Archive for April, 2018
25th April 2018
Walter Williams is not afraid to ask the hard questions.
Here are my questions to you: If only 37 percent of white high school graduates test as college-ready, how come colleges are admitting 70 percent of them? And if roughly 17 percent of black high school graduates test as college-ready, how come colleges are admitting 58 percent of them?
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on How Colleges Are Ripping Off a Generation of Ill-Prepared Students
24th April 2018
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Hey, open the borders! Let ’em all in! What could go wrong?
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on Hours After a Mexican Presidential Candidate Suggested Cutting Off Hands to Punish Crime, a Gang Gave His Idea Grisly Sign of Approval
24th April 2018
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Am I the only one in my spinning class at Equinox in Manhattan who’s fed up paying $200 every month for a gym with clean showers, $3,000 in rent every month for an apartment without cockroaches and $8 every morning for a cup of coffee? Am I the only one moving through the greater part of New York City boroughs and seeing an inexorable march of urban decay matched with the discomfort of crowding and inexplicable costs? I know I am not.
New York is the most expensive city in America. Its lower-cost neighborhoods are riddled with crime and homelessness. Its public schools, some of which are among the worst in the nation, look more like prisons than places of learning.
Y’all come to Texas. Plenty of room. I’m paying less than $2000 a month for a house with 2850 square feet in a Dallas suburb run by Republicans.
Posted in Dystopia Watch | 1 Comment »
24th April 2018
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Today is the 103rd anniversary of the start of the genocide against the Armenians in Ottoman Turkey.
Posted in Living with Islam. | Comments Off on The Ottoman Armenians: The Fate of Christians in a Muslim Land
24th April 2018
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A reminder to proglodyte dreamers everywhere that not everybody in California is a woke SWPL hipster.
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on People Are Vandalizing the Scooters Taking Over San Francisco With Everything From Stickers to Poop
24th April 2018
CNN: Trump Using The Word ‘Breeding’ Is ‘Racist’ Where is the word that isn’t racist when Trump uses it?
‘The Nation’ Angered that ‘Racist’ Trump to Pardon Late African-American Boxing Champ Doesn’t Trump know he’s supposed to be Hitler?
Maxine Waters: 70 Percent Of Women Want To Impeach Trump And they all wear the Bitter Beer Face.
CNN Host Finds Nothing But ‘Racist’ Intent in Trump ‘Breeding’ Tweet My, what a surprise.
Hillary Clinton called Donald Trump disgusting in ‘f***-laced’ rant, new book claims My, what a surprise.
Judge Napolitano Says There’s ‘No Question’ Democrats Tried To Frame President Trump Of course they did — and will.
Eagles Owner: Trump’s Presidency ‘Disastrous’ And of course the owner of a football team who gave money to Hillary is an expert.
White House Reporters Whine About ‘Tension’ With Trump Well, when you spend your time calling a guy Hitler, there’s going to be some tension. yeah.
CNN Dedicates Entire Segment To Trump’s Personal Cell Phone Use Hey, when you’ve not nothing but nits to pick, then nits are what you pick.
Joy Behar Cracks Donald Trump Jr. Is Going to Jail: ‘The Feds Are Gonna Get Him!’ Joy has a very rich fantasy life.
President Trump: guilty until proven innocent
Trump Explains Why He Is Skipping The WHCA Dinner Why sit down to dinner with people who have spent the last year calling you Hitler? That’s a no-brainer, in my book.
CNN’s Cillizza Does Entire Segment On Awkward Trump, Macron Photo Awkward for CNN, perhaps.
Comedian Says She Dreams Of Donald Trump Dying Yeah, that’s pretty funny.
Posted in Axis of Drivel -- Adventures in Narrative Media | Comments Off on Today in Trump Derangement Syndrome
24th April 2018
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On Tuesday’s New Day, as CNN’s Alisyn Camerota hosted a debate between far-left former MSNBC contributor Michael Eric Dyson and former Donald Trump advisor Steve Cortes over what the word “breeding” was referring to in a recent tweet by the President, Dyson at one point asserted that “you can be a white supremacist in brown skin” as he argued against his fellow guest defending Trump.
Additionally, Camerota repeated the discredited myth popular on the left that illegal immigrants have a lower crime rate than American citizens.
The intellectual vacuity of the people who regularly step forward to promote the proglodyte agenda is one of the most disgusting aspects of our degenerate modern age.
