Yep. If I was Varoufakis, I'd ride up to the German finance ministry in a motorcade of motorcycles promising to "sort Germany's finances out". Not because I'd be a plenipotentiary, more a nullopotentiary, but just for the giggles.
At least for them the weather power might actually work given the level of sunshine and/or wind due to everything being coast or mountain range (and often both).
I think it's clear that the 'governing' class has by and large forgotten how to actually govern because these days they're just puppets for the globalists. Glorified middle managers botching everything they touch and then blaming the citizens for noticing.
That assumes that there is a shadowy class of evil geniuses pulling the strings.
Is it too ... disappointing to conclude that Merz, Scholz and the others _are_ the globalists? The newly retired Schwab was equally a midwit promoted far beyond his competence. Von der Leyen - the same, as she proved when she was a government minister under Merkel.
It's blundering fools all the way up (apologies to turtlekind).
Ah, I thought you'd reached that stage a while back (maybe because I enjoy snd agree with your comments in general).
Some, like Soros, or Gates, are obviously brighter than others, but in their own fields. Once they try to become masters of the universe, they're not impressive. Soros can only manage destruction, while Gates goes for crackpot schemes. When you read them, or watch public talks or interviews, they show every sign of earnest belief at the level of their fundamental ideas, even if they can pull off some deft wheeler-dealing in the implementation of those ideas.
I agree. I think money opens doors, and this gives the impression of importance. Bill Gates can easily get books published, for example. But who reads them?
I think the elite types are one joke acts as you say. Bill Gates' heyday was the 1980s. A long time ago.
Those who rise to political power are not necessarily intelligent in the same sense that we measure intelligence, mainly, abstract reasoning. Nor are they necessarily competent at governing. Their particular talents are for forming alliances, knowing when and how to double-cross potential rivals, recognizing opportunities to form an appealing public image, and possessing the ability to sit through crashingly boring legislative sessions, committee meetings etc. without running from the room screaming. What we end up with are ass-kissing, treacherous, boring leaders who have no real talent for running anything.
I agree. Selective pressures serve to produce this kind of outcome. A lot of conspiracies in my view are this, a series of incentives and disincentives selecting for a certain type. Narcissists, for example, are common where performance is valued, like politics.
The word "genius" is not essential to the argument here. You again use a puppeteering metaphor: your elite "just need to be pulling the strings".
Genius or not, this requires a cognitive elite that must be considerably more intelligent than their puppets, since your model requires them to operate on the basis of their own private motives while manipulating their puppets into belief in a different set of motives - if this is not what you think, then you'll have to drop your notion of puppeteers and puppets.
You place the apparent political leaders of European states on your level of the puppets, including Merz, Scholz and presumably Macron, Starmer, Sánchez and the rest. You haven't named your puppeteers, but presumably you would put Soros and Gates there, and maybe you're also sufficiently impressed by Schwab and Ghebreyesus. Or the Rockefellers and Rothschilds? Or unknown figures who remain in the shadows? Feel free to tell us.
Whatever the personnel, the puppeteers will have to be at least two standard deviations more intelligent than the puppets they manipulate - if not, then the puppets would work out that they were being fooled, and even deduce some motives of the puppeteers. Again, if you don't think this, you'll have to drop your puppet model, since I'm only drawing out the implications.
Your model also implies, for example, that Davos cannot be a forum for the puppetmasters, since that annual event is populated mainly by politicians at the level of your puppets. Likewise for Chatham House or the Council on Foreign Relations and all other such publicly known organisations. Your puppetmasters would have to seek out clandestine meetings elsewhere to discuss their real purposes, while using Davos, Chatham House etc. for programming their puppets. Again, your model would be forced into mysterious and paranoid waters.
If you don't think that Soros, say, is two or more standard deviations more intelligent than Merz, then you're pushed up higher towards unknown persons, and your puppet model again becomes precarious and paranoid.
So what I'm asking is: are you actually prepared to follow through on all the implications of your puppet model or is it just a kind of throwaway insult aimed at our political class?
IMO selective pressure accounts for some of this chaos and then the ones who figure out they are being manipulated simply participate in the kayfabe uniparty theatre just to stay relevant especially if their reputations and livelihoods depend on them touting an equivalent of the "safe and effective" line.
