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Category Archives: US vs UK

Disaster in the United States

20 Friday Jan 2017

Posted by Virginia Smith in US vs UK

≈ 7 Comments

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Half of the US is in mourning, grief-stricken, and in complete shock.  This country’s leadership is changing, and not in a “great” way.  We’re replacing the kind, decent, intelligent, thoughtful President Obama with a thin-skinned, bellicose, combustible, narcissistic, scandal-ridden, failed businessman and abuser of women and minorities.

I hadn’t planned to watch the Inauguration.  Why rub my nose in it?  Why make this national nightmare even more real?  But my college-age older daughter who worked for Elizabeth Warren this summer turned on the TV, and it’s like a bad traffic accident:  impossible to turn away from.

The cameras are scanning the crowds, and I say, “Let’s see how long it takes to see a black or brown face in the crowd.”  Time passes;  we’re still looking.

This is an election that Hillary Clinton should have won.  And indeed, she did win the popular vote, with almost 3,000,000 more votes than Trump.  But thanks to the Electoral College, where the vote of a person in Nebraska has three times the value as a vote of a New Englander or Californian, the Democrats have lost this election, as they lost the election when Democrat Al Gore ran against Republican George Bush in 2000.  That election was decided by one Supreme Court Justice.  Just think how far ahead we would be now in combating climate change if Gore had won.

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There are many theories about why Hillary didn’t win.

Putin and his Russian hackers are certainly the most culpable.  They hacked the emails of the Democratic National Committee and of John Podesta, the Chairman of Hillary Clinton’s election campaign, and provided them to Wikileaks, which did as it name suggested:  leaked them.

If the Russians, and Julian Assange of Wikileaks, had done this also to the Republicans, then all would be fair in war and politics.  But they didn’t:  they targeted only Hillary.

But then Trump had never pissed off Putin, as Hillary had done when she was Secretary of State and warned us never to trust this former KGB agent.  Trump, on the other hand, said on July 31, 2015, “I think I’d get along very well with Vladimir Putin. I just think so.”

The Director of the FBI, James Comey, is also culpable.  He not only opened an investigation into Hillary’s emails, which he closed down with a determination of no criminality, and then, in a completely incomprehensible and unprecedented action eleven days before the Election, opened it up again.  Although he closed down  this second investigation before the Election, the harm had been done.

Lies spewed by Trump, his organization, and the Alt-Right, which includes members of the American Nazi Party and the Ku Klux Klan, harmed Hillary Clinton.  Even the totally demented rumor that Hillary ran a child sex abuse ring out of the basement of a Washington, D.C. pizza parlor was believed–as seen when a man, a father and former firefighter, drove from North Carolina to show up at the restaurant, fully armed, to free the (nonexistent) abused children.

There was also the anger of some white working class males that has been bubbling under the surface, and which exploded in a torrent of votes for Trump.  They didn’t seem to realize that the shutting down of coal mines wasn’t primarily due to the Democrats, but rather to better alternative technologies and a massive drop in gas and oil prices.  Nor did they understand that the closing of factories throughout America was not solely because of free trade agreements done by the Democrats, but rather due to the actions of Trump and his wealthy corporate cohorts who moved jobs overseas, throwing American factory workers out of work.

I believe that Hillary Clinton would have been an extraordinary president, in many ways as excellent as Obama, but with a greater ability to achieve bipartisan compromise and move us forward in this most perilous time in human history.

It began to rain as soon as Trump started speaking.  My mother walked out of the room, my daughter and I stayed to the end.  I haven’t sworn this much since the Election results came through on the evening of November 8th.

The only cheering thing is this comparison photo from by Vox, showing  that the crowds at the Trump Inaugural were nothing like those at Obama’s:

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Farewell, Barack and Michelle Obama!  You have done America proud.

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Just wait until tomorrow’s marches in Washington, New York, Chicago, LA, San Francisco, Boston, and cities and towns across America.  The other side of America will be heard.

Sounds of the English countryside

01 Monday Aug 2016

Posted by Virginia Smith in US vs UK

≈ Leave a comment

The English countryside is very quiet and peaceful . . . unless you have a field of sheep that have just been shorn and let out into a new field!

