America Far Away

Posted on by accordingtohoyt

Most of the rest of the world, but particularly Europe, seem to have a bizarre funhouse vision of America.

Part of it I’ll admit is our fault, or at least “our fault” in the sense that every place in the world has idiots and crazy people, but some we’re the only country on Earth who make those people celebrities and stars. And also that no other country’s movie industry specializes in showing the worst possible about their own country, including making up stuff.

However, it leads to completely surreal experiences. Let’s say there is no resemblance between our country and what people abroad believe we are, except perhaps that we occupy a certain landmass and speak English (and even those. They routinely underestimate both.)

I have on various occasions had my brother try to “broaden the American’s experiences” by saying things like, he knows we only have one kind of cheese (from a country where maybe six kinds are available at any time) or offering to send me a book on history (which I’d read a year before from the History bookclub — so this was pre-Amazon.)

I’ve had the distinct, er…. pleasure…. of being in a store that had bars in every window, in a place where even nice areas have window bars and metal drop shutters on residential homes, and being told by the lady that America sounded nice, but she didn’t want to live with the danger of that much crime. … at the time I lived in downtown Colorado Springs which — at the time — was safe as houses. I routinely left my car unlocked and — often, being scatty — my purse on the floor. (It’s more dangerous now.)

Sometimes, more rarely now, I find myself in late night discussions with various people abroad who…. well, some of them think we have shootouts on the street as a matter of course, others think the average American is starving. The most common ones think that we have a race war going on (which is very alarming, since they think we’re divided 50/50) and almost all of them think that we die on the street corners for lack of health insurance.

This last group falls under “your governments are herding you by telling you lies about freedom.” Which is why it’s so pervasive. Our media lies, their media amplifies it because it’s useful.

Yesterday a blog tried to link to my blog — for no very clear reason — and I always follow the link before approving.

I will confess that this one annoyed me by being wordy, confusing and white letters over a busy background.

The gist seemed to be “America is falling apart because of its fatal flaws” only all the flaws they mentioned are ten times as bad in Europe, particularly France where — for reasons — I suspect this blog originates.

It did the double reverse leap of reasoning about our sexual morals too.

It accused us of being too bound by tradition/what will the neighbors say and blamed, of course, the puritans — I don’t know about you, but I don’t seem to have any guys with tall hats in the neighborhood — and it claimed we’re peculiarly infantile because we always give in to our basest urges and have an “ubiquitous availability of any kind of sex and drugs.” To which we always give in.

And therefore systems that are based on the individual are bad evil wrong, and true morality is collective and also reee.

The fact that they seem to be for more traditional morality than the SJWs doesn’t mean they’re not precisely the same thing, since “collective morality” and a society focused on “the good of society” and not the individual always ends the same way. I’ll grant you certain traditions get there faster, but enforced, collective morality only works in religious orders and isn’t perfect there, where everyone enters volitionaly.

I’ve come across this opinion before and I remain utterly unimpressed. Look, I am an extremely boring woman, married and monogamous and edging towards “grandma aged.” The only drug I do consistently is caffeine. I drink like 4 times a year, which is why my drinks cabinet keeps overflowing since unless I use a liquor in cooking, I rarely use it up. I like alcohol, or at least the taste of it, but I don’t like it enough to drink alone, and husband doesn’t drink and sons drink very rarely.

I doubt there’s anything about my life, or even my attire and general attitudes that would set this kind of twerp off. But I don’t care. My disagreement isn’t with their moral beliefs (those are so different in my friend group that it doesn’t bear speaking, anyway) but with their idea that the community should be able to make decisions about what I get to do when and impose them on me.

I remain convinced that so long as I’m not doing it on the street and scaring the horses, they can put it in their pipes and smoke it. (Well, I’m not going to.)

I also remain convinced when a society becomes convinced that “morality” “justice” and other virtues are collective ones, they’ve already chosen the slide to hell and are merely, busilly, rubbing goose grease on it.

However, it wasn’t till this morning that the idea that we all run around having sex with everything and doing ALL the drugs really percolated. And I’m caught somewhere between laughter and crying.

Uh…. I know this won’t convince anyone, because you’ve seen ALL the movies — ALL THE MOVIES — but seriously, little strange foreign dudes and dudettes….. you’re out of your barking minds.

Hunter Biden or Jack Dorsey or Bill Clinton for that matter aren’t representatives of Americans. No. Seriously.

You can’t at the same time accuse us of being ultra-repressed and having sex with the horses on the street. (Though in a country of 300 million yes, we probably have a few of those, but then so do you. You just don’t put them on TV.)

You also can’t accuse us of working too much — like the evil capitalists we are — and then turn around and think we’re shooting up, snorting and screwing our way through life. Yes, I know the movies show that, but that’s the magic of camera cuts. We are, indeed — thank you for noticing — amazing, but even we can’t lead two totally all-absorbing lives at the same time.

Well, you can, but you risk making even less sense than normal. You also risk our falling on the floor laughing so hard you can feel it across the Atlantic.

To level set, I am a member of the science fiction community, where a collection of odd people gather. I have friends who are in polyandric and polygamous relationships. I have friends of various attractions and inclinations. …. I don’t have any friends who just have sex constantly and on command. For one, because it would get in the way of writing, or studying the craft, or researching.

I don’t know what substances my friends indulge in, mostly because it’s none of my business. But I know most of them — not being Hunter Biden and therefore working for a living — don’t go through life in a drugged-out haze.

The only Americans that fit your description are Hunter Biden and his ilk, and a bunch of homeless, shooting up and fornicating (and killing each other) on sidewalks. And if you think that’s an effect of our society, you haven’t looked at your own streets. It’s the result of the law against public vagrancy not being enforced. No more and no less.

Every society has mentally ill and addled people We just make them celebrities, or turn our cities into dumps for them.

However, as for the “ubiquitous” drugs and sex making us infantile, all I have to say is buy a mirror. In my trips to Europe I see just as many if not more thirty-something year old enfants terribles. And France has always — seemingly — or at least for the last 200 years had issues with the idea that refusing sex is somehow awkward. And yes, I do get that from your media and magazines. Oh, not accurate? Desole. Perhaps you should take a hint.

As for the US falling apart, you only wish. Probably because you’re jealous of all the sex and drugs we AREN’T in fact having. Sure, we have issues, but nothing like yours.

And as for your diagnosis that our problems are rooted in excess individualism, and your decision to jump up the ass of collectivism once more, in search of some kind of grand morality, let me just say once and for all: Next time you’re on your own. Neither my sons or the grandchildren I hope to have, or my ducttape-adopted children and their children should shed a drop of blood or a single tear over your inability to learn.

Look in a mirror, get over yourselves, and realize everything you think about us is a lie. The clues are there, in that you attribute to us wildly contradictory qualities.

Consider that you might be getting lied to, and ask why.

And then dig yourselves out, because Americans are tired of helping you out, and then becoming your punching bag.

It’s time you moved out of our basement and got a life, and stopped obsessing about how much sex we’re having.

And that’s very much my moral, individual opinion.

333 thoughts on “America Far Away”

  1. You my dear niece are a party pooper!
    How dare you suggest to our European cousins that cowboys no longer ride the range fighting off injuns with smoking six shooters. Or that the Feds do not have daily running battles in the streets of Chicago with gangsters armed with Thompson machine guns. Or that people of color are not still laboring under slave like conditions in the cotton fields of the South.
    Would you have them believe your dismissive words or believe their own eyes in wide screen technicolor at the local cinema?
    Reminds me of a recent observation of my own regarding the upswell in first time firearm purchasers. Literally tens of thousands of adults buying a gun armed (sic) with all the knowledge and experience that they’ve garnered from all those movies and TV shows they watch. And that dear heart is my sobering thought for the day.

    2. Gee. And we haven’t seen a single statistic showing increased violence caused by any of those first time buyers, have we? Come to think of it, I haven’t seen any significant statistics on increased firearm accident injuries for those people or their children. Oh dear, is it possible H.Sap. isn’t as stupid as our self-anointed elite betters would have us believe?

    3. I saw a black man working in a cotton field of the South on TV a few months ago.

      Of course, he owned the cotton field, and he was driving a combine, but still… Cotton field! REEEEE!!
      ———————————
      “I am shocked – shocked! – to find that gambling is going on in Rick’s!”

  2. I’m nor sure that the USA is the only country that the rest of the world profoundly misunderstands

    People have very odd ideas about the British, including the idea that the British Isles are a culinary desert. Now there was a period in time say 1940 to ~1970 or so, when that was probably true,but overall through the centuries that is not in fact the case. And these days it certainly isn’t. Also very few of us have the Queen pop over for tea and so on.

    And then there’s Japan. People have very very strange ideas about Japan. Almost all of them are right up to a point in the same way that the views of the US are..

    If you want to find a view of Japan (or Britain) that meets your preconceptions you probably can. But if you dig in a bit you find out that whether it is you care about is limited to a certain area, or class, or something

    3. Ireland during the potato famine years was a culinary desert; but that’s generally true during any famine. On the other hand, people get very inventive with what’s considered food during those times. And it’s that inventiveness that becomes regional specialties, and eventually, haute cuisine.

      1. I made rumblethumps just this week. And I assume rumblethumps came about because a Scottish housewife saw all she had was an onion, a head of cabbage, some potatoes, and some dairy (milk, butter and a bit of cheese).

    5. According to European media, the British are a very stabby people who are stoic about their misfortunes when they aren’t lying unconscious in a street, mostly likely in a state of undress, after a night of drinking and offering sexual favors to strangers.

      I used to wonder if the bad reputation of British cooking was because of the various war- and post-war recipes. Then I took into account the horrifying dangerousness of British flour. I’ve read everything from old to modern writers (most recently Pratchett and Pullman) and, when the protagonist needs to distract the baddies or destroy a wall, nothing is easier than introducing flour to open flame.

      Despite being a klutz and taking many opportunities to unleash clouds of flour around gas burners, I have never done anything more than made myself sneeze and made a mess. Perhaps it needs more sifting?

