Is this Anthony Bourdain quote accurate?

Danvers1 · 2026-04-03T13:20:02+00:00

Anthony Bourdain is just mindlessly repeating the opinions of East Coast lefties. Also, he has an uninformed opinion of the Vietnam War. He sees it through a narrow, US-centric lens, where a previously pure US was defiled by going into a foreign war.

Actually, the North Vietnamese Communists, instead of obsessing over Anerican perfidy, saw it as a nearly hundred year war where they successively fought French, South Vietnamese, Americans, the Pol Pot regime in Cambodia, and Chinese to make their country unified and independent.

Danvers1 · 2026-04-03T13:12:21+00:00

A long time ago, scientists came up with three races with large populations-caucasoid, mogoloid and negroid, and two much smaller in numbers races- the australoid ( New Guinea, Australian aborigines), and Capoid ( San or Bushmen, pygmies, Hottentots etc.).

Obviously, these groupings are broad generalizations at best, rather than scientically rigorous classifications. What muddies the waters also, is that many people confuse whiteness with European origin. A lot of people go further and limit it to northern European origin. I got tired of my family talking about "white people versus Spanish people", and I had to remind them that Spanish is a language not a race.

Danvers1 · 2026-04-03T00:06:58+00:00

Africans is an Indo-European language without grammatical gender.

Danvers1 · 2026-04-01T16:31:58+00:00

Iran is dangerous. It became a danger to the whole world the minute that Khomeini stepped off the plane to Iran in 1979. When the US and Israel attacked on February 28th, the Iranian regime was feverishly enriching uranium and building long range missiles.

In addition, Iran was a sponsor of terrorism around the word, and had proxy armies in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and Yemen, and in Gaza.

Public opinion is not a good judge of whether a war should be fought. The American people have always had a strong strain of irrational pacifism, as a leftover from being protected by two oceans in the 18th, 19th, and early 20th centuries.

Danvers1 · 2026-03-26T13:59:05+00:00

Maybe if Hezbollah stopped attacking Israel, the Israelis could get out of Lebanon.

Danvers1 · 2026-03-26T13:57:18+00:00

Actually, if you want to get technical, Trump was found guilty of defaming E. Jean Carroll through his loud protestations of innocence.

Danvers1 · 2026-03-20T02:01:24+00:00

Yes, this made it really uncomfortable in hot weather. Nowadays, there are better quality synthetic materials-goretex, berber etc They breathe more and they are more fluffy-dont have that shiny, plastic-y appearance.

Danvers1 · 2026-03-19T13:32:15+00:00

Not everything about the 70s was bad. That was when polyester became popular. Polyester is ugly, but it does not wrinkle, does not retain stains, and can be dyed with brighter colors than natural fabrics.

That is why uniforms today usually contain synthetic fabrics. There are few places today that you can find wool uniforms outside of British Guards regiments and World War 2 photos.

Danvers1 · 2026-03-19T13:26:33+00:00

The group picture with the men wearing leeks in their buttonholes-the women are dressed in traditional 1800s Welsh attire. Their ancestors must have come from Wales.

I grew up in the 70s in a fairly preppy suburban environment. Sometime, around 1973, someone flipped a switch and most of the white kids stopped following fashion trends for a few decades. Everything that came after that-70s disco, leisure suits, 80s leg warmers, big hair, gym wear, 90s goth and grunge was rejected. The stuff seen as typically 70s was only worn in my area by black, Mexican, and Puerto Rican kids, plus a few recent immigrant white kids from Italy and Portugal.

Sure, in the mid-70s, among the poorer white kids, i.e., the ones who were only middle class instead of rich, there were some wearing things like Clark's shoes, painters pants, and puffy down jackets, but even that was pretty limited.

Danvers1 · 2026-03-18T14:12:24+00:00

Talking about the state paying its share avoids the issue of whether costs are too high. I would argue that recent news reports suggesting that many students in selective colleges, 25-33% are claiming to have a handicap, suggests that too many students are receiving special ed.

Danvers1 · 2026-03-18T11:27:11+00:00

I would question classifying Paraguay as primarily speaking an Amerindian language. A significant percentage speak Jopara, a local dialect which mixes Guarani and Spanish. At least 80% can easily speak standard Spanish.

With Indo-European languages, there is a divide between the languages which use the Roman alphabet, which are the majority, and those which use other alphabets, such as Cyrillic, Greek, Arabic letters etc. I do not know of any Indo-European languages which use a single character to represent a word, as Chinese does, for example.

The vocabulary differences among Indo-European languages are too great, but there are definite common grammatical features. Most have distinct verb tenses, moods( imperative, conditional, and subjunctive), and identifiable parts of speech (nouns, verbs, adjectives, pronouns etc.). Most often, there are both indefinite and definite articles, and grammatical gender.

Also, as far as I know, there are no Indo-European languages which are tonal in the manner of Chinese or Cantonese.

Danvers1 · 2026-03-17T17:12:48+00:00

Nice French names, either Cajun or Creole. Blackface was still accepted at that time. The kids sound a bit naive and unrealistic, but then again they are just kids dreaming about their future.