Posted in Axis of Drivel -- Adventures in Narrative Media | Comments Off on Dyson to Hispanic Republican: ‘You Can Be a White Supremacist in Brown Skin’ Share
24th April 2018
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Identity politics turns to bite the Fashionable Victim Groups that feed it.
Shiva Ayyadurai, an independent candidate challenging Democratic Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren in November, is suing Warren’s hometown of Cambridge for demanding that he removes signs labeling her a “fake Indian.”
Ayyadurai, who has billed himself as the “real Indian” in the race, was born in Bombay, India.
Ayyadurai’s federal lawsuit, filed Sunday, accuses the city of violating his free speech when officials ordered him to remove two campaign signs picturing Warren in a Native American headdress along with the slogan: “Only a real Indian can defeat the fake Indian.”
That’s clever. I would vote for such a candidate.
Posted in Whose turn is it to be the victim? | Comments Off on ‘Real Indian’ Sues City for Barring Him From Calling Sen. Warren a ‘Fake’ One
24th April 2018
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Gee, I wonder how that happened.
Posted in News You Can Use. | Comments Off on NRA Breaks Fundraising Record in Month After Parkland Shooting
24th April 2018
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When the $2 billion Miami Intermodal Center (MIC) started construction in 2011, the plan was to have its central station serviced by long-distance Amtrak trains.
Construction finished in 2013 and while three different rail services currently operate at the station, Amtrak is nowhere to be found. The reason? The platform built for Amtrak is 200 feet too short for Amtrak’s long-distance trains.
This is why we don’t have government employees in charge of our health care.
Britain made that mistake after WWII and is still suffering for it.
The problem was first discovered shortly after construction began, but who exactly is to blame for the multi-million-dollar mishap, or what is to be done about it now, remain open questions.
Prediction: Nobody will get fired, nobody will go to jail.
Posted in Your tax dollars at work - and play. | Comments Off on Oops! Amtrak Trains Don’t Fit in Miami’s $2 Billion Train Station
24th April 2018
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Hey, open the borders! Let ’em all in! What could go wrong?
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on Cartel Enforcers Dissolve Bodies of Mexican Film Students in Acid
24th April 2018
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I think Joe Scarborough has a rich sponsor who is protecting his job.
Posted in Axis of Drivel -- Adventures in Narrative Media | Comments Off on Joe Scarborough Thinks Scott Pruitt Has a Rich Sponsor Who’s Protecting His Job
24th April 2018
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on Candace Owens Accuses the Left of ‘Wanting Their Slaves Back’
24th April 2018
ZMan is delightfully dyspeptic today.
If you read Donald Kagan’s account of the The Peloponnesian War, the politicians of Athenian democracy come in for some rough treatment for their dishonestly, stupidity and fecklessness. Kagan is especially tough on Alcibiades, who he mostly blames for the disastrous Sicilian Expedition. Whether that is fair or not is debatable, but Kagan’s description of Alcibiades as a duplicitous and egotistical politician, with a penchant for snapping penises off of statuary, strikes a chord with anyone who follows politics today.
Look around Washington, and with few exceptions, the place is full of the worst sorts of people. It’s not just the dishonestly, which is a permanent feature of politics, regardless of the system. That’s a self-correcting feature, for the most part. The main issue in our politics is that our system attracts the worst people. It is nearly impossible to find an elected official who has ever done honest work. Most are phenomenally stupid, outside their reptilian ability to fool voters and cozy up to the billionaires that bankroll them.
The problem is that politicians will say whatever it takes to get them elected. Once they’re in office, the people who are in a position to give them money and votes to help them stay in office get priority, and to Hell with what would actually benefit the people.
It is tempting to say that this is just the natural result of democracy. There is a lot of truth there, as this was the result of Athenian democracy, as well. The standard critique of democracy is that it brings together a bunch of not so smart and wise people, expecting them to be collectively what they are not individually. Dumb people do not become smart when their numbers increase. Therefore, the antidote to the defects of democracy is limiting the franchise to the best people. That’s the argument for a representative republic.
The counter to this is the public is almost always choosing between two terrible choices when they go to vote. It’s not that they are choosing poorly, so much as they can only choose poorly. At election time, you get to select between two degenerate sociopaths, so the result is fixed. It’s hard to blame the public for bad choices, given what we see on display in our elections. The reason Trump is in the White House, despite his long list of liabilities, is he was the most honest guy on stage. Think about that for a second.
