32 thoughts on “Russians to Phuket”

  1. too bad the latenight shows are reruns and their comedy writers are on strike.

    what a bucket of Phuket jokes they’d come up with.  surely zelenskyy with his show biz moxie will make use of a tempting turn of phrase. 

  2. excerpts from the guardian article linked above:

    In the humid evenings on the Thai island of Phuket, Aleksei* often sits alone on his balcony, and wonders if the past 18 months have been a strange dream. Last year, he was living with his mother and siblings in Moscow, and working in an IT job in one of the city’s skyscrapers. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022 changed everything.
    “At that moment I thought: ‘OK what opportunities do I have here in Russia?’ Go to war, which I don’t want of course because Ukrainians are our brothers,” he says. The alternative, to protest, was hopeless. “It is impossible to fight against the government in Russia,” he says.
    He travelled to the airport in Moscow, with a couple of thousand dollars in savings, and a one-way ticket to Thailand, praying immigration would let him through. He chose Phuket, he adds, because it was more affordable than renting in neighbouring countries where a recent influx of Russians meant it had become harder to find a place to stay.
    Aleksei is one of the hundreds of thousands of Russians estimated to have fled their country after the mobilisation of troops for the war in Ukraine, with many flocking to nearby Kazakhstan, Georgia or Turkey.
    Thailand, although further away, has also experienced a rise in Russian visitors, with some appearing to be putting down more permanent roots in the country. Last year, Russians were the leading international buyers of property in Phuket, and during the first quarter of this year, sales to Russian nationals increased 68% on the same period in 2022. The value of properties being sold has also risen, by 46.7% during the first quarter, according to the Thai Real Estate Association.
    […]
    Thailand, which under the outgoing government has sought to avoid taking a strong stance on the conflict, is seen as a more welcoming destination.
    Russian nationals who want to stay for a year can apply for an education or business visa, if they have the right paperwork. There are also longer-term visas that target very wealthy individuals who invest in Thai property or government bonds, and who meet other requirements.
    Phuket, one of Thailand’s most famous tourist destinations, has always been popular among Russians. Menus and massage parlour listings are often written in Russian. There are supermarkets and restaurants selling anything from borscht and dumplings to Russian keyboards.
    [continues]

  3. Lahaina's banyan tree providing shade from the sun in January 2016 anouchka via Getty Images

    Lahaina’s banyan tree providing shade from the sun in January 2016 anouchka via Getty Images

    Will Maui’s Beloved 150-Year-Old Banyan Tree Survive the Scorching Wildfires? (msn.com)

    Maui has been burning since Tuesday—engulfed in wildfires that continue to spread across the Hawaiian island, destroying its western region and killing more than 50 people. In the coastal town of Lahaina, a bustling tourist destination and home to about 12,000 people, at least 271 buildings have been decimated, and a historic landmark is at risk: a 150-year-old banyan tree.
    Lahaina business owner Tiffany Kidder Winn returned to the scorched town on Wednesday to observe the damage, telling Bobby Caina Calvan and Jennifer McDermott of the Associated Press (AP) that the site “looked like a warzone.” Amidst the devastation, the tree was badly damaged but still standing. “It’s burned, but I looked at the trunk and the roots and I think it’s going to make it. … It was kind of this diamond in the rough of hope.”
    Others are less optimistic. Based on images of the damage, “it certainly doesn’t look like that tree is going to recover,” James B. Friday, an extension forester with the University of Hawaii, tells the New York Times’ Jacey Fortin. He adds that the layer of bark protecting the tree may have been too thin to withstand the fires.
    […]
    Banyan trees are capable of spreading laterally, as their branches grow aerial roots that reach down into the ground to form new trunks. The world’s largest banyan, near Kolkata, India, is 250 years old and spans 3.5 acres, resembling a small forest. Lahaina’s banyan tree is the United States’ largest, standing 60 feet tall and covering an entire city block. Its more than 46 trunks cover two-thirds of an acre. As the AP puts it, the tree has been “the heart of the oceanside community” for a century and a half, serving as a landmark, shade-provider and gathering place.
    Having already lost their homes, many Lahaina locals fear the demise of this historic natural beauty. Satellite imagery and social media videos show the tree’s bare branches, its vegetation burned away, reports CNN’s Alisha Ebrahimji. As he toured the devastation, Brian Schatz, a senator from Hawaii, also captured on-the-ground video footage of the tree.

