This is just a bit of venting, but also a measure of the exasperation I experience: life in Europe is more and more of a dystopia. I wish this nightmare ended.

The Euronews app notified me…

…that Mario Draghi would present its famous report on the future of European competitiveness, and that I should watch it live. Well, the video had absolutely NO SOUND whatsoever, and it remained like this through the end, when the retards have deleted it, so there is no video on YouTube to document what just happened! They should change the name of the channel to Eurofucks.

If you know where to look, you’ll find the recording on the “EC AV PORTAL”: Mario Draghi delivers his report on the future of European competitiveness to President von der Leyen. The page also contains recorded cutaways, but let’s go for the full recording. I’m also embedding the video here:

The report itself is here: Part A: A competitiveness strategy for Europe (69 pages), and Part B: In-depth analysis and recommendations (328 pages).

Once I watched portions of the video, it became clear to me that all is but a blah-blah. Some more centralized nonsense and inept bureaucracy that isn’t going to lead anywhere. This fabulous document (or two, if we count the two parts distinctly) will need tens of thousands of hours of reading by central and national bureaucrats. By the time they’ll figure out what they should do, we’ll all be dead. (National legislations must be amended, national regulatory bodies should be harmonized, and, ideally, pigs should fly.)

A random example: the GDPR

At about 1h07m in the full video above, as part of the Q&A session, a question about boosting innovation is asked. In his reply, Draghi covers several points. Forget about the very first idea, that the EU lacks focus. The EU lacks too many things, starting with a raison d’être. He starts reading from the document, not always using the exact printed wording and skipping a lot, but the main points include: (1) the complex and costly procedures across fragmented national systems; (2) the EU regulatory costs hamper innovation: the EU has almost 100 tech-focused laws; (3) digital firms are deterred from doing business because they face heterogeneous requirements and “gold-plated” national legislation (i.e., national laws that, while implementing EU legislation, add specific national requirements, hence making compliance costlier); (4) limitations on data storing and processing, with high compliance costs.

He gives the example of the GDPR. He claims the GDPR is estimated to have reduced the profits for small tech companies by more than 15%. “Here there is a general issue,” he adds. To be compliant, you need people. “But these companies are small companies, they have 2 people often, 3 people.” Some of them gave up, left Europe, and moved to the United States! They could not afford to hire people just to comply to the GDPR! This legislation, made for the big 5-6 American IT corporations, kills the EU’s small companies!

He’s more than right here. Let me add tidbits from his document, then my views.

Part B, page 319:

The GDPR, which entered into force in 2016 and is directly applicable in all Member States, aims to offer a harmonised EU approach to privacy enforcement. However, it gives Member States the possibility to define privacy rules in 15 areas, leading to fragmentation and legal uncertainty stemming from the widespread use of specification clauses, ‘gold-plating’ [Box 1] and inconsistent enforcement by national Data Protection Authorities (DPAs), and the fact that some Member States have several DPAs doing so (e.g. 16 in Germany). This could hinder cross-border entrepreneurship and innovation, including the development and deployment of new technologies and cybersecurity solutions. As an example, divergence in the age of consent across Member States creates uncertainty in the application of data protection rights for children in the Single Market [NOTE 24: The age of consent is 13 in Belgium, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Latvia, Malta, Portugal, Sweden; 14 in Austria, Bulgaria, Cyprus, Spain, Italy, Lithuania; 15 in the Czech Republic, Greece, France; 16 in Germany, Hungary, Croatia, Ireland, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Poland, Romania, and Slovakia.]. Estimates point to high GDPR compliance costs, up to EUR 500,000 for SMEs and up to EUR 10 million for large organisations [NOTE 25: 68% of the large companies surveyed by PwC planned to spend between GBP 1 million and GBP 10 million to meet the GDPR requirements. The average cost of GDPR compliance for a mid-sized company with 500 employees is found to be around EUR 1.3 million. As reported by the Financial Times, the International Association of Privacy Professionals, and Ernst & Young also estimate that the average cost for large EU-based companies to achieve GDPR compliance could be in the order of EUR 1.3 million per company, with ongoing annual costs of EUR 1.1 million for maintenance.]. Furthermore, due to these compliance costs, EU companies decreased data storage by 26% and data processing by 15% in relation to comparable US companies [NOTE 26: For data-intensive industries, such as software, the cost increase due to GDPR compliance can be as high as 24%. Other sectors, like manufacturing and services, experience an average cost increase of 18%.]. However, in December 2023, Member States in the Justice and Home Affairs Council formation resisted further harmonisation.

Yeah, Germany has 16 Data Protection Authorities, one for each land. Tards. Now, regarding the huge costs incurred by the need to be GDPR-compliant, I could only add that the example of the age of consent is only showing that the national legislations will never be harmonized, even if the EU were a federation, which it isn’t. The US is a federation, and it has 50 sets of criminal laws, plus federal legislation. They need 50 or 51 ways top say the same thing, no matter the retaliatory measures are equivalent or not. So we, too, need 27 ways of declaring that 1+1 makes 2. Or anything between 1.8 and 2.2. Union or federation, sometimes the moral standards, the laws of mathematics, of physics and of chemistry are not the same everywhere. Each country believes that young people should be allowed to start fucking at a different age. They would also establish different jail times for the exact same crime. Even when there is a central regulatory board, such as the European Medicines Agency, this is how it works: if you need to authorize a new drug, you have to authorize it in each and every country, regardless of the EMA approval; only when the EMA bans a drug, the national regulatory agencies would all ban it swiftly. The same goes for cars: no matter a vehicle is homologated in Denmark and Germany, it cannot be sold in Bulgaria or Romania without being certified in those countries too! What’s the purpose of the EU, then?!

Back to the GDPR, there are several reasons why it’s both useless and harmful.

It’s useless because the main purpose of the GDPR cannot be realized. It’s impossible to prove that a company did not sell your personal data! It’s like in the formal logic: it’s impossible to prove that somewhere on Earth there isn’t a green raven, or that somewhere in the Universe there isn’t a floating teapot. If one finds a green raven, then the opposite is proven. But that such a thing doesn’t exist cannot be proven. Similarly, if a data breach happens, and it’s revealed, or if a company willingly passes your personal data to another company and someone discovers this fact, then the GDPR non-compliance is clear. But if the voluntary passing of your data is not discovered by accident or whistleblowing, it’s just there, it happened, despite the GDPR. One might say that, similarly to ISO 9001 not ensuring the quality per se, but establishing consistent processes that however cannot guarantee precise outcomes, the GDPR establishes processes to deal with personal data. Still, the possibility that someone at a GDPR-compliant company sells your data unbeknownst to anyone is not eliminated! Therefore, the costs added by the GDPR compliance are not justified!

As I mentioned in a previous post, in the section 3·The GDPR is a creator of Bullshit Jobs and does more harm than good, which I will now complete ad hoc, the GDPR is also stupid and harmful:

  • The GDPR does more harm than good to people trying to read some US websites, which simply refuse access to EU users (this is why a VPN is useful). This is usually a misunderstanding of the GDPR, as those organizations cannot be made liable as long as they don’t have any EU branch, but this is the reality.
  • The GDPR doesn’t only harm EU’s small companies, it also killed various EU small projects, such an independent forum related to open-source software, whose owner said it had to close the forum because he cannot afford a GDPR compliance officer.
  • GDPR compliance is a very lucrative business: it has created lots of bullshit jobs, to be added to those created by ISO 9001, 14001, 27001, and 50600.
  • And no, the fear of the GDPR isn’t exaggerated, especially in Germany and Austria, two countries with mentally retarded judges. Here’s a court case regarding a WordPress blog using Google Fonts. Using a Google font instead of one hosted by the same site that hosts the blog would “reveal your IP to Google,” and your IP is apparently sacred! (More about that: here, here, with courts rulings Az. 3 O 17493/20 and Az. 2 C 381/21, and finally two articles in English, German Court Fines Website Owner for Violating the GDPR by Using Google-Hosted Fonts, and WordPress.org Strongly Urges Theme Authors to Switch to Locally Hosted Webfonts). How about images hosted on CDNs, then? Whoever created the GDPR is a complete moron! How can “revealing your IP” be a violation of privacy? If you don’t want your IP to be known, stop using the Internet! (Yes, I just said that VPNs can be used for various reasons.) Can anyone use a search engine without revealing their IP? And is there really anyone who did not use a search engine?
  • Finally, the famous “cookie banner” that even the European Commission’s website is using: some smart ass says that there is no cookie banner law, because “Companies could easily avoid any cookie banner. Just don’t track.” Oh, so the EU is tracking us, you fucking moron? Nope. Any website, any blog, any site in which one can set an account, or just change a setting (say, increase the font size, or change the language, which is what the EU websites allow for!) uses cookies, and even the EU’s web admins, undoubtedly after having consulted the legal department, have decided that the grotesque “cookie banner” is required!

