The worst for me was my mother-in-law who, seeing me give the bottle (to our third baby, so it wasn’t by far the first time), said to me that I was “playing mommy”.

I put no maybes. I put mainlies. Do you understand the difference?

It’s easy to take a sentence without context and making it say something else, but it’s a bad faith argument. You only discussed in bad faith until now.

I counted, I say 5 times “mainly” or a variation of “mainly” in our discussion and I wrote one ambiguous (if taken out of context) sentence. You’re trying to save face at this point.

Show me where I said that European governments owned no US debt, please. I said that it was mostly owned by private agents in Europe. The keyword here is mostly. Mainly. For the greatest part. Predominantly. Don’t change the terms of the discussion now that you feel cornered.

Of course the UK, Luxembourg, France or Ireland own US bonds. But what is owned by European countries is largely dwarfed by what’s owned in European countries. Not a word in the Congress’s document contradict that, and I provided a source that you conveniently ignored.

So if the European countries sold what they own directly, the effect would be weak. For this idea to work, they’d have to make private agents cooperate, and I don’t think they can.

As you can see from the actual beginning of the paragraph rather than picking out the words you like at the end.

The beginning of the paragraph changes nothing. Two different sentences can have two different meaning; the text says “in the US and abroad”.

As I’ve already posted and mentioned right at the start of the pdf

Again that’s a worldwide average. It’s not equally distributed. Prove me wrong instead of repeating your error.

there are plenty of European nations in there.

Again, this table mixes public and private investors and is then irrelevant. Prove me wrong instead of repeating your error.

Again, your table doesn’t differentiate public and private ownership. You obviously don’t understand the numbers you’re sending. Citing page 1 of your own link:

Investors in the United States and abroad include official institutions, such as the U.S. Federal Reserve and foreign central banks; financial institutions, such as commercial banks; and private individual investors.

Both financial institutions and individual investors are private. So your link is totally irrelevant to our discussion (as you would know if you had read it). Yes, for example Luxembourg holds $423.9 billions, but do tou actually think the Luxembourgian state owns it? Of course not! Luxembourg is a trading place where a lot of holdings are based. These holdings hold the far biggest part of those billions. It’s the same with the UK (the London City is another trading place with a lot of holdings). And most of European countries.

As far as I know, the US Treasury doesn’t communicate on this, so we don’t have strict numbers. But it’s a well-known thing, as stated the Financial Times recently:

But this doesn’t change the fact that most of these assets are not actually owned by European governments (the Norwegian sovereign wealth fund being the only notable exception). These stocks and bonds are actually overwhelmingly held by the private sector: thousands of insurance companies, pension plans, banks and other institutional investors, and millions of ordinary people.

I’d love for Europe to have this kind of power, but we simply don’t have it (we have others however, like the “commercial bazooka”).

Ok except you’re completely wrong regarding Europe. Governmental investments in US are mainly made by countries outside Europe, like China. The only European exception is Norway, which alone can’t do much (and is not in the EU).

So yes, almost half of foreign US bonds owning are by governments, just not European ones.

No, unfortunately, it doesn’t work like that. “Europe” doesn’t owns a lot of US bonds; private investors from Europe own them. There’s no way to compel them to sell them.

I was in highschool and I begun to date my ex-girlfriend this year (she’s now my wife).

Pork brain is delicious.

He was quite fond of his .45 I read somewhere; but I don’t know shit about firearms.

Rum

God helps, i’m convinced of that too. But there’s no shame in seeking help from a professional too, there’a no stronger force to change one’s life than when the spiritual and the psychological work together.

And Russia begun to invade Ukraine in 2014.

I’m a French guy who doesn’t like wine, that’s my whole personality.

In Swedish it’s also different. Mor is mother, far is father; mormor is the maternal grandma, farmor is the paternal grandma, morfar is the paternal grandpa and farfar the paternal grandpa. I love this system, it’s almost the only thing I remember from my study of Swedish 😅.

Of course science evolves, but that shouldn’t be a reason for a vulgarization book to teach something else than the scientific consensus of the time.

I didn’t read Sapiens, but if this book claim that homo sapiens is responsible for the disappearing of Neanderthals, you can close it. This idea was disproven by research long ago: when sapiens arrived in Europe, Neanderthals were already on the verge of disappearing.

I understand the reaction. The Bible is sold by a lot of churches as “the word of God”, and if it’s the case, God is a lying asshole. But nowhere in the Bible it is written that the Bible is the word of God; according to the Bible the word of God is Jesus-Christ so… it may not be the right approach according to the Bible itself.

I love the Bible, I read it (almost) every day, I use it as a guide in my material and spiritual lives, I studied the story of its interpretation in the university, I even thought about making that my speciality. Yet I don’t understand how someone could believe in biblical inerrancy. It’s very clearly a human work, written by error-prone normal humans. I believe that God spoke to its redactors, but it’s still a human work. And ours is (according to me) to listen to the voice of God through the human form; and that’s why we have the Church, as it’s not something one can do alone.

I do not really know. I was not raised in a practicing family, and my country is very secular.

Philosophically, I’m agnostic. I’m not convinced either by arguments for or against the existence of God. I think a being which could exist outside time and space is not approachable by our reason.

But I can’t stay neutral, the question is too important. And I feel the presence of God in my life. This feeling came first, and when I tried to understand it, I went to the culturally nearest place of worship, and it was Protestantism, and I felt at home. I read the Bible, not as a theology manual, but as the story of people who try to understand the presence of God; sometimes they’re right, sometimes they’re wrong, but their quest is mine, and theirs inspires mine.