Servilité, Iniquité, Avidité
An overdue update to that 1789 quaint phrase
I had written up 5 different versions of this, and was about to dump it all when CC2 happened… It really is time to get out!
Post the “wrong” thing online and they show up at your door.
Read the wrong thing and you’ve committed a crime.
Back the wrong candidate and they’ll find a reason to keep them off the ballot.
Cheer for the wrong party and the government moves to have it banned outright.
The opposition leader who might ACTUALLY win gets disqualified, or jailed, or simply disappears into a prison system. “Due process”…
Neighbours report on neighbours.
Cameras on every corner.
Every message you send sits somewhere the state can read it.
Every payment you make sits somewhere the state can freeze it.
Sounds like 1940, or 48 if you’re into that kind of thing. Or Russia. Or China.
We’ve all learned history, and those times, those countries are bad. Evil even. They can’t but control their population else they would all flee to freer destinations…
Right?
RIGHT?!
Let me tell you… Welcome to the EUSSR 2026.
This. is. Europe.
What first triggered me was that on July 2nd the Court of Injustice of the EUSSR ruled on a case out of Saarbrücken.
Three Germans ran a free website. No ads, no subscriptions, just a donation button. Over sixteen months they collected €60k and reposted a few videos from RT Germany.
None of that matters though.
“Operator”, under the EU’s Russia sanctions seems to be now be ANYONE who directly or indirectly makes such content available.
Profit, duration nor reach are relevant.
The court went even wider than the Commission’s own guidance, which had said this only applied to commercial entities. The FAQ that made everyone believe there was still a little common sense left, just got blasted by its own court.
Up to five years in a German prison. For a donation jar and a repost button.
But what made me decide to warn you all is the following:
Chat Control 2.0.
Because we are not allowed to have any privacy in whatever social media or apps we use. All for our own good of course!
It’s of course completely different when you’re negotiating multi billion contracts with Pfizer, that needs to stay out of everyone’s view. Or when you’re someone advocating for surveillance and finding a bug in your office.
In March, Parliament actually killed Chat Control 1.0. It voted down the temporary scanning regime 311 to 228. But that expired on April 3rd.
Google, Meta, Microsoft and Snap kept scanning everyone’s messages anyway. Who cares about any legal basis right? No consequences either.
And here I was believing that the GDPR applied to everyone.
But now. Just days before the summer recess, Parliament President Roberta Metsola revived the EXACT same rejected text through an emergency procedure…
The trick getting played here is purely procedural: instead of needing a majority to pass, it needs an absolute majority, 361 MEPs, to reject it.
And when you schedule the vote just at the last sitting day before recess, you can be assured that half the chamber has already left for the summer, and that this law that lost fair and square in March will get passed anyway.
That’s European democracy for you. Right there.
Try try try until you succeed. If it wouldn’t be so depressing, I’d be able to find some humour in that.
Martin Sonneborn tried to stop it from the floor, citing the Parliament’s own rulebook and offering to hand the President a printed copy in person, reminding her “we’re not in Malta here”.
He put it more plainly elsewhere: the manoeuvre “suspends a fundamental right”.
Chat Control 2.0, the permanent successor, is still in trilogue in parallel, the same fight I mapped out in “Heil Comrade! Welcome to the EUSSR!”, and the Council’s own legal service already told them in writing that warrantless scanning breaks the Charter of Fundamental Rights.
Nobody seems to care.
Across the Channel it’s more of the same thing.
Roughly thirty arrests a day in the UK for “grossly offensive” posts.
However, fewer than one in ten ends in a conviction. The process IS the punishment. Doesn’t matter if it sticks.
None of those people as far as I can tell actually hurt anyone. They got a visit nevertheless…
Germany’s answer to a party it can’t beat is obviously losing gracefully.
AfD is polling first or tied for first nationally. And of course nothing screams “European Democracy” like a fresh 1,500-page legal report, arguing that that party should be banned outright by the Constitutional Court.
Even Friedrich Merz - do I have to say? no fan of the AfD - called that push something that “smacks too much of political competition elimination”.
No1 seems to care…
France…
France, being French about it, delivered the actual season finale today… Definitely more thrilling than their soccer game.
Anyway, the appeals court upheld Le Pen's conviction. So she IS convicted of it. However, her office ban was cut from 5y to 45 months (30 suspended), which backdated to March means she can now run for president in 2027.
And she needs to wear an electronic leash the next year and have to ask to go grocery shopping to some magistrate.
“European Democracy”. Right there.
Nothing says free and fair elections as a presidential campaign scheduled around a curfew.
She doesn’t know yet if she would run like this, so it’s perfectly possible that she passes “le bâton” to Jordan Bardella. Whose chief qualification - as far as I can tell - is not fitted with an ankle bracelet yet.
If you’ve been reading me for a while now, you would surely have noticed the pattern forming: ordinary citizen? the law gets read as wide as it can possibly be. Political rival? the “law” gets found, specifically, right on schedule, exactly when they’re about to win.
And if they can’t find a law, they’ll make something up about Russia.
And if that doesn’t reek of Gulag enough for you? Watch them build the money equivalent of this.
On June 23rd the European Parliament’s economics committee waved the digital euro through, 43 votes to 14, clearing it for a plenary vote this month.
Basic use is free, of course.
But how much digital euro you’re allowed to hold will get decided later on, by the Commission, through a delegated act, reviewed every two years - probably in a decade or so that will be on a daily basis, adjustable whenever “financial stability” requires it.
Not by referendum - not that they wouldn’t rig that.
