Best Of

If it is OK with the moderators, a post about an election: Yesterday I voted. Which meant that I sat down at my dining room table with two official guides and marked an optical ballot. This year the guide from Washington state is just 24 pages long. The guide from King County is 114 pages. (Fortunately I could ignore most of it, since it covered local elections all over the county, as well as legislative elections in other districts
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_County,_Washington )

In order: I voted on a constitutional amendment to the state constitution,
a special tax for emergency services in the county,
a state senator,
a state representative,
the county executive,
three commissioners for the Port of Seattle,
four positions on the Kirkland city council,
a municipal court judge,
two directors for the Lake Washington school district, and
three commissioners for a Public Hospital district

And then signed and dated the ballot, and took it over to the local post office, and deposited it.

The county will begin counting ballots next Tuesday, and we will have partial results by that evening.

Reminder: Ballots are legal in Washington, as long as they are postmarked by election day, or deposited in one of the drop boxes before 8 PM Tuesday. So the election offices will not have all the ballots by Tuesday.

More later.

In case TSE is wondering, "I am an f*cking idiot" in Dutch is:

Ik ben een verdomde idioot.

Is that Single Dutch or Double Dutch? As an inveterate lawyer TSE must surely be conversant with the latter.

I'm currently roaming around the USA. Everything seems perfectly normal here, apart from occasional performative ICE raids that ratchet up fear among a very small % of the population. Back in the day chancellor Dennis Healy recalled earnest student debates in the 1930s about 'who will do the dirty work under socialism?' 'Later in life,' he quipped, 'I discovered it was me.'

In the 2030s who would do the dirty work under Fascism? In reality there's no-one available on the scale they aspire do. ICE is two orders of magnitude too small to make any real difference to American lives. There's light at the end of the tunnel, comrades.

In all police states, the police is tiny relative to the population.

Fear does most of the work.

The KGB* peaked at about 200k actual spies (bigger numbers include border guards and volunteer spies) - for a population of 286 million

RSHA (Germany) was 50k for 280 million (peak population conquered)

The OVRA (Italy) was 50k for 70 million (peak population conquered in WWII)

*under a multiplicity of names

Fine KGB joke:

Two men are in a train carriage. One leans forward and says to the other, 'Do you want to hear some jokes about the KGB?'

'Before you go on,' said the other, 'I think you should know I'm a very senior officer in the KGB, holding the rank of colonel.'

'That's not a problem,' said the first man. 'I'll tell them very slowly and I'll even explain them to you.'

The UK had a £26bn tourism deficit in the first half of the year:

Overseas residents made an estimated 7.2 million visits to Great Britain and spent an estimated £4.7 billion in Quarter 1 (Jan to Mar) 2025.

Overseas residents made an estimated 9.3 million visits to Great Britain and spent an estimated £7.9 billion in Quarter 2 (Apr to June) 2025.

Residents of Great Britain made an estimated 18.7 million visits outside of the UK and spent an estimated £16.5 billion in Quarter 1 (Jan to Mar) 2025.

Residents of Great Britain made an estimated 26.0 million visits outside of the UK and spent an estimated £22.1 billion in Quarter 2 (Apr to June) 2025.

https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/leisureandtourism/bulletins/overseastravelandtourismprovisional/januarytomarchandapriltojune2025

Which is approximately how much money the government borrowed from foreign sources.

Clearly they need a tax on going abroad.

There could be a windfall tax on travel writers.

I've had something rumbling around in my head for a few weeks. If I were Leon, I'd ham it up as a unique insight. Not being Leon, I suspect that what I'm about to write is in no way original. If the latter is true, I'd appreciate anyone pointing me towards anything I can read about it.

Anyway, the thought: we make a real mistake when we compare Trump's dismantling of democracy and the rule of law with Nazism or even Fascism, because from our perspective in retrospect Nazism was so clearly evil and Fascism so clearly led to evil outcomes. It is not so clear, as least not to those on Trump's side right now, that what he is doing either is, or will lead to, evil. In fact it looks to them like the answer to their problems, otherwise they wouldn't support him.

