So aktuell wie eh und je. Meine Tochter findet die Bücher vom kleinen Bären und vom kleinen Tiger einfach klasse.

I used to live in Wiesbaden and can confirm that there are many Americans there. They should qualify as suspicious.

It’s quite obvious that Iran (or at least its current regime) is fighting a war of survival. If the current regime stays in power and gains the ability to open and close Hormuz at will, that should be a win for Iran. If the US cannot guarantee safe shipping through Hormuz, that is a loss for them. In my book that seems pretty straightforward.

And here I was thinking that it takes one side to start a war but two to stop it. The US seems to be in a no win scenario. Either they just call it a day while publicly claiming victory, which in practice results in an Iranian victory, or they commit to a ground campaign, which is Afghanistan all over again but much bigger in scope.

Genau, das ist aus meiner Sicht ein Skandal. Ich habe für meine beiden Kinder auch den Höchstbetrag bekommen. Um den Kaufkraftverlust auszugleichen müsste die Obergrenze heute bei etwa 2700 Euro liegen.

Die Pauschale ist ja schon viele Jahre nicht angepasst worden. Unabhängig davon, ob es sinnvoll ist den weitesten Arbeitsweg zu fördern, finde ich, dass jede in absoluten Zahlen definierte Leistung oder jeder Grenzwert einen Mechanismus zur regelmäßigen Anpassung braucht aufgrund der Inflation.

Oh Boy. A keyboard warrior who tries to compensate for a lack of courage with a wall of text. Have a great life. I hope you come up with something good to do during the rest of it.

That’s a very sad point, if true. I’m old enough to remember coverage of that event on the evening news. How can a clear and obvious case of ethnic cleansing be downplayed?

I was in Afghanistan, first serving with the Dutch armed forces and later working for a company that built clinics and schools. After that I worked in eastern Africa for a rural electrification programme. While parts of these efforts may have been fruitless in hindsight, I still stand by these choices.

What have you done? I feel like I was (and am) willing to work towards putting an end to atrocities, at least within my limited influence. I am willing. Therefore I expect a similar level of caring for the lives of others from others.

It’s so frustrating that we are living through an active genocide (again) and doing absolutely nothing (again). In my youth, when there wasn’t yet a 24 hour news cycle and I learned about the genocide in Rwanda as a teenager, it was my naive belief at the time that a lack of knowledge was the main reason for the general indifference in “the West”. A year later the genocide in Bosnia, especially the massacre at Srebrenica, was headline news in my home country of the Netherlands and yet people seemed to collectively just shrug that off just as quickly as it happened. Now, many years later, I’ve become much more cynical. If you want people to care about unjustified murder you should either make sure to have your country located really really close to “the West”, but even that is just of limited use to Ukraine, or make sure that the killing happens to take place at the hands of mostly Jewish people, although most Palestinians can attest to the fact that while media attention is good, action is still lacking.

No, you seem to be (willingly?) misrepresenting what I’m saying. There is no long term plan. There is no strategy. There simply is a situation in which the actions of Europeans in the past have caught up with Europeans in the present and we are now stuck between a rock we failed to move decades ago and a hard place we built ourselves. What our current crop of “leaders” seems to be doing is (once again) hoping this all blows over in a decade, because we’re all out of other good options. While this is a fatalistic point of view, I believe it is warranted. Building some degree of strategic autonomy will take years, maybe decades. Until then we remain dependent on the hegemon and cannot face it head first on any and every issue. Had we collectively done what le Général had told us to do back in the 1960s, we’d be in a better position, but we didn’t, so we aren’t.

I started to realise how much furniture is still manufactured in Europe, when you start to look for quality and not simply for the cheapest product available. My personal favourite has to be Müller Small Living. After our move we ditched our old and broken bed for a new one and got one of their folding work stations for working from home. Both are amazing, both in terms of design and quality of the furniture. They are all made in Germany as well.

It’s not about 5D Chess at all, in my opinion. We’re unfortunately at a point where decades of inaction and lethargy have left the EU largely dependent on the US for many things, ranging from defense to energy security to digital infrastructure. The hole we dug for ourselves is so deep that confronting the hegemon, the US, is not realistic any time soon. Therefore I believe it’s more about recognising where we have to use our limited ability to resist and where we can get away with nodding along, while knowing that this is bullshit. I believe the threat to Greenland for example was much more concrete and dangerous and rightly led to Europeans using some of their limited ability to resist to put a foot down. This current threat to Spain seems vague and unenforceable, given the structure of the EU. With the realities being as they are it seems unwise to use what little power we have to resist for a pointless threat that will be forgotten in two weeks. The alternative is a head on collision like the one that Zelensky experienced that may not be forgotten.

What the Europeans should have done is to build an independent power base and maintain that, even if it costs effort and money. Unfortunately we didn’t and now we are where we are.

Internationaal recht bestond nooit. Het bestond alleen in de hoofden van sommige Europeanen. De rest van de wereld had nooit zulke illusies.

While I really don’t like the guy, I feel like he understands that the best way of dealing with a narcissist that you’re powerless to confront head on is to just let him talk.

I believe he understands that you need to choose your battles wisely. I’m convinced that it takes a lot of effort to keep a straight face when this big baby goes on one of his rants. We all know that cutting trade ties with Spain is all but impossible, given the structure of the EU. By this time next week Mango Mussolini will have forgotten all about this episode. The only way to escalate is to give him more fuel for his fire, for example by directly challenging his lies. Unless you happen to have enough power to do so, like China, that’s not a good option in my opinion.

This must be this freedom of speech, that is supposedly under attack.

I’m fully convinced that the United States have nothing more than a controlled opposition at this point. It’s honestly hard to imagine a world in which an authoritarian government willingly gives up power through elections without any major upheaval. I’d personally want to see a Romanian scenario, but I fear the land of the free and home of the brave doesn’t have it in itself to get rid of a dictatorship.

Let me fix that real quick:

Russian foreign language correspondent confirms that Hungary and Slovakia are the Kremlin’s key outposts within the EU.

She must be lying. After all, she’s talking.