Because It's Friday

German steam.

Or maybe not. I don't know German.

It's Getting Bizarre in Russia, plus Appeasement Is on the Menu

Draping noodles over one's ears can lead to a charge of "discrediting the army".

Meanwhile, the leader of the Western European Appeasement Caucus is visiting Washington for some quiet meetings.

German Chancellor Olaf Scholz is visiting the White House on Friday for a private meeting with President Joe Biden as both allies become increasingly vocal about their concerns that China may step off the sidelines and supply weapons to Russia for its invasion of Ukraine.

The Germans have been not terribly quiet about fretting about the course of the war and not wanting to see the Russians beat around too badly. They seem to be continuing to nourish some fantasy that Vladimir Putin is someone that they can do business with. The nations bordering Russia know better, but whether it is prejudice against the smaller nations of Eastern Europe or inherent German superiority, the German politicians continue to not pay attention to them.

The thing that Scholz seems to be turning a blind eye to is that, in war, absent one side completely crushing the other, both parties get a say in how the war will end. Even the Japanese, facing what they might have feared would be continued atomic obliteration of their country, had a condition.

So, what does Russia want?

Russia wants to restore its empire. For whatever reason, Putin's first step was to try to conquer Ukraine. From there. he would just have his army go a little further and take Moldova. The rest of his ambitions are outside of the scope of this post.

So, what does Putin want, now? He wants the war to cease on the most favorable terms possible, which means a recognition that he keeps all territory under the boots of his soldiers. He wants, as part of that deal, to neutralize, if not neuter, the Ukrainian army. With a cease-fire or some other sort of agreement, he'll push for the lifting of sanctions. Then, with money from Western customers (and sociopathic entities like American and European corporations) and with Chinese materiel, he'll rebuild his army. And then, when he judges that his army is ready, Putin will rip up any agreements/treaties he has made and he will try again.

Before then, he will do everything he can to strengthen his ties with the American Taliban to weaken a future American response by electing more pro-Russian politicians like MTG. He'll keep working to fund pro-Russian politicians and parties in Europe.

Putin's goals are clear to anyone who has not turned a blind eye to it, either out of ideological blindness (the far Right) or out of a craven desire to appease a dictator out of the hope that, maybe, this time, appeasement will work.

What is the open question is whether or not various politicians in Western Europe and the US have learned from history. Those to the east of the Oder-Neisse Line have learned that the word of Russia, like the word of past dictators with territorial ambitions, is not worth half a farthing.

Dragging Along the Germans

The German government will not object if Poland decides to send Leopard 2 battle tanks to Ukraine, Germany’s top diplomat said Sunday, indicating movement on supplying weapons that Kyiv has described as essential to its ability to fend off an intensified Russian offensive.
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Germany’s tentativeness has drawn criticism, particularly from Poland and the Baltic states, countries on NATO’s eastern flank that feel especially threatened by Russia’s renewed aggression.

Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki said that if the fellow NATO and European Unio member did not consent to transferring Leopard tanks to Ukraine, his country was prepared to build a “smaller coalition” of countries that would send theirs anyway.

The Poles dragged the Germans to yes by telling them that, whether or not the Germans liked it, Poland would give their tanks to Ukraine. The Germans may be content to being near the trailing edge, but they didn't want to be seen as being wholly recalcitrant (or being, effectively, Russian tools).

The Russians are displaying an astonishing level of hypocrisy:

Earlier Sunday, the speaker of the lower house of Russia’s parliament, State Duma Chairman Vyacheslav Volodin, said governments that give more powerful weapons to Ukraine risked causing a “global tragedy that would destroy their countries.”

“Supplies of offensive weapons to the Kyiv regime would lead to a global catastrophe,” Volodin said. “If Washington and NATO supply weapons that would be used for striking peaceful cities and making attempts to seize our territory as they threaten to do, it would trigger a retaliation with more powerful weapons.”

The Russians have been pounding peaceful Ukrainian cities since the beginning of the war. They have been indiscriminately bombing hotels, schools, apartment buildings and hospitals. I guess that they are worried that the Golden Rule of Warfare may apply: Do Unto Others as They Did Unto You. Beyond that, nobody has seriously proposed invading and occupying Russian territory. That would be an exceedingly stupid move.

Meanwhile, there seems to have been a pause in Russia's campaign of aerial terrorism. Maybe they have come to realize that video and photos going around the world of Ukrainian resuce workers trying to save people from the wreckage of an apartment building leveled by a Russian missile isn't advancing Russian interests.

Putin Takes Comfort Wherever He Can

Germany has become one of Ukraine’s leading weapons suppliers in the 11 months since Russia’s invasion, but Chancellor Olaf Scholz also has gained a reputation for hesitating to take each new step — generating impatience among allies.

