Baffled European

Category: Plain stupidity

  • 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.

  • Vladimir, STOP!

    The Art Of The Deal. A book that was not written, or even read, by the man named as its author. Despite this, he enjoys a reputation for being a deal-maker. People must be listening to what he says about his great business successes and believing him.

    A notorious boast was about achieving peace in Ukraine within 24 hours. Three months in and the USA has finally negotiated a peace deal. They have found the best way to do this is to only talk to Russia and agree a modern-day Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, but not secret.

    A senior Russian general was blown up in a car bomb in Moscow earlier today, which is presumably Ukraine’s answer to the proceedings.

    The EU and NATO have also rejected the terms. This is what happens when you don’t include all major stakeholders in the negotiations. So it is a non-starter and a big waste of everybody’s time.

    What next? Presumably, the USA will abandon the whole process and blame Ukraine, the EU, the woke mind virus or anything. The result is that we are exactly where we were before the master negotiator took over, but that the USA has now made itself look extremely foolish in front of the whole world. It has alienated its friends and allies, while demonstrating its weakness to everybody else.

    Maybe they will have more luck with the trade war they have started with China. Useless, they are, utterly useless.

  • Lose-lose

    The USA has been the leading country for research and innovation since WWII. The government itself has done very little of this work. It decided back then to outsource the work to universities. There were a few steps between what the president wanted and what the universities did, but that’s what happens when you delegate and don’t try to micromanage.

    As with so many other things, it’s easy to take this success for granted, to assume it is the natural order of things. But what happens if the president does try to micromanage the research? What if the president doesn’t understand the system he is in charge of? What if he is a gangster as well?

    In this case, research money is not there for the good of the country, but as a means to threaten and extort. He thinks that everybody is like him and only interested in money, and that they will do anything to protect the precious government grant money.

    Harvard has done the calculation. If they give in, they will lose their reputation for academic independence and excellence. The brightest and best will go elsewhere, where they can pursue their research outside of a dictatorship. If they resist, the brightest and best will still go elsewhere, because there is no government money to pay them – but they retain their integrity and reputation. If they can weather the storm.

    They are suing the government. Other universities are taking note.

  • Dividing by zero

    RFK has been talking about autism again. It’s pretty clear he has no idea what he’s talking about. This should make it easy for the study he has set up to establish definitively the link between vaccination and autism: if you don’t understand either the cause or the effect, it’s not hard to find a connection.

    It is all a bit offensive though and does give the suspicion he’s looking to find some useless eaters that he can remove from the population to strengthen the stock. He will be helped in this aim with the new autism registry to track USAians with autism. This will be set up as part of the research he is conducting.

    They are consistent. They invest enormous amounts of energy identifying people who do not fit their ideal: blacks, latinos, gays, transes, women, etc – and then they discriminate against them. Now they’ve got another group that they can identify, then demonise and dehumanise. Followed by persecution. This seems to be their policy on every single issue.

    On one level, I suppose it’s a reaction to the diversity policies of the past. If one side celebrates diversity, there needs to be another side that punishes it, right? At its root is just the same old racist mentality, dividing people into arbitrary groups and rating them. All the while keeping themselves at the top of the pile.

    When you get the basics so wrong, everything else follows.

  • 25th Amendment time

    Presidential Easter messages are usually anodyne, boilerplate stuff. Peace and happiness. Something Christian about sacrifice. That sort of thing. This year’s edition broke from tradition by adopting an incoherent rant about the president’s enemies and his grievances against them. It is clear that the man is completely insane and that Congress should remove him quickly.

    This was the prelude to a new trade offensive. Acclaimed trade expert “Ron Vara” has evidently uncovered a multitude of new ways in which the world is cheating the USA. It is pointless for anybody to attempt to negotiate with the constantly moving target of USAian demands. That’s assuming they even respect the agreements they make.

    First signs of the trade war are starting to hit the USA. A sudden and dramatic collapse in shipping has caused many truckers to be laid off as there is nothing for them to transport. Logistics people are predicting a drop in traffic more severe than during Covid. Once stockpiles run out, shortages will be endemic in the country.

    This is partly because of China’s response. The Chinese are basically blocking all exports of various critical minerals for the semiconductor industry. More shortages of stuff that the USA can’t supply themselves. Although there might be deposits in Greenland.

    The White House has been anxiously asking China if they want to schedule an audience with the President to discuss trade, but China is not interested. Let’s see if the USA blinks first.

  • Did they lobotomise RFK as well?

    April is Sexual Assault Awareness Month in the USA. To mark the occasion, RFK has disbanded all the agencies working on prevention of sexual violence. All that remains are a few people to answer the phone and say they can’t do anything. Trade Unionists: beware of Labor Day.

    This falls under sacking people who are “DEI appointments”, a catch all for racism, sexism, transphobia, etc, which seems to be an acceptable term in polite society and the press. From the people sacked under this rule, about 20% have been rehired. RFK claims this is all part of the plan. Sorry, but what management strategy is this? How is it part of an efficiency drive?

    Whatever. RFK says it is all to do with the Deep State which has captured agencies. Does he really believe this stuff? Probably. He talks endless nonsense about the damage caused by vaccines and “environmental toxins”. His solution is nutrition quackery, but declines to do anything about it. Everybody has a choice about their health, he reckons. If they die, it’s their fault. Why should he do anything about it?

    Maybe the most unhinged idea is that people were healthier when he was a child than they are now. This is such patent rubbish he must only say it to waste people’s time refuting it. But maybe he genuinely believes there was an idyll when he was a child and all in the world was well? Is he really trying to recreate this?