You're Up, Europe

What Just Happened? And What is Next?

Okay, well, I mean, it's a lot.

Over the past week, President Zelenskyy of Ukraine met with Donald Trump, JD Vance, and a host of Senators and officials at the White House. The stated intent was to sign a deal for security guarantees from the United States in exchange for rights to minerals in Ukraine. What happened instead was Vance and Trump berating Zelenskyy, saying he was rude and ungrateful, followed by the dismissal of the deal entirely with Zelenskyy even leaving early. Trump went as far as to say that Zelenskyy "is not ready for peace."

The exchange caused the international community to say a collective, "uh, the fuck?"

So where are things now, where does the US stand, who is winning here, and what is on the EUs plate? Let's take a look-see.

The United States and the European Union are tied together primarily through NATO, which Trump has been pretty loud about not liking. He also just doesn't like the EU to begin with, having previously stated that he believes the European Union was "formed to screw the US," because of course anything any country does anywhere is specifically because of the United States.

So with Trump rejecting Zelenskyy and having previously called Zelenskyy a "dictator," European leadership has already been on high alert and making plans in the event that they need to be completely independent or even defend from US aggression, be them economic or otherwise. Trump is of course threatening the EU with 25% tariffs, to which the EU has made it clear they would impose retaliatory tariffs.

The EU has a thing where they rotate who is the technical head of the union, which currently lands on Poland's Prime Minister Donald Tusk (hilariously opposing our own esteemed leader). Tusk made it clear that its time for the EU to take new steps towards controlling their own future, citing that Europe needs the capacity to insulate itself from the fluctuations of American politics.

Certainly the better option would be that the United States isn't arbitrarily beefing with all of its own allies, but given that we have an unhinged child and a ketamine-fueled moron running our country, its nice to see other countries organizing to move forward with clearer eyes. The fact remains that Putin is a massive threat to the stability of the EU, and if Trump is going to side with Putin (which we'll get to momentarily), the EU is incentivized to change everything—from their intelligence monitoring to their supply chains—to avoid dependencies on the US

Now, pull out a map. A map of Earth, specifically. Any map would do, but if you're pulling out a map of Gielinor you might get a bit confused. Take a look-see at the big blobs on the map. Notice that the very biggest of the blobs are The United States, Russia, and China. Of course there's some other big blobs, but let's focus on those three superpowers.

The EU needs to insulate from the United States, but the EU lives in 2025, where global trade and policy are valuable things. The EU is actively defending Ukraine against an invading Russia, which leaves one particular blob available to them: China. As it turns out, the intense hatred of China is fairly unique to the US. Countries are countries, and their primary goal is generally to maintain stability. Usually. And one way to maintain stability is to work with large trade partners who you can generally trust to be at least predictable. China has predictability on lock compared to the US or Russia.

Let's now ask, "why is Trump so weirdly anti-Ukraine, given everything?" Trump has tried to paint Ukraine as the aggressors of the war, somehow. He's called Zelenskyy a dictator, and now shouted him out of the White House.

While arguments can absolutely be made that the US spends too much money sending weapons overseas, there are zero reasonable arguments to claim that Ukraine is the aggressor. Their borders were invaded. If they cease to defend, they cease to exist. So why side with Russia when an allied country is invaded?

Despite Trump's repeated insistence that he has "nothing to do with Russia," he has quite a lot to do with Russia. Putting the whole election interference investigation aside, Trump has a 30-plus-year history of multi-million-dollar deals with Russian officials, including some curiously timed investments from Russian officials in Trump Tower when Trump was facing bankruptcy and banks were refusing to help him.

That kind of history doesn't exactly scream, "I am not beholden to Putin," especially for someone with such a storied history of trying (and often failing) to make "deals."

Beyond that, the US State Department is holding peace talks with Putin which exclude any EU or Ukrainian representatives. Trump has also expressed interest in a deal Putin offered, in which Trump would get mining rights for Russian-occupied land in Ukraine if the US helps Russia land a deal which includes keeping the land they've annexed.

All of this—the cozying up to Putin, the attempts to spread anti-Ukraine rhetoric, the threats to our allies, the attempted dismantling of NATO, the disruption to the EUs trans-Atlantic stability—seems fueled by something less-than-above-board.