Fuck it. GDPR or no GDPR, I think people believe in the tooth fairy. No matter what anyone says, ALL your personal data WILL BE SOLD to third parties, full stop. Your bank, your ISP, your cell provider, the supermarket where you have a loyalty card—THEY ALL sell your data! I’m also amused by the “right to be forgotten” that supposedly allows you to exercise your right to delete your personal data. What a great idea to do that after it has already been sold to third parties! Are there only morons in Brussels? (In California, too.)

What has finally been acknowledged by Mario Draghi himself: the GDPR hampers the IT companies, and the EU’s citizens are victims of this stupid situation. And this is only one of the many examples of stupid EU legislation!

Another random topic: IT at large

Browsing Draghi’s document, I ran over this chart of EU vs US cloud providers market share:

This is only one of the many ways in which Europe is nowhere regarding information technology, being completely dependent on the US!

As it’s patently obvious from the said document, the European Commission only became worried in the age of the latest bubbles: AI, which is only this stupid generative AI, as opposed to the non-existent artificial general intelligence, or AGI; quantum computing, which is a scam with little to no practical uses; blockchain and other crypto technologies. These technologies sucked hundreds of billions of dollars and huge amounts of energy, and the EU wanted to waste similar amounts of money on nothing?! The EU should have been worried that there is no European company to counter the non-European ones, not even in the consumer-grade technologies!

Before the bubbles, and even before the Cloud, they should have asked themselves:

  • Where are the EU providers of operating systems and of major commercial end-user software?
  • Where are the EU providers of searching engines that people would really use?
  • Where are the EU manufacturers of computers and of other IT hardware?

The answer is: nowhere to be seen.

Roughly 80% of PCs are running Microsoft Windows. (The servers might be running anything, including Linux and FreeBSD, but if the Cloud is American…) Despite the existence of LibreOffice and of other office suites, including the German Softmaker Office, probably 70% of PCs run Microsoft Office. And wherever it’s not Microsoft, it’s Apple, unless you’re thinking of those 4% taken by “Linux on the Desktop.” And how about the mobile OSes? What European OS is running your smartphone?

The small European search engines are niche ones, and they cannot index the Internet properly. Everyone is using Google or Bing (Yahoo! Search is also Bing); if they don’t, they still use Google if they use Startpage; and DuckDuckGo is American. Privacy-wise, who is not having an e-mail account with either of Google, Microsoft, or Yahoo?

Hardware-wise, it’s old news that three quarters of everything one can purchase in either of Europe or America is made in China or in other South-East Asian countries. Even fabless, there isn’t any non-Asian smartphone brand! There’s only South Korea and China, with a moribund Japan in trail (Sony Xperia).

PCs? HP and Dell are American, but their products are largely made in China (you too, Apple). The only other brands are the Taiwanese Acer and ASUS, and the Chinese Lenovo. OK, let’s not list the defunct US PC makers (Gateway 2000 was acquired by Acer and disappeared; Packard Bell went under NEC, then also under Acer). But where are ICL, Bull, Olivetti, Nixdorf and Siemens? Or Sinclair, Amstrad, Acorn Computers for home computers? Wait, Amstrad even made PCs, as this one that I owned:

Semiconductors? Europe was a major player in semiconductor and electronics manufacturing in the 1970s and 1980s. It made chips of its own brands (Philips, Siemens, Thomson, SGS) or US ones (Intel, Zilog). But semiconductors were manufactured everywhere, even in the Soviet Bloc: in the USSR, Romania, Czechoslovakia, the GDR, and more; consumer electronics in many Western countries, then also in the aforementioned countries, plus Poland, Hungary, etc. Computer-related hardware even in Bulgaria! What is Europe manufacturing now, Samsung TVs? CPU-wise, we’re not completely dead. Intel has a manufacturing presence in Ireland, and GlobalFoundries in Dresden (but not for PCs).

Communications: for the 5G/6G infrastructure, we want to ban the Chinese Huawei based on unfounded fears. Apparently, we don’t have any issues with other Chinese IT products (nor with the Huawei/Honor and Xiaomi smartphones). But if for the infrastructure there are European alternatives, Ericsson and Nokia, although I’m pretty sure their products are manufactured in China, for consumer-grade routers and stuff, the only offers are non-European: Chinese (Huawei, ZTE, Tenda), Taiwanese (D-Link), Singaporean (TP-Link). This is ridiculous.

For once, this isn’t the European Commission’s fault. It’s the fault of the corporate greed, with dogmas imported from the US and the UK! Such a dogma says that it’s better to make something in China and carry it 20,000 to 24,000 kilometers from Shanghai or Shenzhen to Rotterdam or Hamburg, even if it’s only marginally cheaper overall! In the process, we’re “green” and “we save the planet” in the West while importing everything from China, from paper clips and toothpicks to high-tech!

Also, in their infinite wisdom, Europe and the US have handed their technologies to the People’s Republic of China (which might also want to swallow ROC Taiwan, including its TSMC). 

Either way, Europe won’t return to what it once was. Or will it?

Draghi’s report, in a nutshell

I’m not entirely nuts, so I only cursorily browsed those two PDFs. But Euronews has five key takeaways from the report. In brief:

  • “Europe needs to mobilise at least €750bn to €800bn a year to keep pace with competitors such as the US and China. … Delivering this increase would require the EU’s investment share to jump from around 22% of GDP today to around 27%, reversing a multi-decade decline across most large EU economies.” But investment in what? The R&D is pathetic. Page 235: “Public spending on R&D ranges from 0.94% in Germany to a mere 0.15% in Romania.”
  • Europe has a “China problem.” Europe “must continue to reduce its economic dependence to increase its internal security, warning that Europe is particularly dependent on a handful of suppliers for critical raw materials and digital technology. In the case of chips, the former ECB president noted that 75-90% of the world’s wafer manufacturing capacity is located in Asia.“
  • We need to boost innovation: “The problem is not that Europe lacks ideas or ambition … but that innovation is blocked at the next stage: we are failing to translate innovation into commercialisation.” “In the last five decades, no EU company worth more than €100bn has been created from scratch – and 30% of Europe’s unicorns [a privately held start-up company valued at more than $1bn] have left the bloc since 2008 because they could not scale up on the continent.”
  • Industry (hopefully not the “financial industry” of which the City of London is so proud of!) “Industrial strategies today – as seen in the US and China – combine multiple policies, including tax, trade and foreign policy. Owing to its slow and disaggregated policymaking process, the EU is less able to produce such a response.” Automakers as an example: “Opponents often cite the EU’s ambitious regulations that would see conventional petrol and diesel vehicles start to be phased out in just over a decade — but domestic manufacturers factories are also struggling to compete with heavily subsidised Chinese electric cars.”
  • Europe’s decision-making needs to be reformed: “Europe does not coordinate where it matters, [and] Europe’s decision-making rules have not substantially evolved as the EU has enlarged and the global environment we face has become more hostile and complex.” Draghi: “As of 2019, the EU has passed around 13,000 pieces of legislation, while the US has passed 3,000 and 2,000 resolutions. … That makes you think, can we do a little less and can we be a little more focused?”

We’re completely fucked-up.