        1. I tried replying, but my phone doesn’t recognize my wordpress credentials. (Such as they are.) I was making fun of the highly-combustible-flour as a protagonist’s helper for escaping the bad guys. Kind of like the myriad cement-headed protagonists who are knocked out, sometimes repeatedly, yet get on with the adventure as soon as they come to. 😉

      2. I wouldn’t expect it to take out a wall– best I’ve seen (on video) is closer to “oops! THAT burner was on!” type whoof of flame (didn’t even take out eyebrows… I may be lucky….) as the dust catches fire.

        I think my flour may be too damp?

        (FWIW, I thought you were going to make a point of parasites and such in the flour! IE, the reason you “cook” the flour before making edible-cookie-dough with cream cheese instead of eggs.)

        1. Parasites and insects in flour is universal, isn’t it? I was just poking fun at the surprising number of British stories I’ve read in which flour is used as a distraction or a means of escape. Bobbypins are no longer feasible, but flour marches on. Ha ha.

          1. Almost any kind of dust will explode with the right encouragement; you may have to go looking for it, but grain elevator and silo explosions are rare, but do happen if enough static electricity builds up when adding or removing contents.

            1. I remember one grain elevator explosion a year back in the 70s-early 80s in Nebraska, Kansas, South Dakota, Iowa. I think dust reduction has gotten better, and spark-protection likewise.

          2. Flour gets used in D&D and its associated fiction, too. It’s been a long time since I read them, but I recall that in the first of Salvatore’s Drizzt books Drizzt uses a bag of flour to disable a powerful evil artifact.

            1. Did it make sense? Pratchett’s Monstrous Regiment had the protagonist and her friends creating an explosion by dropping of old flour bags from the rafters and igniting the resultant particle cloud. On the other hand, Pullman’s Lyra simply tore open a bag of flour and threw it around, then heard a muffled explosion behind her as she ran from a kitchen.

              1. >> “Did it make sense?”

                Some. The artifact was a small, hovering piece of crystal that absorbed light for power. The idiot villain using it is in full-on “you can’t stop me” mode and dares Drizzt to take a swing at the crystal. Drizzt instead dumps the flour on it, puts the bag over it and ties the bag shut to keep the light out. It disrupts things long enough to help the heroes.

                Honestly, the part that made the least sense is Drizzt carrying around a bag of flour as part of his adventuring gear in the first place. Supposedly it was a reminder of a previous adventure, but it felt contrived to me.

                    1. ARCANE CASTER: “Big deal. I can Raise Dead too, you know.”
                      TEAM MATE: “You can?!?”
                      ARCANE CASTER: [makes upward motion with his hand] “Levitate.”

                      There’s an idea for Sarah for the next time she needs an easy post: she can open the floor to funny gaming stories. I can throw in the D&D story that inspired that “You must be this smart to enjoy AccordingToHoyt.com” sign I made.

                    3. Sarah, you know your e-mail hates me and wants me to die in a fire. That’s why I stopped trying to offer guest posts; I just can’t get them to you. Set up an alternate channel for submitting content like I’ve asked and we’ll talk. Otherwise, another gamer here will have to do it.

                      Speaking of which: any other gamer here who has e-mail contact with Sarah is welcome to steal the idea and write that post for her.

                    4. If you are able to get on her Discord, it allows you to upload files as an attachment to chat messages. We use it in our online game for that.

                    6. >> “try sci fi hoyt at the g mail”

                      We already tried that as well as your hotmail address. We had trouble with both. I’ll give Steve’s way a try. I hate Discord and save it for a last resort, but if it has a file sharing function it might do the job.

                      Anything in particular you want that prompt post to cover?

          3. I got it eventually!

            But while yes, it’s possible everywhere, I haven’t seen ANYTHING in flour since I was 3 or 4, and living in a very elderly house, with flour that was probably older than I was or at least had a non-zero chance of being from Mexico; I would guess some pasteurization going on during processing of most modern American flour, possibly as a side-effect. Took me years to stop sifting flour for everything, because I was taught that’s what you *did*… eventually figured out that it messes with recipes that aren’t made for it, and if you don’t have weevils in the flour, it’s not really needed.

            1. Around here, if there aren’t already pantry moths’ eggs in it, the local ants will find their way. If I have a big bag, I freeze it once it’s been opened.

              1. We keep ours in Tupperware that seals tight. If I have multiple bags, the bags go in the freezer. Avoid the latter, we don’t have a big freezer. We have trouble with the tiny sugar ants. As long as I am using Tupperware for storage, they are blocked. Everything else OTOH … I have sugar bowls, I do not use them.

                1. Large, around two gallon jars for us. Flour goes straight form container to jar. Same with sugar, brown sugar, etc. Only opened with taking the flour out or putting new in. Never really found anything while sifting, no moth eggs or other vermin. Mice would go after the cereal in boxes, or the muffin mix, but those jars defeated them every time. I think the glass they used was the same sort used in car windshields- thick, tough stuff.

                  1. Grandma used a large tin bucket. But it didn’t seal tight. IDK if Tupperware would hold up against mice or rats. But not a problem, inside anyway. Well cats toys, some were even alive at one time, but they don’t try to bring them in alive to play with them. Sealing tight is the key.

                    At one time I had containers that cereal went into too. But we go through that fast enough I don’t bother anymore.

                    Reminds me. About time to call in the Ant Exterminator. I finally insisted. I don’t have problems with the ants in general, or spiders, OUTSIDE. Inside … they have to pay rent or I call the exterminator. Since they won’t pay rent, they are history, or at least banned.

      3. The actual explosions that one hears about tend to be silos of the stuff.

        Apparently, handling grain dust is a serious concern when you build the equipment.

        Lot of the time, with stuff that can explode if burned, you have to confine it, or it won’t explode.

        I know particle size influences the reaction rate of the combustion. I know that how well you have stuff mixed, and what with, also matters.

        Beyond that, there is a lot of stuff I never knew, and it has been too many years since I’ve done much serious reading.

          1. I’m not sure I remembered about static electricity.

            I think that almost anywhere you move a lot of small objects, you can get charge carried along.

            So, if you don’t meticulously ground your equipment, charge can build up on it. If you don’t discharge it through a conductor, increasing charge eventually exceeds the insulating value of air, and sparks over. Which may ignite combustion if combustion is one of the reactions which can occur.

            I once saw a tanker ship/boat explosion story, that involved charge carried on a liquid organic chemical of some sort. I think I’ve also heard about charge being a potential issue with fueling rockets, which are massive explosion hazards at the best of times.

            My education is very haphazard, lots of different sources at different times. The way I think, it means I don’t consistently remember every relevant detail.

            I think it would be cool to be an explosion expert. I am most definitely not an explosion expert. I just sometimes hear about stuff that it takes actual work to prevent.

            1. Blowing dust can build up huge static charges. Sort of like an amorphous Van de Graff generator.

              Airports have grounding cables that are connected to the planes and the fuel trucks before they even think about pumping fuel.

              Gas pumps at gas stations are grounded, but the cars aren’t, and once in a while somebody gets a big surprise when a spark jumps to the gas nozzle.
              ———————————
              He’s a lumberjack, and he’s OK.

              1. St Helens during May 18th and days after, while the initial ash was being ejected, generated an impressive lightening storm. What was going on within the ash cloud, that is unknown. But the backside lightening storm generated was extremely impressive. (We had a very nice view from Columbia Heights, west side of Toutle River. At least we did after we raced up there on May 18th. We lived in Longview.)

                1. Oooh. That sounds interesting.

                  I wonder how one would go about trying to learn what was going on with a volcano generating such.

        3. A somewhat related issue to dust-in-silos is green hay fires.

          You get damp organic matter, pressure, and time, and it will start to ferment (the reason that manure piles/fertilizer piles melt snow).

          It *can* catch fire.

          Even folks who know what they’re doing can have “oh, crud” events where they have to run into the barn and drag out bails of hay that are smoking, and every couple of years I hear about somebody who didn’t know what he didn’t know losing a barn to bailing wet hay (general alfalfa, but that may be due to my sample).

      4. flour, icing sugar and powdered milk will all burn excitedly if huffed/spilled correctly onto an open flame. It was a trick I learned growing up in the UK. It’s a classic thermobaric (sp?) reaction and with enough of it in a closed area you’ll get a kind of explosion. Mostly you need to have the flour/powder well distributed in the air. I don’t think it would destroy a wall without a lot of careful planning but it will do a number on people caught in the same room.

        1. >> “flour, icing sugar and powdered milk will all burn excitedly if huffed/spilled correctly onto an open flame.”

          I think it’s ANY organic material that’s been made into a fine powder, isn’t it?

          1. Just about. Mythbusters found that non-dairy creamer was the most…energetic concoction of the many they tested. They made a huge powder flare out of a lot of creamer and a blast of compressed air.

            Hmmm…what if they used a blast of oxygen instead?

            Don’t mind me, I just wonder about things like that. 😀

            2. And then they had one of those great moments of “OH F*** WHAT HAVE WE DONE” as they fled the giant fireball coming right at them. Good tiimes.

            1. There’s a ‘well, akshully’ case that it is organic. If we are using the definition of combustion that requires carbon and oxygen.

              Powders have a large surface area. So, if you suspend them in a gas or a liquid, and a reaction is possible, it can happen quite rapidly.

              Endothermic reactions tend to bind up loose energy, exothermic reactions release energy.

              An exothermic reaction that is rapid produces a lot of heat.

              Oxygen is a fairly strong oxidizer, so has a fair number of exothermic reactions.

              I’m not sure how much of an explosion is the state change, and how much is gas expansion from adding thermal energy.

        2. I learned that flour will explode when I was about 12, and spent a summer screwing around with a big coffee can, with a layer of flour on the bottom, a hole in the side, and tinfoil on top.

          1. Bang can on ground
          2. Put green army men on top of the tinfoil
          3. Stick lit match in the hole
          4. BOOM!

          My parents sort of knew what I was doing. I think.

