Tales From the Brussels Crypt

Harassed and Bossed Around by Bureaucrats

By Pater Tenebrarum

The bureaucrats in Brussels treat the citizenry of the EU like a gang of small children that needs to be kept in check by benevolent overseers. Their most recent strikes all aim at allegedly 'saving the planet' while slowly but surely rolling back the blessings of civilization.

Naturally, most people are barely aware of what is happening. After all, who has the time to actually look through a 60 pages long document entitled “Development of EU Ecolabel Criteria for Flushing Toilets and Urinals”? Mind this is just a 'working paper', but you can already guess what the end result will be. Toilets all of a sudden won't flush properly anymore. The filthy toilet plunger, long thought to be an instrument used only in the gravest of emergencies, will have to be employed on a regular basis. Taking a shower will suddenly feel like standing in a weak drizzle. Very few people will know what happened of course, but everybody will be aware that the quality of life has declined by a notch. 

If people were to sit down in the morgue-like lighting provided by the expensive and highly poisonous 'energy savings lamps' EU citizens are forced to use these days instead of the trusty incandescent light bulb, and took the time to read through various EU directives, they would realize that their non-working toilets and weak showers are the work of bureaucrats in Brussels. As the latest 'working paper' indicates, things are about to take a turn for the worse. Under 'proposed criterion' we read that 

“The full flush volume, independent of the water pressure, of flushing toilet and flushing urinal equipment, when placed on the market, shall not exceed the value presented in Table 2.” 

So how much water are citizens going to be allowed per flush henceforth? 6 liters – that is 1.58 gallons. In times of yore, a good toilet flush was accomplished with 5 gallons, or roughly 20 liters. Plunger? No-one ever had to think about that filthy appurtenance much.

Of course not a drop of water will be saved by having only 1.58 gallons per flush available either, because it means one must flush 3 or 4 times before the business is done. All that is going to happen is that citizens will have to relinquish enjoyment of the full blessings of one of the most important advances of civilization: indoor plumbing.

Note please that US citizens are not exempt from such regulations – they too are forced to use toilets that no longer flush properly and shower heads that release only paltry amounts of water (see Jeffrey Tuckers 'Bourbon for Breakfast' for details on the US situation).

It accomplishes absolutely nothing, but it is emblematic for the tyranny of the bureaucrats that has been erected everywhere in the so-called 'Western democracies'. In the name of saving ourselves from ourselves, these useless parasitic bodies that produce nothing anyone really wants or needs have begun to rule our lives down to the minutest detail. There is practically no democratic control over these decrees issued under 'administrative law'. 

The Latest Strike: Emasculating Vacuum Cleaners

Via Austrian newspaper 'Die Presse' we have become aware of an article written by renowned mathematician Rudolf Taschner. It is entitled: “Boundless imagination in inventing new chicaneries” and is about the latest strike planned by the faceless bureaucrats in Brussels. As usual, they are working hand in glove with the big business combines which stand to make a pretty penny by depriving consumers of choice – an eerie parallel to the light bulb regulation. 

“The EU commission declares war against power guzzling vacuum cleaners. Step by step, as of coming September, only appliances with a maximum of 1,600 Watt may be sold, and this is supposed to be lowered to 900 Watt within the next three years. The Association of the Electrical and Electronics Industry is happy with the new regulations because they will allegedly “provide the market with an innovation push”. Economic growth via bureaucratic decree – anyone who believes that is more naïve than someone who believes in the egg-laying Easter Bunny.”

The decree hasn't been issued to boost economic growth anyway, but rather to further the “environmentally responsible design of vacuum cleaners”. That is supposed to contribute to the EU meeting its self-imposed climate protection goals by 2020. That consumers' freedom choice is thereby restricted seems to bother no-one at the EU bureaucracy. In fact, the term 'freedom' has decayed  into an alien concept in the EU.

Arguments against the vacuum cleaner decree, which is as moronic as the well-known and utterly blinkered light bulb decree, are obvious: For one thing, the supposed environmental damage produced by a 2,000 Watt vacuum cleaner is definitely much lower than that of many other environmental sins, which the bureaucrats in Brussels mercifully ignore. Who in the gorges of Brussels would dare to ban the sale of SUVs, or limit air traffic or truck traffic?

Moreover, power use isn't altered by halving power requirements but doubling  running times. If a 900 Watt vacuum cleaner isn't up to dealing as easily with the dirt on a rug as was possible with its 1,800 Watt predecessor, one must actually expect that desperate cleaning persons, armed with their new 'environmentally responsible' designed and EU-compliant vacuum cleaners, are going to be busy with rugs for more than twice as long as previously. Apart from that, there must surely be more urgent problems for the EU bureaucracy to deal with?

What is most repulsive though is the constant bossing around of their subjects, which has apparently become the most popular pastime of the EU bureaucrats. And there is method to the madness: in favor of an allegedly 'greater good', the EU believes that it must increasingly limit the freedom of individuals.” 

He is of course exactly right – the supposed objectives of the vacuum cleaner emasculation will remain elusive. All that will happen is that flats and houses will become less clean and the process of cleaning them will become far less efficient. Under bureaucratic rule, in civilization is no longer advancing – it is regressing. And for what? Officially the objective is to meet an alleged 'global warming' threat, the evidence for which is becoming more tenuous by the day. In reality, we are on a seemingly inexorable slippery slope toward tyranny. Brussels has long forgotten the objectives of the EU's founders, who wanted to restore pre-war liberalism in Europe after the disastrous failures of fascism and socialism. The EU has lost its way, and it should be no surprise that more and more of its citizens no longer think it worth preserving.