PeterRS

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/

Two days ago it started around 5:00 am with the loudest crack of thunder which woke me up. Today it started about an hour ago (10:50 am) and it remains very gray outside with rain lashing down.

It has arrived earlier than usual. And the amount of rain has been considerably greater than usual. Normally you could expect an hour or so fo rain followed by some nice sunny weather. Two days ago Bangkok had five hours of continuous rain.

The China issue is fascinating on several levels - economic, military, socially around the world. and so on.We know that China is going through a lot of economic pain right now. The real estate market is totally bankrupt and this used to be a key factor in determining the country's GDP. Youth unemployment has passed the 21% mark. It is now so bad the Chinese have stopped issuing monthly figures. Yet we also know that with US markets increasingly subject to sanctions, the Chinese have not been idle. They have been carving out markets in many other parts of the world. President Xi's Belt & Road initiative is expressely intent on expanding China's markets. Yet its sabre-rattling continues over Taiwan, an issue I have discussed in several other threads here if only because I believe China historically and diplomatically does in fact have the legitimate claim to the island. But it is an island and a people I love and visit 3 or 4 times a year. Interestingly, I think, not one of my friends there believes China will try to take back Taiwan by force. Having lived and worked in Hong Kong for the better part of four decades since the end of the 1970s, I believed China's promises re the 1997 handover. And I believe China did fulfil its promises. It was the British and their idiotic and ultimately impossible attempt to introduce democracy in the last years of their rule when they totally broke their Agreements with China and as a result opened a massive pandora's box. Why had they waited more than a century before atempting to introduce any form of democracy when they had specifically promised the Chinese there would be no change in the status quo? China has every right to blame the British - and I write as a citizen of that country. By 2012 Hong Kong was progressing towards a form of anarchy which China would never have allowed on its borders. It is especially sensitive about these borders - as we have seen sadly in both Tibet and with the Uighurs in Xinjiang Province and we are now seeing in war-torn Myanmar. Even earlier at the end of the 1960s, there was amost a nuclear war between China and Russia re a border dispute. With riots and the attempts to build on Britain's last governor's hollow promises, it had no option - it had to do something in Hong Kong. Having been there several times last year, I abhor what is happening. But anyone with any real knowledge of modern China would have known that by breaking the jointly negotiated Agreements Britain's last governor was playing with a deadly fire and his actions were bound to result in a crackdown of some description. So in terms of Taiwan, I believe had Britain allowed Deng Xiao-ping's concept of one-country-two-systems actually to work in Hong Kong, it could have been a model for Taiwan. That is now a dead duck. The assumption of most in the west seems to be that the Taiwanese want independence. That is just not true! What most fail to realise is that Taiwan is split virtually down the middle on whether it wishes to become an independent sovereign state or retain the status quo or become part of China. In the latest 2023 poll, just under 50% wanted independence. And I find it hard to think of any other reason why the USA would find itself in a war with China. Although there is an Agreement (not sure if it is a Treaty as such) that the US will come to Taiwan's aid if attacked by China, realistically what can it possibly do? China is a massive military and nuclear power. It is no Vetnam, Iraq or Afghanistan! Will the American public stand for yet another war in Asia when it lost the last one so badly? I suspect there is presently a majority of hawks in Congress who would quickly vote in favour - until their constituents come down on them like a ton of bricks saying "stop". A war on the basis of trade? That won't happen if only because it is in neither side's interest to allow it to happen in my view.

All the above assumes that the release of a wrongly accused person will result in his having the rest of his life to enjoy new found riches. The effect of wrong incarceration may not give the released that chance. In 1976 in the UK, 23-year old Stefan Kiszcko, a young man of Ukrainian heritage discovered to have a mental age of 12, was sentenced to life in prison for sexual assault and the murder of a young woman. His conviction partly hinged on three 13-year old girls having accused him of indecent exposure days earlier. One of the girls had told a major newspaper that Kiszco was "a monster". The police had advised him he could "go home" if he confessed. The confession was later retracted. It was only a result of his mother's continued persistence in pursuing her son's innocence that irregularities in the actions of both the police and her son's defence team resulted in the sentence being quashed. He was finally released 16 years later in 1992 after he was found to be infertile whereas sperm had been found in the victim. The girls then withdrew their allegations, stating they had only made the accusation "for a laugh". The real culprit was eventually found and jailed. In the meantime, Kiszco, emotionally and mentally broken, suffered a massive heart attack and died after just one year of liberty. His ordeal was described by one member of parliament as "the worst miscarriage of justice of all time." Neither he nor his mother received the full £500,000 he had been promised. There was an interesting programme on UK television more than a year ago. It was an experiment to try to find out what goes on as a jury deliberates. Following a mock trial, with cameras following their deliberations both juries eventually delivered a verdict. The result - one of "guilty" and the other of "not guilty"! Which in my view helps to prove that trial by a jury of one's peers is not the ideal way of procuring justice.