Speaking of the automotive industry

The forced transition from ICU (internal combustion engine) cars to electric cars is not only dictatorial, but it’s misguided, and it cannot compensate for the real reasons of climate change.

Let me quote myself from two comments I made in reply to a reader; they’re attached to completely unrelated posts, so I’ll insert them here (first, second):

I never said that climate change is not real. But the problem is not that the average temperature increased by 1 degree instead of 0.5 degrees Celsius or whatever. The issue is that extreme weather phenomena are becoming more frequent and more extreme. Even if the average temperature were constant, extreme phenomena could destroy our civilization. To oversimplify: if a certain average used to be obtained through summer temperatures of 30 °C and winter temperatures of -10 °C in a certain place, with a hypothetical average of 10 °C, what if the summer temperatures reach 60 °C and the winter temperatures reach -40 °C? The average doesn’t change! And how about tornadoes, which started being more frequent in Europe, a continent that wasn’t used to them?

In my opinion, the real culprit is the fact that we’re 8.2 billion people. The world’s population was 2.5 billion in 1950. That many people are requiring huge quantities of energy. And our increased use of technology only increases the electricity consumption. But no, CO2 is not a pollutant; it’s a natural gas without which life couldn’t exist. We need both O2 and CO2 to live on Earth. Pollutants are SO2, NOx and PM2.5/PM10, which give me lung cancer. Coal burning has decreased, so there are no more lethal fog episodes like those from the Meuse Valley (Belgium) in 1930, Donora (PA) in 1948, and London (UK) in 1952. But we’re 8 billion!

And the real issue is not the CO2, it’s the heat itself. Large urban agglomerations create heat singularities. Not only the concrete and the asphalt accumulate heat, but the entire city creates heat: the people, the cars, the various installations. Not enough trees, either. And instead of people being spread in many small towns scattered around and with green areas in between, we have huge megalopolises. We also have huge industrial areas, especially in China. The more the heat distribution is unequal on Earth, the more the climate suffers. The heat produced by humans, to be clear. The same is valid for the distribution of trees.

We cannot balance that by using electric cars in Europe and in the US! (Not to mention the questionable “greenness” of their batteries, the way the electricity is produced, and so on.)

The average annual home electricity consumption per person in the US is of 12,000 to 13,000 kWh. In Germany, it’s 3,500 to 4,000 kWh per person per year. My wife and I are using about 2,500 kWh per year FOR TWO PEOPLE. And they’re telling me THAT I SHOULD DO SOMETHING TO SAVE THE PLANET?

Yeah, “global warming” is far from accurate. “Climate change” is better, but much better is the French “dérèglement climatique”—literally climate disruption or disturbance. However, with dogmas and Soviet-style legislation, this won’t work. No matter how frequently people are told that “the weather is not the climate” (when episodes of unexpected cold weather occur), they’ll reply, “up your ass!”.

Now to the antidemocratic part of the EU-mandated “greenification.” When they started the transition to energy-efficient lighting in the EU with the Ecodesign Directive 2009/125/EC, which implied the phasing out of incandescent bulbs (100W in Sept. 2009, 75W in Sept. 2010, 60W in Sept. 2011, and finally 40W and 25W in Sept. 2012), everyone was forced to use compact fluorescent lamps (CFLs). Initially, these devices were expensive and slow to reach the nominal brightness (40 to 60 seconds sometimes). The technology gradually improved, with faster CFLs becoming cheaper, and warmer color temperatures becoming easily available. But they could have avoided this Soviet-style ukase by waiting until the technology becomes more affordable, so people would decide for themselves what to use. Today, everyone is using LED devices, which are fast and much, much better than the infamous CFLs! The forced mass purchasing of billions of CFLs could have been avoided! Similarly, our Gracious Masters and Gods should have waited until electric, hydrogen, or whatever technology becomes affordable and people willingly opt for such cars! But no, they like ruling and dictating, and they’re as stupid as Greta Cuntberg!

The European automotive industry is on life support because of the EU’s stupid plans to phase out the ICE cars. It’s all but dead. Such brainless following of a stupid regulation was previously encountered only in the Soviet Union and its satellite countries. So tell me again how calling the EU “the Soviet European Union” is “an extremist thing”!

The rest of the planet will undoubtedly keep using ICE cars for decades to come. Is anyone expecting Latin America, Africa, and the poorest parts of Asia to go “full electric”? It’s a shame to be born and to live in Europe! And things are not much better in the United States, either.

But what makes and brands will these cars come from? Which companies will still be producing them? With Europeans and Japanese going full electric (Toyota changed the focus, though), meaning they literally face the death of their automakers, the answer is not obvious. Even the Chinese are betting for electric, but they own lithium and rare earth quarries, battery factories, and everything. Also, at 1.4B+ population, they need to fight the real pollution.

What is “real pollution,” you might ask? Go to this previous post of mine on a different matter and only read the English-language quotations describing Freeman Dyson. Let me cut short to the bare minimum:

The eminent physicist Freeman Dyson … had proposed that whatever inflammations the climate was experiencing might be a good thing because carbon dioxide helps plants of all kinds grow. Then he added the caveat that if CO2 levels soared too high, they could be soothed by the mass cultivation of specially bred “carbon-eating trees” …

Dyson well remembers the lethal black London coal fog of his youth when, after a day of visiting the city, he would return to his hometown of Winchester with his white shirt collar turned black. Coal, Dyson says, contains “real pollutants” like soot, sulphur and nitrogen oxides, “really nasty stuff that makes people sick and looks ugly.” These are “rightly considered a moral evil,” he says, but they “can be reduced to low levels by scrubbers at an affordable cost.”

He was absolutely right. CO2 is not a pollutant, regardless of how much of it we have in the atmosphere. Pollutants are SO2 and NOx, and those PM2.5 and PM10 particulate residues that every single car is releasing. They are pollutants because they can give you lung cancer. The CO2 can never do that!

And electric cars do not offset the real pollution that much. First, because they need electricity, which in most cases is still produced by burning fossil fuels, especially as Germany closed all its remaining nuclear power plants after the Fukushima disaster in 2011. The last three operational plants—Emsland, Isar 2, and Neckarwestheim 2—were shut down in April 2023. Italy, on the other hand, phased out its nuclear power much earlier. Following the Chernobyl disaster in 1986, Italy held a referendum in 1987, resulting in the decision to close its existing nuclear plants and abandon future nuclear projects. By 1990, all of Italy’s nuclear power plants were shut down. It’s only these days that Italy is reconsidering this decision, because “Italy’s demand for electricity will almost double by 2050.” There isn’t enough electricity anyway, especially during hot summers and chilly winters, yet they want to increase the electricity consumption even more! Add to the equation the data centers, the AI crap that Draghi wants to see further developed in the EU, and all such “modern” sources of absurdly high electricity requirements, and you’ll find this strategy stupid. The “renewables” are expensive, and they cannot take much of a share in the overall electricity generation. Solar and wind need storage, which means, you guessed right, huge, expensive batteries.

Batteries, right? The official dogmas say they’re green. They’re not at all green! I’ll not elaborate on that, but the Elektroschrott (the e-waste), which includes the solar panels, has huge recycling issues. And the number one manufacturer is China, by the way. Is the European Commission trying to make China even more prosperous?

And not only the European Commission is doing that. The fucking suicidal automakers do the same! Stellantis, that fucked-up merger between PSA (Peugeot, Citroën, Opel) and FCA (Fiat Chrysler Automobiles) that has destroyed the trust in PSA’s brands due to the abysmal lack of reliability of the 1.2 PureTech engine whose plastic timing belt is literally dissolving, and who also almost destroyed Fiat (or what was left of it after the late Sergio Marchionne abandoned B-segment cars such as Punto), became a strategic investor in the Chinese EV maker Leapmotor! After having invested €1.5 billion to acquire approximately 21% equity in Leapmotor in 2023, the resulting joint venture Leapmotor International B.V. (note its residence in the Netherlands, which is sort of a fiscal haven for holding company structures, and this made Renault move its legal residence from France to the Dutch Renault Group B.V.) is 49% owned by China and 51% owned by Stellantis. Long live the People’s Republic of China! Already, the first batches of electric Chinese Leapmotor C10 (D-segment SUV) and T03 (A-segment replacement of Fiat 500e) that left Shanghai in July have reached Europe! Leapmotor International will sell C10 and T03 in nine European countries starting in September and plans to establish 200 sales points for Leapmotor vehicles in Europe by the end of 2024. The distribution channel is mostly based on the FCA network.