  6. This is our Banyan Tree, except it’s an Oak.  Hope theirs survives.   

    When I was a kid it was just a big tree in the woods, now it’s a city park.

    Time marches on.

  9. and a big shoe it will be

    Trump could face “big picture” RICO case in Georgia, expert says – CBS News

    […]
    For the past two and a half years, Willis’ office has been investigating alleged efforts by Trump and his allies to overturn his loss in the 2020 election in Georgia.
    Georgia’s RICO statute is considered to be more expansive in scope than the federal code from which it is derived. In Georgia, prosecutors are able to point to a range of organized or related attempts to engage in predicate acts or predicate crimes, which include everything from violent crimes such as murder or arson, to false statements and obstruction of justice.
    “The racketeering statute does not look simply at a single crime, it tries to look at the big picture of view,” said Morgan Cloud, a law professor at Emory University. 
    In order to prove racketeering took place, Cloud said prosecutors must convince a jury beyond a reasonable doubt that at least two of the racketeering activities are related in terms of method, purpose, or victims. And in Trump’s case, Cloud believes “the most important of those would be related in terms of goal or purpose, which was to overturn the 2020 presidential election in Georgia.”If former PresidentDonald Trumpis indicted in Georgia, some believe he may face felony counts unlike any of the 78 chargesalready filedagainst him. Fulton County District AttorneyFani Williscould pursue Trump under a law commonly known for its use against organized crime, but that has far broader applications — the state’s Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, better known as RICO — sources have told CBS News.
    In order to convict under RICO, prosecutors have to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that there is an enterprise, which can range from a corporation to an informal group of individuals, who undertake criminal actions as part of a shared goal. That is why, if Trump is charged under RICO statutes,  he is likely not alone in being exposed to potential racketeering charges. In 2022, Willis’ office sent letters to multiple Trump allies warning that they could face unspecified charges, including Trump’s former attorney, Rudy Giuliani, and so-called “fake electors” — supporters who submitted an illegitimate version of the state’s Electoral College vote.
    Cloud suggested several key events after the 2020 election could be considered “actions taken as part of that scheme” under Georgia’s RICO statute. 
    […]
    If Trump is charged in Fulton County, the case would be different in several significant ways from the federal trials he’s facing. 
    First, if reelected in 2024, Trump would not be able to pardon himself on state criminal charges as he would be able to do in the federal prosecutions.
    The other big difference is that the courthouse in Fulton County allows cameras inside the courtroom to broadcast the proceedings, while federal courts do not. Kreis believes the ability to watch would be crucial to democracy, “so that people understand exactly what happened here in Georgia and throughout the country in the aftermath of 2020 elections, and that they’re able to see the evidence for themselves and to understand the kind of damage that Donald Trump and his allies did.”
    [continues]

  10. The gop have painted themselves into a corner……they’re waaaay out on a limb and are about to run out their string cause they’re at the end of their rope after having burned all their bridges…..Their paradigm has left them in the dust, still clinging desperately to their orange testicle keeper.
    You can hear them muttering to themselves, “Stayin’ alive, Stayin’ alive”.

    Little do they know.

    Don’t you make the perfect martini by mixing 3 parts gin and 1 part passing the vermouth cork reverently over the glass? I learned that from reading “Playboy” magazine about the same time I learned about ironing the lapels flat.

  11. sturge, you’re on a roll… wow, six whatayacallits all in one sentence (if one includes that dusty last one)

  14. “…I am struck by how completely the Republican Party, which began in the 1850s as a noble endeavor to keep the United States government intact and to rebuild it to work for ordinary people, has devolved into a group of chaos agents feeding voters a fantasy world.”
    – Professor Heather Cox Richardson

  18. Haha…..That’s a first time listener…..
    Hands down you win, I can’t BELIEVE there ain’t a good box canyon song.

    Might better write one, like, Ridin’ Roughshod and Hell Bent for Leather Into Box Canyon and Reachin’ For the Sky or somethin

  22. Short Story of the Week again. 
    “I Went To Sullivant”  by James Thurber.   If you don’t feel like reading it Old Berman reads it on his Friday podcast.    

