Why would he view any of this as a problem? They don't. They get incentivized to create problems. Without "problems" they wouldn't be able to implement "solutions" to the problems they create!
That has become the one constant during the reign of the Administrative State over the last 60 + years across the world. And that's why a peasant populist movement is so dangerous/threatening to them.
It seems so obvious that it begs the question of why we even question what their intentions are.
I mean, Merz has screwed up so hard that he has made his chancellor bid less likely than it was before he started screwing up. I accept that he doesn't personally care about migration or climate or even defence or anything else, but presumably he and his party do actually want to be in government.
Well when you lie to make other people live a lie than the lie becomes your reality.
People will do very stupid and desperate things when their reality is challenged.
I just don't think they've come to terms with being called on the carpet for their ineptitude. If you were a liar and incompetent you might act they same way. The liar and the incompetent must always hide and conceal. That is his motivation.
They were used to this:
“The masses have never thirsted after truth. They turn aside from evidence that is not to their taste, preferring to deify error, if error seduce them. Whoever can supply them with illusions is easily their master; whoever attempts to destroy their illusions is always their victim.”
- Gustave Le Bon
People don't make decisions that they knowingly believe not to support their interests. And I think that's why he has made these silly decisions.
I just don't think they thought it conceivable that a good portion of the people would assert their will and not give into apathy they try to create through demoralization.
I hope he is wrong, at least for a few years, for if not, we are all doomed.
It does appear that a common sense populism is sweeping the western world, being only held back by statist shenanigans such as we've seen recently in Brazil, the US, Germany, Romania, France, Canada... It seems pretty clear that, if not for lawfare, insane media bias, and massive IC spending and interference, that we would already have a populist wave sweeping many more governments than we have already seen. Particularly if Trump and DOGE are able to succeed in cutting off the supply of "International Investment" funds and other forms of money laundering, er, I mean "waste, fraud and abuse" - I don't believe this wave will be held back over the next decade.
We live on a razor's edge right now, for sure, but I think a great many people have been awakened, and I don't think they will be easily lulled back to sleep.
Its hard to flesh out their true intentions because we are reasonable and rational people - they are not.
Its sort of like trying to decipher why the D's insisted on running Biden.
You can only assume that they thought Biden was their best chance of staying in power. No matter how misguided i think that's exactly what's happening in Germany.
The status quo system that has supported and been run by Western governments for decades is undergoing a massive shakeup, on multiple levels.
Right now it is in the tremor stage, forewarning of an impending earthquake.
It started on November 5th, and is just getting started, and it will have worldwide repercussions, extremely harsh for a while and then, by necessity, settling into saner and more rational forms governance for those who want to survive.
*"Its sort of like trying to decipher why the D's insisted on running Biden."
I would say it was for the same reason they insisted on running Harris. The D's are controlled from the top by the DNC, and the DNC is controlled by someone who wants Presidential power, but cannot win an election. Hence, D candidates for the presidency and vice-presidency who are so absurdly incompetent that they can only take their instructions from the DNC and the person who controls it.
I don't disagree with that, and I think that is part of the story. But either way, they were determined to run an idiot, who would only serve as the seat-warmer for an office that would be controlled by the DNC.
It's why the D's don't do honest primaries anymore. If a candidate actually works his/her way up against a field of other candidates, the winner is likely to be competent, and less likely to passively take orders from the DNC.
Whoever is controlling the DNC now, is more willing for the Democrats to lose a presidential election than to lose their own dominance over the Democratic Party.
We may discover that the election cheating has been larger and more pervasive than we ever thought. I can't find much agreement or but Trump received anywhere from 67% to 80% of the in-person votes, and Biden received somewhere between 58% and 80% of the mail-in votes. I find even the lowest ranges of these numbers statistically impossible without widespread cheating
I made a post a couple of years ago on election cheating and one commentor noted that he was involved in a state election integrity group. They noted that there was more cheating in the 2016 presidential election favouring the republicans however there was a massive amount of cheating in the 2020 election favouring the demorats.
Deliberate crashing of the financial systems to enable a worldwide digital currency run completely by the WEF, World Bank and UN. Any citizen unrest then gives the UN an excuse to intervene with troops and take over administration on behalf of a global government.
Very sketchy. Either this politician is very very bad at being a politician, or it is smoke and mirrors in a very evil sort of way. The outcome is closer to what Klaus Schwab seems to want. Blackrock Merz is probably a cabinet owned by WEF.
Yes. Like most of the PM’s in UK these past few years and Schultz.
I really hope Trump bluster doesn’t screw up chances for Poliver (sp) in Canada. I’m generally in favor of his strategies but that one may very well backfire. 👎🏿👎🏿👎🏿
If Canadians are stupid enough to vote for the Liberal/NDP disaster again. They will only have themselves to blame. I am ready to pack my bags for the the UAE, I cannot stomach more taxes for services that I will never get. A national economic policy that is insane to say the least. Hopefully all of Trump's bluster will force whoever wins to start to diversify our resource client base. Build at least a few LNG export terminals and more pipelines that go from west to east. If they don't the resource rich central provinces may as well just join the US.
What would be involved with the central provinces being able to do that? Is it even lawful? It’s exceedingly difficult for a state to break off in the US. The only lawful method was the one used by West Virginia. Lots of dreamers but the reality is restricted in possibility.
Quebec has held 2 referendums to become independent. So it is distinctly possible. All it requires is a referendum and a negotiation. If Quebec can do it, then Alberta and Saskatchewan can.
"somewhere in the Hitchhiker’s Guide series Mr. Adams told the story of the The Golgafrinchans, a race of people who sent their Telephone Sanitizer population away. The Sanitizers were sent along with another third of the planet’s population who were also deemed useless to form a colony on a remote planet (Earth as it happens). Of course, the remaining Golgafrinchan population was then wiped out by a virulent disease contracted via unsanitary telephones."
- Merz is BlackRock: ruining a country, even if it is your own, is an opportunity;
- Merz and Ursula von der Leyen are from the same party: both are throwing their scopes of influence, -Germany and the EU, in a concerted way-, down the drain;
Thus, it is worth thinking about what is happening at both levels.
