Baffled European

Tag: corruption

  • Nonsense summary

    There’s been an outbreak of e-coli in Florida caused by people drinking raw milk. More cancellations of vaccine and other medical research as well.

    Nebraska is suffering a deep recession, with a 6% contraction in the economy this year so far.

    The Ford Motor Company posted a loss in Q2 of this year. They blame the tariffs, which are expected to cost the company $2billion this year.

    The price of everything is going up, except for eggs. These tariffs are biting.

    Bad weather and people are losing their homes and livelihoods because of storm damage. FEMA shrugs and ignores this. People need to pull themselves up by the bootstraps. Small government is the future.

    Except when it comes to racism. The immigration mania continues, there’s no way to stop it now.

    Amazingly, the Epstein stuff is still going on. Epstein’s greatest friend has not been able to shake away the story and people are asking questions.

    I’ve been away from this blog for the last month. I simply haven’t had the patience or enthusiasm to follow the experiment going on over in the USA. It’s not that it takes that much time, just that it is greater than zero and therefore more than I’m prepared to waste on watching a convicted fraudster steal hundreds of millions from his adoring followers. It’s all variations on illegal and inhumane stuff. They are inventive, but it gets to be too much.

  • Freedom and liberty

    “What’s your message to communist Zohdan?”

    A question at Tuesday’s press conference.

    How things have changed since January. The new administration banned AP from press conferences because they were insufficiently positive towards the president. They sued against the decision and won. The regime blocked them anyway.

    By now, all recognised press organisations have been banned from official press conferences. What remains are a set of influencers from Twitter and Youtube who agree with the project and will flatter the president appropriately. It’s no wonder he hated the NATO presser so much last week. That was the first time he has faced real questions for ages.

    “We’ll have to arrest him,” came the reply. “We don’t need a communist.” He went on to threaten a number of other political opponents with deportation, some of whom were born in the USA.

    Bondi is on the case, trying to find ways to suppress opposition.

    That’s where we are, less than six months in. The president talks about arresting and deporting his enemies to a tame press and that’s the way things are.

    Then there’s also the reports from Abrego Garcia’s trial, where he describes the harrowing torture the regime put him through. No wonder they tried so hard to stop him coming back. This is another one of the changes we have seen.

    I’m taking a break from this for a week or so. I’ve had enough of these monsters.

  • Keystone Kops

    I don’t know how else to put this, but US cops are not very good.

    They went in all gung-ho in the first wave of unrest in LA. I sort of got that, they wanted to show who was boss and don’t mess with us. However, the way they kept getting surrounded by protesters and then having to fight their way out with plastic bullets and tear gas, that shouldn’t happen at all.

    For all the criticisms you might level against European police, they do seem to have some idea of strategy and tactics. They are the ones doing the surrounding and they stay in charge. The USAians appear poorly trained and incompetent by comparison. Not to mention the hyper-aggressive attitude, like berserkers. It’s as if they did a couple of lines before heading out.

    The NoKings demonstrations were peaceful, amazingly so considering the vast numbers of people present. An MSNBC reporter was present, broadcasting about how there was no trouble, when the police suddenly, for no apparent reason, began firing at the crowd, causing the reporter and everybody else to scatter.

    Then there was the time when the LAPD and the LASD decided to corral a group of demonstrators. But without any coordination. This resulted in the sheriffs opening fire on the police with rubber bullets. The police responded with tear gas against the unmasked sheriffs.

    One thing was certain. The demonstrators were to blame for the injuries to all these officers.

  • Die Würde des Menschen ist unantastbar

    I have a problem with the Supreme Court of the USA. This is unlikely to bother the justices there, but I’m going to complain anyway.

    The issue this time is lifting the protections that 300000 Venezuelans had against deportation. The Supreme Court has decided that they shouldn’t receive the protection of the law as a group, but rather fight each case on an individual basis. This is the same solution that they found with the purge of trans soldiers from the military.

    Laws control and limit human behaviour. They allow society to function by discouraging a range of destructive impulses. At the same time, they protect us and promote acceptable behaviour. Most of all, the law should be viewed as a system created by humans in order to serve humans.

    There is a breed of judge which regards the law as a clever logic puzzle. It is an enclosed, (fairly) consistent system, which can produce very unexpected results, if you set your mind to it.

    This approach enslaves humans to the law. So what if hundreds of thousands of people have their lives ruined? So what if it leaves them at the mercy of an over-powerful and vengeful executive? It fits in with their interpretation of the law, fine.

