Baffled European

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  • Out of this world

    Dr Collier recently made a video on her Youtube channel in which she read through James Dyson’s paper proposing the “Dyson sphere”. Rather than a serious proposition, she demonstrated it was a joke, a satire of the SETI project.

    The SETI logic ran so: if there are alien civilisations like us, they will be using radio transmissions. We should monitor radio in the sky to see if we find somebody.

    Dyson’s version was slightly different: if the aliens were space nazis, they would be megalomaniacal techno-fetishists who would develop something really ridiculous like this sphere collecting all the energy from the sun. We should look for an infra-red shift on stars to see if there are space nazis.

    He was doubtless thinking of the many and varied attempts the nazis made to create magical weapons that would win the war. Rockets, jets, death rays, there were so many of them.

    The US Navy has just announced a new class of battleships. It’s going to be fitted with rail guns and lasers. Military watchers are unanimous in their opinion. Such ships are inappropriate and useless. It’s not merely the operational, design and conceptual flaws in these ships: the USA simply does not have the capacity to build a fleet of such ships. It’s all wishful thinking, vanity projects and a complete disregard for reality.

    Well that’s 2025. See what they get up to next year.

  • Tariff updates

    A few months ago, the president decided he would apply tariffs to movies. This is illegal and impractical, and was ignored. Until now. He’s decided he wants a 100% tariff on all movies made outside the USA. There’s no idea of how to even try to apply this, but he’s the president. The establishment of the USA is still very much in thrall to their senile dictator and his acolytes who are destroying the country.

    It was a busy day for tariffs. He’s also decided to impose tariffs on any country which does not buy its furniture from the USA. National security, apparently. There’s a full schedule, dealing with upholstered furniture, kitchen furniture, etc.

    This seems to be a response to a spate of closures of furniture manufacturers in the USA, who are dealing with enormous and unpredictable tariffs from their supplier, as well as a collapse in domestic consumer confidence. Not to mention JD Vance’s sofa hobbies.

    Then there’s the new 25% on all truck imports. Or the 100% on all medication. The medication thing will be suspended if the countries start building factories in the US by the end of the week.

    These are going to make everything more expensive for people in the USA, with no benefit to their own industry. Most likely, they also break the “deals” that have been cobbled together over the last few months.

    How long can this go on?

  • Live by the gun

    I’d never heard of Charlie Kirk until last week. His last words before he was murdered were a racial slur as he worked himself up to some transphobia.

    He lived as he died. He had clear views on the possibility of being shot by a gunman:

    “I think it’s worth to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the Second Amendment to protect our other God-given rights.”

    It’s pretty clear he intends other people to take the bullets for him, but he can’t complain too much if he turns out to be one of the expendable ones.

    His trade was a mish-mash of racism, sexism, homophobia and especially transphobia. Mainly, he was loyal to his president. A president who, raging at his death, promised revenge on the left for what they had done.

    The left. All of them.

    Meanwhile, the FBI was trying to find out who did it. The agency has been gutted, with many sacked for being “woke” to the extent that nothing works. So the FBI looked busy while doing nothing, but basically waited until the parents of the shooter handed him in to police.

    Another right-wing gun nut, as it turns out. Like the one who shot the Republican candidate last year.

    Doesn’t matter. Full purge of “the left” anyway. And extra, they are trying to connect the murder to transes. They’ve gone insane, all of them.

  • Switching sides

    The USA continues its foreign policy of alienating long-standing allies, while sucking up to dictators. South Korea is the latest target.

    Hyundai has been building a new battery factory in Georgia. It’s due to go into operation next year, so a group of engineers and technicians from South Korea have been on site, setting up the new facility.

    No longer. ICE decided to raid the place, arresting everybody for (spurious) visa violations. The South Korean government has managed to secure the release of its citizens and is now, along with Hyundai, considering its options. South Koreans are understandably outraged by this incident, and there will be consequences.

    It’s a deliberate provocation, no question, but why are they doing it? Possibly it is part of the trade negotiations, with the USA trying some extortion to help its side. The Leader of the Free World is of course a great friend of Kim Jong-un in the north. He has also expressed antipathy towards the president of South Korea, Lee Jae Myung, particularly since he is soundly democratic and has replaced a despot.

    That, as well as simple racism, explains the treatment of a close ally. Beyond this, there is the point that they want everything Made in USA. They want companies to set up factories in the USA. But what companies are going to invest in the country, if this is the way their employees are treated?

    What do they hope to achieve?

  • I guess we’re not in Arkansas anymore

    Here’s a heartwarming story. Voting makes a difference. It’s nice to see democracy in action.

    Over 64% of Arkansawyers voted Republican in the last election, with only 33% for Harris. State elections show a similar pattern. I think it is fair to say that a clear majority of voters are happy with these results and no doubt enthusiastically support the policies of the party they elected.

    So let’s have a look at how this is turning out. It seems the tariff policies have really hit Arkansas farmers. More than a third are expected to declare bankruptcy this year. This has a knock-on in other areas of the local economy, with crop-dusting, machinery dealers and maintenance, and even rural banks taking a hammering from loss of business. The agriculture sector is describing the situation as a disaster.

    There is only one course of action available for these proud, independent frontiersmen: to pull themselves up by the bootstraps and go to DC to beg for government money. Some people might call them welfare queens. Others say that this is basically communism. But they are wrong, because it’s different in this case.

    Unfortunately, they are dealing with a man who has extensive experience in bankruptcy and he considers it normal practice. Somebody will make money picking up all these businesses for buttons, and that’s what matters.

    I assume Arkansawyers will vote Republican next time as well. If they get the chance.

