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Posted by tuckupp on the SXX bb :-

A married man was having an affair with his secretary. One day, their passions overcame them in the office and they took off for her house. Exhausted from the afternoon's activities, they fell asleep and awoke at around 8 p.m. As the man threw on his clothes, he told the woman to take his shoes outside and rub them through the grass and dirt. Confused, she nonetheless complied and he slipped into his shoes and drove home. "Where have you been?" demanded his wife when he entered the house. "Darling," replied the man, "I can't lie to you. I've been having an affair with my secretary. I fell asleep in her bed and didn't wake up until eight o'clock." The wife glanced down at his shoes and said, "You lying bastard"You've been playing golf!"

A young man goes into a drug store to buy condoms. The pharmacist tells him that the condoms come in packs of three, nine, or 12, and asks which ones the young man wants. "Well," he says, "Ive been seeing this girl for a while and she's really hot. I want the condoms because I think tonight's the night. We're having dinner with her parents and then we're going out. Once she's had me, she'll want me all the time, so you'd better give me the 12 pack!" The young man makes his purchase and leaves. Later that evening, he sits down to dinner with his girlfriend and her parents. He asks if he may give the blessing and they agree. He begins the prayer, but continues praying for several minutes. The girl leans over and says, "You never told me that you were such a religious person." He leans over to her and says, "You never told me that your father is a pharmacist."

Posted by by tuckupp on the SXX bb :-

A young journalism graduate from Cheshire had gone to work for the Liverpool Echo. His first assignment was to write a brief human interest story. An idea came to him and he returned to one of the most remote areas he knew of in his home county of Cheshire.
Deep in the woods, he came upon a farmers house and decided this would be a good place to start.
He introduced himself to the country farmer and explained why he was there. The farmer named Farmer Mahon agreed to answer his questions.
The reporter asked the farmer what event in his life had made him the happiest?
Farmer Mahon replied, "One time a neighbour lost one of his sheep. We all formed a posse and found it. After we all screwed it we took it back to the farmer that lost it."
"I can't print that," said the reporter, "Is there another event that made you really happy?"
Farmer Mahon thought for a minute and said, "Yep. One time the daughter of another local farmer got lost. She was a good-looking young girl. We all formed a posse and found her. After all of us screwed her, we took her back to her daddy."
Again the reporter knew he couldn't print the story and decided to take a different tack. He asked Farmer Mahon, "Was there any event in your life that has made you really sad?"
Farmer Mahon hung his head and replied, "Well, I got lost once."

An old man marries a young woman and they are deeply in love. However, no matter what the husband does sexually, the woman never achieves orgasm so they decide to ask a sex therapist for advice.
The therapist listens to their story and makes the following suggestion:

"Hire a strapping young man and while the two of you are making love have the young man wave a towel over you, as though he is fanning you both. Make sure he is totally naked and she can see his manhood as he fans you both with the towel. That will help your wife fantasise, and should bring on a full-blown orgasm."
They go home and follow the therapist's advice. They hire a handsome young man and he strips off and enthusiastically waves a towel over them both as they make love. But it doesn't help and still the wife is unsatisfied and frustrated.

Perplexed, they go back to the therapist. "Okay", he says, "let's try it reversed. Have the young man make love to your wife and you wave the towel over them."
Once again, they follow the advice. The young man gets into bed with the wife and the husband waves the towel. The hired hand really works with great enthusiasm and the wife soon has an enormous, room-shaking, screaming, creaming orgasm.
Smiling, the husband drops the towel, taps the young man on the shoulder and says to him, triumphantly: "Now THAT'S how you wave a towel, sonny!!!"

