Creme Fraiche wrote:

> jmcquown formulated on Saturday :
> > I sure as heck haven't heard anything on the news about people having their
> > water shut off due to lack of payment as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic.
> > That's not the sort of thing mainstream media would ignore.
> >
> I haven't heard anything about that happening
> either, funny how we have to get our news about
> the USA from people that don't live here.
>
> Fake news once again.


Isn't it...and of course what they present here is *always* negative - always, always direly mis - informed...I've seen many such on other Usenet groups and forums...

Like "Pamela's" imbecile troll thread about "smart cars"...believe it or not poorer folks here do not live like the Joads, they drive okay cars, have cellphones, air conditioning, big TV's, health care and other resources. Many own their own homes, even...

Years ago there was a snotty Dutch poster ("Sjoerd") on rec.travel.air. HATED the US and everything it did. I sailed into him after he stated that Central/Europe had had it better when they were communist, "Oh, in East Germany people had closer and deeper friendships...in Romania and Poland women were a large percentage of the workforce...all the basics of life in those places were GUARANTEED..." He even had nothing but good to say about his six - month business sojourn in North Korea, "the people all have solidarity, they all seem happy..." [!!!]

The final straw was when he called the Marshall Plan and NATO "evil", that these organizations were only installed as a tool of American imperialism....e.g. there was no moral diff at all between NATO/EU and Warsaw Pact/COMECON, or between Western free - market capitalism and Soviet centrally - planned economies...

My reply was, "Uh, let's see...you were lucky to be born in the now - rich and prosperous Netherlands...you have a C - suite job with Philips, which allows you to fly your queer ass all around the world First Class on KLM, you have a lovely canal - side townhouse in Amsterdam, which you share with your *** male partner to whom you are married. If you had been born in Minsk or Sofia or East Berlin, how do you think your quality of life would now be!? Certainly not like the posh life you lead now. And part of the reason that you have it all is because NL was/is allied with the US and Western Europe and their values, and as a result it's much nicer even today in 2002 to live in Holland or Norway or Spain than it is in Bulgaria or Romania or Belarus..."

He got all huffy, claiming "I'll NEVER visit the USA!", I replied, "We don't need you here in the states, you can take your perverted self and your dirty florins to Thailand or someplace to buy your little boy prostitutes..."

LOL, he flounced away, never to return...

--
Best
Greg