She’s continuing the policy of her Green predecessor. Who was continuing a policy drawn up around the turn of the millennium by Fraunhofer: Balance renewables with gas peaker plants which then at one point can be weaned off fossil gas and switched over to synthetic gas. There’s other forms of grid storage, but Germany can store three months worth of total (!) energy consumption in its pipeline network so it’s ideal for long term, seasonal, storage.

Also see the deals Germany made with Namibia and Canada to supply green hydrogen (in the form of ammonia because easier to transport). Much of the German pipeline network is built to a standard that allows it to transport pure hydrogen (it started out as a hydrogen network) and re-declaring some pipes and building new ones is an ongoing process, there’s going to be a full separate network before long.

Why not batteries? First off, those were nowhere near ready when Fraunhofer drew up the plan, secondly, they still don’t have the same tradeoffs as synthesising fuel: They generally have higher round-trip efficiency, but also lose energy over time. Synthetic fuel is less efficient, but doesn’t lose appreciable amounts of energy over time and it’s much easier to store large amounts of it so that’s what you want for long-term storage.

Not to mention that we’ll need synthetic fuel for some applications anyway, e.g. catastrophe relief: You don’t want to rely on electric field kitchens when the grid is down. The current ones run on diesel, just as all the vehicles, and you don’t want to be in a situation where you can’t use that 70yold semi-mothballed Unimog. The reserves are deep and push come to shove, you want to field them.

The often mentioned “silent majority” are actually latent fascists who were previously apathetic.

You saw the silent majority on the streets when that “remigration” talk leaked out of closed AfD circles: The streets were literally not big enough to contain them. 70% oppose any other party going in coalition with them (unsurprisingly, the rest are AfD, BSW, or FDP voters), about half want to see them banned, which is a question more nuanced than “I want them gone”.

I guess that after a ban, the BSW could gobble up most of that support for them. And while Wagenknecht is a clown and at least veering towards Nazbol she’s far less of a danger to democracy.

The states generally have shit covered on their own and aren’t relying on the BPOL, the BKA certainly won’t get involved, they could divert some personnel from the railway system or Bepo. I very much doubt that, though, why do things when you can say that you’re doing things.

…in fact, if I were a BPOL higher-up I’d interpret “tighten border controls” to mean “stop that pointless driving around in the countryside and station those people at international airports, instead”. You know, places where there’s actual border checkpoints that can be tightened. Let state police deal with stray foreigners dumped roadside.

It’s a shot before the bow. His behaviour in the past had been quite autocratic, trying to pressure parliament etc so this is people telling him that he may be in charge, but he’s not in charge.

And he seems to have understood, judging by his face when he was told so in no uncertain terms by one of the speakers. That shot stung.

Yep this should work SEPA-wide, In Germany POS terminals occasionally fall back to the old way of doing things (print out a long-ass reciept, sign it), the card then is just a way to transfer bank details, the actual authorisation is the signature, can be done offline, harkens back to the Eurocheque system. Basically the same thing as, I might be giving away my age, writing your bank details on a postcard and signing it, “yes I want to subscribe to your newspaper”, just that you don’t have to write out your account number.

Sounds like it’s vulnerable to fraud and abuse but if your bank authorised you to debit other accounts like that and complaints or chargebacks pile up you’re in all kinds of trouble: The bank knows where you live. Chargebacks also cost an arm and a leg, and if a customer charges back illegitimately you might have to go to court to recover it.

In case anyone is curious what that means in practice: There’s federal police driving around in border areas investigating “lost people” reports, i.e. people dumped at the side of the street by traffickers, and drive them to the next town to get processed. Occasionally they can catch a glimpse of a license plate. Those guys now get more overtime.

As to the rejecting asylum thing: IIRC you’re supposed to apply for asylum in the first EU country you step foot on, the refugee distribution mechanism only distributes people who filed paperwork, it doesn’t mean that you can choose where you file.

This is 100% symbolic, with no actual real-world impact. Which, we can only hope, is the only type of politics the Dobrindt will do.

Solve anxiety. The hatred, the desire to put down others, all that is caused by anxiety short-circuiting people’s minds, acting on, put very hand-wavily, reptilian instead of higher mammalian instincts, including social ones¹. Without underlying anxieties fascism has nothing to latch onto, and nothing to make even worse so it can propagate and perpetuate itself.

Key anxieties to address nowadays, and feel free to add your own, are economical security, “will I be poor in the future”, as well as social alienation, “can people be trusted”. Both require overcoming neoliberalism. Also, yes, solve anxieties regarding the future of the planet but that’s more about saving the planet so we may continue to live on it than anti-fascism for the simple reason that eco-fascism is overall negligible as a political force.

How? First of all, stop acting from anxiety.

¹ Is that where the “lizard people” thing comes from?

If anything, more potent weed is less harmful because you are putting a smaller amount of burned plant material into your lungs to get the same effect.

Yes. The actual issue is the THC/CBD ratio, CBD being antipsychotic as well as blocking the metabolisation of THC into more psychoactive variants.

