Walker88

Yes. Many here hate folks who are what they are by accidents of birth. I like to point out that other people might find fault with people who are 100% responsible for their sad state. WHile some katoeys might engage in crime, not all do. See? If it's fair to dislike someone for an accident of birth, surely it would be okay to dislike someone for willful neglect and laziness. In other words, I was trying to make a point. Fatties, clean up your own act before you diss on others.

I guess we all have things we don't like. I have more sympathy for someone who thinks they're in the wrong type of body than I do for, say, fat people. The brain is a wildly complex organ, and depending on what happens during development in the womb, perhaps the diet of the mom, or just random gene expression, someone can emerge with a mind that thinks 'female', but in a body that says 'male'. It is not a choice. I feel fortunate---because it makes life a heck of a lot easier---that I am a 100% hetero male in a male body. Now fat people are fat because they lack discipline and self-control. Fat is 100% the fat person's fault. They are lazy, slovenly and gluttonous. They should be ashamed. The world needs to stop indulging this fantasy of 'body positive'. Nothing positive or attractive about it. Fat people also cost non-fatties money. Hospital costs are higher because many fatties have ailments and cannot pay. Insurance companies assume a certain % of people are fat, so charge premiums accordingly, which means I have to pay despite the fact I am disciplined, hit the gym, and have very low body fat. I look around and it seems maybe 1% of people are trans. Maybe about 5% are gay or lesbian, and another 5% bisexual. I really don't know the percentages. None of them chose to be those things. I also look around and see maybe 50% of people---especially Westerners---are fatties, and maybe another 35% overweight. They chose to be fat. It's 100% their own fault. I might not know 'gay' or 'lesbian' or even 'trans' when I see one, but I absolutely know fatty when I see one. So go ahead and have at trans people or any other of the alphabet types that you don't like. I reserve my scorn for the lazy fatties.

Plenty of the wealthy come to Thailand, though not as many as russians escaping conscription. The Oriental's top suites go for ~550,000 baht/night during the high season, and tend to be booked most nights. Plenty of better restaurants serve expensive wines such as Solaia or Sassicaia, or even a top French burgandy such as La Romanee Monopole. The FBO at Don Mueang will take care of the Gulfstream while the visitors enjoy high tea at the Authors Lounge. Those guests are not backpackers or budget travelers. Everybody comes to Thailand at least once. Some stay....discreetly.

Not sure if you've ever studied history, but 'destroying the environment' is hardly an invention of Boomers. Ever wonder what London air quality was 200 years ago? Were Thailand's tropical hardwood forests all cut down by Boomers? As for 'feudalistic oligarchic state', if I can guess what you mean by that, I suggest you look at other history going back to, say, Oldavai Gorge. NOBODY and NO GENERATION since humans walked upright has ever wanted to cede power nor wealth. I can see that being even stronger today, since so many young people have delusions of grandeur and think five minutes in a job means they're ready to be CEO or President.

I don't know what 'mainstream' means or how that excuses anything, but the leader of the Irgun was Menachem Begin, who went on to become Prime Minister, despite his hand in the slaughter at Deir Yassin. Prime Minister sounds pretty mainstream, and sadly, Deir Yassin was just about the first terrorist act on that land, which has subsequently led to almost 8 decades of terrorism and reprisals. Both sides gravitate toward leaders who are always ready to draw swords. Until that changes on both sides, the slaughter will continue.

I do not see there is any solution to this ongoing mess. Not now, not ever. From the time of the Lehi (Stern Gang) and Irgun, and their massacres such as Deir Yassin and the King David Hotel, to this most recent heinous barbarism by Hamas, there are no winners and lots of innocent deaths on both sides. Sadly, Hamas just created more militants on the Israeli side, and the IDF in its reprisals, which always kill innocents, will create a new generation of militants on the Palestinian side. All will exact their pound of flesh. Even two days ago some Israeli settlers murdered 4 Palestinians simply because they were Palestinians. There's never going to be turning the other cheek, only an eye for an eye. Years ago I worked the "Middle East Issue" in a foreign policy arm of the USG. The elders at that time were so cynical, they advised us youngsters, "Work this issue and you'll never be out of a job". Having dealt with both sides, I quickly realized how true that advice was, as the two sides---or their leaders, who ALL had terrorist backgrounds whether named Begin or Arafat---were incapable of ever finding a workable solution. The innocents, on both sides, will always pay the harshest price.