However, after doing some activism against municipal corruption in the late 90s I ran into an organized fusion network of informants, law enforcement and intelligence goobers defending the status quo on par with the FBIs Cointelpro.
Then I played the wounded bird long enough to find out the nuances of their operant conditioning, trauma-based schtick and then began pushing back which resulted in them swapping out interns and druggies for a mix of retired LEOs and Middle aged guys using amateur NLP fear anchors.
"It's blundering fools all the way up (apologies to turtlekind)."
Yep, that's it. But they get by by _pretending_ that there's some greater authority which makes sense (on a grander scheme than we mortals can comprehend) of their total nonsense. So that they - and we - can pretend that _someone_ is actually in charge. Everything they do is _referred_, for its coherence, appropriateness and rationality: to an authority we cannot see.
(I wrote a longer comment on this theme last week, based on the Bosnian Viziers in Andrić's "Bosnian Chronicle").
The disease, as you suggest, may not be located in an unlocatable Secret Cabal, but in the visible "leaders" who, by their actions, _imply_ that there must be a Secret Cabal running things: because, in themselves, their actions make no sense whatsoever. This Secret Cabal is their delusion, more than ours.
Kurt v. Hammerstein-Equord identified four types of officer:
"I divide my officers into four groups. There are clever, diligent, stupid, and lazy officers. Usually two characteristics are combined. Some are clever and diligent -- their place is the General Staff. The next lot are stupid and lazy -- they make up 90 percent of every army and are suited to routine duties. Anyone who is both clever and lazy is qualified for the highest leadership duties, because he possesses the intellectual clarity and the composure necessary for difficult decisions. One must beware of anyone who is stupid and diligent -- he must not be entrusted with any responsibility because he will always cause only mischief"
European political leaders all fall into this last category.
"His triviality the pigeon Chancellor Merz" - this is gold! I never noticed but the similarity is astonishing. Better wear your finest bathrobe in the coming weeks for when the meme police comes to your door.
"Monty Python and the Holy Grail," the inferior German remake.
It's just amazing how the most dangerous people in the world are always the absolute dolts.
You ought to tell us sometime about the secret of your own schooling, that you managed to not have your brains crushed out of you. Are you ever in touch with old classmates? How did they end up?
Maybe it's some incredible 4D chess move by Merz, lure the SPD into a coalition with promises of infinite spending, then point at the EU and shrug. Surely he got plenty of concessions in return for abandoning the debt brake, right? Right?
In 2016 John McCain faced a tough US Senate reelection battle. One of his most potent talking points concerned Obamacare. His opponent would keep it, he would repeal it. The issue became a centerpoint of his reelection campaign, he spent millions on advertisements that said he would repeal Obamacare, unlike his opponent. And won reelection. But within a few months when the vote to repeal Obamacare came, he voted against repeal, Obamacare survived. He lied:
The talking heads at the time acknowledged that it was his hatred for Pres. Trump that changed his vote. He hated Trump more than he loved his voters. Or his word, for that matter.
McCain was lionized in his death. A model politician, statesman, if only other politicians could be as ethical and upstanding, put a nation and its people ahead of their own agendas like McCain did! What their eulogies were actually saying was that all politicians should lie to their voters to win elections and then do the exact opposite of what they say. Lie, lie, lie some more! So courageous! Statesmen! History lauds the best liars. Even the liars with a history of criminal scandals:
So they lie. Until we stop believing their lies and defy their ill-gotten authority. Liars are illegitimate pretenders to power. We must stop pretending they are legitimate. Disobey.
It's not his service they are celebrating, they are celebrating that he is dead.
When it comes to McCain, many people don't remember that Arizona Republican voters themselves were spinning up a rather healthy movement to recall McCain in 2001, one that was unfortunately crushed under the tank treads of our response when 9/11 occurred.
It's a pity McCain didn't die of stomach cancer, and after a much longer run with it. While living under the rules for prescribing opiates he endorsed.
Yes, it's low of me. But fuck John McCain. Like, with a chainsaw or something, I'd never suggest someone sully a body part of their own on him.
