knows how many actually died but historians estimate it could have been as high as 3 million.

You think the Iranian people are fighting for free and fair elections? What planet are you on? Hardly any now know what that means! Ever since the Brits and the CIA mounted the coup that got rid of their last freely elected Prime Minister Mosaddegh in 1953, there have never been free and fair elections. Iranians have only known dictatorships, increasingly repressive, megalomaniacal and murderous ones. Iranians do not forget that it was the USA's weapons and cash that enabled the hated Shah to hold on to power and to continue through his Sawak Secret police his murderous regime. Without all that American aid, the Shah could never have survived - and the result of that would almost certainly have been no Khomeini. Nor do Iranians forget that when Saddam Hussein started the 8-year Iraq/Iran War, it was with Saddam that the USA sided. And what happened to Saddam? The Iranians know well that the USA turned 180º against him. Further, as we now know from CIA documents declassifed in 2013, the USA never once pushed Saddam to stop using chemical weapons against the Iranians. https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2013/08/26/215733981/new-details-on-how-u-s-helped-saddam-as-he-gassed-iran Which country called Iran part of the "Axis of Evil"? Which country has not only frozen vast sums of cash owed to the Iranians, it has persuaded others to do so as well leading to the Iranians being owed around $100 billion of its own cash? Which has led the movement to place sanction after sanction on the country? You clearly forget these were all actions of or started by the USA and pressed on its allies. And if you think Iranians in general might even consider placing any trust in the USA which with its ally Israel has also bombed the hell out of them in recent weeks - starting, let's recall with a US missile which murdered 170+ girls aged 7-12 in their school - you have with respect very little idea about Iranian thinking. FYI this mural still remains on the wall of the old US Embassy building in Teheran! PS: I doubt if the Iranians hold much faith in free and fair elections. They wiill have noted that such a process elected Trump and Netanyahu!

The US could not occupy Iran. Let's get that very clear. It did indeed occupy Iraq with near disastrous consequences for it had no clue what it was really doing - one result being the rise of ISIS. But Iran is four times larger than Iraq - four times! Further, the deserts in Iran are nothing like the deserts in Iraq. They are not sand. They are basically a wide mix of some of the highest stony sand dunes on the planet, barren salty desert and high rugged mountains. Desert areas cover more than 50% of the country. Only around 10% of the country is what we might call lowland. Then there is the heat! Some of the hottest temperatures ever recorded on our planet were 82.2ºC (180ºF) near Iran's Qeshm Dayrestan Airport in August last year. For a long time the Lut Desert had the highest temperature ever recorded on earth at 70.7ºC. That was exceeded last year when the Lut Desert recorded 80ºC. Humans die at such temperatures if exposed for much more than ten minutes without massive hydration. How long would troops carrying a lot of equipment last? Remember, too, that Iran has a severe shortage of water. While we're at it, let's also recall that if the present negotiations in Pakistan fail and Trump is idiotic enough to try and invade, he will be doing so at the hottest time of the year. I would certainly fear for the lives of US forces in such conditions, the more so as you have to cross deserts to get to many population centres. On my two-week trip to Iran in 2017, I had to spend two days crossing deserts and each time I prayed the car I was in would not break down! Then there is the population. Before the war, Iraq had a population of between 24 and 25 million with 432,000 in its armed forces. Iran's population is generally agreed to be around 92 million and we know that it has much larger armed forces than Iraq in the Revolutionary Guard. We also know that Iranians are a proud and passionate people, jealous of their 2,500 year old Empire. Iraq only became a state in 1921. America's forces are already almost overstretched. A ground war would require massive conscription. After the disaster of Vietnam, the US public will never stand for that again unless the US homeland is being invaded. https://www.worldweatherattribution.org/human-induced-climate-change-compounded-by-socio-economic-water-stressors-increased-severity-of-5-year-drought-in-iran-and-euphrates-and-tigris-basin/

There is no way the US can occupy Iran.

I think the reason Japan now seems more affordable is simply because it is!! The ¥ has fallen by more than half its value against the US$ and the spa owners don't seem to have been quick of the mark at adjusting prices. On the other hand, why should they adjust prices given that the vast majority of their clients are Japanese guys? With the usual large number of Chinese tourists virtually banned from visiting Japan by their government, now is almost as cheap as the Japan has been for tourists for decades.

Thanks for taking us behind the paywall. As far as the above comment is concerned, today it does indeed seem farcical. But looking 2 or 3 years into the future, is it any more farcical that Germany would become an ally of the UK and the USA, or that Vietnam become an ally of the USA? Israel is never going to get rid of Iran and Iran is never going together rid of israel. I can certainly see a situation where the Middle East is torn apart and then carved up between them. Surely that would be preferential to a bunch of individual states which were carved out of the desert and created from scratch by Brtain and other colonial powers?

Do we know for sure that Netanyahu persuaded Trump? To me that is spin and I have no idea if it is true or false. I believe Netanyahu is very much at the bottom of the quagmire the US is now in, but I doubt if Trump would have started a war unless he knew Netanyahu was going to back him up with a vast arsenal of weaponry. I know little about AI. But if his vdos are AI speak, they sure make a great deal of sense.