Why should it be up to anyone else to comment of another's affairs of the heart? Shakespeare said it best in the first Act of A Midsummer Night's Dream - "the course of true love never did run smooth." Beware, though. That play features the magic potion which, when applied to the eyelids of somone who is asleep, on wakening that person falls instantly in love with the first living thing he sets eyes on. Just in case such a potion is available in Pattaya, make sure there are no geckos or frogs in your bedroom! You might have a problem with your air ticket home! LOL

As we have been experiencing, the heavy rain is forecast to last until around May 25. The Thai Meteorological Department has forecast the onset of the rainy season, with continuous rainfall expected from May 13-17 and May 18-22, 2025, driven by a strengthening southwest monsoon. The department warns of widespread rain, with 70-80% of Central, Eastern Thailand, and Bangkok affected, while the South faces risks of flash flooding. photo and story: Pattaya Daily News

I fully accept your point. My point was much more mundane. In 1986 and 1987, the years prior to this poor man's incarceration, the Mir Space station had just been launched, Pixar had just been invented, the Space Shuttle Challenger expoded, the Chernobyl nuclear reactor exploded, the Big Mac was introduced, The Phantom of the Opera opened in London, the British car Ferry The Herald of Free Enterpise sank in 90 seconds killing 193, first-ever RugbyWorld Cup was held, Agreement between Britain and France to build the Channel Tunnel signed, Black Monday when the DJ ndex lost 508 points etc. These are all happenings which may still be in the memory of Mr. Sullivan. We have no idea how much he read the newspapers or whether he watched tlevision news, but out of prison he can talk to no-one basically about what happened outside for the last 38 years. Does he know about buying in supermarkets, riding in buses, smartphones, tablets, laptop computers, ATM machines, computer banking - in other words all the things we take for granted if only because we have been living normal lives. How active is his brain? Does he know how to integrate socially? For more than half his life he has virtually only been talking with prisoners and guards. Feeling confortable talking with other people is not something that just happens! In other words, how is he going to fit into this new world socially - not economically.

It's an interesting discussion - who was worse? Much as i absolutely loathe Trump for all the reasons so far expounded, I also agree that by the thinnest of margins, Bush was worse. First he should never have become President. All that ridiculous hanging chad business should have seen Al Gore succeed Clinton. I think most now agree with that. It did highlight, though, how backward the US voting system is. Not in terms of voting for governors or congressmen and women or even District Attorneys and Sheriff's - although I think the USA takes this idea of democracy way too far. No! I mean in terms of a General Election in which the entire nation paricipates. I know how much states' rights etc. are valued, but a General Election affects not just states, it affects the country as a whole. And if a country of the size and importance of the USA cannot get a standard voting system that is as accurate and fair as in, say, the UK (despite the little flaws it may possess), something is seriously wrong. Equally, as have written before, the seemingly desperate desire for all in US public life to cling on to what worked 200 or more years ago is just ridiculous, surely! Why wait for more than two entire months between the results of votes being announced and a new President taking office. What mayhem could an existing President indulge in during that period. In the UK, the result is announced one day and the incoming Prime Minister is installed the next. The US no longer has to work on hand count after hand count and then use covered wagons in relaying the results to Washington does it? Then there is the four year term limit. 200 years ago that might have made sense. Today it makes none - unless the US votes more often than not for idiots to the top job! Internationally you cannot have one President start a raft of programmes and then another ditch them in favour of his own a few years later. Example 1. Clinton with assistance from Bill Richardson and Madelyn Albright was making progress - how much we do not know but it was definitely progress - with North Korea. In comes idiot 1 in the shape of Bush 2, calls North Korea part of an axis of evil - and boom, back to the drawing board on one nuclear state. Example 2. Iran. As long as the USA backed the Shah and the Shah happily sided with the USA but only because of all the $$$ and weaponry it gained, the US was perfectly happy for Iran to start an atomic programme and Iran agreed to regular inspections. Having totally misread the Iranian people, the USA continued with this fiction until the Iranians were fed up of their corrupt, megalomaniac leader, kicked him out and welcomed back the Ayatollah Khomeini. All change again and again back to the drawing board - but arguably a more dangerous one this time! Example 3. Iraq. The US happily propped up Saddam Hussein as a stablising force in the turbulent Middle East. Even during the 8-year Iran-Iraq war it fed oodles of cash and even more weapons to Hussein. When that ended in stalemate and Hussein was discovered to be the bully and thug he always had been by attacking Kuwait, the US changes tack once again. Bush 1 attacks but stops short of dethroning him. To save papa's face, on false pretenses Bush 2 lunches a full-out war. He then puts a cigar-chomping cowboy-boot wearing idiot like Paul Bremer with little foreign policy experience other than being a staffer in that warmonger Henry Kissinger's company into Baghdad to run the country. His first job is abolishing the Iraqi army which directly leads to ISIS - and we know where that led. Example 4. Iran again. In 2015 under Obama, the US announced its participation in a joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) to permit Iran to start a simpified programme of nuclear activity in return for getting rid of sanctions. The Agreement was signed by the USA, the UK, China, France, Germany, Russia, Iran and the EU. Throughout IEAE inspectors confirmed iran's adherence to the Agreement. In April and July 2017, Trump's administration confirmed Iran was sticking to the deal. Trump then pulled out of the deal and it collapsed. So in my view four years in a term of office is not nearly long enough. The top men in the US' main opponents Russia and China have no term limits that cannot be broken virtually at will. They can view the future through a long term lens. How can the US compete in our hugely complex world of 2025 when election depends on achievements during four year terms? Yet the US happily elects Supreme Court Justices on the basis of their politics, they adhere to no known ethics standards and are there for life! How can a sub-standard lawyer with only 2 years judicial experience like Clarence Thomas be allowed to vent his spleen and accept bribes on those who opposed his stupid nomination for almost 34 years? It surely makes no sense whatever! But I still believe Bush wins the more loathed President - at least until next week when goodness knows what Trump might do. After all, Bush is the one who claimed after his first meeting with Putin in 2001, "I looked the man in the eye. I found him to be very straight forward and trustworthy . . . I was able to get a sense of his soul." What an idiot! Bush had not the faintest grasp of foreign affairs.

