We have to do something about Elon

Does the UK still keep a set of James Bonds with car boats and martini glasses?

The news out of the German state of Saxony-Anhault has Europe shaken. A statewide election shows that the Alternative for Germany (AFD) has won 44% of the vote of the state legislature. It’s not a majority to take over the state but it is a VERY worrying trend. From Reuters:

The anti-immigrant, pro-Russia AfD won nearly 44% of the vote, an outcome that underlined the deep unpopularity of Merz’s ruling coalition and also triggered alarm among Germany’s neighbours, France and Poland, and elsewhere.

However, the party — which wants to deport immigrants, halt support for Ukraine and restore ties with Moscow — fell short of an absolute majority in the state legislature, winning 39 of the 83 seats, and hopes to poach individual conservative lawmakers.

Chancellor Merz’s party is the conservative CDU. For the past several years, it has formed a “firewall” coalition with other parties to prevent the AFD from taking over but this coalition is starting to crack:

Their vow —dubbed the firewall— was to honour the pledge of the country to never again let Nazis come to power in the country.

…

Observers have said that AfD and its supporters abroad, such as America’s Maga movement, have used the firewall to rally support by playing the victim card. They flag that the AfD has argued that the moderates are violating democratic principles by denying the single largest party the right to form the government.

In other words, Germany’s equivalent to MAGA has almost taken over the smallest, poorest of Germany’s east and whines that the firewall coalition isn’t fair because the AFD would have acknowledge that there are other parties in government.

Guess who voted for the far right assholes in Germany? Ok, I’ll tell you. It was men, generally the least educated who long for the good old days of East Germany. (Did anyone else get a flashback to the pre-unification days remembering East German women swimmers at the Olympics? Was it just me? Ok. Anyway…) 50% of men and 39% of women voted for these guys.

They’re nostalgic for those days when your friendly neighborhood KGB agent kept company with your local STAASI. I’d never normally recommend that readers her go to Prime for anything but if you have a subscription, rent The Lives of Others to see what living in east Germany was like back in the fun times behind the Berlin Wall.

MAGA people should watch that too. That’s what’s in store for you. Just ordinary people having to watch everything they say or do no matter how innocent it appears because they’re constantly being monitored by the state and their neighbors. Good times when you couldn’t trust anyone.

Hard to believe that anyone would want that again but throw a little neo-Nazi into the mix and you can see why Poland and France are not waking up happy this morning.

Oh, sure, it’s only one state and in the board scheme of things, it’s tiny. But it’s like Germany has been sleepwalking into this. It was very very slow to give help to Ukraine. I’m not surprised that this small state is feeling the pinch and longs for the days of cheap Russian oil.

This is the CDU and the firewall’s wake up call.

But who else stands to gain from this? Elon. Yep, Germany is the big one in Europe and he’s been supporting the AFD. There has got to be something in it for him. What would it be like to turn Europe into the biggest fans of terraforming Mars?

Or just be in control of a lot of countries that claim to be democratic? The West? NATO?

From Reuters again:

Saxony-Anhalt is a relatively ⁠small state, and one of the poorest in Germany’s former communist east, but Alice Weidel, the AfD’s other national co-leader, hailed Sunday’s result as a milestone and said her party aimed to win at least 40% in the next national election, due in 2029.

…

While far-right leaders ⁠in Europe welcomed the result as a mandate for change, and U.S. billionaire Elon Musk cheered on the AfD from the sidelines, French Finance Minister Roland Lescure told RTL radio it “sends out a very, very worrying signal”.

Here’s my FDR liberal Democrat reaction to this: give them a centimeter, they’ll take a kilometer. They absolutely will not stop until someone stands up to them and tells them enough is enough. If I were Europe, I’d stop dilly dallying about supplying Ukraine with whatever it takes to win the war against Putin. Like, stuff noise cancelling ear plugs in your ears when the AFD and other extremist right wing parties start shrieking it’s not fair to stand in the way of them dragging their countries back to 1939.

There’s something about this that reminds me of the Lincoln speech at Cooper Union 150 years ago.

“But you will not abide the election of a Republican President! In that supposed event, you say, you will destroy the Union; and then, you say, the great crime of having destroyed it will be upon us! That is cool. A highwayman holds a pistol to my ear, and mutters through his teeth, ‘Stand and deliver, or I shall kill you, and then you will be a murderer!'” [1]

Yeah, that was a good speech. We should have learned from it before the guys (it’s always guys) voted in Donald Trump.

Let this be a lesson to Europe. They want it all. It’s all about power and control. Now is the time to hit them hard. Bring Putin to his knees and get Elon’s money out of your country once and for all.

