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Filed, appropriately, under the category “bonkers”:
A major developed nation handed over their health system to somebody who doesn’t believe in the Germ Theory of Disease.
This makes me question whether I’m still living in reality.
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The main difference between Idiocracy and today is the US had a far better President in the movie.
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You mean that wasn’t from Trump’s mid-term Republican convention?
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Apparently this is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JHBRMyx_xHs
I thought it was fake when I first saw it written out, but nope, it’s real. He actually got a crowd to chant “I pledge to the greatest president in the history of the United States that loves us so much he can’t even breathe…” If he tried to pull this in 2018, it would’ve been a national scandal, but now it’s just another day. (And somehow I didn’t know about it until almost a week later, despite trying to keep up with my country’s politics.)
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If only he couldn’t even breathe.
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As I just getting to be a old geezer who is programmed to say it didn’t used to be like this, because I really do not remember it being like this.
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No. The giveaways are that he acknowledges the reality of serious problems like drought and crop failure, and hires the most competent person he can find to solve them.
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I try not to pick on Melania. She is the only one in the family who ever had to work for a living.
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Meanwhile, I’m defiantly opposed to Trump’s ludicrous sniper-and-drone “military complex” at the entrance to Arlington National Cemetery.
I guess you could say that I’m his arch-nemesis.
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My wife, who knows some French, calls it the “Arc de Trompe”.
Getting Google to translate this from French yielded “squinch arch” in English. When I looked up “squinch”, I found a number of obscure architectural meanings, depending on the context, of which “A straight or arched support constructed across an angle in order to carry some superstructure” seemed closest to pertinent. I think I may be down a rabbit-hole here. 
Relax, Tim.
Even in French, it’s still meant as a pun on Arc de Triomphe.
Edited to add: I have it on good authority (i.e. some random AI) that the French are great lovers of puns (calembours) and bilingual English-French puns in particular. Examples given:
- Why do the French only eat one egg for breakfast? Because one egg is un œuf (enough).
- I asked a French man if he played video games. He said, “Wii!”
- What would you call the Eiffel Tower if it falls over? The I Fell Tower!
- Two cats had a swimming race. One was called “One Two Three”, the other “Un Deux Trois”. Which cat won? “One Two Three” because “Un Deux Trois” cat sank (quatre cinq).
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Perhaps “Tromp” would work better.
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Not sure. Trompe l’oeil, meaning “fool the eye” is a well-known genre of ultra-realist painting. The verb tromper means to deceive or trick. Nothing to do with “squinch”. But a lot to do with our beloved President.
I think John’s “Tromp” works best – as in “it landed like a heavy tromp” (i.e. thud) – which rather sums up its level of approval or acceptance.
I can’t really see it fooling anybody’s eye – unless of course they share Trump’s preference for kitsch.
But mainly, I was just amused by the weird literal translation – I had never heard of a “squinch" before – and initially thought it meant something squeezed.
“Comrade, cancel the invasion of America. Abort. Abort!”
“…why?”
“They put snipers on the Arch.”
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