And thus the comparison with Hitler is easily rejected: Hitler was evil, Trump might be a bit 'out there' but he isn't evil, so these libs are just frothing unnecessarily.

What is, I think, much more instructive, is to put ourselves in the minds of the average busy, stressed German or Italian in 1924, after the Beer Hall Putsch or the March on Rome. Perhaps you've got a family to feed, or a busy job. You're not that engaged in politics. A leader comes along who so clearly speaks to you about the flaws and failures in the current political system, and offers a radical solution to them. You have a few misgivings about their methods, but those methods sort of align with your prejudices so you damp down any disquiet. The frog gently boils.

I guess what I'm trying to get at is that evil regimes don't (usually) seem evil in advance. Indeed, if democratically elected, they seem like the answer to our problems, just as Trump does for many, including some on here.

So I think a much more interesting question than whether Trump is a Nazi is: what percentage risk is there that the USA develops into an evil regime over the next generation or two, either intentionally or otherwise? And what percentage risk is acceptable to a Trump supporter? What cognitive dissonance are they experiencing, and how can non-Trump supporters help make that cognitive dissonance more visible?

Looking from the outside, with USA's still unique military and cultural dominance, I'd say the tolerable percentage risk of going full Dr. Evil is incredibly low. For an American I can see the tolerable risk is higher, and the challenge all Americans face is to highlight the risk in the ways the situation over there could develop into something that even a Trump supporter would recognise as evil.

Anyway, I'm on a plane in 15 mins so may not reply for a bit, but if you know anyone writing about this I'd really appreciate you letting me know. Thanks.

The Bierkellar Putsch didn't lead to the Nazi regime. They took power rather more than nine years later.

And January 6 didn't lead directly to the MAGA takeover of the US. They won a presidential election 4 years later but can't be said to have "taken power" yet. If that is going to happen, it probably won't happen until at least the next Presidential election which is, er, 8 years later

Hitler and the other leaders of the putsch were incredibly well treated by the authorities. Hitler was able to use the trial as a launch pad for his later career. He was lucky not to be executed, or at least a far longer prison sentence. The message is take these things seriously for you don't know what may follow. I'm pretty sure that those welcoming the ascent of the Nazis in the early 30's in Germany didn't image the fate that befell Germany in 1945.

At least four Russian energy facilities taken offline overnight. Ukranian kinetic sanctions are clearly still working.

https://x.com/nexta_tv/status/1984129561542488141

The problem Russia faces with the interruption to refininery capacity is that there is nowhere to send the production. The storage capacity is being hit too. That means you start closing down the ability to produce fields. Those fields close down for good once the pipeline facilities stop flowing. This is due to a combination of two things Putin cannot control: the waxy nature of Russian crude oil and the Russian winter. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, many oil fields were closed down and the pipelines turned into giant canndles.

In a nutshell:

"Most of the oil fields in the Samara region (Russian Federation) are produced at the end of secondary and tertiary recovery processes. The natural reservoir drive is insufficiently high to allow effective oil production. Thus, water flooding is used to maintain reservoir pressure on the initial level and enhance oil recovery. However, the flooding operation with cold water causes the reservoir temperature to decrease significantly. Moreover, oils of these reservoirs contain large amounts of wax in composition. Exploitation of oil wells is complicated by plugging of tubing with wax. Therefore often production shutdowns are taking place to remove the deposits in the downhole equipment by hot oil flushing, solvent treatment, pigging or even steaming operations. Numerous workover operations lead to oil production losses for the operator company in the field."

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0920410517310458

Those operations are expensive - and need to be continuous.

The cold causes the wax to form. The wax kills the oil fields.

Dead oil fields = dead Russian economy. Which probably = dead Putin.