Happy Labor Day: Americans Buzdari Iksos Daor

It means Americans are not slaves in a dialect of high Valyrian. If you know Game of Thrones, you’ll know what scene I’m talking about. It’s said by Danaerys Targaryen in one of the best plot twists of the series. What I like about it was she never gave away to anyone what her intentions were. She stayed cool, calm and absolutely focused on her goal.

The rest of the world has been looking at us, wondering if we’re slaves, submitting to the masters with the whips and a man who is arrogant, profane and ultimately very very stupid.

I see us more as the silent determined type walking barefoot over broken glass.

November is Coming.

*****************************

And another thing…

I’ve heard that ranchers are hawking their beef on TikTok now, begging Americans to give them a break.

This is infuriating for a couple of reasons.

I still see a lot of beef in my grocery stores and have for years now. But the prices keep going up. To have a nice pot roast in the slow cooker, you’ve got to fork over about $20. Hamburger is about $7/lb.

Like I said, there doesn’t seem to be a shortage of beef and I’m disinclined to believe that ranchers just can’t cut a break with the weather for the last 6 years. That sounds like a civilization collapse signal.

Their income isn’t what it used to be. That is indeed unfortunate. I know exactly how that feels after my layoff and industry collapse and I didn’t have a ranch where I was pulling in millions of dollars a year. I was just a middle class R&D professional living in NJ paying property taxes through the nose, trying to save for college tuitions and retirement, and working hard to design newer and better drugs for those ranchers’ families. So I know the pain of what it’s like when some corporation and financiers speculate with your livelihood to make their masters richer and get that hot, juicy bonus at the end of the year.

But where my empathy ends is when these ranchers are upset that the import of tariff free meat from Argentina is going to hurt their bottom line. What they are saying is they like the high price of beef. They don’t care about the poor families who are struggling to get by on $40K/year can’t afford hamburgers for Labor Day bbqs anymore.

It was a cool and groovy when the price of beef was high and voting for Republicans seemed like a sure bet to keep them that way. Now that these ranchers see that they can also be taken advantage of by big corporations that feed on their profits, they should STFU about consumers not liking their high prices.

Let’s set aside the fact that they voted for an orange moron and his Congressional toadies that aren’t that much smarter who have perverted what it means to be an American both domestically and internationally. We are royally pissed off about the crazy high prices of food in this country.

The guy they voted for could have made a lot of the current crisis go away if he knew anything about economics and foreign affairs. If he was fighting for the ranchers when he sweet talked them to undress for him for the last three election cycles, he would have truly ended the war in Ukraine for Ukraine’s side and not started a pointless, humiliating, expensive war in Iran. That right there might have helped transportation costs.

Instead, he has pursued a mercantilist agenda where South American countries are like vassal states where we now import less expensive beef while all the other goods in the world are tariffed through the nose to extract money from average Americans in order to spare the ultra wealthy.

Now the ranchers can get a sense of what the rest of us been up putting up with. You know, all of us slacker libtards just doing regular book smart work and doing our thought experiments to know what’s coming if we vote for Republicans.

You don’t have to tell me who you voted for when you complain that you’re getting screwed because the rest of us want cheaper steaks. For that money, I can buy lobsters.

Mohamed Bouazizi, Pierre Damas Bel

Yesterday, Pierre Damas Bel jumped in front of a truck and died. He was 20 years old. He was a student at Wright State University, an honor student in high school, a soccer player and in ROTC. Any one of us parents would be proud to know him.

He was also Hatian, a target of this administration. He came here with Temporary Protected Status. Trump wanted to send these Haitians back to Haiti. The US Supreme Court gave him its blessing.

He was forced to wear a gps ankle bracelet. This kid, the least likely person to need one or have a violent criminal record, couldn’t play soccer with the gps boot on. And he couldn’t wear his new ROTC uniform. He was bullied relentlessly by his classmates who were likely from MAGA families.

I have two quotes to ponder today:

This is what we are up against. This is what the casual Trump voter didn’t understand.

“Now I will tell you the answer to my question. It is this. The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power. Not wealth or luxury or long life or happiness; only power, pure power. What pure power means you will understand presently. We are different from all the oligarchies of the past in that we know what we are doing. All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites. The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives. They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just round the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal. We are not like that. We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now do you begin to understand me?”

O’Brien’s monologue, 1984.

But we don’t know the end of our story.

“‘Despair, or folly?’ said Gandalf. ‘It is not despair, for despair is only for those who see the end beyond all doubt. We do not. It is wisdom to recognize necessity, when all other courses have been weighed, though as folly it may appear to those who cling to false hope. Well, let folly be our cloak, a veil before the eyes of the Enemy!’”