Both the EU and Germany are at a critical stage in terms of globalist transformation: the EU seems to have blackmailed Romania into doing anything to prevent Calin Georgescu from getting into power, the ReArm obscenity, -with or without goat sex picture-, plus the introduction, -ahead of time-, of the digital Euro, go all very well with what the German cartel parties are cooking.
And both are using the same argumentation: Ukraine, Russophobia, Trumpphobia …
As usual, I'd love to laugh at the state of you Germans. Then I remember I live in the UK where things are pretty much following the same retarded globalist/WEF Uniparty path.
As an American, I'd like to laugh at both Germany and the UK, but then I remember I have an business in a county that is historically part of our Rust Belt where the leadership is out of ideas and decline has been ongoing for the last 50-60 years.
The amount of crying coming from the Universities around me at the Trump admin imposing a limit on research grant overhead (the part the institution tacks on) has been hilarious. Have these people never heard the trite sayings of "do more with less" and "work smarter not harder". Cry me a river -- I'm old enough to remember the massive unemployment when steel mills closed around here.
The Dumb is strong, all around all of us. Unfortunately, we're going to have to go through some pain before learning will take hold.
Ah yes, one of my favorite sayings, that someone is fractally wrong. They are wrong at the macro level, and the further one zooms in on any part of things, they remain equally wrong.
> I now accept that this is never going to happen, and that the coming months and years are going to provide nothing but an unending parade of screwups, one after the other, each more inexplicable and baffling than the last. We must begin the tiresome work of trying to understand Merz’s screwing up now, because there will only ever be more of this.
Mmmmm, yes. A clown parade at the goat rodeo being held by the fuck-fuck circus.
For another example of "fractally wrong", or quite potentially "fractally stupid", see the response to the supposed "Climate Crisis". *EVEN IF* the people who are pushing the theory are 100% correct, and not immediately reducing our carbon dioxide output to pre-industrial levels will result in large swathes of the planet becoming uninhabitable in the lifetimes of, at the very least, the grandchildren of the people pushing it, they have chosen *fractally retarded* strategies for combating the problem. The push solutions which not only will not solve the problem, but actively make it worse, while doing far worse damage to the environment than any mere excess of carbon dioxide even potentially could, while vehemently shunning solutions that actually *could* stem the flow of CO2 into the atmosphere. Additionally, they implement these idiotic strategems in a manner that deliberately weakens their positions in the world while strengthening their enemies.
If all of the money that various western government had poured into so-called "green energy" development had been put into nuclear fission and fusion reactor research, and an effort had been made to restrain the appalling levels of regulation which utterly smother the nuclear power industry, they would be on the path of a strategy which would actually achieve their stated goal. And if the west had started building reactors of all sorts, and continually improving designs and building those, in ever increasing numbers, starting when the first whisperings of this "problem" had been brought to public attention -- which, by the way, the world was first predicted to end, that its ending would actually *come*, not just the prediction being made then, *before I was born*, and I am *forty-eight years old* -- we would have enough reactors to replace every fossil fuel driven power plant on the planet.
It would undoubtedly been used as an enormous money siphon to fund various peoples' ascent into financial godhood, just as the green energy scam was, but at least we'd actually have something to show for it. There are reactor designs which not only *do not* but actively *cannot* be used to produce fission bomb materials. There are reactor designs which do that and are additionally *physically incapable* of having *any sort* of catastrophic meltdown. Yes, of course there are still radioactive materials involved, and of course an *intentional* reactor breach of some sort would create hazards. But there is no potential whatsoever for accidental horrors a'la Chernobyl or even Three Mile Island. And if one is not forced to continue running fifty year old outdated reactors because no more can be built, and indeed, run them in locations susceptible to taking damage from *tsunami*, one avoid the potential for Fukushimas as well.
I've been shocking my friends lately by confessing to rethinking nuclear energy. We are all of the China Syndrome generation — boomers — conditioned since childhood to view nuclear power as evil.
For the Net Zero/Climate Apocalypse folks, an internal combustion engine, a coal fired power plant, or a plastic straw is going to end Life As We Know It within our lifetimes. So why not go ahead and use nuclear? What've we got to lose?
If we had only redirected all the money poured into "green" energy, I think there's a good chance we would have licked the fusion problem by now. Fusion seems to be the ideal solution to all problems.
Unfortunately, more money won't lick the fusion problem. It's thoroughly submerged in the "Big Science" consortium, which means that only certain paths of inquiry are recognized and funded. We need a few real breakthroughs, and those rarely happen in organizations dedicated primarily to the status quo.
Well, yes. More and more people are recognizing how science has been subverted over recent decades. Change will be slow — one funeral at a time, as they say — but hopefully there will be progress.
This why everyone needs to push on every platform for Trump and Wright to enact a public debate, blue/red team, Munk style debate, choose some format and hash out the data on "climate emergency" (hint, there isn't one), lay this all out and force the climate/insane to participate or declare their position null and void.
There has to be public, irrefutable debate of the data as that is the only thing that ends all this nonsense. Force them from cover and then pop the little bunnies as they run.
"climate Emergency" pushed by the climate/insane is the enabler for all of this catastrophic energy and climate policy.
The poisoning of nuclear power in the minds of the public was the fault of the Greens. Now that they need to have nuclear in the mix, they can't admit they were wrong in the first place. So, no nuclear!
> If he wanted to bring the SPD to heel, he could’ve kept the door open to a minority government with AfD support.
Could he not, even at this late date, decide that the only sane path forward is to simply tell the Greens to go flat out fuck themselves, and form a coalition government with the AfD? I mean, if he and the CDU / CSU were hypothetically willing to smash the firewall into slag, and just go for it? Together, they *absolutely* have enough seats to basically rule the next Bundestag with an iron fist, and leave the opposition parties with absolutely no leverage on anything.
