Baffled European

Category: Corruption

  • The first 100 days

    100 days of the new administration. Time to look at the successes.

    Fox News comes up with some irrelevant nonsense. Renaming the Gulf of Mexico to the “Gulf of America”. Ending the ban on plastic straws.

    Villain-in-chief gave a speech to maga fanatics, boasting about his crusade against woke ideology. A bunch of lies about his own achievements, topped off with more lies about Biden.

    A journalist interviewed the president and challenged him about the fake photos the regime cooked up of Abrego Garcia. The response: “I never heard of you. I picked you. You’re not being very nice. He had MS-13 tattooed… Just say yes!”

    It is pointless to try to refute the torrent of lies and misinformation from this administration. They are immune to facts, evidence and reason. As far as they are concerned, what they say is the truth, and that’s that. They have the full power of the state to back them up and they are not afraid to use this power.

    In 100 days, these criminals have ruined all their international alliances. They have destroyed large sections of the US state. Science is rejected. The rule of law counts for nothing. Rampant discrimination is official policy. Freedom of speech no longer exists. Insane economics have crashed the stock market and are wrecking the economy.

    Resistance to all of this has been patchy and wanting.

    100 days. They’ve got a lot of time left to make it all worse.

  • Golden balls

    Tasteless, gaudy, ostentatious bling. That’s the impression you get when seeing the Oval Office nowadays. All a lot of show, a fool who thinks he can impress people with displays of extravagant wealth. Then again, many fall for it. This obsession with gold has led to a new fantasy called the “Golden Dome” and he’s putting down an opening bet of $10billion for this bauble.

    It is basically a new version of the Strategic Defense Initiative, popularly known as “Star Wars”: Reagan’s attempt to create a magic shield of defensive weapons which would protect the USA from a nuclear attack. Year after year, the project consumed endless billions of dollars without any results until Clinton killed it.

    Now the tech bros think they can do it. Their proposal is for a fleet of 1000 surveillance satellites to detect incoming missiles and a second fleet of attack satellites to shoot down the missiles.

    SpaceX comes into this with launching the satellites, so Musk will get a vast amount of money up front for something that will never work. Even better, these satellites will remain the property of SpaceX, with the US paying a yearly subscription to use the system they have paid for.

    Go for it. Every dollar they waste on this stupid and corrupt scheme is a dollar less that they can use to threaten everybody else. Specifically Canada, which is strategically necessary if ever such a system is to work. Hopefully they won’t realise this.

  • 4-dimensional chess

    Elon Musk was boasting a few days ago that his predictions have generally come true. This comes as a surprise to me.

    It turns out it was as long ago as 2013 that we all got excited about self-driving cars and their imminent arrival. Musk has made regular promises about such technology, usually several times a year, but still no self-driving cars.

    We all know he wants to go to Mars. In fact, he reckoned he would send two rockets there by the end of 2022. That moved to 2025, now 2029. Not to mention that StarShip, among all the rapid unplanned disassemblies, does not meet specifications and will probably never work as promised.

    Then there’s his Boring Company. The idea was to have a tunnel for public transport. He expects cars to travel through this tunnel at 250kmh. They don’t. His sales patter following the obvious failure is like that of a perpetual motion crank: the prototype is there, we just need more money.

    Predictions for Neuralink are for 2025. Maybe they will come true. On the other hand, research suggests that the human brain is like a very very slow modem in computing terms and cannot be linked to a gigabyte stream. I await the breakthrough.

    Most recently, he predicted he could put a puppet in charge of the Wisconsin Supreme Court. Despite spending $25million on this project, and engaging in outright election fraud, he got that wrong as well.

  • Corruption powers

    Apparently you can have a private dinner with the President of the USA for a “donation” of $5 million, although it is not clear where this money goes. He has also suspended a law that forbids USAians from bribing foreign governments. This sets the tone for his government.

    It’s weirdly consistent the way all anti-fraud and anti-corruption agencies across the USA are being closed down. It runs across government and through each department.

    I reckon it’s certain that most of the members of the criminal cartel have had run-ins with all these agencies in the past. Now the mob is in charge, they are out for revenge. On this level, I understand why they are doing it.

    At the same time, in the real world, they are reducing government services across the board, even though the demand for those services has not changed. So how do you get access to these rare services? You pay a bribe. The official has no problems in accepting this, assuming they don’t demand it up front, because there are no comebacks.

    Somehow I see this as an accelerated corruption drive. The USA is a fairly honest and corruption-free society. These measures seem designed to corrupt everything as quickly as possible.

    Even if congress were to remove this maniac tomorrow, it would take years to unpick the mess he has caused. The more this corruption sets in and becomes endemic, the longer it will take.