I'm with you. I'll even do you one better. With all I knew about him and what I know now I wouldn't be surprised if his whole heroic POW story enduring torture, passing up his turn to leave was BS. I lay better than even odds that he had a fantastic makeup artist and voice coach through the whole thing. Smoked cigars and drank whiskey with Ho Chi Minh after every night's performance. Sung like a bird and ratted on Americans. At this point that possibility seems closer to the truth than the hero story.
Good grief, no wonder German politicians are protected by statute against hurty words shouted by the rabble. You would wonder how they dare show their faces in public. Their ineptitude knows no bounds.
Yes, sorry. the point is that the debt rules apply also to defence spending, which is not specifically exempt. The recent EU loosening of rules for debt spending doesn't particularly help Germany here.
If Germany, France, Britain, Poland, and other European countries are hell-bent on fighting Russia in Ukraine, I'm sure the EU leadership will meet to make an emergency exemption for the EU debt rules. That way they can stimulate their economies with new defense spending. If everything goes sideways in Ukraine and the European economies (which is going to happen anyway), they can then blame it all on Putin.
Debt sustainability is a function of the servicing cost (interest rate). Japan can carry a huge debt load because it costs nothing, whereas Europe must pay ~3%. The more indebted Europe becomes, the greater the pressure on the ECB to push down the yield curve.
… and Germany’s “climate” policies are destroying Germany’s manufacturing industry as we speak. Paying off debt requires the debtor to sell something and generate a return… particularly important in a high cost region, where added value is the key to manufacturing success.
Germany’s industrial powerhouses are leaving Germany as a manufacturing base, as energy costs are too high to sustain profits.
The Ukraine war has only exacerbated this problem.
In actuality, there exists no evidence that the combined efforts of the countries adhering to the Paris Agreement are having even a detectable effect upon the Keeling Curve.
Look up. Look way up. (You will not get this unless you are a Canadian of a certain vintage!)
Model solar output against global temperature. For extra marks include planetary orbital mechanics. (Hint- the effect is a consequence of greater land coverage in the northern hemisphere.)
In some chemistry course or other we learned that gases dissolved in a liquid outgassed with increasing temperature.
For the gold star try to explain this to any climate catastrophist.
"Or perhaps Germany will just spend its debt as it wishes and we will ignore these [EU] rules."
I'd put my money on this one. Not for nothing you have a German president for the Commission and a German leading the strongest parliamentary group in the EP.
When I open my inbox each day, my eyes are immediately drawn to the latest eugyppius missive. In addition to the drama, I am also hooked on the plotline because it helps me to not feel so terrible about U.S. politics -- which, as ridiculous as D.C. is, seem almost competent compared to the clownshow of cowardly tyrants in Germany.
You sure it’s incompetence and not good old “legal, illegal, scheißegal”? Zensursula is a party colleague after all and maybe there’s some sort of agreement to force this through come hell or high water by creating facts, with the threat of Germany collapsing even faster which no one in the EU – not even the guilty victims in Greece – can want.
OTOH maybe the multiplication of rules, regulations, pacts, agreements, standards, practices, habitual understandings… has just overtaken our rulers themselves?
There’s this awesome essay from the good ole times of the NRx blogs, before the slop right ruled the roost, “Inaccessible is Ungovernable” by the sorely missed Handle: https://archive.ph/eRBH9
When this reaches the people who inflict the information corvée themselves, surely we have surpassed diminishing and reached negative returns to complexity.
Your reference to the HandleHaus piece is VERY valuable to the discussion. Raises all sorts of issues regarding the republic (not democratic) form of government, and its debasement largely beginning with and accelerated by Wilson's Presidency in the U.S.A. His 1884 doctoral thesis is the thinly veiled justification and blueprint for the technocratic totalitarianism that he envisioned. While Handel may be correct in his dismay over government chosen by "the least common denominator", that is the kernel of a democratic republic based solely on individual freedom and acceptance of individual responsibility.
I’m sure the Greeks appreciate the irony…
Perhaps Ukraine will bail Germany out :P...
Or Romania? Bulgaria, Croatia?
