Germany’s Merz Is A Moron, But at Least He’s Got Some Guts

He has some “guts” or he has watched a key focus group as part of the recent electoral campaign. I am betting the latter. Former Blackrock executives use their gut to judge the zeitgeist’s implications for financial returns. And electoral returns, of course.

Ordinary people have, in their prejudiced, intuitive way, become both leading indicators and lagging responders. Elites are responding, but without any real clear understanding of the world changing beneath their feet. The elites think they can keep it all going as it has been. And, that they themselves have no responsibility for understanding design and consequences.

What bruce brings up is highly relevant. I too had heard of Merz’s pimping for Blackrock, went and looked at his Wikipedia page, linked here– https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedrich_Merz

In “Private Sector Career (2009-18) you can see all the Globalist scum he works for. Does he care a great deal about Germany? Count me as dubious, Ernst & Young etc. are also big clients. He will do as he is told, if Germany is going to continue to be de-industrialized (I’m assuming Baerbock and those “Green” clowns are out? But that may change nothing) he will throw a friendly salute and click his heels and obey.

He sounds like Trump without the charisma or (occasional) smarts. I am changing my German last name in the next couple of months. That is a sick society that I want no association with. (Also if I move to Mexico my current last name is unpronounceable, on a level that many Czech names, say, would be here).

Germany was never de-Nazified and probably never will be. (Certainly not during my lifetime.) I think Freud’s theories about the “Anal retentive” psychological type occurred to him as a resident of the German speaking Welt. The only good thing I can say about Germany is that it doesn’t have Nuclear Weapons (which Baerbock and that fake “Green” crew were demanding.)

Will any European states wise up and leave their voluntary slavery? I think the Irish, Spanish, possibly the Italians have publics who may push for that. Also, since “everyone loves a winner”, I expect the tacitly-allied neighbor states with Russia list will grow from the current one, which includes Belarus, Hungary, Slovakia, Slovenia etc.

Could the EU drop from the current 27 states to 22 or fewer? It’s not impossible. But it will still be hugely authoritarian, bureaucratic and failed. It will be a small and toxic Garden, while the former “Jungle” in Asia, Africa, China, Russia, hopefully Latin America (apart from Argentina) will be on a material and cultural climb to a brighter future.

Except that nuclear power is almost the most expensive power there is. See for example https://ourworldindata.org/cheap-renewables-growth.

The price fall of renewables is a matter of economies of scale and learning curves, says Our world in data.

As a point of clarification Canada becoming a member of the EU will solve Europe’s resource problems overnight if we completely ignore the effect that global heating is going to have on the world in the near future.

Europe is chirping aggressively about supporting Ukraine, even talking of sending troops to Ukraine, because their only play, their only potential leverage to get a seat at the table of the negotiations to end the war and get some of the spoils, is to threaten that there will not be peace without them agreeing to it.

This has come about because Trump is trying to cut in front of the line and negotiate the spoils of Ukraine with Putin and also get War Pimp Zelensky to sign over Ukrainian mineral rights. The money that the US gave Ukraine was basically a grant though, not a loan, while the money that Europe gave them was a loan. Trump is trying to make the grant into a loan retroactively and then place US claims in front of Europe’s loan on the basis that the money that the US gave Ukraine was much more than what Europe gave.

The dark assumption to Trump’s strategy though is that Europe can’t do anything about Trump’s bullying because US has got more military might than Europe. Europe is not going to go to war with the US, of course, so they are using the Ukrainian war now as a proxy instrument against the US and threaten to continue it in order to null and void Trump’s and Putin’s peace negotiations.

By the way, UK gave Ukraine $5B more today, a big wad of cash for them, and Canada is giving Ukraine $5B cash from confiscated Russian money in their country and also some more weapons. So, essentially Canada is also tossing in against the US on this, probably seeing that it’s best to use this friction to ally themselves with Europe.

Z

Agreed with Wiklund. Neither Germany nor anyone else needs to “invest in new forms of nuclear power which are safer and cheaper to provide electrical backbone (and to catch up in tech.)” Nuclear power as a technology is so last century. Not that it was any good last century; using a bomb in slow motion to power a steam engine using materials that will get brittle and weird as they’re irradiated was never a smart idea. And there are NO “safer and cheaper” new forms of nuclear power on the horizon. Small modular reactors suck. There should be no need for a detailed takedown of them because nobody has ever advanced any decent evidence of them being remotely good for anything. In general, it seems clear that with nuclear, “safer” and “cheaper” is a “pick at most one” kind of choice. You can have safe nuclear reactors (not counting waste). You can have . . . less ridiculously expensive nuclear reactors. You can have nuclear reactors that are both unsafe and ridiculously expensive. But you can’t have nuclear reactors that are both safe and cheap(er).

Nuclear power is fundamentally difficult to make better, because the smaller a reactor is the less efficient it is, but if you go with larger ones that make better sense in terms of the physics of them, that means they’re megaprojects which tend to have major cost and time overruns. The only way to minimize galloping costs on these megaprojects is to standardize design, but that means not improving them. And there isn’t much market for nuclear power because it’s so damn expensive, so not that many plants are going to be built at a time, so to save much money a standardized design would have to stay the same for decades.

