Headlines like this are appearing because of the fools we have put in charge

 Germany draws up list of bunkers amid Russia tensions: App planned for public to find emergency shelter in places including underground train stations and car parks

The country of 84 million people has 579 bunkers, mostly from the second world war and the cold war era, which can provide shelter for 480,000 people, down from about 2,000 bunkers previously.

Maybe try Schlachthof Fünf.

 

 

Most Americans are seriously ignorant about their own history, and Bill Maher, who is Jewish, tells Megyn Kelly that the Nuremberg Laws passed in September 1935 in Hitler's Germany were OK

 

German party Alternative für Deutschland wins in Thuringia, comes in close second in Saxony, still frozen out of governance by CDU member who heads German intelligence

 For the first time ever, the right-populist Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) won a state election. In Thuringia, the party gained 32.8 per cent of the votes – nearly 10 points ahead of the conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU), which came in second with 23.6 per cent. In Saxony, the AfD won 30.6 per cent and came just 1.3 per cent behind the leading CDU. ...

Meanwhile, the three parties of the ruling coalition government lagged far behind. Combined, their vote share amounted to less than 15 per cent in Saxony and just over 10 per cent in Thuringia. ... The AfD’s gains are not a one-off slip-up, but a continuation of its successes. The party was already the second-strongest force in both federal states in the last state elections in 2019. On a national level, the AfD came second in the EU elections this June. ...

The attempt to combat the AfD by merely dismissing it as beyond the pale clearly isn’t working. Even those who don’t like the AfD, but are principled democrats, can see the problem with freezing out a party that just won a democratic election. ... The polls are crystal clear about which topics matter most to voters – rising crime rates, unregulated migration, a sinking standard of living and the growing influence of radical Islam. These are all real, rational concerns.

More.

Germany's Alternative für Deutschland is against EU bailouts of Greece and Italy and against EU membership for Ukraine

 

In discussing the party's policy platform, Weidel said AfD's future allies in the European Parliament should oppose the disbursal of taxpayer money to the "debt states" of Europe - a reference to countries such as Italy and Greece - and the idea that Ukraine belongs to the European Union, after it opened membership talks this week.

Reported here.

Joe Biden was just fine being the VP to the president who openly embraced the anti-semite last employed by the "Best Remnant of the Liberal Media"

 

Navalny would be alive today had he stayed in Germany in January 2021, but he just had to go back didn't he

 Opposition Leader and Putin Critic Alexei Navalny Dies In Prison at 47 :

Navalny looked healthy when he appeared by video for a courtroom appeal on Thursday. Speaking from prison, Navalny complained about the frequent fines he received while in a punitive cell and asked the judge to send him some money “as my own is running out thanks to your decisions”. ...

In 2020, Navalny fell into a coma after a suspected poisoning using novichok by Russia’s FSB security service and was evacuated to Germany for treatment. He recovered and returned to Russia in January 2021, where he was arrested on a parole violation charge and sentenced to his first of several jail terms that would total more than 30 years behind bars.

 

 

German court rules emergency spending on climate change is unlawful, coalition government forced to freeze outlays under debt brake rules

Story here.

Freeze.

Lolz.

Um, excuse me, America was founded by people who had given up . . .

. . . on England, and on Ireland, Germany, Italy, and the rest.

The libertarian impulse to go Galt, to run away, is a feature of America, not a bug, a built-in self-destruct mechanism which went off most spectacularly and destroyed the root in 1861.

The rest of the plant has been withering and dying on the vine ever since, overtaken by tenacious weeds.

Freedom for Christian religion combined with plenty of Lebensraum, home country memory, and time made it seem otherwise in the face of the steady decline, but here we are with Scylla and Charybdis for choices come November 2024.

The Declaration of Independence was a repudiation of politics. Two thirds of the country was not down for the struggle. Secession was a repudiation of politics. There was resistance to military conscription everywhere, but especially in the Confederacy. We were content to let the world burn for more than two years before the Japs forced our hand on December 7, 1941. We have right now the unthinkable European land war in its 20th month and sports is what trends on Twitter day in and day out. Mao killed by the tens of millions during The American Century. Americans quietly go to church every Sunday while tens of millions are aborted. It all began with migration, the most basic form of repudiating politics.

We do not need, in short, to relearn to think politically. Most of us have never thought politically in the first place. Apolitics is our politics, but this horror vacui is why the left seems to have won and why we hate them. We hate politics. As polarized as we think we are, as rigged as our politics is, 100 million eligible Americans still did not vote in 2020.

You do not get political blood from this turnip.

Ultimately, nothing could be more un-American than to give up on America.

The American idea, alas, is precisely to stay out of it. 

Here. 

