A Truly Tremendous Use of Your Federal Taxpayer Dollars

Yes,  Visit Detroit, via a grant from the Michigan Association of Convention and Visitor Bureaus, which itself got the money from Covid relief dollars, is spending a million plus to sponsor a football team to wear "Visit Detroit"  on their jerseys.

The team? Burnley FC in Burnely, England, United Kingdom.

This idea likely came up after the Visit Detroit execs were wondering how to spend their Covid funds they received before the grant ran out, and they had just watched a few episodes of Ted Lasso.

The Detroit Free Press:  Why Visit Detroit became prominent sponsor for English soccer team Burnley FC

Burnley you ask?  it's a thriving metropolis of 73,000 in Lancashire, England. Currently the team is not in the top league having been relegated. Clearly Burnley is a potential source for throngs of English visitors to come visit Detroit.  Maybe visitors will fly Emirates to get here. Nothing against Burnley mind you, it seems like a nice enough place, but for Detroit to burn through Covid funds to sponsor its football team is kinda bonkers.

The Clarets don't have quite the name recognition of say Manchester City or Arsenal, or such, being currently ranked 23rd, but when you've got a million plus you need to burn quickly, needs must and all that, wot?

Sounds like an absolutely great use of over a million dollars in Covid (federal taxpayer or debt sourced) funds.

Increasing Angles of Attack - New study shows the English are rather more German than previously suspected

Der Spiegel: Britain Is More Germanic than It Thinks

But there is no use in denying it. It is now clear that the nation which most dislikes the Germans were once Krauts themselves. A number of studies reinforce the intimacy of the German-English relationship.

Biologists at University College in London studied a segment of the Y chromosome that appears in almost all Danish and northern German men -- and is also surprisingly common in Great Britain. This suggests that a veritable flood of people must have once crossed the North Sea.

New isotope studies conducted in Anglo-Saxon cemeteries produced similar results. When chemists analyzed the tooth enamel and bones of skeletons, they found that about 20 percent of the dead were newcomers who had originated on mainland Europe.

The Germanic invasion and the reason for its success where an estimated 200,000 invaders beat over a million natives contains a cautionary tale:

The estimated 200,000 intruders faced an overwhelming number of Britons, about a million, and yet the invaders triumphed. The kingdoms that soon developed, like East Anglia, Wessex (West Saxony) and Essex (East Saxony) were run by robust chieftains like Sigeric and Cynewulf.

The Celts were no match for these roughnecks. The Romans had taught them how to play the lyre and drink copious amounts of wine, but the populace in the regions controlled by the Pax Romana was barred from carrying weapons. As a result, the local peoples, no longer accustomed to the sword, lost one battle after the next and were forced to the edges of the island.

So the Angles, Jutes and Saxons arrived and easily took over a defenseless population,and a conquered people suffered the consequences:

Many fell into captivity. According to Härke, the captured Britons lived a miserable existence as "servants and maids" in the villages of the Anglo-Saxons.

There were two types of grave in the cemeteries of the time: those containing swords and other weapons, and those with none. The local inhabitants, deprived of their rights, were apparently buried in the latter type of grave.

The London geneticist Mark Thomas is convinced that the conquerors from the continent maintained "social structures similar to apartheid," a view supported by the laws of King Ine of Wessex (around 695). They specify six social levels for the Britons, five of which refer to slaves.

As a result of the brutal subjugation, the reproduction rate of the losing Britons was apparently curbed, while the winners had many children. The consequences are still evident today in the British gene pool. "People from rural England are more closely related to the northern Germans than to their countrymen from Wales or Scotland," Härke explains.

So an unarmed population leads to barbarians taking over. No possible modern example regarding an unarmed populace ordered by their betters to be unarmed and helpless while the barbarians are at the gates could possibly exist....