The russian assets in the White House want to portray Zelensky and Ukraine as insufficiently thankful for USA aid and as disrespectful towards the usa, and to use those supposed slights as justification for cutting off aid. To reinforce this narrative with their audience, other fellow travellers are now repeating those lies.

This goes back to the white house meeting where Trump and Vance claimed that Zelensky was disrespectful because of how he was dressed (normal) and how he didn’t thank anyone according to them (he had, profusely, there’s video of it). It was a clown show and the meeting didn’t deliver the desired images + soundbites, so now the usa republicans are working overtime in providing the necessary soundbites for fox news etc.

They might be trying to confuse search algorithms, so that when Russians look for Ukrainian meat grinder, they get some articles with babushkas instead of blogposts that are critical about how Putin’s regime conducts the war.

Edit after some more thinking about it: those critical blogposts probably get censored away, so that when Russians try looking for them, they find no relevant results. Now that these other meat grinder articles exist, the search results will be populated again and look less suspiciously devoid of relevant results.

If you try to take too many eggs out of 1 basket, the person carrying that basket is likely to try and run away. So it’s easier and less disruptive to take a few eggs out of lots of different baskets.

Taxing accumulated capital without exceptions is also guaranteed to screw people over. The man in the OP is a good example: he’s a modest man who many years ago bought a modest house for a modest sum of money. Due to circumstances, that house has now increased in value, making him a wealthy man on paper. But he’s deriving no income from that wealth, since he can’t rent it out because he lives in it himself. So now he’s a modest man, who is rich on paper, who is expected to pay high taxes on his paper wealth, turning him into a poor man who is barely scraping by.

That has to be the most regressive tax I’ve heard of in western Europe. Absolutely excessive and I’m sorry it’s happening to you.

Belgium has a home value tax as well, based on fictional rental income + a very convoluted calculation + different % surcharges per council. I find back that it’s on average about 700 to 800 euros per Flemish adult person, but it has large variations. It causes a lot of grumbling, but for most people it’s not considered excessive.

And this is why in most civilized countries, progressive income taxes make up the majority of the government budget. Basing taxes on non income/investment related metrics screws over the poor + lower middle class. It’s a transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich.

Yep, french language class in a too large highschool class. If the class had been smaller, then the teacher would have definitely gone for more presentations by the students.

Keep up the good fight, I’m certain that many of your students appreciate what they learn from you.

Students and cheating is always going to be a thing, only the technology evolves. It’s always been an interesting cat and mouse game imo, as long as you’re not too personally affected (sorry).

I was a student when the internet started to spread and some students had internet at home, while most teachers were still oblivious. There was a french book report due and 4 kids had picked the same book because they had found a good summary online. 3 of the kids hand wrote a summary of the summary, 1 kid printed out the original summary and handed that in. 3 kids received a 0, the 4th got a warning to not let others copy his work :D

In my Eu country, and also the neighbouring countries, the general rule for a detached building is that it has to be build 3 to 5 meters (depending on the local rules) from the terrain boundary. If the builder wants to build closer, then they have to build a blind wall on the boundary with certain minimum fire + insulation requirements. If then someone else builds against that blind wall, that someone else is expected to buy “half” of the existing wall, ie: pay the first builder some money.

So we fortunately don’t get those dystopian tightly packed detached housing neighbourhoods.

The shared wall between a home and any other building is also required by law to have certain minimum acoustic insulation values. But there’s plenty of old buildings where this isn’t the case yet. Living in an apartment building without proper acoustic isolation is horrible, I’d rather live in a dystopian detached house, so maybe that’s why those houses are still popular in North America and Australia: guaranteed proper acoustic insulation.

From what I’ve read, Zelensky as comedian made intelligent political and anti corruption criticism. Making jokes about the bad things in life, highlighting them, setting the stage for something being done about those problems. Broader than his on screen personality, he had middle class beginnings and on the back of his comedy work, he build a successful career as TV producer/executive. You probably know more about this than I do.

