Baffled European

Category: Tyranny

  • The cost of paranoia

    Moody’s lowered the credit rating for the USA last week. They had concerns about the federal deficit. Those concerns have been justified with the new budget proposal, which will raise the deficit by almost $4trillion.

    The headline policies are predictable: a massive giveaway to the president’s friends and clients, to be partly funded by destroying Medicaid. Destroying education, science, research etc are all part of it as well. The Golden Dome makes its appearance with $25bn as a first payment in what is expected to cost $175bn in total. It’s a waste of money, but go ahead.

    What is astonishing is the amount of money they want to spend on racism. ICE will receive $50bn to build a network of concentration camps for up to 200,000 inmates as part of the mania against “illegal immigrants” and anybody else who gets in their way.

    There will be another $30bn to turn ICE into a massive secret police force. This is for hiring, transport and infrastructure, again purely for the perceived necessity to remove undesirables.

    Best of all is a provision that would prevent judicial oversight of what the government is up to. It removes any penalty for the government ignoring an injunction or a contempt charge. Nice.

    This was passed by Republicans. Their great leader told them it would be “ultimate treason” to reject it. It still needs to be passed by the Senate. It’ll be interesting to see how much they accept.

  • The emperor’s new clothes

    The USAian media is taking the line from their emperor-god about Biden and his cancer diagnosis. Many questions about who knew what and when. This led them into one of their favourite topics: whether Biden is going senile or not. Might be the last time they can do this, even though it is now irrelevant.

    It is a real contrast to the way they fawn over Biden’s successor. He was rambling on yesterday about how he’ll win California and New York if there were “honest” elections. That was part of it, at any rate. He kept fading in and out of various topics. He doesn’t really seem to know what he is talking about and cannot maintain a single line of thought for longer than about ten seconds.

    Just straight reporting would question the dubious notion about him winning a slew of straight Democrat states. Not to mention the implied slur that the elections up to now were not honest. Then they could probe what he intends to do to make them fair. And yet all they do is faithfully sanitise this deranged, incoherent garbage.

    CBS had a story talking about the demolition of the IRS, but pulled it to put on a feature about Cajun music instead. PBS edited one of their documentaries to remove a contributor who was critical of the president.

    The press always likes to characterise itself as “telling truth to power.” They are a disgrace.

  • Stasi in their eyes

    ICE Director Thomas Homan is sad. For the last few months, his agents have been arresting people off the streets. Frequently masked, without showing identification, they grab people, bundle them into a van and take them to a detention centre. From this point on, they are transferred from one location to another in an attempt to evade court orders ordering the release of the person they have kidnapped.

    This behaviour has attracted a lot of criticism, such as calling it gestapo tactics. This makes Director Homan particularly sad. It’s not fair to compare his brave, hard-working men to nazis – they are only obeying orders, after all.

    It’s good that he’s sorted out this misunderstanding. There is another that he may have to answer in the near future: why are his men now illegally arresting opposition politicians?

    The Mayor of Newark went to a detention centre with three members of Congress. Congresscritters have the statutory power to enter such facilities at will and conduct inspections without notice. However, they were refused entry. The Mayor was arrested after he left, for trespass apparently, by masked agents and taken away in an unmarked car. The DHS is now considering also arresting the Congress members.

    Republican Representative Dan Bishop commented, “Members of Congress and the Mayor of Newark committed an insurrection… Worse than 9/11… Hunt them down.”

    It sounds like Director Homan is doing exactly the job that is expected of him.

  • Shameful

    The trans military ban is back. This was one of the first actions of Pete Hegseth. He wanted to sack all trans soldiers – over ten thousand of them – because trans people are incapable of “an honorable, truthful, and disciplined lifestyle, even in one’s personal life”.

    That this is obvious nonsense was pointed out by two judges when they overturned the order. You can’t punish a group of people just because of political or ideological reasons.

    Obviously, the administration escalated this to the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court has suspended the injunction against the ban. They did not offer any explanation for their decision. Nor are there any names attached to the ruling, but the 6–3 division leaves no doubt that it is on entirely doctrinal lines.