If you look at the strategic blunders of Mertz and the CDU, there are two things that are noticeable. First, they are stuck in the past and do not see that the political landscape has changed and continues to change. It's like the cavalry charges of WWI or the fixed defenses of WWII. They are using the strategy and tactics of the past which are now outdated. Second, Mertz' actions seem to be about making gains with minimized risk and effort. Often this is a viable strategy, especially if you are the dominant party, but today ALL options for the CDU/CSU are high risk and difficult. Courting the AfD is high-risk, high reward, maneuver, but Mertz, who is no risk taker, backed off after a few days of Leftist pushback. "Klotzen, nicht kleckern"
Not just the strategy and tactics of the past but the technology of the past. The message on an answer machine drama which the Greens immediately took advantage of (fair play to them) sounded like a joke to me.
I'm not sure. I thought AfD got more seats than SPD. They certainly got more votes, by a lot. Though that does not always translate, of course.
I mean, I know it won't work because CDU / CSU will never *do* it, but I think the numbers work out. Actually, before I even post this, I'll go look... :D
Yup. 630 seats total, 316 required for a majority, CxU got 208, and AfD got 152, for a total of 360. Well above what would be needed. CxU + SPD only have 328. A far narrower majority.
"In the meantime, things will just get stupider and stupider – stupider than you ever imagined they could get, and stupider than they have ever been before."
So, approaching the singularity of stupidity. The Stupidarity.
All the competent ones died. That's the core historical phenomenon of 20th century European history: WW1 slew half the good seed of Europe, and WW2 and the postwar order did for the rest.
Pretty sure Hitler would've stopped with Austria if someone like Trump were prime minister. And honestly I would've had no problem with Germany reclaiming the Sudetenland, the Rhine, Austria and part of the Czechoslovakia where the people spoke German. Germany, regardless of Hitler, had the right to protect their sovereignty and to reclaim areas taken from them by the allies.
But i would've drawn the line at Poland because all they wanted with Poland is Lebensraum (living space)...and a place to ship jews and other undesirables.
Chamberlain was weak...and that's what you get from weak men.
The alternative interpretation of Chamberlain's time in office is that he knew that the British military was in no shape to take on Germany when Hitler started making demands, and that he instead chose appeasement in order to buy time for industry, conscription and training and so on to catch up.
When put in contrast to the French response, it looks kind of credible, since the French basically managed to make themselves ready in the wrong way, in the wrong place, by insisting the enemy would attack according to their plans for an attack (de Gaulle, who clearly saw the folly of this, was sidelined for voicing his protests too loudly).
If anything, the current EU response to Russia-Ukraine is reminiscent of pre-WW2 France I'd say: ready for an enemy that only exists in their own plans.
Interesting angle. So many what ifs. The reality is the UK was never in a position to defend their island without a staging ground in France, and without the help from Americans.
But i don't think there was any stopping Hitler once they invaded Czechoslovakia. He was so high on himself and the population was euphoric with how fast they rolled through all the areas they initially invaded.
What i find interesting, as with the current saga in Ukraine, is the absolute certainty that Putin is evil and that Zelensky is not. Just the same as saddling with Russia to defeat Germany. I mean, after all, Stalin killed 10X as many people as Hitler.
Russia was always Hitlers crown jewel. He made his mistake by fighting two fronts and not realizing that Russias best defense (as it will always be) is a thousand mile march it takes to get to Moscow.
So all they have to do is throw men, material and munitions at it and wait for winter.
Certainly, there was no stopping >Hitler<, but Germany could have been stopped even without the British expeditionary force.
Remove Hitler from the equation right after the surrender of France and the miracle at Dunkirk, and the most likely action of the German command would be an immediate cessation of hostilities with Britain, in order to be able to completely focus on taking on Stalin's endless hordes, and to secure their hold over South-Central Europe.
This could have been - perversely enough - an even worse outcome than real history: a Britain at peace with Germany would not have acted as an airstrip for the US, and it is highly unlikely Germany would have done more than posture after Pearl Harbour (Speer among others knew full well the industrial potential of the USA, should it opt for a total war-strategy, as did his Japanese counterparts).
It is even possible that the British and American leadership would have not agreed to a lend-lease program with Stalin, but with Germany instead, and it is equally possible that Britain would have agreed to the initial German plan of transferring all the Jews to Palestine instead of what really happened. If so, the American Jews that had been funding the Zionist project for decades by then would have lobbied for the US to not interfere with this, since an influx of millions of German/European Jews into Palestine would have made them an immediate power-player in that region.
Counter-factual history is fun.
For even more "What if?", imagine what would have happened if the interwar proposed military alliance and subsequent militarisation between Denmark, Sweden, Finland, Iceland would have come to pass. All of a sudden, there's a real power in the North, capable of upsetting the plans of the USSR, Germany, UK and USA all in one go, depending on which side it decides to support.
Or if Leif Eriksson's colony had survived and thrived. Imagine the USA had it been colonised and settled several centuries earlier, by the Norsemen instead of the Spanish, English and French.
After complaining how the Germans made a huge mistake in WWI by fighting on two fronts, Hitler ended up fighting on three (Russia, France, North Africa/Italy). His original plans where to wait until 1945-1946 before he attacked the USSR, but he was probably getting high on his own farts. He made silly assumptions about what his enemies would do.
It's an interesting "what if" discussion. It's possible that Poland was emboldened in negotiations with Hitler over the Danzig Corridor by Churchill's (unsolicited) guarantee of security, and without it would have ceded the area to Germany in order to avoid war. It's also possible that Hitler would have turned its re-occupation into a full-scale invasion as he had done with the Sudentenland, and that Poland was right to resist from the start.
The bottom line is that both World Wars were completely avoidable and were the result of idiotic diplomacy on the part of elites in Britain, France, Germany, and Russia. That situation is not unlike the situation the European elites are creating for themsleves today.
I don't think that WWII was totally avoidable. The unrest and instability of post WWI Central Europe, the amputation of historically German lands, the dismemberment of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and the creation of brand-new nations was eventually going to come to a head.
Yeah but Poland resisted as opposed to the other areas.
They have a right to their sovereignty as well...and Hitler did not care. Poland was the real beginning of conquest with the intended purpose of staging an offensive base for the eventual invasion of Russia.
Czechoslovakia was essentially sacrificed by the European powers for a peaceful settlement. All the Czech defenses where in the Sudetenland on the German border. Losing the Sudetenland undermined their entire defensive strategy. They knew that if they fought, they would have lost anyway. Historically in Central Europe, one year you're a part of an empire, the next you're an independent nation, a few decades later you're once again part of an empire.
