Germany
November 5, 2023 — John Hinderaker
Yesterday, many thousands of Islamofascists and leftists turned out across the globe for pro-Hamas demonstrations, celebrating the massacre of October 7 and demanding the extermination of Jews. Trafalgar Square was packed to overflowing: Hundreds of thousands turned out in Paris: Some might find the idea of a “kill the Jews” rally in Berlin alarming: And, of course, many thousands rallied to support genocide against the Jews in Washington, D.C. It
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October 22, 2023 — Steven Hayward
I have been speculating for some time, and occasionally hinting here, that if Europe wants to survive, at some point it is going to have to deport large numbers of unassimilable “migrants.” I’ve long thought for a variety reasons that France would be the country most likely do this, though don’t count out Sweden or Denmark, which, unbeknownst to most American media, are starting to reckon with rising crime and
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October 21, 2023 — Steven Hayward
An unusual experience on the train from Salzburg to Munich yesterday. The train stopped at the German border, whereupon eight police officers, well armed and wearing full body armor, boarded the train and asked to see passports. I haven’t had a passport check on a European train in years, and I thought they were obsolete in the era of the Schengen Zone that allows visa-free travel throughout the European Union.
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September 23, 2023 — John Hinderaker
Destroying the German economy isn’t easy, but that country’s government is working hard at it. Since the Industrial Revolution, it has been hard to imagine a de-industrialized Germany. But that is the way things are trending. The London Times reports: Germany is in the teeth of a “severe and sustained downtrend”, experts warned after a closely watched survey showed that a deep contraction in factory output was keeping its economy
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September 19, 2023 — Steven Hayward
Everyone knows that Germany was the “first mover” on the net-zero bandwagon, spending more than a trillion Euros over the last 15 years on its “energiewende” (“energy revolution”) only to see their greenhouse gas emissions begin rising again, and last year reviving coal-power to keep the lights on. One thing they did achieve was causing consumer energy prices to roughly double. I guess that “wind-and-solar-are-cheaper” isn’t working out according to
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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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