Not really even the full Parliament - not that they wouldn’t rig that either.
A cap on your own money, set by people you didn’t vote in for that specific purpose.
Meanwhile the people writing all of this can’t even produce the most basics of basics…
(Ursula enters the chat): Like their own text messages.
She negotiated a vaccine deal worth billions by phone and SMS with Pfizer’s CEO. The price went from €15.50 a dose to €19.50 during those texts. I think she has no idea how a “volume discount” works…
And when journalists asked to see them, the Commission said it didn’t have them.
The General Court ruled against that answer, more than once even.
The Commission’s response? As the graceful loser they are, they didn’t release the texts. No no no… “European Democracy” requested that they rewrite their own rules so future ones get a “presumption of non-disclosure” by default.
Nobody seems to care…
Or look at where the actual money’s going.
Ukraine scores worse on Transparency International’s corruption index than every one of its western neighbours, EU member or not.
As one example: in November a $100 million kickback scheme at the state nuclear company cost two ministers their jobs and got Zelensky’s own chief of staff raided and fired the same day.
Last month Kyiv quietly deleted several anti-corruption commitments from the reform plan it had promised Brussels.
So nothing says supporting “European Democratic Values” like pumping more “aid” regardless.
Everywhere you look in Europe, you see more of the same.
Coincidence? Well, I’ve got a bridge in Brooklyn for sale for you…
Chat Control, the RT ruling, the party bans, the ballot bans, the holding limits. And of course true to “European Democracy”, No1 gets a vote.
My heart cries for the Europe of old. You know the one. The one that invented the printing press, the scientific method, the Renaissance, the Industrial Revolution.
Those people currently in charge cannot survive their own populations thinking clearly and deciding for themselves.
Why not just trust your people with an open argument, an unbanned candidate, an unscanned message?
Nah, can’t have that… Because then eventually somebody wins who isn’t supposed to win. So you don’t win the argument. You just have to make sure that the argument never happens.
A government that can survive an open argument is called a democracy.
A government that can’t survive one is called Europe.
My other publications:
[Daily Digest] → The news in 5 minutes, without the forty open tabs.
[Portfolio] → What I do with my own money
Voilà. A Union Venerable in its own Vainglory, Vaunting the Virtues it has quietly Voided, a Vast and Velvet Vigilance that Vets the Voter and Values the Vault above the Voice. It Bans and calls it Protection. It Vacates a truth because a Russian Voiced it. It Vouchsafes the approved Version and Vanishes the rest. It has read your Charter, admired the phrasing, and filed it somewhere you cannot reach.
The only Verdict is: Votre opinion n’est pas nécessaire.
Voilà.
Germany 1976. The Baader-Meinhof Gang was wreaking havoc in the country. I was enjoying being an Air Force Sargent. When I got to the party the average annual exchange rate for the US dollar was approximately 2.5170 Deutsche Marks. Lots of soldiers had to live on the economy because base housing was condemned after the second world war. Oh yeah. Guys were living in the back of bowling alleys and everything else. Meanwhile, as we were all wondering who won the war, my landlord was driving a long wheelbase Mercedes-Benz sedan. He lived in a house that had an apartment for his mother-in-law and a seperate small apartment for my wife and kids and I. I drove a Ford escort that had holes in the floorboard. It rains a lot in Germany and if the pieces of wood plywood weren't in the right place on the floorboards you would definitely get your face wet on road trips.
The powers that be told us to keep our place. We had ration cards for cigarettes and liquor. I collected those ration cards from the guys that didn't drink or smoke and bought all of the stuff I could at the BX and sold it to the Germans. I made 50% and they saved 50%. I lived in a nicer house than the base commander. My landlord had shrunks in the bedrooms because closets were considered rooms and were taxed by the government.
You may wonder where this is headed. Simply put you learn (at an early age hopefully) that laws are passed for the people that benefit from them. Rules are made to make sure that them what has - gets.
I explained to my son years ago that you want to shoot a deer when it is not running and terrified and adrenaline is pumping through its system. It makes the meat taste funny. Do not run through the forest with your gun over your head screaming "I'm going to kill you!" Instead you go to the river where the deer drinks and find a nice spot downwind from where the deer tracks are on the river bank. You wait patiently until it shows up and shoot it in the heart; don't want to damage the rack.
Remember that if you encrypt a file that you should decrypt it to make sure it works. And if it looks like it's working then encrypt the encrypted file. Repeat the same process with a different password. Leave it in a spot where the appropriate group will find it using an appropriate file name and let them spend a long time finding out it's garbage.
Don't put anything on the internet that may be "misunderstood." And remember what you put on the internet will be reviewed by people that have an interest in doing to you what people like you need to have done to them. Whether you understand it or not.
Frank Zappa was credited with saying, "In any contest that is you versus the world always bet on the world." Sage wisdom.
Read "Shogun" by Clavell if you haven't. read "Catch-22" by Heller if you haven't. The main characters in those books are both trying to adapt to circumstances, cultures and situations that are foreign in almost every way to them.
The way we were raised in the USA and our expectations are diametrically opposed to cultures in other countries. I have found that it is important not to get too preachy towards other countries. I am reminded of what a close friend of mine told me when I was in Saudi Arabia. He told me that when we were finished there we could go home.
I am an ardent supporter of America first and let us make America better and let people in other countries run their own countries and solve their own problems.
Just me ~
This only ends in blood. Theirs, ours, both, but when the only choices are removed and one is backed into a corner with nothing to lose.
Me, I'm going to miss indoor plumbing.