Here’s the racket outside my window (turn up the volume to get the full effect):

 

 

 

 

An English farm, Summer 2016

29 Friday Jul 2016

Posted by Virginia Smith in US vs UK

≈ 1 Comment

Roses in the old orchard.

Door to the granary.

Door to the barn.

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The granary.

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The barn and a rainbow.

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The farm cats.

 

The English countryside, Summer 2016

29 Friday Jul 2016

Posted by Virginia Smith in US vs UK

≈ Leave a comment

View over the valley from a stone wall.

View over the valley from a stone wall.

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Clouds over fields.

Green steps.

Green steps.

Rainbow in the late afternoon.

Rainbow in the late afternoon.

The end of the harvest.

The end of the harvest.

The village graveyard.

The village graveyard with a shaft of evening light.

Night sky at our cousins' farm.

Night sky at our cousins’ farm.

Sunset over the fields.

Sunset over the fields.

The beautiful city of Cambridge, England

20 Wednesday Jul 2016

Posted by Virginia Smith in US vs UK

≈ 2 Comments

Cambridge is one of the most historic and beautiful cities in the world.  Here’s what I’ve seen in the past two days:

King's Parade, with the facade of King's College

King’s Parade, with the facade of King’s College

Clare College on the left, King's College Cathedral on the right.

Clare College on the left, King’s College Chapel on the right.

Flowers in the Clare gardens

Flowers in the Clare gardens

Clare College

Clare College

Gargoyle over a College gate.

Gargoyle over a College gate.

Cambridge humo(u)r.

Cambridge humo(u)r, literally, at Indigo Cafe.

A gate at Clare.

A gate beside the River Cam.

Brilliant scientists and mathematicians.

Brilliant scientists and mathematicians.

And of course, punts!

And of course, punts!

An orphaned kitten comes into our lives

04 Monday Jul 2016

Posted by Virginia Smith in US vs UK

≈ 7 Comments

IMG_4248At 4:40 p.m. on Friday, my 13-year-old bellows for me.  She and her younger cousin have found a kitten lying in the wet grass; can I help?

There is no mother cat around, and it looks abandoned.  Its eyes aren’t yet open, and it still has its umbilical cord.  It’s extremely young, born perhaps just a day or a couple of days ago.

There’s a clear rule on farms around here:  kittens, if found with their eyes not yet opened, can be put in a sack and drowned.  Once the eyes are open, they are safe.  When I was a child on my grandparents’ farm, I helped save quite a few kittens and puppies by keeping my mouth shut as to their location.

The kitten is sodden, and cold.  I get a cardboard box out of the back of the car, my 13 yo gets a flannel shirt for the bottom of the box, and we turn on an electric heater that we’ve been using because it’s been in the 50s and 60s here.  As of now, summer hasn’t yet come to England.  We station the box next to the heater.

Version 2

In the past seventeen years, my family has had three cats, Lucy, Tess, and Shadow.  We found Shadow during an Easter weekend in Indiana on our front steps;  we believe that someone, seeing my young children and her three cousins, thought our house would be a good place to leave a six-month-old kitten.  We flew her home with us to Boston, where she had seventeen very happy and active years of life.

Our two youngest cats, Lucy and Tess, were orphaned, feral sisters, who were found by Suzanne, an acquaintance of mine.  Lucy was on a sidewalk, and Tess nearby under a porch.  Suzanne took them home and fed them milk with a dropper for two weeks, every three hours, and then advertised them.  We responded immediately, and they came into our lives.

To our great sadness, Lucy dashed out of our house during a thunderstorm  in 2012.  Six weeks later she appeared at a vets, brought in by a strange woman.  The vet informed the woman that Lucy had a microchip and told her to leave her so they could return Lucy to us.  Instead, the woman left with Lucy, and stated in an affidavit, after a private investigator we hired finally found her, that she dumped Lucy out on the street outside her house when she returned home.  Lucy has never been seen since, and Shadow died two months ago.

There’s no way we’re not going to look after this kitten.

I dashed off to a pharmacy in a nearby village, and the women in the shop kindly looked out a dropper for me.  She gave me an extra one free, and asked me to tell her “how you get on with the kitten.”   For the first night, we fed the kitten with the dropper, using a mixture of half milk, half water.