Amen to that.
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on The Worst People
24th April 2018
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on Thought for the Day
24th April 2018
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Banning guns didn’t reduce crime, it redirected it to knives.
It turns out that when you pass laws disarming people in an attempt to prevent violence, criminals who habitually disregard all laws don’t make exceptions for the new rules. In London, crime still thrives despite the U.K.’s tight gun controls and the British political class is now desperately turning its attention to restricting knives.
This whack-a-mole will continue until politicians get a clue (i.e. forever).
The mayhem that’s closed London’s homicide gap with its trans-Atlantic rival appears to be largely the result of violent criminal gangs. Firearms are strictly restricted in the U.K., including a near-total ban on handguns. Nevertheless, “[i]n the 12 months to October 2017, there were 2,500 offences involving guns: a 16 per cent increase on the previous year and a 44 per cent increase on 2014,” the London Assembly’s Police and Crime Committee noted in January. Criminals, it seems, are not averse to committing crimes—including the illegal acquisition of tools that help them commit more crimes.
Couldn’t have any connection to the importation of thousands of tribal Muslims, oh no.
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on British Politicians Declare War on Knives
23rd April 2018
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Senator Whitehouse looks like the dimwitted scion of a rich family who was sent into politics because they couldn’t think of any place else to put him.
Oh, wait, he really is….
He also appears to be a classmate of mine, although I don’t remember running into him.
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on NBC Airs Adoring Segment About Dem Senator Up for Reelection
23rd April 2018
Posted in Axis of Drivel -- Adventures in Narrative Media | Comments Off on Today in Trump Derangement Syndrome
23rd April 2018
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Sky is falling, women and minorities hardest hit, give us your money and go live in a cave, etc. etc.
Note that they are depending on the Low Information Reader to hear that ‘could’ as a ‘will’ and panic.
I’m still pulling for New York City to be under 3 feet of water. That would make me smile.
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on Disturbing Before-and-After Images Show What Major US Cities Could Look Like in the Year 2100
23rd April 2018
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I see that the Ninth Circuit is taking steps to cement its place as most reversed Court of Appeals in the country.
Posted in Your tax dollars at work - and play. | Comments Off on Monkey See, Monkey Sue: Monkeys Can Bring Lawsuits, 9th Circuit Says
23rd April 2018
No, it wasn’t. It got boring VERY quickly.
Lincoln Logs make great fire-starters … when properly chemically treated beforehand.
Just sayin’.
Posted in Think about it. | 2 Comments »
23rd April 2018
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You’d think that by this time he could take the hint.
“Hmm. The Natural Selection is strong in this one.”
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on Man Attacked by Shark Was Previously Mauled by a Bear and Bitten by a Rattlesnake
23rd April 2018
Can’t say he’s wrong.
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on Thought for the Day
23rd April 2018
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Hey, who hasn’t wanted to do that?
Posted in News You Can Use. | Comments Off on 12-Year-Old Boy Uses Family Credit Card to Fly to Bali After Argument With Mother
23rd April 2018
Steve Sailer runs the numbers.
One place where White Privilege definitely exists is at the upper pay ranges at the Southern Poverty Law Center in Alabama, which enjoyed a bonanza fiscal year, adding over $120 million to its vast endowment.
One of the weirder aspects of the SPLC has long been its adamant refusal to hire any blacks for its best jobs. The SPLC’s new tax form lists its 11 highest paid employees for the year ending 10/31/17, and sure enough they are still all white.
Posted in Whose turn is it to be the victim? | Comments Off on White Privilege at the SPLC
23rd April 2018
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Not often you see an article like this in reliable Voice of the Crust The Guardian.
The deep state has been blamed for many things since Donald Trump became president, including by the president himself. Trump defenders have used the term promiscuously to include not just intelligence bureaucrats but a broader array of connected players in other administrative bureaucracies, in private industry, and in the media.
But even if we focus narrowly on the intelligence bureaucracies that conduct and use information collected secretly in the homeland, including the FBI, National Security Agency (NSA), and National Security Council, there is significant evidence that the deep state has used secretly collected information opportunistically and illegally to sabotage the president and his senior officials – either as part of a concerted movement or via individuals acting more or less independently.
Posted in Your tax dollars at work - and play. | Comments Off on The ‘Deep State’ Is Real. But Are Its Leaks Against Trump Justified?
22nd April 2018
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Just lucky, I guess.