In Germany nuclear power is a particularly stupid idea going forward, because with climate change they are likely to see more and more droughts of the sort that left some of their biggest rivers dry a couple summers ago. Nuclear power plants need rivers to cool them; when the rivers run dry, they have to shut down.

The whole “baseline power” thing seems to be getting increasingly passe, as storage gets cheaper and grids get more flexible. Still, if they want to research something baseline-y, how about geothermal?

Solar improves much, much faster than nuclear possibly could because a solar panel is a small thing manufactured in mass quantities.

To write anything about Merz and not mention Blackrock seems deliberately remiss.

joey_n, you are correct. In East Germany, they had reasons to out and punish their Nazis. As somebody noted in a previous post, they did so and executed many (Nuremberg trial type process.) They let a few scientists and skilled actors become state assets.

Trump is talking about removing ALL US troop from Nato Countries added after 1997, which would be from most of E. Europe. The big question is if the US MIC will cooperate, or stiff him like last time, when they openly disobeyed his directive to leave Syria to the cheers of the Dems and the MSM. He seems to be much more forceful in removing the 5th column within the MIC at this point, however.

As to Berletic’s claims, referenced above by Curt K, he could be correct, he’s usually quite insightful, but in this case I’m dubious. When I sign on to the internet, my “pocket” has stories “I might be interested in” (& also bs advertisements.) This morning they had a BBC story, collectively crying and wetting their pants because the US voted WITH Russia on a UN resolution viz Ukraine!!

The Atlantacist Class in EUrope has always been more Dem.-aligned, at least since 2000. Note how the Bush Torture and Endless Wars regime alienated many “allies” apart from say the Poodle Tony Blair (or B.liar) during Bush Jr’s eight years. The EU Leadership are smug Elitists cut from the same cloth as the Dem party (I laugh whenever Buttigieg’s name as the new savior is mentioned), Trump and his MAGA base clearly don’t like nor align with these types. I predict the Albatross that is Old Colonialist Europe will be left on its own by Trump to tread water, or to die off slowly. (And will more likely follow the latter path.)

Z’s update is valuable and points the same direction as the preceding. Even with Trudeau out Canada will be led by the same smug, smiley-faced fascist wannabes. Naked Capitalism among others covers this disgusting story from Canada of the jailing of Yves Engler for responding to an uber-Zionist woman’s posts in his Twitter feed (X is bullshit), jailing and persecuting him for “hate speech” presumably by criticizing the Israeli genocide. https://mondoweiss.net/2025/02/silencing-dissent-the-arrest-of-yves-engler-and-the-criminalization-of-political-speech-in-canada/ I presume nobody on this site apart from Purple Library Guy, who loudly supported Trudeau robbing the Trucker protester’s bank accounts without due process (which was overturned in the courts) & Tallifer in the rare appearance here would support such openly fascistic censorship? Mondoweiss covereed this thoroughly if it seems too insane to be true: https://mondoweiss.net/2025/02/silencing-dissent-the-arrest-of-yves-engler-and-the-criminalization-of-political-speech-in-canada/

I hope Ian is following & will give his take on the Engler arrest and prosecution in a future post.

The Atlanticist Ghouls and the EU Ghouls are kin, psychologically: they are the face of Friendly Fascism, polite and “diverse” viz sexuality and race (which I support, but not when it is paired with Zionist mass extermination and US Imperial overreach.) Canada is thoroughly in that Camp, which is why the MAGAt leader Trump has targeted them.

Oil & water don’t mix. Trump says the ugly parts out loud, he doesn’t bother with the “Rules Based Order” bullshit, like the Biden admin saying that since they dropped some food aid from the skies while letting Bibi keep the aid trucks out and starving and denying food and medicine to the Canaanites, they “supported” the Palestinian population!! (Cretinous Joe literally said that he was a great “friend” to the Palestinians and “protected” them from excessive force after Oct. 2023. I can’t be bothered to look something so absurd up, but it’s out there.)

As others have said nothing changed but superficial appearances.
The Germen government will go from an establishment center-left to center-right coalition to an establishment center-right to center-left coalition.
Even when anti-establishment parties enter coalition governments they rarely enact any meaningful or structural changes. See Portugal, Spain, Italy, Greece, Sweden.
Short from winning the AfD has the best outcome they could hope for. With BSW –their closets competitor– failing to enter parliament they now have a monopoly on that section of politics.
How much longer will the Germen voters stomach going from establishment coalition to establishment coalition until they pull the lever for AfD?

@Ian “It [Europe] has to have its own arms industry.” Several European countries still have a very decent arms industry. There is almost nothing an army might require that cannot be produced here (hypersonic missiles maybe).

Something like 60% of EU weapons come from the US. So any increase in mil spending will be “leaky”, as the economists like to say. And to do it in Germany, you need Russian energy. And getting rid of that, wasn’t that Merz’s whole point?

And you want to detach from the US? Going to evict all those US mil bases? I guess you could try. If you succeeded, there would be another large loss of spending into the adjacent communities.

I’m not seeing this project as remotely possible.