Baffled European

Blog

  • 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.

  • Snafu

    There were a few issues counting against Pete Hegseth when he was proposed as SoS for Defense. There was the wife-beating, the far-right tattoos, the philandering, the lack of any relevant experience outside of presenting a show on Fox News, and him being an alcoholic. His confirmation was close-run, with JD Vance supplying the casting vote.

    His actions since then have shown his determination to stamp out wokeness. First by sacking trans, black and female soldiers. Evidently righting historical wrongs, he has renamed an army base after a Confederate general. He has also gone through naval libraries, removing books such as “Memorializing the Holocaust”, but keeping “Mein Kampf”. Priorities.

    A recent memo instructs the army to suspend all recreational activities other than those for sport or fitness. Soldiers will no longer be allowed to play pool, darts or cards to unwind. I guess the beatings will continue until morale improves.

    I guess he thinks these are all steps in the right direction, but he has overlooked the danger posed by the straight white cis males that he appointed. A leak enquiry has implicated his chief of staff, the deputy and his senior advisor in releasing top secret operational information to the public.

    They have all been sacked. Combined with previous purges, this leaves a huge hole in the leadership at the Pentagon, with more chaos expected. Hopefully this will prevent them from starting any wars in the near future.

  • Delusional

    Marco Rubio is worried about freedom of speech. “People out there, they put a post,” he says, “and they – a cop comes knocking on their door: You’re going to go to jail for 60 days for posting something online.”

    Terrible.

    He knows what’s important, and that is not “attacking Americans who are exercising their First Amendment rights.”

    Absolutely.

    That would be great. However, he seems to be talking about Europe and the attacks on freedom of speech on this continent. He’s very concerned about just how bad things have got.

    He admits it has been a problem in the USA until recently. Anti-vaxxers, racists and cranks of all sorts have been banned from Twitter and that is against freedom of speech. What’s more, it was the fault of the State Department. Therefore they are changing the State Department so that it better suits the interests of the US citizens.

    Back to Europe and the EU Digital Services Act. This demands a basic level of respect for truth and decency, something which Twitter has routinely failed to offer. Musk is expected to be hit with a big fine for non-compliance with basically everything. It turns out this is the attack on freedom of speech that exercises Rubio more than any other.

    Meanwhile in the USA, a Russian student – speaking anonymously, of course – describes the climate of fear in US universities as being “like Russia”.

  • 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?

  • Legal difficulties

    Law firms were an early target for the administration. The criminals see the law as either a hindrance or a tool they can use for oppression. They need to control the lawyers, even if they can’t control the judges.

    Much of the chaos in the country is caused by Executive Orders. People view them as if they are legal documents. Royal proclamations. Everybody must jump to the president’s will. However, they are merely glorified memorandums, directing the government bureaucracy to focus on certain tasks. And yet everybody behaves as if this is a new law that must be obeyed.

    Law firms should know this. When a new orange order comes along targeting them, they should simply use the massive legal firepower they have to tell the government to mind its own business. Instead, they have simply turned their legal services over to the government. Good for the government – not only do they get free service, but fewer opponents.

    At least there is now some resistance. Other firms are being targeted. By now, the bad intentions of the regime are obvious. In any case, like all protection rackets, the extortionists have taken the first payment and are now coming back for more.

    These efforts are succeeding, for the time being. At the same time, Harvard has commendably taken a stand to defend its independence and integrity from maga’s ideological attacks. They may as well go down fighting than just simply give in.

  • 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?

  • Making a summer

    The immigrants are back. Swallows are flying into my woodshed, looking for a place to nest. They’ll find it – I’ve screwed a piece of wood to the rafters. It’s nice for them up there, and safe from the cats. I find this approach better than brooding over imagined resentments, before working myself into a lather of ever-escalating rage until I burn down the woodshed. But then I’m an old-fashioned type.

    There are developments in the Abrego Garcia case. The government went to the Supreme Court in an attempt to get Judge Xinis removed from the case. The Supreme Court very firmly gave the case back to her. She is now demanding that the government return Garcia to the USA, and to give daily progress updates. The government is refusing to comply.

