the french do have a long history of not putting up with too much bull****. they are pretty awesome in that regard.

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I think that lifting a barbell is probably the single most important thing that women can do to improve their body image. Lifting heavy and feeling stronger and seeing how muscle mass changes your body is a phenomenal experience. - Tamara Cohen

The French people are way more politically active than the US. If the US population marched even half as quick on Washington as the French do....the investment banking CEOs of Wall Street would all be sitting in a super max right now lofl.

When you consider that France has socialized medicine and is bailing out its indebted neighbors each month and the US has mostly private medicine and is going bankrupt as a culture because of the escalating costs of medicare (while still getting worse overall outcomes than France)...its hard to make too many snide remarks about "freedom fries" or whatever else anymore. France will probably still be around long after the US has collapsed into financial obsolescence from its debt.

Victoria's nurses start proest rallies today | News.com.au

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"A society that gets rid of all its troublemakers goes downhill." -- Robert A. Heinlein

also..I just want to say...

David Cameron is absolutely bat**** crazy for wanting to continue to hold onto the pound sterling (and resist tighter EU integration). The pound sterling is more than ripe for a fall and has been for a long while. The UK and Russia BOTH need to join the EU. It would be great for the EU and much better for them. The UK is deluding itself if it thinks its economy can survive chaos in the rest of Europe, the EU is deluding itself if it thinks it doesn't need whatever balance sheet assets the UK could provide and Russia is deluding itself if it thinks that it would get higher prices on its exports by staying independent. The EU is one of Russia's biggest customers and as long as Russia doesn't have them to play off against its competing customers (specifically China) it will continue to throw very good money (or in this case gas) after bad by letting a place like china be its buyer of first resort and shipping out its resources at the buyers price not the sellers lol. Russia obviously didn't pay attention to the virtuous lessons of the Arab oil embargo.

An EU with Russa and the UK fully integrated (both adopting the Euro..a definite upgrade for the Ruble lol) would be a titan able to dictate its trade terms (once again) on equal footing with the US and pretty much the rest of the world. The path its on right now is just a ruinous cyclical path of chaos leading to obsolescence no matter what the foreign exchange rates currently say.