I know the history well enough to recall when former butcher Byrd was not even yet the grand old dude in the US Senate and people said “forgive him, in West Virginia it was only possible to win if having the KKK’s endorsement”. Sometimes it’s not worth winning.
And the sexual assaults of enslaved kids wasn’t something that just began when kids turned 14. The enslavement establishment players aimed to rape kids even younger than 14.
People need to remember that the raping of slaves were not limited to raping just women. The slave owners and slavery-enablers raped extremely young girls, and many of those establishment players had a preference for raping girls from an extremely young age.
We should have a Surgeon General’s warning advising against the Trumpublican regime & RFK Jr as they are bad for human health.
I’ve said it before that Starmer would likely be more right wing than even David Cameron as PM and if he couldn’t move the UK himself that way he would end up making sure someone else does.
I’ve seen used baby diapers tossed out of the second floor window (of what was a bathroom) in a place where I lived in Europe. Mostly in a plastic bag. It happened regularly at one home so that when the window opened, good chances that diapers would be coming out the window & going plop in the yard.
Tossing out Trump’s adult diaper?
If — and that’s a big if — they are allowed to go by road to Jordan, then they should be able to fly from Amman to the US unless the US has put them on a no-fly list. If they are on a US no-fly list, then they may want to make their way to Canada or Mexico and head by road to the US.
Every time he opens his mouth, it screams “Illegal Alien!”.
…. or his visits to the “girlie bars”.
I am not venting nor dividing anyone. The facts are as they are: the vast majority of voting age European-Americans refused to vote against Trump. Care about what got the US into this TrumpubliKKKan mess? Then focus on the very majority which delivered it & needs an intra-community fix.
During at least the last 20 years, IIRC, the peak year for US citizen asylum claims in Sweden was during the first Trump Admin. Typically, Sweden rejects most asylum claims from US citizens. Easier chance to get a Swedish work permit.
Most European-Americans refused to stop Trump in the 2024 election. Looking around, it’s not going any better in 2025. So much pussyfooting going on for the situation and what led to it that Republican regime’s multigenerational damage piles up exponentially faster than it may ever be cleaned up.
Trump won despite Muslim Americans voting for Harris in the same large proportion as Jewish American voters. Trump’s victory in the 2024 general election is the disease the country’s Muslim-despising European-origin population refused to stop.
I think we all should have realized how news coverage and opinion pieces are decided at MSNBC when they literally deplatformed their “brown” people talking heads in October 2023 for purposes of setting the news and opinion coverage on the channel.
There have been a few American asylum seekers in Sweden over the last 20 years or so — think it was around 40 or so in at least one year of Trump’s first term as President but most of those asylum claims don’t really get approved by the Swedish government.
Sweden is the size of California with a population size and population density of Minnesota+Wisconsin — and yet Sweden indeed has much better commuter rail service.
The country’s population is around 20% bigger than it was 20-25 years ago. Doesn’t sound like a population growth probelm.
The Sweden Democrats’ “rounds of purges” were mostly for show. The neo-Nazi adjacent mentality is baked into the Sweden Democrats and it’s not a problem for its own voters and leaders as long as the more extreme hyper-racism is not recorded and disseminated publicly to the world at large.
Enthusiasm grows when voters see a party standing up for values about which the voters care passionately. If you’re only enthusiastic when winning, that’s a long-term losing strategy. MSNBC audience didn’t move the dial on US general election outcomes in 2024.
Why are you calling the Republicans the GOP? The TrumpubliKKKans are not the GOP of your youth, they are the monstrous evolution turbo-boosted by Islamophobia as accelerant.
“Israel can do little/no wrong” and the “whataboutism” folks need a reality check: anti-Muslim racism fast tracked the US’s transition into fascism. Islamophobia literally as accelerant.
Modi hates Erdogan and Erdogan hates Modi and both were there too. A real rogue’s gallery, but Trump & Netanyahu were missing.
India trying to make common cause with China’s hostility toward China’s Muslims is not really useful for China. So the main result will likely be a resurgence of business ties and a lot of Chinese imports making their way into world markets via India until the next meltdown.
India’s “reconciliation” with China won’t be much of one and not much of one longer term. Modi has neither the will nor ability to give China what China wants from India. India wants to buy time for itself in its dealings with China, but China doesn’t want to see a rising India.
Recognized UK citizens have a right to be admitted into the UK upon arrival at a UK port of entry.
By the time she was around 3 years and 3 days old, the UK had eliminated birthright citizenship for those born to foreign parents not permanently domiciled in the UK. No need to guess what motivated the Conservatives to go down that path of eliminating birthright citizenship for all born in the UK.
