"Remember, Japan is, for the first time ever, OPENING ITS MA[R]KET TO THE USA, even to cars, SUV’s, Trucks, -and everything else, even agriculture and RICE..."

"... which was always a complete NO, NO. The Open Market Japan may be as big a profit factor as the Tariffs themselves, but was only gotten because of the Tariff Power. They also agreed to buy BILLIONS OF DOLLARS WORTH OF MILITARY AND OTHER EQUIPMENT, and give us 90% of 550 BILLION DOLLARS - AND MORE!!! MAGA!!!"/"Indonesia has also agreed, for the first time ever, to COMPLETELY OPEN ITS MARKET TO THE USA. That’s BIG!!! Our businesses will make a fortune. Likewise Japan!"/"I will always give up Tariff points if I can get major countries to OPEN THEIR MARKETS TO THE USA. Another great power of Tariffs. Without them, it would be impossible to get countries to OPEN UP!!! ALWAYS, ZERO TARIFFS TO AMERICA!!!"/"I WILL ONLY LOWER TARIFFS IF A COUNTRY AGREES TO OPEN ITS MARKET. IF NOT, MUCH HIGHER TARIFFS! Japan’s Markets are now OPEN (for first time ever!). USA BUSINESSES WILL BOOM!"

Writes Trump on Truth Social this morning, here, here, here, and here.

"The phrase cold lava is a translation of the term 'lahar' in Indonesian and Tagalog. Temperatures range between 0°C and 100°C..."

"... according to how they are formed, but are typically below 50°C [122°F], according to several academic reports on the phenomenon. A moving lahar resembles a 'roiling slurry of wet concrete' that can grow in volume as it incorporates other debris in its path, said the US Geological Survey."

From "'Cold lava' sweeps villages near volcano, killing 41" (BBC)("I heard the thunder and the sound similar to boiling water. It was the sound of big rocks falling from Mount Marapi").

"The mountain exploded. Wow, it was horrible. There were rains of rocks. Twice. The second one was really heavy, even the houses far away were also hit."

Said a 95-year-old woman in Tagulandang.

Quoted in "Indonesia volcano eruption spreads ash to Malaysia and shuts airports/"Ships evacuating 12,000 islanders over fears that side of Mount Ruang might slide into sea and cause tsunami" (The Guardian).

"Bali is part of a growing number of popular travel destinations fed up with overtourism."

"Hawaii is considering a bill to dissolve its government-sponsored tourism marketing agency. Amsterdam has been trying to reduce rowdy tourist behavior in its Red Light District, rolling out a ban on pot-smoking on the streets there, reducing hours for restaurants and brothels, and tightening some alcohol restrictions. Italian authorities have been fining tourists in Rome, Florence and Venice for littering, camping, vandalism and traffic violations.... 'We have a lot of tolerance here … but it’s this behavior of I am the more important person. Look at me,' said Fatmawati, an Indonesian personal assistant... 'It’s disgusting — people are tired of it. I’m tired of it.'"

From "'It’s disgusting': Bali locals are fed up with bad tourists/Many in Bali are sick of the disrespect, the illegal work and the indecent social media posts from foreigners" (WaPo).

"The provisions are generally broadly and vaguely formulated.... This is a trend in Indonesian lawmaking. In Indonesian we call it pasal karet, which means ‘rubber clauses.'"

Said Ken Setiawan, a senior lecturer in Indonesian Studies at the University of Melbourne, "Indonesia’s sex ‘morality’ laws are just one part of a broader, chilling crackdown on dissent/Analysis: the moralistic aspects of the new criminal code risk obscuring wider concerns about a stifling of protest and criticism of the state" (The Guardian).

“When something is grey, or slippery, or nebulous,” said Eve Warburton, the director of Australia National University’s Indonesia Institute, it makes it difficult to know how an individual’s behaviour will be interpreted or where the boundaries are. “And I think that is precisely the point.”

“Laws that criminalise political dissent or criminalise critiquing heads of state or government don’t have to be used in a systematic way, they can be used in a very ad-hoc, unpredictable way,” Warburton said. “The effect is the same: it intimidates opponents, it chills dissent, because it increases the risk of being thrown in prison for your political opinions.”

"As the search continued, rescuers pulled a five-year-old boy from the rubble, who had survived because he was protected by a mattress."

"In a video of the rescue posted by a local fire department, Azka, who had been trapped for two days, appeared conscious and calm as he was lifted to safety. '[Azka] is fine now, not wounded,' his relative Salman Alfarisi, 22, said.... 'The doctor said he’s only weak because he’s hungry.'"

 From "Five-year-old boy pulled from Indonesia earthquake rubble after two days/Azka, whose mother died in disaster, probably survived due to being protected by a mattress, while 40 people remain missing in Cianjur" (Guardian).