I don't mean to be insulting to either Germany nor Greece, I really don't - but this is beginning to look like Greece when PASOK was starting to collapse.
I had thought the publicised concessions and such would have been mostly mirages to placate the most rabid constituents/media/politicians, while the real negotiations would be undertaken in private, by shrewd realistic operators from the involved parties.
But it seems I was wrong: the frantic scrabbling isn't some clever front, nor are there any shrewd negotiators or deft real-politik wielding grey eminences doing the real work on the quiet in the wings - it's government and governance done the same way cockroaches scramble for cover when the lights come on.
In essence, it is the same cartelisation of politics only in Greece it happened under the pressure of the debt crisis. Funny thing is, since the main populist/anti-systemic party (take these words with a grain of salt) ie Syriza capitulated and was subsequently crashed in successive elections there has been a single party rule of the Right, while the opposition is fragmented and impotent. Now the whole thing is collapsing and it is obvious that the political system is morally and ideologically bankrupt and the more obvious it gets, the more authoritarian it becomes.
When you shut down Volkswagen plants in GE (never happened in VW history), with LUNATIC government policies, you know that, a ONCE GREAT ECONOMIC POWER is dying.
Indeed, Merz should be striving to be as boring and predictable as possible. Instead he's doing crazy counterproductive stuff he likes of which we have never seen before.
This analysis assumes that Merz wants to uphold his campaign promises and govern as a center rightist. But the obvious explanation is that he wants to do neither of those things, that his dalliance with AfD was the aberration, and he actively wants to hew a Merkelian center-left “co-opt” line.
Sure, this creates problems down the line and eventually will destroy his party (as it has done to “establishment” conservatives in the US, UK, and France) but getting SPD onside no matter the cost and turning open the money spigot will make *his* life a lot easier and maybe that’s all he cares about.
The only thing Merz clearly wants to achieve, is the chancellorship. Almost everything he has done has made that harder. Stepping across the firewall and then closing the door to the AfD made that harder. Trying to overhaul the debt brake with the old Bundestag has made that harder, among other things by putting him in the farcical position of negotiating with the Greens who won't even be part of any future government. The strategy is so bad that he's even increased the incentives of the left parties to form their own minority government without him.
Since he didn't get anything for his firewall gambit, he would've done better just to say brave things about restricting migration followed by not doing very much. There were any number of ways to approach the debt brake that wouldn't have publicly humiliated key underlings like Thorsten Frei and Carsten Linnemann – and we know after a dismal sub-30% showing that internal Union support can't be an overabundant good right now. Really, just doing less overall, being more boring and predictable, would've been a better political strategy. Instead it's like Merz is biased towards a dramatic self-destructive interventionism.
Everyone in the USA who advocates for an end to the two party system should read this and other of your essays to understand that things would be equally retarded in a multi party parliamentary system, just in different ways
E: Thank you for doing a great job with these complexities. I feel very sad for the German public, especially for all the old school intelligent, industrious, rational people who work hard and do their best. This guy is an immoral clown. I pray the people see through him. Seems the greens have!
Perhaps all these "screw ups" are deliberate?
Why would he view any of this as a problem? They don't. They get incentivized to create problems. Without "problems" they wouldn't be able to implement "solutions" to the problems they create!
That has become the one constant during the reign of the Administrative State over the last 60 + years across the world. And that's why a peasant populist movement is so dangerous/threatening to them.
It seems so obvious that it begs the question of why we even question what their intentions are.
I mean, Merz has screwed up so hard that he has made his chancellor bid less likely than it was before he started screwing up. I accept that he doesn't personally care about migration or climate or even defence or anything else, but presumably he and his party do actually want to be in government.
Well when you lie to make other people live a lie than the lie becomes your reality.
People will do very stupid and desperate things when their reality is challenged.
I just don't think they've come to terms with being called on the carpet for their ineptitude. If you were a liar and incompetent you might act they same way. The liar and the incompetent must always hide and conceal. That is his motivation.
They were used to this:
“The masses have never thirsted after truth. They turn aside from evidence that is not to their taste, preferring to deify error, if error seduce them. Whoever can supply them with illusions is easily their master; whoever attempts to destroy their illusions is always their victim.”
- Gustave Le Bon
People don't make decisions that they knowingly believe not to support their interests. And I think that's why he has made these silly decisions.
I just don't think they thought it conceivable that a good portion of the people would assert their will and not give into apathy they try to create through demoralization.
That LebBon quote is brutal and completely true.
I hope he is wrong, at least for a few years, for if not, we are all doomed.
It does appear that a common sense populism is sweeping the western world, being only held back by statist shenanigans such as we've seen recently in Brazil, the US, Germany, Romania, France, Canada... It seems pretty clear that, if not for lawfare, insane media bias, and massive IC spending and interference, that we would already have a populist wave sweeping many more governments than we have already seen. Particularly if Trump and DOGE are able to succeed in cutting off the supply of "International Investment" funds and other forms of money laundering, er, I mean "waste, fraud and abuse" - I don't believe this wave will be held back over the next decade.
We live on a razor's edge right now, for sure, but I think a great many people have been awakened, and I don't think they will be easily lulled back to sleep.
Yeah. He's got some real humdingers.
He usually nailed it
He described the Nazis&co to a t, 50 years before they happened, and similarly Covid over 100years before it.
A star fund manager once recommended the book to me as his favourite book on the financial markets.
With the additional comment that they aren't even mentioned in it once.
My mother used to say “it’s cutting off your nose to spite your face”.
What for?
If this goes through, there is nothing important left to deviate from, decide and do policy-wise for the next 4 years.
From the citizens and country's perspective, of course.
They might as well shut this parliament down or replace MPs and the government with robots.
You speak too much common sense!...;)
Its hard to flesh out their true intentions because we are reasonable and rational people - they are not.
Its sort of like trying to decipher why the D's insisted on running Biden.
You can only assume that they thought Biden was their best chance of staying in power. No matter how misguided i think that's exactly what's happening in Germany.
The status quo system that has supported and been run by Western governments for decades is undergoing a massive shakeup, on multiple levels.
