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I read that book and I remember it well. Paul Kennedy's analysis was an eye-opener. However, I would not imply that the US will not remain a great power, at least for the rest of this century. Very likely it will be one of two powers in a bipolar world though if (post-Trump) it fails to repair its relationships with Europe, Canada and other democratic countries, it will get increasingly isolated to the point of irrelevance. Even if it tries to repair those relationships, I fear permanent damage has been done; there will never be the same level of trust again. Foreign powers are smart enough not to imagine that this is just a Trump-and-Vance phenomenon. They know that the agonies the US is suffering right now arise from systemic factors (more below) including cultural and ideological ones. These agonies will remain long after Trump and Vance, and to that extent, the US will continue to eat itself. I was born when the British Empire had just crumbled. Like so many here, I witnessed the fall of the Soviet Union and the re-arrangement of the world order from the bipolar world it represented. While both empires fell relatively quickly; we should not assume that the US empire will vanish as quickly. I think the difference may be that the British and Soviet empires had their economies hollowed out to a much larger extent than the US' today, and so when they collapsed, it was more complete. The US economy is still relatively strong so even if its political influence wanes (mostly due to self-inflicted damage) it will remain an economic force to be reckoned with.  The British empire My understanding is that the fall of the British Empire was a classic example of military overreach, but a fiction of military might still have been sustained for a century more if not for Kaiser Germany and Nazi Germany. The two World Wars accelerated the humbling of Great Britain by draining it of precious resources. Also - and we often forget - by the beginning of the 20th Century, Britain had lost the technological edge  and industrial might to the USA. So, by about 1915 or 1916 when Britain was struggling in the trenches in France, dependent on supplies from across the Atlantic (attacked by German submarines) the writing was on the wall. There was still much political pretence of power in the 1920s and 1930s (King George V's extravagant visit to India for example), but the economic troubles and electoral upheavals of that period further hollowed out the UK. The Second World War was the coup de grace; after that it could be nothing but retreat after retreat from imperial status after 1945. So, even as I speak of a fast collapse of the British Empire, it still took about 30 years from 1915 to 1945, and then another 20 years to 1965 before decolonisation had more or less run its course.. The Soviet empire The collapse of the Soviet Union, in my estimation, took about 25 years, which is still remarkably long considering that the Soviet empire was only built on military mght, never on economic might. The Soviet empire came about because its armies were victorious over the Nazis across large swathes of Europe. There was enough industrial prowess to support a powerful military but Russia never developed a well-rounded economic engine to deliver prosperity and a better life for the peoples it had conquered. Starting from 1956 in Budapest, merely 10 years after the establishment of its sphere of influence, it had to use military power to suppress a revolt. This would be repeated every decade. Unlike the decline of the British Empire which was all over the newspapers even as it lurched from one crisis to another through the 1920s and 1930s, the fiction of a powerful Soviet Union was kept up through the 1960s and 1970s such that its weak foundations and gradual hollowing out were largely invisible to the Western public. Sure, the Soviets engaged in propaganda making themselves look great, but even more so, the invisibility of Soviet weakness was also due to American propaganda which needed a fear of a powerful adversary to justify its military-industrial complex. @PeterRS's hope for an updated Kennedy book is seconded by me. I think it will reach quite different conclusions when taking the Soviet example into account. Although the Soviet empire was engaged in several proxy wars plus a direct intervention in Afghanistan through the 1980s,they weren't particularly costly (except maybe the last one), Instead the already weak economy behind the Soviet empire was further weakend from the 1960s onwards through rigidity, over-centralisation, inefficiency, and the idiocies of ideological blinkers. The stiff, aged Brezhnev only symbolised what was happening throughout its economy. Maybe there was a dose of corruption too, but nothing like the scale of what was to come from the post-Soviet Yeltsin years on. In other words, the fall of the Soviet Union and its empire was primarily an economic event in my opinion rather than a matter of military over-reach. It was very different from the collapse of the British empire. And the US empire? Of course it is too early to be writing about the fall of the US empire. However, when it is written, I think it will be a different story again from the collapse of the British and Soviet empires. In its heyday, the US had trememdous economic, technological and military might, and so it resembled the British empire at its late 19th Century apogee. Unlike the British empire which had a relatively tiny population in its metropolitan country compared to the population sizes it dominated, the US home population (and economy) was also relatively large. It was an empire with far stronger footings than the British or Soviet empires. So how does an empire of such solidity collapse? In short: because it was stolen. It was a case of larceny on an epic scale. Eh? The American ideology of trickle-down economics created a relentless and accelerating enrichment of the 1-percent at a cost to the 99-percent. And it's not just ideology, it is also culture-with-a-religious-fervour. The American culture over-prizes freedom over responsibility; built into it is a distrust of the role of government. The American myth is about escaping the clutches of authority (into the untapped potential of the Wild West frontiers, for example), where "government" is synonymous with regulation and taxation (King George III and successive US administrations in Washington) rather than shared security, pooled resources and wellbeing. Leveraging this myth, the 1-percent essentially stole the American economy with the consent of the American electorate. "Tax cuts" is a winning slogan. It helped when the opposition neutered itself by engaging in arguments about (1) adding more letters to LGBTQIA... (2) slavery reparations (3) defunding the police, etc. If we look back, we can see the symptoms of this Grand Larceny from decades ago. Among developed nations, the US is striking in how impoverished its people are relative to its economic headline numbers. The cost of healthcare compared to other developed countries is well known. And yet, Americans' health is arguably worse than in most other developed countries. The US has a perpetual housing and homelessness crisis. It has a perpetual, endemic drug problem. Don't even get me started on guns and the public safety issues (and costs) these create. It incarcerates a relatively large percentage of its population (at a cost to the State, and a cost to its social fabric). Higher education leaves Americans with a ridiculous debt burden that is seen in no other country. People in the US have to buy cars and pay for gas or take flights even for short hops to a degree that people in other countries do not, because of a failure to invest in public transport and fast rail. For a country of its wealth, its failure to provide public goods - public health, public housing, public safety, public education, public transport - and a decent social safety net is quite astounding. Not so obvious: Americans are so influenced by status culture that they spend disproportionate amounts of money on status goods that do not yield much return in real terms (and status culture is a result of almost unregulated media freedom, promoting celebrities). Is it any wonder that the average American has reached breaking point? He is now frustrated and lashing out. At the same time, he is also trapped by his own culture (freedom!) and the American myth, so that he cannot see that the way the US organises itself is the fundamental problem. Blaming foreigners is much easier.  So, this is not just a Trump phenomenon. The inherent contradictions of the US model are what's at work here.

Short time for me range from one to two hours. If no sex is involved and it's just going to another bar/disco, it can extend to four hours. I recently saw a guy leave a bar with customer. A short while later, he was back. He happily said to me, "Twenty minutes. Two thousand!"

Yep Lots of girls on the streets at night outside the hotels, but no guys. I didn't bother with otot-otot. I figured that with the fast ending around 7, by the time the guys had eaten it would probably be too late for any action, as everybody seems to leave the sauna around 9. I'd only have an hour at most. Also, the clients would be mainly Indians. I've found them very unattractive in the past - overweight and aggressive. I much prefer the Malay guys.

He may begin ignoring judicial branch decisions and when federal marshalls are directed to jail those failing to abide by rulings Trump may block the enforcement arm of the courts since they report up to him.    

The exact amount of time it takes to get to my hotel, both shower, do the deed and shower/pay. If I want more than that i'll do LT.