The Year Of Acknowleging Mistakes

France's mistake shows taxing wealth doesn't work

"Three years on, President Hollande is shame-facedly scrapping the 75 percent rate, having forcibly re-learned an ancient truth: Wealth taxes don’t redistribute wealth; they redistribute people. Thousands of well-off Frenchmen made the easy journey north, including the country’s richest man, Bernard Arnault."

I'm tempted to say "Duh!". I mean, who would say "Duh" about something so obvious? "Duh!"

"Hollande’s tax, levied on incomes above one million euros, has been a miserable failure. Over its lifespan, it raised around $500 million, a tiny fraction of the original projections. Why? Well, the Paris bureaucrats who made those projections overlooked something rather important. Rich people don’t sit around waiting to be taxed."

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"Parts of Kensington, an expensive district of West London, are now largely Francophone. London is, on some measures, the sixth-largest French city in the world. It pullulates with French financiers and French footballers and French management consultants and French pastry chefs. They have just two things in common. First, all had the get-up-and-go needed to start a career in a new language and a new country. Second, all are paying their taxes to the British Exchequer instead of the French treasury. Merci, mes amis.

Not since the expulsion of France’s Protestants in 1685 has there been such an exodus of entrepreneurs to the Anglosphere; and this wave, like that one, has been a transfusion of talent, leaving the English-speaking world more energetic and France more anemic. Nicolas Sarkozy, well understanding where the relatively small free-market-minded section of his population could be found, launched his presidential election campaign in London."

President Of France Was First To Visit U.S. After 9/11

BWHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!

Actual Exchanges Between Pilots and Control Towers

Pan Am 727 flight, waiting for clearance in Munich, overheard the following: Lufthansa (in German):

"Ground. What is your start clearance time?"

Ground. In English:. "If you want an answer, you must speak English."

Lufthansa (in English):"I am a German, flying a German airplane, in Germany. Why must I speak English?"

Unknown voice from another plane (in beautiful English accent): "Because you lost the bloody war!"

Others at that site are pretty good, too, especially the one about the dead animal at the end of the runway. Must be Air Canada.

What?! The French And The English Don't Like Each Other???

"No" It Is

Scotland rejects independence with decisive 55% ‘No’ vote

I wouldn't call 55% all that decisive. There were four districts in which the "Yes" side won. I'd say we have another Quebec situation. Gimmie. Gimmie. Gimmie. Gimmie, or we'll keep doing this until we get what we want. However, the Quebec separatists who went over to Scotland as observers must be very disappointed.

I Didn't Know That

The origin of the nursery rhyme - Humpty-Dumpty:

"This classic nursery rhyme is also a history lesson in the English Civil War. Humpty Dumpty was not originally an egg, as immortalized by John Tenniel, illustrator of Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass published in 1871. Rather, the name referred to a cannon used by the army of Charles I in 1648 to deter the opposing army of Parliamentarians. In fact, there are two preceding verses, now mostly forgotten, that name the expert gunner, One-Eyed Thompson, and the cannon, Humpty Dumpty. The cannon was mounted on a church tower and effectively defended the town of Colchester for nearly three months. Eventually, however, the church tower was knocked down and the cannon tumbled into the marsh below, never to be found. Thus all the kings horses and all the kings men couldn’t put Humpty together again."

Hilarious!

And, of course, there's a song for everything.

Scotland

At the moment I have a young English immigrant in my house doing something or other to my boiler, which conked out a few days ago. We chatted for a bit about how my ancestors came from England, and of course, of Scotland's bid for independence. I likened it to Quebec. I gather, from our conversation, there is no love lost for Scotland in jolly old England, at least not in his Cockney heart.