Yep. If I was Varoufakis, I'd ride up to the German finance ministry in a motorcade of motorcycles promising to "sort Germany's finances out". Not because I'd be a plenipotentiary, more a nullopotentiary, but just for the giggles.
Or just roll up and threaten to turn off the ATMs…
Or just roll up and take a piss on the steps of the Reichstag.
Maybe they'll come bearing gifts?
Hope so. Hollow wooden horses are good.
"My liege, I have a plan"
---
"If we built this large wooden badger" >smack!<
Beware
At least for them the weather power might actually work given the level of sunshine and/or wind due to everything being coast or mountain range (and often both).
Excellent reference.
I think it's clear that the 'governing' class has by and large forgotten how to actually govern because these days they're just puppets for the globalists. Glorified middle managers botching everything they touch and then blaming the citizens for noticing.
That assumes that there is a shadowy class of evil geniuses pulling the strings.
Is it too ... disappointing to conclude that Merz, Scholz and the others _are_ the globalists? The newly retired Schwab was equally a midwit promoted far beyond his competence. Von der Leyen - the same, as she proved when she was a government minister under Merkel.
It's blundering fools all the way up (apologies to turtlekind).
I am beginning to think this too. The main thing on display across the world is incompetence, not Machiavellian verve.
Maybe we look for the secret cabal of geniuses, because it makes us feel better.
If we are represented by politicians that are representative of their constituents, then what does that say about us, since we are the constituents?
No, far easier on the mind to imagine that we the people are smart, the politicians stupid, and the secret club running things smart too.
(I feel like I'm channeling Marvin the Android and Puddleglum at the same time...)
> (I feel like I'm channeling Marvin the Android and Puddleglum at the same time...)
"Marvin the Paranoid Android was an optimist."
Welcome to my life. If I ever make it to Sweden I'll buy the first round for us to drown our sorrows with. ;)
Ah, I thought you'd reached that stage a while back (maybe because I enjoy snd agree with your comments in general).
Some, like Soros, or Gates, are obviously brighter than others, but in their own fields. Once they try to become masters of the universe, they're not impressive. Soros can only manage destruction, while Gates goes for crackpot schemes. When you read them, or watch public talks or interviews, they show every sign of earnest belief at the level of their fundamental ideas, even if they can pull off some deft wheeler-dealing in the implementation of those ideas.
I agree. I think money opens doors, and this gives the impression of importance. Bill Gates can easily get books published, for example. But who reads them?
I think the elite types are one joke acts as you say. Bill Gates' heyday was the 1980s. A long time ago.
I think his heyday of child diddling was more recent than that though.
Those who rise to political power are not necessarily intelligent in the same sense that we measure intelligence, mainly, abstract reasoning. Nor are they necessarily competent at governing. Their particular talents are for forming alliances, knowing when and how to double-cross potential rivals, recognizing opportunities to form an appealing public image, and possessing the ability to sit through crashingly boring legislative sessions, committee meetings etc. without running from the room screaming. What we end up with are ass-kissing, treacherous, boring leaders who have no real talent for running anything.
I agree. Selective pressures serve to produce this kind of outcome. A lot of conspiracies in my view are this, a series of incentives and disincentives selecting for a certain type. Narcissists, for example, are common where performance is valued, like politics.
Sheftall's Razor: Never ascribe to incompetence what can be explained by malice.
Related: Sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice
"Warmek's Axe: You can't keep calling those consequences 'unintended' if they are blatantly obvious."
I'm reminded of one of the rules for evil overlords (http://www.eviloverlord.com/lists/overlord.html )
One of my advisors will be an average five-year-old child. Any flaws in my plan that he is able to spot will be corrected before implementation.
Politicians do not employ enough average five-year-old's as advisors
Upper management doesn't need to be geniuses, they just need to be pulling the strings.
We're actually lucky they're incompetent, too.
The word "genius" is not essential to the argument here. You again use a puppeteering metaphor: your elite "just need to be pulling the strings".
Genius or not, this requires a cognitive elite that must be considerably more intelligent than their puppets, since your model requires them to operate on the basis of their own private motives while manipulating their puppets into belief in a different set of motives - if this is not what you think, then you'll have to drop your notion of puppeteers and puppets.