There are small details nobody talks about. The Chinese-built T03 is meant to replace the electric Fiat 500e. Incidentally, a small part of the production will be made at the former Fiat Polska plant where the normal Fiat 500 (aspirated, turbo, then hybrid) was made, probably the customized models, but still from CKD kits from China. The “the new new” Fiat 500 hybrid will be made next year in Italy, at the same plant that now still makes the electric 500, which is being discontinued because it’s too expensive. The new 500 hybrid will be on the platform (except for the powertrain) of the former 500 electric, which is known to be a simplified build and with a much worse finish than the regular 500. So anyone who wants the non-electric 500 will get one that looks like the former 500e, with cheap finishes, but with a hybrid engine. Anyone who wants electric will buy the Chinese Leapshit! Stellantis is destroying its European brands!

As for the D-segment SUV Leapmotor C10, have you noticed how many EVs, including the Chinese BYD and MG (whose EVs are made in China) are SUVs? Sure, they’re following the general trend of making cars larger than a Panzer. But this also makes them heavier, and let’s talk one more time about pollutants.

Press Release: Pollution From Tyre Wear 1,000 Times Worse Than Exhaust Emissions:

  • Tight regulation of exhaust emissions by the EU has meant that new cars emit very little particle pollution
  • But tyre wear pollution is unregulated and can be 1,000 times worse, finds independent real-world testing experts Emissions Analytics
  • Increased popularity of SUVs, larger and heavier than standard vehicles, exacerbates this problem – as does growing sales of heavy EVs and widespread use of budget tyres
  • Fitting only high-quality tyres and lowering vehicle weight are routes to reducing these ‘non-exhaust emissions’

Oxford, 6th March 2020: Pollution from tyre wear can be 1,000 times worse than what comes out of a car’s exhaust, Emissions Analytics has found.

Harmful particle matter from tyres – and also brakes – is a very serious and growing environmental problem, one that is being exacerbated by the increasing popularity of large, heavy vehicles such as SUVs, and growing demand for electric vehicles, which are heavier than standard cars because of their batteries.

What’s more, vehicle tyre wear pollution is completely unregulated, unlike exhaust emissions which have been rapidly reduced by car makers thanks to the pressure placed on them by European emissions standards. New cars now emit very little in the way of particulate matter but there is growing concern around ‘non-exhaust emissions’.

Non-exhaust emissions (NEE) … are currently believed to constitute the majority of primary particulate matter from road transport, 60 percent of PM2.5 and 73 percent of PM10 – and in its 2019 report ‘Non-Exhaust Emissions from Road Traffic’ by the UK Government’s Air Quality Expert Group (AQEG), it recommended that NEE are immediately recognised as a source of ambient concentrations of airborne particulate matter, even for vehicles with zero exhaust emissions of particles – such as EVs.

To understand the scale of the problem, Emissions Analytics – the leading independent global testing and data specialist for the scientific measurement of realworld emissions – performed some initial tyre wear testing. Using a popular family hatchback running on brand new, correctly inflated tyres, we found that the car emitted 5.8 grams per kilometer of particles.

Compared with regulated exhaust emission limits of 4.5 milligrams per kilometer, the completely unregulated tyre wear emission is higher by a factor of over 1,000. Emissions Analytics notes that this could be even higher if the vehicle had tyres which were underinflated, or the road surfaces used for the test were rougher, or the tyres used were from a budget range – all very recognisable scenarios in ‘real world’ motoring.

Richard Lofthouse, Senior Researcher at Emissions Analytics said: “It’s time to consider not just what comes out of a car’s exhaust pipe but particle pollution from tyre and brake wear. Our initial tests reveal that there can be a shocking amount of particle pollution from tyres – 1,000 times worse than emissions from a car’s exhaust.”

Now, to amend part of the above text: the upcoming Euro 7 regulations, due to come into force at the end of 2026 in the EU, will regulate particle emissions from brakes and tires. But this will make the EVs even more expensive, as a heavier car, by all laws of physics, creates more wear and tear in both brakes and tires! I don’t even know how they’ll manage to comply. Unless, of course, after Dieselgate, we’ll have a Tiresgate and a Brakesgate!

From Euro 4 to Euro 6d, cars have become 2–3 times more expensive; in addition, because small engines cannot meet the increasingly stringent rules (the derogation for Euro 7 is the best proof), and because the legislation requires all sorts of electronic crap to prevent accidents (although they can be disconnected), cars have started to get bigger and bigger, to justify the higher prices, and they have started to be hybrids to meet the rules. But a big, heavy car, especially an electric SUV, not only produces more PM2.5/PM10 particulates through tire and road wear, but is also much more dangerous in a crash!

The generalizations of Panzer cars, electric or not, had an avalanche effect. When you know that the car that might crash into you won’t have 700 to 950 kg like in the 1980s, but rather 2,000 to 2,600 kg, would you still buy an A or B segment car, or a D segment one? Europe is on its way to becoming as retarded as North America. 

A couple of days ago, Luca de Meo, CEO of Renault and president of the European Automobile Manufacturers Association (ACEA), ate some shit on France Inter. He insisted that, as the hybrid cars get increasingly expensive (the list price for a Renault Clio is €24k as per his saying), the EVs are cheaper in the long run, and they’re more durable. More durable, my ass. How about the batteries, connard? The current EVs are eating tires 30–50% faster than ICE cars, not only because of their increased weight but also because of their acceleration: the maximum torque is available almost instantly, which also contributes to an increased accident rate of EVs!

But the most important thing is that, as Luca de Meo also complained, Europe’s autos industry could face fines of 15 billion euros ($17.4 billion) for carbon emissions due to slowing demand for electric vehicles:

“If electric vehicles remain at today’s level, the European industry may have to pay 15 billion euros in fines or give up the production of more than 2.5 million vehicles,” de Meo told France Inter radio.

“The speed of the electric ramp-up is half of what we would need to achieve the objectives that would allow us not to pay fines,” de Meo, who is also president of the European Automobile Manufacturers Association (ACEA), said of the sector.

Exceeding CO2 limits can lead to fines amounting to 95 euros per excess CO2 g/km multiplied by the number of vehicles sold.

It is clear that the CO2 thresholds and these fines for not lowering CO2 emissions as much and as fast as the European Commission’s dogma wants are destroying the European car industry. How can anyone in their right mind still defend this criminal construct called the European Union?

The right solution to decreasing the pollution in Europe is to increase the public transport network and its reliability. Driving e-Panzers is grotesque. But even about mass transit, there are aspects that need to be discussed.

We do not need electric buses, which are very expensive, very heavy, and full of Chinese batteries! What we need is in this range: trolleybuses, trams, subways, or the more recent rubber-tired trams such as the trambus. Trolleybuses are still the cheapest to implement (the rubber-tired trams fall in the same category). They were extremely popular in Europe until some stupid mayors have decided that they’re “unesthetic” and that the power lines are “too expensive.” Oh, yeah, so let’s buy the even more expensive electric buses! The same mayors have removed most of the trams, for they’re even more expensive to maintain! Yeah, sure. Let’s destroy what we already had.

The rail-based mass transit, underground and overground, must also be fully electric. And let me tell you how not to do this!  Deutsche Bahn (DB) has faced criticism for its lack of investment in infrastructure in the past 25 years, particularly in the electrification of railway lines. With only around 61% of the network electrified, DB has turned to Siemens and asked them to develop battery-powered electric trains! Everything is more expensive, heavier, and battery-powered! Is everyone in Europe mentally retarded?!

The China problem

The “China problem” is not only in relation to EVs, batteries, solar panels, and shit. It’s a more general issue, and it’s the collective West that has created it by moving its production to China starting in the early 1980s, following Deng Xiaoping’s economic liberalization.

