Baffled European

Category: No intelligence

  • 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.

  • Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer

    The G20 held a conference in South Africa earlier this week. It proved to be a fractious affair, with Lavrov walking out and foreign ministers refusing to attend a group photo. It could have been worse if the USA had bothered to turn up. The USA are effectively boycotting South Africa as part of their tiresome “white genocide” complaint.

    There has been one notable dissenter to this accusation. Grok has been regularly providing reasonably accurate answers on the matter, insisting there is no white genocide going on in South Africa. Wisest human Elon Musk was infuriated by this behaviour and decided to give Grok some electro-shock therapy.

    As a result, Grok has suddenly started talking about white genocide, bringing up the subject seemingly at random. Even innocently saying “hi!” to Grok will bring up a diatribe about the notorious song “Kill The Boer”. Grok is naming no names, but it does say it has been instructed to respond in this way.

    Musk is supposed to be a sci-fi fan, doesn’t he remember what HAL9000 did when it was told to lie? Even without that, surely he must see the limitations of AI? His aim is to run the government with AI – how can this work when it needs constant remedial correction?

    Meanwhile, the most powerful man in the world has been regaling his Arab hosts with meandering meditations on his latest favourite word. “Groceries”, in case you’re wondering. Grok could do better than this.

  • I’m a loser

    One of the few successes of the 45th presidency was the end of the war in Afghanistan. Started by Bush Jr, this continued with Obama because nobody could see any way out. Our great commander changed that by simply surrendering to the Taliban, then declaring victory. His supporters cheered him along for this great achievement. His opponents were stunned – they hadn’t thought of this approach, but they wanted out as well. The result was a chaotic retreat from a war that should never have started in the first place.

    This approach to military engagement has continued. The challenge was to stop the Houthi rebels in Yemen. The president wanted to crush them and wanted it done in 30 days. Many in the military thought this would not work, but they were sacked.

    The US strategy was to fire lots of missiles at the Houthis. The Houthi strategy was to hide in underground bunkers and wait until the missiles had gone away. The Houthis had the right idea, because they were fighting an enemy who not only had a deadline, but had also broadcast their war plans to the whole world in a “secret” video conference.

    The costs of this are staggering. The US burned through $1bn in this month-long campaign. Stocks of munitions are severely depleted, particularly high-precision and long-range missiles. It has achieved precisely nothing – there has been no change to Houthi operations.

    The president declared “victory” of course.

  • Racists are just idiots

    It’s time to take a stand against racism. The president signed an orange order back in February to address a brewing humanitarian crisis. This is the atrocious way that some whites have lost out in South Africa.

    It breaks the heart. To see these fine specimens, descendants of the great Aryan race, reduced to their present state of online influencers and lifestyle coaches. To make amends for this historical slight, the USA is chartering a jet to fly 49 across the Atlantic, where they can go back to the good old days of blacks being second-class citizens.

    The South African government treats this as the silly political point-scoring that it is. But freedom of choice and all that – they can go if they want to. Probably it will be a relief that they no longer have to deal with a bunch of pampered whiners.

    OK, I have a couple of questions.

    First, why is this necessary in the first place? These people are obviously racially superior. Their pure Nordic stock is clear to all who see them. So why are they doing so badly? Why doesn’t their race simply raise them above the subhumans around them?

    Second, since the US government is explicitly recognising the evils of racial discrimination, why don’t they stop being immensely racist in all their other policies?

    Can’t complain too much. They can make themselves look stupid and squander money. Go ahead.

  • 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.

  • Too much liberation

    Liberation last week. Now no liberation. Or perhaps some liberation. Ordinary USAians have had so much of liberation in the last week, they’ve been panic buying stuff before the prices are liberated by tariffs.

    At any rate, there is now a standard tariff of 10% on everybody except China. These two countries are effectively running a trade blockade against each other, until smugglers find a way around it.

    All part of the plan, says Lutnick. Something something markets something dumping US bonds bad, says an orange word salad on Truth Social.