Maybe the Germans will get there. Maybe they'll eventually agree to provide tanks to the Ukrainians. But every bit of foot-dragging along the way gives a little comfort to the Russians, that they can split the Western alliance apart and then prevail in their war of conquest. And it it clear that, every step of the way so far, that Germany has been lagging the problem of countering Russian aggression.

The Russians are trying to rebuild and reorganize their army to regain the offensive. It's up to the West, including Germany, to ensure that the Ukrainians have the support they need in order to break any Russian offensive into pieces.

War, Past and Future

Past:

The last surviving World War Two Dambuster has died at the age of 101.

Sq Ldr George "Johnny" Johnson died peacefully in his sleep in Bristol on Wednesday, his family confirmed.

Mr Johnson was a bomb-aimer in the 617 Squadron during the 1943 operation which destroyed key dams in Germany's industrial heartland during the conflict.

As explained in his obit, his bomber hit the Sorpe Dam. The special bombsight was useless for that dam, which was an earthen dam, rather than a concrete one. It took nine passes, under fire, before then Sgt. Johnson was satisfied and dropped the bomb.

With his passing, the Dambusters now belong to history.

(H/T)

Future:

Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania will all aim to boost defence spending to about 3% of gross domestic product (GDP) because Russia’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine is raising fears that Moscow could turn its eye on the former Soviet republics.

“All three of us are in agreement that we have to move our defence investments further in the direction of 3% of GDP,” said Latvian Prime Minister Krišjānis Kariņš after the meeting. “Each country will do that individually.”

Three percent of GDP is a significant expenditure, but the Baltics have experience within living memory of being invaded and occupied by the Russians.

The Germans, on the other hand, can't even make it to two percent.

Has Russia Shot Its Bolt in Ukraine?

I'm not saying that Russia is out of weapons or cannon fodder. Far from it.

But they seem to be running out of ideas. In attacking Ukraine's electrical grid, the Russians have escalated as far as they may be able to. And, so far, it is not working. The Ukrainian people are not bowing down to the Russians. If anything, Ukrainians hate the Russians even more each passing day.

What the Russians will likely do is just keep inflicting suffering on the Ukrainian people and wait for their useful idiots/allies, like H.D. Vance and MTG, as well as Germany and France, to make it harder to keep aid flowing to Ukraine.

Probably Not a Good Idea to Count on Them

Germany on Wednesday announced it's offering 5,000 helmets to Ukraine amid fears a Russian invasion is around the corner, in a move that was denounced by Kyiv's mayor as a "joke."

"I received a letter from the Ukrainian embassy, requesting support with military equipment, helmets to be precise," Defence Minister Christine Lambrecht told reporters, per Reuters. "We will supply Ukraine with 5,000 helmets as a clear signal: We are at your side."

They still have these in stock?

The Germans are also offering a field hospital, but it's safe to say that the Ukranians are utterly underwhemed by the level of German support they are receiving in the face of a potential Russian invasion.

Heil Hail the Wehrmacht, I Mean the Bundeswehr....

Germany has recalled a platoon from a Nato mission in Lithuania after reports emerged of troops engaging in racist and anti-Semitic behaviour, as well as sexual assault.

Acting like assholes is really a slick move in a country that still remembers being invaded by the assholes' grandathers.

Convicted Murderer Named Paul Termann Wins the Right to "Be Forgotten"

A man convicted of murder 37 years ago has the right to be forgotten and have his name removed from online search results, Germany's highest court ruled on Wednesday.

The constitutional court in Karlsruhe found in favour of Paul Termann, who was given a life sentence for killing two people on a yacht in 1982.

A rift with another couple aboard the 'Apollonia' ship, ended with Termann, then 43, shooting dead Herbert Klein and Gabriele Humpert.

Seems that Termann is finding it hard to have "social relationships" because nobody wants to date an 80-year old murderer.

I'm kind of skeptical of a court in a certain country finding in favor of the "right to be forgotten" for killing people. For one might argue that said nation may have a vested interest in the same rules applying to them as a nation.

80 years

Kristallnacht was 80 years ago.

Germany had been an the trajectory to the Shoah since the German far-right began blaming Jews for the outcome of the Kaiser’s War (WW1). If there was any doubt as to what was going to happen, it should have ended on November 9, 1938.

Junkers F.13 Revival--- But Why, Exactly

Rimowa, better known for making metal suitcases, has recertified the Junkers F.13 for production. This article is in French and this should take you to an English translation. Junker's press release is here.

In late `15, they were projecting a price of $2.2 million per.

Seems like a lot of money for an airplane that might outrun a Cessna 150 on a good day. Spending the kind of money it took to re-engineer and make a F.13 seems like a very British thing to do.