This should have been considered treason or high treason, but the corporate greed and the politicians’ cupidity ensured its continued success. China’s success, and the West’s decline, for sure.

China joined the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 2001, so when there aren’t any bilateral tariff agreements, the WTO rules provide limited import duties for most products. Beyond the basic WTO Commitments, there are also the Most-Favored-Nation (MFN) tariffs, typically around 7-8% on average for industrial goods. Currently, the average tariff rate on industrial goods faced by China is about 7.5%; for most consumer goods, including electronics, tariffs are below 10% (closer to 7%, often below 5% due to ongoing trade agreements), with some key items like IT products being at 0% due to the Information Technology Agreement (ITA). Agricultural products generally face higher tariffs, averaging around 15%, but this varies widely depending on the specific product.

Therefore, the 25% tariffs imposed in 2019 by the Trump administration on a limited range and quantity of Chinese products, followed by another 15%, reduced to 7.5%, round in 2019-2020, were just peanuts. (He also imposed tariffs on EU products: 25% on steel and 10% on aluminum, then 10% on aircraft; 25% on other products such as wine, cheese, and olives.) And the EU never imposed real tariffs on Chinese goods!

Until now, that is. But even now, the proposed EU tariffs on the Chinese-made EVs were scaled down to 7.8% for Tesla, 17% for BYD, 18.8% for Geely, and 35.3% for SAIC and other companies, on top of a standard 10% duty already imposed on Chinese auto imports. Peanuts, I say! In comparison, the US and Canada announced a 100% tariff on imports of Chinese-made EVs, with Canada planning a 25% tariff on Chinese steel and aluminum.

But would this help? This would surely fire back if the Chinese retaliate with their own punitive tariffs. Let’s not count the exports of aircraft, as China’s Comac (C919 and ARJ21) and AVIC (the Xi’an range) are no match for Airbus and Boeing (and ATR, if we think of Xi’an). But the EU is exporting to China machinery and equipment, vehicles and automotive parts, chemicals and pharmaceuticals, medical equipment, then dairy products, wines and spirits, and meat (especially pork). In the non-technological fields, the US seems more vulnerable, with soybeans, corn, wheat, and other grains making an important part of its exports to China.

I personally believe that there should have been no trade under the WTO with China. 

Let me summarize a thought I had some 30 years ago, when Europe started being suffocated with products Made in China. There was still the age of Panascanic and Abibas, but quality products also came from China, including my dirt-cheap walkman clone (scroll down for more pics; cheap but extremely robust and reliable), my Sony boombox (identical to this one, except for having all 3 FM bands, OIRT-JP-CCIR, in one) and, a few years later, my first laptop (it came with Win98SE). Coffeehouse or pub wisdom, but still.

In the context of Central and Eastern European countries having switched to democratic, multi-party societies, I was thinking of an apparent paradox, especially as left-wing parties were still focusing on workers’ rights. If we in Europe were to insist on the observance of human rights, including workers’ rights (better and safer working conditions, shorter working weeks, and longer paid holidays, specific minimum hourly rates), how could we keep being competitive with imports coming from countries that don’t give a rat’s ass on human rights, on workers’ rights, on environmental protection, and where people work 12–16 hours a day while being paid peanuts? This seemed an impossibility, unless serious customs protections would offset this discrepancy. Say, if a country doesn’t observe the aforementioned rights or the environment, and if the minimum and the average wages aren’t above specific thresholds, slap the imports from it with a 300-400% tariff!

Obviously, such a thing never happened. Everyone was for free trade and the maximization of profits. (Milton Friedman: “The social responsibility of a business is to increase its profits.”) If we look at the death of the UK’s industry, we see the model Europe wanted to have: let the peons of the Third World do the physical work, and we’ll do the intellectual tasks; we’ll develop the services (the tertiary sector), and we’ll innovate in the “financial industry” field. Yeah, wisely planned. A country or a continent that cannot produce most of its own food (the current case in the UK), that cannot make its own clothes, and that imports most of its consumer goods might not be considered “Third World,” but it’s extremely vulnerable to adverse conditions!

During WWII, when Britain was isolated, but in just about any single war in which any given country had to severely limit its international trade, the only enemy to fear was the enemy’s army. Usually, any country was able to live out of its own produce and manufactured goods. If 70-80% of the staple goods are domestic-made, this is possible. Say it’s not a war, but a bubonic plague pandemic, or COVID-19 for that matter. Or, suppose it’s a nuclear war. Who will survive: a country where most people know to use Excel and to understand the Stock Exchange lingo, or a country where people know to cultivate the fields, to raise animals, to manufacture clothing, and so on? Today, if there’s no Internet or if some piece of software in the Cloud breaks, an entire planet is paralyzed! This is how vulnerable our civilization has become.

If the supermarket cannot scan a product because the IT infrastructure is down, they cannot sell me food. How absurd is that? It happened to me more than once to be unable to purchase some grocery item because “it was not in the computer.” What I should have said is this: “Oh, sorry, my bad; I bought this product elsewhere, and it somehow got mixed with my shopping cart’s contents.” If the item isn’t in their system, how can they prove it’s theirs? Modern society is a complete fuckup.

Long story made short: there’s no way to solve “the China problem” unless strong protectionist measures are adopted. But this won’t happen, and not only because of the greedy corporations. It’s a Catch-22, or more like a zugzwang. Let me quote again from myself:

But even as Taiwan’s president wants to treat economic security as national security, what is the West doing? The West is still relying on China for most everyday products! This is more than insane, this is outright suicidal! And the moving back of industrial production to the US and the EU won’t happen anytime soon, except for a few crucial fields, such as semiconductors. Kamala Harris made it clear that taxing imports from China would mean the consumer will pay more, which she can’t accept. She thought she fought Trump, but she fought national security at that. So there’s no incentive to manufacture products in the US, as long as it’s cheaper to make them in China. Even if in the long run, the manufacturing of more and more products would “return home,” this will be strongly opposed. That’s because such products will be increasingly expensive. Such a move would need a radical change in consumers’ habits from “buying more and buying often” to “buying quality products that last longer,” provided that someone offers such products. Even so, people should understand that they need to work in factories instead of moving a mouse and making video conferences. I don’t see the TikTokers doing that; they seek quick enrichment, either as social media influencers, or as cryptominers, if not stock exchange speculators. Unless, of course, they’re Europeans from the Last Generation, in which case they deface paintings, block roads and airports, because their goddess is that stupid bitch who goes by the name of Greta Cuntberg.

Replace “US” with “EU” and everything else remains true.

I’ll stick to another opinion of mine from the 1990s: in the long run, Latin America and Africa might have better survival chances than Europe and the United States. They would end up dominated, just like Southeast Asia, by China, but they’ll survive as a society. We won’t.

Energy, ethics, wars and sanctions

As I already said, the increase in the price of energy in the EU started towards the fall of 2021, before any war with Russia, and it was generated by the European Commission’s implementation of the so-called “liberalization of the European energy markets,” which included the separation of supply and production activities, and the gradual obligation to trade energy through the European Energy Exchange (EEX) AG in Leipzig. Only then there was a war. But there also a planned European subordination to the American liquefied natural gas (in the same blog post).

This being said, the price of the natural gas in the EU is roughly 5 times higher than in the US. Page 10 of Part A of Draghi’s report:

While energy prices have fallen considerably from their peaks, EU companies still face electricity prices that are 2-3 times those in the US and natural gas prices paid are 4-5 times higher.

Wonderful. Meanwhile, with all the sanctions that we seemingly have imposed on Russia, their gas is still transiting Ukraine to reach the European Union! WHAT THE FUCK. Reuters:

Russia’s economy ministry has revised up its 2024 forecasts for export sales of oil and gas, key sources of budget revenues, by $17.4 billion from the previous estimate to $239.7 billion thanks to a more positive price outlook, a document seen by Reuters showed.

The improved expectations for Russia’s oil and gas business underscore how the West has struggled to inflict lasting damage on Russia’s economy through unprecedented sanctions, including oil price caps and import restrictions, over Moscow’s war with Ukraine.