A 20 year old, no matter which country he’s from, should never give in to despair. You do not know what your future holds.

Don’t forget that Mohamed Bouazizi, a street vendor who had his wares confiscated by government officials, set himself on fire to protest the autocratic regime in Tunisia. He was 26 years old when he self-immolated and died on January 4, 2011. On January 14, 2011, the President of Tunisia, Zin El Abedine ben Ali stepped down. A lot happened in 10 days.

Dolly: Our Best American

I was in an elevator at work when I heard about Dolly. She had big hair, bodacious ta-tas and lots of eyeliner, she said, because all the fancy girls in the nearest town were like that. It wasn’t until later that she realized that those ladies were probably prostitutes. By then, the look was who she was, not what she did.

She had a lovely soprano and a gift for songwriting. I suspect that’s where most of her wealth came from. Think about how many times Whitney Houston sang “I Will Always Love You”. Dolly wrote that. Or 9 to 5, she wrote that.

I thought about the best song as a tribute to Dolly who said, “Daddy was Republican, Mama was a Democrat, and I’m a hypocrite.” But Dolly didn’t need a party affiliation to sing about her roots or her love for people. She helped give us the Moderna vaccine. That right there is a testament to her intelligence, curiosity and love of humanity. It probably also made her incredibly rich but she gave her money away instead of hoarding it. Moderation in all things is what Dolly seemed to be about. Except for her body maintenance. Honestly, I had no idea she was 80.

She was one of Americas best exports as shown in this brief video of her singing “Coat of Many Colors” in a pub in Ireland. Odd that she chose this song from out of all her hits but it exemplifies what a little girl in Appalachia loved best and how all people should be treated with dignity and respect no matter who they are or how poor they may be.

Here’s the short version.

The French Connection

Just for fun, or because I was avoiding weeding my back flower beds, I got a free trial of ancestry.com and started to trace my roots. I found the usual suspects, a Bavarian, probably a farmer, the English lake country people who were probably third or fourth sons of some wealthy landowner, lots of people from Ireland, both northern and the bogs of the middle. There was one ancestor who fought in the Revolutionary war and a couple who were drafted by the Union to fight in the civil war. They settled in Pennsylvania, Ohio and Chicago when those places were largely wilderness or trading posts. Then I stumbled across the unexpected.

We have a French connection on my paternal grandmother’s side. I started tapping back and back. They were from Reims and left France in about 1793. Huh. That’s interesting. Wasn’t that about time the Terror was sweeping through the country taking out the nobility, Catholic clergy and the elites? Yes, yes it was.

Reims was especially hard hit by the Terror. It is the city where French kings were coronated. It has one of the most magnificent cathedrals in Europe. And it had a thriving industry in weaving.

I followed up on the trail of the French branch and how they got to America. My many greats grandmother was about 18 when she fled France. Like many emigres who made it out during that time, her family probably wasn’t poor. England opened its doors to them with the aliens act. Many ended up in Londonderry Ireland which also prospered in weaving. She met an Irish man who she married and they landed in the US shortly thereafter. In those days, Pennsylvania was still mostly wilderness. They settled in Fayette county, PA, named after the Marquis de Lafayette.

I did a little more digging for what happened to French emigres who fled the French Revolution. It turns out that they were initially supportive of the revolution. Many of them preferred a constitutional monarchy like the English had instead of the estates system and the remnants of feudalism.

The French emigres included a lot of snooty intellectuals who came to America because… I don’t know, they could? It doesn’t seem like they liked us very much. Apparently, they thought we were, unsophisticated people driven by trade and fascinated by foreigners. They in turn, kept to themselves with the French especially experiencing something like PTSD combined with an intense longing for home. This passage in a diary got my attention by the use of one word that described the Americans they met- mercantile:

The mercantile spirit, so widespread, inevitably breeds selfishness; it isolates the person in its grip, leaving them neither the taste nor the time for society. Consequently, what we call "society" does not exist in this city. (…..) Such is the true state of society in Philadelphia: grand dinners and grand tea parties for arrivals from Europe—English, French, and foreigners of every country, class, and character: philosophers, priests, men of letters, princes, tooth-pullers, wits, and fools alike. (1798, 6: 326)

Yep, we weren’t picky about what they were as long as they were foreign, like exotic birds singing a different song.

That word- mercantile. It sounds like I should know what it means. At first I think of a man who sells dry goods, notions and other things in a general store. I get the feeling of ordinariness tending to his business, probably decent and honest but lacking in social graces.