    Germany doesn’t get everything right, but emphasising human dignity in the first line of the constitution sets a good example. It tells judges exactly where their priorities lie. The US judges are failing at their job.

  • 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.

  • 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”.

  • Too much liberation

    Liberation last week. Now no liberation. Or perhaps some liberation. Ordinary USAians have had so much of liberation in the last week, they’ve been panic buying stuff before the prices are liberated by tariffs.

    At any rate, there is now a standard tariff of 10% on everybody except China. These two countries are effectively running a trade blockade against each other, until smugglers find a way around it.

    All part of the plan, says Lutnick. Something something markets something dumping US bonds bad, says an orange word salad on Truth Social.

    There is supposed to be a 90 day break until the tariffs are reapplied, but of course nobody believes this. In fact the terms have already been “clarified”, probably with further clarifications to follow, as nobody really knows what is going on. It’s good that they got themselves a strong and decisive leader.

    Presumably the rest of the world will use these 90 days, or however long it turns out this time, to reduce their exposure to the USA as much as possible. It has become a joke among traders that they want pronouns back, in the magical hope that things will go back to the way they were.

    Hopefully they will quieten down for a few weeks and concentrate on terrorising their own population. I feel bad for the USAian citizens, but they created this problem and they should sort it out. Just leave the rest of us alone.

  • Unreal

    China and the USA are biting chunks out of each other, raising the ante over tariffs. Incredible as it seems, China is the honest actor, by being basically rational and genuinely the victim in this battle.

    It’s worth looking at what else is happening in the land of fantasy economics. President Bonespurs wants a strong military, and is planning a Pentagon budget of $1trillion. Maybe they’ve saved enough money from social security and destroying the health system to pay for this.

    Savings from USAID will definitely cover the network of “detention centers” that they want to build around the country, in order to process “immigrants” or whoever else crosses their path.

    There are plans for a large military parade through Washington to honour the president on his birthday. The timetable is a bit tight though. Maybe they will get it done in time.

    Of course, the money wasn’t allocated for any of these things, but Congress doesn’t seem to mind. They aren’t doing anything to stop it at any rate.

    Getting away from the money, there is one positive thing for us Germans – we don’t need to worry about any guilt about the shoah anymore. At least not according to the Leader of the Free World, who talked about the generous and kind treatment that the Jews received from the nazis. Netanyahu was sitting next to him. Unlike Zelensky – who answered back – Bibi just took it. Disgraceful.

  • Texas sharpshooter fallacy

    Rain here at last. First time this month, we really needed it. It’s not enough, but at least it hasn’t forgotten how to rain.

    Meanwhile, over in the USA, measles is spreading in eighteen states. Doctors are telling people to get vaccinated, but they are shouting into the wind. Decades of undermining medicine and science are paying off.

    RFK is again responsible for this. But good news, he’s found somebody to lead his vanity project which will definitively establish the link between vaccination and autism.

    This man is David Geyer. He has no experience in research, clinical or otherwise. He does however have medical experience, at least he did until they took his licence away. That was for lying about his credentials, and maltreating autistic children.

    The last point is the clue. It’s depressing looking through his record. You can extrapolate the entire anti-vax movement just by looking at his madness. Now RFK has got somebody who knows the conclusion to the study, all they have to do is find the evidence to fit.

    So typical for the new administration. Loyalty and ideological purity are the watchwords here. Here we have them wasting a lot of money and the expertise of what remains of the CDC in order to prove a logical fallacy.

    All of this and then I read that JD Vance is now calling bullets “freedom seeds”. They are insane, the lot of them.

  • Procrastination makes you go blind

    Big protests in Türkiye. Erdogan has imprisoned his main rival. The Türks have clearly had enough of their dictator and are trying to get rid of him. I wish them all the best.

    Reading through news feeds and the stories of protests, authoritarianism and government violence, I have to check carefully if it is about Türkiye or the USA. Judging by responses on social media, I’m not the only one to be confused.

    The US media is not so confused. They know how to deal with stories like this. It’s some unstable foreign country, where they don’t value freedom anyway because they are not white and what else do you expect. The complacency of the media can be explained to a large extent by their oligarch owners.

    And the opposition? AOC is making an effort, but the Democrats are relying on procedure and precedent to solve the problem. They have set their red line for when the government defies the Supreme Court. Then they will spring into action.

    Two problems with this. First is that the bad guys already routinely ignore other courts already, no need to wait. Second, it presumes that there will be a clash between the Executive and Supreme Court.

    The mob is running rampant. Their mates in the Supreme Court will just nod approvingly. The Democrat strategy is to pray to their constitution to save them, until such time as they are told to shut up.