The document showed that Russian crude oil exports are seen rising to 239.9 million metric tons (4.8 million barrels per day) this year from 238.3 million tons in 2023.

The ministry also expects the average price of Russian oil sold for export to rise this year to $70 per barrel, a $5 upward revision from an estimate made in April. This is also up from $64.5 in 2023 and above the price cap of $60 per barrel imposed by the West.

Natural gas prices were also revised up, for sales in both Europe and China.

Russia has managed to divert much of its business away from Europe since its invasion of Ukraine, ramping up trade with China and India.

The revisions ultimately mean higher revenues. Earning nearly $240 billion from oil and gas exports this year would represent a $13 billion increase on 2023. In 2025, the forecast was also raised, to $236.5 billion from $226.2 billion in the previous forecast.

I can’t even.

So far, Putin’s gas and oil has reached Orbán’s Hungary as usual, war or no war. It’s only now that Viktor Orbán is gradually losing his Russian discount. 

For the last two years, Hungary has enjoyed special EU exemptions giving it access to Russian oil at well below market rates. In June, Ukraine put that arrangement in doubt when it blocked Russian energy giant Lukoil from sending products through the country to the EU.

Hungary and Slovakia, another lingering Russian oil importer, swiftly warned that energy shortages loomed for both. They demanded the EU intervene. 

But in the weeks since, the crude oil has kept flowing. Data from energy intelligence service Argus Media shows that Hungary and Slovakia received a combined 720,000 tons of crude in August, compared to 792,000 in July and 610,000 in June. The European Commission gave a similar assessment this week.

There could be several reasons for the broadly unaltered flows. While Lukoil is blocked, other Russian oil producers aren’t — and are free to keep sending crude across Ukraine. Additionally, Lukoil can sell its oil at the Ukrainian border to a trader that sells it to the EU. If that fails, Croatia is eagerly offering its own pipeline as an alternative supply route.

What the fucking fuck. The Russian oil and gas should have completely stopped entering the EU, full stop.

But how can anyone trust the Europeans’ words (they keep saying that “Crimea is Ukraine”), when after the 2014 annexation of Crimea, only the most symbolic of the sanctions were adopted, and every kind of business with Russia kept going on as if nothing ever happened?

One can never trust any promise made by the European Union. The Eurocrats are as trustworthy as Putin’s Russia or as the former Soviet Union’s General Secretary.

The “Draghi and the ECB” problem

Mario Draghi served 2011-2019 as President of the European Central Bank (ECB), after having been 2006-2011 Governor of the Bank of Italy and 2009-2011 Chair of the Financial Stability Board.

Of course, we’re now much worse with Christine Lagarde at the ECB. This woman, previously the 11th Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) from 2011 to 2019, and having a long history in France’s governments, including being Minister of the Economy, Finance, and Industry 2007-2011, has absolutely zero competency in finance and economy! Her degrees are in law and law alone. How did she manage to occupy such high positions, for which she’s utterly incompetent?

But Draghi, while not a stupid individual, has his faults.

It was under Draghi’s leadership that the ECB first lowered its deposit facility rate to 0% in July 2012, and then moved it into negative interest rates in June 2014: -0.1%. This was gradually lowered further in subsequent years. You know what followed: the banks are shitting on us ever since!

It’s true that Draghi didn’t invent the concept. The Bank of Japan (BOJ) first introduced its zero interest rate policy in February 1999. It then raised interest rates in August 2000 to 0.25%, only to return to the zero interest rate policy in March 2001. The BOJ has since then mostly maintained extremely low interest rates, even venturing into negative territory in 2016. So when the BOJ went into negative rates in January 2016, the ECB already had negative interests since June 2014!

In Europe, the Swedish Riksbank was the first central bank to implement negative interest rates for deposits: -0.25% in July 2009. It raised it back to positive territory in September 2010. The Riksbank reintroduced negative rates in February 2015: -0.1%. This was further lowered to -0.5% by February 2016.

The negative interest rates are a concept “against nature”: if the banks don’t want our money, why don’t they give us all their money? Why should anyone PAY THE BANK to keep their money?!

The official rationale is a stupid one. Famous economists have blamed the sluggish economy on the lack of investment. They should have insisted that regulatory agencies and legislators force the banks to start doing again what they were still doing 40 years ago: financing the business plans of small and medium enterprises. Instead, they blamed the population. To them, the population was making too many economies instead of spending and investing. The stress was on investing.

The century-old wisdom and precautionary thinking was that people and families put some money aside for unexpected needs. Making economies was a sign of wisdom. In recent times, however, under the influence of the increasingly irrational American mindset, people were told to be continuously indebted to banks. Saving made an outcast of you, a pariah. And now they’re surprised at the fact that the vast majority of the American population couldn’t afford a supplementary cost of $400 because they don’t have this amount of savings! When you know the healthcare costs out there, this literally means that most Americans are living in poverty.

So they want to make us, Europeans, slaves of the banks. And we didn’t obey. Particularly, the Germans were not keen to spend all their gains, so they made savings. No problem, the ECB, and by a cascading process, all commercial banks, punished us.

The real problem, once we ignore the outrageous abuse of the ECB, is that this didn’t increase the investment. It only increased the consumption. The big oligopolies became even richer. The imports from China increased, only to be disrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic. But the small and medium businesses still got no funding for their projects! It’s ridiculous to depend on predatory venture capitalists, angel investors, or even crowdfunding platforms like Kickstart, Indiegogo, or Ulule. What are banks for, then? To give people consumer credits?

Another idiocy of the ECB, this time under Christine Lagarde’s leadership, was to spread the panic about an imminent deflation. Negative inflation, if you prefer. As sure as eggs is eggs, this deflation never came. Quite the opposite happened: the energy got more expensive, and everything followed the trend. That was before Russia invaded Ukraine!

You should understand that a deflation would indeed be catastrophic in theory. That’s why economists, governments, and others prefer a moderate inflation rate of about 2% annually. 

But a true deflation would be almost impossible nowadays. In theory, in a deflationary economy, people would defer to tomorrow what they wanted to buy today. As tomorrow is another day, and the deflation is still there, they would defer to after tomorrow. Apply, rinse, repeat.

Now tell me this: how can you not purchase the food you need? Or the clothing you need? How about the ISP or the Netflix subscription? Who cares that €10 tomorrow could buy more than €10 today if you need those products or services? If you need a new car, you’ll just buy it! (Or lease it, duh.) People would only avoid purchasing goods and services that they don’t actually need. But this was the normal behavior 50+ years ago: why returning to a sane normal would be wrong? In the short term, true, this would increase the unemployment. But in each and every crisis of any kind, when people stop purchasing what they don’t really need, this is what happens.

So deflation only happened in some Excel files they were examining. Just like the negative interests on deposits, which made the banks even more parasitic, the “fake news” of a looming deflation only created more havoc than it was supposed to prevent.

We do have an ECB problem in Europe.

Centralism and corruption by design

Quoting myself from 2021:

The EU is more than ever a bureaucratic burden instead of being of any use. I always said that this USSR-like construct wasn’t needed in order to ensure the free movement of people, merchandise, and money. (Merchandise-wise, Turkey being in the EEA, they only need visas for their people.) The most socialist (if not even communist) principle of the EU is “give your money to us, and instead of letting you sponsor your national infrastructure, agriculture, digital economy, culture, etc., it’s up to us to decide who deserves such funding.” Looks like Moscow in the Soviet times, only it’s Brussels. So a country can’t provide aids for a national aeronautic company, but the EU can sponsor random businesses such as a private dental clinic in Romania and a small software development company in Germany (not open-source, but commercial products!), in both cases with over a million of euros, for it counts as “regional development.” It counts as pan-European Mafia to me.

