GoneOffShore
GoneOffShore's JournalIrish educational priorities.....
An Irishman goes to a building site in London and asks the foreman if he can have a job. “Are you Irish?”, said the foreman.
“Well sor, that I am”, replied the Irishman.
“Well”, said the foreman,”I don’t want any more Irish on this site, because they don’t know nuffink. Last week we have one here who didn’t even know the difference between a girder and a joist. Can you tell me the difference between girder and joist?”
The Irishman thought for a little while, and then replied, “Well sor, I tink that Joyce wrote Ulysses and Goethe wrote Faust.”
"In the Shadow of the Holocaust" by Masha Gessen - New Yorker 9 December
A thought provoking piece from the excellent Masha Gessen.
Berlin never stops reminding you of what happened there. Several museums examine totalitarianism and the Holocaust; the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe takes up an entire city block. In a sense, though, these larger structures are the least of it. The memorials that sneak up on you—the monument to burned books, which is literally underground, and the thousands of Stolpersteine, or “stumbling stones,” built into sidewalks to commemorate individual Jews, Sinti, Roma, homosexuals, mentally ill people, and others murdered by the Nazis—reveal the pervasiveness of the evils once committed in this place. In early November, when I was walking to a friend’s house in the city, I happened upon the information stand that marks the site of Hitler’s bunker. I had done so many times before. It looks like a neighborhood bulletin board, but it tells the story of the Führer’s final days.
https://www.newyorker.com/news/the-weekend-essay/in-the-shadow-of-the-holocaust
Anybody else polishing their tap shoes today?
What with Kissinger being unalive and all.
Asking for a friend.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer on stupidity and what we're up against.
?si=ZrkCe3Vc7zah5ze6Trump Claims Buyer Beware Clause' Makes Fraud - Satire/Parody
From my friend John DiDomenico - The best Drumpf impersonator out there -
Note to Mods - If not appropriate, I'll repost in the Lounge.
Neil Innes wrote a song for Magats -
?si=FkyY2_8elKjsDd935 years in France
Last night, 4 sept 2018, at 5:55 EDT we left Boston Logan Airport on TAP 218 bound for Lisbon and then on to Marseille Airport. Earlier, we had arrived on a Jet Blue flight from Philadelphia.
Before boarding, we fortified ourselves with gin Martini’s and Legal Seafood’s clam chowder.
A couple of nights before we had been stuck in an elevator in Center City, Philadelphia, and waited for the firefighters to get us out. At that time, we worried that something else would delay or derail our plans, But, boarding the Air Portugal plane and winging away across Massachusetts Bay, we knew we were finally on our way.
We left behind a 5X5 storage unit and our Philadelphia friends. It was bittersweet, but after a summer of farewell dinners, living out of suitcases, a recalcitrant teen, scary rabbits, and various doctor’s appointments, we were relieved to be on our way to our new life in France.
Today, is our fifth anniversary of arriving and living full time in France. We have Carte Vitale’s, French driving licences, and, probably most importantly, a cat.
We’re grateful and fortunate to be here, and will remain here.
Of course there have been adjustments to our lives, but we know we made the absolute right choice in coming to France.
Off on the summer cruise - Kingston-on-Thames, mid 1970s
Praktica LTL - Pentacon 50mm 1.2, Ilford B&W
The Cannibal South - An inferiority complex-ridden region depends on eating its own.
From How Things Work
by Hamilton Nolan
The Cannibal South - An inferiority complex-ridden region depends on eating its own.
https://www.hamiltonnolan.com/p/the-cannibal-south
“New York and California Each Lost $1 Trillion When Financial Firms Moved South” a Bloomberg headline blared this week. The headline itself was journalistic malpractice—in fact, the $1 trillion it referred to was the combined amount of assets managed by all of the financial firms who moved, a number designed to look big in a news story but that tells you little about the actual economic impact of these firms leaving. Now we are sure to get politicians waving that headline around clamoring for tax cuts, and frantic residents assuming that New York, a state with a $229 billion annual budget, has fallen $771 billion in the hole thanks to the decline in bottle service revenue from Wall Street analysts who relocated to Miami.
Still, the underlying trend is real. Since the Covid pandemic struck in 2020, more than two million people have migrated to the six fastest growing states in the South, bringing with them $100 billion in new income. This population shift is held up by Southern governors as proof of the success of their policies—and as a herald of an ongoing shift in the balance of economic power that is bound to continue due to the South’s inherent advantages. What spurred this grand relocation? Traditional wisdom will tell you that it was the more relaxed and open posture of Southern states like Florida during the Covid pandemic, along with the perpetual allures of warmer weather, lower taxes, and more affordable housing prices.
In reality, though, this current sloshing of America towards its drain is not the start of anything new at all. It is spurred not by any new economic paradigm, nor by any Texan or Floridian governor’s new ideas about unleashing the power of free enterprise under the nation’s sunniest skies. It is, instead, a normal reaction to a temporary rise in the appeal of something that the South has been offering for more than 200 years. Politicians will tell you that the South is attractive because it offers greater freedom. Actually, it offers cannibalism: it is willing to kill and eat its own to fuel a marginal improvement in your lifestyle. Don’t let this deal pass you by!
Profile Information
Name: SamGender: Male
Hometown: Philadelphia, PA
Current location: Aix-en-Provence
Member since: 2002
Number of posts: 17,339
