Is it possible the Finnish president was trolling Trump then totally denied what he said?

President of Finland:  Yes, we do... (snickers) we do (snickers) a lot of raking to prevent forest fires (uncontrollable laughter).

Ravenprose said:

Trump has officially declared a fake national emergency so that his administration can steal much needed  disaster relief funds to build his dumb wall. SMH.

Meanwhile Puerto Rico still suffers.

He doesn’t play favorites with fast food.

So elections came and went this Sunday here in Belgium.  We've been blesssed with the holy trinity of European elections, federal elections and elections-for-the-governments-per-geographical-are-where-they-speak-the-same-language.  We have a better word for that last one in Flemmisch (and French) but I don't think it'll have an apt translation.

Everybody was so focused on how well the ecology party's would do, and if the right wing party in Flanders would grow, that nobody even thought of what actually happened.  In Flanders extreme right gained a lot of ground and in Walony extreme left grew enormously.  This leaves us with a nation that is neigh ungovernable.  Which is exactly what the Flemmish right wing party wants, as they want to go for full on confederalism.  Yuck.  Basically imagine the south half of the USA voting all Democrate, the top half all Republican, and then having them try to make a governement together.  And now imagine that all the Democrates are extremely left wing and all the republicans extremely right wing.

So yeah, seems we're set to attempt to break our own world record for longest timespan it takes to form a government after an election.  I think our current record sits at about 540 days.

gamingeek said:

I think on the news they said they would now be the largest block in the European parliament wtf?

That's bollocks.  Eurosceptic parties did well, but they're by far the largest block.  Biggest shift is that the democrats and socialists together don't have enough seats to govern together.  They'll need to take aboard the liberals or the ecologist parties/green parties.

Arguably, many governments undergoing difficulties today are super effective, it's just that some of the things they're doing don't represent majority interest, and most of the stuff they're doing that does, they've decided a) relinquishing control over the narrative for profit won't do much damage or b) (more likely) getting shat on is worth it for the sake of stoking the fires of xenophobia and irrationality, which private media is significantly better at than public media, unless you're in Australia; no one does xenophobia better than the Australian government. Russia's up there too, to be fair.

Take the UK, for instance. On many popular metrics of public outrage, they're actually doing great. A public discourse complaining about things you're doing well, is a wonderful smokescreen for where you're shitting on people, such as your rampant austerity measures. Given that private media will complain about these things regardless of how they actually are, then why not just let them go ham, and keep quiet about how well things are actually going in those areas? It also makes shitting on the weak affected by said austerity measures easier, cause the average idiot thinks they're all a bunch of pregnant teen illegal immigrants defrauding the dole while simultaneously stealing jobs. I'm sure that's just a coincidence, and not by design.

SupremeAC said:

Well, over here a main focus for years has been that labour is too expensive (read, too much taxes) and that this is our biggest handicap in attracting more internationa investments, but which was partially alleviated by our superb productivity.

We've finally closed the gap in terms of labour cost with our surrounding nations (read, taxes were cut for enterprises, taxes were raised for families) and now that's out of the way it seems the government has little to hide behind when it comes to the fact that they've been basically screwing over everyone because they're so poor at governing and actually looking ahead more than 3-4 years.

I think the above is more or less an reply to what Foolz wrote, but I could be wrong about that.  

Either way, it's interesting.

All I know about Belgium's politics is that Herge continued to work during the Nazi occupation, which hurt his reputation almost as much as his early comics that we find tremendously offensive today (I personally think the TNT, seemingly shooting the same animal 50 times, and monkey skin jokes are some of the best in comic slapstick ever, though; I'm also partial to the dark humour of the Soviet stuff). And, to be fair, Belgium's colonial activities were on a comparable sort of scale and horror to the Nazi's... But Belgium had the good sense to conduct them in Africa, not Europe, so they dodged a reputational bullet there.

I fully expect Trump will never see prision nor impeachment but I do believe he fears those possiblities. His ego couldn't take his reality show Presidency being cancelled by anyone but himself.