Posted by by tuckupp on the SXX bb :-

Bob was in trouble. He forgot his wedding anniversary. His wife was really angry. She told him "Tomorrow morning, I expect to find a gift in the driveway that goes from 0 to 200 in 6 seconds AND IT BETTER BE THERE!" The next morning he got up early and left for work. When his wife woke up, she looked out the window and sure enough there was a box gift-wrapped in the middle of the driveway. Confused, the wife put on her robe and ran out to the driveway, brought the box back in the house. She opened it and found a brand new bathroom scale. Bob has been missing since Friday.

After fighting some crime, Superman wanted to score some action. He flew over to Wonder Woman's apartment to see if she was available. As he landed on her balcony, he saw Wonder Woman naked on the bed with her legs wide open. Superman thought to himself, "I'm faster than a speeding bullet; I could be in there, have sex, and be out again before she knew what happened." So Superman did his super thing in a split second and flew off happily. Meanwhile back on the bed, Wonder Woman asked, "Did you hear something?" "No!" said the Invisible Man, "But my ass sure hurts like hell!"

A man joins a soccer team and his new teammates inform him, "At your first team dinner as the new guy, you will have to give us a talk about sex." The evening arrives and he gives a detailed, humorous account of his sex life. When he got home, his wife asked how the evening went and not wanting to lie, but also not wanting to explain exactly what happened, he said, "Oh, I had to make a talk about yachting," his wife thought this a little peculiar but said nothing more and went to sleep. The next day she bumped into one of his new teammates at the supermarket and asked, "I heard my husband had to make a speech last night. How did it go?" His mate said smiling, 'Oh, it was excellent! Your husband is clearly very experienced!." The wife looked confused and replied to his mate, "Strange, he has only done it twice and the second time he was sick."

Maria, a devout Catholic, got married and had 15 children. After her first husband died, she remarried and had 15 more children. A few weeks after her second husband died, Maria also passed away. At Maria's funeral, the priest looked skyward and said, "At last, they're finally together." Her sister sitting in the front row said, "Excuse me, Father, but do you mean she and her first husband, or she and her second husband?" The priest replied, "I mean her legs."

Part 2
You will count all the things you do not need.

The true nature of the people around you will be revealed with total clarity. You will have confirmations and surprises.

Literati who had been omnipresent in the news will disappear, their opinions suddenly irrelevant; some will take refuge in rationalisations which will be so totally lacking in empathy that people will stop listening to them. People whom you had overlooked, instead, will turn out to be reassuring, generous, reliable, pragmatic and clairvoyant.

Those who invite you to see all this mess as an opportunity for planetary renewal will help you to put things in a larger perspective. You will also find them terribly annoying: nice, the planet is breathing better because of the halved CO2 emissions, but how will you pay your bills next month?

You will not understand if witnessing the birth of a new world is more a grandiose or a miserable affair.

You will play music from your windows and lawns. When you saw us singing opera from our balconies, you thought “ah, those Italians”. But we know you will sing uplifting songs to each other too. And when you blast I Will Survive from your windows, we’ll watch you and nod just like the people of Wuhan, who sung from their windows in February, nodded while watching us.

Many of you will fall asleep vowing that the very first thing you’ll do as soon as lockdown is over is file for divorce.

Many children will be conceived.

Your children will be schooled online. They’ll be horrible nuisances; they’ll give you joy.

Elderly people will disobey you like rowdy teenagers: you’ll have to fight with them in order to forbid them from going out, to get infected and die.

You will try not to think about the lonely deaths inside the ICU.

You’ll want to cover with rose petals all medical workers’ steps.

You will be told that society is united in a communal effort, that you are all in the same boat. It will be true. This experience will change for good how you perceive yourself as an individual part of a larger whole.

Class, however, will make all the difference. Being locked up in a house with a pretty garden or in an overcrowded housing project will not be the same. Nor is being able to keep on working from home or seeing your job disappear. That boat in which you’ll be sailing in order to defeat the epidemic will not look the same to everyone nor is it actually the same for everyone: it never was.

At some point, you will realise it’s tough. You will be afraid. You will share your fear with your dear ones, or you will keep it to yourselves so as not to burden them with it too.