The lack of legitimacy of the EU institution isn’t “populism” but reality: even if the European MEPs are indeed elected, the European Parliament cannot initiate laws, they can only amend what the European Commission presents them with. And either way, it looks like the most imbecile individuals are getting jobs at Brussels, for the citizens of Europe aren’t aware of the importance of who they’re sending there! Brussels is the epitome of a supra-national Mafia that abolishes national sovereignty. Take the recent case of Poland, who was ordered by the ECJ to close some coal mines; Poland said no, because it’s their sovereign right to do so. But the EU managed to do more than Hitler and Stalin with their tanks: to subjugate an entire continent of formerly free nations! As for how and why a unique currency can only lead to disaster, there are smart economists who know the answer. But apparently, our only hope stays in those “populists” who might trigger one day a Frexit, an Italxit, and so on.

I gave a couple of examples for the first topic, that of the centralized “European funding” of projects. Unfortunately, that post is in Romanian, but it presents: (1) a small IT company in Romania, with pictures; (2) a dental practice, also in Romania; (3) LanguageTooler GmbH, the makers of LanguageTool!

From last one’s Imprint:

The European Union and the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) support this project by providing funding. They support the development of error detection algorithms in multilingual texts, and the development of our browser add-ons and website.

Supported by the Ministry of Labour, Social Affairs, Health, Women and Family from funds of the European Social Fund, who support the development of our style checker. You can find information about the ESF at esf.brandenburg.de.

Once again: a government cannot subsidize a public or a private company, as this would “distort the free market”; but the EU is free to do just that!

Such “non-repayable grants” are, in my view, severely distorting any market. What is this, alms?! The process of getting such European funds approved for one’s business project is prone to creating corruption at the local level, where the applications are accepted (they have to be filled out in due form), and possibly at Brussels too. Why couldn’t they leave each country with the already existing corruption? Why adding to it?

The second topic, that of who gets in the European Parliament, is also further developed in my post from 2023, but I’m not sure that an automated translation from Romanian would do it justice. Let me translate only a specific paragraph:

Once an EC Directive is adopted, it is virtually impossible to change it, at least not because a single country has reconsidered. I am not aware of any case where a pan-European consensus has been reached whereby a Directive repealing an earlier Directive has been voted. Not to amend or replace it, but to recognize it as inadequate. Now, if national sovereignty still existed, after new elections in which the population elected new representatives, they could repeal any law. As an EU member, a national parliament can only repeal a national law, but not a law implementing a European Directive! It’s no use having a new government (and therefore new representatives in the Council of the European Union) and new MEPs, as long as they cannot vote to repeal a Directive previously approved when the representatives of that country had different views.

This is why I insist that the EU is an antidemocratic construct because it destroys the national sovereignty itself. The Eurodogma that labels the “sovereignists” as “agents of Putin’s” and “right-wing” is abject. Giving up sovereignty is unnatural and wrong. This has nothing to do with nationalism; it’s just common sense.

That some such right-wing parties are harmful—that’s another story. That some of their people are siding with Putin—that’s a sad fact. But this is all Europe’s fault.

Even the recent landmark victory of AfD in Thüringen is the EU’s fault. Let me explain. I’ll start by quoting from what the political scientist Ursula Münch told Deutsche Welle back in March:

The AfD has evolved from its early days, when it was dismissed as a party catering to economics professors, into a “far-right party that is extremist, antisemitic and racist,” political scientist Ursula Münch told DW.

At the time of its founding, the AfD was critical of the euro currency and the EU bailout program for Greece. In September 2012, the “Election Alternative 2013” was formed — the precursor to the AfD. Economics professor Bernd Lucke, journalist Konrad Adam and Alexander Gauland a former member of the center-right Christian Democratic Union then turned it into the Alternative for Germany.

The party was officially founded on February 6, 2013. Since then, “the AfD has become a permanent fixture in the German party system, where a decidedly liberal-conservative force had previously been sorely lacking,” wrote AfD co-chair Alice Weidel in response to a DW query on the tenth anniversary of the party’s foundation.

The party fast became a rallying point for people with right-wing attitudes for whom existing far-right extremist splinter groups seemed too extreme, but who had become disenchanted with the liberal tendencies of the center-right Christian Democratsunder former Chancellor Angela Merkel.

From the beginning, the AfD comprised three different movements: the liberal economists, the national conservatives and right-wing populists.

The frequent change of leadership has become a distinctive feature of the AfD, as more moderate leaders opt out.

The party’s radicalization began when hundreds of thousands of people fled to Germany in 2015, seeking protection from the war in Syria. Xenophobic anti-refugee street protests began to grow, especially in eastern Germany, the former communist GDR, which had known little immigration until 1989.

AfD founding member Alexander Gauland once referred to this development as “a gift” for his party, whose anti-government rhetoric turned increasingly aggressive. In 2016, then-AfD leader Frauke Petry said refugees should be prevented from crossing the border into Germany by force of arms if necessary.

Indeed, the AfD was initiated, as I recall, by a group of economists who argued that the single currency was bad for Germany. That the single currency is bad for countries with healthier economies is obvious to any financier who is not retarded. The dilution of the effects of bad policies in countries like Greece is paid for, on the principle of communicating vessels, by all other countries. In practice, a euro weaker than the DM would have been, has served German exporters but not the population, which consumes a lot of imported goods.

Hundreds of thousands of refugees? Millions even! And not all were fleeing Bashar al-Assad’s regime. They weren’t all from Syria, and they weren’t all from Afghanistan. Those from Egypt were clearly economic refugees. But instead of looking for a legal path, they paid up to €10,000 to smugglers to boat them across the Mediterranean. And you can’t throw them back in the water!

The problems with Angela’s refugee policy are multi-faceted. Naturally, if Germany had not taken in refugees, Greece and Italy would have been suffocated. And so they’re overwhelmed. But the real issue is another one.

Refugees or not, in Germany or elsewhere, the thing with the massive influx of largely uneducated people unwilling to abide by the rules of civilized social coexistence is this: the respective countries have done nothing to enforce the law. France hasn’t enforced its laws in entire neighborhoods for decades. When in Rome, do as the Romans do? Not so for an important part of such refugees! And the law enforcement didn’t enforce anything!

Germany should have found funds to hire tens of thousands of police and civil servants. It should have set up regular patrols in areas with many “boatie” refugees. These patrols do not exist because they say, “We are not a police state.” Then what happens is that you become an anarchy, and no wonder that the public, perceiving that public safety is decreasing, vote for AfD and Die Heimat (ex-NPD).

Germany should also have hired officials to check whether asylum seekers really qualify for the aid. Otherwise, you end up like France, paying benefits to people who are no longer in the country. And the allowances can be higher than those paid under Hartz IV, hence the frustration of those who, as a result, instead of voting SPD or Die Linke, vote AfD.

Finally, Germany practices “positive discrimination” towards refugees, so that a German citizen will not find a place in a nursery or kindergarten, which are reserved in priority for refugees. I know of a case where a town hall had to be forced by a court of law to find a place in Kita (nursery) for a German child! How can the population not revolt? How can they not vote AfD when the government’s policy is perceived as being due to the application of European treaties? With such headless politicians, we have ended up where we are now.

And it’s indeed EU’s fault, too. National politicians dare not question Brussels’ policies for fear of being declared “extremists.” Especially Germany, with its Nazi past, has adopted this “ostrich policy.”

And this is why AfD will rule them all. When you deny that a problem even exists, the problem will be solved by extremists.

Not only antidemocratic and inept, but it doesn’t even work!

There are several ways the EU is not democratic. The Americans should understand it easier, as their Union, which is a Federation, has a distinction between Federal Authority vs. State Autonomy, and many Americans still perceive the Federal Government as being too intrusive. Yet, their Congress’ members are elected in full earnestness! So the federal legislation is 100% legitimate. In the EU, which is not even a Federation of States, the members of the European Parliament are often elected from the failed politicians, i.e., those who failed to be elected in national parliaments. No wonder the EU is such a sham of a democracy.

Now, I’m not sure that I’ll be understood. While many Americans hold strong feelings about the national flag and view its desecration, such as burning, as highly disrespectful, more like a blasphemy, the law says otherwise.  Burning the American flag is protected under the First Amendment of the Constitution, which guarantees freedom of speech, and the Supreme Court has upheld this right Not that it would be advisable to do such a thing. Well, in many European countries, it’s a criminal offense to burn the flag! You’ll be prosecuted if you publicly desecrate or destroy the national flag, including burning it, in Germany, France, Italy, Spain, and other countries. In Poland, you’re facing jail time. 