            1. At about the same age, I wanted to know what happened when you short-circuited AC wall current (I think I read about a short circuit in some SF story).

              1. Wait until parents aren’t home (most important step)
              2. Pull bed a foot out from wall
              3. Pull light cord out a quarter inch from socket so light is still on
              4. Put straight pin in small glass pipette from chemistry kit (I knew glass didn’t conduct electricity)
              5. Holding the pipette, lay pin across tines of plug

              When I could see past the giant purple splotch in my vision, I went and flipped the breaker back on and cleaned up the scorch marks on the wall. The open end of the pipette had shattered, so I vacuumed up the shards. The straight pin was all mottled and half-melted.

              So now I knew. 😀

  3. Well, yes, the U.S. is falling apart at the moment. We have a totalitarian government controlled by communists, err Progressive-Socialist Democrats, a demented President trying to start a civil war, and two point 5 foreign wars at the same time. Same Democrat set enabling full scale invasion by foreign shock troops (peasants, as usual), while stealing a trillion dollars in infrastructure funds, and disabling our energy industry, and burning significant portions of the cities they control. So yeah, America is falling apart. But we’ve been falling apart for well over 200 years now. Every so often we elect a set of people to office who actually CAN find their butts without a map, GPS, and 6 helpful Boy Scouts.

      1. BSA today is not the same BSA I went through, nor what I had my boys go through. I dropped support when they started letting known non-standard sexuality leaders, and actively non-standard sexuality boys into the organization; and then subjecting everyone who was a volunteer to yearly background checks AND a plethora of child safety training.

        Considering the morals of most of those people currently in Congress, I wouldn’t let a minor child anywhere near them.

        1. I do not remember the BSA form asking who someone had sex with. Yes, our unit, and others, had adults (IDK about youth, never came up, and no one asked) who were non-standard sexuality (not that they were asked) long before BSA made a big deal out of it.

          Background checks every single year and child safety training was over the top. And we were in a council that had two incidents, publicized. Both were turned in by scouts. One would have gone through the background checks. They have to be caught before background checks work. Meanwhile it is limiting what other adults can do (trust me, it happens). Intent or not, one of our rules was hubby and I counted as one adult until there was a third one available for an outing.

          Haven’t been involved (registered) since 2009, for me, 2010 for hubby. Exactly because we are not willing to do the annual youth safety program. Background annual checks … that is part of registration and unavoidable, and not a problem (most boring people ever) but are they really doing them, beyond the first time registration?

          Requirements. Splitting the requirement of building a wood fire, and cooking a meal over a wood fire you built, was a good idea. But not requiring a meal cooked on a wood fire, I think is selling a budding scout short. Substituting GPS usage for Map & Compass? Just stupid. Then I’m sure the scouts from the ’50s and ’60s are not happy about the lack of tracking, semaphore signalling, and Morris Code, requirements. OTOH allowing girls to earn Eagle is at least 55 years late, just saying. (Yes, I was upset X decades ago when I learned I couldn’t earn Eagle, why?)

          * Should have been caught by Foster system. (I know. They have to be caught once before background checks work. But foster system is suppose to be monitoring!)

          1. Hey! I did tracking, and learned semaphore and Morris code for the requirements in the early 1970s. But I do hear you about the scouts from earlier decades. The program is, or at least was, useful in teaching young people self-reliance, self-confidence, self-responsibility and teamwork. Most of those who made it to the Star, Life, or Eagle ranks had enough experience to put them on the next tier above ordinary campers when it came to wilderness survival, and probably two tiers above never campers.

            But Boy Scouting was conceived by Baden-Powell as a celibate organization teaching useful Army scouting skills to young men while instilling in them ideals of chivalry as a kind of modernized page-squire-knight training system. There’s still a ghost of a framework of that in the current scouts; but not enough of that in my humble opinion.

            1. Girl Scouts was suppose to mirror that, with a little more domestic added in. By the time I was in ’60s, GS Eagle was history (at least not mentioned), and the “out” (outdoors) in Scouting was on it’s way out. GS who wanted to camp partnered with BS. There was still Trapper Camp for the middle school level (12 – 14). IDK if there is an equivalent now. I know there still are GS troops who camp, even without partnering with BS troops, even before the recent BS change. But the fastest BSA program growing over the last 24 years was Venturing, all girl units, as they double registered with GSA and BSA (or at least were between ’98 and 2012 when we started not paying as close attention). Personally, if I was of an age, I’d double register with GSA, BSA, and Venturing. Earn GS Gold, BSA Eagle, and Venturing Gold, Awards. Over reach? Nope. A lot of the requirements overlap. Not like they have to be done 3 times. Just make sure done once, make sure all parts of all 3 requirements are covered, and signed off for all three. But, I’m not that age (well past it). FYI. My sisters were in Campfire.

              1. In Scouts as a youth through Life. With kids took up leadership as Cubmaster, Asst Scout master and Venture Crew leader. Loved scouting until saw some of the changes. Son is eagle, Daughter was in Venture Crew. Very correct about the self reliance and overall camping skills.
                Took a crew to Boundary Waters in Canada for ten days on the water. Crew consisted of 4 adult leaders and 6 ‘kids’ All the boys were Eagles and the rough stuff of camping and canoeing and being in the wilderness were so well honed that setting up camp and all the drudgery was trick or treat. Which gave all of us much more goof off time. All those lads are successful in their lives at 30. Skill sets in comparison to their peers without scouting is enormous and it shows in every aspect of living.

                1. Our son earned Eagle. Class of ’05. From his age group. Only one of 6 Tigers to Eagle. One of two from Wolf. The troop son earned Eagle with has a healthy percentage to Eagle once they can *keep them in and get them to 1st Class. Even if once they’ve hit Life rank the “boot to the ass” is (metaphorically) applied. The 3 Eagles before our son turned in their Eagle application just a few days before they turned 18 🙂 Our son earned Eagle at 15 (his “boot” might have been both his driver’s license AND a car key).

                  Both his dad and his scoutmaster had the same saying “No one regrets getting Eagle. But not earning Eagle is definitely regretted.” Both made it to Life Scout, didn’t make Eagle.

                  * What used to amaze me is the sports parent. “We can’t do both sports and scouts.” Um, until HS (and this comment was grade school and middle school) their coach was a scout leader too, AND worked. Yes. Our son did sports and scouts all the way through HS. Heck (not to date my self or anything), David, Doug, and Danny Ange are all three Eagle Scouts All three played HS Football, Basketball, and Baseball, although only Danny played professionally.

        2. It’s entirely going to depend on the troop. My eldest’s is sponsored by the American Legion and the leadership reflects that.

          Oh, but have you heard about California AB 506? Everybody involved with youth organizations of any kind has to sit through the two-hour California training and get fingerprinted.

          For EVERY organization.

          Our American Legion contact was at the committee meeting last night and I think the only reason he didn’t repeatedly use the word “bullshit” was because a Scout could come in at any time.

        1. I’m gonna have to remember this one.
          Ox may say he is slow, but obviously Ox knows that the slow burns hurt the worst.

        3. Alternative:

          Wouldn’t a qualified medical doctor do a better job at colonoscopy than you are?”

          Meanwhile, we paratroopers like to suggest removing one’s sixth point from one’s fourth point of contact*.

          *For the uninitiated, there are five points of contact in a properly-performed parachute landing fall:
          1. Balls of the feet
          2. Calf
          3. Thigh
          4 Buttocks
          5. Push-up muscle

          The head is a common, though unrecommended, sixth point of contact.

    3. It does help that our system does have mechanisms for vacuuming up the Barbarians into the system.

      Or at least had. The current “elites” have tried their darndest to pull up the ladders and plug the pressure valves behind them.

  4. Being the child of immigrant parents and having lived abroad, I’ve got a fair bit of experience with people’s rather distorted views of the US. I’m usually polite about it, which does throw the Europeans off since they think we’re all savages, but for those who persist I mention that they would be Americans too had their ancestors been active enough able to raise the fare. Bone idle they are.

    Interestingly, my family is actually quite pro American, not to me of course family being family. They’ve all spent significant time here and seen what actually is. Living in a place is different from visiting a place which is entirely different from reading about a place.

    My grandfather had absolutely no patience with anti Americanism. He would say “They filled your empty bellies after the war.”

    1. When a friend from Australia visited, I made a point of taking him and his to various ‘out of the way’ or ‘hole in the wall’ places. Seems a buddy of his had been to the USA… and never got off the Interstate corridor and figured it was all alike and pure “generica.” All he had to do was turn 90 degrees and drive a ways… The ONE ‘generic’ place we stopped at was as he was about fly out to his next locale. “Do you want to laugh at fake Australian? There’s an Outback…” And, well, he was amused.

    2. *le sigh deep*
      I had some dear friends when I lived in Greece: my next-door neighbors. Penny was English and married a jolly Greek gentleman named George. I got in the habit of passing my issues of Harper, Atlantic and IIRC Smithsonian off to them, once I had read them. Penny was just rocked – she had no idea that US publications were so intelligent. (This was back in the mid-1980s when all those publications were relatively sane.) I think, that when Penny considered Americans generally, we were all reading tabloid newspapers and comic books.

      My daughter still has FB friends in England who are convinced that in Texas, we are all living in small shacks on dirt roads, with an outhouse in back and frequent gunbattles. Well, in Chicago, maybe…

      1. Well, we do have cattle drives through the streets, but only twice a year up here – Tri-State Fair, and the Coors Ranch Rodeo. (Unless you call the lunch-rush as all the downtown government offices clear out a stampede.)

  5. Dang. I always get frustrated hearing about all the sex I am supposed to be having but never did.Perhaps it is my foreign breeding, being raised in the South, But in the main men were/are gentlemen and the ladies are circumspect when it comes to such matters. As far as the rest, well, my father was a foot soldier in the Great War of Industry (1939-1945) and bled for it. He told his children that he had more respect for his German enemy than he had for the French. He said and I quote, “The French are pigs.”

