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I know that Armada is Spanish for naval fleet (coming from the word for armed). So, given there is nothing Spanish about North Korea, I am assuming that Trump is only using this Spanish term because of its historical context, namely the famous Spanish Armada of 1588.

Someone should tell The Donald that this Armada was destroyed by the much smaller and less-well-armed British navy.

6 hours ago, ilostmypassword said:

Wow! I didn't realize the O'Reilly was the only right wing guy hosting his own news show. Thanks for the update.

Clearly no one listens to radio any more, especially AM!

I see a new position opening up at the White House for Bill - Gender Equality Advisor. You think I am crazy? Wake up, Trump is President!

22 hours ago, steven100 said:

Who's gonna be around in 99 years   .....

The bastards who gave you a mortgage on the property!

The problem with short leases is that mortgage providers don't think that they will get fair market value for your property in the event of a default, say after 10 years. 

Yes, there are special markets where 40 year leases are handed out but they are for very very high end properties in London and for very high prices and where no buyer is looking for a standard mortgage.

I have never understood why anyone, except a professional or a young highly trained athlete, would dare to put themselves through this. Apart from the pain, the damage to organs and the stress on the body is terrible.

I lost a pal who, at the age of 60 (!) had given up the smokes a few years before and had run the London marathon - died a couple of years later of a heart attack although he had a few other complications, none of which he had before running the marathon. The way I see it, he probably would have lived longer if he just kept smoking (and I am NOT advocating smoking - it is terrible for you but probably not as terrible for some people as running a marathon at 60!).

Remember what the moniker Marathon comes from! The original runner, Pheidippides, ran to from Marathon to Sparta to ask the Spartans for reinforcements for the Athenians in their battle against the Persians, at Marathon. Pheidippides apparently died after he had given his message. Although, I suppose in fairness his distance was about 225km.

5 hours ago, Revlife7 said:

At the hosptial, she is already passed away. She is in rest in peace. The polices cannot find more the evidence from that lady. It is kindly of hard to find proof if her hubby did go wrong or not. 

It depends. If they find evidence on her of certain kinds of bruising which would indicate that he held her against her will before throwing her or if he has scratch marks indicating that she fought back to avoid her fate. There may be other evidence in the room of a violent fight. There may also be a motivation too. If all of these were to be in place it would be a very hard murder/manslaughter case to defend.

Sorry to nit-pic but Laotian comes from French and is not a real word in English. The adjective is Lao, as in Lao Language, Lao food and even the name of the country is Lao PDR (Lao People's Democratic Republic).

Mr Xaysana is lao or if you really want to describe him as a Lao drug lord.

It is the typical classy street theatre that you see on almost a daily basis in Pattaya.

4 hours ago, elgordo38 said:

There are 3 major players in this game. Who is smart enough to goad the other two into a fight and stand back and take on the weakened looser.?

USA, China, N. Korea, S. Korea, Russia, Japan - 6 so far.

But what is N. Korea supposed to do? They know that if they do anything other than a little provoking, like dropping missiles into the sea, Kim and his clan will be done for good.

What is interesting in this regard is that Kim Jong Un is not playing precisely the same game of his dad and grandad - namely, to up the stakes, rattle the sabres and then grudgingly accept some aid in a back-down that is labeled a crowning victory over the forces of imperialism.

Perhaps Un is playing a longer game. But what is worrying is that none of the Western analysis, if that is what we can call it, has provided any insight into what the regime is actually up to.

6 hours ago, HooHaa said:

but it never occured to him to address her directly politely and explain to her the error of her ways?

 

it would have taken me exactly words to solve the issue.

"move your feet"

But don't you get tired of correcting the never-ending tide of bad unthinking behaviour, viz behaviour by children who go on long journeys without as much as a book or a toy to distract them accompanied by ineffectual parents who just let them misbehave and will defend their misbehaviour even when it adversely affects others around them.

Then there are the adults who are so self-entitled that they appear to think they live alone in the universe. Invasions of space, feet on seats, loud music on earphones, shouting to each other, shouting on mobile phones etc. There are also parents who think that they should keep their newborn at 35,000 feet as much of the time as possible - why? It can't be good for the kid who screams all the time and we all know that viruses spread more easily on planes than anywhere else. 

If you raise any of these issues with a fellow passenger, don't expect any improvement in behaviour. In fact, you can get the opposite and nowadays it is all to easy to end up on a no-fly list because you are a "trouble-maker."

I used to enjoy travelling as you would meet people and have conversations - no longer, not even in business class. Too many lunatics, badly behaved, idiots with strong opinions and mad people. No point in trying to change the world.