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on Why Do Fantasy Novels Have So Much Food?
22nd April 2018
Posted in Axis of Drivel -- Adventures in Narrative Media | Comments Off on Today in Trump Derangement Syndrome
22nd April 2018
Posted in News You Can Use. | Comments Off on How the New LED Cinema Screen Could Change Filmmaking and Moviegoing
22nd April 2018
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The subject comes to mind because today is Earth Day, a quasi-religious day of observance for (mostly) irreligious types who claim to revere science but wouldn’t know it if it bit them in the hindquarters. It leads the list of irrelevant and concocted “holidays” that are mainly occasions for silliness (sometimes serious silliness, as on Earth Day), filling air time, selling greeting cards, and pandering to political correctness.
Others of its kind include Valentine’s Day, St. Patrick’s Day, Kwanzaa, Rosa Parks Day, Harriet Tubman Day, Malcolm X Day,Juneteenth, African New Year, Groundhog Day, National Girls and Women in Sports Day, International Women’s Day, April Fools’ Day, Arbor Day, May Day, Cinco de Mayo, Mother’s Day, Children’s Day, Helen Keller Day, Father’s Day, Women’s Equality Day, Grandparent’s Day, German-American Day, and Leif Erikson Day.
I have nothing against Washington’s Birthday, which honors a man who should be honored. But I object strenuously to its popular name, Presidents’ Day, which submerges Washington in a presidential pool that includes the anti-patriotic likes of Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama. Presidents’ day belongs with the list in the preceding paragraph; it has become an occasion for selling automobiles, appliances, and furniture.
Concur.
I would go farther and bar Congress and the President from establish bogus National ‘Days”, “Weeks”, and “Months”, starting with Black History Month and such rot. This sort of political posturing and virtue-signalling fills mind-share that would more profitably be devoted to actual substantive reforms.
Who needs National Pig Day? Certainly not the pigs.
Posted in Dystopia Watch | 2 Comments »
22nd April 2018
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on Thought for the Day
22nd April 2018
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When scientists in France set out to sequence 1,000 yeast genomes, they looked at strains from all the places you might expect: beer, bread, wine.
But also: sewage, termite mounds, tree bark, the infected nail of a 4-year-old Australian girl, oil-contaminated asphalt, fermenting acorn meal in North Korea, horse dung, fruit flies, human blood, seawater, a rotting banana. For five years, two geneticists—Gianni Liti, from the Université Côte d’Azur, and Joseph Schacherer, from the Université de Strasbourg—asked for samples of Saccharomyces cerevisiae from nearly everyone they met, whether doctors in French Guiana collecting human feces or Mexican tequila makers.
“It’s easy to get a thousand wine strains,” says Schacherer, “But that’s not how we wanted to proceed.” They wanted little-known wild strains of yeast that live all over the world in a great variety of environments. And they wanted these samples to see if they could confirm their suspicions about the historical origin of yeast. The results of their analysis, published in Nature, suggest that yeast came from, of all places, China.
Posted in News You Can Use. | Comments Off on All of the World’s Yeast Probably Originated in China
22nd April 2018
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California voters may soon be asked to decide whether their state is too big and should broken into three, separate states. Venture capitalist Tim Draper, who pushed for a six-state proposal, now has a three-state proposal called “CAL3,” according to CBS San Francisco.
Draper did not have enough signatures to get his six-state measure on the California ballot in 2016. For this new proposal, he needs 366,000 signatures. On Thursday, he announced that he has more than 600,000 signatures.
“I’m proud to announce we’ve collected more than enough signatures to qualify for the 2018 ballot,” Draper said.
The best way to split California would be a major earthquake that would send the coastal areas out to sea.
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on Splitting California
22nd April 2018
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The term is probably a shortening of “software engineer,” but its use betrays a secret: “Engineer” is an aspirational title in software development. Traditional engineers are regulated, certified, and subject to apprenticeship and continuing education. Engineering claims an explicit responsibility to public safety and reliability, even if it doesn’t always deliver.
The title “engineer” is cheapened by the tech industry.
Software developers have no more right to the term ‘engineer’ than medical doctors. Engineers build things whose behavior after being built is precisely calculable; that ain’t software. Software above the level of ‘Hello, world’ is a complex system that interacts with the complex system software hosting it, and none of those interactions are precisely calculable, any more than the biological processes in a body are calculable. The best you can do is say ‘well, well think it will act this way, mostly’.