Right now it is in the tremor stage, forewarning of an impending earthquake.
It started on November 5th, and is just getting started, and it will have worldwide repercussions, extremely harsh for a while and then, by necessity, settling into saner and more rational forms governance for those who want to survive.
That is the hope anyway. Let us pray it works!
In the UK November the 5th is Guy Fawkes night where we "celebrate" an event of someone trying to blow up parliament.
Sort of apt.
*"Its sort of like trying to decipher why the D's insisted on running Biden."
I would say it was for the same reason they insisted on running Harris. The D's are controlled from the top by the DNC, and the DNC is controlled by someone who wants Presidential power, but cannot win an election. Hence, D candidates for the presidency and vice-presidency who are so absurdly incompetent that they can only take their instructions from the DNC and the person who controls it.
I don't think they wanted to run Biden at all.
It was Dr. Jill. She said she wasn't leaving. She told Joe he was running again, and that was that. Until he messed up the debate.
I don't disagree with that, and I think that is part of the story. But either way, they were determined to run an idiot, who would only serve as the seat-warmer for an office that would be controlled by the DNC.
It's why the D's don't do honest primaries anymore. If a candidate actually works his/her way up against a field of other candidates, the winner is likely to be competent, and less likely to passively take orders from the DNC.
Whoever is controlling the DNC now, is more willing for the Democrats to lose a presidential election than to lose their own dominance over the Democratic Party.
Biden name recognition + Trump abrasiveness + promises Biden didn't keep (34%) + election cheating = Democrat Victory by small margin.
We may discover that the election cheating has been larger and more pervasive than we ever thought. I can't find much agreement or but Trump received anywhere from 67% to 80% of the in-person votes, and Biden received somewhere between 58% and 80% of the mail-in votes. I find even the lowest ranges of these numbers statistically impossible without widespread cheating
I made a post a couple of years ago on election cheating and one commentor noted that he was involved in a state election integrity group. They noted that there was more cheating in the 2016 presidential election favouring the republicans however there was a massive amount of cheating in the 2020 election favouring the demorats.
Deliberate crashing of the financial systems to enable a worldwide digital currency run completely by the WEF, World Bank and UN. Any citizen unrest then gives the UN an excuse to intervene with troops and take over administration on behalf of a global government.
Very sketchy. Either this politician is very very bad at being a politician, or it is smoke and mirrors in a very evil sort of way. The outcome is closer to what Klaus Schwab seems to want. Blackrock Merz is probably a cabinet owned by WEF.
Same in Canada, a Liberal/NDP Cabinet taking their orders from the WEF. They just inserted (not elected) Mark Carney, King of the WEFers. 😰😨😱
Yes. Like most of the PM’s in UK these past few years and Schultz.
I really hope Trump bluster doesn’t screw up chances for Poliver (sp) in Canada. I’m generally in favor of his strategies but that one may very well backfire. 👎🏿👎🏿👎🏿
If Canadians are stupid enough to vote for the Liberal/NDP disaster again. They will only have themselves to blame. I am ready to pack my bags for the the UAE, I cannot stomach more taxes for services that I will never get. A national economic policy that is insane to say the least. Hopefully all of Trump's bluster will force whoever wins to start to diversify our resource client base. Build at least a few LNG export terminals and more pipelines that go from west to east. If they don't the resource rich central provinces may as well just join the US.
What would be involved with the central provinces being able to do that? Is it even lawful? It’s exceedingly difficult for a state to break off in the US. The only lawful method was the one used by West Virginia. Lots of dreamers but the reality is restricted in possibility.
Quebec has held 2 referendums to become independent. So it is distinctly possible. All it requires is a referendum and a negotiation. If Quebec can do it, then Alberta and Saskatchewan can.
IIRR Texas can also go independent as it's in their State's constitution.
The political class has simply become this stupid. They are hairdressers and telephone sanitizers.
Lol, very nice reference to the Hitchiker's Guide.
https://collateraldamage.wordpress.com/2006/05/02/douglas-adams-right-again-lack-of-phone-sanitizers-will-doom-planet/
"somewhere in the Hitchhiker’s Guide series Mr. Adams told the story of the The Golgafrinchans, a race of people who sent their Telephone Sanitizer population away. The Sanitizers were sent along with another third of the planet’s population who were also deemed useless to form a colony on a remote planet (Earth as it happens). Of course, the remaining Golgafrinchan population was then wiped out by a virulent disease contracted via unsanitary telephones."
And their colonists are now being wiped out by their poisonous sanitizers?
Yeah the useful idiots ranks were completly recruited by the time of the Obama administration, so they had to send out RSVPs to useless idiots.
The response has been strong.
“Telephone sanitizers”
OMG hilarious! 😂😂😂
I tend to agree. Merz cannot be that stupid.
Let’s not forget that:
- Merz is BlackRock: ruining a country, even if it is your own, is an opportunity;
- Merz and Ursula von der Leyen are from the same party: both are throwing their scopes of influence, -Germany and the EU, in a concerted way-, down the drain;
Thus, it is worth thinking about what is happening at both levels.
Both the EU and Germany are at a critical stage in terms of globalist transformation: the EU seems to have blackmailed Romania into doing anything to prevent Calin Georgescu from getting into power, the ReArm obscenity, -with or without goat sex picture-, plus the introduction, -ahead of time-, of the digital Euro, go all very well with what the German cartel parties are cooking.
And both are using the same argumentation: Ukraine, Russophobia, Trumpphobia …
As usual, I'd love to laugh at the state of you Germans. Then I remember I live in the UK where things are pretty much following the same retarded globalist/WEF Uniparty path.
As an American, I'd like to laugh at both Germany and the UK, but then I remember I have an business in a county that is historically part of our Rust Belt where the leadership is out of ideas and decline has been ongoing for the last 50-60 years.
The amount of crying coming from the Universities around me at the Trump admin imposing a limit on research grant overhead (the part the institution tacks on) has been hilarious. Have these people never heard the trite sayings of "do more with less" and "work smarter not harder". Cry me a river -- I'm old enough to remember the massive unemployment when steel mills closed around here.
