JAG

As so often, you seize the wrong end of the stick and gallop off into the distance. I make no criticism of Shirer, I have read much of his work, including "The Rise and Fall" I am pointing out the remarkable parallels between the events he documented so vividly ( whose authors boasted amounted to the creation of a new "World Order") and what is happening today. It was you who raised the spectre of creating and reshaping "World Orders".

He would, but the phone battery is flat! Isn't that so Bob?

I must confess that I don't watch Fox News - but then I am notorious for using long words like "marmalade" and "wheelbarrow "!

Aha, I see an opening for a domestic (US) brand of "sneakers". Perhaps some really glitzy gold ones with a presidential endorsement? Ah, hang on, aren't they made in China?

The American people elected him. FAFO.

Ah - ownership of "Global Orders"! Yes, it was one of the great American journalists, William Shirer, who wrote the great book which documented the last big attempt to create own and manipulate the "Global Order", in the third and fourth decades of the last century. I think it is fair to say that didn't end all that well, particularly for the country which laid claim to the "Global Order"! Mind you, he ended up on Senator McCarthy's little list, so he was probably a liberal, a Democrat even a commie. In fact if he was alive now he would probably be leading the drive to boycott Teslas!

Because the mathematics is flawed. It is not based on tariffs but on trade balances - so if the USA buys more from another country than it sells to another country then it is raising a tariff on them. It is the USA which decides to buy the product not the other country, so the process is inherently unfair. Essentially what is happening is that the Trump administration has decided to raise revenue by applying wide raging taxes on imported goods, taxes which will be paid by it's own citizens, and is cynically and dishonestly justifying it by using a nonsensical mathematical model which attempts to divert the blame to other countries.

You missed America's very own Barbie Goebbels of that list!

Is that the same chap who several years ago threatened to set off a nuclear mine in the Atlantic which would cause a tsunami which would drown Ireland, Great Britain and our "moss covered Queen". Quite an imagination.

Well he did suggest it, on live TV, to his medical leaders. Along with, if I recall, the internal application of UV light?

Ironically those most likely to be "stuffed" by the Trump administration are his most fervent supporters.

Witch hunt! Corrupt judges! Politicised prosecutor! Biased jury! Fake media! Hunter Bidens laptop! Bigliest landslide ever! I don't know who Stormy Daniels is! And so it drags on...

, If that is your current "liquidity" (no doubt pending your next pension cheque) then somehow I doubt you satisfy the basic requirement of any casino operator!

From Wikipedia: Sir Timothy John Berners-Lee (born 8 June 1955),[1] also known as TimBL, is an English computer scientist best known as the inventor of the World Wide Web, the HTML markup language, the URL system, and HTTP. He is a professorial research fellow at the University of Oxford[2] and a professor emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). I vaguely knew his sister, one of the first female Anglican ordained women clergy. They were a quintessentially English family, you couldn't get more English than the Burners-Lee siblings.

Ironically, of the three expats who live in our neck of the woods, the one who never, ever, stops complaining about Thailand and the Thais is...the American!

We agree.

They were still broadcast - very much in the public domain, and they utterly destroyed Andrew Sachs.

Many will remember the notoriety he gained , some 20 years ago for the foul practical "joke" he played on the entirely harmless elderly actor Andrew Sachs - Manuel in Fawlty Towers. Brand, along with his partner in crime, Jonathan Ross, invited Sachs onto his radio programme; he then regaled Sachs and the listeners with lurid descriptions of his (claimed) sexual exploits with Sachs' much loved granddaughter. It was a foul and extremely cruel thing to do, which left Sachs an utterly broken man. He died not long after. Not criminal perhaps, certainly deserving of a good kicking, but it is entirely credible that someone who did such an appalling deed could also be capable of a bit of casual rape. He may well have been baptised in the Thames, I suspect that even the Thames does not have enough water to wash his soul clean!

Oh, I expect the battery will be flat, it always is! Trouble does seem to follow our Bob around doesn't it?

His best defence would probably be to take a leaf out of the late ( and much missed) Andrew Sach's book: "Qué? I know nothing. I come from Barcelona!" Vile creature (Brand, not Sachs)!

Unfortunately they were fencing "foil", so that would have been out of the target scoring area, if however they had been fencing epee, or sabre, that would have been allowed. I used to fence, I once got through to the final round of the British Army competition (more by good luck than good judgement - my Regiments team had a couple of very good fencers, I wasn't one). I was drawn against a tall languid sort of chap who was in the running for the UK Olympic Squad - shortest bout ever but I did get praise for trying from the judges! It is certainly not a sport for "Nancies"! But a woman against a man is always going to be an unfair match.

I am on no side, I am not an American and of course do not vote. But I do watch with some considerable dismay the carnage and destruction which Trump, yes, corrupt, malevolently vengeful, amoral and increasingly remote from reality, and utterly careless of the results his actions (which seem to be only calculated to boost his fragile reputation and ego) have wrought upon American society, and in particular it's more vulnerable members. I have spent time in the USA, and frankly did not much like quite a lot of what I saw. However, the offices of state, legislative and executive, were underpinned by a basic acknowledgement that it was their duty to understand and support the society which they governed. That, together with basic respect for democracy and people's rights seems to have gone by the board, certainly in the case of the executive and much of the legislature. I also regard with some amazement the antics and posturing of the hopelessly out of their depth collection of sycophants Trump has appointed to positions within his government; together with (it seems to me) the increasingly bizarre attempts of many of his supporters to justify what he is doing. My own country's' leaders (on both sides of the political divide) and those of other European countries are far from perfect, but ye gods and little fishes, compared with the. malevont idiocy running rampant in America, they are virtual plaster saints!

Well done that man, bringing Hunter Bidens laptop into the discussion!

I wish such practices had been around back in the day - I used to play rugby - front row forward. Golly, it would have been such fun!

You feed me the lines, I will respond!