Against the Black Pill

David Azerrad, Chronicles

The Feds always bury the bad info in Friday afternoon data dumps when no one is paying attention

 The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Friday said it is “very unlikely” the Pfizer omicron booster carries a risk of stroke for seniors after it launched an investigation into a preliminary safety concern detected by one of its monitoring systems.

The CDC, in a statement posted to its website Friday, said a surveillance system called the Vaccine Safety Datalink detected a possible risk for stroke in people ages 65 and older who received the Pfizer booster shot targeting the omicron Covid variant. A CDC spokesperson said this issue was first detected in late November.

By mid-December, the CDC concluded the concern was persisting and launched an investigation into whether seniors are more likely to have a stroke in the first 21 days after receiving the Pfizer booster, the spokesperson said. A similar preliminary signal was not detected for Moderna’s booster.

The VSD monitoring system found that 130 people ages 65 and older had a stroke within 21 days of receiving the Pfizer omicron booster among about 550,000 seniors who received the shot, the CDC spokesperson said. No deaths have been reported. The Washington Post earlier reported the news. ...

The agency spokesperson said investigators hope to have a clearer picture and more data in the coming weeks.

Story here.

Again, notice the limited scope "within 21 days". 

Hey, if I don't get sick within 90 days of reception the jab worked, right?

And if I don't have a stroke within 21 days of reception, no problem, right? 

Right?

The people have been voting on this with their feet.

From the peak in April 2021, the vaccine uptake rate in the US has collapsed from 1.06% to 0.04%, or over 96%.

The current rate annualized would mean just 48.5 million Americans per year will get a jab, about 14.6% of the 332 million population.

Meanwhile, France, 80.6% of which has received at least one dose of a vaccine to date, ranks 37th to date for deaths per million at 2438.

Germany, 77.8% of which has received at least one dose of a vaccine, ranks 50th at 1975.

The United States, 80.9% of which has received at least one dose of a vaccine, ranks 12th WORST in the world at 3439.

Vaccine coverage doesn't seem obviously correlated with outcomes.

Germany boosts electricity from coal to 10 gigawatts, a drop in the bucket

 Bloomberg, here:

Germany now generates more than a third of its electricity from coal-fired power plants, according to Destatis, the federal statistical office. In the third quarter, its electricity from the fuel was 13.3% higher than the same period a year earlier, the agency said.  

Germany as recently as 2019 still had 40 gigawatts of electricity capacity from coal, and planned to reduce that to 27 by 2022, so obviously Germany has much more capacity available than 10 gigawatts during its present natural gas supply crisis caused by the Ukraine war.

But Germany's more serious mistake than reducing its coal capacity was its voluntary and hysterical reduction of nuclear generation capacity by 40% in the wake of the Fukushima disaster in 2011. Now it's got just 3 reactors left out of the 17 it had back in the day. 

Meanwhile US electric capacity from coal in 2021 dwarfed the German, at about 210 gigawatts, but that is way down from almost 318 in 2011, a similarly ideologically driven, self-imposed, and illogical reduction of 108 gigawatts, or 33% in ten years.

The foolish growing reliance on unreliable "green energy" in the US and the turn away from coal which began in earnest under Obama has meant increasing unreliability of electric resources during extreme events, and a huge increase in the duration of power outages experienced by customers.

The average customer outage was just north of 8 hours in 2020 vs. about 3.5 hours in 2013, an increase of over 130%.

This will only get worse if America tries to rely on wind and solar at the expense of fossil fuels and nuclear.

 

 

Despite 2015 Paris climate agreement, global reliance on coal grew by about 8%, looks to grow 23% more, shattering Greta's world, lol

 The NGOs report said there are currently more than 6,500 coal plant units globally with a combined capacity of 2,067 gigawatts. ...

Urgewald’s Schuecking told CNBC that since the 2015 Paris accord was signed, the global coal plant fleet had seen a net increase of roughly 157 gigawatts. That’s the equivalent of Germany, Russia, Japan and Poland’s coal fleet added up together.

The research found that 467 gigawatts of new coal-fired capacity were still in the pipeline worldwide. And, if realized, these projects would increase the world’s current coal power capacity by 23%. ...

China was found to be responsible for 61% of all planned coal power capacity additions and, perhaps unsurprisingly, the top four coal plant developers were found to be Chinese companies . . .. China Energy Investment Corporation was the world’s top thermal coal producer last year. This was closely followed by Coal India . . ..

I omitted Schuecking's temper tantrum parts of the story, here.

She is, predictably, a German environmentalist wacko who is also against nuclear power. Urgewald is full of crazy Karens just like her who agitate against corporations and try to get individuals like David Malpass of the World Bank fired because they don't mouth the right words like the Paris Climate Accord hypocrites do.

Urgewald is Exhibit A for the prospect of Germans freezing to death this winter.

