It’s that festive time of the year when interesting tales get told around a fireplace. So here goes (minus the fireplace).
Once upon a time there lived a country that was the envy of the world. It was among the world’s pre-eminent producers of manufactured goods. From chemicals and pharmaceuticals to precision engineering and the brewing of beer, it was second to none. Its people’s work skills, industriousness and discipline became the national hallmark of civilisational success. The country gained fame and fortune in bringing the luxuries of fine automobiles to the world’s rich and aspiring middle classes.
Alas, a blight visited that once great country not more than a score of years ago, though its destructive seed had been planted earlier. It was not some external force or act of God. Rather it was a sickness of the mind, a debilitating disease of the soul, that vexed that country’s ruling class. In restless search for virtue, the country’s rulers paid obeisance to the Goddess Gaia and promised the nation’s blood and treasure to satiate her inviolable sovereignty over her earthly domains.
This, then, is a tale of woe and misery. This Christmas shall not have been one of unalloyed merry times and good cheer. And while beer will have been drunk and dinners eaten in many a hearth and eating place, the lifeblood of that nation shall be constricted and its breathing blocked by a cursed phlegm as normal life resumes in the New Year.
Within the fateful score of years of becoming afflicted by the primordial cult of Gaia, the world’s envy has now become a sad basket case. Its economy has been tarnished as “the sick man of Europe”.
The beginning of the end of the German miracle
While the travails of Germany along with the economic stagnation of Europe as a whole have been apparent for some years now, the spate of dire headlines have gathered pace in recent weeks as the coalition government collapsed.
“Behind Germany’s Political Turmoil, a Stagnating Economy” — New York Times (December 17th)
“Germany Is Unraveling Just When Europe Needs It Most” – Bloomberg (December 15th)
“Europe’s Economic Apocalypse Is Now” – Politico (December 19th):
If Europe – and its economic powerhouse Germany – remains on its current trajectory, its future, Politico says, “will also be Italian: that of a decaying, if beautiful, debt-ridden, open-air museum for American and Chinese tourists”.
The economic rot induced by the adoption of Energiewende policies for the “energy transition” in 2010 resulted ultimately in the recession of the German economy in the last two years. Among the manifestations of this rot are the growth of corporate bankruptcies in double digits, soaring layoffs as the Federal Employment Agency said that the unemployment figure could exceed the three million mark for the first time in 10 years at the beginning of 2025, and the crown jewel of German industry, its automative sector, announcing massive job cuts.
According to a recent poll, 40% of industrial companies are currently considering reducing their production in Germany or relocating it abroad due to the energy situation; among industrial companies with more than 500 employees, more than half are now considering this. High labour costs, caused by the myriad regulations of a hyperactive administrative state, and among the world’s highest energy prices brought about by its Energiewende folly, have led to the nation’s de-industrialisation.
Germany’s governing coalition collapsed after Chancellor Olaf Scholz fired Finance Minister Christian Lindner, plunging Europe’s largest economy into political chaos. This occurred barely hours after Donald Trump’s U.S. election victory triggered existential questions about the future of the Continent’s economy and its energy security. Mr. Trump – a climate sceptic who has promised to bring the U.S. out of the UN’s Paris Agreement and its financial commitments for large scale transfers of funds to developing countries – will pull the rug out from under the EU’s famed if quixotic climate leadership.
Europe’s economic implosion is self-induced. Its ruling elites over-tax and over-regulate the private sector and obsess with promoting unreliable renewable energy to replace fossil and nuclear fuels in its crusade to ‘save the planet’ from an alleged impending climate apocalypse. Its attempt to blame Russia’s President Putin for high energy prices is hollow and self-serving.
Perhaps most revealing of Europe’s regulatory hubris is the Qatari Energy Minister’s recent statement that “I am not bluffing”. He warned that Qatar, one of the world’s largest natural gas suppliers, would cease gas exports to the EU if the bloc’s countries imposed penalties under recently adopted legislation on “sustainability due diligence”. For Europe to tell the world that it would punish foreign countries that did not buy into their “sustainability” beliefs might seem to most non-European observers as the height of arrogance. But such is the delusionary might of the Gaia cult.
The EU’s “Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive”, which entered into force in July, allows for fines of up to 5% of a company’s annual global revenue “if the management fails to address adverse human rights or environmental impacts”. Bumptious Brussels bureaucrats seem to believe that their ideas of “sustainability” command universal acceptance. This, in a world where China, India, Indonesia, Vietnam and other populous developing countries, accounting for most of the world’s population, are busy expanding their capacity to mine coal and other fossil fuels so as to afford their citizens access to affordable and reliable energy.
Back to barbarism
“Little else is requisite to carry a state to the highest degree of opulence from the lowest barbarism but peace, easy taxes, and a tolerable administration of justice: all the rest being brought about by the natural course of things.”
So said Adam Smith, the great sage of political economy, over 250 years ago. Germany has shown that the converse may also be true. To go from opulence to poverty and potential barbarism is but a short road, assured by the burden of high taxes in service of an alleged climate crisis, and an intolerable administration of “climate justice” that demands suffocating regulations on the private sector.