You will eat again.
We’re in Italy, and this is what we know about your future. But it’s just small-scale fortune-telling. We are very low-key seers.

If we turn our gaze to the more distant future, the future which is unknown both to you and to us too, we can only tell you this: when all of this is over, the world won’t be the same.

© F

A letter to the UK from Italy: this is what we know about your future
An author in Rome describes what to expect based on her experiences of lockdown
The acclaimed Italian novelist Francesca Melandri, who has been under lockdown in Rome for almost three weeks due to the Covid-19 outbreak, has written a letter to fellow Europeans “from your future”, laying out the range of emotions people are likely to go through over the coming weeks.

I am writing to you from Italy, which means I am writing from your future. We are now where you will be in a few days. The epidemic’s charts show us all entwined in a parallel dance.

We are but a few steps ahead of you in the path of time, just like Wuhan was a few weeks ahead of us. We watch you as you behave just as we did. You hold the same arguments we did until a short time ago, between those who still say “it’s only a flu, why all the fuss?” and those who have already understood.
As we watch you from here, from your future, we know that many of you, as you were told to lock yourselves up into your homes, quoted Orwell, some even Hobbes. But soon you’ll be too busy for that.

First of all, you’ll eat. Not just because it will be one of the few last things that you can still do.

You’ll find dozens of social networking groups with tutorials on how to spend your free time in fruitful ways. You will join them all, then ignore them completely after a few days.

You’ll pull apocalyptic literature out of your bookshelves, but will soon find you don’t really feel like reading any of it.

You’ll eat again. You will not sleep well. You will ask yourselves what is happening to democracy.

You’ll have an unstoppable online social life – on Messenger, WhatsApp, Skype, Zoom…
You will miss your adult children like you never have before; the realisation that you have no idea when you will ever see them again will hit you like a punch in the chest.

Old resentments and falling-outs will seem irrelevant. You will call people you had sworn never to talk to ever again, so as to ask them: “How are you doing?” Many women will be beaten in their homes.

You will wonder what is happening to all those who can’t stay home because they don’t have one. You will feel vulnerable when going out shopping in the deserted streets, especially if you are a woman. You will ask yourselves if this is how societies collapse. Does it really happen so fast? You’ll block out these thoughts and when you get back home you’ll eat again.

You will put on weight. You’ll look for online fitness training.

You’ll laugh. You’ll laugh a lot. You’ll flaunt a gallows humour you never had before. Even people who’ve always taken everything dead seriously will contemplate the absurdity of life, of the universe and of it all.
You will make appointments in the supermarket queues with your friends and lovers, so as to briefly see them in person, all the while abiding by the social distancing rules.

Part 5
In an article titled, «Coronavirus Threatens European Unity,» Bill Wirtz, a political commentator based in Luxembourg, observed:

«As the coronavirus unfolds, Schengen countries are shutting their own borders. Whether or not they do so because they believe that a coordinated European response would be inefficient, or whether they believe that their own voters wouldn’t buy it — at this stage it’s irrelevant. The mere fact that borders have resurfaced in Europe is a failure for the integrity of the Schengen open borders agreement….

«A coordinated EU response to this crisis does not exist, and as the recommendations fall on deaf ears, Brussels is dealing with a crisis of confidence. There is no union-wide crisis response, coordinated testing or research. Worse than that, the EU institutions are bystanders to a war between countries, which are trying to limit exports of medical supplies in order to keep them for themselves. In times of crisis, the true influence and capacity of the EU has shown, and it is very little.

«As it stands, countries are dealing with a crisis of missing hospital beds, medical equipment, and overall resources. If the virus ever happens to lay lower than it does now, and the conclusion is drawn that the European Union was a powerless bystander in the eye of the storm (which it is), then the Schengen Agreement and open borders in Europe could be dealing with a difficult recovery.»