    1. My dad flew his B-17 out of England. He didn’t call the British names, but it was plain he didn’t have a high opinion of them.
      The thing that sticks in my mind from our visit to Romania was our fellow American students had no problem whatsoever asking the EU Commissioner’s rep questions….and the Romanian students barely said a word. Their desire to avoid any authority’s attention was obvious.
      (Also the representative, out of nowhere, saying Europe had to solve its population issues, “….or we will become a museum.”)

      1. You really need to have 4 children or your line is likely to become extinct either through accident or mal-education/indoctrination. The second being a major reason to support home schooling.

  6. Much mirth on Catholic blogs when people say Catholics are really hung up about sex and have large families.

  7. BTW, on another theme discussed here, I am not watching the Commie Games, but it appears the CCP is leaving no stone unturned in making themselves look like the third or fourth generation Communists they are. Including running the Hunger Games: they are feeding the athletes poor food and not much of it. The venues are dystopia. They’re using “Covid tests,” as excuses for isolating athletes and then scaring the life out some of them.
    If they were competent, they’d be pampering all those visitors, while gently denying anything bad ever happens….instead, they’re doubling down.

    1. Starve them into being weak and losers. Frighten them out of protesting mistreatment. Well-understood tactics in that part of the world. Not so understood is that it’s not how the world runs, only how China runs.

      1. And Nancy Pelosi aided and abetted them. Err, isn’t that providing support to our enemies? Isn’t that called Treason? On the other hand, Jane Fonda committed treason on national tv and was never prosecuted for it.

        2. They have to be at war for them to be enemies. Otherwise we drift back to the definition that inspired the Founding Fathers to define it in the Constitution.

      2. But the rest of the world’s Left sure would like to:

        “The police have 85 ongoing criminal investigations and investigators estimate a quarter of “heavy vehicles” are housing families with children. “We are consulting with Children’s Aid Society to ensure the safety of these children remains a top priority,” the Tuesday update says.

        An undated clip from JCCF, however, shows an unidentified officer explaining why he’s seizing fuel from demonstrators as “evidence.”

        “What’s happening downtown is deemed to be mischief,” and “the fuel is contributing” to that violation, the officer said, referring to Section 430(1)(c) of the Criminal Code. The provision criminalizes willful obstruction, interruption or interference “with the lawful use, enjoyment or operation of property.”
        ”
        Yeah, we’ll confiscate the propane used for heating and then accuse the truckers of “endangering children”…. and again, they have a “legal framework” for this evil.

        And they’ll put the “Good Guys” on the rest of the city while the “Baddies” do this. Until Good Guys show up and arrest Baddies, the term “accessories” applies.

        https://justthenews.com/world/canada/whoa-canada-police-criminalize-food-fuel-donations-freedom-convoy-protest

            1. I can’t believe ALL of the fuel containers seized by the police were only half full. So, if they returned them half full of water, they disobeyed the court’s order to return the fuel. Whoever ordered them to do it should be thrown in jail for contempt of court.

              What am I saying? That would require the law to be applied fairly and equally. Like that’s ever going to happen. It’s just more evidence that Canada is being ruled by a cabal of spoiled children.
              ———————————
              Negotiating with an enemy that can’t be trusted is just plain stupid.

          3. There seems to be a LOT of chaff flying– the link above talks about the *propane* that was taken from the *camp* (which appears to be of the camping-on-public-property sort)– which gets conflated with (diesel) fuel being walked into the truckers at the protest– and I can’t find any kind of non-blog source for a judge acting at all, much less the name and specific order involved.

            The camp is also where they had no video of the police coming in and acting, just interviews with people saying it had happened, in contrast with other aspects of this, and stuff is returned, but it’s contaminated?

          1. GiveSendGo stated that they have no authority, there is still no actual statement on the premiere’s website, and the court’s website has nothing about the claimed stay.

            Shorter, total source is an unspecified media source quoting Spokeswoman Ivana Yelich (Ontario Premier’s director of media relations) and even the most complete form I’ve been able to find doesn’t even include a full paragraph; they literally start and stop quotes in the middle of sentences.

            Just checked, there is *still* no statement on the Premier’s website, although there are updates since yesterday.

            That is a very obvious sign of media manipulation. Kind of like the switching between taking fuel from the truckers, to claims of taking fuel from the campers, to propane being taken from campers, to people arresting truckers which then turned out to be open container and failure to wear a seatbelt….

            1. I guess we’ll see, won’t we. And again, Ezra Levant / Rebel News on scene. Are you? I’m not. So I have to rely on those who ARE. Capability is there.

              1. Ezra Levant took the effort to draw very stark lines between what was actually observed, and what people standing in an area at a later point said.

                After repeatedly getting snookered because you take every rumor or report as gold standard evidence, as long as it says what you want to hear, and how you keep offering videos that claim things have happened with absolutely no evidence except for their word, you’d think that the concept of WANTING TO SEE PRIMARY SOURCES would be a bit easier to grasp.

                For crying out loud, you yourself just posted some politician idiot calling for a thing as if it was the thing being done, even after they’ve been making utterly moronic and/or illegal demands for, what, a week and change?

        3. More lawfare…. which only works as long as Good Guys don’t arrest Baddies.

          https://americanwirenews.com/canada-cranks-up-crackdown-givesendgos-defiant-response-to-judge-ordering-a-freeze-of-trucker-donations

          Canadian Transport Minister Omar Alghabra called on Ontario — Ottawa is located in the providence — to cancel protesters’ commercial truck licenses.

          “The provinces have extensive regulatory powers over commercial trucking and road transportation to help end this unlawful occupation and disruptions of commercial trucks blockading the streets and highways,” Alghabra said, according to CBC.

          “These powers could include, for example, quickly enforcing the provisions of … Ontario highway safety, to begin suspending commercial licenses and also insurance of commercial owners of equipment blockading the streets for days on end …”

          PS: Suspending insurance means that companies that engage the services of “independent owner-operators” will stand naked if anything goes wrong.

          1. OK, Dictators of Canuckistan, you’ve got a lot of truckers refusing to haul essential goods, so your solution is to…revoke their licenses and insurance so they can’t haul essential goods? Brilliant! Cut your own throats, why don’t’cha.

            See, you can prevent them from driving, but they still own the trucks. What’s next, confiscate the trucks and get illegal aliens to drive them? Are you that determined to turn the whole continent against you?

            We’re all watching this clown show, and at least a few Americans are waking up to our own clown show in D.C. Pressure is building up.
            ———————————
            “If more of our so-called leaders would walk the same streets as the people who voted them in, live in the same buildings, eat the same food instead of hiding behind glass and steel and bodyguards, maybe we’d get better leadership and a little more concern for the future.”

            1. Notice how the guy isn’t actually moving to do it, just “calling on” someone else to do it, when it’s probably not legal?

              Just like the jab mandates in the US– why actually do things when you can make announcements, call on people to do things, etc? Especially if you have media arms to spin it and push people into doing what you want, without having to actually hold the bag?

            2. Their belief is that if they “prove their resolve” by making an example of some of the most defiant truckers, the rest will cave in and go back to work.

      3. That seems to be the Democratic Party game plan as well. Wreck things so badly so that people will be starving and destitute and begging for Big Brother government to give them scraps of food while it hands out crack pipes and free drugs instead. Its as if their “how to manual” is the child of 1984 and Brave New World.

      4. The dark side of the Chinese bureaucrat’s obsession with “face.” They think people will be intimidated if they deny them face, and that the whole world’ll just go home and seethe quietly while acknowledging inferiority.

        I don’t think they really understand the “hospitality cultures” out there.

        Now, if you asked the average Chinese person, they’d probably be more on the hospitality side. Or at least they’d think it was embarrassing to invite people over, and then act like you don’t know how to make food.

        2. I suppose that’s the difference between treating foreigners as guests-in-your-country and treating them as enemies-you-can’t-kill-outright-yet.

    2. Bits and pieces that I’m hearing implies that China may be having serious food shortage problems. It’s quite possible that this is completely unplanned and just a result of all their wheels coming off.

      1. And the bit about at least one woman getting poorer quality and less food than a man was, well, it’s China. She’s a woman (and a foreign athlete). I’m not surprised.

      2. Hundreds of square miles of their prime farmland flooded last summer (sat view of the worst area showed a giant lake). That was all lost crops. China imports about 40% of its food from the U.S., and now there’s this little problem with container ships not going anywhere. So, yeah, not at all surprised about food shortages (been hearing that too).

      3. This little news tid-bit has been circulating for a while now. A couple of months ago, there were breathless rumors about China supposedly buying up large quantities of food on the international markets in order to horde it and take it off the market as some sort of economic weapon. What was really going on was that China’s scrambling to find enough food to keep it’s population fed and avoid starvation.

        It should be noted that the famine under Mao was pretty much the *only* time the CCP leadership found enough spine to stand up to Mao. This is potentially serious business.

        1. That’s what I’ve been hearing too. Was also listening to some stuff about their big water transfer project, and how significant regions basically do not have enough human drinkable water left (most of their water has become so contaminated that you cannot drink it and live) that they’re also facing severe drought possibilities and soon.

          1. Don’t forget, the 3 gorges dam has been deforming since before it was completed. Latest shots of it I saw looked really squirrelly. I wouldn’t be surprised if it collapsed tomorrow. I would be surprised if it lasted another 10 years.

            1. Latest shots of it I saw looked really squirrelly.

              Link? I’ve been kinda sorta keeping tabs since last summer but haven’t seen anything recently.

                1. Okay, so to an untrained eye that looks kinda lumpy and out of alignment, but what do I know?

                  What did it look like in 2019?

                  1. Okay, so there’s this topic on Quora, in which a lot of people with Chinese names say that photo is an artifact of Google Earth stitching together multiple photos. So okay, that sure clears things up (not).

    3. Yah, hearing about the treatment of the Olympians gave me a lot of hope. Not for them, of course, but for everyone else. The Chinese are in desperate need of some good PR, or at least “Fly under the radar” PR. Now, they have the eyes of the whole world on them, and instead of treating these athletes well, and using this all for propaganda, they’re making it even more obvious how shitty they are. Treating these athletes this awful is pointlessly damaging to their reputation.

