Baffled European

Author: baffledkim

  • Health don’t care

    The Big Beautiful Bill for the US budget is making its way through committee. The latest indicators suggest a $1trillion cut to Medicaid and Medicare. There’s going to be an awful lot of people who suddenly find themselves without healthcare.

    It’s needed to pay for the even bigger tax cut for billionaires, naturally, and also for the estimated $170billion they want to waste on their immigration policy.

    Where will the remains of the money for healthcare go? RFK has given us a couple of pointers.

    He wants people to have “wearables”, that is smart monitors to record exercise and heart rate etc. His dream is that every USAian will carry a wearable for their health. As a bonus, these devices will record all sorts of personal information and act as a marker for the precise location of the wearer. I guess you either submit to government surveillance, or no healthcare.

    He’s been shipping out Medicare functions to a company called United Healthcare, which is currently under investigation for fraudulent use of such funds. All the anti-corruption agencies will be gone soon, so that won’t be a problem any more.

    And to no surprise, no money will be spent on vaccines. But we know this and the whole charade of the anti-vaxxers. RFK believes stuff that is 100% not true. Unfortunately, he is the one in charge, and there is nothing that can shift him.

  • Pogrom gets green light

    The Supreme Court has done its thing again. If you happen to be a house, or a big pile of money, you’ve got no problem. They will protect you. If you are a mere human, it’s all got worse.

    They have given the government permission to persecute absolutely anybody it wants. They did consider the rights of the individual in this, and have decided that if a person can afford a lawyer, the government should back off, for the time being, and find somebody else who can’t afford a lawyer. That’s cheaper and faster if you’ve got a quota to fill.

    Even if the government was benign and benevolent, this ruling is just plain evil, but they are doing it with the full knowledge of what the government is going to do.

    You can’t even excuse the fact that this judgement was delivered on a Friday, and that the justices are clearly a set of bored and lazy workers who are putting in a shoddy shift before going home for their holidays. They backed this up with directly attacking the gays, while also hindering the lower courts from blocking all the illegal stuff the government is doing. Up until now, the lower courts had been doing a good job. That will stop.

    It comes on a day where Senator Taberville raved about “inner city rats” who are “try[ing] to overwhelm us… we have got to fight back.”

    And now they can.

  • Just trust us

    They are lying and it’s funny to see. That bombing raid on Iran, it “obliterated” the Iranian nuclear programme. That’s what they keep telling us, and we’ve just got to believe them.

    There was going to be a presentation to congress to prove their claims, but this was inexplicably delayed. It has since been delayed again, with no new date given for the briefing.

    Somebody leaked the intelligence reports to a CNN journalist. The enriched fuel has not been affected. The purifying centrifuges are intact. Some ground-level buildings have been destroyed, but that’s as far as it goes.

    The president was furious and called for the journalist to be sacked and to treat her like a dog. Usual fake news complaints and insults. He later blamed the Democrats for the leak. But last week, they said the Dems were not briefed. It can’t have come from then, so what is it?

    Pete Hegseth is also on the case. Completely unhinged, he rants on about how this was “the most complex and secretive military operation in history, and it was a resounding success”. More so than D-Day, I guess. Furthermore, it is offensive to question the results because everything went so flawlessly.

    Karoline Levitt gave it away: “When you have a totalitarian regime, you have to save face. I think any common sense, open-minded person knows the truth about the precision strikes on Saturday night. They were wildly successful.” No more to add.

  • Changing of the guard

    Much excitement in New York, where Zohran Mamdani has won the Democrat mayoral nomination. The celebrations have been so great, it’s almost as if he had won the presidency.

    He isn’t eligible to run for the presidency, of course, having been born in Kampala, Uganda. Despite being a US citizen and a member the New York State Assembly, his birthplace presents a huge problem for maga.

    Stephen Miller is in no doubt about this being “the clearest warning yet of what happens to a society when it fails to control immigration.” It proves “how unchecked immigration fundamentally changes the NYC electorate.” Well, yes. It’s New York, a city that famously consists almost entirely of immigrants, and always has. That’s almost the point of the city.

    Laura Loomer reckons there should be a law to prevent him from holding office. She thinks he should be charged with terrorism. She’s not alone. Other racists in the “Republicans for National Renewal” are calling for him to be deported. They are fantasising about the president revoking Mamdani’s citizenship and remigrating him as soon as possible. For the good of New York.

    Why are they so worried about “replacement”? I suppose they look at the Native Americans and see what a disaster immigrants were back then. Although I doubt it: they hate Native Americans almost as much as they hate “immigrants”. Who is left not to hate? Nothing they say makes any sense.

  • Police ICE

    There is a law enforcement problem in the USA. Last week in Pasadena, a man left his car and pointed a gun at pedestrians. After a short time, he got back in his car and drove away. The police are trying to find out if he was a federal agent of some sort, or a criminal. Nobody can tell the difference.

    A man who claimed to be an ICE agent harassed workers at a car repair garage and stole $1000. Again, nobody knows who is real and who is not.

    The police have started alerting ICE to people who call them out, for instance in cases of domestic violence. As such, people are afraid to call the real police.

    If anybody was in any doubt, this is the reason why police and other government agents are supposed to identify themselves. It is worse when the behaviour of agents is exactly the same as that of criminals.

    As a response, somebody has set up a website that will identify any police officer. You upload a photo and it will tell you their name and number. This is legal because of the useless data protection laws in the US. I can’t imagine the police are too happy about such tools, but it exists for a reason.

    This situation did not exist a few months ago. The new regime has created a serious problem out of thin air. It seems their only response is to escalate further.