Darren McCaffrey, the political editor of the France-based news channel Euronews, wrote:

«In the past couple of weeks, solidarity has collapsed in the bloc. Countries have started imposing border controls on neighboring EU countries, and even Germany has taken steps to manage the flow of people entering and leaving its territory.

«On Tuesday, a 35-kilometer-long queue formed at the Polish-German border, where hundreds of Europeans — Latvians, Estonians and Lithuanians — were stuck in trucks, cars and buses.

«As the EU must take measures to prevent the spread of the disease, many are worrying about the essence of the European Union and its four freedoms [the free movement of goods, services, capital and people].

«What is the EU if its own citizens can’t move freely? What is the single market if goods can’t cross Europe’s borders without hindrance?»

Part 4
Belgium, March 22. The coronavirus has fueled tensions between Belgium, which is on lockdown, and the Netherlands, which is not. «In the Netherlands, shops are still open and meetings of 100 people are still allowed — these are breeding grounds for the virus,» said Marino Keulen, mayor of the Belgian border town Lanaken. Belgian authorities have set upbarricades along the border and are ordering cars with Dutch license plates to turn around and return home. Keulen called the border checks a «signal to The Hague» to «quickly scale-up» its response and align with neighboring countries. «The Dutch government is incompetent and ridiculous in its response to the coronavirus crisis,» said Leopold Lippens, the mayor of Belgian seacoast town Knokke-Heist. «The Netherlands is doing nothing, so we have to protect ourselves.»
Spain, March 25. After failing to obtain assistance from the European Union, the Spanish government asked NATO for help in acquiring 1.5 million face masks and 450,000 respirators. NATO lacks this material and is limited to passing the Spanish request on to the remaining 29 allies, many of which are also members of the EU.
Poland, March 25. Polish authorities prevented hundreds of thousands of bottles of hand sanitizer from being exported to Norway, which is not a member of the EU. The Norwegian company Norenco manufactures and packages hand sanitizer for the Scandinavian market at a factory it owns in Poland. Norenco’s chief executive, Arne Haukland, said that after he applied for an export license, five men arrived at the factory, and demanded to be shown its stock of hand sanitizer. He said the company then received a letter ordering it to sell any hand sanitizer it had produced to the local city authorities in Lubin at a fixed price, under emergency coronavirus laws passed in Poland at the start of March. The seizure will exacerbate the supply problem faced by Norwegian hospitals.
France, March 25. President Emmanuel Macron, in an address to the nation at a military hospital in the eastern city of Mulhouse, which has been especially hard hit by the coronavirus, called for national, as opposed to European, unity: «When we engage in war, we engage fully, we mobilize united. I see in our country factors of division, doubts, all those who want to fracture the country when it is necessary to have only one obsession: to be united to fight against the virus. I call for this unity and this commitment.»
Meanwhile, in Italy, a nationwide survey published on March 18 found that 88% of Italians believe that the EU is not helping their country. Only 4% thought the opposite while 8% did not have an opinion. More than two-thirds (67%) of Italians said that they believe that being part of the European Union is a disadvantage for their country.