Instead, the minute I reach the seat, the ear plugs go in, which immediately excludes the loud steaming coming from the baby that the check-in clerk thought I would enjoy sitting beside or the even louder shouting to his mates that the beer-swilling chap in a "wife-beater" tee-shirt thinks is acceptable behaviour in a confined space.

As soon as we take off, the eye patch goes on - stops me having to watch the nonsense around me or interact with anyone. I sometimes make the mistake, if on a short journey, of talking to my neighbour - I usually regret it!

If we are on a long journey of more than a couple of hours or so (when I usually try to at least get into enhanced economy if not business class), I take my "mother's little helper" that lets me sleep all the way. 

The only thing that now gets me down is being kicked in the kidneys, usually by wayward children but sometimes by adults - I find that the magazines in the seat pocket can be placed in the small of my back and usually that deals with it. I have on occasion asked to be reseated in such circumstances as I find that a direct approach is taken to be confrontational, whether adults or children are involved - sometimes me prompting a crew member to ask them to ease up on the kicking works, sometimes it makes them kick more. Push it with the wrong people and you have a fight on your hands and your name on a no fly list.

Welcome to the 21st Century where it is both legal and apparently acceptable behaviour to drag a grandfather off a plane AFTER he has been seated so as to make room for crew (and not because the plane was "overbooked" as was mis-reported). They should have put the management and the thugs on a charge of assault but apparently they were "in the right." So there! Good luck with telling United and their thugs that they were behaving badly!

It will be very interesting to see how the Thai police treat this case.

We had a case like this but for a much smaller item of value in the UK a couple of months ago. It was over a small sum of money, £20, found on the floor of a store. A woman, Nicole Bailey, found the £20 note and just put it in her pocket, guessing that it probably fell out of someone's pocket and the person would probably not remember where they lost it.

But she had not reckoned with Staffordshire's finest! Staffordshire Police solved the case (using CC TV, I suspect). Instead of giving her a caution and getting her to pay back the money (very normal in such circumstances), they instead subjected her to a full-belt-boots-and-braces show trial during which she had to plead guilty, get her name in the newspaper and get a criminal record (her alternative would have been to fight it at great personal financial cost).

By the way, getting a criminal record in the UK can have a huge effect on your life - your employer can fire you on that basis, you may not be able to get another job in your profession, your insurance may be invalidated, you may find it hard to get insurance or mortgages or they will become very expensive, you may have difficulties setting up in business, getting finance - the list is quite endless, actually. And this is what the Staffordshire Police did to this woman.

It completely beats me why Staffordshire police were able to devote so many resources to this case - you only have to read the local newspapers to see that the level of violent and other crime in that part of the world is very high. You would have thought that they would be concerned with the high rape, robbery and general violence rather than a finders-keepers case - especially when a huge number of people believe that if you find a small amount of money in a public place, it is yours to keep and you are not committing theft!

Anyone who wrote to Staffordshire Police to complain about their behaviour were told that their complaints had no basis because the complainants were not themselves adversely affected and their complaints were rejected.

So, welcome to the Police State of Staffordshire which has nothing on the Military State of Thailand!

The only central point that this story gets wrong is that there is only one palace intrigue. I would imagine that there is a whole forrest of them as various personalities have factions formed around them but parts of those factions secretly belong to other factions with so many focussed on their own agendas that it is hard to get anyone to focus 100% on the ever wavering strategies of the president.

Do they think that the wealthy people who can afford this are going to still queue up at some office every 90 days/leave the country periodically, reapply every year having to reprove every little thing etc etc so as to keep up with the ever more stringent conditions for retirement visa?

It still does not mean that they have stopped thievery at the airport. I was transiting through Suvarabhumri twice in the past month when they broke the locks on my suitcase. Nothing taken but they break the locks AND part of the suitcase.

As the locks are that kind where the security personnel have an override key, we know that the cases are not being broken into for security reasons.

Can you imagine, between courses, when Trump says, "yeah, send in the missiles," the position that the Chinese interpreter was in. Only later would Trump explain that he was just dealing with a little bit of nastiness in Syria - nothing to worry about, Mr Xi!

5 hours ago, daveAustin said:

TV trolls will no doubt be disappointed no Brits were on the list.

Actually there were a couple but they were listed as Europeans . . . 

To an outsider, such an edict might appear to be that of a hard-working government trying to improve road safety. But in Thailand, it amounts to the ruling/urban middle class pushing around the rural working class, a kind of yellow shirt pushing around the red shirts. And to enact it just before Songran when the police are at their most hungry and thirsty? Hmmm. 

