“POTUS doing X at Kremlin’s behest”

get used to seeing more headlines like this

I hate how realistic this is.

Comedy? Did they mean self-inflating shoulder clapping racist mysogynist guffawing?

I struggle to imagine that somebody would put one of those on the coffee table when they’re entertaining guests.

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We’re already getting MAGA, thanks to the internet. It’s called far-right populism. Many of their takes are taken over from the X crazies 1:1. Sometimes they don’t even fit our situation. No matter. Flooding the zone is all that counts.

This is how I always understood Berliner Weisse: it’s more a basis for a drink than a beer in its own right.

But I think most Berliner Weisse are already sold with some taste added.

Aww I love Shostakovich. He almost died under Stalin, but decided to play along afterwards. Still, anyone who doesn’t understand that his music was deeply critical of the system - well, doesn’t understand his music.

Unfortunately, in their world it works perfectly, because of “systemic oppression of white christian family values”.

The whole thing (government takeover? Coup?) is a smoking gun.

And if we ever get back from this, that will be their downfall. There’s no deniability, plausible or otherwise.

Audience members had undergone a full Secret Service security check as Vance’s motorcade drew up at the US’s national performing arts centre, delaying the start of the concert by 25 minutes.

After news of the reaction to Vance at the concert emerged, Richard Grenell, interim director of the Kennedy Center who was recently appointed by Trump, said the crowd was “intolerant”.

In February, Donald Trump sacked the chairman of the Kennedy Center board along with 13 of its trustees, appointing himself the new chair, bringing in foreign policy adviser and close ally Richard Grenell as interim leader, and naming new board members (…)

“So we took over the Kennedy Center,” the president said at the time. “We didn’t like what they were showing and various other things. We’re going to make sure that it’s good and it’s not going to be woke. There’s no more woke in this country.”

Who ruined this place, JD?

Several senior Office of Personnel Management (OPM) political appointees (…) have significant ties to Musk’s businesses, either holding large financial stakes in his companies or on a leave of absence from one of his enterprises.

OPM sets government-wide human resources policies and has become one of the central hubs for Musk’s and the Department of Government Efficiency’s (DOGE) efforts inside the executive branch, such as sending federal workforce-wide emails questioning government employees about their accomplishments from prior weeks.

If the corruption wasn’t so blatantly obvious anyhow one might call this a smoking gun.

Oh sure, bashing the UN as if it was some sort of deep state global elites cultural communism bla bla… shit, I can already spout all their buzzwords.

Nobody believes a fucking word either of those clowns says.

Let them mash their heads together and spout BS to the media. If they still do it in a month I might start listening. Just listening!

The thin one with the long grey hair. Reminds me of Slartibartfast. And he told you his name doesn’t matter. But he got an award for Norway.

Well, I am not one of those unmarried men. I’m a really good cook, okay?

Together with Britain, Norway and Switzerland, the continent’s GDP reaches $24.5trn, almost as big as America’s $29trn. American firms, from brewers to banks, would like to continue doing business in that market. That is the premise of Europe’s retaliatory tariffs, which will fall initially on easily substitutable luxury goods, such as Harley-Davidson motorcycles and whisky.

What can I say? I like it.
But then there’s also this:

The hitch is that tariffs or other restrictions on imports from America hurt European consumers as well as American exporters. A case in point is Europe’s biggest import from America, energy. Last year it gobbled up 35% of America’s exports of crude and refined oil. More than half of America’s LNG went to Europe, too. Demand from the bloc, which may well keep rising long into the 2030s, underwrites many of the multibillion-dollar gas-export projects under development in America. Were Europe to curtail LNG purchases from America, many American energy firms would be in trouble. But it is hard for Europe to do this without crippling its already limping economy or again becoming dependent on Russia, an alarming predicament from which it has only just escaped.

Not so good.
But however I look at this (and other stories of destroyed relationships with yet another country), it always looks like US economy is the biggest loser.

A more plausible, albeit for the moment entirely hypothetical, target is America’s tech giants. Europe can probably do without Instagram, a social network owned by Meta, for instance, but Meta would be hit hard by the loss of European revenue. Europe has lots of ways to make life difficult for such firms short of banning them from European markets, including taxation and competition policy. This allows it to calibrate the torment, gradually tightening the screws if need be.

nnnyaarrghh, stop! I can only get so hard. 🍆💦

I thought “what a clickbaity headline, what’s that outlet?”

Then I saw that the outlet is the UN human rights office and I realized what sounds exaggerated is actually a report of stark reality.

I’ve been saying it since 2016: the EU should start granting political asylum to people from the US.

edit: I did say political