Those Taliban jihadis, once trump released them, went on to overthrow the Afghan govt, and they now run it. They also engineered the airport attack that left many US Marines dead. "The great dealmaker"....only if you're on the other side.

Why don't you go ahead and point out something....anything....positive about trump. -He tried to overthrow US democracy -He stole highly classified documents and then lied about it -He is a convicted sex offender -He is a convicted charity fraudster -He withheld already-approved aid to Ukraine expecting Zelenskyy to make up lies about Biden -He is a convicted fraudster (for his silly "university") -In a partial summary judgement, he was found to have committed bank and insurance fraud -He ordered his bag man to pay off a pornstar with whom he had an affair, watched the bagman convicted for the crime and sentenced to jail...all so Stormy would say again, "not quite freakishly small by well below average" -He uses tactics taught him by Roy Cohn to elicit violence from his Goobers...anyone who argues otherwise is either a liar of an idiot...trump is more transparent than a stripper's nighty -He tried to pressure the Georgia SecState to commit fraud and 'just find me 11,780 votes' -Such a child is trump that he threw a hissy fit when Forbes removed him from its 400 list, tossing out the usual "failing publication" argument...yet he demands to be on that 'failing publication's' money list -Oh, the the self-proclaimed real estate genius claimed his 10,997 sf NYC apartment was 33,000 sf

While we do get taxed on overseas' earnings, the first $120,000 is exempt from US tax.

I'm a "whatsoever". How about you? Just stayed because of your wife, eh? Didn't come for the temples? You were off to a good start with your mention of the ubiquitous bogeyman George Soros, and THE WORLD ELITE, but you had me hoping for chemtrails, Bilderbergers, Bohemian Grove and the rogue planet Nibiru. Too late to edit?

Same problem, though I was stuck between North Korea and Somalia. If I was short in stature...easy...St Helena, where I could live out my 'complex'.

Okay. I read the whole thing. It wasn't what I expected. Thailand does make it difficult to spend money, but not so much in 7-11 or Siam Paragon. Where it makes it difficult, in my opinion, are: 1) Limits on RE purchases by foreigners 2) An extremely complicated and bureaucratic process when one wants to buy/establish a business I have heard the argument about buying RE, but the reality is foreigners would not drive up prices anymore, nor put prices out of reach of the average Thai. Chinese buy plenty of property, because they find loopholes that are not available to everyone. More importantly, Thailand's 1% control 75% of all assets in Thailand. THEY are the ones keeping property out of reach of the average Thai, save for in rural areas. Regarding doing business, only Americans---via the Treaty of Amity---are allowed 100% ownership of a Thai business. Other foreigners are limited to 49%, and must find a trustworthy Thai partner. That is not always easy, especially for someone relatively new to the market. Reporting is somewhat onerous, and there are folks in positions of authority who expect tributes. A second issue is the visa bureaucracy. I know some members here are business owners, but most are retirees, married, digital nomads, or scamming the visa system. My Non-B Business Visa is now a 170 page application, done yearly, and redundant (as little has changed since the last renewal). It could be 20,000 pages and the officer would find something missing, even without looking at the tome. Whatever is missing---apparently officers can request whatever additional documents they want, such as one's 2nd grade report card---can generally be fixed instantly, albeit for a fee. That is irritating. The renewal usually costs somewhere between 50,000 and 100,000 baht. Granted that isn't make-or-break money, but the nonsense is off-putting. Things will be made worse if Thailand imposes the tax on cash inflows for those staying more than 180 days in country. Funds sent to Thailand are not necessary current income. It may well be savings from many years in the past, which has already been taxed by a home country government. Proving that is just additional expense and bureaucracy.

Besides the fact trump eff'd up Covid by denying its existence and doing nothing (such as banning flights from China, ramping up PPE production) until it has taken firm hold in the US, his economy was nothing special BEFORE Covid, as his GDP growth ranked in the bottom 30% going back to WWII. He also began running up record deficits even before Covid, and ended up adding almost $8 trillion in all before getting his butt kicked in 2020. THAT $8 trillion is what caused the subsequent inflation. Obama's job growth dwarfed his, and Biden's job growth also beat trump. Obama's stock market was far superior to trump, too. Because I call out your messiah doesn't make it nonsense. Nonsense is that trump ever did anything beneficial since his mother squirted him out.