Part 3
Italy, March 13. European Central Bank President Christine Lagarde dismissed calls by Italy for financial assistance to help it cope with the pandemic. After her comments rattled financial markets, Lagarde said that the ECB was «fully committed to avoid any fragmentation in a difficult moment for the euro area.» Italian President Sergio Mattarella replied that Italy had a right to expect solidarity rather than obstacles from beyond its borders.
Denmark, March 14. Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen imposed border controls on all traffic by land, sea and air until at least April 13.
Poland, March 15. The government closed the country’s borders to everyone except Polish citizens or people with a Polish residence permit.
Germany, March 16. Germany, the largest and most powerful country in the European Union, introduced controls on its borders with Austria, Denmark, France, Luxembourg and Switzerland. The move came after Germany registered 1,000 new cases of COVID-19 in just one day.
Hungary, March 16. Prime Minister Viktor Orbán halted all passenger traffic into Hungary would be halted and only Hungarian citizens allowed to enter the country.
Spain, March 16. Interior Minister Fernando Grande-Marlaska decreed the establishment of controls at all land borders.
Serbia, March 16. President Aleksandar Vucic declared a state of emergency due to coronavirus. He condemned the EU for restricting exports of medical equipment and appealed for help from his «friend and brother,» Chinese leader Xi Jinping. «European solidarity does not exist,» Vucic said. «That was a fairy tale on paper. I have sent a special letter to the only ones who can help, and that is China.» Serbia applied to become a member of the EU in 2009. Accession talks began in January 2014.
Czech Republic, March 17. Czech authorities seized 110,000 face masks that China had sent to Italy. On March 23, the Czech Republic delivered the confiscated material to Italy. «There are 110,000 masks on board the bus as a gift to Italy, which is supposed to replace the material that was probably a Chinese gift for Italian compatriots,» said Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Zuzana Stichova.
Germany, March 18. Chancellor Angela Merkel, in a rare televised speech, urged all Germans to obey rules aimed at reducing direct social contact and avoiding as many new infections as possible. «It is serious,» she said. «Take it seriously. Since German reunification, actually, since World War Two, there has never been a challenge for our country in which acting in solidarity was so very crucial.» Merkel’s address to the nation was the first time in nearly 15 years in office that she had spoken to the country other than in her annual New Year’s address. She did not mention the European Union or other EU member states.

Part 2
Recent examples of the unilateral pursuit of the national interest by European leaders, many of whom publicly espouse globalism but in times of desperation embrace nationalism, include:

France. On March 3, France confiscated all protective masks made in the country. «We will distribute them to healthcare professionals and to French people affected by the coronavirus,» French President Emmanuel Macron wrote on Twitter. On March 6, the French government forced Valmy SAS, a face mask manufacturer near Lyon, to cancel an order for millions of masks placed by the UK’s National Health Service.
Germany, March 4. Germany banned the export of medical protective equipment such as safety glasses, respiratory masks, protective coats, protective suits and gloves. On March 7, the Swiss newspaper Neue Zürcher Zeitung reported that German customs authorities were preventing a Swiss truck carrying 240,000 protective masks from returning to Switzerland, which is not a member of the EU. The Swiss government summoned the German ambassador to protest against the export ban. «In these contacts, the German authorities were urged immediately to release the blocked products,» a Swiss government spokesperson was quoted as saying. After facing a backlash from other EU member states, Germany on March 19 reversed course and lifted the export ban.
Austria, March 10. Austria became the first EU country to close its borders to another EU country. Chancellor Sebastian Kurz announced controls along the border with Italy and a ban on the entry of most travelers from there. «The utmost priority,» Kurz said, «is to prevent the spread and thus importing the illness into our society. There is therefore a ban on entry for people from Italy into Austria, with the exception of people who have a doctor’s note certifying that they are healthy.» The government also announced a ban on all air or rail travel to Italy. Austria’s decision threatened to undo the so-called Schengen Area, which entered into effect in 1995 and abolishes the need for passports and other types of control at the mutual borders of 26 European countries.
Slovenia, March 11. The government closed some border crossings with Italy and at those remaining open, had started making health checks to combat the spread of the virus.
Czech Republic, March 12. Prime Minister Andrej Babiš closed the country’s borders with Germany and Austria and also banned the entry of foreigners coming from other risky countries. On March 22, the government said that the border restrictions may last for up to two years.
Switzerland, March 13. The Swiss government imposed border controls with other European countries. Switzerland, although not a member of the European Union, is part of the Schengen zone.