It is all very well for Westerners to decry this kind of transport - we all know if it is dangerous but so is riding on the roof of a train but it is all that the poor can afford.

That showed that well-known war-mongerer, Prince Charles! (for those with a sense of humour limit, this is meant to be ironic)

I always understood it that the trip from Bangkok to Pattaya was so cheap because the taxi driver was always sure of a return fare. Is this the end of this arrangement now?

8 hours ago, ffaarraanngg said:

Only another 5-10 years to wait and driverless cars will save Thais from themselves.

 

Driving will go down as a skill they as a collective just could not master.

Actually the police will still insist on functioning seatbelt "in case the person has to drive the car." Just you wait! The public never gets away so easily in Thailand!

Why don't Americans invest in guard dogs? I live in a different country but my two dogs will see off three teenagers armed with knives any day - they know how to give a quick bite and dodge back before any human can make contact with a knife, as many dogs can. And seeing a teenager being chased around a garden minus one or two items of clothing while dialing the police is priceless and a far better outcome than three corpses, a band of lawyers, a trading of accusations and all the nonsense.

6 hours ago, MalandLee said:

Personally let me disclose I am not an American - never been there, but have visited 82 countries.

 

I think that Mr Trump has the outcome he wanted from the beginning. His meeting with Mr Obama prior to the election, plus some of the points raised in the above article are "some" of the things that seem to point this way. He has abandoned this pledge far to easily.

 

Brand me a conspiracy theorist if you like. But, I still think Mr Trump has been underestimated, if it is, in fact, what he wanted all along, his "negotiation" through the system is a stroke of genius.

 

 

I think that MalandLee is on to something. If you look at Trump's successes in business in the past, he has always been in a position, usually by luck, to be able to swing it. But at least he understands that he is in the position. When he is not in a position of significant leverage, he then arranges matters so that there is some other person or entity that can be blamed. In this case, it will be those pesky Republicans who just would not support his beautiful bill. Or he uses the situation to his own advantage (his exposure to the banks was an example of this when he was just too big a debtor for the banks to pull the plug on).

He may try a second time but if he does it will become personal - he will hang the failure personally on individual Republican politicians and will name them - that is the threat. Watch those pesky Republicans fall into line the next time this bill comes up.

What about the population group in the USA that generated the various terrorist and anti-semitic organisations like Posse Commitatus and The Sword and the Arm of the Lord, the population group that gave rise to Timothy McVeigh, the terrorist?

6 hours ago, Morch said:

 

The report claims to pertain to all Palestinians, whether or not residing in the West Bank or if living under Israeli occupation. If you wish to make such general nonsense claims as you do, either explain how the comparison to SA fully applies when considering all of the groups of Palestinians mentioned, or limit your argument.

 

If and when Israel does annex the West Bank, and if under such conditions it will refuse granting full rights to the Palestinians living there - then you'd have a point. Until such a time, the situation, while far from being acceptable, is not exactly what you go on about.

 

As to your assertions about the Israeli government's territorial wishes, there's yet to be something official declared to the effect you describe. Equating the expressed views of extreme elements (even within the current right wing coalition government) with official government policy is stretching things a bit.

 

Guess that pointing out the less than stellar human rights records of ESCWA member countries will be met with the usual one-sided "off topic" cries.

What do you mean exactly by 'if and when Israel does annex the West Bank," the International Court of Justice has ruled that the West Bank and East Jerusalem are occupied territories with Israel as the occupying power.

I would also like to introduce you to the concepts of acts by omission and acts by commission - the latter are acts that someone initiates themselves knowing their consequences. The former are acts that an individual could prevent but chooses not to even through they know the consequences. The various settlements are a case in point - the Israeli government lets them happen and then protects them once they have happened despite the fact that they muddy the waters in the West Bank, will make any settlement extraordinarily difficult, will probably ensure that Israel will have complete control over the Palestinians forever not to mention that Israel will keep them as a vassal state.

6 hours ago, ezzra said:

Your steaming pile of horse shit you have just penned out,  only shows what a philistine you're and how bigoted and narrow minded opinions you have on something you have absolutely no knowledge of and have been fed propaganda BS and this is how you shape your opinion.....

You are confusing me - the man said that the report had a totally baseless conclusion.

Do you believe this? If so, say so. 

Was he being ironic? If you think so, then say so.

Just pouring out vitriol on someone without challenging their opinions achieves nothing. And nobody knows what your opinion is anyway