Baffled European

Category: Oligarch

  • The best free press money can buy

    I’ve tried to ignore the Jeff Bezos wedding as much as possible. Unfortunately, when people are determined to give attention to an attention-seeker, it’s hard to avoid.

    There was a time when this billionaire spent all his money on TV programmes. Stuff like The Man In The High Castle, The Rings Of Power, the Top Gear trio. All expensive, and actually quite good. This is the acceptable face of billionaires throwing their money around.

    The wedding on the other hand was just total megalomania. Renting Venice for the occasion. All of these oligarchs, they can do anything. They can buy anything. Laws don’t mean anything to them. Only a few governments can stand up to them and even they can be bought. These are the most powerful men in the world and they are literally detached from reality.

    Bezos has bought Vogue for his new wife. As in the entire magazine, including the publishing house, how sweet. The deal includes other magazines such as Wired. Now Wired has been doing a good job recently of keeping track of what the US government and all the tech bros have been up to.

    We already know what Bezos is like as a proprietor from his performance at the Washington Post. Like all proprietors, he keeps a tight rein on what his journalists print and make sure his editorial line is strictly observed. He can afford to buy his reality.

  • Management

    When it was introduced, Tesla claimed a ten year waiting list for the Cybertruck. This was based on preorders, which disappeared rapidly as the problems with the vehicle became clear. Tesla is now stockpiling Cybertrucks, with an estimated six months inventory parked in fields, unsold. Heavy discounting, attractive specifications, nothing works – nobody wants to buy them. It’s too expensive to close the factory, so they continue to produce them. The stockpile grows.

    Intergalactic superbrain and 4D chess grandmaster Elon Musk is the man responsible for this situation. Of course, he is also the man charged with raising the efficiency of the US government. Let’s take a quick look at how that’s been progressing.

    The head of FEMA was sacked yesterday and has been replaced by another lackey. He should have a good four or five weeks to get his feet under the desk before the first hurricane.

    All 37 divisions of the National Science Foundation are being abolished. The aim is to give more political control over the remains of what science is being conducted.

    The head librarian has been fired. She was also responsible for the Copyright Office and so stood in the way of the various AI machines trying to steal other people’s work.

    National parks are being hit with another round of layoffs, the science directorates being disproportionately hit. The remainder is subject to crippling bureaucracy and micromanagement.

    There’s more. Thank goodness they have such a gifted manager.

  • Fallen star

    Energy Star was set up in 1992 to reduce the energy requirements of computers. Its success led to similar standards for lighting, heating and other appliances. Loads of numbers are thrown around to show its effectiveness: TLDR; it costs little and saves a lot.

    Obviously, maga denies climate change as part of their general rejection of reality. However ignorant and irrational, it is at least predictable. For some reason, they are also rejecting energy efficiency measures as well. Presumably the two issues are so tightly linked in their brains, they are unable to see any difference.

    They are cancelling Energy Star in the name of government efficiency. There will be no further drive to reduce energy consumption of equipment, nor will there be any further ratings of new products. This will hit all consumers, business as well as private.

    What is striking about this is the extravagent, willful waste of it all. It’s not enough for them to convince themselves that reality is a left wing conspiracy, they have to behave in the most inefficient way possible.

    Surely even those who hate environmental politics must recognise the value of lowering your outgoings? Is it about owning the libs? Or is it because the country is being run by oligarchs who don’t care about the cost?

    Whatever, they think they can outperform the rest of the world by being less efficient and having higher costs. It’s an interesting idea. See how it works.

  • 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.

  • Tech solves everything

    As secretary of the interior, Doug Burgum has got everything he ever wanted.

    First, and perhaps most importantly, he has a supply of freshly baked cookies that his staff bake for him in the department.

    Secondly, he is responsible for the management of federal lands and natural resources. In principle then, he is looking after reservations for Native Americans, conserve fisheries, perform geological surveys and maintain monuments.

