France, Food, Scooters and More

In this first in a series of short videos, I discuss the 2020 Presidential election in the USofA as seen by an American living in France.

Let me clear from the outset. The people who are championing a single-payer healthcare system in the United States are lying to you. At the very least, they are misrepresenting - one assumes intentionally - what the savings would be should the US institute a system like Medicare For All. Such a system will not mimic the healthcare offered in such places as France or the Scandinavian countries for one important reason. In those countries, costs are strictly regulated. Doctors can only charge so much per visit. The rates are set by regulation for all sorts of specialties and services. And those rates are substantially lower than what is normally charged in the US. So if there is to be money saved by switching to a single-payer, Medicare For All system, that money will almost certainly have to come from price controls. That's NOT the way that Americans do things. In the US, healthcare is considered a business like any other. And that means that providers are, by and large, in it for p

  A teenager carries a gun illegally in a city and state away from his home. He shoots two people dead. Now a discussion ensues that includes the media and public officials as to whether he should be considered a villain or a hero.    What has changed? Something must have changed. Have we changed or have the rules changed?    Are we so habituated to violence that the idea of a high schooler, a kid barely old enough to shave, walking down a street and shooting people indiscriminately - apparently including someone begging him to stop - is OK as long as we agree with his politics? Or have we decided that the Ten Commandments or, if you are not religious, The Golden Rule no longer apply in modern America? Is that the real answer, that our opinion of the use of violence depends on our politics and not our morality? Because if that's the case, then the folks who believe that America no longer values their lives have every right to walk down Main Street and start shooting too. So far, th

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No, calm down. That hasn't happened and it ain't gonna happen. I'm the first one to agree that comparisons of modern political figures to Hitler are often overblown and without merit. But putting that aside, can you just imagine the outrage if such were to come to pass, Germans celebrating Hitler with statues as an important component of German history that needed to be preserved in bronze in public spaces? Other than a few right-wing, brain-dead fanatics, modern-day Germans would simply not stand for such a thing. Now ask the following question. Why is it acceptable to erect statues to traitorous American slave holders like Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee, who prosecuted a treasonous war that killed a higher percentage of adult American males than any war in American history, all for the purpose of preserving the institution of slavery? Don't. Just don't try to tell me that preserving slavery was not the cause of the American Civil War nor its ultimate aim.

...and Walsh and Duane Allman and Dicky Betts and Bonamassa and...