America has been bullying the rest of the world since it emerged from WW2 not only triumphant, but holding the notes of every single Allied nation – the last WW2 debt payment to the USA was in 2006, or possibly later. Being rich and having every nation’s mortgage gave it the clout to insist that we all live the way they wanted, or be proven Commies. Like it or not, Trump, Vance and, let us never forget, Musk, are just the ultimate articulation of what it means to be America.

I do wish people would stop with the “Britian stood alone.” stuff. Even before Hitler attacked the Soviet Union, there were Allies fighting all over the world, resistance movements in every single continental European country, famously France, but also the Nederlands, Belgium, Luxemburg, Norway, Denmark, Poland, and Czechoslovakia. The entire British Empire was at war, either based in Britain, as saboteurs on the continent, on fronts from east Asia to the Sahara – Canada, Newfoundland, Nepal, Australia, New Zealand – India alone lost 2 million fighters (look it up!), Burma, Malta, South Africa, Egypt, and southern Rhodesia. China did not just surrender blindly: before 1941, both Mao and Sun Yat-sen had armies fighting the Japanese which kept them from attacking the Soviet Union after Hitler turned. Mongolia and Korea never stopped fighting, either. Britain endured the Blitz, it is true, and Churchill certainly made some great speeches about ‘standing alone’ while he was sacrificing literally millions of ‘colonials’ to preserve his European troops. But it was, and is, propaganda.

True or not, one can avoid the whole issue by using your phone as a phone, maybe to send texts, with location, mike, and camera switched off permanently, and all the other apps deleted or disabled. Sure, Google will still know you called your SO daily and your Mom once a week (NOT ENOUGH!), and that you were supposed to pick up the dry cleaning last night (did you?). Meh. If that’s what floats the Surveillance Society’s boat, I am not too worried.

Thanks for clarifying that.

The person promoting adoption is presuming a right to impose his/her morality on others, being emotionally manipulative, and assuming human children have an inherent superiority over, say, an litter of kittens or puppies starving at the side of the road. Nah.

Morality is an individual choice. If you perform an act because someone else demands it, or because ‘it’s what’s done’, or because you want to be judged worthy, as Yeshua ben Yusuf said, you get your reward in the approval. If you do it because you believe it is the right thing to do, regardless of praise or opprobrium, that is a moral act. My morality says a life is a life and all lives are of equal value, because each gets only one, and it is the most precious thing in the universe to the one who lives it, whether tardigrade, garden slug, disabled pigeon or human child. Based on that and other principles I have evolved over a life, I have not had biological children, nor have I adopted a human child, quite deliberately. Perhaps, in his/her eyes, I am evil. Tant pis: I don’t answer to any conscience but my own.

I’m not American, so I don’t know: can one state actually bar an American citizen from being in it?

Seems they don’t ship to Canada yet, according to the pop up.