  • Great victory

    It sounds like Iran and Israel have announced a ceasefire for the time being. If anything, this will strengthen the position of the warmongers in the USA. A rash and pointless bombing mission, then “peace”. They will paint it as a stroke of genius by the master strategist in charge.

    Newspaper gossip suggests he decided to get involved because he saw the pictures of Israel shooting missiles and wanted to get in on the action. Maybe. It’s plausible.

    Rather more concerning is that he is now openly wondering if he is imagining things. Specifically things about nuclear weapons. Even he seems to recognise his mind is failing.

    What excuse do his supporters have? All those politicians who make excuses for his behaviour? The press sanitises all of his rubbish and then discusses this version as if it is desirable or even coherent.

    There are a lot of very serious people who have been taken in by a conman, a conman who is quite clearly demented. They indulge his every whim, allow him to start wars, kidnap and torture people, personally enrich himself, while destroying the government and its institutions.

    Have they invested so much into this man that they can no longer admit that he is a senile criminal, because they themselves would look extremely foolish? What is the hold he has on them? The whole country is on a complete flight from reality and everybody is cheering along. There’s no sign of them stopping.

  • Vibe war

    Is there any point in having a cabinet government in the USA at the moment? That everything is done at the whim of an insane president is obvious, but literally everybody else is kept out of the loop.

    It’s not just Gabbard, but Hegseth, Rubio and Vance apparently also advised against starting a war with Iran. Didn’t help. The latter three went on the interview circuit, assuring people that the aim is not regime change. They should check these things first: a correction on Truth Social insisted that the whole point of the action is regime change. They were at least present at an official announcement to hear the president struggling to read an autocue and unable to pronounce words.

    Nevertheless, Vance has been doing his best trying to sell the operation. The problem in the past, he explained, is that the USA had really dumb presidents. Thank goodness that is no longer the case. When asked what Iran should do – what with the USA breaking its existing agreement and then launching an unprovoked attack – Vance was quite clear that you can’t trust Iran.

    Public opinion is strongly against the attacks, although this will change. Maga has already learned the message from the party that 2 + 2 = 5 and they are faithfully repeating their new knowledge.

    Iran has announced it will close the Strait of Hormuz. Whether they do remains to be seen, but it would cause chaos everywhere. This likely counts as a win for maga.

  • When a woman says no she really means yes

    Tulsi Gabbard is on one of those learning curves. She testified to Congress that there was no danger of Iran gaining nuclear weapons. Just to make her point clear, she released a video warning about the effects of a possible war in the Middle East.

    It’s understandable why she should do this. Everybody remembers the lies about “weapons of mass destruction” that were used as an excuse to start the Iraq war disaster. Maga is opposed to foreign adventures of any kind, particularly in that region. What’s more, the president himself has repeatedly criticised the Iraq war. Surely she was doing what he wanted?

    She has now learned that he was lying, one of those habits that convicted fraudsters have. “She’s wrong”, he said. “I don’t care what she thinks.” That’s his Director of National Intelligence he’s talking about.

    As a result, she has quickly reassessed her analysis, and is now insisting that Iran is only three weeks away from obtaining a nuclear weapon. She should have said 45 minutes. Why not? It’s just as ridiculous.

    Not that anybody is paying attention to her. The president has launched a set of bombing raids against Iran and is using hokey Twitter accounts to guide his strategy.

    So is this the war they want? How far will they go? How long will it take for maga to insist that they’ve always been at war with Eastasia?

    Please, Europe: don’t get sucked into this.

  • A white house in a red square

    This might be counted as good news, but for the fact that it is simply undoing an obvious wrong by the government. There was in edict that trans people must have their birth name and gender on their passports. This has been overturned. It is now once again possible for trans people to get a passport with their legal, chosen name, rather than a government mandated name.

    All this name stuff highlights a few inconsistencies. The birth name of the Vice President is “James Donald Bowman”, but he changed this to “James David Vance”. Should he be forced to readopt his birth name? I guess not.

    More concerning is the case of Sergio Gor, the man in charge of appointing and vetting all White House personnel. His birth name is Sergio Gorokhovsky. He claims to be from Malta, but was definitely not born there. His keeps his actual birthplace a secret, but he does confirm it is not Russia. OK. However, being born in 1986, the big happy family that was the USSR still existed. Could that be the “not Russia” that he is talking about?

    At any rate, he has not been vetted for his position and refuses to cooperate with security checks. An imposition, considering all the money he paid over the years to get the job. At the same time, thousands of trans soldiers are being discharged with a black mark on their record, implying they are a security risk.

    There is something very wrong here.

  • Nothing’s gonna stop us now

    I was thinking of writing something about the imminent start of World War III, but it has been postponed for 14 days. Maybe in that time the disorganised mess of US government structures will have sorted themselves out.

    Instead, let’s look at another setback for engineer extraordinaire Elon Musk. The latest test of Starship resulted in a spectacular explosion on the test stand. Not only was the rocket destroyed, but most of the test facility as well. I guess Musk won’t be going to Mars in 2026.

    SpaceX aren’t even trying their “partial success” story for when a rocket blows up. This time it’s a “serious anomaly”.

    Unsurprisingly, morale among SpaceX employees is rock bottom. It’s not just the run of failures, but also the poor working conditions and dissatisfaction with Musk’s foray into extremist politics. Many engineers have left this year, even when considering the high personnel churn at Musk’s companies. A wall of NDAs is in place to stop people from talking, but that just makes things worse.

    It’s amazing just how things are unravelling for Musk. In the past you could look at Tesla and SpaceX and they were undeniable achievements. No matter what you might have thought of him personally, he delivered. Now it looks like all of it was built on sand. There’s no culture, no institutional knowledge in his companies, they are just hollow shells. This slow-motion implosion is spectacular in its own way.