The Dumb is strong, all around all of us. Unfortunately, we're going to have to go through some pain before learning will take hold.
Well said. I wish you good fortune in your business.
Ah! Thank you for the reminder about "overhead" costs in publicly-funded "research."
We live and have assets in both countries.
The worst combo these days and over the next 4 years.
Ah yes, one of my favorite sayings, that someone is fractally wrong. They are wrong at the macro level, and the further one zooms in on any part of things, they remain equally wrong.
> I now accept that this is never going to happen, and that the coming months and years are going to provide nothing but an unending parade of screwups, one after the other, each more inexplicable and baffling than the last. We must begin the tiresome work of trying to understand Merz’s screwing up now, because there will only ever be more of this.
Mmmmm, yes. A clown parade at the goat rodeo being held by the fuck-fuck circus.
For another example of "fractally wrong", or quite potentially "fractally stupid", see the response to the supposed "Climate Crisis". *EVEN IF* the people who are pushing the theory are 100% correct, and not immediately reducing our carbon dioxide output to pre-industrial levels will result in large swathes of the planet becoming uninhabitable in the lifetimes of, at the very least, the grandchildren of the people pushing it, they have chosen *fractally retarded* strategies for combating the problem. The push solutions which not only will not solve the problem, but actively make it worse, while doing far worse damage to the environment than any mere excess of carbon dioxide even potentially could, while vehemently shunning solutions that actually *could* stem the flow of CO2 into the atmosphere. Additionally, they implement these idiotic strategems in a manner that deliberately weakens their positions in the world while strengthening their enemies.
If all of the money that various western government had poured into so-called "green energy" development had been put into nuclear fission and fusion reactor research, and an effort had been made to restrain the appalling levels of regulation which utterly smother the nuclear power industry, they would be on the path of a strategy which would actually achieve their stated goal. And if the west had started building reactors of all sorts, and continually improving designs and building those, in ever increasing numbers, starting when the first whisperings of this "problem" had been brought to public attention -- which, by the way, the world was first predicted to end, that its ending would actually *come*, not just the prediction being made then, *before I was born*, and I am *forty-eight years old* -- we would have enough reactors to replace every fossil fuel driven power plant on the planet.
It would undoubtedly been used as an enormous money siphon to fund various peoples' ascent into financial godhood, just as the green energy scam was, but at least we'd actually have something to show for it. There are reactor designs which not only *do not* but actively *cannot* be used to produce fission bomb materials. There are reactor designs which do that and are additionally *physically incapable* of having *any sort* of catastrophic meltdown. Yes, of course there are still radioactive materials involved, and of course an *intentional* reactor breach of some sort would create hazards. But there is no potential whatsoever for accidental horrors a'la Chernobyl or even Three Mile Island. And if one is not forced to continue running fifty year old outdated reactors because no more can be built, and indeed, run them in locations susceptible to taking damage from *tsunami*, one avoid the potential for Fukushimas as well.
I've been shocking my friends lately by confessing to rethinking nuclear energy. We are all of the China Syndrome generation — boomers — conditioned since childhood to view nuclear power as evil.
For the Net Zero/Climate Apocalypse folks, an internal combustion engine, a coal fired power plant, or a plastic straw is going to end Life As We Know It within our lifetimes. So why not go ahead and use nuclear? What've we got to lose?
If we had only redirected all the money poured into "green" energy, I think there's a good chance we would have licked the fusion problem by now. Fusion seems to be the ideal solution to all problems.
especially that annoying problem of massive piles of windmill parts?
And acres /miles of hail-destroyed solar ‘farms’. Idiots, one and all.
Yes, it was wrong to fall for the badmouthing of nuclear and idiotic to shut off existing plants.
But it is equally wrong to dream about building new reactors.
Prohibitively expensive in the West if calculated correctly and strategically dumb.
The CO2 lie just needs to be exposed and accepted as such, and gas and coal burning are then the answers until fusion might get realised.
It doesn't *have* to be prohibitively expensive, though.
Unfortunately, more money won't lick the fusion problem. It's thoroughly submerged in the "Big Science" consortium, which means that only certain paths of inquiry are recognized and funded. We need a few real breakthroughs, and those rarely happen in organizations dedicated primarily to the status quo.
Well, yes. More and more people are recognizing how science has been subverted over recent decades. Change will be slow — one funeral at a time, as they say — but hopefully there will be progress.
Fusion energy at least has been worth a try, unlike the "climate crisis" crap.
Green is rent-seeking.
Low density power is high land use and the subsidies raise the economic rent on the land.
Basically a land-owner welfare state...
Guess who owns most of the land and you'll find most of the WEF.
"The push solutions which not only will not solve the problem, but actively make it worse".
That sums up exactly what's happening with every single asinine policy they try to implement.
Its a wholesale indictment of the perverse incentive structure with career politicians and the administrative state.
This why everyone needs to push on every platform for Trump and Wright to enact a public debate, blue/red team, Munk style debate, choose some format and hash out the data on "climate emergency" (hint, there isn't one), lay this all out and force the climate/insane to participate or declare their position null and void.
There has to be public, irrefutable debate of the data as that is the only thing that ends all this nonsense. Force them from cover and then pop the little bunnies as they run.
"climate Emergency" pushed by the climate/insane is the enabler for all of this catastrophic energy and climate policy.
Until this is done we are vulnerable.
C02 is not a problem. It is plant food and we could use more of it to green up the planet.
World wide: they are "experts" at nothing. and we vote for them.
They are experts at ladder-climbing, and that is how they become "experts" at things they have no understanding of.
The poisoning of nuclear power in the minds of the public was the fault of the Greens. Now that they need to have nuclear in the mix, they can't admit they were wrong in the first place. So, no nuclear!
> If he wanted to bring the SPD to heel, he could’ve kept the door open to a minority government with AfD support.
Could he not, even at this late date, decide that the only sane path forward is to simply tell the Greens to go flat out fuck themselves, and form a coalition government with the AfD? I mean, if he and the CDU / CSU were hypothetically willing to smash the firewall into slag, and just go for it? Together, they *absolutely* have enough seats to basically rule the next Bundestag with an iron fist, and leave the opposition parties with absolutely no leverage on anything.