Dr. Tilak K. Doshi is an economist, a former contributor to Forbes and a member of the C02 Coalition. Follow him on Substack and X.
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“The rights of trans people”
There is no such thing as a trans person
There are absolutely people who claim to be persons despite they aren’t. For instance, men who believe that wearing a dress combined with high heels and a neckbeard would be some sort of special identity (which can conveniently be changed to anything else at a moments notice). In reality, this is just maximized idiocy of the consumer society where people self-identify as functional appendixes of their attire.
Indeed
I’m happy about the term “transvestite” but I don’t recognise the concept of “trans gender”.
I can’t imagine that the above illustrations were pixelated when being viewed by children, so why are they pixelated for this article? Seems a bit precious to me.
It’s important that parents push back against this woke nonsense, the days when we could trust our schools to do the right thing are sadly in the past. But pushback does work.
The legalisation of PAEDOPHILIA is the aim.. nothing less. Destroy it or lose our children to the outright perverts running this evil..
I wonder when simulation training will be introduced before moving on to “Escape your virginity” classes.
Oh I’ve no doubt they’ve already got that planned and ready to go..
Dental dam? I had to look that up. I’m 66 and I think that the best way of avoiding nasty diseases is to pick your partners more carefully and spend a decent time getting to know if their standards are the same as yours.
When did this sort of discussion come within the purview of the Education Authority?and isn’t it time parents took it back?
Seems to me if enough of them said no, it would be stopped in it’s tracks…
The outcry should targert Relationship and Sex Education as something that’s part of a curriculum. Practially all humans have relationships involving sex but this is considered something that’s private and not public. Hence, the state has absolutely no business messing with it.
This is State-sanctioned grooming.
Like how the pictures on here for adults are blurred out! But they’re perfectly happy to show them to kids?! Ffs, peido’s!
Ooh, the downticker agrees with peido’s?
Conspicuously absent from all of this seems to be any mention of the actual biological purpose of sex or anatomy.
Beyond all the post-Marxist societal deconstruction, groomy vibes and so on, there’s something parasitical about it I find it hard to put into words.
This ideological movement seems irresistibly drawn to children. The only explanation I can think of as to why (other than opportunity for indoctrination) is that it is being driven by a group of narcissistic adults who have failed to overcome important stages of development themselves, and so see children as no more than an extension of their own needs.
Amongst these is a desire for self-infantilisation: to be coddled, indulge in permanent ‘play’, oversimplify the external world into black-and-white triviality, fall back on emotional impulsivity to control relationships with others, to swing between unregulated states of mindless conformity and performative rebellion against imagined authority, and probably most importantly, to normalise the childlike concept of moral equivalence that lies at the core of intersectionality (“this thing is unfair so I deserve special treatment on the basis of who I am or who I claim to represent”). All of this is a way of living in fantasy, and divorcing from a challenging and sometimes ugly, unfair reality.
For them, forcing adult ideas of sexuality and identitarian ideology onto children – making them complicit ideological objects in their adult ‘play’ – seems to be a psychological way of closing the gap between adult and child, making the fantasy world they need to inhabit a bit more real.
Motivations really don’t matter. Random adult strangers who happen to work for the state shouldn’t be holding lengthy talks about sexual technicalities to prepubescent children and the state has no business trying to regulate (in detail!) aspects of the intimate lifes of its future citizens. That incorrigible busybodies are among the least dubious characters this ‘profession’ attracts is a side aspect.
Incorrigible busybodies are the ones enthusiastically holding the door open for the most dubious characters, and given that this seems part of an ideological march, I’d argue that it’s extremely important to understand their motivations (whether my speculative assessment is correct or way off the mark).
The part of the state apparently trying to interfere in the intimate lives of its future citizens is acting way outside of its remit. Unless any government minister has approved of smuggling cultural Marxism into the curriculum behind closed doors, the State is running a parallel programme rooted in far-left ideology, and doing its best to normalise it. This ideology has a religious appeal to the sections of the state pushing it that overrides any sense of ethics or official responsibility, and hides itself under a cloak of compassion and tolerance to protect itself from scrutiny.
By the time this government is replaced, it will have bedded in and become another step towards implementation of a social order very few people have voted for or want. A future left wing government will likely consider its victory a sign of popular approval of this ideology and accelerate its implementation, if only to appease a fringe which has already shown a capacity for calculated agitation.
For anyone with concerns about its potential to vastly increase opportunities for child abuse, this ideology should be the enemy, and to fight it effectively, they need to know it and understand its appeal.
Also missing from the descriptions of sex is love!
Absolutely.
I’ve just found out what a dental dam is!
And they are teaching this to children??
Debauchery and depravity, they should be locked up!
We are fast approaching “The fall of Rome” levels of depravity.
I would have expected the commentators here to be familiar with A Huxley’s Brave New World. This is exactly what happens in it and Huxley explains why. The only pornography in Brave New World is natural birth, monogamy – and love, of course.
Which government ministers & MPs advocated & supported the launch of this school porn to our chicken ?? Who approved this in the government ? Who is responsible??