      And when I see evil leaders engaging in pointless cruelty in public, I know I’m not dealing with very smart people. They have power, but they don’t know what to do with it.

      This is right up there with “President for Life” and “Gets most of their staple grain from their number 1 enemy”. All clear signs that China is falling. The US isn’t doing too hot right now, but the signs that we’re riding through a dark age on the way to a new golden age are there. China is being run by idiots, but unlike us, they have no release valve. It’ll crash and burn, and I can’t wait.

  8. Not one more drop of American blood shed for the globalists. When Clinton was elected, Hillary supposedly looked up at the jets flying in formation to celebrate the Inauguration, and she turned to Bill and said: “Those are our planes now.”

    No, they weren’t. Our boys were flying those planes, and from Deep State Clinton to Deep State Bush to Deep State Obama, the ruling class sent our children to be maimed and killed for their goals and desires. Now that the puppet Biden is in office, they’re trying to do it again in Ukraine. Not this time. Trump pulled back the curtain and we can all see the corruption now. Those are not your planes.

    2. I couldn’t agree more. Dad was kind of funny about that sort of thing. He died young (54) before Reagan had left office so I guess he was spared later adventurism. I do recall back during the Vietnam war He was absolutely furious at our government sending all those boys over to southeast Asia. A life long conservative, he hated war. He hated what it did to the guys that had to go fight it. He did what he felt he had to to get his eldest son rated 4F, thought I don’t really know the details since I was #3 son and much younger. Perhaps it had something to do with the family a block over having a huge flag pole in the front yard since their son would never be coming home. Or the man across the street who’s son came home spiritually hurt. I could go on.

    3. From what I’ve read, Hillary could give lessons in arrogance to Stuck-Up Noblewomen. 😡

      1. Biden is definitely not the only congresscritter benefiting from the Ukraine situation. That’s why virtually none of them are complaining about how he’s “handling” it.

        1. And meekly rushed to follow his lead, on both sides of the aisle. Damn few who set their heels against it.

          They’re makin’ it look more and more like #teamheadsonpikes needs to do a clean sweep.

        2. And when the Ukrainians were ready to ally with the Germans against Stalin….. This is what happens when you forget that people can really mean what they say about “subhuman Slavs”.

          1. Timothy Snyder’s _Bloodlands_ Is a magnificent book that I will not go back and re-read. That and Applebaum’s _Red Famine._

      3. Interestingly, the current president of Ukraine seems to think that the White House’s position regarding a possible impending war with Russia is nonsense.

  9. Yeah, I follow a number of European podcasts etc, and they all do the same thing: make good sense *until* they start describing America, and then it’s all movie fantasies and CNN. “I’ve been to America, I’ve seen how they all live in cardboard boxes and are shooting each other in the streets,” that sort of thing. Um, so, how much of America did you see? any clue that it’s bigger and more diverse (in every sense) than all of Europe combined?? Nope, not a clue, and LA LA LA if you point that out.

    Methinks a lot of it is sour grapes, they being the descendants of those who lacked the balls to settle the American frontier.

    1. I’ve encountered a few American city dwellers that were that clueless. They’d been all across America and Europe, but never really on ground outside a city. I once got to watch one such sixty-something year old woman on her first time outside a city, ooh and ahh over spotting a deer in the wild for the first time in her life.

      1. Yeah, I’ve run into American townies who are that clueless, but with the Europeans it’s pretty much across the board, even with the more-rural sorts. Never leave pavement, or never leave their village, either way makes for a cramped perspective.

        1. I don’t know, I think a lot of UK (actual real) fannish types have a pretty good idea about America. Maybe because they spend a lot of time talking to Americans on the Internet, and watching American streams.

          That said, there are sometimes some weird differences that show up (the mental image of robins, for one).

          1. *laughing* Oh my GOSH yes, robins– and badgers!
            And, I found when looking for this comic that had the American robin flipping a switchblade, our Opossum vs Australia’s Possum.

            There’s a ton of adorable memes about it– the European robin looks like some kind of chickadee that got touched up with hair chalk, they do the poof-in-the-winter thing. The American robin is almost the size of a jay and NOT fluffy. 😀
            The English badger, famously, looks like it will invite you in for tea, the American badger looks like he’ll shank you for meth money.

              1. That’s exactly what happened, and the tendency goes WAAAAAAAAAY back. I’ve read that there’s an Indus River fish named something cognate to “salmon” that is completely unrelated to either Atlantic or Pacific salmon, because apparently it looked similar enough to the Indo-Aryan migraters/invaders back in 1600BC.

                1. My favourite is when something has different names. Like when one of my friends and I figured out that a courgette was a zucchini. We both speak English, so it never occurred to me that I might need to “translate” it, unlike when my cousins call it calabacín.

                  1. I got a kick on how an author used this in their story. Scotish immigrant hearing
                    “Stay away from Skunks!”,
                    “They are dangerous?”
                    “In their way.”
                    See’s skunk.
                    “Why that is just a lil’ ole pole cat!”
                    Chases after it, with dog.
                    Comes back extremely chastised, tears streaming. Obviously having ignored the “Lil Ole Pole Cat” warning. Has to stay downwind of party even after “cleaning up”.

              2. Robins? I once saw a comment to a posted photograph of a robin (North American): “I can see why you call them robins.”

  10. Selection of Hollywood actors seems to be a deliberate information operation mostly aimed at the American people.

    I think it is not an accident that so many black actors appear to be racist nutjobs, and that this is not statistically representative of American blacks generally.

    Hollywood appears generally to be a toxic festering pile of predators, enablers, and people whose disordered ambitions make them easily victimized.

    Of course, American universities also have a lot of peopel with disordered ambitions.

    1. Also keep in mind that Southern Europe, especially France, has been the playground of the jetsetters (translation: rich, sleazy and substance-addled) for many decades now, which probably shapes their view of Brits and Americans. Normandy, for instance,, has the reputation of being rather kinder to and more admiring of Americans than, say, the area around Paris. And yeah, some of that is the tourist dollars at work, but some of it is surely due to the kind of people who make the pilgrimage to the D-Day sites versus the kind of people who think Paris is awesome.

      1. I enjoyed southern France (well away from usual tourist areas). The people were patient with my broken survival French. Ditto when I was up in Normandy.

          1. Normandy is worthwhile. I’ve made the trip. Pro tip: Rent a car. Hit the beaches, D-Day museum. Then Mont St. Michel (which is fantastically beautiful at night, they have it lit up). Return up the Loire valley…the chateaux on the Loire feature some of the most gorgeous architechture in the world.

              1. I was in France in 2019 for a professional conference. I’d done Normandy and Mont St. Michel in 2006…and have an interest in military history. So I went to the Musee des Blindees (Tank museum) in Saumur. Then motored up the Loire. You’ll have to pick and choose…there’s a chateau about every 30 km. Then Fontainbleu (Napoleon’s favorite). Versailles. The usual in Paris…managed to make the Paris Air Show (Pro tip – you really want to go on a Public Day, that’s when they have the full-blown air show)

      2. Even Paris isn’t that bad, I lived there for a while and never had a problem. OK, I speak French but my accent is horrendous and I know a fair few people who loved it there. The problem is with, as always, the chattering classes.

        Perhaps we can get them all to slash a truck’s tire. Since they have no sons or daughters that would end the Darwinian risk they represent.

        1. I remember that one of the NCIS guys ended up going to Paris with his wife/fiancee, and it turned out that NCIS was insanely popular in France. And when they went to a fancy restaurant, it turned out that the headwaiter and all the other waiters and the chef were all NCIS fans (in syndication). Nobody minded his French, not one little bit.

          So yeah, sometimes Americans get really good treatment even in snooty places.

    2. I mean if all I knew of the United States was from Hollywood and our news media, I’d probably hate the U.S. as well.

  11. Two years of banned travel, with no end of the banning in sight (We saved all from the plague by locking them up, we much keep them confined to save the world from global warming!) , assures that the only view of America, or China, or Russia available to most is that dictated by our beloved leaders and provided by the lame stream media.

  12. “And then dig yourselves out, because Americans are tired of helping you out, and then becoming your punching bag.”

    Interestingly, France has one of the most powerful militaries in Europe these days (Britain is probably the only Euro military rival). Germany, which – based on the size of it’s economy – *should* have the most powerful military, is a complete joke.

    In any case, the problems in Western and Southern Europe are largely of their own making. Eastern Europe needs to worry about potential Russian aggression. But no one is in a position to launch a conventional invasion in other parts of Europe.

        1. Which is why Germany is calling its new planned army the “EU army”, so it will look like it belongs to all of Europe rather than it being the toll to make all of Europe belong to Germany.

          2. Germany’s “EU Army” schemes always seem to revolve around multiple nations in the EU providing combat units for a multi-national force. The most basic problem for Germany in a unit like that is that the German military is so gutted right now that they would have problems providing the German contingent for such a force.

        2. >> “To be fair, that’s exactly how we wanted it to be after the previous half century of experience with a militarily powerful Germany.”

      1. “Look, someone’s got to have some damn perspective around here! Sooner or later, boom. Boom!”

  14. “Collective morality” is having everything of your stolen to support your worthless good for nothing relatives. So you can forget about anyone ever rising above the dirt unless you get a “position”, in which case you get to steal from a much larger group of people to support your worthless relatives.

    That’s of course the low end where things are relatively peaceful and friendly.

    And you will enjoy it because being the first person to stop clapping is not good for one’s continued good health.

  15. I’m always baffled about the “you’re all such repressed puritans who are incapable of controlling your sexual urges”. Especially when the erotically incontinent American Left levels that accusation against American Christians.

    The same kind of baffled as when I hear of some American guy saying “you won’t sleep with me? I didn’t want a slut like you anyway!”

    It’s like… do you actually listen to the words that are coming out of your mouth?