If you look at the strategic blunders of Mertz and the CDU, there are two things that are noticeable. First, they are stuck in the past and do not see that the political landscape has changed and continues to change. It's like the cavalry charges of WWI or the fixed defenses of WWII. They are using the strategy and tactics of the past which are now outdated. Second, Mertz' actions seem to be about making gains with minimized risk and effort. Often this is a viable strategy, especially if you are the dominant party, but today ALL options for the CDU/CSU are high risk and difficult. Courting the AfD is high-risk, high reward, maneuver, but Mertz, who is no risk taker, backed off after a few days of Leftist pushback. "Klotzen, nicht kleckern"
Not just the strategy and tactics of the past but the technology of the past. The message on an answer machine drama which the Greens immediately took advantage of (fair play to them) sounded like a joke to me.
Do they have enough seats to do it? I thought I remember Eugy saying that this wouldn't work?
I'm not sure. I thought AfD got more seats than SPD. They certainly got more votes, by a lot. Though that does not always translate, of course.
I mean, I know it won't work because CDU / CSU will never *do* it, but I think the numbers work out. Actually, before I even post this, I'll go look... :D
Yup. 630 seats total, 316 required for a majority, CxU got 208, and AfD got 152, for a total of 360. Well above what would be needed. CxU + SPD only have 328. A far narrower majority.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_German_federal_election
"...someone is fractally wrong..."
Stolen, if you don't mind. What a beautiful phrase!
Gotta love fractals.
I almost certainly picked it up elsewhere and filed the serial numbers of at one point, so it would be vastly hypocritical of me to object. ;)
Retard finder would have a field day in Germany. What is the German word for retard? Merkel? Do the police knock on your door if you say retard?
Schwachkopf/Habeck, verb to habeck, have now become those widely understood and secretly used terms.
"habecken"? To excel at being stupid?
There are various definitions around those lines floating around for habecken (and also for scholzen). E.G.:
-to deliberately ruin your country
-to try to explain something unsuccessfully of which you yourself have absolutely no clue
-to keep on bullsh*tting when it is clear that it's over
etc.
💩
Sorry, that's become a reflexive response to "habeck".
"In the meantime, things will just get stupider and stupider – stupider than you ever imagined they could get, and stupider than they have ever been before."
So, approaching the singularity of stupidity. The Stupidarity.
Bravo, I'm using that! We live in the stupidarity.
Stealing.
Elon Musk is right, AfD really is Germany's only hope.
Where was all this incompetence when the world REALLY needed it --- i.e., 1938-1945?
All the competent ones died. That's the core historical phenomenon of 20th century European history: WW1 slew half the good seed of Europe, and WW2 and the postwar order did for the rest.
Ethnogenesis.
Uggh.
Astute observation.
Well there was Neville Chamberlain
He might have been right after all.
Pretty sure Hitler would've stopped with Austria if someone like Trump were prime minister. And honestly I would've had no problem with Germany reclaiming the Sudetenland, the Rhine, Austria and part of the Czechoslovakia where the people spoke German. Germany, regardless of Hitler, had the right to protect their sovereignty and to reclaim areas taken from them by the allies.
But i would've drawn the line at Poland because all they wanted with Poland is Lebensraum (living space)...and a place to ship jews and other undesirables.
Chamberlain was weak...and that's what you get from weak men.
The alternative interpretation of Chamberlain's time in office is that he knew that the British military was in no shape to take on Germany when Hitler started making demands, and that he instead chose appeasement in order to buy time for industry, conscription and training and so on to catch up.
When put in contrast to the French response, it looks kind of credible, since the French basically managed to make themselves ready in the wrong way, in the wrong place, by insisting the enemy would attack according to their plans for an attack (de Gaulle, who clearly saw the folly of this, was sidelined for voicing his protests too loudly).
If anything, the current EU response to Russia-Ukraine is reminiscent of pre-WW2 France I'd say: ready for an enemy that only exists in their own plans.
Interesting angle. So many what ifs. The reality is the UK was never in a position to defend their island without a staging ground in France, and without the help from Americans.
But i don't think there was any stopping Hitler once they invaded Czechoslovakia. He was so high on himself and the population was euphoric with how fast they rolled through all the areas they initially invaded.
What i find interesting, as with the current saga in Ukraine, is the absolute certainty that Putin is evil and that Zelensky is not. Just the same as saddling with Russia to defeat Germany. I mean, after all, Stalin killed 10X as many people as Hitler.
Russia was always Hitlers crown jewel. He made his mistake by fighting two fronts and not realizing that Russias best defense (as it will always be) is a thousand mile march it takes to get to Moscow.
So all they have to do is throw men, material and munitions at it and wait for winter.
Certainly, there was no stopping >Hitler<, but Germany could have been stopped even without the British expeditionary force.
Remove Hitler from the equation right after the surrender of France and the miracle at Dunkirk, and the most likely action of the German command would be an immediate cessation of hostilities with Britain, in order to be able to completely focus on taking on Stalin's endless hordes, and to secure their hold over South-Central Europe.
This could have been - perversely enough - an even worse outcome than real history: a Britain at peace with Germany would not have acted as an airstrip for the US, and it is highly unlikely Germany would have done more than posture after Pearl Harbour (Speer among others knew full well the industrial potential of the USA, should it opt for a total war-strategy, as did his Japanese counterparts).
It is even possible that the British and American leadership would have not agreed to a lend-lease program with Stalin, but with Germany instead, and it is equally possible that Britain would have agreed to the initial German plan of transferring all the Jews to Palestine instead of what really happened. If so, the American Jews that had been funding the Zionist project for decades by then would have lobbied for the US to not interfere with this, since an influx of millions of German/European Jews into Palestine would have made them an immediate power-player in that region.
Counter-factual history is fun.
For even more "What if?", imagine what would have happened if the interwar proposed military alliance and subsequent militarisation between Denmark, Sweden, Finland, Iceland would have come to pass. All of a sudden, there's a real power in the North, capable of upsetting the plans of the USSR, Germany, UK and USA all in one go, depending on which side it decides to support.
Or if Leif Eriksson's colony had survived and thrived. Imagine the USA had it been colonised and settled several centuries earlier, by the Norsemen instead of the Spanish, English and French.
