Could be a tribute to Oscar Wilde, about your *edit - could you have mixed up the personas?

Oscar Wilde
Born: October 16, 1854, Westland Row, Dublin, Ireland
Died: November 30, 1900, Paris, France

Bob Ross
Born: October 29, 1942, Daytona Beach, Florida, United States
Died: July 4, 1995, Orlando, Florida, United States

It's a sad thing that many Americans' first introduction to Europe is Charles de Gaulle airport, which serves the same purpose in European transportation as Hell does in Christian theology. CDG is how France punishes Americans for telling World War 2 jokes.

When you're landing at CDG, the pilot says "We are now arriving at Charles de Gaulle Airport. Please prepare to weep tears of blood and rage." That's when you realize the scenes below of people running in circles and screaming in panic is just the line for passport control. It gets worse from there and differs from Dante's Inferno only in that Dante' got out within a single human lifetime.

(Story: I got lost in that place once -- and by 'once', I mean 'every single fucking time' -- and couldn't figure out how to get to the taxi stand. Since no one will give you help at CDG like no one will give you ice water in Hell, I approached this French military guy toting what looked a lot like a MP-5.

"Bonjour, Monsieur," I began, "je ne parle pas français; parlez-vous Anglais?" and I'm trying to scrape together enough of the infantile French I know into some semblance of "how the fuck do I get out of this failure of architectural design and vacancy of God's mercy to get a taxi?", which came out as "Taxi, S'il vous plaît?", probably much to my advantage.

The dude with the MP-5 gives me the Gallic stink-eye, shakes his head slowly, and then points directly up.

"Taxi -->" said the giant sign directly above his head.

"Ah, merci!" I said brightly while he, my mortified wife and pretty much the entire nation of France rolled their eyes.

I so fucking love France!)

I'll point out a couple of significant differences in the way you characterise Joe's comment and what your Dear Leader said -
1. Biden made this statement in public and to their faces, and...
2. It was clearly said in a joking manner and meant to be in the spirit of camaraderie judging by the reaction he got from the troops.
Very different than the way Donnie snidely and backhandedly disrespected those who gave their lives many years ago and who still serve today. The fact that Mr. T could not be bothered to attend the memorial in France for these fallen heros because he was worried about mussing his ridiculous comb over (due to a misting rain) adds insult to injury.
So, technically, you are correct in ascribing Bidens quote, and probably not one of the smartest comments he has made, but you evidently can not understand, or don't want to admit, that the situations and context were totally different. Seems a little trollish to me, but that's just my take.
Btw OAN, really?

Naw, previous to the fucking idiot at 1600 completely botching the Covid response and turning America into the laughingstock of the world, a US passport would have gotten me to Lyon, France, where I had a job waiting. Thank fuck Estonia wants my start-up in their country, which at least offers me a way into the EU and away from this unspeakable shithole.

Bob,

No.

I don't want Biden because he's exactly the wrong candidate at exactly the wrong time. 2020 is going to be the most important election since Reconstruction. The stakes are deadly high. The problems facing America are becoming insurmountable. I don't want to vote for Biden because he's not Trump. I want to vote for a candidate who is a pragmatist and is going to do whatever it takes to fix the damage Trump and the others of his ilk have done to America. We need someone with a backbone and balls of steel who isn't afraid to break china and stampede the horses. What we need is a Trump on our side, only one who actually knows what the fuck he's doing.

Also, fuck your boy for costing me a chance to emigrate to France.

I have southern France doesn't have any earthquakes in the next 5 years...
so complex of a build.

One of the ways in which Martin Luther broke from the Catholic church was by not seeing marriage as sacramental: he wanted to be able to acknowledge marriage between non-Christians rather than just marriage between Christians. Thus, from the perspective of Protestant theology, it's not clear that the church should have much to do with marriage. (This was most succinctly summarised for me thus: have a civil wedding, and then come back to the church for potato salad and a party.)

What about the civil arrangement, then? For me, the clearest argument for a non-paternalistic state granting some people preferable treatment (e.g. untaxed inheritance, etc.) is that those people are reducing the burden on the state somehow. In the 'traditional marriage', they do this partly by providing (on average) a more stable environment in which to raise children (thus, raising somehow more productive - on average - citizens for the state), and partly by caring for each other in their old age (thus, saving the state costs). From this point of view, whether or not they have sex, on whatever basis, with each other is irrelevant: an adult son living with and caring for his elderly mother is saving the state in the same way that an wife caring for her husband is. Thus, when France introduced its 'pacte civil', I thought that they missed the opportunity to get right out of the bedroom.

April 30th was a good day that year too....all of that April was good.

Winter....for Hitler...and Germany.
Springtime....for England...and France.

Is this in France?

Newt,

This is in response to your comment on my statement about Biden needing to lose in '20.

