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Cake day: June 4th, 2023

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  • The whole thing read to me like a Seinfeld episode - Kramer accidentally kills a whale off the coast of New York, and with the show having made dozens of Kennedy references, hearing of a Kennedy dumping a bear in Central Park would fit right in.

    So this doesn’t feel even like an own to anyone, more like a parody, a comedy. And in the context of it actually happening 1. in the setting of probably the most famous one, 2. with a character from the exact family they’ve referenced many times over and 3. with the same type of bizarre things happening to wildlife one of which has been one of the most famous episodes.

    To me, as a lib, it feels like the best Seinfeld/Curb Your Enthusiasm episode that’s never been written.

    Edit: Now that I think about it, the story even came out because he told it to Roseanne Barr, writer of most popular sitcom just prior to Seinfeld, notwithstanding her interminable slide, with her just staring at him incredulously throughout, the whole thing feeling like a Curb Your Enthusiasm scene. Honestly, at this point Larry David is definitely thinking to himself that he could never have written anything this Larry David.

    Edit 2: I completely forgot that his, Larry David’s, wife in Curb Your Enthusiasm is RFK Jr.'s actual wife. At this point I’m about 80% sure that multiple Seinfeld and/or Curb episodes were actually just Kennedy misadventures in disguise.



  • Germany is being interpreted as a disaster, but the only hard right party is the AfD and they’re up around 5% it looks like… and there are 13 other parties about to represent Germany in the EU parliament. France is looking terrible though, at least the RN has at least pretended to cut off ties to the AfD. And the equivalent of the CDU/CSU in France is near death, so it’s not like voters in the middle had anywhere to go other than Macron or RN.


  • Austria could have gone worse, despite the FPÖ up. In Germany you have this kind of cordon sanitaire, the other parties have an agreement of sorts to never cooperate with the AfD, the CDU/CSU has been a bit flimsy on that though.

    Meanwhile in Austria, the FPÖ has been around forever and used to represent some liberal politics way back when so they didn’t have that cordon sanitaire, including coalition governments between the ÖVP (the equivalent of the CDU/CSU but imbroiled somehow in more political turmoil in recent years) and FPÖ on numerous occasions. And what happened in this election is that basically three seats went from the ÖVP straight to the FPÖ.

    Basically Austrian representation in the EU probably got marginally worse for all it matters, but in turn the CDU/CSU saw that any cooperation with the AfD would just lead to voters of theirs just going to the AfD in the long run, strengthening the case for a cordon sanitaire.

    At least I hope that’s how they’ll interpret it. The other Austrian shift was one from the Greens to the heavily pro-EU NEOS, as much as I’ll disagree on some of their domestic policies when it comes to their EU politics they’re a bit more palatable.