    There is supposed to be a 90 day break until the tariffs are reapplied, but of course nobody believes this. In fact the terms have already been “clarified”, probably with further clarifications to follow, as nobody really knows what is going on. It’s good that they got themselves a strong and decisive leader.

    Presumably the rest of the world will use these 90 days, or however long it turns out this time, to reduce their exposure to the USA as much as possible. It has become a joke among traders that they want pronouns back, in the magical hope that things will go back to the way they were.

    Hopefully they will quieten down for a few weeks and concentrate on terrorising their own population. I feel bad for the USAian citizens, but they created this problem and they should sort it out. Just leave the rest of us alone.

  • Did they use AI for this?

    I’m starting to understand the purge of academics in USAian universities. The regime is not interested in anything they have to say. So why pay for them?

    The new tariffs were announced today. A seemingly random set of numbers, all with huge increases. It didn’t take long to work out what was going on. They have taken the total trade with each country, divided it by the trade deficit with the USA and set this percentage as the new tariff. Essentially, they have converted the US trade deficit into a tax on US citizens.

    Why stop at that point? If tariffs are so good, why not set them at 1000%?

    A few countries have been spared, such as Russia, Belarus and North Korea. For most countries, there is a flat rate of 10%, including the Heard Islands, which are uninhabited, except for penguins. They’ve also hit Diego Garcia, a US naval base, with the same tariff.

    It’s not merely the idiotic policy, but the way they are pursing it. Resentment about countries “cheating” and “victimising” the USA. Vietnam is one of these countries, but all of South East Asia is being clobbered by a policy designed to drive everybody into the arms of China.

    An incredible quote by SoS Howard Lutnick, who said the EU “hate our beef because our beef is beautiful and theirs is weak.” How can anybody say stuff as stupid as this?

    These people are lunatics.

  • Texas sharpshooter fallacy

    Rain here at last. First time this month, we really needed it. It’s not enough, but at least it hasn’t forgotten how to rain.

    Meanwhile, over in the USA, measles is spreading in eighteen states. Doctors are telling people to get vaccinated, but they are shouting into the wind. Decades of undermining medicine and science are paying off.

    RFK is again responsible for this. But good news, he’s found somebody to lead his vanity project which will definitively establish the link between vaccination and autism.

    This man is David Geyer. He has no experience in research, clinical or otherwise. He does however have medical experience, at least he did until they took his licence away. That was for lying about his credentials, and maltreating autistic children.

    The last point is the clue. It’s depressing looking through his record. You can extrapolate the entire anti-vax movement just by looking at his madness. Now RFK has got somebody who knows the conclusion to the study, all they have to do is find the evidence to fit.

    So typical for the new administration. Loyalty and ideological purity are the watchwords here. Here we have them wasting a lot of money and the expertise of what remains of the CDC in order to prove a logical fallacy.

    All of this and then I read that JD Vance is now calling bullets “freedom seeds”. They are insane, the lot of them.

  • They really mean it

    Lovely warm spring day today. I put a cat tree out next to my front door. Both of my cats have found it and immediately recognised its strategic advantage. They started fighting over possession of it at any rate.

    This being a laboured link to indicate that my cats display more intelligence than the US government at the moment.

    Thousands of government workers have been sacked by DOGE over the last two months, with the destruction still in full swing. I thought this was all inspired by a love for small government. In fact, it looks as though they want to maintain government capabilities by using AI. This is astonishing. It appears they actually believe their own hype about AI.

    Have they ever used AI for anything? Like a google search? It’s useless. It produces walls of readable text, but it can’t tell the difference between fact and fiction, truth or lies. It gives every appearance of doing the same job as a human, much faster, but the results are worse.

    In one sense, this explains why the rulers of the USA are a bunch of amoral liars. They actually believe the things their computers tell them and they don’t have the critical faculties to evaluate the results. On the other hand, they think they can use this unreliable and immature technology to run the country.

    Maybe it will work.