Russia invaded Ukraine today.

I'm not in Scotland.

He was a painter and decorator as far as I know, no idea if he was ever military, he was in the Phils from quite a young adult age and then back and forth to the UK.

I could be wrong it might not be him, but if it walks like a duck, talks like..... then who knows.

I banned both of them.

There is no guarantee that this guy is one of those ex-members there is just a lot of corroborating evidence that makes it likely, back door evidence.

Yes the member in question was a mod elsewhere and was deliberately winding us up here, there had been years of posting of YouTube videos of far right extremist views, basically poisoning the public content of this site, similiar to the shill like and quisling videos being posted here now, hence my "who are you" question.

Others did partially walk away for different reasons, one specifically because his friend was banned, albeit in awkward circumstances and partly through his friend's own bad temper at the time although that temper was understandable given the tone of this place back then.

Markham was banned from a well known Philippine forum many many years ago, it was after that when he started posting here and even that only happened to any large extent after his own forum failed and went under, there is another member who is not banned who was involved with the creation of Markham's forum and we had a period of time where numerous members of that forum posted here as well, we're talking over 10 years ago, they all fought with each other and most eventually stopped posting.

At the time Gunther seemed to be one of the better ones but the whole lot of them were under attack from an internet troll called Evan Illiadis for year after year, who knows what was true and what was not in that battle, I liked Gunther I think he was a decent man, he owned restaurants over there and was a chef and by all accounts a good one.

The Philippine based forums seem to be very aggressive at least the ones I've looked at, yeah people from everywhere but a lot of very diverse and angry views, not my thing.

Yeah Gunther is a good bloke but he was chased off here by a group of refugees from Marham's forum.

And yeah I know the forum you mean, so is Gunther still going strong?

Our neighbour immediately across the road in Las Pinas is working as OFW in Austria, James's best friend's mother.

Surprising the number of country connections that the Philippine people have.

That chart says Americans are parochial basically inward looking.

New Zealander's being a tiny population in a remote location don't do a lot of overseas travel and also travel a bit less inside the country.

And Hong Kong being a tiny area most of their trips are outside their boundaries, with almost nowhere to go domestically as it's so small

Australia is a bit remote and France probably a bit insular like the British.

Which is why they have no idea that that other people in the world have good healthcare and social welfare programmes and that what they have is an absolute ripoff and as a result they keep voting in people that want to keep their lousy systems exactly the way they are or who want to make them even worse.

Like god forbid having a national health service means you're in a communist country.