    1. In most cases, no. Memorized slogans go straight to the pie-hole without disturbing any of the other slogans. Nothing is connected to anything else. It’s how they were indoctrinated by the union-run government schools.
      ———————————
      Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!!

    2. The ones that amuse me are the ones who complain about how hyperviolent American media is, while simultaneously complaining that we’re such sexual Puritans compared to the Japanese (it’s always the Japanese, mosaiced naughty bits notwithstanding).

      Uh, dude, all of the goriest stuff that I’ve ever seen (very briefly) was made by Japanese…

      1. Japanese movies and anime are often shown in the U.S. with the gore redacted…

        Ever seen anime where the blood is white? Censored for the U.S. market.

      2. Well I can’t recall the title offhand, but I do recall an anime I watched that was quite the gorefest… but the gore was actually anatomically accurate. Organs, tissues, bone, the whole bit. That’s not something you see everyday.

          1. Maybe? My memory of the show is about 20 years old, and I saw it while half drunk with lack of sleep. Could well be, but I can’t say for certain to be honest.

          2. That’s certainly one of them.

            Guyver had a fair amount of anatomically correct – or at least anatomically convincing – sliced off arms.

            But I tend to avoid gore shows, so I think those are probably the only two I could name.

    3. “How Puritanical!”

      “Um, you do know that the Puritans had about five kids per family, on average, and a woman could sue her husband for not doing his, ahem, ‘marital duty’ often enough?”

      *cue eyes bulging so far they fall out of the skull*

        1. The medieval English ate a lot of coconuts. Imported by the Venetians from Alexandria. Because the Muslims had taken over the India trade.

          And then, when the milk and meat was eaten, they turned the coconut shells into cups that sat in little metal stands. More coconut cups in an late medieval English village than in a tiki bar.

          I am really sad I didn’t know about this when I was in the SCA.

          https://muse.jhu.edu/article/758503

    4. It’s the covid Karens and the pronoun people and the How Dare You say That Word crowd running the shop in media, politics and academe that make the picture.

      Tall hats and buckles as far as the eye can see.

      That these sorts also indulge in every vile perversion imaginable is, I suspect, a function of the above, since they do not appear to enjoy the normal sexyfuntimes, just the humiliations and abuse.

  16. When I visited northern Spain, I was struck by how backward the villages in Galatia were. WiFi was slow, the roads were narrow, the buildings ancient, the cattle herded down the same road I was walking. The people were nice and the food was good (and the beer was excellent) but the infrastructure was something I’d expect to find in rural Mississippi. Later, at the Hilton Olympia in London, the rooms were so cramped they felt like a seedy motel in that same rural state. Later still, on the bus from downtown Mazatlan to the airport, we passed a neighborhood where the residences were just walls, no roofs, couldn’t afford them.

    Since I’m a big-shot expert in all things foreign, having been there for a few days, I can tell you for sure: I’m SO glad to be an American. Don’t know how good we have it until we see how other people live. I don’t care what they think of us. I’m happy to be home.

    1. Sweden’s per capita GDP is around $51K PPP. South Carolina is $52K. Germany and the UK’s per capita GDP is around $41K. Mississippi, the poorest state, is $42K. Spain is $25K but Galicia is not the richest part of Spain. Pace our hostess, Galicia is more like Portugal, which is around $20K. Rural Mississippi is significantly better off than rural Spain.

      People in this country have no idea, no idea at all, just how rich we are. Hell, Puerto Rico, Guam, and the US Virgin Islands are richer than France.

          1. Galicia. Where the bagpipes are smaller and the droning is more buzzy. And they wear a lot of black and red.

            There’s some great videos of various Irish groups at Galician festivals, everyone having a great time jamming and dancing.

            1. I wonder (because I can’t be bothered to go look it up right now) if they have similar pipes in the Austrian Galicia, or in the Anatolian region that used to be the home of the Galatians.

              1. They do have bagpipes in Galatia, but then bagpipes are fairly universal. The ones in Turkey are of the typical Mediterranean variety being a goat skin with the hair on.

      3. I used to say – as a simplification – that western Europe, economically, was Alabama with history theme parks.

        This, it turned out, was unfair to Alabama.

    2. We went to Punta Cana a few years ago for our anniversary. We stayed at one of those all-inclusive resorts and as we went from the airport to the resort we passed several towns…third world country all the way. Beautiful scenery, no infrastructure. And tips were preferred in dollars not pesos.

  17. Collective morality means that the individual doesn’t actually have to practice morality.

    It’s formalized peer pressure, and to heck with that.

    2. Collective morality works about as well on humans as collective anything else. See: the last century of communism, socialism and fascism. How can anybody still believe in that bullshit?
      ———————————
      The one thing we need more of from the government is LESS!!

          2. Henry Sumner Maine described the progress from ancient to modern law (1861) as the movement from status to contract. Contract being free agreement of the concerned parties, status being birth mostly. The left has been trying to bang us all back into their status boxes for the last 100 years or so.

              1. They lack imagination. We’re we still ruled by status I, who come from the gentry (la di da,) would be in charge, while they would be peasants. It’s like reincarnation, the biggest argument against it is that no one’s past lives ever included being a street beggar or a slave.

                  1. Galicia is the land of the Gauls or Gaels. Good pipers in Galicia. They have more range than the Scottish pipes. I play a couple of muiñeiras as jigs on the flute and whistle. They work really well.

                    4. Realta (star) is feminine. Planead is masculine. (Irish)

                      Reul, reil, reiltan (star) is feminine and so is rionnag (star, shooting star), but reiltean (little star) is masculine. (Scottish)

                    5. Just so.

                      Then again in neamh agus talamh — heaven and earth— heaven (neamh) is feminine and earth (talamh) meaning us here below, is masculine. Make of that what you will.

                      Then again Domhan meaning earth is masculine while cruinne meaning globe is feminine, An chruinne cheatharthais universe, world meaning literally fourfold globe.

                4. >> “It’s like reincarnation, the biggest argument against it is that no one’s past lives ever included being a street beggar or a slave.”

                  Well, there was that guy who admitted to being Alexander the Great’s chief eunuch. Does that count?

            2. I’d disagree with that a bit. It’s not that we’ve moved from status to contract as such, as we’ve moved from status determining what type of contracts could be entered into or enforced to status not having as much of an effect in enforceability or validity.

              That is, while slaves of the ancient era couldn’t enter into contracts (except, sometimes, to *become* slaves) with freemen, or that those contracts if entered into, were non-enforceable (including marriage contracts), in modern law one can’t sign over responsibility for one’s self (not even for certain non-traditional sexual or marital arrangements), but valid contracts will be enforced regardless of relative status–assuming one has sufficient means to pay the lawyers.

  18. I’m guessing what happened here was that they met some American men, who followed the very real American male tradition of wildly exaggerating their sexual success. Since they have this vision of Americans as being prudes who hide behind their Bibles when temptation comes around, they weren’t quite sure how to integrate two flavors of bullshit, and instead decided to believe two contradictory things simultaneously.

  20. Now, to be fair, there’s a lot of good things to be said for a moral framework held in common.
    They’re just trying to steal a base or two from there.

    I don’t care if you’re a drag queen.
    I do care if the local government is trying to indoctrinate children that it’s cool to be a drag queen.
    And I do care if a “conservative” pundit dismisses the event as “a blessing of liberty”.

    2. That’s not a moral framework. That is breaking the contract between government and citizens, which is very explicit in the US.
      As for the later. I care. If enough people care, the pundit is out of work. See how that works?

  21. On an unrelated note, dear hostess, I’m introducing my husband to the Shifters on our road trip via audio book. We’re almost done with “Draw One in the Dark,” and when we stopped for lunch, he mentioned that he wants to stop the book and tell the reader, “You’re reading it wrong!” A la Princess Bride.

    1. The reader is. I had NO say in selecting the reader, and I still haven’t seen those contracts, btw. which the reversal says I must “respect.”
      I’m not amused.

      1. To clarify, it’s the “she’s reading it wrong” like Fred Savage telling Peter Faulk he’s reading it wrong. “Tom’s not dead! He can’t be! Who kills the Great Sky Dragon? Rafael, Kyrie, Keith, who? You mean he lives?!”

        1. oh. That. 😀
          My husband came running up the stairs. I was under TIGHT deadline, so sending him every twenty pages to his office downstairs.
          He came running up “FIX THIS NOW.”

          1. Also, my husband works for Landry’s, parent company of the Aquarium Restaurant in Denver, and he would like you to know that the most unrealistic part of “Gentleman Takes a Chance” is the restaurant not changing the locks. 😀

  22. Let us not forget that many an Ivy League graduate is as profoundly misinformed about America outside their urban enclaves as any foreigner, with rather less excuse for it.

    1. Try explaining to someone from an academic family back East that “there never were trees out here. The ones you see were planted by people.”

        1. I live in Oklahoma. In 2011/2012 we broke a ridiculous percentage of the dustbowl era records (that is we’d hit the same climatic point again.) This time the state did NOT blow away because we’d planted trees. Places where they’d let the windbreaks die because ‘why do we need these things they’re a pain!” were having trouble with dust storms on their fields. (then we had the May of All The Rain In The World in 2013 and if our soil hadn’t been so dry it would have washed away instead.)

    2. Just like in my tale above of the sixty-something west coast urbanite amazed to see trees and deer for the first time.

      1. sixty-something west coast urbanite

        … considering how close the trees and deer are to most of the west-coats urbs, I’m going to guess he wasn’t big on leaving the house.

        1. Oh, she’d flown to a bunch of other cities in the US, Canada, and Europe – and hadn’t get much outside of them. Walk the streets, sure. Get out of the city? Only if the airport was outside the city.

        2. In the Chicago area, there’s enough forest preserve that deer cross freely from it into homeowners’ back yards, as well as office parks. Neither appreciate the munching on expensive landscaping or the piles of scat left behind, yet neither group want the deer hunted.

          When I was working at Moraine Valley Community College, there were signs warning that deer crossed all campus roads.