I recently wrote this as a reply to one of my readers (I write under a number of different names in other places).:

Dear <name>,

>I took some time to absorb what you wrote. It's a lot to juggle. The Atlantic has an article in the July-August issue on the worst and best case scenario in CLO defaults. I'll read more.

I read the article you mentioned, and while it's certainly good, it also misses a very important point that explains the mess we're in: the collapse of Lehman and Bear-Stearns, while catastrophic in their own ways, were not the nightmare that caused the Fed to freak out in 2008 -- AIG was. Had AIG gone under and the counterparty default contracts triggered, we'd be on the barter system right now. We came within hours of not having an economy in the western world. The $700b ($.7t) the Fed coughed up to stop this from happening calmed the panic, but did nothing to resolve the underlying issues. These issues continued to compound during the 2011-2020 stock run-up and now we're at the point where the Fed is throwing trillions of dollars at every piece of bad debt they can find just to keep the whole thing from imploding into an economic black hole. It is important to note that in September '19, the credit markets started freezing because of the debt that was already on the books then, -before- CV-19 started rolling, and it took $3t just to get them unlocked again. Absolutely nothing has gotten better since then, and I would argue things have gotten dangerously worse.

In an odd coincidence, the NYT ran an article today about the looming bankruptcy crisis. They're calling for 30-60 days before things start imploding, but I'll stick to my estimate of ~90 days. There's some talk about extending the $600 benefits (we'll see) and chatter about another stimulus check, but that's kicking the can as well as telegraphing how bad things really are. When the Republicans are getting behind free money, you know we're in some uncharted territory. For all intents and purposes, Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) -- the reason the Fed is backstopping debt and printing money like crazy -- is the hill the US economy will live or die on. Should the US dollar come unpegged as the world's de facto currency or should inflation begin (and there's already worrying signs this is happening), that's game over.

Please don't take anything I say as the Word of God; please do your own research and come to your own conclusions. Everything I've said is an opinion based on my education, experience and way of thinking. Your mileage may vary.

Here is the article I mentioned: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/18/business/corporate-bankruptcy-coronavirus.html -- might be paywalled, but clear your cookies for the NYT and you should be able to read it.


>Frankly, it's the physical danger in my area of the States that concerns me. There are the guns and bullying. During some BLM demonstrations in the Midwest, locals were standing around with semi-automatics. I drive a Prius for the fuel efficiency. Pick up trucks enjoy tailgating, trying to intimidate me. This behavior isn't going to change with a change of President but will get worse is we don't change. This ideological push to takeover the country instead of ruling by compromise started around the same time we came to the US in 1981, Reagan's first year. I was so shocked when I heard talk radio for the first time; this wasn't the country I had left in the 1970s.


And now we come to the giant pile of sweaty dynamite that's just waiting for the right shock to set it off. I could give you a prolonged lecture about how this all started in 1978 with California's Proposition 13, or how David Stockman's tragically prescient warnings were blatantly ignored, but Haynes Johnson does a far better job at this than I ever could in his 1991 book "Sleepwalking Through History", as does Kevin Phillips in 2006's "American Theocracy". Honestly, at this point, the prelude is academic. The reality of the situation is that a large swath of adult Americans are appalling ill-educated, innumerate and devoid of even the most basic critical-thinking skills. These people are now locked out of the Information Economy. They lack the most basic skills required to compete in the 21st century job market and thus will watch their standard of living sink into the abyss. These people are not blind to this fact because they're living with the reality of their situation every single day. They're totally without hope, cut off from all avenues of control over their own lives and they feel utterly abandoned by the very people who're supposed to be helping them. The reason you're seeing bullying and behavior like that is because these same people are totally removed from any avenues of recourse and the only people they can take their anger out on are people like you and me. Their anger is being stoked on a daily basis. FOX News and the GOP are experts at this and have a host of boogeymen to keep the anger from being pointed their way: ANTIFA, BLM (black Americans have always made a perfect target), "coastal elites" and, of course, Liberals.

Trump's election was a warning, not an outlier. Trump was the primal scream of these people and Liberals and the Democrats as a whole chose not to listen because they found the sound so abhorrent. The rage will only get worse and the number of people enveloped by this rage will only grow as economic conditions worsen. At this point, it no longer matters who wins in '20. Winning the election will be like winning the deed to the World Trade Center one second after the first jet hit. The damage has already been done and no steps are being taken to repair it; if anything, people are actively making it worse either through ideological blindness, deliberate malfeasance or outright stupidity. It took almost 50 years to get to this point and the endemic issues will not be undone in a single generation, much less a single election. Until the people who voted for Trump feel a sense of real hope, a sense of control over their lives and a genuine expectation of recourse for their grievances, they will keep right on voting for Trump, or people like him.

My unfortunate suspicion is that this country will rip itself to shreds long before those reforms are enacted.