I recently saw a house on the market with 2 washing machines + 2 dryers in the laundry room. It is uncommon enough that it got my attention. For people that have 6+ categories of laundry to do separately, this meant closer to half the time to run the laundry and dry stuff.
China also subsidized Pakistan’s transformation into a solar energy consumer. Pakistan is such a perennial basket case that Pakistanis needed workarounds around the utility companies which cut off electricity always when it’s most needed by the people in an increasingly hot & drying up land.
That presupposes that the Modi regime has any desire to sort out issues in any way which isn’t barbaric & built upon “might makes right”.
Stop drinking the propaganda diarrhea coming out of all of the orifices of the RSS & other Indian fascists. The war on Ukraine started because Putin is a war-mongering type still upset about the Soviet Union/Russia having lost the Cold War to the US and the collapse of the Soviet Union.
…. and yet train ticket prices on SJ and Snalltaget trains to get across Sweden are at the highest prices ever and also appear more sold out for ticket purchases on day of travel. And the flight ticket prices can even be much cheaper than the train ticket prices for same city pair.
Those Democrats/Democratic voters who refuse to recognize that Trump is a symptom of a chronic health disorder in our body politic & society at large are doing a disservice to the country and setting up the country for worse outcomes than what is currently already in evidence to most all Democrats.
Before I knew better I assumed Paul Bunyan was from Maine, not Minnesota. Because of the lumber stuff. :D
Häagen-Dazs marketing-like gimmick to make people in the US think it’s European and higher quality stuff.
Sweden is about as densely populated as Minnesota+Wisconsin and has a comparable number of people as these two states combined.
Not hypocrisy as much as that rising power status or great power status increases the risk of a country becoming a sort of monster of its own. And also there can be an element of “payback”/“just desserts” toward former colonial masters for having been subjected to brutal racism by colonial masters.
Modi & Co have been in charge of India for over a decade and gotten only worse after being re-elected. They and their voters & are part and parcel of India becoming rather fascist. But this is the natural result when Islamophobia grows in any democracy.
It’s also bad economically for this language divide to happen since a regional cross-border labor market is tremendously beneficial. Schools in the region should really drive up the regional local language learning even if it’s just 30-40 minutes a week of additional class time for under-16 kids.
In the first decade of the Oresund Bridge being opened up and with older people still, the Danes mostly stuck to Danish and Swedes to Swedish in talking to each other. Now, it’s a switch to English way more often than ever before especially the younger the people.
It’s striking how fast the change has happened. Just in the course of the history of the bridge being opened between Copenhagen and Sweden, the intelligibility/comfort level with the other Scandinavian language has dropped tremendously.
Maybe he’s hunkered down in a bunker with Laura Loomer trying to generate new life out of him.
The country deserves to know how damaged Trump’s brain is from syphilis. The country also deserves to know what Trump is hiding in nearly all of the Trump-Epstein child sex abuse scandal files.
Racism is the road by which the country has been delivered into the hands of this wannabe fascist regime. Without racism against persons of color and Muslims, TrumpubliKKKanism wouldn’t have taken over the country.
Tea water, what a name.
But for some reason Danish and Swedish were considered more mutually intelligible 20-100 years ago by people living around the Oresund than by their kids, grandkids and great grandkids. Maybe radio and more TV programming “from the other side” focused the mind more?
And between the Nordic Passport Union, Nordic Council and EU/EEA arrangements with Schengen, not sure what there is to gain — beside “synergy” savings in bureaucracy and parliamentary costs — from merging countries with a different history, different language in the main, and even different culture.
Unlike with Norwegians and Swedes talking to each other, young Swedish adults and young Danish adults now almost default to speaking English to each other because of a sense of reduced mutual intelligibility/comfort.
Not sure it’s changed that much or different anywhere in the country. Kids in Malmo and other parts of Skåne that are convenient to Copenhagen generally seem to have very limited knowledge about Denmark even when they have grown up with Danish classmates.
We are headed toward a major financial meltdown from all the irrational exuberance and fraud related to crazy selling and buying of “AI” & crypto stuff plus all the fraud enabled by programs/bots/AI & crypto. Just a matter of when it’s dot-com bubble burst + Enron etc.
Too bad we can’t bill this kind of stuff to just Trumpublican voters.
The EU/EEA’s EES system will make a mess of things at a lot of airports but this and ETIAS (de facto evisa) is what security paranoia brings about — and it will cost travelers in time and money.
