Germany
August 21, 2023 — John Hinderaker

It is hard to believe, but Germany is on its way to becoming a post-industrial country. What its economy will look like at that point is anyone’s guess, but it won’t be pretty. The Telegraph interviews Monika Schnitzer, who heads Germany’s Council of Economic Experts. She leads off by talking about the need to distance Germany from China: Berlin outlined a plan to “de-risk” the relationship with China last month.
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April 8, 2023 — John Hinderaker

Not the German government, which continues on a collision course with reality. But Germans have figured out that the green dream is turning into a nightmare. This report is on a survey of Germans done by forsa: An overwhelming majority of the German population is of the opinion that a successful energy transition is not realistic. According to a Forsa survey, 88 percent of respondents share this view. 88 percent!
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April 5, 2023 — Elizabeth Stauffer

The Alternative for Germany (AfD) is a right-wing populist political party whose members fiercely oppose the elitist, globalist agenda now favored by leftists around the world. On Friday, the morning after news broke of New York County District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s indictment of former President Donald Trump, AfD member of the Bundestag Petr Bystron stood before his colleagues to deliver remarks on the state of U.S. politics and the September
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January 3, 2023 — Steven Hayward

Oh goody, something new for The View and other fanatical leftists to worry about. Fans of statistical fallacies and other quantitative flim-flam will know that it is possible to demonstrate a correlation between storks and the birth rate, but social science has moved on to much more significant questions, such as “anti-wolf sentiment.” And especially anti-wolf sentiment among—wait for it!—the “far right.” A recent study from the Proceedings of the
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December 25, 2022 — Steven Hayward

One of my favorite indicators of ignorance are the people who buy personalized license plates, or affix stickers, for their electric cars that say “Emission Free.” Even if you ignore the enormous environmental impacts associated with manufacturing an electric car (which are significantly higher than a gasoline-powered car), if you live in a state that generates a lot of its electricity from coal, you are essentially driving a coal-powered car.
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September 28, 2022 — Steven Hayward

Who blew up the Nord Stream pipelines? Your guess is as good as mine. It does seem peculiar to think Russia would have blown up their own pipeline, but it is not inconceivable that a faction of Russia’s military is trying to sabotage Putin as a prelude for ousting him, or that Putin sees it as a kind of “Cortez burning his ships” moment to indicate that he is all-in
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August 16, 2022 — Steven Hayward

When I made a government-sponsored junket to Germany in 2008 to tour their ambitious energy and environmental plans, every expert and government official our delegation met said the same thing: to have any chance of making Germany’s ambitious carbon-emissions reduction targets, they’d have to keep their nuclear power plants, despite the determination of the previous Social Democrats to phase them out. It seemed possible that Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrat-led coalition
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July 14, 2022 — John Hinderaker

How bad is the coming energy shortage in Germany? Deutsche Bank is counting on people to substitute wood burning in their homes for fossil fuels: The German energy crisis has reached the point where Deutsche Bank starts to 'model' (let's call it that) the potential for **gas-to-wood** substitution for heating German households this winter | #NothingToSeeHere #ONGT #GasCrisis pic.twitter.com/zuSls1SiCP — Javier Blas (@JavierBlas) July 13, 2022 Courtesy of Stephen Green,
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June 28, 2022 — Steven Hayward

At first I thought this photo of the G-7 meeting had to be a fake, or deeply photoshopped, but apparently it is genuine: First of all, Boris Johnson looks like he just stumbled in from an all-night bender. And just where is President Biden’s right hand? I’m working on a separate piece about why this was maybe the worst G-7 meeting since the 1979 G-7 meeting in Japan, which, coincidentally,
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March 10, 2022 — Steven Hayward

The world was startled and impressed two weeks ago when Germany announced in the immediate aftermath of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine that it would increase its defense spending substantially, keep some coal-fired power plants running that would otherwise have been replaced with Russian natural gas, and rethink its plan to shut down its remaining nuclear power plants. Well, they’ve done their rethinking on nuclear power, and decided—”Never mind: we’re going
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January 24, 2022 — Paul Mirengoff

As a Russian invasion of Ukraine becomes more and more likely, major European nations behave more and more in character. Britain, in its finest Churchill-Thatcher tradition, is stepping up to the plate. It just delivered anti-tank weapons to Ukraine. Germany, reverting to its traditional approach of accommodating Russian aggression to further its interests, reportedly refused Britain permission to transport the anti-tank weapons through German airspace. Germany denies doing so, but
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September 26, 2021 — John Hinderaker

Germany held its parliamentary election today, and the race between the retiring Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union and the left’s Social Democrats is too close to call. The London Times reports: The chancellor’s conservatives were predicted to lose to the centre-left Social Democrats (SPD) by roughly a percentage point, although the outcome remained too close to call. *** The finely balanced results herald a phase of uncertainty that could drag
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July 22, 2021 — John Hinderaker

Most people understand that leftists take advantage of real or alleged crises to expand their power. But an equally important phenomenon is that they use crises of various kinds to excuse their own incompetence. (Covid has served such a purpose over the last year and a half; it has become a near-universal excuse for failure of performance.) The recent floods in Germany, which killed more than 150 people, are a
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March 15, 2021 — Paul Mirengoff

Germany’s ruling Christian Democrats (CDU) suffered big defeats in two state elections yesterday. It lost in both Baden-Württemberg and Rhineland-Palatinate, collecting only about one-fourth of the vote in each. Angela Merkel, the CDU leader, will be stepping down as chancellor. Yesterday’s results suggest that her successor as party leader may be in for a difficult time. Germany has been hit much less hard by the Wuhan coronavirus than have the
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January 18, 2021 — John Hinderaker

Sure, it’s Germany. But don’t think it can’t happen here. If you have harbored the suspicion that covid hysteria is a Trojan horse for totalitarian control over our lives, Germany points the way forward: Germany to hold Covid rule breakers in REFUGEE CAMPS under new crackdown to stop Brit mutant virus explosion. GERMANY’S worst Covid rule breakers will be held in detention centres under new proposals being drawn up by
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January 11, 2021 — Paul Mirengoff

In the 1970s, my constitutional law professor, Gerald Gunther, was invited by the West German government to visit that country and to lecture on the American Constitution. Gunther and his family had fled Germany in the 1930s. When he returned home to California, Gunther commended the Germans as hosts and for what they were accomplishing as a society. However, he added that they still didn’t quite understand the importance of
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August 1, 2020 — John Hinderaker

The Associated Press reports on opposition by Germans to their government’s shutdown order. The AP, of course, has a position on the issue: Thousands protested Germany’s coronavirus restrictions Saturday in a Berlin demonstration marking what organizers called “the end of the pandemic” — a declaration that comes just as authorities are voicing increasing concerns about an uptick in new infections. Got that? The demonstrators are wrong! The AP wouldn’t want
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