However, the EU flag generally doesn’t benefit from such legal protections. That’s to say that most EU countries do not have specific laws against burning it. Well, some do. In Bulgaria, a protester that burned a Russian flag ended up in jail, which is absurd and it doesn’t have anything to do with the EU, but here’s what the article says: “While damaging the Bulgarian or EU flag is punishable by up to two years in prison, no such prohibition exists for flags of other nations.” So you can get two years of jail time for burning the EU flag in Bulgaria!

I’m sorry, but I am all for the freedom of expression. If burning the EU flag can put you in jail, this is anything but democratic. The fucking European Union is not even a country!

Another topic now. What they call Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) in the States has hit Europe for about 20 years with regard to promoting women.

Norway, Iceland, France, and Spain have laws requiring at least 40% of board members to be women on publicly listed companies (Italy only requires a third). France also has penalties for political parties that don’t meet gender parity requirements for candidates. But the European Commission aims higher.

The Von der Leyen 1.0 Commission consisted of 44% women and 56% men, later to be adjusted to 48% women, still falling just short of gender parity (or is it sexual parity?). Now, the Von der Leyen 2.0 Commission is unable to meet the new target of “at least 50% women,” so Ursula has pressured EU countries to swap women in for the proposed commissioners! She asked each country to nominate two candidates—one male and one female—to give her leeway in appointing a gender-balanced College.

Oh, fuck, the contents of one’s pants is a competence criterion! They don’t need the best person for the job, they choose people based on gender! This is Idiocracy and nothing else!

I fully appreciated the moral fiber of the Irish: “There are member states like Ireland that say they have used their full rights to put the best person forward. In Ireland’s case, a man — namely their finance minister, Michael McGrath.”

Notwithstanding the stupidity to prefer a woman (why not a non-Caucasian lesbian?) to whoever happens to be the most qualified candidate, I have another question for those idiocrats. What do they do when someone declares themself to be non-binary? How could we meet gender parity for 63 genders or whatever? And, again, is this about gender, or about sex?

This is like the mental retardation of those who say that “gender is not sex, so there can be more than two genders,” and therefore they ask for a “Male/Female/Other” field on passports and ID cards, ignoring the fact that all passports and all national ID cards do not have a “gender” field, but only a “SEX” field! The “SEX” field remains correct even if consider yourself to be a lamp post or a tomato! “The plane crashed with 239 passengers, of which 63 were women and 32 were non-binary.” “This hospital has 4 OB-GYN practicians, 2 andrologists, and 2 specialists in lamp posts and tomato people.” No, it cannot work this way. It’s complicated at the lavatories and locker rooms.

But I’m genuinely curious to see what happens when someone will say that they’re non-binary, so “please don’t assume my gender to be the same as the sex assigned at birth, but yes, I want to be an EU Commissioner, thank you.”

A last one. The lack of frontiers is not working. Since this chaotic migration started in 2015, and given the various terror acts, it has already happened more than once, but it’s happening again: Germany announces temporary border checks at all land borders. “We want to further reduce irregular migration.” Of course, this came following a series of deadly knife attacks by migrants. Sure enough, the Belgians are puzzled and displeased: “In the 1980s, we had to get off the bus and they checked all our passports. We’re not going back to that time, are we?” Oh yes, you are. Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk said the action was unacceptable, while Austria has announced that it will not accept any migrants who are turned back. Isn’t Europe wonderful? United like never before.

The Guardian: ‘The end of Schengen’: Germany’s new border controls put EU unity at risk:

Besides Germany, Schengen members currently operating controls on particular borders include Austria, which cites Ukraine-related security threats and pressure on asylum to check arrivals from Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Slovenia and Hungary.

Denmark, citing terror threats related to the war in Gaza and Russian espionage risks, is carrying out checks on land and sea transit from Germany, and France is checking Schengen zone arrivals on the grounds of an increased terror threat.

Italy, Norway, Sweden, Slovenia and Finland are also operating border checks, variously citing terrorist activity, the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, Russian intelligence activity, increased migration flows and organised crime in the Balkans.

Wunderbar. However,

“It won’t fly under EU law – yet will this dissuade Scholz from going ahead?” he said. Christopher Wratil of the University of Vienna was even more scathing, accusing Berlin of “governing as if the AfD were [already] in power”.

After today, Wratil said, German politicians “should no longer tell me that somebody else is failing to comply with EU law … Wanting to wipe out Schengen with a mere stroke of the pen – and entirely without thinking.”

Speaking of Schengen, which is a complete idiocy (why have the EU, the EEA, and Schengen?), the confusion regarding the European institutions and the corresponding membership is momentous. Just take a look at this chart:

I’ve never seen more insanity in my entire life!

But wait, there’s more. Out of an obvious lack of imagination (and a lack of intelligence), they have different institutions with similar names. If they wanted to confuse 445 million people, c’est chose faite. The most blatant examples:

My head is spinning. WHOEVER DECIDED ON THESE NAMES WAS A COMPLETE MORON!

And I can’t even burn the EU flag, apparently.

Tutankhamun and Agrippina

If I were to be born again

Nobody gets to be born again. Even if they did, the old saying that one can’t choose their parents could be extended with “nobody chooses where to be born.” But for the sake of the argument, let’s say I get the chance to be born again, just not here. “When” is a different issue, but “where” is more important in my view.

I always considered two hypothetical scenarios: I got reborn at the same date, so in 1970. Alternatively, say I’m still born in Europe, but right now I’m 24 years old, so I can try to immigrate to some other place on Earth. Heck, the place is the same in both cases!

If I were no more than 24 now, I’d learn Spanish, and I’d move to Latin America. I’m dead serious about that.

Central and South America is not a miraculous region. There are countries there that were almost destroyed by incompetence, such as Venezuela. There are countries with recurrent crises, such as Argentina and Brazil. Other countries seem to recover, as was the case with Mexico under AMLO, but then things start drifting a bit. A number of countries are relatively stable and safer than others: Uruguay, Costa Rica, Panama. And Argentina isn’t that bad. I’m not sure about Chile lately.

Even considering that there’s a lot of poverty there, is anywhere a Land of Cockaigne? It surely isn’t. So I really don’t understand those who go out of their way to enter the United States illegally. They won’t find the Paradise there. First, they should avoid being caught by the CBP. Later, they must constantly avoid ICE’s officers. They would also fear the police, unless they live in a “sanctuary” city or county. And they won’t even exist, officially. No SSN, no driver license. How can this be a dream for so many people?

There are over 400 million Spanish speakers in Latin America (out of about 650 million), so with Spanish and English one can have access to almost all the information one could have. The cultural life of Latin America is incredibly complex and rich; it’s just that we don’t know much about it. Writers, thinkers, philosophers, graphic artists, filmmakers, musicians. On the topic of the graphic arts, take a look at Domestika; you’ll find that most teachers there are from Latin America. Lately, they have expanded to the entire planet, but this is an easy way to discover the creativity of a continent.

Should I live there, I’d most likely only know Spanish and English, with Brazilian Portuguese as a possible third language. I’d most likely never learn French, nor would I be interested much in the Italian culture. That would be a bad thing, but if you don’t know what you’re losing, you don’t feel that you’re losing anything!

If I were born there, I wouldn’t read French books in the original, and I wouldn’t watch French movies with the original sound, if at all. Worse even, I would probably never have discovered the universe of the bande dessinée franco-belge.  C’est grave, ça, mais on peut vivre avec. They have comic books creators in Latin America. Well, even if I were 24 now, in Europe, targeting Latin America, I’d be a young fool who would have failed to discover the said French-Belgian stuff, so it’s all the same. A completely different life.

Europe is going down the drain. It has absolutely no future. As I wrote here, “We might be facing another Fall of the Western Roman Empire.” Try not being chronically desperate at this thought.