Or...
After complaining how the Germans made a huge mistake in WWI by fighting on two fronts, Hitler ended up fighting on three (Russia, France, North Africa/Italy). His original plans where to wait until 1945-1946 before he attacked the USSR, but he was probably getting high on his own farts. He made silly assumptions about what his enemies would do.
It's an interesting "what if" discussion. It's possible that Poland was emboldened in negotiations with Hitler over the Danzig Corridor by Churchill's (unsolicited) guarantee of security, and without it would have ceded the area to Germany in order to avoid war. It's also possible that Hitler would have turned its re-occupation into a full-scale invasion as he had done with the Sudentenland, and that Poland was right to resist from the start.
The bottom line is that both World Wars were completely avoidable and were the result of idiotic diplomacy on the part of elites in Britain, France, Germany, and Russia. That situation is not unlike the situation the European elites are creating for themsleves today.
I don't think that WWII was totally avoidable. The unrest and instability of post WWI Central Europe, the amputation of historically German lands, the dismemberment of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and the creation of brand-new nations was eventually going to come to a head.
Probably getting in over my head here, but should the draconian reparations demanded of Germany after WWI be on that list?
Great final paragraph, especially.
I think his official original intentions reg. territories in Poland were more limited and mostly justified.
Yeah but Poland resisted as opposed to the other areas.
They have a right to their sovereignty as well...and Hitler did not care. Poland was the real beginning of conquest with the intended purpose of staging an offensive base for the eventual invasion of Russia.
Czechoslovakia was essentially sacrificed by the European powers for a peaceful settlement. All the Czech defenses where in the Sudetenland on the German border. Losing the Sudetenland undermined their entire defensive strategy. They knew that if they fought, they would have lost anyway. Historically in Central Europe, one year you're a part of an empire, the next you're an independent nation, a few decades later you're once again part of an empire.
But the people who lived in those countries may have had a big problem with it.
I don't mean to be insulting to either Germany nor Greece, I really don't - but this is beginning to look like Greece when PASOK was starting to collapse.
I had thought the publicised concessions and such would have been mostly mirages to placate the most rabid constituents/media/politicians, while the real negotiations would be undertaken in private, by shrewd realistic operators from the involved parties.
But it seems I was wrong: the frantic scrabbling isn't some clever front, nor are there any shrewd negotiators or deft real-politik wielding grey eminences doing the real work on the quiet in the wings - it's government and governance done the same way cockroaches scramble for cover when the lights come on.
In essence, it is the same cartelisation of politics only in Greece it happened under the pressure of the debt crisis. Funny thing is, since the main populist/anti-systemic party (take these words with a grain of salt) ie Syriza capitulated and was subsequently crashed in successive elections there has been a single party rule of the Right, while the opposition is fragmented and impotent. Now the whole thing is collapsing and it is obvious that the political system is morally and ideologically bankrupt and the more obvious it gets, the more authoritarian it becomes.
What is PASOK? Thanks.
The “Panhellenic Socialist Movement” ie social democrats (in name only).
Eugyppius, “manifold” - a lovely, expressive word which isn’t much used nowadays. Thank you.
Except by mechanics and plumbers ;)
I was delighted by “manifold” but thrilled by “upscrewery”.
and mathematicians (maybe they're quantum mechanics?)
When you shut down Volkswagen plants in GE (never happened in VW history), with LUNATIC government policies, you know that, a ONCE GREAT ECONOMIC POWER is dying.
Save yourself GE patriots. Save YOURSELF.
Koalitionsverhandlungen in a nutshell:
Merz: We have to waste more money!
Klingbeil: Don’t threaten me with a good time.
crazy, when normally the main advantage that conservative parties hold is that they can win in part by doing less. or nothing. by conserving.
going out and doing stuff can be tricky. going out and doing stupid stuff is pretty much always an unforced error.
Indeed, Merz should be striving to be as boring and predictable as possible. Instead he's doing crazy counterproductive stuff he likes of which we have never seen before.
'We must begin the tiresome work of trying to understand Merz’s screwing up now, because there will only ever be more of this.'
You answered your own question. It's a deliberate strategy of desensitization. Before long we will regard all this as normal.
And demoralization to lull the population into indifference and its subtle feathering into apathy.
Apathy is the tyrants instrument of dominion over the masses.
This analysis assumes that Merz wants to uphold his campaign promises and govern as a center rightist. But the obvious explanation is that he wants to do neither of those things, that his dalliance with AfD was the aberration, and he actively wants to hew a Merkelian center-left “co-opt” line.
Sure, this creates problems down the line and eventually will destroy his party (as it has done to “establishment” conservatives in the US, UK, and France) but getting SPD onside no matter the cost and turning open the money spigot will make *his* life a lot easier and maybe that’s all he cares about.
The only thing Merz clearly wants to achieve, is the chancellorship. Almost everything he has done has made that harder. Stepping across the firewall and then closing the door to the AfD made that harder. Trying to overhaul the debt brake with the old Bundestag has made that harder, among other things by putting him in the farcical position of negotiating with the Greens who won't even be part of any future government. The strategy is so bad that he's even increased the incentives of the left parties to form their own minority government without him.
Since he didn't get anything for his firewall gambit, he would've done better just to say brave things about restricting migration followed by not doing very much. There were any number of ways to approach the debt brake that wouldn't have publicly humiliated key underlings like Thorsten Frei and Carsten Linnemann – and we know after a dismal sub-30% showing that internal Union support can't be an overabundant good right now. Really, just doing less overall, being more boring and predictable, would've been a better political strategy. Instead it's like Merz is biased towards a dramatic self-destructive interventionism.
> "biased towards a dramatic self-destructive interventionism" or perhaps dramatically competing with other European leaders in opposing Trumpism?
Everyone in the USA who advocates for an end to the two party system should read this and other of your essays to understand that things would be equally retarded in a multi party parliamentary system, just in different ways
E: Thank you for doing a great job with these complexities. I feel very sad for the German public, especially for all the old school intelligent, industrious, rational people who work hard and do their best. This guy is an immoral clown. I pray the people see through him. Seems the greens have!