Add to that criminalisation and the desire of dealers to impress clueless customers with head highs and you get selective breeding for high-THC strains. I’d say the main reason I stopped back in the days was because there was essentially nothing but white willow on the market, ~20% THC ~1% CBD. And that’s not even the worst of the strains.

Hopefully legalisation cuts back on that BS, with every satchel coming with test results showing people how off-kilter or balanced the weed is. There’s certainly no shortage of CBD-heavy seeds available, the market is obviously there.

The Chinese are making a lot of noise about Taiwan and that’s why Taiwan is the last place you should be looking at. Look at Outer Manchuria, instead, especially in the face of Russian weakness and looming chaos.

They tried that before, the Verfassungsschutz will say, publicly, something along the lines of “Two of these 500 quotes are from our moles”. That way they protect their sources, vanishing in the general soup, while the court can see that it’s party sentiment, not something injected into the party by the Verfassungsschutz. Judges will be able to see the whole uncensored thing one way or the other though it might not necessarily the judges actually judging the case: There’s special in camera senates in high courts for when some agency really doesn’t want to show stuff. They can look at absolutely anything, and all they have to judge is “yep, it was indeed 2 of 500 quotes”.

The article, most of all, misses that it’s about CBD to THC ratio, not raw overall cannabinoid content. CBD is an antipsychotic and on the cusp of getting the stamp of approval for treating schizophrenia. Strains on the street, in the meantime, have been bred for THC at the expense of CBD because it’s THC which gives a head-high, makes consumers believe they got strong stuff.

The deeper question, overall, is why we live in a society which prompts people to take anxiolytics to cope.

I very much doubt Germany could grant Netanyahu immunity from arrest without withdrawing from the ICC, which is not going to happen. Just because Merz says he’d like to do something doesn’t mean it’s going to happen, he’s running his mouth all the time.

Nah there’s also plenty of mismanagement, in particular spending the cold war being a one product economy and thinking that the USSR will be around forever, overpaying for sugar and sending industrial goods in return.

Venezuela messing up royally and not being able to subsidise Cuba with their oil any more is a more recent problem, but pretty much the same pattern.

Cubans are masters of improvisation and the party is smart enough not to interfere with the people’s capacity to self-organise to get around acute problems, unlike Americans and Russians they don’t micro-manage for the sake of micro-managing, but they’re very much not masters of strategic planning.

Over long, better short, Cuba has to increase its value-add and labour productivity. Export fewer resources, more and most of all more high-value finished products, also become energy independent. It’s nice that they can help out Venezuela with toilet paper but truth be told it’s not really a product that’s highly sought after on the world market because by and large, countries are better at not fucking up their economy than Venezuela.

Or, differently put: Wake me when Cuba exports electric buses. That, preferably, look weirdly like 40s, 50s American cars, in a retrofuturistic way. Or something more niche, but have something that’s not rum, tobacco, or honey. Oh, pharmaceuticals, gotta give them that.

You posted your comment on a platform funded by the EU. Not feddit.org or lemm.ee, but lemmy itself (though as I gather sunaurus himself is getting funds for development, the EU isn’t funding instances, though, just the development).

and to do that, we need to fight disinformation and far-right propaganda on social media.

Nope. I mean it’s not wrong to do that, but it would be mistaken to see that as anything but a flanking measure: You can’t fight affect with cognition. We need real-world policy which alleviates people’s anxieties.

A hypothetical Maltese jet could take care of it, yes.

Malta isn’t part of NATO but I’d guess they have an air policing deal with Italy in one way or the other.

It wasn’t necessary for previous cases: The SRP (NSDAP successor) and KPD (run by the KGB, laid siege to parliament) had no political hand-wringing attached to them, legally they were also pretty much open and shut cases. Banning the NPD was never politically contentious, but needed some work for the legal part so it took a while for proceedings to be opened.

That is: It’s not necessarily a long and arduous process.

The reason it’s such a slog with the AfD is because it didn’t start out as a Nazi party – it slowly, over multiple internal putsches, turned into one. It got normalised, simply by people becoming accustomed to its presence, at about the same speed at which it radicalised. Had it started out with the programme it has now it would have long since been banhammered.

Oh, well, add piracy to the list.

If the support was for Jewish safety or the safety of Israel as a state they would work for it to return into its 1967 borders and start making ammends to all the people they wronged.

That’s pretty much the German position: The annexations and settlements outside of 1967 Israel are illegal.

Jews that are dissenting the German state ideology get repressed in Germany.

It’s more complicated than that because those people aren’t dissenting from the German position, see the link above. They’re just being way more blunt about it. More correct would be “Jews who are dissenting from whatever the Jüdische Allgemeine writes”, i.e. Zionist apologia. I think the technical term for the political situation is “clusterfuck”.

It’s a pickle. The unwavering support is for Israel and its existence, not for the fascist regime or the genocide. Germany sent multiple sternly worded letters regarding the latter.