    Will this end up as the constitutional crisis that everybody is waiting for? It’s going to happen at some point, so why not this case?

    Assuming it gets there, it’s hard to see the Supreme Court giving in on this. They want to be able to deal with people by themselves, without being subordinate. If they accept that the government can simply disappear people without the courts getting involved, they are basically powerless.

    Maybe it’s best that this is sorted out now. The government is attempting to deport or rendition thousands of people, because they think these people might be criminals. No evidence. Please clarify the situation.

  • Nixon could see this

    When a river literally catches fire, you know you have a problem. The Cuyahoga river was less a body of water than a thick, toxic, oily gloop filled with junk that slowly oozed its way into Lake Eyrie. Warmed by the outflow from power stations, it was incapable of supporting life and poisoned everything it touched. It caught fire in 1969. Again.

    Investigations into the fire led to the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency. The EPA was intended to clear up the mess that humans had left behind, while at the same time preventing this sort of thing from happening again. Such an agency is always going to be attacked from both sides, but it is undeniable that it has fulfilled its remit.

    Undeniable that is, except to a clutch of fanatics who deny reality. The EPA has been attacked by DOGE, as with everything else. The scale and extent of the destruction is the same as elsewhere. It is essentially being reduced to a placeholder agency, presumably to fulfill statutory requirements, but without any power or ability to do anything.

    This is the most frustrating thing about the new order. It’s as if they are looking at every mistake that humans have made in the last hundred years and they are determined to repeat them. And they do it with such enthusiasm. They have absolutely no understanding of how the world works or why. And these are the people who are in charge.

  • You can do anything with computers these days

    It’s 2025, a quarter of the way through the 21st century. I’m stuck by the way I still so often think in 20th century terms. I was wondering how the administration will spy on its citizens and I initially imagined millions of inoffizielle Mitarbeiter informing the government about the indiscretions of family, friends and colleagues. The answer is staring me in the face as I write.

    Beyond destroying government departments, DOGE has been consistently targeting databases. Getting these is illegal, but that’s hardly a problem. They can now move all the data from all branches of government into a single dataset. At this point, the government can find out literally everything about anybody they want.

    On top of this is social media. They’ve already got AI trawling through everybody’s accounts, looking for signs of dissent. It’s just practice at the moment, getting rid of foreigners. It will work for everybody else just as well soon enough.

    It’s something AI is very good at. Fast and cheap. Produces pretty good results. It will make frequent mistakes, but that’s no problem. Collateral damage. None of those obeying Grok are going to question who to sack or disappear. It’s not their job and it takes too much time anyway. Who cares if you ruin a person’s life anyway? Empathy is causing the Downfall Of Western Civilisation.

    The best we can hope is that Peter Thiel is incompetent.

  • Trans obsession

    Maine has distinguished itself by not implementing a set of illegal orange orders intended to persecute transes. The astonishingly thin-skinned president has reacted by withdrawing money for school dinners. Classy. And illegal. He is also now illegally withholding money for the Maine prison system for the same reason.

    Southern states are taking the initiative. Florida has just sacked a teacher for calling a student by their preferred name, not as recorded on their birth certificate. This is a new law that they are zealously enforcing. Mississippi is banning all books about trans from public and research libraries on the grounds of “obscenity”.

    RFK is putting the NIH over to studying transition “regret” as part of his effort to destroy science and punish scientists. He’s got the best worm-eaten brains working on a report to say trans doesn’t exist.

    Trans people exist because they say they exist. Maga, on the other hand insists that transes don’t exist. This isn’t a difference of opinion, “both siding”. On the one hand, transes are an observable pattern of human behaviour which is consistent across the world; on the other, maga makes a blunt assertion forced through by the power of the state. Maga is telling people what they must feel or believe, and how they must lead their lives. They don’t listen to anybody: they order people what to think. Or else.

    It is rank, irrational prejudice. This is after only three months.