Okay. Forget the tax. Straight-up tribute instead.

[Andrew D]

Other countries pay the US whatever the US is pleased to command them to pay, and the US allows them passage in international waters. They decline to pay, and their ships end up at the bottom of the ocean.

The "Hitler" bullshit?

We do not care how many synagogues you have. Or how many mosques. Or how many temples. We are not Hitler. You can go ahead and live however you want. Just pay the freight.

We are not interested in your religions or your cultures or anything else about you. We are interested in just one thing: Pay us, or suffer the consequences.

We may have to enter into special agreements with the few nuclear powers -- recognizing, of course, that if they want to fuck with us on the nuclear level, they will all die -- but as for the rest of you: Pay up.

You do not like the deal? Tough shit.

What are you going to do about it? What can you do about it? Nothing.

So when y'all get your rocks off dissing the US, remember a simple fact: We run the world, and y'all prosper because we magnanimously permit you to prosper.

You don't like that fact, and there might well be a lot of contrary squealing. But it's a fact.

[Scooter]

So that's how you see your country? As a Mafia don extorting protection money?

You have my pity.

[Andrew D]

Write your pity on the back of your check.

Your country has been freeloading off of ours for centuries.

Now you're whining at the suggestion that the bill has come due.

My country is not a Mafia don. My country is a parent who's had enough of the unruly behavior of the petulant children which it has the misfortune of being in the same room with.

[Scooter]

"Psychiatry. please report to the fifth floor for a medication adjustment."

[Andrew D]

When you cannot come up with an answer, just mock your opponent.

When was it, Scooter, that you started channeling Rush Limbaugh?

[Sean]

Andrew, for the OP there is no answer; no response that could do it justice.

[Rick]

Well for my part not (not that I'm being critical) I think that ya'll have the wrong historical personality with Hitler.

With the qualifiers Andrew has listed the leader would be more akin to Ceasar, just an observation...

[Gob]

I wonder if Andrew was the sort of kid who bullied younger and smaller kids into giving over their pocket money? Maybe that's where he gets his ideas from.

My country is not a Mafia don. My country is a parent who's had enough of the unruly behavior of the petulant children which it has the misfortune of being in the same room with.

I wonder what sort of parent demands monetary tribute for protecting, or not attacking, kids?

Andrew's megalomania has got so bad he now seems to be declaring that he speaks for the US on it's attidue towards international diplomacy. Silly bugger.

[Andrew D]

I wonder if Andrew was the sort of kid who bullied younger and smaller kids into giving over their pocket money? Maybe that's where he gets his ideas from.

Interesting observation, Gob.

Interesting mostly because of how precisely wrong it is. Far from being the bully, I was a kid who got bullied. I was a kid who showed up at home crying. Older kids would throw rocks at me as I walked home from school, because -- they claimed -- they thought that it was funny. (In fact, it was because I kept showing them up: Nothing pisses off a room full of eighth-grade boys more than a third-grader who keeps getting right the answers to the questions which they can't figure out.)

Eventually, I decided that I was not going to be bullied any longer.

Fine, they were bigger than I was. I had to deal with that.

But I was smarter than they were. They had to deal with that.

It didn't take all that long, really. I should have done it much earlier. Once they realized that I could, and would, fuck up their lives in ways they had never anticipated even as possibilities, the bullying stopped.

The US has been bullied long enough. It is time -- it is long past time -- for the US to remind the loudmouths in the international schoolyard where the real power lies.

The US is the most benign superpower the world has ever seen. The US does not do what the British Empire did. (Or the Roman Empire, etc., etc., etc.) The US has freely spent untold trillions of dollars making the world relatively safe for everyone -- even for countries that avowedly hate us.

The US reconstructed the western world after WWII. The free nations of the western world exist as free nations, because the US brought them back from the dead.

And now the time has come to pay the bill. So, of course, they're whining.

[Gob]

Such melodramatic bullshit, oh grow up!

[Lord Jim]

[Andrew D]

Such melodramatic bullshit, oh grow up!

I was so perfectly wrong!

So wondrously, gloriously, perfectly wrong!

God, I love being wrong!

[Andrew D]

WARNING:

This guy wants to swindle you.

If you value your bank accounts, ignore him.

[Andrew D]

I have no use for melodrama, Gob. Even as a literary/theatrical form, it bores me.

You know a fair bit about me, including stuff that has not been posted here.

If you're going to take a (vacuous) swing at me, can't you at least try to conform it to what you already know?

Really. You have plenty of material to work with.

Why stoop to something so ... pedestrian? It's beneath you.

You and I have been friends. And I like to think that we still are. So as a gesture of friendship, if you're going to launch something at me -- which is fine with me; "above all, argue" means that everyone's asserted positions are fair game -- can't you at least launch something which suggests some shadow of the respect in which we (I hope) hold each other?

[Gob]

Lord Jim has been a member of Car Talk, CSB, and Plan B for some time now, without ever anyone reporting him for attempted swindling.

If you can back up your accusation I'd be interested in hearing it. Put up or shut the fuck up, there's a good boy.

[Gob]

Your posts in this, and recent thread have been nothing but melodramatic, stupid, provocative, shit Andrew and well you know it, why not turn your incisive legal brain on your own motivations eh?

[Andrew D]

Lord Jim has been a member of Car Talk, CSB, and Plan B for some time now, without ever anyone reporting him for attempted swindling.

If you can back up your accusation I'd be interested in hearing it. Put up or shut the fuck up, there's a good boy.

Will you let me?

Are you giving me permission to post quotations from, and links to, the websites which bear his real name?

I have hinted at them before; he may by now have done some sanitizing. (He is cunning.)

Is that all fair game?

Shall we look at his attempted scam that has been taken down due to his violation of the website agreement?

It has (or had; I haven't been there today; he may have disabled it by now; and who could blame him?) phone and fax numbers -- or, at least, what he claimed to be his phone and fax numbers -- publicly displayed.

Is it OK for me to post that?

Or the others? Or the others that he will create after erasing his tracks from the current stuff?

Which is it, Gob? Am I allowed to post the relevant stuff -- which, not due in any way to me, includes his personal information -- or am I barred from doing so?

[Sean]

...says he knowing well that Strop would never allow that info to be posted here...

The old, "I can prove it but Strop won't let me" isn't going to cut it Andrew. Again you underestimate the intelligence of those around you. Why don't you simply PM your 'evidence' to Strop?

Next you'll be telling me that I shouldn't have given Jim my life savings...

Or that he's not even a real Lord...

[Gob]

If Jim is the perpetrator of an "online scam": then evidence of it being posted here would not be a problem, as any illegal activity is by its very nature illegal, and if evidence of it is freely available online, then why should links not be posted?

[Crackpot]

Andrew Do you notrealize that "tribute" was nothing but formalized extortion?