  26. Starting to see more updates on Ukraine showing up on twit.  Some appear to be the same people as before, but new names, some appear to be new to twit.  Time will tell how long they last before the fat twit bans them, as he did the others for not supporting puttie.
     
    Kerch bridge appears to have had modifications, so far not pictures.  There was one twit about how some russians vacationing in Ukraine Crimea don’t know how they will get home now.  Oops, doing the August in a war zone does carry some risk.
     
    Be vigilant and careful when going out.  The RSV is bad for older people, and infants. I am getting over the worst but still having breathing issues.  The new COVID variant looks like it is going to be nasty too.  Mask and sanitizer.

  27. get ready for the next big show, better stock up on the popcorn and other essentials while you can

    New details: Fulton grand jury to hear Georgia Trump case early next week (ajc.com)

    Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis will begin presenting her 2020 elections interference case against former President Donald Trump and his allies to a grand jury early next week.
    The timeline came into sharper focus on Saturday, when former Georgia Lt. Gov. Geoff Duncan and independent journalist George Chidi separately confirmed that they received notifications they will testify on Tuesday.
    The developments raise the likelihood that the public should know whether jurors hand up indictments against the former president and others by Tuesday evening. Willis is expected to begin her presentation to grand jurors on Monday.
    A Willis spokesman did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
    Chidi tweeted that he was called by the DA’s office and “asked to come to court Tuesday for testimony before the grand jury.” CNN first reported Duncan’s appearance date, which was confirmed by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
    [continues

    i do hope the media will forego the OJ-style crawl of vehicles to the courthouse this time.

  28. one of the reasons the loser guy will never admit he lost or is guilty was something pointed out by politico back in 2017. 