Denmark restarts two coal and one oil power station, Germany restarts three coal power stations

From the story:

Orsted said the order applied to “unit 3 at Esbjerg Power Station and unit 4 at Studstrup Power Station, which both use coal as their primary source of fuel, and unit 21 at Kyndby Peak Load Plant, which uses oil as fuel.” ...

A few days before Orsted’s announcement, another big European energy firm, Germany’s RWE, said three of its lignite, or brown coal, units would “temporarily return to [the] electricity market to strengthen security of supply and save gas in power generation.”

 

LOL, fear-mongering spending lunatic at The Daily Beast gets nothing right about Nigeria, which has Africa's largest economy and a COVID-19 death record 55 TIMES better than the world's, and: "A few trillion in U.S. government spending isn't a lot of money"

Gee, and Nigeria is only 14% jabbed . . . after all this time.

The U.S. is COVAX’s biggest donor, but not its most generous. Both Germany and Japan have donated a greater share of their gross domestic product. And another big injection of American money looks unlikely as Republicans pull tight the purse strings.

That means fewer vaccines for poorer countries as the pandemic grinds toward its fourth year and vaccination rates in the poorest countries remain stubbornly low—14 percent in Nigeria, for example, compared to the global rate of 63 percent. Starving COVAX “will only enhance global inequities,” Gostin said. ... A few trillion in U.S. government spending, spread out over years, arguably isn’t a lot of money . . ..

More.

Low winds for a whole year, huh

 In Germany last year, in part because of low winds and the already rising price of natural gas, hard coal and lignite accounted for 28 percent of electricity production.

Seems like an awful long time to be without wind but still depend on it.

More.

Germany's Economy Minister Robert Habeck of its Green Party says Germany will fire up the coal plants to produce electricity and conserve natural gas for winter heating as Russia reduces gas shipments

 Reality trumps ideology.

‘The situation is serious’: Germany plans to fire up coal plants as Russia throttles gas supplies

Angela Merkel doesn't blame herself for making Germany dependent on Russian energy, blames the Chancellery plumbers instead

 

America's idiotic green dream will end up in disaster just like Germany's

 Hans-Werner Sinn, here:

To cushion the twin phaseout of coal and nuclear, and to close supply gaps during the long transition to renewable energy, Germany decided to build a large number of additional gas-fired power plants. Even immediately before Russian forces invaded Ukraine, policymakers assumed that the gas for these facilities would always come from Russia, which supplied more than half of Germany’s needs. ...

Germany’s pledge to abandon coal and nuclear, the very energy sources that would have given it a degree of self-sufficiency and autonomy, has thus placed the country in great danger. Not so long ago, Germany was the world’s second-largest lignite producer, after China. And it easily could have procured the tiny amount of uranium needed to run its nuclear power plants, and stored it domestically for many years. ...

Despite the fact that turbines and photovoltaic panels now dot much of the landscape, in 2021 the share of wind and solar power in Germany’s total final energy consumption, which includes heating, industrial processing, and traffic, was a meager 6.7 per cent. And while wind and solar generated 29 per cent of the country’s electricity output, electricity itself accounted for only about a fifth of its final energy consumption. Germany would not have come close to achieving energy autonomy even if the renewables sector had expanded at twice the speed that it did. ...

If Germany suddenly halted Russian gas imports, gas-based residential heating systems, on which half the German population, approximately 40 million people, rely, and industrial processes that rely heavily on gas imports would break down before replacement energy became available. The government would be unlikely to survive the resulting economic chaos, public uproar, and outrage should gas become unavailable or heating costs rise dramatically. In fact, the likely scale of domestic disruption would call into question the cohesion of the Western response to the Ukraine war.

The UK and The Netherlands join Germany in crying uncle over Russian energy embargo to stop Ukraine war

CNBC here:

Germany, the Netherlands and the U.K. have appeared to back away from a coordinated Western embargo on Russian energy exports, however. ...

Western sanctions imposed on Russia over the invasion have so far been carefully constructed to avoid directly hitting the country’s energy exports, although there are already signs the measures are inadvertently prompting banks and traders to shun Russian crude. ...

“You can’t simply close down use of oil and gas overnight, even from Russia. That’s obviously not something that every country around the world can do,” Johnson said. ...

Like its beer, Germany is the cause of, and the solution to, all of Europe's problems

The Bundeskanzler, quoted here :

"That is why it is a conscious decision on our part to continue the activities of business enterprises in the area of energy supply with Russia," Scholz added.

LOL, Obama had to drop pallets of cash on Iran because of SWIFT: "U.S. and international sanctions isolated Iran from the international finance system"

 Obama 2016 swan song: 

$1.7-billion payment to Iran was all in cash due to effectiveness of sanctions, White House says

Germany will find a way to pay for heat, too. Keep a sharp eye out for flights from Frankfurt to Moscow, loaded with pallets of cash to get around SWIFT.