You place the apparent political leaders of European states on your level of the puppets, including Merz, Scholz and presumably Macron, Starmer, Sánchez and the rest. You haven't named your puppeteers, but presumably you would put Soros and Gates there, and maybe you're also sufficiently impressed by Schwab and Ghebreyesus. Or the Rockefellers and Rothschilds? Or unknown figures who remain in the shadows? Feel free to tell us.
Whatever the personnel, the puppeteers will have to be at least two standard deviations more intelligent than the puppets they manipulate - if not, then the puppets would work out that they were being fooled, and even deduce some motives of the puppeteers. Again, if you don't think this, you'll have to drop your puppet model, since I'm only drawing out the implications.
Your model also implies, for example, that Davos cannot be a forum for the puppetmasters, since that annual event is populated mainly by politicians at the level of your puppets. Likewise for Chatham House or the Council on Foreign Relations and all other such publicly known organisations. Your puppetmasters would have to seek out clandestine meetings elsewhere to discuss their real purposes, while using Davos, Chatham House etc. for programming their puppets. Again, your model would be forced into mysterious and paranoid waters.
If you don't think that Soros, say, is two or more standard deviations more intelligent than Merz, then you're pushed up higher towards unknown persons, and your puppet model again becomes precarious and paranoid.
So what I'm asking is: are you actually prepared to follow through on all the implications of your puppet model or is it just a kind of throwaway insult aimed at our political class?
IMO selective pressure accounts for some of this chaos and then the ones who figure out they are being manipulated simply participate in the kayfabe uniparty theatre just to stay relevant especially if their reputations and livelihoods depend on them touting an equivalent of the "safe and effective" line.
However, after doing some activism against municipal corruption in the late 90s I ran into an organized fusion network of informants, law enforcement and intelligence goobers defending the status quo on par with the FBIs Cointelpro.
Then I played the wounded bird long enough to find out the nuances of their operant conditioning, trauma-based schtick and then began pushing back which resulted in them swapping out interns and druggies for a mix of retired LEOs and Middle aged guys using amateur NLP fear anchors.
"It's blundering fools all the way up (apologies to turtlekind)."
Yep, that's it. But they get by by _pretending_ that there's some greater authority which makes sense (on a grander scheme than we mortals can comprehend) of their total nonsense. So that they - and we - can pretend that _someone_ is actually in charge. Everything they do is _referred_, for its coherence, appropriateness and rationality: to an authority we cannot see.
(I wrote a longer comment on this theme last week, based on the Bosnian Viziers in Andrić's "Bosnian Chronicle").
The disease, as you suggest, may not be located in an unlocatable Secret Cabal, but in the visible "leaders" who, by their actions, _imply_ that there must be a Secret Cabal running things: because, in themselves, their actions make no sense whatsoever. This Secret Cabal is their delusion, more than ours.
Kurt v. Hammerstein-Equord identified four types of officer:
"I divide my officers into four groups. There are clever, diligent, stupid, and lazy officers. Usually two characteristics are combined. Some are clever and diligent -- their place is the General Staff. The next lot are stupid and lazy -- they make up 90 percent of every army and are suited to routine duties. Anyone who is both clever and lazy is qualified for the highest leadership duties, because he possesses the intellectual clarity and the composure necessary for difficult decisions. One must beware of anyone who is stupid and diligent -- he must not be entrusted with any responsibility because he will always cause only mischief"
European political leaders all fall into this last category.
> European political leaders all fall into this last category.
:s/European p/P/
Sadly.
"His triviality the pigeon Chancellor Merz" - this is gold! I never noticed but the similarity is astonishing. Better wear your finest bathrobe in the coming weeks for when the meme police comes to your door.
"the meme police." That has a shine to it as well.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OPemyipJzAM
A parody awaits... :D
"Monty Python and the Holy Grail," the inferior German remake.
It's just amazing how the most dangerous people in the world are always the absolute dolts.
You ought to tell us sometime about the secret of your own schooling, that you managed to not have your brains crushed out of you. Are you ever in touch with old classmates? How did they end up?
[edited for clarity]
Maybe it's some incredible 4D chess move by Merz, lure the SPD into a coalition with promises of infinite spending, then point at the EU and shrug. Surely he got plenty of concessions in return for abandoning the debt brake, right? Right?