"[He] said he had been scared and often cried while adrift... Every time he saw a large ship..."

"... he said, he was hopeful, but more than 10 ships had sailed past him. None of them stopped or saw [him]."

From "Indonesian teenager survives 49 days adrift at sea in 'fishing hut'" (BBC). The "fishing hut" is "a 'rompong' - a floating fish trap without any paddles or engine... which... floats in the middle of the sea but is anchored to the seabed by ropes." Before the ropes snapped, the 19-year-old Aldi Novel Adilang lived alone out there, visited once a week by "someone from his company who would come to collect the fish" and give him food and water. It's a hard, lonely life even when you are not adrift.

ADDED: If isolated, floating rompongs are a common sight, why would anyone on a passing ship notice that one was no longer properly anchored?

In 1975, Deep Purple received $11,000 in advance to do a concert in Jakarta in a venue seating 7,000.

"After checking into Sahid Jaya Hotel, the band was told they would be performing for two nights at Senayan Stadium for 75,000 people per show. After the first concert, the band’s manager Rob Cooksey and bodyguard Patsy Collins met with [the Indonesian promoter] and tried to negotiate a fairer deal. The meeting ended in an altercation. Later, Collins allegedly got into a fight over a prostitute and fell down a lift shaft at the hotel. He survived and crawled outside, but died a few hours later. Police responded by arresting Deep Purple’s singer and bassist Glenn Hughes, as well as Cooksey and the other bodyguard, Paddy ‘the Plank’. Hughes was allowed out at gunpoint the next night for the second concert. Authorities declared Collins’ death an accident. Then Cooksey and Paddy had to pay US$2,000 each to get their passports back. The band was driven to the airport, where their plane had a flat tire. They had to pay US$10,000 to use a special jack and torque wrench, and their roadies had to change the tire."

That's only #3 on "Top 10 Concert Fails In Indonesia." I'm reading Indonesia Expat this morning because I have been fighting spam that contains the words "Jakarta" and "chloroform," and a Google search got me to the article at Indonesia Expat. The headline is "Delving into the Dark Web." Excerpt:

[T]here are dozens of Indonesian sites selling date-rape drugs. A typical spiel goes like, “Rohypnol pills have very powerful properties and can be used to drug a woman targeted for rape or for other crimes, but our intention in selling this sleeping pill is not for that purpose, but to make it easier for you to sleep.”

Another site offers chloroform, stating it “can be used for rape” and causes memory loss in the victim. A similar site, offering 250 ml bottles of chloroform for Rp.450,000, states “this anaesthetic is often misused by criminals who want to rob, kidnap or rape a target by first anesthetizing them”.

Police and the Ministry of Communication and Informatics are not blocking these sites or arresting their operators, so there’s no need for the culprits to use the dark web.

"Indonesia closed the airport on the tourist island of Bali on Monday and ordered 100,000 residents living near a rumbling volcano spewing columns of ash to evacuate immediately..."

"... warning that the first major eruption in 54 years could be 'imminent.' The airport was closed for 24 hours from Monday morning, disrupting 445 flights and some 59,000 passengers, after Mount Agung, which killed hundreds of people in 1963, sent volcanic ash high into the sky, and officials said cancellations could be extended."

Reports Al Jazeera (which I chose from among several options for this story because it had the best photographs).

"A 100-foot statue depicting a Chinese deity was covered with an enormous sheet this weekend in East Java Province, Indonesia..."

"... after Muslims threatened to tear the colossus down amid mounting ethnic and religious tensions across the country," the NYT reports.

The Islamist campaign against the statue, a depiction of the third-century general Guan Yu, who is worshiped as a god in several Chinese religions, began online and soon spread to the gates of a Chinese Confucian temple in Tuban, near the Java Sea coast, where the figure was erected last month.

On social media, Muslims assailed the statue as an “uncivilized” affront to Islam and the island’s “home people,” and a mob gathered this week outside the East Java legislature in the city of Surabaya to demand its destruction.

How did such a statue get erected in the first place? Here are the demographics of the province of East Java. Ethnicity:

Javanese (80%), Madurese (18%), Indian (10%), Chinese (2%)

Religion:

Islam (96.36%), Christianity (2.4%), Buddhism (0.6%), Hinduism (0.5%), Confucianism (0.1%), Kejawen also practised

Is it about wealth and foreign influence? The NYT article says Muslim Indonesians are afraid "that as Beijing becomes more dominant in the region — exerting financial and military influence — ethnic Chinese will profit at the expense of Muslims."