If there were a convenient term for ‘software physician’, that would be best. Unfortunately, I can’t think of one.
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on Programmers: Stop Calling Yourselves Engineers
22nd April 2018
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A lot of these are little formulae we’ve come to expect from stories in each genre, like ‘one upon a time’ in fairy tales. Their dramatic usage trumps their divergence from real life, like whooshing spacecraft.
That said, a lot of these bother me, especially looking at the other guy when you’re supposed to be driving. (I’ve actually known people who do that, and they invariably spark panic in the passenger.)
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on The Top 10: Unrealistic Clichés in TV Drama
21st April 2018
Posted in Axis of Drivel -- Adventures in Narrative Media | Comments Off on Today in Trump Derangement Syndrome
21st April 2018
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The brownshirts of the Left are on the march. The witch-hunt for Heretics and Sinners proceeds apace.
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on NRA Lobbyist’s Home Targeted by Anti-Gun Vandals
21st April 2018
Severian is not afraid to ask the hard question.
Borrowing a phrase from Marx, the early 21st century West is the only place with the “objective conditions” that allow a “displaced Southern queer millennial womanist organizer/writer” to exist. Everything about this… being… and They’s partner-being exist, and can only exist, thanks to the culmination of decades of unprecedented material prosperity and its consequent mental enstupidation. In my time in a college town I met quite a few people who make up their own pronouns, and trust me, they should be required to talk in footnotes — everything they say or think is lifted wholesale from Jezebel, Feministing, or the Guardian. If they were my students, I could fail their entire lives for plagiarism.
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on Liberation from WHAT?
21st April 2018
Alex Tabarrok, a Real Economist, explains how the Deep State works.
If you want understand the Facebook hearings it’s useful to think not about privacy or technology but about what politicians want. In the Peltzman model of regulation, politicians use regulation to tradeoff profits (wanted by firms) and lower prices (wanted by constituents) to maximize what politicians want, reelection. The key is that there are diminishing returns to politicians in both profits and lower prices. Consider a competitive industry. A competitive industry doesn’t do much for politicians so they might want to regulate the industry to raise prices and increase firm profits. The now-profitable firms will reward the hand that feeds them with campaign funds and by diverting some of the industry’s profits to subsidize a politician’s most important constituents. Consumers will be upset by the higher price but if the price isn’t raised too much above competitive levels the net gain to the politician will be positive.
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on The Peltzman Model of Regulation and the Facebook Hearings
21st April 2018
John Derbyshire looks at a prophet without honor in his own country.
Powell was right, and his enemies were wrong. And we are suffering the consequences.
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on On Enoch Powell—Fifty Years Later
21st April 2018
Women and minorities hardest hit, of course.
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on Thought for the Day
20th April 2018
Posted in Axis of Drivel -- Adventures in Narrative Media | Comments Off on Today in Trump Derangement Syndrome
20th April 2018
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The woman whose book Silent Spring resulted in the banning of DDT and consequently thousands of deaths from malaria in Third World countries is refuted by an actual scientist.
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on The Lies of Rachel Carson
20th April 2018
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If you can, you need to get out more.
Just sayin’.
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on Can You Solve These 10 Medieval Riddles?
20th April 2018
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I’m good with that.
Actually, you’d be hard put to find a cow as big as a Clydesdale or Percheron horse. But nobody expects accuracy from ‘journalists’ any more.
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on Cows Could Be Largest Mammals on Earth if Extinction Continues at This Pace
20th April 2018
Feel the Berne….
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on Thought for the Day
20th April 2018
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If, of course, that’s what you want to do.
Posted in News You Can Use. | Comments Off on Moasure ONE Brings Actual Rocket Science to Any Measurement You Could Ever Need
20th April 2018
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Surprising that the New York Times would publish such a direct refutation of a key provision of the proglodyte Narrative.
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on The 10-Year Baby Window That Is the Key to the Women’s Pay Gap
20th April 2018
Posted in Living with Islam. | Comments Off on ISLAMOCOPIA FRIDAY: What’s New in the Religion of Peace
20th April 2018
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Well. There it is.
My question is: How does he come to have it in the first place?
My next question is: If France is a ‘slave country’ to the U.S., can we send them out for pizza? I’ve always wanted to do that.
Posted in News You Can Use. | Comments Off on Syria Returns Legion d’Honneur to France Because Assad Will Not Wear Award of ‘Slave Country’ to US