And how are you feeling about the profoundly stupid people who vote the rulers into office, Eugyppius?
In 2016 John McCain faced a tough US Senate reelection battle. One of his most potent talking points concerned Obamacare. His opponent would keep it, he would repeal it. The issue became a centerpoint of his reelection campaign, he spent millions on advertisements that said he would repeal Obamacare, unlike his opponent. And won reelection. But within a few months when the vote to repeal Obamacare came, he voted against repeal, Obamacare survived. He lied:
https://www.nbcnews.com/health/obamacare/mccain-hated-obamacare-he-also-saved-it-n904106
The talking heads at the time acknowledged that it was his hatred for Pres. Trump that changed his vote. He hated Trump more than he loved his voters. Or his word, for that matter.
McCain was lionized in his death. A model politician, statesman, if only other politicians could be as ethical and upstanding, put a nation and its people ahead of their own agendas like McCain did! What their eulogies were actually saying was that all politicians should lie to their voters to win elections and then do the exact opposite of what they say. Lie, lie, lie some more! So courageous! Statesmen! History lauds the best liars. Even the liars with a history of criminal scandals:
https://www.phoenixnewtimes.com/news/mccain-the-most-reprehensible-of-the-keating-five-6431838
McCain was just one of many notable and noted liars. Like the Clinton's.
Congenital liars:
https://web.archive.org/web/20090517044151/https://www.nytimes.com/1996/01/08/opinion/essay-blizzard-of-lies.html
Unusually good liars:
https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2013/02/bill_clinton_is_an_unusually_good_liar_and_hillary_is_no_slouch.html
Even liars recognize other liars, point out the ones that require the willing suspension of disbelief:
https://www.commentary.org/abe-greenwald/remember-a-willing-suspension-of-disbelief/
Politicians are gifted, practiced liars:
https://www.bustle.com/articles/98956-how-to-tell-someones-lying-and-what-makes-a-good-liar-explained
It's global. Because they get away with it:
https://regardless.sg/why-politicians-rarely-pay-the-price-for-their-lies/
Lying is even called "ethical" among political leaders. There's a lot of academic study and practitioners of "ethical lying":
https://www.scu.edu/ethics/ethics-resources/ethical-decision-making/lying/
Remember Fauci's "noble lies"?
So they lie. Until we stop believing their lies and defy their ill-gotten authority. Liars are illegitimate pretenders to power. We must stop pretending they are legitimate. Disobey.
Democrats and their MSM mouthpieces are always willing to lionize a Republican politician AFTER he is safely dead.
While the same politician is living, they much prefer to demonize him, instead:
https://x.com/MikeLaChance33/status/1810153996641829110
It's not his service they are celebrating, they are celebrating that he is dead.
When it comes to McCain, many people don't remember that Arizona Republican voters themselves were spinning up a rather healthy movement to recall McCain in 2001, one that was unfortunately crushed under the tank treads of our response when 9/11 occurred.
https://www.timebomb2000.com/xf/index.php?threads/gvt-az-begins-recall-effort-against-mccain.2207/
It's a pity McCain didn't die of stomach cancer, and after a much longer run with it. While living under the rules for prescribing opiates he endorsed.
Yes, it's low of me. But fuck John McCain. Like, with a chainsaw or something, I'd never suggest someone sully a body part of their own on him.
I'm with you. I'll even do you one better. With all I knew about him and what I know now I wouldn't be surprised if his whole heroic POW story enduring torture, passing up his turn to leave was BS. I lay better than even odds that he had a fantastic makeup artist and voice coach through the whole thing. Smoked cigars and drank whiskey with Ho Chi Minh after every night's performance. Sung like a bird and ratted on Americans. At this point that possibility seems closer to the truth than the hero story.
No. I don't have any kind regard for that man.
Ah yes, the hidden legacy of Songbird McCain!
Good grief, no wonder German politicians are protected by statute against hurty words shouted by the rabble. You would wonder how they dare show their faces in public. Their ineptitude knows no bounds.
No one else writing about this in the U.S. that I know of. You’ve been invaluable
eugyppius, you quote Handelsblatt as saying that "EU rules would also strictly limit … defence spending."