Trump as TV personality looked more like the most clueless person in the room, while all the actual work was done by others behind the scenes. No intelligence, no social commentary. Before his role in the apprentice, Trump had started his business career as a Nepo baby, and as a businessman he had failed every venture that he had tried, each time leaving a bloodbath of unpaid bills behind, a reverse Midas. And once his face was known from TV, he started with large scale scams like Trump University.

Those are 2 very different career paths.

One USA metropolitan area has as many as many people in it as many small countries. All these excuses that you’re making as to why there are no large protests because of American exceptionalism, they just sound hollow. Protesting or not comes down to people and ATM there seems to be a severe lack of high level activist pro democracy leadership.

Edit: I do appreciate your answer about it taking 2 years to prepare that march, that’s new info for me. But even then, I’d expect pro democracy protest everywhere and the Washington DC metropolitan area (or other densely populated areas) shouldn’t need to depend on further away regions to get large numbers to turn up.

So why was it possible to organize such a protest in 1963 but not in 2025?

Lack of democratic leadership is not a geographic problem. In your previous comment you claimed that it was because of distance that there were no large protests, but it’s pretty obvious that those distances are not the reason.

The civil rights movement managed to organize a massive march on Washington in the early 1960s. It should be far easier to organize something similar or even larger with the current technology and larger population.

I hope for a small core of countries that further integrates their military, which can then later be joined by other countries. If smaller countries like Belgium, Netherlands, Denmark, Norway, Ireland (+ Scotland after their independence) got together in the near future and instead of each rebuilding (I suspect their armies have all been severely underfunded in the last 2 decades) their army separately, build one stronger new army, then they would all be stronger for it.

The eu as it already exists could use some fundamental rule changes to deal with internal abuse. Orban has been a pseudo dictator for years now, and he just needs 1 other eu country to side with him to shield Hungary from real consequences. So what’s especially needed is more democracy and less veto powers.

Things like education, culture, social welfare, … are imo better done on a regional level and thus should not be fully integrated.

Edit: I added the “fully” because I think it would be good for the eu to set out a standard framework for compatibility and/or minimum standards, but the actual implementation should be left to the regions imo.

Many thanks for the links, the first article was very interesting, I don’t agree with your conclusion though :)

My takeaway is that traditional polling is mostly dead, because it has become prohibitively expensive to get a representative result. So if we still want to see regular opinion polls, then opt in polling is what we’re going to get. And when it comes to opt in polling, yougov appears to be one of the better firms, from the article: “But opt-in polling firms run the gamut. Some, like YouGov, publish their methodology and strive to ensure the integrity of their data. Others, experts say, do not.”.

Trump’s fascist coup d’état appears to be progressing nicely (for the fascists that is).

Hitler only needed 53 days to secure absolute power after having been appointed chancellor. Trump is now 33 days into his second presidency.

Why? Do they have credibility or other issues?

Officially it’s allowed after April 17th, but there’s already an extensive list of approved devices.

https://www.test-aankoop.be/woning-energie/hernieuwbare-energie/nieuws/plug-and-play-zonnepaneel

There’s probably a french version of that article as well, but test- achats/aankoop hasn’t made it easy to switch languages :)

These plugin systems shut down automatically when there’s a power outage. To make sure that they really do shut down when needed, in Belgium only plugin systems that have been approved by the network management organisation may be used. The other countries that allow these probably have similar precautions.

Many thanks for the links, was interesting.

Just by the existence of food standards laws, we know that there must have been food standards problems. Stuff like mayonnaise composition being put into law, must mean that there had been a mayonnaise quality problem or worries at a certain point in time, I just can’t find any specific info on when or what. Those scandals were probably recorded just as well in the news papers of my small country, but if no one writes a new article or paper about the scandal 50+ years after it happened, then that info won’t turn up in an internet search query.