The next morning, I went to a vets’ office.  The woman at the desk said that if this kitten hadn’t already received several feedings of colostrum from her mother, almost certainly she will die.  If she had, the chances were 50/50.  The big danger is infection, so everything must be kept sterile.  I bought powdered milk, a vial for feeding her, and three kitten-sized nipples, and began boiling and sterilizing.

And so my daughter and I have been feeding her every three hours, with my daughter taking the night shift, thank God.  I’m too old for this waking up every three hours, it reminds me of the 5 1/2 months I spent looking after my first-born child who had colic, when I averaged two hours of sleep a day. I have no wish to repeat that experience in any way, shape, or form.

But I have to say that my maternal instincts are kicking in big-time, and I want to give this little kitten the best shot possible at life.

That evening, after a rainstorm, there was the best double rainbow I’ve ever seen.

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This is apropos of nothing, but it was absolutely breathtaking.

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Brexit: Britain votes to Leave the EU

28 Tuesday Jun 2016

Posted by Virginia Smith in Back in Boston, US vs UK

≈ 1 Comment

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It was so close.  So breathtakingly close, only a few percentage points apart.

But still, most people thought that “Remain in the EU” would squeak through.

The first I knew of the final vote for the UK to leave the EU was when I landed in Dublin at 5 a.m. on June 24th, the day after the referendum.  An airport worker, an Irishman, said, “It’s daft, really.  Now we have to put back the border controls between Ireland and Northern Ireland.”  Northern Ireland is now out of the EU, and Ireland remains in, so there will no longer be a borderless free flow of travel for the Irish.

The British Prime Minister, David Cameron, of the ruling Conservative Party, has resigned. Jeremy Corbyn, the head of the other main party, the Labour Party, is under a great deal of pressure to resign;  he is blamed for the failure of “Remain” due to his lack-luster support.

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Jo Cox

It was, in many ways, a very un-British campaign, with lies and threats and racist comments flying.  An up-and-coming young MP, Jo Cox of West Yorkshire, was shot and killed by a mentally unstable supporter of the “Leave” campaign who had ties to U.S. neo-Nazi groups.  The UK banned handguns in 1996,  but this man constructed a gun by following an instruction manual he bought from the neo-Nazis.   Jo Cox was the mother of two young children, had worked for the children’s charity, Oxfam, and was seen as an emerging leader of the Labour Party.  Her murder was a terrible loss, and a direct outcome of the vitriol of the EU referendum.

In this campaign, both sides lied.  The Conservatives said that the Turks wouldn’t be up for membership in the EU for 20 years (a major sticking point for many who voted “Leave”).  It now appears that the process for considering Turkish membership in the EU is beginning in two days, on June 30.

The right-wing UKIP (UK Independent Party) said that if “Leave” won, 350 million pounds a week that was paid by the UK to the EU would now be available for the NHS (Britain’s National Health Service), and they’d be “building a new hospital every week.”  That wasn’t true, either, and they are busy backtracking.

At least a small part of the vote was a protest vote;  some people voted “Leave” to make a point that they were unhappy with the way that the EU bureaucrats made decisions, and were stunned when “Leave” actually won.

A prominent “Leave” group listed the following points on its website:

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With the group telling people (see the second point, above) that “It is not legally binding–the European Court can tear it up the day after the referendum,” who can blame people for being confused?

The immediate reaction by the “Remain” group after the ballots were counted was shock, which soon turned to anger and fear.  Amongst the “Leave” group, there was a feeling of joy, perhaps also tinged with some fear.  Amongst those who ultimately voted “Leave” but debated until the very last minute, I sensed a feeling of resignation and a need to “get on with it,” because, as I heard said numerous times, “The people have spoken.”

There are also calls for a second referendum, to overturn this one.  But it’s clear that this isn’t going to happen.

What was obvious in the vote was that there was a huge split between London/Scotland (“Remain”) and the rest of England and Wales (“Leave”), and between young people (“Remain”) and older people “Leave”).