    The ruling allows two things. First, the government can do as it pleases. Second, litigation can continue in parallel. This can take years and will not prevent thousands of people from having their lives ruined by this capricious government.

    The Supreme Court did exceptionally give a strong ruling about returning Kilmar Abrego Garcia, which the administration is obstructing. However, this case looks to be a more typical example of their approach. They will allow the government to do anything it wants on fine procedural grounds, ignoring the real issue. The administration can salami-slice the constitution with the full blessing of the Supreme Court, regardless of what lower courts say.

    The protections offered by the constitution are effectively gone.

  • Rubber stamp

    Congress doesn’t have much to do these days. Mainly it is a forum for Republicans to coo over their dictator, while Democrats cluck disapprovingly, writing their strongly worded letters.

    It has only passed six laws in the first hundred days. The mob isn’t particularly interested in new laws. There are plenty on the books that they can ignore or abuse. One of these six laws is the Take It Down act. Melania herself wanted this, who could refuse?

    In any normal world, this new law would be a good idea. Designed to take down “deepfake” and revenge porn, it is intended to protect people from onling bullying and persecution. To a tyrant, the law is an effective method of government censorship, a way to clamp down on the free speech of his opponents.

    The key to it all is in the enforcement. Take Twitter, for example, which is owned by Elon Musk. Any violation of the new law will be policed by the FTC, which is currently controlled by Elon Musk.

    Much of the traffic on Facebook nowadays is bots sharing AI pictures with each other. Since Zuck has sworn fealty to the emperor, he has nothing to fear from the law.

    Smaller companies however will be hammered, or merely comply without question. Wikipedia will probably be the prize target.

    Many writers yesterday were complacently assuming the regime is burning out, that it is running into implacable opposition. It’s only just started.

  • 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.

  • Just ICE

    “We will come after you and we will prosecute you. We will find you.” This is Pam Bondi, the Attorney General, threatening judges. Not terrorists, or immigrants, or even transes, but judges. Two judges have been arrested in the last couple of days on the ridiculous charge of obstructing ICE agents from deporting somebody.

    Maybe difficult to top, but she has also issued a memo saying ICE can enter any home without a warrant. Who voted for that? Now they are deporting children – US citizens – while their parents are trying to stop the process.

    She got the job by being a presenter on Fox News, her boss’s favourite channel, and for taking a bribe from him to avoid an investigation into his diploma mill. At some point, she worked on his first impeachment trial, but she was only one of many. That Fox job – she was Florida Attorney General at the time. She was challenged on ethical grounds about this, but lied a lot and got away with it.

    Corrupt, obviously. Also racist, bloodthirsty and spiteful. And, as with so many others in the gang, a big fan of Russia. Part of her vandalism has been to disband the agencies that investigate or sanction Russian oligarchs.

    Since becoming Attorney General, her job seems to be to appear on Fox News as often as possible in order to tell many obvious and unfounded lies as possible. She’s the ideal person to destroy the justice system.

  • 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.

  • Dead wrong

    In one of his last acts as president, Biden commuted the sentences of 37 federal prisoners on death row (out of 40) to life sentences without parole.

    This act of clemency stirred up an orange fury, with the result that all the prisoners have been transferred to ADX, a maximum security prison, where they are being kept in solitary confinement. They have now entered a plea with the courts, saying quite reasonably that there is no good reason for them to be reclassified, it’s all just sadistic cruelty by the administration.

    There will be no such acts of clemency in the near future. Since 1988, there have been 16 federal execution, with 13 of those being enforced by Biden’s predecessor in the last six months of his office. The current proclamations demand the death penalty be used as often as possible and enforced quickly. He also wants to extend the range of the punishment to include non-capital offences such as drug trafficking. Of course, crimes by immigrants will receive the harshest sentence. This should apply to South African ketamine addicts, but probably won’t.

    With the federal death row empty, they are trying to find a way to get death penalties for these prisoners at the state level. Aside from this, they are encouraging and assisting the states to use the death penalty as much as possible.

    It’s a death cult, isn’t it? What is this obsession with killing people?