Baffled European

Blog

  • 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.

  • Make Canada Great Again

    Pierre Poilievre aligned himself with the new fascism of the USA. Despite many of his standpoints being relatively sane and normal for right-wing politics, he leaned enthusiastically into the culture wars and was viewed as a puppet of the president to the south. He even borrowed the slogan.

    In January, the Canadian Conservative party had a lead of 23% over the ruling Liberal party – a combination of them being in power for too long and a very unpopular Prime Minister. Poilievre was expected to capitalise on the coronation of his mentor in the USA and lead his party to government.

    The talk of the 51st state ended this. On the eve of the election, the dictator was making it sound so tempting, talking about the military power of the USA and how there would be zero tariffs. That being the military he is using to threaten the country, and the tariffs he raised himself. The usual insults and myopic greed, basically.

    It’s hard to get past this. Poilievre has lost not only the election, but his own seat in parliament as well. The Conservatives are already descending into civil war, with various lunatics insisting they weren’t insane enough. This party division shows they weren’t fit to rule.

    Congratulations to Mark Carney. A boring technocrat who has tapped into the real popular spirit of the Canadian electorate. It’s going to be a difficult job with the maniacs to the south, but hopefully he will pull through.

  • Holiday in Cambodia

    Two 19 year old German women decided to take a trip to Hawaii. A day later, after being strip-searched and interrogated for hours, they were deported back to Germany. Appalling, of course, but at least it’s not El Salvador.

    This sort of thing has been going on since the start of the new administration, but is not letting up. As a result, the number of visitors from Europe to the USA has dropped by 30%. Still more Canadians are avoiding the country: they’ve been threatened with annexation as well.

    It’s obviously a bad thing for the tourist industry, which looks to be in big trouble if this continues into the summer. By coincidence, the effects of the trade war should hit at the same time.

    I think I’ve worked out the strategy.

    There are 12 million people working in tourism. Hotels, shopping, events, guides and so on. At the same time, there is a shortage of people to staff the new factories. Sewing machines, welding, assembly, packaging, that sort of thing.

    If the new factories are all ready in time, and if they manage to sort out the supply chain problems, these extra workers will come in handy. Provided their skills are transferrable, and maybe also if they are in the right location. Could work.

    Maybe this is what the president means when he says the tourism collapse is “not a problem”. He’s looking forward to the new tourist resort in Gaza.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • Ampelalphamännchen

    “Hi, this is Elon Musk. They say money can’t buy happiness, and I guess that’s true. God knows I’ve tried. But it can buy a Cybertruck, so that’s pretty sick, right? Fuck, I’m so alone.”

    This is the message played by a pedestrian crossing in California when you press the button to cross the road. Similar AI generated recordings of Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg have been added to crossings in other states.

    It’s quite easy to do. The magic boxes on the traffic lights run some software which is configured over a Bluetooth connection. If you have the app and the correct password, you’re in and you can reconfigure the crossing to do as you want. The default password is “1234”. Polara, the manufacturer, gives strong warnings about changing it before putting the device into public use. This seems like sensible advice, but obviously nobody does it.

    Polara has removed the app from Google Play Store, which will at least slow down any copycat hacks. Local authorities have reset the devices, presumably setting a proper password this time.

    “Hey, it’s Zuck here. I just want to tell you how very proud I am of everything we’ve been building together. From undermining democracy to cooking our grandparents’ brains with AI slop, to — to making the world less safe for trans people. Nobody does it better than us, and, uh, and I think that’s pretty neat. Zuck out!”

  • 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.