Does this mean that EU rules limit increases in defense spending as such, or that they require compensating reductions in other areas (welfare, etc.)?
Yes, sorry. the point is that the debt rules apply also to defence spending, which is not specifically exempt. The recent EU loosening of rules for debt spending doesn't particularly help Germany here.
If Germany, France, Britain, Poland, and other European countries are hell-bent on fighting Russia in Ukraine, I'm sure the EU leadership will meet to make an emergency exemption for the EU debt rules. That way they can stimulate their economies with new defense spending. If everything goes sideways in Ukraine and the European economies (which is going to happen anyway), they can then blame it all on Putin.
Remember though that the “Rules” have never been applied to either France or Germany in the past. What’s the German equivalent of the Gallic shrug?
The Bavarian belch?
Debt sustainability is a function of the servicing cost (interest rate). Japan can carry a huge debt load because it costs nothing, whereas Europe must pay ~3%. The more indebted Europe becomes, the greater the pressure on the ECB to push down the yield curve.
… and Germany’s “climate” policies are destroying Germany’s manufacturing industry as we speak. Paying off debt requires the debtor to sell something and generate a return… particularly important in a high cost region, where added value is the key to manufacturing success.
Germany’s industrial powerhouses are leaving Germany as a manufacturing base, as energy costs are too high to sustain profits.
The Ukraine war has only exacerbated this problem.
Yes, but destroying your economy is a small price to pay for reducing atmospheric CO2 by 0.0001%.
In actuality, there exists no evidence that the combined efforts of the countries adhering to the Paris Agreement are having even a detectable effect upon the Keeling Curve.
And CO2. doesn't cause global warming.
Separate issue, but there is scant empirical evidence that atmospheric CO2 concentration is a climate driver.
Look up. Look way up. (You will not get this unless you are a Canadian of a certain vintage!)
Model solar output against global temperature. For extra marks include planetary orbital mechanics. (Hint- the effect is a consequence of greater land coverage in the northern hemisphere.)
In some chemistry course or other we learned that gases dissolved in a liquid outgassed with increasing temperature.
For the gold star try to explain this to any climate catastrophist.
But if we don't the Amazon and the Polar Ice Caps will be gone by the year 2 000.
All the experts and The Science said so in 1992.
We only have ten years to act.
we only have -20 years to act. FIFY :)
Destroying their economy is the point, it helps in the larger plan of destroying their nation.
"Or perhaps Germany will just spend its debt as it wishes and we will ignore these [EU] rules."
I'd put my money on this one. Not for nothing you have a German president for the Commission and a German leading the strongest parliamentary group in the EP.
When I open my inbox each day, my eyes are immediately drawn to the latest eugyppius missive. In addition to the drama, I am also hooked on the plotline because it helps me to not feel so terrible about U.S. politics -- which, as ridiculous as D.C. is, seem almost competent compared to the clownshow of cowardly tyrants in Germany.
You sure it’s incompetence and not good old “legal, illegal, scheißegal”? Zensursula is a party colleague after all and maybe there’s some sort of agreement to force this through come hell or high water by creating facts, with the threat of Germany collapsing even faster which no one in the EU – not even the guilty victims in Greece – can want.
OTOH maybe the multiplication of rules, regulations, pacts, agreements, standards, practices, habitual understandings… has just overtaken our rulers themselves?
There’s this awesome essay from the good ole times of the NRx blogs, before the slop right ruled the roost, “Inaccessible is Ungovernable” by the sorely missed Handle: https://archive.ph/eRBH9
When this reaches the people who inflict the information corvée themselves, surely we have surpassed diminishing and reached negative returns to complexity.
Your reference to the HandleHaus piece is VERY valuable to the discussion. Raises all sorts of issues regarding the republic (not democratic) form of government, and its debasement largely beginning with and accelerated by Wilson's Presidency in the U.S.A. His 1884 doctoral thesis is the thinly veiled justification and blueprint for the technocratic totalitarianism that he envisioned. While Handel may be correct in his dismay over government chosen by "the least common denominator", that is the kernel of a democratic republic based solely on individual freedom and acceptance of individual responsibility.