 

Screen Shot 2016-06-28 at 1.55.34 PMScreen Shot 2016-06-28 at 1.55.43 PM

One clever clogs, Michael Shaw, has created a new country comprised of the strongest “Remainers,” Scotland and London.

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Immigration was a huge part of the vote to Leave, with the worry that the Turks would be granted EU membership, and therefore the right to live in the UK.  Parts of England, particularly around Essex and Lincolnshire which have substantial numbers of immigrants from Poland and other EU countries, want to limit the number of people from overseas coming to live in the UK, which they couldn’t do under the EU mandate.

London, the financial capital of Europe, desperately wanted to “Remain” in order to maintain its power, financial and otherwise.  Under “Leave,” the British pound is at the lowest level in 31 years, and shares around the world have dropped dramatically.  Richard Branson is saying that Virgin shares lost one third of their value.

But this vote was not just a split between the UK and the EU, it was a split within the UK. In the countryside and smaller towns and cities, there was a sense of backlash against Londoners and the political establishment;  a feeling that Londoners have little or no respect for anyone outside London, that they think non-Londoners are “simpletons,” and don’t understand what it’s like to live without vast amounts of money  and with new threats to their traditions.

There was also a backlash against President Obama, generally very highly regarded in the UK, due to his comment that if Britain left the EU, it would go to the back of the line in terms of trade deals.  “He’s trying to manipulate us,” I heard;   “He wants to continue to exert his influence in Europe by working through the British puppets.”

Most members of my own family, who live in the countryside of England, voted “Leave,” though some were very much on the fence until the last moment.  One wrote to me, “My head says one thing, but my heart says another.”

The farmers in my family, like most farmers and fishermen in the UK, were delighted to have the chance to jettison the onerous and sometimes ridiculous rules sent down from Brussels, the headquarters of the EU, dictating how they run their farms.

Others in my family believe that “Leave” would allow them to get better health services through the NHS (National Health Services), with fewer “health tourists” from countries in the EU with substandard medical care clogging up the queues for Britons.

But the truth is that no one knows what’s going to happen.

Whatever happens, it will be life- and nation-changing.

The British have wielded enormous influence in the world, far more than their size warrants. They have been some of the world’s greatest scientists, explorers, thinkers, and writers, and were the last hold-out against the Nazis when the rest of the Allies had succumbed.  They fought to the very end, and won.

If anyone can do it alone, they can.  If anyone can sort it out, they can.

I wish everyone involved in this referendum the best of British.  Luck, that is.

 

 

 

Boston: “Wicked pissah!”

24 Sunday Jan 2016

Posted by Virginia Smith in Back in Boston, US vs UK

≈ Leave a comment

There’s a Boston UK, which on the eastern part of England in Lincolnshire, and a Boston USA, which is on the East Coast of America in Massachusetts.

Map of Boston, UK.

Map of Boston, UK.

Map of Boston, USA

Map of Boston, USA.

 

 

 

 

 

Boston USA was obviously called after Boston UK, but I don’t think that Boston UK has quite the . . . uniqueness . . . of Boston USA.

Boston USA is known for its world-class educational institutions, including Harvard and MIT, its superb medical care, its crazed Red Sox (baseball) fans, its Brahmins (the old WASP aristocracy), its old Irish gangsters (think Whitey Bulger), and its distinctive native accent, in which “R”s are put at the end of the words that don’t end in an “R,” so that a word like “idea,” becomes “ideee-errrr.”  In words that actually end in an “R,” “R”s  are nowhere to be heard, as in the famous “Pahk yah cah in Hahvahd Yahd” and a carwash is called a “spah for yah cah.”

Take a look at these videos for a good laugh and a new insight into Boston culture.  It’s all true!

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Seth Meyers, late night TV host, on Boston’s accent.

 

Courtesy, flickr user makelessnoise.

Courtesy, flickr user makelessnoise.

Why the rest of the US isn’t like Boston

Featured photo above of Boston harbor at night is courtesy of Flickr User rjshade.

 

US vs UK: Boston: “Wicked pissah!”

24 Sunday Jan 2016

Posted by Virginia Smith in Back in Boston, US vs UK

≈ Leave a comment

There’s a Boston UK, which on the eastern part of England in Lincolnshire, and a Boston USA, which is on the East Coast of America in Massachusetts.