    The Power of Trump’s Positive Thinking – POLITICO Magazine

    Donald Trump is a self-help apostle. He always has tried to create his own reality by saying what he wants to be true. Where many see failure, Trump sees only success, and expresses it out loud, again and again.
    […]
    … his fact-flouting declarations of positivity continue unabated. For Trump, though, these statements are not issues of right or wrong or true or false. They are something much more elemental. They are a direct result of the closest thing the stubborn, ideologically malleable celebrity businessman turned most powerful person on the planet has ever had to a devout religious faith. This is not his mother’s flinty Scottish Presbyterianism but Norman Vincent Peale’s “power of positive thinking,” the utterly American belief in self above all else and the conviction that thoughts can be causative, that basic assertion can lead to actual achievement.
    Trump and his father were Peale acolytes—the minister officiated at at the first of Donald Trump’s weddings—and Peale’s overarching philosophy has been a lodestar for Trump over the course of his decades of triumphs as well as the crises and chaos. “Stamp indelibly on your mind a mental picture of yourself as succeeding,” Peale urged his millions of followers. “Hold this picture tenaciously. Never permit it to fade.” It was a mindset perfectly tailored for an ambitious builder determined to change the skyline of one of the globe’s great cities. Trump, who used this self-confidence to blow right past a series of seemingly fatal gaffes and controversies to win an election last fall that polls said he couldn’t and wouldn’t, in this respect has been a prize Peale pupil—arguably the most successful Peale disciple ever.
    “I don’t even think it’s an argument,” Trump biographer Gwenda Blair told me recently. “It’s a fact.” The power of positive thinking? “He weaponized it.”
    […]
    He was born into a house that Norman Vincent Peale helped build.
    Peale’s cheery, simple tips allowed Trump’s father to alleviate his anxieties and mitigate the effects of his innately awkward, dour disposition. Emboldened, Fred Trump banked hundreds of millions of dollars building single-family houses and then immense apartment buildings in New York’s outer boroughs. Peale appealed to the elder Trump, too, because both men embraced conservative, right-wing, us-versus-them politics—an important but often forgotten portion of Peale’s M.O.
    A generation down, Peale appealed to Donald Trump because Trump idolized his father, and because what Fred Trump drilled into his most eager, most ambitious, most like-minded son—be a killer; be a king; be a winner, not a loser—is what made that son so receptive to the teachings of Peale. Born in 1946, Donald Trump’s childhood was spent in a house with white columns and nine bathrooms and a live-in maid and chauffeur in Jamaica Estates, Queens. Sometimes, when it rained or snowed, he did his paper route from the back of his father’s limousine.
    Peale, known as “God’s salesman,” reached the peak of his influence in the heart of Trump’s childhood, preaching in the 1950s to millions of people on Sundays at Marble Collegiate Church on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan as well as through a syndicated newspaper column, radio and television shows, his Guideposts magazine and a spate of books that were self-help trailblazers—first and foremost, of course, The Power of Positive Thinking, his defining work and wild bestseller that came out in 1952. It offered chapters such as “Believe in Yourself,” “Expect the Best and Get It” and “I Don’t Believe in Defeat.” “Whenever a negative thought concerning your personal powers comes to mind, deliberately voice a positive thought,” he wrote. “Actually,” Peale once said, “it is an affront to God when you have a low opinion of yourself.”
    […]
    And for Donald Trump, the attraction to Peale did not diminish with time. Even as more traditional theologians derided Peale as more huckster than holy man and intellectuals mocked him as a lightweight, Trump in his 30s remained a staunch Peale adherent.
    Peale, then nearly 80 years old, officiated Trump’s wedding in 1977. In 1983, shortly after the opening of Trump Tower, Trump credited Peale for instilling in him a can-do ethos. “The mind can overcome any obstacle,” he told the New York Times. “I never think of the negative.” The feeling was mutual. In the Times, Peale called Trump “kindly and courteous” and commented on “a profound streak of honesty and humility” he thought Trump possessed. Trump at the time was newly ascendant, and the influence of Peale coursed through his aspirations and interactions. “If you’re going to be thinking anyway,” he wrote in 1987 in The Art of the Deal, “you might as well think big.”
    […]
    “Norman Vincent Peale, the great Norman Vincent Peale, was my pastor,” Trump told the audience at the Family Leadership Summit in Ames, Iowa, in July of 2015, barely more than a month into his run. “The power of positive thinking,” he said. He said this in between having consultant and pollster Frank Luntz ask him the same question twice: “Have you ever asked God for forgiveness?” His answer: “I’m not sure I have.” For Trump, thanks to Peale, that’s not primarily what religion was for.
    “Affirm it, visualize it, believe it, and it will actualize itself,” Peale had written—and last year around this time, in the roiling wake of the tape of Trump bragging about his ability to grope women with impunity, with pundits saying he would lose and lose badly, and with more and more women accusing him of sexual harassment and members of his own party and even the man who would become his chief of staff suggesting he should drop out, Trump did not do what almost anybody else would have done. Everybody else? There’s literally not another politician in history who was facing what he was facing and didn’t not only stop running the race in question but recede from public life altogether. But that’s not what Trump did. Trump did what he’s always done. He doubled down on Peale 101.
    [continues]

  29. Positive thinking is not what SFB is doing.  You can tell yourself whatever you want to pump up your self-confidence.  What he’s doing is lying to folks to manipulate them, albeit, most of them are willingly pliable.   He’s a narcissist and he uses everything and everyone, with not a care for any negative consequences.   That is not the power of positive thinking, that is the love of power.  He’s not a Christian. He’s not a patriot.  He’s a monster.  Go, get him, Fani. 

  30. The power of positive thinking? “He weaponized it.”

    The problem in a nutshell. Like Rick Wilson said, everything Trump touches dies.

  31. And not that I think the quadrennial Iowa State Fair Republican smile fest is a great thing- quite the contrary- but because it’s something the others might gain a little traction in, he’s flown in to fuck it up for them, well for DuhSantis anyway. Screw both of them. 

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