I have adored that play since I first read it - even before I saw it on stage. I suspect there is a part of Hamlet in every gay of the older generation and perhaps even of the younger. I find myself at times wanting to scream at the page "Don't do this!" "Can't you see where this is leading?" Yet we can change nothing in the play and we know it is not going to end at all well for almost any character. If you love Hamlet, you absolutely have to read/see what I call it's companion play by the superb writer Tom Stoppard, Rosenkranz and Guildenstern Are Dead. They are perhaps only bit players in Shakespeare's play, but Stoppard effectively imagines a play next to a play. In other words, as you read or watch it, you have to imagine that much of Shakespeare's Hamlet is being performed just offstage to your left or right. Rosenkranz and Guildenstern are of course the two pals of Hamlet but in Shakespeare as in Stppard's play they have little idea what is really going on. They are almost permanently confused. Stoppard brilliantly starts the play with just the two characters on stage flipping coins. They are trying to work out the probability of how often they will come up 'heads' and how often 'tails'. As the curtain goes up, the coin has landed 'heads' 85 times in a row. They speculate on chance and the meaning of chance. Then they realise they have no idea why they have been summoned to Elsinore, their lives are chance and the first clue that they are as in little control of their own destinies as the coin landing 'heads' so many times. And as the title implies, they eventually have an inkling that death will be the end of their journey to England, just as most of the characters in Hamlet are dead before the curtain falls. A fabulous play!