Map of Boston, UK.

Map of Boston, UK.

Map of Boston, USA

Map of Boston, USA.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Boston USA was obviously called after Boston UK, but I don’t think that Boston UK has quite the . . . uniqueness . . . of Boston USA.

Boston USA is known for its world-class educational institutions, including Harvard and MIT, its superb medical care, its crazed Red Sox (baseball) fans, its Brahmins (the old WASP aristocracy), its old Irish gangsters (think Whitey Bulger), and its distinctive native accent, in which “R”s are put at the end of the words that don’t end in an “R,” so that a word like “idea,” becomes “ideee-errrr.”  In words that actually end in an “R,” “R”s  are nowhere to be heard, as in the famous “Pahk yah cah in Hahvahd Yahd” and a carwash is called a “spah for yah cah.”

Take a look at these videos for a good laugh and a new insight into Boston culture.  It’s all true!

Screen Shot 2016-01-23 at 7.42.04 PM

Seth Meyers, late night TV host, on Boston’s accent.

 

Courtesy, flickr user makelessnoise.

Courtesy, flickr user makelessnoise.

Why the rest of the US isn’t like Boston

 

Featured photo above of Boston harbor at night is courtesy of Flickr User rjshade.

 

Image

US vs UK: Stipulated: Donald J Trump is a wazzock*

18 Monday Jan 2016

The UK is looking at the US as if it had three heads.  And no wonder: a know-nothing** blowhard named Donald Trump, a sometimes successful, sometimes bankrupt, always obnoxious businessman is running for the most powerful position in the world.

And he just might win the Republican nomination for President of the United States.

Why is this horrible man smirking?

Why is this horrible man smirking?

Those of us who are Democrats, and a much smaller number of Republicans, are cringing in horror.

He has called Mexicans “rapists.”

He wants to ban all Muslims from entering the U.S.

He mocked a physically disabled reporter.

He said that he watched “thousands of Muslims in New Jersey” celebrating the destruction of the Twin Towers on 9/11.

And as for him treating women decently, as they say in New York, fuhgeddaboudit!

ff4f08101e05c647e74d1e065328586aHe is a racist, homophobic, misogynistic specimen.  And he’s only just getting started. Imagine him as U.S. President negotiating with Kim Jong-un of North Korea. They’d both be hurling atomic bombs at each other’s country before you could say “comb-over” (look right).  And as for relations with Putin? The testosterone would be flying, and we’d be fighting ground wars against the Russians all over the world.

Unfortunately, America is stuck with him.  But other countries are not.  In fact, just today the British Parliament debated as to whether he should be banned from the UK on the basis of his “hate speech” toward Muslims.

Screen Shot 2016-01-18 at 9.17.01 PM.jpgIn the UK, there’s a new system in which citizens can sign petitions for Parliamentary debate, and if more than 100,000 people sign, Parliament must do just that.

So far, 573,996 people have signed their names to a petition stating that Donald J. Trump, presumptive president of the U.S., is, in effect, a “wazzock” and should be banned from the UK.

He was also called a “fool,” a “buffoon,” and a “demagogue”–all by Members of Parliament.

Any idea what he could possibly be saying?  Guesses?

Any guesses as to what he might possibly be saying?

There’s another reason for Brits to dislike Trump.  In the UK, the word “trump” means “fart.”  President Fart.  There’s a certain ring to it, for this particular man, don’t you think?

—

* “Wazzock.”  (British, chiefly Northern England, mildly pejorative, slang.)  “A stupid or annoying person.”  Possibly from wiseacre, influenced by pillock.  First used in the 1984 novel, When the Martians Land in Huddersfield, by Mike Harding. According to the Guardian, Harding told them, “It takes its name from the habit of medieval kings to ‘take a crap on a shovel.’ The royal turd would be ‘wazzed’ out of the window and the wazzock was the tool for performing this operation.”

** The Know–Nothing Party, also known as the American Party, was a prominent United States political party during the late 1840s and the early 1850s. The American Party originated in 1849. Its members strongly opposed immigrants and followers of the Catholic Church.

 

Posted by Virginia Smith | Filed under US vs UK

≈ 2 Comments

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