But it turns out the French were describing an economic system. Here’s the AI generated description:

Mercantilism is an economic system from the 16th to the 18th century where governments tried to make their countries rich and powerful by maximizing exports and minimizing imports. [1, 2, 3]

Key Principles

• Favorable Balance of Trade: Nations tried to sell more goods to other countries than they bought, creating a trade surplus.
• Accumulation of Bullion: Wealth was measured in gold and silver reserves.
• Zero-Sum Game: People believed the world’s total wealth was fixed, meaning one country could only grow rich by making another country poorer.
• Colonial Exploitation: Colonies provided cheap raw materials to the mother country and served as captive markets to buy finished goods. [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]

Historical Context and Impact

• Dominant Powers: Practiced heavily by Western European nations like Britain, France, Spain, and Portugal.
• Government Control: States used high tariffs, trade monopolies (like the British Navigation Acts), and subsidies to protect local industries.
• Conflict: The fierce competition for resources and trade routes often sparked wars and fueled the transatlantic slave trade. [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6]

Decline

• Critique: Thinkers like Adam Smith argued that trade is a two-way street and that wealth can grow through free markets and labor rather than government hoarding.
• Shift: It faded in the late 18th century as classical liberalism and laissez-faire capitalism took over. [1, 2, 3, 4]

I can take the classical liberalism and leave the laissez-faire capitalism, merci beaucoup.

But doesn’t that description sound like Trump economics? Is Venezuela now a “colony” of the US? Is that why Trump wants to control Canada?

I don’t know. Just making connections.

Or maybe my beneficial TDS comes from my condescending and disdainful French ancestors who thought Americans were a bunch of hicks obsessed with accumulating money.

Anyway, it’s time to cancel the subscription. Ancestry had records of my French connections going back to Reims in 1695 and farther back than that. But it wanted a stepped up luxury subscription to comb through the French archives in order for me to see them. AI said I could probably comb those French archives for free.

{{Gallic shrug}}

Friday Afternoon Brain Dump

Did you ever get deep in the weeds on a problem on Friday afternoon and realize you there’s no one else on the floor and you’re still typing away on your laptop?

It’s just me, right?

Dang, hard to switch it off and it may have just been fantasia.

On the bus music:

Dune, Eric Cline, Iran

I read Dune in the 80s, right about the time the first movie came out. I liked it ok but I wasn’t compelled to read beyond the first book. I felt Frank Herbert had made his point.

What is that point?

Spice is so much more than you think it is even as a direct analogy. Check this out.

Democrats think that??

Take a look at this chunk from the Washington Post:

Let’s get this out of the way up front. This is a dumb poll that nobody but Trump would ask for.

What I want to know is who is answering this poll? What kind of Democrat? How old are they? 12? At grandma’s house using her relic landline?

Confession: I don’t have a subscription to WAPO anymore and I don’t feel like looking it up in Apple News when I’ve got more important things for my beautiful mind to think about.

Here’s my best logical guess as to what these particular Democrats were thinking:

Term 1, with its two impeachments and an insurrection, was like losing one eye.

Term 2 is like losing the other one.

Was it better when we had only one eye? Yes, yes it was. But if anyone had asked me on January 6 2021 what I thought about Trump Term 1 I would have said:

“I just want my eye back”

Spain, Spain, Bacon, and Spain

If you watch this video to the end, you’ll get it. This is a video of Timothy Snyder giving a lecture on Ukraine at fhe University of Toronto, the Munk school of global affairs and public policy. In this lecture, Snyder tells the history of Ukraine going back to the Stone Age (there will be a mastodon question on the test). He tells a story of richness and migration and ties it all together elegantly at the end. You will be convinced.

These are the kinds of lectures I loved. Snyder is a master story teller, he relates and interacts with his audience, and he tells what sound a lot like dad jokes.

You can skip the first 10 minutes or so of Snyder giving class schedule updates. Then sit back and listen to the fascinating history of Ukraine and realize how much of our own culture we owe to it.

Thots

In the past couple of weeks, the Trump administration has banned the sale of foreign robot vacuums and drones.

Is it because they can be used to spy on US citizens? To do what, exactly?

Or his he thinking that they can be used as weapons?

That last one is curious because since the Ukrainian war began, I’ve been wondering how easy it would be to turn things like robot vacuums into lethal weapons. I’m using MINE for vacuuming floors, thank you very much.

But how small could you make them? Could you make them so small they would be indistinguishable from insects like palmetto bugs? And when all the insects got close enough to each other, could they do quantum sensing and become aggregate explosives?

Not that I would know how to do this but I’m wondering if maybe the Iranians do. Or maybe Trump himself if he wanted to stage a terrorist attack.

These are the things I think about between work and Jane Austen. Just pondering what you’re pondering… on the bus or shopping at Aldi’s. As one does.