Bayou Sam

Trust the plan :usa:

I googled and learned that these other cures were highly recommend by the search engine. The medical websites also had links to my favorite ammunition stores, So I am hopeful!

Does anyone know if our president is taking Hydroxychloroquine? I learned on this board that the liberal media was lying to crash the economy and bring in Maoism and that this was the cure.

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the dirty Turks

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:rolleyes:

I'm going to interpret this question as "whose decisions were most important in shaping the modern (western) world?"

I think the answer has to be "what is the most contingent thing"--i.e., what could almost certainly have been radically otherwise had this figure not intervened? With this in mind, if we were including religion, my answer would definitely be Constantine, who brought Christianity from being just one minority cult in the empire to being the privileged cult.

With explicitly "religious" figures out, I think we should begin with the most significant "non-religious" event (ultimately a distinction that doesn't work, but whatever). I would say that this is the conquest of Constantinople by the Ottoman Turks. This event had enormous repercussions--it led to the Greek scholars and manuscripts moving to western Europe, which caused the Reformation. (If you don't believe me, look up Erasmus's New Testament). Perhaps more importantly, the severing of trading routes into the east led to the Age of Exploration, which is what more than anything else transferred the balance of power to western Europe for around 500 years (a period that is now ending).

So this will inevitably be controversial but who is responsible for the conquest? Mehmet II was brilliant, but the empire was so weak that it seems to me the conquest was pretty much inevitable. The Normans for decisively weakening the empire in 1204? Romanos IV for losing the battle of Manzikert? Basil II for expanding the empire, making it rich and therefore a target of opportunity, but who also failed to appoint a successor and therefore weakened the empire with civil wars?

All things considered, I'll say Alexios I Komnenos, the man whose call for Latin help against the Turks launched the Crusades. Unfortunately that help was more or less useless against the turks and in fact it wound up destroying the empire. But the Crusades also profoundly affected western europe as well, bringing it a great amount of learning, civilization, and trading wealth/connections from the arab world. We have to remember that western Europe in the 11th century was a backwater civilizationally compared to the Eastern Roman Empire and the various Arab caliphates.

So that's my answer, Alexios I Komnenos, who invited the Latins in, and inadvertently launched the Crusades and destroyed his dynasty and empire.

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Maybe from a Scottish, Welsh, Irish perspective.

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Or from a Jewish perspective.

Unfortunately it's a sci-fi movie that makes you think, so naturally the studio refused to distribute it.

Yeah, that points back to my original question. If the city enforces the 90-day rule (so far they have not), what you'll see is lots of airbnb owners voluntarily blocking off dates, especially regular weekdays, in order to save their 90 days for mardi gras, jazz fest, and other big holidays and weekends. So long as booking.com and others are still operating outside the law, those same owners will probably try to make up for their lost business on those websites.

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You also have to realize that a high percentage of short term renters are looking to skim and not report rentals, not pay their taxes.

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That's part of the deal Airbnb struck with the city government though--airbnb collects the taxes themselves and pays them to the city.

What makes you think they are going to crack down hard on the 90-night rule?