    That’s the theory at any rate. He has turned 600k hectares of Alaskan wildlife refuge over to oil drilling. This is in addition to demands for more drilling on federal lands, as well as coal mining. An off-shore wind farm in New York has however been cancelled

    The rest of his remit is simple: he’s got rid of it. He has handed over the National Parks to one of Musk’s minions, also an oil company executive. A safe pair of hands.

    Digging into his weird ideas led me to something I had never encountered before: de-extinction. The idea seems to be that it is not necessary to do any sort of nature conservation. Exploit the land as much as you want and kill all the life there. Later, you can use some magic tech to recreate all of those extinct animals.

    Do the tech bros actually believe this, or do they think other people believe their fantasies? They are so far removed from reality, I’m tempted to think, yes to both. And these idiots are in charge.

  • 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.

  • The value of your investments…

    Stock market crash seems to have no end. I’ve lost money because of it, but then so has virtually everybody who has money in there somewhere. Except Warren Buffett apparently, who evidently saw the disaster coming.

    Hardest hit it seems are the tech boys. Nobody has any sympathy for them. Not least because of their incredible arrogance, but also because they so desperately wanted a failed businessman as president. Presumably they thought they would be able to control him and have only now found out that the mafia doesn’t work that way.

    In any case, the tech stocks have been hugely overvalued and this crash is providing a correction. If the market loses trust, it will punish the dodgy investments first. It seems they are not the geniuses we all thought they were.

    This still leaves the protection racket that the rest of the world has to deal with. The problem is that the mob don’t seem to have worked out their price, or what constitutes success. So far, retaliation (China), negotiation (EU), and capitulation (many others) hasn’t brought any relief: just more threats.

    What can possibly work? And if a “deal” is struck, what is it worth? Does anybody trust the president? He changes his mind constantly, doesn’t seem to know what he is doing, and agrees with whoever spoke to him last. Beyond that, as the USA destroys itself from within, are they even able to keep an agreement?

  • Whatever it takes

    It wasn’t the tyrannical behaviour. Not the repeated violations of the holy First Amendment. Nor was it the destruction of government agencies. It certainly wasn’t the persecution of the transes. Gangsterism on the international stage was excused. So was insulting foreign leaders and betraying long standing allies. Sucking up to dictators was tacitly approved. The outright contempt for the rule of law is something that people are conditioned to by now. Even blabbing out state secrets in a video conference is no cause for concern.

    A stock market crash, though, that’s a different matter. That’s what brought millions of USAians out to protest across all 50 states. Each person will have their own reasons, but the important thing is for them to see they are together. And it’s only a start, but that’s important in itself.

    However, ordinary people are not the only protesters, with rumours of various oligarchs complaining privately to the reality TV host. The crash last week wiped out over six trillion dollars. Just two months ago, the Wall St. traders were exhilarated by their new freedom to say “pussy” and “retard”. Owning the libs. Was it worth it? Do they have any influence?

    The USA seems to be trying to create as many major crises as possible, while simultaneously destroying all government capacity to deal with them. At some point, something must break, and very badly.

  • 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.

  • Pump and drumpf

    It appears official US government policy is to keep the share price of Tesla above $200. The full force of the government is being deployed to achieve this. The idiot-in-chief has literally performed a sales pitch to sell the cars, and is now designating Tesla protests as “domestic terrorism”.

    Howard Lutnick, SoS for commerce, tells the public to buy Tesla stock, great buy. He must know, having made a big investment himself, which he has not yet divested as required by anti-corruption regulations.

    Elon Musk is doing his part to pump the share price by making absurd promises again. This time, he wants to build 5000 useless robots. He has also told Tesla employees that they shouldn’t sell their shares. That’s reassuring. He really ought to tell Tesla directors and executives, who have been selling millions of shares in the last couple of weeks.

    Still, there is something that he doesn’t quite understand. Why don’t “liberals” just passively accept what is happening? Libs are soft, touchy-feely beta cucks who are incapable of direct action. That means somebody must be directing them. Elon knows who this is. It’s George Soros.

    You have to feel sorry for these people. They are the rulers of the most powerful nation in the world and they are being thwarted by a Jewish conspiracy. Why is it always the Jews? And why am I not surprised?