One final note here: so much of the anti-foreign-aid and isolationist rhetoric we're seeing is again stemming from a massive discrepancy between how much we spend on foreign aid, and how much people think we spend on foreign aid. As I noted in a recent newsletter, the average American thinks we spend around a third of our annual budget on foreign aid, while the actual number is about 1% of the budget.

But polling shows something incredible and rare: turns out nearly 90% of Americans actually agree on something: spending at least 1% of our budget on foreign aid is a good idea. According to a recent poll, 94% of Democrats and even 84% of Republicans agreed that 1% is an acceptable amount of the budget to put towards foreign aid. Well, guess what!

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Gaming

PEGI is a Joker

The EU entertainment rating system PEGI had originally rated the wildly-successful indie card game "Balatro" as 18+, citing that it had poker imagery and themes. Anyone who has played Balatro knows its not actually a poker game, but rather is a poker-themed solitaire kind of experience.

The developer of the game was of course annoyed by the rating, as were a lot of the player base who made fun of the hilariously unnecessary rating.

PEGI has since responded to the appeal, lowering the rating to 13+, which is fair because we can't be crushing the hopes and dreams of mere 12-year-olds.

Funnily enough, this fiasco has caused PEGI to announce they'll be taking another look at their rating system for gambling stuff.

EA Doing Something Kinda Neat For Once

EA is releasing the source code to four older Command and Conquer games, publishing the code under the open source GPL license.

The games are:

• Command & Conquer
• Red Alert
• Command & Conquer: Renegade
• Command & Conquer: Generals

The release of the source code for these games are not only great for preservation purposes, but they may also enhance existing projects like OpenRA, which aims to be a modern re-creation of the classic franchise.

Tech

RIP Skype

Microsoft will be shutting down Skype this May, shifting their focus fully to beloved software, Microsoft Teams.

(It is not beloved software)

Microsoft acquired Skype in the early 2010's after it had become one of the dominant video chatting platforms of its time. It's gone through several major redesigns, of all which were terrible [citation not needed]. Skype always had a unique dichotomy of being absolute dogshit while also being the option everyone used for a long, long time. But now we say "goodbye" to our beloved dumpster fire of a video chat app.

Instagram Reels Glitch

Instagram recently had a "glitch" which someone caused people's Reels feeds to become overrun with egregiously violent content. Violent enough that I will not be repeating the stuff here. If you want descriptions of the content people saw, you can check out 404Media's great writeup about the incident.

The feed of horrific content traumatized some viewers, while others got mad enough to just outright delete the app (which is a great idea!)

The incident comes right after Meta announced they'd been pulling back on content moderation efforts now that Trump is in office. Unfortunately for Meta, hosting multiple social networks the size of large countries does call for a bit of moderation here and there.

Policy

Medicaid Cuts

The Republican budget framework is moving forward, including plans to cut popular public welfare programs like Medicaid, which helps cover medical expenses for vulnerable and impoverished citizens.

When asked about the plan, Florida representative Byron Donalds had this to say:

I support any plan that helps Medicaid be sustainable. And the current trajectory of Medicaid is not.

Interestingly, Medicaid costs the United States government hundreds of billions of dollars less than the military budget, but for some reason Medicaid is the unsustainable program. Weird!

The cuts haven't happened yet though. The only thing that has passed is a vague plan to cut spending from certain sectors. The actual details are far from finalized, so anyone claiming that the new tax plan includes or excludes specific line items is likely misinformed.

Epstein Docs

So turns out the MAGA world is still deeply obsessed with the Jeffrey Epstein case, specifically around "The Epstein Documents," which they likely believe is the key to cracking the case of all the baby-eating that they think liberals do.

Our new Attorney General Pam Bondi has been hard at work being loud about releasing the documents, going as far as to bring in right-wing influencers to Washington to give them binders labeled "THE EPSTEIN DOCUMENTS" in big bold letters to wave around for photoshoots.

Ultimately, they released a bunch of still-highly-redacted documents, most of which were already out in the public.

Bondi has also sent requests to the FBI to turn over more Epstein documents, but I'm not particularly holding my breath for an actual full release of anything meaningful. It'd be nice to have a concrete list of evidence of people who should be locked away for child abuse! But unfortunately for us, Donald Trump is deeply implicated in all the Epstein stuff, which is a bit of a wrench in their plans to "reveal all."

Here's the Weather

More Stuff

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