NATO Military Spending

First: Trump's handlers approve:

Trump’s remarks on Nato were met more favourably in Moscow, where Dmitry Peskov, spokesman for the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, agreed with the US president-elect that the alliance was “obsolete”.

The current knock on NATO by Trump, his excuse for planning to gut it, is that other NATO nations have a "free ride" and don't spend what they should on their militaries.

I suspect that lower spending by other nations is not a new problem. But part of the problem in coming up with a comparison is that older data seems to have used GNP as a baseline, while modern data uses GDP.

Having said that, in 1968, the US and the UK spent 5-10% of their GNP on defense, as did Poland and the Soviet Union. Most of the other nations of both NATO and the Warsaw Pact spent 2-5%. (The U.S. spent 9.3% of its GNP on the military, but that was the peak year of the Vietnam War.

In 1995, Greece, France, Holland, Norway, Turkey, Portugal, the U.K and the U.S. spent at or over 2% of GDP on their militaries. By 2004, the list of two-percenters in NATO was Bulgaria, France, Greece, Italy, Norway, Romania, Turkey, the U.K. and the U.S.

Trump thinks that the EU is a German tool. Well, no shit. Germany is the strongest economy in the Bloc. And to some extent, that's not a bug, it's a feature. The Germans got to use the rest of Europe as a duty-free market to dump sell their excess production and, in exchange, they tacitly promised to keep the boys in the Wehrmacht Bundeswehr at home.

NATO, similarly, had two objectives. The first was to prevent the USSR for marching to the French Atlantic coast. The second, by committing all of Western Europe to that purpose, was to remove any excuse for German rearmament on a massive scale. A corollary to that was to make peacetime prosperity so attractive to the Germans that there would be little, if any, chance that the militarists would be able to take hold in the German psyche again.

The American nuclear umbrella was critical to that working. Because an attack on a NATO nation was considered to be an attack on the American homeland, an adversary could not be certain that the Americans would not respond to an invasion of NATO with nuclear force. Additionally, the stationing in Europe of a third of a million American troops, together with all of the necessary accoutrements of battle, was a clear statement of American interest in keeping the peace in Europe.

(Everybody, except for a certain French pissant leader in the 1960s, understood that bargain.)

And it worked, for quite a long time. It fell apart when the overt reason for NATO, preventing an invasion, went away when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991.

Things might have worked out. Except the geniuses in NATO (including Bill Clinton and George W. Bush) got the idea of admitting countries that, were not only formerly in the Warsaw Pact, but were in the former Soviet Union, as NATO members.

Why this is a problem will be the subject of another post.

Bayer Should Be Used to This

Bayer's chief executive acknowledged on Friday that he will face an uphill battle to improve Monsanto's reputation once Bayer completes the takeover of the U.S. seeds and agrochemicals company.

"Monsanto’s image does of course represent a major challenge for us, and it’s not an aspect I wish to play down," Werner Baumann told shareholders at Bayer's annual general meeting.

For a company that was once part of the IG Farben empire to show any signs of squeamishness about another company's reputation is almost funny. IG Farben produced Zykon B and developed Sarin.

Monsanto may be the largest producer of carcinogens in the U.S. You'd think it'd be a natural fit with a former Farben company.

The Germans Could Invade, Now.

The British soldiers would be too busy reading all of the warning labels, such as "CAUTION, Bayonet May Have Sharp Edges and Be Pointy."

Tinned herring has been recalled from Lidl branches because its label does not warn consumers the cans contain ingredients including fish.

Canned fish is being recalled because the cans lacked a warning label that the cans contain fish. Oh, the humanity!

Is it heartless to suggest that any person who has a seafood allergy and who consumes canned fish because there isn't a warning label on the can which explains that a can of canned fish contains fish probably needs to be skimmed out of the gene pool?

(Not the first time that I've made this helpful suggestion to the Wehrmacht Bundeswehr.)

Dumb German Neo-Nazis are Still Dumb

A surging German nationalist party has sharpened its rhetoric against prominent Islamic groups and is suggesting limiting the religious freedom of more than 4 million Muslims in the country.

Senior members of Alternative for Germany cut short a meeting Monday with the Central Council of Muslims, accusing the group of failing to renounce religious beliefs that clash with the German constitution.

Party co-leader Frauke Petry told reporters that "Islam, the way it is mostly practiced, doesn't belong in a democratic Germany."

I find it almost laughable that the German Neo-Nazis are blathering about the rule of law. If they got power, it would be "one man, one last vote."

Beyond that, who is going to do the shit jobs in Germany if not for the Muslim immigrants? Germany has the lowest birthrate in the world, very far below the rate needed for a stable population (2.1 children per couple in the West). Without immigration, Germany will wither.