          1. We had a large forest preserve ja half-mile north of where we lived in the western suburbs, though we never ran across deer. (Timeframe 1960-72. No idea if they were culling deer at the time.) The last time I was back there (still have family in the area), I got the heebie-jeebies looking at the state of the forest. They’re one drought and a good lightning storm from having a conflagration. The last time I saw an area with so much ladder fuels, the entire town burned (Camp Fire, Paradise CA).

            1. 2019 we were in Jasper AB Canada. Dead Spruce everywhere. Huge difference between 2019 and 2012 (none), the last time we were there. It was really sad to see. They are one spark from “Oh Damn”. Really paid attention to last years fires in Canada, but they seemed to stay on west side of the Continental Divide Range and didn’t appear to be approaching Jasper and the northern portion of the Glacier Parkway. We will see. We are headed back this July, with my sister and her husband, after our niece’s (other sister’s oldest child) wedding.

          2. San Marcos, TX had people complaining they were being attacked by deer (bucks in rut are no joke) and also the munching on scenery so pricily landscaped etc, etc.
            “We gotta DO Something™ about this deer problem!!”
            Shooting them works
            “We can’t do that!”
            then you got a deer problem

              1. Seriously. Mt Rainer and Olympic National Parks the Deer are more dangerous than the black bear when it comes to animal to human problems, no vehicle required. Colorado National Park it is the Elk. Yellowstone and Tetons it is a tie between Elk and Buffalo. The last two parks are known for their bears, both black and grizzly. The wolves tend to stay away from the roads. But the coyotes tend to stay closer to the roads (to stay away from wolf packs).

            3. Shooting them works

              –
              So does inviting in the cougars and jaguar big cats, and red wolves, …
              Oh wait!
              You have a deer problem.
              You also have a big cat problem.

              Not that you’ll see the big cats except maybe on a house cam.

              1. Er. We have lynx, cougars, and mountain lions not that far from town in my little mountains. Ain’t that rare to see ’em. They chase rabbits and stuff littler than them around the edges of the farm where I was working once. Too skittish to get close. Rightly so- farmers are well armed. They probably enjoy the offal left behind during deer season, though.

                1. I didn’t mention the Lynx, Bobcats, or smaller canines, none are big enough to take deer individually and do not pack up and take game like deer. Even our local coyotes, that someone said they saw a “pack” of are likely to be mom, dad, and last year’s pups that haven’t dispersed yet, do not go after deer (given where seen, cats, dogs, feral bunnies, turkeys, etc., yes; deer, no). Smaller carnivores do benefit from the hunting leavings, be it human hunters, or bigger carnivores like the big cats, or wolves.

                  Note, while we are not far from farmers hay fields or some fields where people have horses in fields (about a mile), it is still a few miles from where anyone has sheep in fields. We do live in an established neighborhood on < 1/2 acre lots (bigger than the new "I'm two or 3 strides from the property line" lots, but still neighborhood. Have never seen deer, or deer sign (yes, I'd know), either (south hills has them but for whatever reason, we don't).

                  1. A jag or two have been spotted crossing the border in Arizona where someone set up a trail cam. Also that map is WAY off. They are in West Virginia (Kanawah State Park has several), and as I said, east of DFW into Arkansas down to along I20 (I’ve seen a dead one on the shoulder east side of Tyler and there’ve been reports between Longview and Atlanta) there are many up here in the U.P. of Michigan (the State had to admit they exist, finally) and some now in Wisconsin (the local cat is only seen on the Marinette side of the river, though right now it could walk across the ice), and I think some were spotted in Minnesota not long ago (I want to say Superior Natl. Forest near the Canuk border).

                    1. Not surprised. I know cougars are in Florida too, although they are considered a subspecies. Wyoming and Montana have them. There is a tracking program for the Tetons, Yellowstone, and Glacier. Cougars were one of the animals who benefited from reintroduction of wolves, even with the risk added to unsupervised kittens.

                      One place cougars aren’t found apparently is Alaska, or at least that was a comment that has been made on “Homestead Rescue”. But IDK if that is just in the specific area of Alaska where their main homestead is located. Or the cougar range tapers off south of the Alaskan/Canada border.

          3. I loooooved the “well, use darts and inject them with birth control so you don’t have to kill them!” That’s also been proposed for the feral horses in the West. No thanks. Two day open season, or require two does for each buck, that’s more to my taste. *licks muzzle, dreams of venison*

            1. Never having been a hunter myself, I’m curious: if the deer are wandering right into my yard and messing with my stuff, how is the government going to know how many of them I’ve shot? Do they have anything other than the honor system on their side?

              1. Never having been a hunter myself

                –
                Besides the whole “not legal to hunt within X hundred feet of a residence or across a road”? Or “firing toward a residence” (whether you know it is there or not). Which in the cases above are usually complaints of close in residential neighborhoods. Means, not hunting even IN hunting season, not with a rifle, and generally not with a hunting bow either.

                Ranches and Farms, at least in Oregon, is a different story. Generally they’ll have a nuance permit, which may or may not allow them to keep the meat in compensation of damages.

                Other means of “taking”? It got tangled in the volleyball net. Tangled with the trampoline. Drowned in the pool. In which case should be reported, because if caught the fines are not pretty. Reporting it means game people come and retrieve the meat and it goes to designated soup kitchens.

                1. A deer got killed when it ran into our neighbor’s (newly installed) fence. We’ll get deer jumping over ours; occasionally they’ll snag a bit on the two lines of barbed wire (as seen by the two lines twisted together–no indication of major problems). Apparently, that deer wasn’t familiar with the new fence and got tangled in it. They’ll go through the area to get to the river.

              2. Karens. Even if you use something like a bow. And that assumes you never have one get away to be found and reported.

                1. [Reading it a second time, then referring back to the post you replied to] Oh.

                  My first impression was that you were advocating hunting Karens with bows… 😛

                  Having a Karen get away to be found and reported would be unfortunate.

          4. Our insurance agent told us that Lorenzo Road from I55 to just past the Dresden Nuclear plant has the highest deer-car accident rate in the US. 3 days after I started working there in 1997 a chemistry technician was killed while driving home after getting off work at 0030. She was on road from the plant to Lorenzo Road.

            There is a state park adjoining the Dresden property line that was donated by an old couple to the state years ago with the proviso they never allow the deer to be hunted. That is the source for all the accidents.

            1. Knew someone who had an older VW Bug, with the motor in the back. This would have been ’76. Deer jumped off the bank onto her VW, front. Smashed in trunk. Deer got up, shook off, and bounded away.

            2. I suspect any farmland in Illinois could/would have a fair amount of deer. My brother ran into one near Bolingbrook, about 20 miles northish of Joliet, so maybe 40 miles from Dresden. B’brook has residential neighborhoods right up against farmland, or did as of 2014.

        3. Seriously.

          Black bears regularly turn up not far from where I live in LA County.

          But I think that sort of thing is largely limited to the northern part of the county, which runs up alongside Angeles Crest.

          1. Looking out the wild to seek a hawk perched in the apple tree between me and the next townhouse complex.

            Hearing hawks scream like the sound they use in video games to indicate wild desert. . .

            1. I read your comment and had to make that “KYYYyyaa” sound out loud, and my cat who was trying to bonk my hand stopped and started visually searching the ceiling. I’m pretty sure he’s never seen a hawk in his life.

        4. It’s been getting worse/more common, I would guess because of fewer hunters (including “in my yard BANG!”) more trees and working to have more green spaces.

  23. Many Europeans are annoyed because we American constantly demonstrate that we are composed of the best folks from everywhere else, not the worst.

    They are the “skim” , not the “cream” .

  24. 1. Hollywood does NOT put America’s best face forward.
    2. Europeans generally have NO clue about just how big the United States really is. They think the USA consists of Manhattan, official Washington, Hollywood, and the theme parks in Orlando. Once they get outside the tourist areas, they discover a completely different country.
    3. When the Europeans discover that country, they find it a decent place, filled with nice people. If monoglot…we speak English, have little demand for foreign tongues.
    4. The same is true of Europe. France, in particular. Get outside of Paris, and you will find a very pretty country, with very nice people. Most of whom speak some English, but you’ll score BIG points if you open in French. It’s a courtesy.

      2. But we do have different languages! Bostonian, Deep Southern, Texan and California Beach-Bum for starters. Very difficult to translate between them. 😀

      3. It does help not having to concern ourselves with the gender of tables. 🙂

        The Esperaanto people use English as a benchmark – they claim that ~70 hours of Esperanto = 100 hours of English = 120 hours of French or Spanish = 140 hours of German. I’m not certain that I agree completely, but it makes a point.

      4. Just as Americans are the best people from all over, American English is the best bits from other languages. Tongue only slightly in cheek.

        1. “English doesn’t borrow from other languages. It mugs other languages in dark alleys, takes the words, then goes through their pockets for loose grammar.”

          1. English is a hybrid. German for basic words, French for most of the rest of the vocabulary, and a much simplified Germanic grammar.

        2. “English is the attempts of Norman soldiers to make dates with Saxon barmaids, and no more legitimate than any of the other results.”

  25. Near the beginning of the Season 1 Episode 1 of Walker, Texas Ranger, some women come in to a Texas restaurant and as if they serve tourists. One fellow at the bar quips, “We used too; but not any more.” and jokes about cutting them into small pieces so they’ll stay on the plates.

    That type of humor used to be universally accepted in America. We left our culture out in the rain and it rotted.

    1. I think most people still accept that humor, but it is a high-trust sort of humor. Deadpan humor, similarly.

      Dad jokes are a fairly low-trust, low-investment type of humor, which is why they go over well with so many different kinds of people.

  26. 1. The UK college kids who hopped the Greyhound to go from NY to LA, and thought it would only take a day. Nice kids who were having a very educational trip by the time they got to Indiana.

    2. The UK couple who visited Chicago and went up the Hancock Tower (or whatever it is these days). Having a great time, and apparently were lovebombed by everyone. Also had a hard time coping with size of US.

