Holy shit, that website can kiss my ass. I hate when sites hijack the back button.

Also, this story shows he is either negligently stupid, intentionally covering up an accident that he thought might implicate him, or intentionally malicious. Some of the mistakes are pretty damning for someone who had made this climb 14 or 15 times. The timeline is suspicious, too. I have no idea if he did anything intentionally, but he certainly made many very bad mistakes that could together constitute criminal negligence in my head.

It is unreal how many tourists are there, though. I was shocked when I went there and basically couldn’t even see the fountain. We left immediately because we didn’t want to deal with all that. Rome has been my least favourite city to visit, purely because of all the tourists. Even going to Paris, which has CRAZY numbers of tourists, didn’t seem as bad; maybe because it was just designed to handle it.

I don’t think the 2 euro fee will stem the number of tourists, but it will help pay for all the upkeep the city has to do for everything to not go to shit when a million people walk through a small area every day.

And I wonder who he thinks would lead this new political entity.

I am all in favor of countries banding together to create more powerful bargaining units and helping to stabilize economies in their regions, I just wonder how well it would work when ALL countries involved are unstable economically and politically. It’s one thing for the EU to be created with Latvia, Romania, and Bulgaria when you have France, Germany, and England to stabilize things. It’s another thing for countries that have all had major issues with stability in both recent years and consistently in the past 30 years to try coming together.

Maybe that instability is partly due to US interference that this will help prevent in the future? Maybe it would help reduce the violence from drug cartels, which could stabilize the region as well?