  • Chaos

    I try to avoid looking at news from the USA as much as possible. It always seems to make me cross in some way. After writing a post yesterday for the first time in ages, I take a look through the madness that is going on and see how worse it has got in the last two weeks.

    So I make the mistake of looking at things again today and, schwupps, he’s gone and sacked the governor of the Fed. That’s the thing the Supreme Court told him specifically not to do.

    I could have gone on to fill a post about that, but then I see that Japan and most of Europe have suspended parcel deliveries to the USA. Tarif regulations are coming into effect. Doesn’t anybody think this is just totally crazy?

    Maybe more will notice. Those tariff agreements he made a couple of weeks ago? He’s going to break them. Now he wants the digital taxes revoked. He takes what he can get, then comes back for more. Just the standard gangster routine.

    Meanwhile, the Department of Homeland Security is amusing itself by referring to Abrego Garcia as “Uganda Man”, a threat to what they plan to do with him next. We’re not dealing with responsible adults anymore. Judge Xinis had this to say: “Your clients [of the DOJ] are absolutely forbidden from removing Mr. Abrego from the continental United States.”

    The country seems to be collapsing.

  • Bolt the door

    Bismarck created the German state in the late 19th century. His Realpolitik, his ability to accrue power by playing various actors off against each other, this won him a lot of admirers – even among his enemies. It was all about 19th century great power games. Unfortunately, the system he built was unstable, ephemeral and inefficient, leading to its total collapse in November 1918.

    That should have been the end of it. Instead Kissinger resurrected Realpolitik in the 1970s. He got a lot of admirers, this being the cold war. For some reason, none of Kissinger’s advocates thought to question the ultimate disaster of Bismarck’s system, thereby ushering in fifty years of solid failure in US foreign policy.

    Even after Kissinger (sort of) retired, he had disciples to continue his good work, such as John Bolton.

    Bolton is currently experiencing the displeasure of a dictator. They kicked his door in last week and ransacked his house. Whether this is due to his criticisms of the current madness, or part of the ongoing purge of the State Department and intelligence service is not clear. It hardly matters.

    Sure, I think of the Niemöller poem when I see the machine chewing up the next target on its list. On the other hand, Bolton has dedicated his entire career to sitting behind a desk, blithely ruining people’s lives. It’s really hard to watch what is happening to this thoroughly horrible man and not think he deserves everything he’s getting.

  • Beyond Dunning-Kruger

    “Britain has had enough of experts,” said Michael Gove in 2016. As a Brexiter, he was aware that his team were getting trounced on both generalities and details when it came to the EU. None of them knew what they were talking about and this was a way to neutralise knowledge and competence in the campaign.

    Unfortunately for everybody, Brexit won and this clutch of self-proclaimed anti-experts set about implementing a prize they never expected to win. “Britain has had enough of exports” became reality as UK trade suddenly permanently dropped as a result of these useless fools.

    This brings me on to RFK, oh good. “Trusting the experts is not a feature of either science or democracy,” was the outpouring from what is left of his brain. It echoes Gove’s comment, but takes the ignorance and stupidity to new levels. I guess everything is bigger in the land of opportunity.

    It strikes me that this goes beyond the Dunning-Kruger effect, the well-known result describing the fact that incompetent people tend to overestimate their own competence at a given task. It’s not merely that RFK overestimates his own competence, he also underestimates the competence of everybody else.

    I don’t know if this is a real effect or something that can be tested. However, in the interests of science, democracy as well, I think he should urgently undergo some psychological evaluation. Preferably in a padded cell with a big lock on the door.

  • Niemöller

    Everybody has heard the poem or something like it attributed to Martin Niemöller.

    First they came for the transes, but I wasn’t trans, and in any case I’d been bombarded with nazi garbage for years and lost both my humanity and ability to think critically for myself and they deserve it anyway toilets are the last safe haven for any woman.

    Something like that. Far-right nutters used to solemnly quote the poem a few years ago. Every time one of their number was martyred by Twitter for repeatedly breaking the terms and conditions they had agreed to when signing up for the account. Sometimes they had to rely on columns in national newspapers to get their message across. Fortunately for their plight, they were rescued by a billionaire who does nazi salutes.

    Trans was just the starter anyway. There is a bigger prize. The Supreme Court is going to have another look at the question of gay marriage, in order to see if it is still commensurate with the modern world and its values.

    The far-right are already designing vectors to blame transes for what is going to happen, rather than the people who are in charge and making the decisions. It’s always somebody else’s fault, that’s what it means when you take personal responsibility so seriously.

    It’s all going to end very badly, obviously, but who is next? Or at what point will it stop?

  • Nonsense summary

    There’s been an outbreak of e-coli in Florida caused by people drinking raw milk. More cancellations of vaccine and other medical research as well.

    Nebraska is suffering a deep recession, with a 6% contraction in the economy this year so far.

    The Ford Motor Company posted a loss in Q2 of this year. They blame the tariffs, which are expected to cost the company $2billion this year.

    The price of everything is going up, except for eggs. These tariffs are biting.

    Bad weather and people are losing their homes and livelihoods because of storm damage. FEMA shrugs and ignores this. People need to pull themselves up by the bootstraps. Small government is the future.

    Except when it comes to racism. The immigration mania continues, there’s no way to stop it now.

    Amazingly, the Epstein stuff is still going on. Epstein’s greatest friend has not been able to shake away the story and people are asking questions.

    I’ve been away from this blog for the last month. I simply haven’t had the patience or enthusiasm to follow the experiment going on over in the USA. It’s not that it takes that much time, just that it is greater than zero and therefore more than I’m prepared to waste on watching a convicted fraudster steal hundreds of millions from his adoring followers. It’s all variations on illegal and inhumane stuff. They are inventive, but it gets to be too much.