I think we delude ourselves or try to make us and our time 'special' by thinking the end is near and it's never been this bad. Few periods in human history have been as relatively quiet as the last few decades. Yes, we had Covid, but the two bouts of Plague wiped out 25% of Europe the first time and upwards of 10% the second. Genghis Khan rolled across South Asia into Europe 8 centuries ago wiping out 20% of humanity. Even in the last hundred fifty years we've had two World Wars, the Holocaust, The Great Depression, The Armenian Massacre, Stalin's purges, Mao's killing of 60 million, Cambodia of the 1970s, three major Middle East wars, Vietnam, the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s....... All things considered, the world is actually pretty quiet today. I can get on a plane and fly anywhere in the world today, save for over Ukraine and Israel. I'll find food and shelter wherever I go, and in most places decent medical care if I need it. We're a heck of a long way from Hobbes or Mad Max or Cormac McCarthy. Relax.

Yes, the guy who got UE back down from trump's disaster of 6.8%, got the economy out of the trump Recession, forged a bipartisan infrastructure Bill (rather than announce endless "Infrastructure Weeks" that never happened, as trump spent 300+ days and $170,000,000 of Taxpayer money playing golf), engineered the NATO effort to stand against russian aggression in Ukraine, negotiated a drop in prescription drug prices, cut $350 billion in FY2021from trump's last year deficit and $1.3 trillion in FY2022.....we should all be so geriatric. Bloated fatboy trump, the convicted sex offender, convicted charity fraudster, guilty business fraudster, twice impeached clown facing 91 felony counts for everything from trying to overthrow US democracy to stealing highly classified documents, to illegally paying off pornstars so she wouldn't announce his "not quite freakishly small, but well below average Johnson".....and now praising the support he gets from Hannibal Lecter (sic) and lambasting Forbes magazine because it removed him form its 400 list...is not exactly Mr Cognition. trump thought he was John von Neumann because he said "man woman camera TV person".

Even when I was 17 I had taste, so if I were 17 today, I know I would hate the banal cacophony and unimaginative drivel that is House, EDM, Techno and trance. "Awesome" it ain't. I do think it's "apropos" (just for you, GG) for the TikTok generation, as it is people without talent producing content for people without taste. I can enjoy classical, then enjoy the shift from that to Jazz by people like Louis Moreau Gottschalk to Ferdinand LaMothe, to Gershwin and Johnny Mercer, to the Swing Era, or Duke to Thelonius to Coltraine to Miles, even to Elvis, the Beatles, Dylan, CSNY, Jimi, Led Zeppelin and others. I can enjoy Blues, Soul and Motown. I can listen to Bollywood dance numbers, or Isaan folk music. The noise played in clubs now, however, is anathema to music in general and me in particular. A hydraulic jack or a pile driver is preferable.

I've been 17, but not 70....but I suspect growing up in the 1950s was a lot more fun. When I was a kid, we were still free to go about things as if society was safe. Walk to school, play sports after school, eat dinner at whomever's house we happened to be at when dinner time came. There was a local gas station run by a guy who loved to ride his old Indian motorcycle, so he left his station self-service. You bought gas, opened his till, put in your money and took your change. Outsiders just assumed the station was unattended, so didn't know the system, and left when no one came out to service them. Locals knew, and we were honest. Couldn't do that today. We had good TV news with real journalists. We learned things in school like math and penmanship and history without any associated 'presentism'. When we were curious about something, we went to a library, poured through the cards, then looked to see if the book we wanted was in the stack or out on loan. We didn't live inside our phones, and when went out for a vanilla coke with friends, we talked with them. As a society run by old school liberals, we were on a path to be truly colorblind. Then the Boomers gave way to the Participation Trophy Generations, where actual talent gave way to inclusiveness...except color and ethnicity have come back in force. We are Black or White or Brown or gay or "cis" first and foremost. Fat is beautiful, even though it's butt ugly and unhealthy. Be careful, 17 year olds, or you'll get cancelled. A 17 year old in 2023 does have the great advantage of almost the entire body of human knowledge a few keystrokes away, but instead of going after muons or the works of Aeschylus, he/she goes after banal TikTok videos, chasing "likes". Horrible. And while each succeeding generation tends to hate the music of the generation after them, there really is a legitimate argument that EDM, techno, house and trance are absolute rubbish. I think the world of 2023 is potentially more boring (unless one is a self-starter), but I don't think it is any more bleak than Vietnam, Biafra, lynchings, the '67 Middle East War, the '73 Middle East War, 1970's Kampuchea, Black September, George Habbash, Angola, the 1990s in the former Yugoslavia, the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, the Kennedy assassination, "Silent Spring"...and certainly no more bleak that what 90-100 years olds faced with the Great Depression, WWII, the Holocaust, etc.