Look at the photograph of Guan Yu. The military general as god is holding a sword so huge that it's sticking out from under the enormous sheet. The Times quotes the Indonesia director for Human Rights Watch, who criticizes the Muslims for using a "hostile interpretation" of the Quran to argue that the statue shows "that China is dominating Indonesia." But why put up a statue other than to say something?

One of the Muslims who's opposing the statue is quoted saying: "Actually we can allow them to build the statue, just not as high as it was and it should be in the temple, not outside... We are tolerant."

Why didn't that argument get made before the huge thing went up? Reading about the Guan Yu statue made me remember writing about colossal statues in the past. From a post I wrote in 2014:

Let's realize that throughout history statuary has been used to intimidate people. What's all that ancient Egyptian sculpture about if not to cow people into abject submission?



Think of all the Lenin and Stalin statues. And how about Saddam Hussein's despicable "Victory Arch"?

That post wasn't about a big intimidating god-warrior like Guan Yu, but about a life-size sculpture of a man stumbling forward in his underpants. That sculpture — "Sleepwalker," by Tony Matelli — upset some Americans at Wellesley College. They didn't throw a big sheet over "Sleepwalker," but they did put orange safety cones and yellow "caution" tape around him.

ADDED: Remember when the U.S. Department of Justice spent $8,000 on a big old drapery to cover the half-nude "Spirit of Justice" statue after photographers seemed too interested in framing Attorney General John Ashcroft with the looming breasts over his head?

The Christian governor of Jakarta was convicted of blasphemy for arguing that the Quran does not bar Muslims from voting for a non-Muslim.

Basuki Tjahaja Purnama was given a 2-year sentence (which he will appeal), and he is now in jail, the NYT reports.

Bivitri Susanti, head of the Jakarta chapter of Indonesia’s Association of Constitutional Law Lecturers, criticizes the application of the law: “It’s not about the speech itself and whether it’s condemning Islam itself. It’s about whether society believes it’s wrong or annoys them.”

Mass rallies were organized calling for his arrest, with some zealots demanding that the governor be put to death. Many analysts said that the protests had been orchestrated by his political rivals and that they were a strong factor in his 16-point defeat in last month’s election....

Among Indonesia’s population of 250 million are more than 190 million Muslims, but there are also smaller, influential minorities including Christians, Hindus and Buddhists.

“First, this verdict is really intimidating for minority groups,” said Tim Lindsey, director of the Center for Indonesian Law, Islam and Society at the University of Melbourne. “Second, it tells Muslim politicians that they should try to use the religion card in other elections. Religion has never been absent,” he continued, “but this is a real shift. This has been building up for a long time.”

"Many Indonesians who are still too poor to eat beef, except on special occasions, can now afford dog or cat."

Said one animal protection researcher quoted in "Indonesians’ Taste for Dog Meat Is Growing, Even as Others Shun It" (NYT).

“From a strictly practical, agricultural point of view, growing dogs and cats for meat requires far less space and feed resources than growing cows, and is therefore cheaper,” [Brad] Anthony said. “The economics of it all is likely the primary motivator for production and consumption.”...

[D]ogs are not classified as livestock, the way cows, pigs and chickens are. Because of this, the slaughter, distribution, sale and consumption of dogs are not regulated.... In Jakarta, Juniatur Silitonga... says he slaughters about 20 dogs in an average week....

“It’s cheaper than beef,” he said. “Eating dog meat is a tradition among local tribes, and they are mostly Christian, but Muslims also eat dog meat soup for medicinal reasons.”

There is a belief that meat from a black dog cures asthma.

ADDED: In the comments — those swamps of vitriol and condescension — they're making a beeline for Obama-eats-dog material. Here's my Obama eats dog tag to beef up — dog up — your witticisms.

But what I really want to talk about is poverty and human health. If dogs and cats are cheap and easy to breed and keep, why shouldn't poor people be accorded respect as they embrace this form of food production? The article doesn't really approach this problem, but immediately distracts us with 2 completely different problems: 1. Cruel methods of slaughter, and 2. Rabies.

These are utterly easy to see as problems. There's no debate about ethics, so it's a fine distraction from the harder question I want to talk about.

And aren't these problems solvable? Can't poor people be educated about and convinced to use the most humane method of slaughter? We affluent people — most of us — don't deny ourselves meat because of the suffering of animals. We just expect that the suffering to be decently minimized.

As for rabies, nobody wants rabies! Let's work on that problem everywhere. According to the article, unregulated commerce makes it hard to rabies, which is "a persistent problem in Bali and elsewhere." If this is a reason to deny a meat source to poor people, please explain to me why affluent people are encouraged to travel to Bali. Here's a NYT article from 2015: "Rabies Deaths Higher Than Previously Thought":

Rabies kills 59,000 people a year, or about 160 a day — more than had previously been assumed — according to a study published last week.

