Below are a week’s worth of entertaining news about the latest antics of the European Union as it attempts to micro-manage the affairs of its citizens in the most corrupt and incompetent ways imaginable.

Many thanks to JLH for translating this report from Die Preußische Allgemeine Zeitung:

It Stinks and Crumbles

The Week in Review with Hans Heckel
November 8, 2013

(How the EU follows us even into the toilet, what Washington and Brussels think, and how we will identify who is evil)

Crapping Out

It’s just impossible to keep up. First we had to stomach the EU vacuum cleaner ordinance.* And now the Eurocrats are following us into the bathroom. Say hello to the European toilet flushing ordinance! After a year of scientific effort, the EU experts have calculated how much flush water is needed to dispose of what we leave behind.

After countless meetings and practice tests, they concluded that 5 liters is enough. EU standardized toilets should not require more per use. However, just so they do not seem petty, the experts are willing to set an upper limit of 6 liters. Now that is something!

But what will the EU do, if unintelligent defecators sneakily circumvent the guidelines and flush twice? There is still a worthwhile investigative task here for the Brussels latrine committee.

Don’t laugh! They are not doing this for their own amusement, but to save the planet. Since it is dry in southern Spain, it is unconscionable that people in sopping wet Hamburg should waste any more water. To be sure, not one drop of the water available in Hamburg will get to Spain. But seen purely statistically, the situation would improve. And that is what interests us.

Side-effects are of no interest to the experts in Brussels. Side-effects like the following. Population is shrinking in many German rural communities, so increasingly less water is being drawn from a water supply network that has remained constant, and the pipes are strained by that. Waterworks are already being forced to pump water through the pipes, simply to prevent decay. Water that never runs out of a tap or down a toilet. Brussels’ little trick will just make this worse.

It does not occur to the Eurocrats in Brussels that the same water conservation regulations for the Iberian semi-desert and the sopping wet regions of north Europe is nonsense. What we want, surely, is the most “similar” possible living conditions all across Europe. And for that we must have the same rules for everyone. Well, at least nature in Spain will be indebted to the EU… or not? The question is, is it really the toilets that use so much water? Or perhaps, the gigantic, artificially watered fields, created with juicy EU financial grants. Or hundreds of golf courses that owe their existence to EU incentives and must be watered every night so that the Andalusian sun does not turn them into steppes?

No, it’s the john! First, because visitors to the bathroom have no lobby, like the golf course developers or agribusiness and, second, because…well, it doesn’t matter. We will bravely bear this restriction too, even if the consequences stink to high heaven.

It’s Not the River Kwai

Europe doesn’t come cheap, but then, it does great things. For over a hundred years, the residents of the village Widin in the northwest tip of Bulgaria have dreamed of a bridge over the Danube connecting them with Rumanian Calafat.

Nothing happened until the EU came. Last June, EU Commissioner Johannes Hahn celebrated the opening of the three-and-a-half-kilometer engineering marvel. It was a true example of European cooperation: built by a Spanish construction firm with Spanish, Portuguese, Polish and a few Bulgarian construction workers and made possible by an EU grant of €106 million — mostly from Germany, as usual. So Hahn symbolically christened it “New Europe.” Applause.

Who “New Europe” connects to whom was lost in the euphoria. People are leaving this area in droves. So, soon hardly anyone will need the bridge.

But that is just as well. Just four months after the dedication, “New Europe” is falling apart. The Spanish firm was so sloppy that even the Balkan authorities are indignant. So the Spanish firm will have to pay damages, right?

Unfortunately, no. There was no guarantee in the contract. The construction firm just had to make sure while they were bumbling that their underhanded maneuvers did not come to light before the transfer of ownership. After that? Up yours! Of course it would be presumptuous and downright Europe-hostile to assume any kind of corruption here. But it is touching to learn that EU and local authorities have worked so closely with the construction firm that the firm could disappear without a shred of responsibility.

The Mouse That Squeaked

Above all, we should not let snafus like this confound our belief in the EU. Who would we be in the world if Europe did not speak with one voice? Faced with great powers like the USA, only the EU as a whole
can have an effect.

In a harsh reaction to the NSA spying affair, the EU parliament sent a “high-ranking delegation” overseas to really pound on the table at the Amis. Did our “high-rankers” meet the president? No. His representative? No again. The foreign minister? Nope. Well, then, who the devil met them? During their three-day stay, according to media reports, they were allowed one conversation with NSA chief, Keith Alexander. He told them that German citizens and Chancellor Merkel had been listened in on. We had known that for weeks from the newspapers. But now the EU representatives had found that out too. Alexander did not wish to say any more to the MEPs, who are said to have spent the rest of their three days meeting with US congressmen and -women, who seem to have been so low in the hierarchy that even experienced Washington correspondents did not know their names. So the EU really made an impression in Washington. Even delegations from Swaziland or Micronesia would have been better received than the “high-rankers” from Brussels.

Furthermore, the leader of the Brussels delegation was an MEP from Great Britain — which works hand-in-hand with the USA in their spying.

Svastikles Falling From Outen Da Sky

Rightist populists and rightist radicals greedily snap up things like the potty regulations, the bridge or the Washington visit as fodder for propaganda. When they are not busy harassing foreigners. With mounting discomfort, politicians and media perceive that citizens are more and more uncomfortable with the exasperations caused by economic immigrants. Horrified, the “Spiegel” reports on a citizens’ demonstration against a home for asylum seekers in Saxon Schneeberg, into which the NPD is said to have inserted itself. To illustrate what kind of people these Schneebergers are, the paper reveals that “Schneeberg is only 15 kilometers from Zwickau, the bolthole of the right-terrorist NSU.”

Aha, geographic proximity alone makes the people suspicious. A suborning logic. Now if the “Spiegel” should want to unmask the darker soul of our Polish neighbors, it will probably go like this: “Poland is only 50 kilometers from Berlin, where Adolf Hitler ruled.” It is immediately clear to all the readers of the magazine — These Poles must be really bad people.

* Restricting the amount of energy a vacuum cleaner may use.