Post-pandemic I’ve seen up to 50 minute differences between EU/EEA+ passport users to and US passport users to clear Schengen passport control. Sometimes the airports or airlines will help some passengers to cut to the front or use an expedited lane if the plane is (soon) boarding, but not always.
BA/airline contractor agents make things up at times. BA can’t get the UK to deny entry to persons legally admissible at the UK Border. The UK is legally required to admit UK citizens at UK port of entry in the UK even if it takes some additional time to determine UK identity & UK citizenship.
A similar approach with the UK & UK ETA should work too without adverse legal repercussions as then the application is being filled and submitted by someone unaware of the UK citizenship. But the lowest risk way is hand-baggage only with a refundable same-day-as-Heathrow-arrival ticket for Schengen
To deal with this for say ESTAs in the US when going to the US — which is much more hardline — as US dual-citizens with expired US passports, what has been done: get another party to apply for the de facto evisa with US passport info without informing the application-filler about other citizenship.
no big *UK* fine
Funny thing is getting blocked by someone who didn’t like being told there is no big UN fine for the airlines for transporting passengers in such circumstance (at least not yet).
Then go to the UK Border at Heathrow and enter the UK. Worse case scenario you apply for a UK ETA in the UK ETA app at Heathrow itself and generally get approved within two minutes anyway. UK citizenship doesn’t expire with passport expiration, so UK Border authorities on arrival would admit.
If I were a UK-US dual-citizen without “valid” UK passport & denied travel like this, I would go with hand baggage only & buy a refundable onward ticket for Heathrow-Paris that would make it possible to stay “airside” to transit Heathrow on day of arrival. ETA not required for airside transit.
There is no big fine for airlines transporting valid US passport users to the UK without a UK ETA.
The UK should get TIMATIC & its equivalents to upload ETA exemptions to holders of expired UK/IRL passports. This situation reminds me a bit of when some airlines require 3 or 6 months remaining passport validity or ID for travel even as govt rules aren’t as bad as what an airline applied.
They really seem to want people to download and use the app. When it comes to US, Canadian & Schengen country citizens flying to the UK, the airlines check for UK ETA approval. But at UK Border at London Heathrow Airport it’s possible to use egates & legally get admitted without an approved ETA.
At least there they may not have the reactions when realizing that “country living” may mean having to deal with trucking in water, trucking out sewage & some other stuff (such as back when cable TV was out of the question beyond city limits).
Parts of Appalachia & the rural South are so awfully impoverished that it reminded me of some of worst of the poverty to be found in India. Maybe some Native American reservations in Wisconsin & Minnesota are like that, but the ones I have been on are an improvement on the poor rural South.
American in Denmark here today. This mess is all on people of European origins who can’t cut their own racism against “black” and “brown” peoples and breathe in and out Islamophobia. Those racisms are what delivered fascism in America, and Denmark hasn’t been helpful as it fueled such racism too.
Rural well-being has been declining in the US in most every sense of “well-being”. In physical health terms, it also comes with rural hospital closures, consolidation of rural healthcare facilities, reduced competition & all the bad that means in our system of healthcare.
True, but those representatives represent themselves and non-local big donors more than they represent their own voters. They are horribly exploitative of the people of the geographical area which they supposedly represent.
It won’t end car reliance in such areas, but it has other benefits. And instead of having dedicated school buses, have a public transport bus network that is used by students and commuters into towns for classes & work.
We should do what some other countries in our population density range have done and that has sort of helped with rural support for public transit: having rural/small town public services transport networks where buses connect with rural commuter trains that connect between towns of 5k-40k people.
The forced displacements of homeless people without a housing solution is like squeezing an air-filled balloon: it forces the balloon to bulge elsewhere and can even burst the balloon and scatters the mess and makes the mess worse.
Good point, but we have more room to go so that low wage earners get more of the share of the pie created by workers & average consumers who‘ve enriched the uber-wealthy. The average age of death of a minimum wage worker is now how much lower than for those who get the $4k check a month from SSA?
4.4 million Muslims out of c. 66 million doesn’t even crack 7% despite the British having ruled over well over 125 million Muslims less than 80 years ago.
“We are going to burn your home down, put you in chains, whip you and rape you and your relatives when we get the chance” is protected freedom of speech/expression? We can’t even scream “Fire!” or “Active shooter” in a crowded theater as a joke without inviting adverse legal consequences.
Cross-border trips should be done using scrubbed burner phones with minimal stored data; and it’s best done with a reloadable eSIM if using a mobile phone number as a passcode or 2FA security method for online accounts. Governments are not saints. CBSA & US CBP are “partners in crime”.
