It's a too typical tactic of people who don't have a leg to stand on to point to newer members sign on date, as if to say, you just started forming your opinions on the day you became a member, therefore they are without merit.
It seems a "newbie" is anyone who signed on at least one day after they did.
Feel free to speak straight to me, if you've got the spine for it, ANYTIME. Or at least have the decency to *ping me to those posts to others that concerns a matter we've discussed in your absence, even if you haven't the belly for challenging something I've said in such exchanges head-on.
Many thanks for your kind words Greybeard.
And please don't think that I am in any way anti-American.
I like Americans very much on the whole.
I just object to the mindless anti-anything-not-American stuff that is so often posted on this forum, particularly when it attacks my own country.