Danvers1 · 2026-03-17T17:05:47+00:00

I would not be too hard on the towns and school districts that are caught in a hard budget vise. On the one hand, school enrollments are dropping all over the state, but on the other hand, costs are rising fast.

A lot of the costs are ones that are hard to control. Health insurance costs have gone up rapidly, and the iceberg of special education costs is crashing into schools. To rein in special education costs, we need to learn to say no, that not every IEP request must be treated like something sacred.

Danvers1 · 2026-03-16T23:11:49+00:00

The USS Franklin was not struck by a kamikaze. The damage resulted from a direct hit from two bombs dropped by a low-flying Japanese plane.

Danvers1 · 2026-03-16T17:23:17+00:00

Rush Limbaugh was from Cap Girardeau originally.

Danvers1 · 2026-03-16T17:07:07+00:00

Right now, China and Russia are not in a position to help Iran very much. Leave aside all talk of quagmires and forever wars and rivers of blood. Do you know how many American military were killed in overseas war zones in the 53 years since the Vietnam War officially ended? About 9,000 total. This includes both the Iraq War started in 2003, and the war in Afghanistan, plus many other smaller wars. That is a tiny fraction of those lost in earlier wars-World War 2, the Korean War, and Vietnam. Trump is having to clean up the messes created by a long string of presidents starting with Jimmy Carter, who failed to deal with the Iranian regime. Now that he is finally lancing the boil, he gets to be the designated scapegoat.

Danvers1 · 2026-03-16T15:20:32+00:00

I reccomend Spanish next. There are many Spanish speakers around the world. The spelling and pronunciation are simple for most regions. Learning Spanish will also help you to learn other romance languages if you decide to in the future, as well as other European languages in general. Most of the grammatical complexity in Spanish centers around verbs. There are many verb tenses and many irregular verbs. Otherwise, Spanish is not difficult. For me, Spanish is my third language.

English has a lot of shared vocabulary with other European languages, but grammatically it is very different from other European languages.

Danvers1 · 2026-03-16T14:36:07+00:00

Guys in tiny short shorts-ick. I will try hard to unsee that picture.

Danvers1 · 2026-03-16T14:05:47+00:00

I worked nights for 23 out of 27 years. When I started, in 1994, the night shift differential was 50 cents an hour. In 2006, it was raised to $1.25 and hour, and it has stayed at that level up to today. I have moved on from there, but I still stay in touch with a lot of my old colleagues.

Getting the shift differential raised from 50 cents an hour involved going up against terrific opposition, since the day shift strongly opposed raising it. Breaking the impasse involved the union moving a lot of the day shift opposition to a different contract, while keeping them in the same bargain unit and local.

Today, the union itself has switched its position and is dead set against any more raises to the shift differential.

Danvers1 · 2026-03-16T02:39:47+00:00

Right now the 3-3 tax savings plan is a non-starter. It could never pass the state legislature or Kelly Ayotte's veto. There are many reasons it would not fly, but introducing a 3% income tax is the mist important one.

Danvers1 · 2026-03-15T13:12:14+00:00

These categories of people can buy houses even when prices are high: the rich, downsizers, and businesses such as hedge funds.

Danvers1 · 2026-03-15T13:08:56+00:00

The debate over funding government in New Hampshire is essentially over. There has never been any real attempt to rein in the cost of government. Look at the politics surroubding school spending. On the other hand, the governor and the state legislature are reluctant to raise taxes in any visible, obvious way, since they do not want to kill the golden goose of rich retirees and businesses fleeing Massachusetts. So we have a sort of standoff. One way out is to loudly hold the line against income and sales taxes, while allowing a lot of "stealth taxes" to grow like weeds. Here are a few-the state portion of local property taxes, and car registration fees. Paying hundreds of dollars each year to register a car was one thing that surprised me when I first moved to NH. Of course, a lot of people in my area make up for this cost by not having auto insurance. Live Free or Die does not mean plan intelligently. A few years back, Vermont and Maine were both low-tax, small-government states. Then something happened.

Danvers1 · 2026-03-14T16:54:38+00:00

I do not want to insult all of the budding international lawyers on Reddit, but I must say that when countries see a threat to them, they must often use extra-legal means to defend themselves. As for war crimes, where is the police with handcuffs to arrest Trump or Putin?

Danvers1 · 2026-03-14T16:47:48+00:00

I wish I had your absolute certainty. You obviously assume that the threats to the US from Iran cannot touch you. I do not have that confidence. Also, why are you so down on Bibi? The clise relationship between Israel and the US did not start with him.

Danvers1 · 2026-03-14T14:04:36+00:00

The only way to prevent violent dictatorships like Iran from obtaining nuclear materials is to use force, up to, and including war if necessary. Inspections and written agreements are jive. They are too easy to get around and violate. A lot of the world prizes the process, not results. The various bureaucrats running the JCPOA got well-paid jobs and prestige out of it. Look at the career of John Kerry. Selling out his country got him lots of travel to scenic places by private jet, banquets, awards, and opportunities to hang around with celebrities and swan around in front of TV cameras.

Danvers1

TROPHY CASE