The problem for the Euros (and Japan) is that they do not have a culture which welcomes immigrants. Keeping immigrants isolated in segregated housing areas is a recipe for long-term disaster.

The Great Escape Murders

If you're a regular reader of this blog, it's probably a safe bet that, at one time or another, you've seen The Great Escape In the movie, the Germans murdered fifty captured escapees by machine-gunning them in a field.

The reality was different. The fifty were murdered by the Gestapo, either individually or in groups of two or three.

The RAF was not amused. After the war, they launched an investigation and manhunt for the killers. They caught quite a number of them. Seven were executed for other crimes. Fourteen of the killers were hung in early 1948. A few escaped the hangman when the British stopped hanging war criminals in 1948 and then, later that year, abandoned most prosecutions for such crimes.

Another Country That the Germans Can Have Back

Denmark.

The Danish TV channel TV Syd reports that a 17-year-old girl from Sønderborg on Wednesday night was assaulted and attempted raped by an immigrant.

The girl now risk being fined because she protected herself against the assailant with pepper spray when he tried to pull her pants off to rape her.

Use of pepper spray is illegal in Denmark, and the girl now risks being charged with violation of the Firearms Act.

When a state outlaws self-defense, the physically stronger will prevail in almost any confrontation. One of the oft-unspoken implements of the liberation of women was the firearm.

Be not afraid of any man;
No matter what his size;
When danger threatens, call on me—
And I will equalize.

A 5'3" woman likely will not prevail against a man a foot taller and 150 lbs heavier. She may be lucky or she may be well-trained and her assailant may not be so. A society that seeks to disarm its citizens/subjects in order to, in effect, make them easy prey for criminals is a pretty pathetic excuse for a civilized society.

In any event, Danes should not expect much from their police, as they are too busy robbing refugees.

75 Years Ago

On September 15, 1940, the Germans essentially lost the Battle of Britain when they tried to force the RAF into a one-day deathmatch. The Germans had switched from attacking RAF facilities and aircraft factories to daylight bombing of cities the week before. The Luftwaffe mounted it largest daylight attack on London. The RAF defeated it.

What the Germans didn't know was that they had the RAF on the ropes. The Luftwaffe was shooting down airplanes and killing pilots faster than the RAF could replace them. The Germans had their own issues with attrition and it's debatable whether or not they would have been able to outlast the RAF.

The shift of German strategy from attacking the RAF to trying to terrorize the British into submission meant that the RAF could rebuild its strength. Aircraft production began to exceed losses.

September 15th has been marked as Battle of Britain Day.

A huge-ass "flypast" was put on in England to mark the day.

(And, very soon after September 15th, The Blitz was on.)

A Respectful Note to the Dutch.

The next time that a very large group of armed Germans[1] comes to sojourn in your country, they can have the place.

This is why:

Yep, there's no antisemitism like good old European antisemitism.

If you drug-addled canal-slime can't tell the difference between Israel as a nation and the Jewish people as a religion, then fuck you, the bicycles you rode in on and everybody who looks like you. You're no better than the mouth-breathers who tar a billion Muslims with the actions of the Taliban and ISIL.[2]

I'd vow not to drink Heineken, but since I regard it as overrated Dutch horsepiss, that's no big sacrifice.
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[1] Or Russians.
[2] Or all Christians, for the crimes of the pederast priests. Oh, wait, nobody does that.

IMF to EU: "Include Us Out!"

The International Monetary Fund has told the Eurozone, in no uncertain terms, that the German ECB's plan to bail out Greece is unrealistic and doomed to fail. The IMF said that the debtors will have to take a massive haircut if there is to ever be a chance of the Greek economy gaining its footing.

The Greek parliment voted to surrender to the Germans. Which sounds like an inflammatory way to describe it, but that's exactly what it was. And yet, it would seem that the German finance minister is apparently disappointed that the entire country wasn't plowed under and the ground sown with salt.

Anglea Merkel may go down as the third-worst German leader since the Prussians welded the country together 144 years ago.[1] She has torn off the fig leaf that Germany was one of many nations in the EU to reveal that Germany has primacy in the EU. If there ever was a chance in Hell that Britain would join the monetary union, it evaporated on Sunday. It is more likely that the Brits will leave the EU entirely. You may see more and more EU countries having second thoughts about having their borders as open as those between most American states.[2] The Schengen Agreement will collapse, especially when nations begin withdrawing from the Eurozone. All the blame will be laid at Merkel's feet.

Meanwhile, one of the intellectual creators of the EU now seems to regard the EU as a German hegemon.

And everyone else will soon realize that Churchill was right.[3]
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[1] Kaiser Wilhelm II holds the #2 spot.
[2] California is an exception.
[3] "The Hun is either at your throat or at your feet."