A Roll in the Universe

A Normandy beach today Water show in Hamburg's "Blumen und Garten" park

"On the 6th of June 1944, on the beaches of Normandy, over 10,000 young soldiers paid for our freedom." From a bronze plaque showing the invasion It's 72 years since D-day , the landing of allied troops on the shores of Normandy, France, in a no-holds-barred attack on the occupying Germans. I visited the pock-marked, bomb-scarred area in 2010. Every village along the gorgeous coast had their own World War II museum, and each one had a unique twist which made every museum interesting. The French were not cowards; they willingly and knowingly allowed their towns, homes and farms to be bombed to oblivion to ruin supply lines for the German military. The landscape shows the scars of war Our group visited the American cemetery, and the German one. The Americans buried their own in proper, marked graves right after the war, while it took 10 years before the Germans could do the same. The American cemetery The German cemetery T

Something interesting has crystalized so far in 2016: A clear desire to change citizenship. I start by applying for Norwegian citizenship, and hope they'll let me keep my US one until I decide what to do about it. The background for this are FATCA and FBAR. FATCA (Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act) cracks down on expats who haven't been filing taxes, starting in 2010 (the IRS wasn't too particular about chasing Americans around the world before then). FBAR (Report of Foreign Bank and Financial Accounts) is a requirement made of US citizens to report all their savings in foreign finance institutions to crack down on hidden assets (like in the Panama papers ). The US is the only nation, besides Eritrea, that taxes based on citizenship, not based on whether you actually had any income in or from the US. For someone who happened to be born on US soil to foreign parents and hasn't worked in the US ever, this must be at best baffling, at worst, a nightmare. It's b