That is a terrible problem. Worry about that, not whether some poor people are taking advantage of the profusion of dogs and cats to get some meat in their diet.

"A toilet-themed cafe where customers dine on meatballs floating in soup-filled latrines...."

"Guests at the 'Jamban Cafe' sit on upright toilets around a table where food is served in squat loos.... 'Jamban' means toilet in Indonesian...."

Owner Budi Laksono, a public health expert who used to work for the local government, hosts discussions with customers and shows them videos as he seeks to encourage people to use dedicated facilities for their bodily functions...

"This cafe serves as a reminder that many people in Indonesia still do not have toilets," said Laksono, 52.... "Many critics say the cafe is inappropriate and against Islamic law," he said.

"I'm in Jakarta right now, and was surprised, while driving in, to see a Trump ad on a billboard."

"'Donald Trump Birthday Celebration, All Items 50% + 10%, Make America Great Again' only 'America' was crossed out and "Malinda Customers" was written in (it was for a furniture company?)."

ADDED: Balfegor took a picture:

"They would look at me — I’m a gay man—and they would say, ‘You’re a woman.’ Their sexuality is what gives them gender."

"I would ask, are you gay or heterosexual, and they would say, no, I’m waria, I’m a woman. What they’re most adamant about is that they’re not gay." Said David Brian Esch, who studied the Pondok Pesantren Waria in Indonesia.  Pondok pesantran means prayer school, and waria means transgender.

“One fascinating aspect of the pesantren is that it went along without any harassment from hardline groups for years and we all wondered why extremist groups were shutting down churches and ‘gayish’ nightclubs and leaving the pesantren alone,” Esch said.

“God created his creatures and I want to live as I am,” Oki, one of the waria at the pesantran, told Esch on camera. “It is my fate. Sometimes I feel sad because I want to pray at the mosque, but people look and talk about me.... Others have told me that being waria is a sin. I told them that we do not know God’s gender. We do not know if God is a man or a woman or waria.... I pray as a man because I want to face my god as a man. And I learned as a child to pray as a man, with the male dress, the sarong, and when I die I want to be buried as a man, even though I am waria,” Oki said. “I will be asked by God what my original family name is.”

Because this belief is prevalent, many waria say they don’t want gender confirmation surgery....

If you're slapping your head over that last line, know that the linked article is in The Daily Beast, in a section — I'm not kidding — called "PROGRESS," and the headline includes the phrase "Indonesia is more progressive when it comes to gender fluidity than the West." There's some mind-crushing obtuseness about the terrible oppression of gay people here:

Transgender people have been acknowledged throughout Islamic history, and the Prophet Muhammad’s wife is even said to have had a mukhannath (effeminate) servant who was only banished from the women’s quarters when the Prophet realized he was attracted to women. Even today in Iran, the Islamic government will pay for gender confirmation surgery for transgender people, making the country second only to Thailand in the number of such surgeries performed. (Homosexuality is punishable by death in Iran, and activists worry that some gay people may be forced into such surgeries to escape that grisly end.)

"Plan to use crocodiles as death row guards moves forward."

In Indonesia.

"A mob of wild monkeys has gone on a rampage in a village in eastern Indonesia..."

"... entering houses and attacking residents.... It's unclear why the monkeys, which are usually afraid of humans and flee when they hear human voices, emerged [from the forest] and attacked."

"A death sentence handed down in Bali to a British grandmother found guilty of drug trafficking has been condemned by the UK government."

Can you understand why?

"The boy should know where his dinner is coming from. What do you think, Barry?"

More meat-oriented education from Lolo, Barack Obama's stepfather, as told by Obama in his memoir "Dreams From My Father." This scene occurs when Obama, age 6, first arrives from Hawaii in his new home in Jakarta:

[T]he man who had carried our luggage was standing in the backyard with a rust-colored hen tucked under his arm and a long knife in his right hand. He said something to Lolo, who nodded and called over to my mother and me. My mother told me to wait where I was and sent Lolo a questioning glance.

“Don’t you think he’s a little young?”

Lolo shrugged and looked down at me. “The boy should know where his dinner is coming from. What do you think, Barry?” I looked at my mother, then turned back to face the man holding the chicken. Lolo nodded again, and I watched the man set the bird down, pinning it gently under one knee and pulling its neck out across a narrow gutter.

"Many people say I want to kill myself because I do this."

"People can say what they want. I do it because I want to be cured."

Electric therapy, via lying on railroad tracks, in Indonesia, where "many practice a form of Islam that is mixed with superstition and traditional beliefs, including voodoo-like treatments to ward off spells and illnesses." So... it's not New Age. It's Old Age.