I think I've seen him ! Oh, maybe it was just Japanese female porn I saw. Never mind.

Does this mean tattooed guys on Harleys, Russian Mafia and Chinese Triads get a slight reprieve? How about overstayers?

Rather than 'strike a nerve' (as I'm not yet in the Death Zone), my thought was: "I wonder if the OP knows he's going to get gutted like a fish by someone sick of his nonsense, and he'll not even live to see Christmas?" At the very least he should keep an eye on his coffee in the break room, as hospitals have all sorts of things that might bring about his quick demise. You have to assume 'once an a-hole, always an a-hole'. More enemies than friends. With questions like the OP poses, his life expectancy is less than a 95 year old on a respirator.

They're going to solve the problem of long lines at Immigration by creating long lines at the Tourist Tax Kiosks. Voila ! Immigration problem solved. And with 40 million tourists X 300 baht - compensation for 2 deaths at Siam Paragon, the Minister of Sports & Tourism has 11,998,000,000 to play with. I'm thinking gold color Rolls Royce Phantom.

I assume you must be trolling, as no one can be so clueless. trump was and always will be an abject failure, who only resonates with the low IQ demographic. He is a convicted fraudster, a convicted sex offender, a convicted charity fraudster, under 91 felony counts for everything from trying to overthrow American democracy to stealing classified documents, and now also mouthing off because of his tiny micro-penis and its impact on his fragile ego. His country club is the target of surveillance by both adversaries and allies, and has members who are employees of China's MSS....and the reason is because he likes to show off by revealing national security secrets. He claimed his 11,000 sf apartment was 33,000 sf, which constitutes bank and insurance fraud for which he will lose his NYC properties. He is likely to face 5 years in a Georgia jail for his attempts to overturn his loss in 2020. He is likely to be convicted of RICO violations, and in GA that carries a mandatory 5 year sentence. He is the first POTUS since Herbert Hoover to leave office with fewer Americans employed than when he took office. He has the worst economic record in terms of GDP change also going all the way back to Hoover. He ran up $7,800,000,000,000 new National Debt in just 4 years, or $24,000 for every man, woman and child in the US. THAT caused the inflation that the Fed and Biden are now largely controlling. He inherited 4.8% unemployment and left 6.8% unemployment. He declared bankruptcy 6 times, foisting all of that bad debt onto the taxpayer (via bank and bondholder tax writeoffs) He got hoodwinked by the fat little cretin in North Korea just because Kim knew how to pull trump's chain. That allowed Kim to ramp up U235 enrichment, improve the Hwasong ICBMs that can now reach all parts of the US, miniaturize nukes so that they fit on the Hwasong, and test nukes via supercomputer, just as the US does. Everything trump has done is a failure. He can save nothing.

Israel will be asking the US for more aid and assistance. I wonder if in some 'perfect' phone call, if Biden will link the release of aid to Israel first providing dirt on Biden's potential opponent? Would that be an impeachable offense? Republicans have said it would not, at least that's what they used to say.

Bio-terror The human genome has been revealed. Genes are now understood and can be altered, not just in humans but in everything from viruses to bacteria. The weaknesses in the human immune system are better understood. Terrorist organizations have sent and/or recruited people who have attended the world's premier universities and have specifically studied gene manipulation, with the intent of developing and unleashing a superbug. It is entirely possible that someone or someones will developed a bug that will take out all of humanity. They might even use AI to help. Yes, it would kill the developer, too. That doesn't stop suicide bombers. Never in human history has one person been capable of eradicating all life.

Watching my staff take joy in each other's company Smelling freshly ground coffee Being fit, agile and nimble Gene Hackman's performance in The French Connection Snuggling with the woman you love