I agree entirely with @Riobard. I have ionly just read that New York post article and find major flaws near the very start - Yes, controllers can take 45 days off to handle alleged “trauma” caused by … equipment failures. Yes, preventing plane crashes is a high-stress job, and it’s surely freaky when your radar cuts out — but that’s not trauma, and treating it as such is deeply irresponsible. One, it’s yet another major intrusion of therapy culture into everyday life, in which the slightest adverse event gets magnified into a life-altering disaster that requires endless healing time. Two, it’s literally putting other people’s lives in danger. The italics and bold face are my insertions. If I am an air traffic controller and I am responsible for - I don't know how many each controller handles at any one time but let's assume - six incoming aircraft, if my radar cuts out I'd be in a state of some considerable panic. I have the lives of, say, 1,500 people in my hands. I do not know where they are, I cannot advise them to climb or descend because I have no idea what other aircraft are in the vicinity. I have no idea if they can continue to land because I do not know what is on the runway. And the NYP terms this FREAKY? It is a helluvalot more than freaky! It's not TRAUMA? It's life-threatening in the first instance and could cost a gazillion in insurance costs if one or more plane goes down. Indeed, would any airport's insurance policies cover a total hull loss due to equipment failure. Somehow I doubt it. Lost in the discussion seems to be one reason for the stress/trauma - as stated in the NBC article in the OP "four experienced controllers and one trainee were on leave." I have no idea how many controllers are on the rota system at Newark, but if you take out that number of controllers and the possbility of others being sick, the airport surely has a problem. Why were they permitted to be on leave at the same time? Was this putting lives in danger? Only Newark management can answer that. With all respect to other responders, I do not believe for one moment that you can compare jobs of a doctor/surgeon or a firefighter with an air traffic controller. Coming from a family amost all of whom are in the medical profession. I have the utmost respect for those working in that field. An operating theatre requires the skills and 100% attention of all present, not simply the lead surgeon. But equipment failure is likely to lead to - very sadly - one death per theatre. A pandemic like covid is different and does require an "all hands on deck" working horribly long hours to keep patients alive. But that scenario is, I am pretty certain, a relatively rare occurrence in each country. Similarly one out-of-order fire hydrant, intensely frustrating though it may be, is not the end of the world for a firefighter. I wonder who remembers the television series titled "Air Crash Investigation". This focussed on a considerable number of air crashes and the reasons for them. The series covered a long time span. I recall one programme about the crash of a full Turkish Airlines DC10 outside Paris in 1973 due to the aft cargo door being closed incorrectly. Some involved air traffic control. One of these focussed on a 2002 nightime crash over the Swiss German border in an area with Swiss air traffic controllers. A DHL 757 cargo jet was flying from Italy to Belgium. In control were two very experienced pilots. At the same time a Russian Tupolev with a equally experienced crew was on an overnight chartered flight from Moscow to Barcelona. Of the complement of 69 passangers and crew, 46 were schoolchildren flying to some UNESCO arranged camp. With Swiss airspace virtually dead at that time of night, only two air traffic controllers were on duty. One was resting in an adjacent room. Although against regulations, it had been practiced for years. Only one therefore handled the very limited air traffic movements. It is a supreme irony that the children should have been on a flight two days earlier. Having arrived in Moscow by overnight train, their driver took them to the wrong airport and they missed their flight. They had to wait two days for what was to be their fatal flight. Again for reasons I cannot recall, both aircraft were permitted to ascend to the same height - effectively putting them on a collision course. About one minute prior to the collision, the air traffic controller finally realised the situation and ordered the Russian aircraft to descend immediately. But most aircraft have a TCAS system (Traffic Alert and Collission Avoidance System) which warns it of an impending collision and automatically takes avoiding action. The DHL 757 did just that and that aircraft also started automatically to descend. Moments later the planes collided. The accident enquiry found that the air traffic controller had given incorrect information about the positions of the aircraft relative to each other. Maintainenance work also meant that one radar system was out of operation. For whatever reason, the ground based optical warning system had also been switched off for maintenance. Had it been operational, it would have given the controller sufficent warning about a potential collision. The air traffic controller understandably required leave due to traumatic stress Three managers of the air traffic control company were given suspended prison sentences. The worst effect occurred 21 months after the accident. Devastated by the death of his wife and two children, one Russian father tracked down the air traffic controller at his home near the airport and stabbed him to death in front of his wife and three children. One further result of the accident enquiry was improvements to the TCAS system. That murder was definitely an extreme example of what could possibly happen to a flight controller. But who is to say it might not happen again? And some say there is little stress management required for controllers?

Dare I suggest the ever present possibility of a hangover rendering whatever the scene as boring as the drill in your head? Oops!

Oh dear, I am just not a gin drinker! On the other hand, if you made it with Belvedere Polish vodka and a dash of ginger or lime, I'd join you next time you're in Bangkok - as I assume you'l be paying. 🤣🤣🤣

I find the concept of restitution a total cop out. Nothing can restore what has been unlawfully taken away. Daily life is not something that can be bought. Seeing the sunrise, the first sip of the morning's brewed coffee, getting the kids ready for school, hearing the birds sing and the swish of the trees, setting off for work, the joys of a family holiday and Christmas, a child's wedding, the first grandchild . . . how do you compensate for missing that year in year out? A few million $$ may help to buy a nice home and take nice holidays and so on. But how does it help anyone adjust to a society and even more importantly mix in with that society that has moved on 38 years since you last tasted freedom? Does it in any way help you face the minefields of the ordinary day-to-day discourse of life in 2025 when the last you remember is life in 1987? Does living in a lovely apartment or house with gardens take away the remembrance of all those years and the clang of the cell doors of your tiny cage? Easy questions - and I just have no answer. I cannot understand how a mega-dollop of cash can compensate.

Qatar also had flights to/from Chiang Mai. But their UTP and CNX flights were not non-stops. At least one of the legs also stopped at another Thai destination - most likely Phuket.