    3. The guy from Salford who couldn’t understand why cute girls from the US thought he sounded so sophisticated, and also why Irish-American people weren’t trying to kill him on St. Patrick’s Day. (To be fair, he might have gotten exposed to the crazy anthro professor with the alleged IRA friends.)

    All these are from quite a while back, sadly….

  27. Thanks so, much, Sarah. It really needed, to be said. I’m so damned tired, exhausted, from all the damned sex I have to have, constantly, just to keep the Europeans from the embarrassment of being so continually wrong about Americans.

  28. My sister-in-law is German. Her brother, a German engineer, came over to visit her a couple decades back, at her place in rural Utah. They drove him across Nevada to northern California and southern Oregon (to visit other family.) Two things stand out in my mind from his experience:
    1) He could not believe that there were wide, wide open spaces where nobody actually lived (like nearly all of Nevada, for example.) He kept asking, as they drove for hours across I-80, “Nobody lives here?”
    2) He thought that Americans had cut all their trees down. When he experienced the forests of California and Oregon for the first time, he couldn’t believe how big the trees were, and how much forest there was. (And that nobody lived there, either.)

    2. Not only does no one live in those vast, open stretches in many states, but quite frequently no one is allowed to live there because the land is owned by the government.

      1. That’s one of the few things Canada has arranged better than the U.S. Public land in Canada (except national parks) is the property of the provinces, which have a positive incentive to put it into the hands of people who will use it and pay taxes.

        1. The US had that, until the Homestead Act, Desert Lands Act, and a few other things were ended during the New Deal. The justification was that the requirements for people to claim the land were too onerous, leading to fraud or starvation. Note that nothing was said about allowing people to buy said land outright.

          Also note that this was at the same time that one federal government agency was teaching people how to stay on the land (Soil Conservation Service) while another was moving people into model government controlled communities (Resettlement Administration).

    3. I am still on FB because of the NP groups I’m on (probably should check MEWE for same groups …). One of the topics that continually comes up is “We have a week and are flying into Salt Lake. We want to see YNP, Tetons, Glacier, Zion, Brice, Arches, Canyonlands, Capital Reef, Grand Staircase, Bryce, Grand Canyon, Yosemite, Giant Sequoia, Redwoods, Crater Lake, St Helen, Rainer, Olympia, and back to Salt Lake.”

      The ONLY answers are “Are you suicidal?”, “Not possible”, or “Barely, if all you want to do is drive”.

      Heck I live in Oregon and we have done the Crater Lake, to Yosemite and Sequoia/Kings Canyon, to Redwoods, and Oregon Cave (why not?), in a week. But then wasn’t our first trip to Yosemite (or second, or third, and prior trips were two weeks).

      We have done the Grand Canyon, and Utah NP’s from the north, and again from the *south (minus Grand Canyon), each time in a week. (* On our way home from a golf trip in Arizona.)

      St Helen and Rainer on the same trip? Go for it. Add in Olympia? Wags hands. Doable. But actually do anything in each of the parks?

      We also regularly go to YNP and Tetons on the same trip. But we aren’t spending just 9 days. It is **two days, just to get there! Or if we do, we know one park is being short changed (besides we were just there the prior fall, but got smoked out of the other, so make up trip …) (** Okay. One long, long, day. Specifically 13.75 hours, cutting diagonally across Oregon. I get sick every, single, blasted time we do this type of drive.)

      This is just one “relatively” small section of the US between the Atlantic and the Pacific. The thought of driving, busing, or even a train, across the US between the two coasts is daunting. Not something I’m up for FYI. People do. My sister and BIL did spring 2021. Eugene to Tetons, then they drove south, with way stops, to Texas, then east to N. Orleans, and then made their way home a different route. Their ONLY deadline was their reservations in N. Orleans over Memorial Day Weekend. Even at that they had over two weeks to get there.

  30. A long time ago, preacher D. L. Moody told his congregation a story about a boat, helplessly rocking and plunging on a stormy, starless night near the Cleveland harbor. The mariners on board could see the lighthouse, but they needed to find their way through the narrow passage in the treacherous rocks that surrounded the harbor. Normally a light on the shore, aligned with the lighthouse, marked the passage to safety. But on this night, the lower lights had gone out.

    Finally, the desperate captain decided they had no choice but to proceed into the harbor without the guidance of the lower lights. “With a strong hand and brave heart”–but in almost total darkness–”the old pilot turned the wheel.” Tragically, he missed the channel, crashed the boat upon the rocks, and lost the lives of his sailors.

    Moody then explained the lesson to be learned from his story: the Master will take care of the great lighthouse, but He depends on us to keep the lower lights burning.

    Though it’s about spreading the Gospel of Christ, it’s also what we need to win back those who can be saved from the hell-spawned delusions of outright socialism and related “government-knows-best”-isms that are poisoning America:

    Brightly beams our Father’s mercy
    From his lighthouse evermore,
    But to us he gives the keeping
    Of the lights along the shore.

    Let the lower lights be burning;
    Send a gleam across the wave.
    Some poor fainting, struggling seaman
    You may rescue, you may save.

    Dark the night of sin has settled,
    Loud the angry billows roar.
    Eager eyes are watching, longing,
    For the lights along the shore.

    Let the lower lights be burning;
    Send a gleam across the wave.
    Some poor fainting, struggling seaman
    You may rescue, you may save.

    Trim your feeble lamp, my brother!
    Some poor sailor, tempest-tossed,
    Trying now to make the harbor,
    In the darkness may be lost.

    Let the lower lights be burning;
    Send a gleam across the wave.
    Some poor fainting, struggling seaman
    You may rescue, you may save.

  31. nice:

    1. Technically, that’s true. What they can do is have the Canadian financial institutions refuse to accept the transfers. And they probably will.

      1. The anons on Gab are suggesting that GSG use a non-traceable cryptocurrency (assuming non-traceable really exists), and making it difficult to show the provenance of the money.

      2. The anons on Gab are suggesting that GSG use a non-traceable cryptocurrency (assuming non-traceable really exists), and making it difficult to show the provenance of the money.

        I have little knowledge of crypto, and don’t know what kind of hoops are involved to turn it into readily spendable form. So, I really don’t know if it would help.

        1. Now, that would be a realistic test of crypto. At least the money might get through.

          However, I suspect that in the end, it would fail the Al Capone test: “You have no official income; how are you paying for your living and where are the taxes we should have gotten?”

      3. Even if the reports of this court action are correct and it is legitimately enforceable, the ruling only applies to Ontario. I’m sure there are responsible truckers with accounts in banks headquartered in other provinces. Once money is transferred there some Money Laundering 101 tactics could be used to get it distributed…

        1. Early on it was noted that the mandate may have been deliberately targeting Canadian trucks registered in the US– a way to punish folks who were avoiding silly whims.

    2. The law that they say they got a stay under would require:
      490.8(1) The Attorney General may make an application in accordance with this section for a restraint order under this section in respect of any offence-related property.
      490.8(2) An application made under subsection (1) for a restraint order in respect of any offence-related property may be made ex parte and shall be made in writing to a judge and be accompanied by an affidavit sworn on the information and belief of the Attorney General or any other person deposing to the following matters: (a) the indictable offence to which the offence-related property relates; (b) the person who is believed to be in possession of the offence-related property; and (c) a description of the offence-related property.
      490.8(3) Where an application for a restraint order is made to a judge under subsection (1), the judge may, if satisfied that there are reasonable grounds to believe that the property is offence-related property, make a restraint order prohibiting any person from disposing of, or otherwise dealing with any interest in, the offence-related property specified in the order otherwise than in the manner that may be specified in the order.

      …which would explain why they appear to be doing enforcement-by-press-release.
      I REALLY wanna see that affidavit. 😀

        1. The ones that turned out to have never actually existed, the actual FISA rules, or the we-have-a-FISA-warrant-wait-it-didn’t-actually-authorize-that-even-with-perjury ones?

          I’m guessing it’ll be the third case, or they’d have already arrested someone– maybe an order that they can’t distribute money to anybody who was arrested during the protest?

          1. 3rd one, absolutely. Remind me again how many of the people who authorized it and used it to hamstring President Trump and his supporters are in jail? As opposed to making bank working for “think tanks”?

            1. You’d have to give specific examples, because you’ve got a very long record of alluding to things, and when I finally dig them up they turned out to be inaccurate reports of situations that had little or no connection to the facts of the situation and I don’t feel like once again building your entire argument for you only to be abused when it turns out that the evidence didn’t match your chosen rumors.

                1. That every time you give enough details to go look at the facts, I am able to show that it is not the story you heard and spread is exactly the point.

    3. In the comments at Ace’s blog last night, there were claims that the Canadian government had frozen donations to what turned out to be a shell company explicitly set up to draw the attention of the Canadian government. Meanwhile, the real donations were going to Florida, and being converted to cryptocurrency to send across the border.

    1. Well, there’s one officer about to be fired, or thrown in the Canuckistan equivalent of Leavenworth.

      Or both.

      1. Or maybe he’ll command the firing squad that takes care of the Castrudeau problem permanently.

      2. Two observations about American officers.

        One, very political, in the sense of service politics.

        Two, they may have information about what they are being asked to do.

        Hypothetically, if some moron civil politician were trying to have infantry shoot up the capitol so that he didn’t have to resign or make a concession, an officer might conclude the the imprisonment for refusing would be shorter than the imprisonment for going along. Or, that one might as well shoot up the capitol, and seize power for oneself.

  33. An interesting blog post. Well, being European I can see how these things must annoy Americans, and for good reason. But, to be fair, Americans are not that much better. When I engage with Americans online I often have to fend off ideas about Europe based on Hollywood films and fake news picked up from the British tabloid press.

    As for collectivism, I must say that America’s worst enemy is your successful export of academic discourse on race, gender, sexuality, etcetera. The problem for you is that your professors seem to hate America, and that’s the message they give our students when they travel to Europe. So how can Americans expect France’s self-proclaimed experts on morality to have a different view?

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