Coronavirus: The European Union Unravels
Av: Soeren Kern 27. mars 2020, 12:49
In recent weeks, EU member states have closed their borders, banned exports of critical supplies and withheld humanitarian aid. Pictured: Trucks are backed up on the road leading to the Austrian-Hungarian border crossing near Nickelsdorf, Austria on March 18, 2020. (Photo by Thomas Kronsteiner/Getty Images)

As the coronavirus pandemic rages through Europe — where more than 250,000 people have now been diagnosed with Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) and 15,000 have died — the foundational pillars of the European Union are crumbling one by one.

Faced with an existential threat, EU member states, far from joining together to confront the pandemic as a unified bloc, instinctively are returning to pursuing the national interest. After years of criticizing U.S. President Donald J. Trump for pushing an «America First» policy, European leaders are reverting to the very nationalism they have publicly claimed to despise.
Ever since the threat posed by coronavirus came into focus, Europeans have displayed precious little of the high-minded multilateral solidarity that for decades has been sold to the rest of the world as a bedrock of European unity. The EU’s unique brand of soft power, said to be a model for a post-national world order, has been shown to be an empty fiction.

In recent weeks, EU member states have closed their borders, banned exports of critical supplies and withheld humanitarian aid. The European Central Bank, the guarantor of the European single currency, has treated with unparalleled disdain the eurozone’s third-largest economy, Italy, in its singular hour of need. The member states worst affected by the pandemic — Italy and Spain — have been left by the other member states to fend for themselves.

The seeds of the European Union were planted in the ashes of the Second World War. In May 1949, Robert Schuman, one of the EU’s founding fathers, boldly announced the creation of new world system:
«We are carrying out a great experiment, the fulfillment of the same recurrent dream that for ten centuries has revisited the peoples of Europe: creating between them an organization putting an end to war and guaranteeing an eternal peace.»

The European Union, seven decades in the making, is now unravelling in real time — in weeks. After the dust of the coronavirus pandemic settles, the EU’s institutions will almost certainly continue to operate as before. Too much political and economic capital has been invested in the European project for European elites to do otherwise. However, the EU’s attraction as a post-national model for its own citizens, much less for the rest of the world, will have passed.

Part 5
In an article titled, «Coronavirus Threatens European Unity,» Bill Wirtz, a political commentator based in Luxembourg, observed:

«As the coronavirus unfolds, Schengen countries are shutting their own borders. Whether or not they do so because they believe that a coordinated European response would be inefficient, or whether they believe that their own voters wouldn’t buy it — at this stage it’s irrelevant. The mere fact that borders have resurfaced in Europe is a failure for the integrity of the Schengen open borders agreement….

«A coordinated EU response to this crisis does not exist, and as the recommendations fall on deaf ears, Brussels is dealing with a crisis of confidence. There is no union-wide crisis response, coordinated testing or research. Worse than that, the EU institutions are bystanders to a war between countries, which are trying to limit exports of medical supplies in order to keep them for themselves. In times of crisis, the true influence and capacity of the EU has shown, and it is very little.

«As it stands, countries are dealing with a crisis of missing hospital beds, medical equipment, and overall resources. If the virus ever happens to lay lower than it does now, and the conclusion is drawn that the European Union was a powerless bystander in the eye of the storm (which it is), then the Schengen Agreement and open borders in Europe could be dealing with a difficult recovery.»

Darren McCaffrey, the political editor of the France-based news channel Euronews, wrote:

«In the past couple of weeks, solidarity has collapsed in the bloc. Countries have started imposing border controls on neighboring EU countries, and even Germany has taken steps to manage the flow of people entering and leaving its territory.

«On Tuesday, a 35-kilometer-long queue formed at the Polish-German border, where hundreds of Europeans — Latvians, Estonians and Lithuanians — were stuck in trucks, cars and buses.

«As the EU must take measures to prevent the spread of the disease, many are worrying about the essence of the European Union and its four freedoms [the free movement of goods, services, capital and people].

«What is the EU if its own citizens can’t move freely? What is the single market if goods can’t cross Europe’s borders without hindrance?»

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