I wouldn’t be surprised if the Trump regime tries to change venues in order to find more “friendly” grand juries and juries. But that too will be a sign that the Trumpublican-Vancian regime sees the American public as being its primary enemy.
Palantir & its Peter Thiel character are supporting the very Donald Trump who wants to make Canada a 51st state of the US. When will Canada learn there is nothing good to come from propping up such fascism supporting actors in the US, more so at this time with a mad man running the US?
Not a welcome development. This sounds a lot like a lot more expensive version of what US CBP does with ATS scoring of travelers: www.dhs.gov/publication/...
….. at least some of them believe it’s a problem that poor people can vote & have their vote counted equally to rich people’s vote: “Fundamental problem with democracy: drunk guy on street corner taking public assistance has as much of a vote as a guy who pays $100m per year in federal taxes.”
Even around a decade after 9/11, CBSA still accepted a US state driver’s license + US state birth certificate as sufficient to enter Canada at Canadian ports of entry. On returns from Canada, the US CBP wasn’t all that happy about it, but at land ports we got back in with the same docs anyway.
www.flyertalk.com/forum/member... is I.
Yes (or at least mostly, beside imposters).
Italy has cut back on giving Italian citizenship by descent as of a few months ago. A plurality of my Argentine acquaintances in Europe are Italian citizens. But they got it before Italy put into place the current, far more restrictive law on citizenship by descent.
Passport card is more portable while the passport is more susceptible to damage. I find use for both.
By air, I’ve flown without a passport to Canada even after 9/11. Then the US passed a law called WHTI and the airlines required passports even as the Canadian government did not when I would just show my regular US DL + US birth certificate.
I used to enter Canada a bunch — by road and by air — without bringing along a US passport. By road, they would often just ask where do I live and let me go. Later I would go with a regular US state-issued driver’s license & that work. Later a DL with a US state birth certificate would work.
And that $72k would be tax-adjusted income. In some cases that is going to be $100k of pre-tax income without even considering price hikes coming from the crazy Trumpublican actions.
This is what misanthropic bigoted governments do when trying to consolidate power and become ever more authoritarian: they go after humanitarian parties so as to try to crush supporters of minority rights and to disappear public empathy and altruism toward targeted minority groups.
It’s like how in Scotland they assumed that smartly-dressed POCs are doctors or related to doctors. It doesn’t mean racism is not alive in the place too, but there is a reason why “brown” and “black” people have a lot more reason to fear even the authorities in the US than in the UK and Ireland.
How do we know he cannot see or smell the telomeres at the end of our chromosomes without any advanced technological tools? Let’s give the guy with the drug-fried brain a break ….. from being head of HHS as he needs to be admitted to a mental asylum for observation.
Immigrants in the US commit less crimes per capita than native-born Americans. An Old World refugee in the 1986-2016 period would be better off landing in the US than in Sweden.
If a country cares to integrate refugees, they will help them get settled in areas with better access to jobs, schools and so on. This is where Sweden fails badly with its refugee settlement plans, but it’s really driven by a “they don’t deserve to be here, so banish them” mentality.
Sweden is full of MAGA-adjacent characters.
Per capita refugee arrivals in the US skyrocketed thru the roof with the Biden Admin? That seems to be a bit of an exaggeration and not factoring in the impact of the pandemic that Trump mismanaged like crazy. Lots of Swedes think Sweden’s “refugee intake” wasn’t a national transparent decision.
It so is. And if you check out some of the edit war history sometimes you get a sense that the subject of the Wikipedia entry is involved in the edits for image purposes.
Given you have enough articles to/with your name, you’d be eligible to create your own and have it remain. But if you add in “DJ George is the best DM” type fluff, it may come with an edit war.
I’ve been visiting Fleet Farm type stores forever. When I was a kid, I almost never saw anyone buying ammo unless it was around deer hunting season. Now I see people buying guns and ammo all year round and it’s just weird with the “must buy” and “‘must shoot” or “must practice” with more guns thing.
Maybe he will honor the British for burning the White House in 1814 and John Wilkes Booth for assassinating Lincoln. It would be in the same spirit as what he is doing with the deceased USAF veteran traitor.
If it’s so unsustainable, good thing it has a massive sovereign wealth fund for itself for those future proverbial rainy days.
Norway’s “neoliberalism” or whatever isn’t destroying Norway. And the idea of Norway destroying the world is rather extreme given how small and “on the periphery” it is by your own mention.