Side note: the fundamental difference between the United States and Europe is that European history has forced the nations of Europe to live with the consequences of their actions. Not so the United States. Europe has suffered for her sins. Not so the United States. The two bloodiest wars in human history were fought on European soil. Not so the United States. The United States has never faced true suffering, nor has it ever had to live with the ramifications of its own actions. Both these facts are about to change and a nation whose character is built on a mythology of individual action and violence is going to have to face reality. The people of this nation are not prepared for this and they will not like it.

Second side note: many people are erroneously comparing the current situation to the Wiemar Republic. This is a lack of historical understanding. A more apt comparison would be to Spain in late 1935.


>As for re-opening, we could have gotten some control if the "leader" had simply donned a mask and used realistic thinking. People could go back to work more safely, wash hands, stay a certain distance. But his hubris led the way, so now we'll have a roller coaster for months and years that will affect the economy even more. France is a good comparison because they were unprepared also, having slashed the public healthcare budget for the last twenty years. But when they laid down the rules, troops patrolled the streets to be sure they were followed. So far, they've flattened the curve (for now), and used different economic incentives, such as paying part of employees' salaries to keep them employed.

At this point, the pace of re-opening is a difference between very bad and much worse. Had $3t been used to pay the yearly salary of every American, we could have saved lives and the economy, but we didn't. The history of 2020 will be littered with "what-ifs". However, the first thing you learn when studying history is that what-ifs are useless because things are what they are and you can't change that. It's already obvious we're going into a second wave. If previous pandemics are any indication of what's to come, this second wave will be many times worse than the first. The wait for a vaccine is indeterminate, but if we're going for herd immunity, ~70% of Americans will need to catch the virus. To date, ~1.5% have. If the US population is ~330 million, ~230 million will need to catch the virus. Call the mortality rate 2%, that means ~4.6 million Americans will die. That's a lot of dead Americans and grieving families.

Take care,

(my actual name)

3 more comments have been lost in the ether at this killed duplicate.

Hmmmm.....I went to public schools in California in the 80's, they were well above average, head and shoulders above public school in Texas. Granted, I went in Los Altos Hills and Palo Alto, neither hurting for tax funds. I'm not sure how they keep the lights on up here in Humboldt county.

You may be right, but even a confirmed pessimist like me has a hard time believing Trumpsters are now average intelligence, 100 IQ. That would make me Einstein, and I'm no Einstein.

Yes, there are more dumb people than intelligent....it's up to the intelligent to use their brains to get around that. It's not a new concept, it's why we have an electoral college.

Why can't I pick up my gun, do my duty to cull the American herd of the mentally feeble, then move to New Zealand? ;-)

The thing about the screaming loonies is they think they're tough, but the first time someone returns fire more than half will piss themselves and drop their guns in terror. Those pansies are afraid of deer. They love to be tough thinking only right wingers own guns....they're wrong. I've got many.

Yeah.....I'm not going to France no matter what happens. I'd move to NZ in a heartbeat though.

To your first post, some of us care because it's a dead American, period. I agree, many have that mindset, but not all Americans by far. That said, I'm astonished that non-white America hasn't openly declared the undeclared and often denied war between them and blue America. Where's Cyrus (from the movie The Warriors)?

I'm not prepared to just hand over the nation my forefathers gave their lives to create without a fight because the number of easily duped morons in our midst was underestimated. The last election gives hope that the populous was sufficiently shocked to at least vote, especially with so many states moving to all vote by mail. Trump was right for once, if everyone eligible votes, no Republican will ever hold a federal office again. To combat voter fraud, instead of presidential tantrums I wish they would make it a mandatory sentence felony and prosecute every case, that would have put quite a few Republicans in prison last election including some candidates.

Who cares?! Sadly it seems to be a minority of us, especially a minority of those of us in office, but still a plurality. There are more of us than there are Trumpsters, but we aren't as single minded or unified since we can think for ourselves instead of just regurgitating propaganda.

Yes, our country, it's values, morals, and ethics are all in dire shape, but I believe it's not beyond saving unless we give up and move to France....then it will probably be a Chinese colony in a decade.

Sorry Newt, but this'll just be added to the pile of "who cares?"

This is the country that watches its children get machine-gunned in their schools and just shrugs. This is the country that poisoned its own population with opioids and just shrugged. This is the country that allowed corporations to take over the entire power structure of the nation and just shrugged. No one cares. No. One. Cares.

You cannot overcome the wall of indifference and entitlement no matter how many impassioned pleas or elegant speeches you make.

Your heart's in the right place, but this is Bob Knight's country now and you will never get it back. And the people who're like Bob Knight? Yeah, they really don't give a shit about dead niggers.

As soon as I get my work visa for France finalized, I am out of here.

If this was France, he'd be doing the same thing, only in reverse and with a queue of 500 irate Parisians waiting to get their driver's licenses only to be told they forgot to check Box 3 with a blue pen instead of a black one.