German welfare state 'can no longer be financed' — Merz - ""The welfare state that we have today can no longer be financed with what we produce in the economy," Merz said in the town of Osnabrück."
How ignorant. Doesn't he know that letting in millions of migrants who pay less in tax than they receive in social benefits is the only way of keeping the system sustainable?
Naturally, left wingers were calling for more taxes on the 'rich' or blamed military spending. One even obliquely blamed Israel
German welfare state 'can no longer be financed' — Merz : r/anime_titties - "The primary issue here is really demographic. Old people retire, require extensive medical care, etc... This is really expensive and consumes lots of capital without generating new capital. That is fine when young people greatly outnumbers old people, but once that reality is reversed, the wheels fall off. Capitalist, socialism, tribal economies with only communal properties would all struggle when the old, retired and sick outnumbers the young and healthy. Non-market economies like Cuba and North Korea are facing the exact same crisis right now.
Cuba to Women: Please Have More Babies
Video Shows Kim Jong Un Crying Over North Korea's Lack of Babies
Most people, governments and institutions are fine with the notion of a gradual and controlled population decline. What is alarming people is the pace of the decline we are witnessing and its impact of the composition of the demographic pyramid. When birthrates fall off a cliff, as we are seeing now, we end up with a massively large old population that needs to be supported by an ever declining young population. We don't know how to run a society with more retirees than working people, or with more sickly people than healthy ones. In the entire history of humanity, this scenario has never happened. This is a very complex problem and we haven't figure out a solution for it yet. But be weary of anyone proposing simple root causes like the "immigrants", "abandonment of traditional family values and gender roles", "wokeness", "the rich", "capitalism" or anything similar. It is never that simple and easy."
We need more left wing anti-natalism
Bayrou's failure was inevitable. France cannot be saved - "A few hours before French PM François Bayrou went down in flames in parliament, having failed to win a vote of confidence for his cutbacks programme to reduce France’s national debt, two ministers from his own government (Green Transition and Industry) announced yet another handout of state money. Buyers of electric cars fitted with European-built batteries would be entitled to an additional €1,000 besides an already-existing bonus reaching up to €4,200, “with the aim to reshore electric vehicle components manufacturing, and create industrial jobs in Europe.” Now 44 years later, the beliefs of the Fifth Republic’s first socialist president, François Mitterrand – persuaded that the state knew better than private companies and launching a vast nationalisations programme while cutting down the work week, hiking the minimum wage, and lowering pension age from 65 to 60 – still prevail among public opinion in France. That’s true not just on the Left... While Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan were reshaping the culture and the economies of the West, hacking through bureaucracies and freeing the markets, France watched on, deriding the “American cowboy” and the “housewife with her handbag”. Grandiose plans for a French video industry (complete with a special standard, V2000, which never took off), a French computer industry (which somehow never managed to jump from the nifty Minitel telecoms terminal of the 1970s to compete even with Lord Sinclair, let alone Steve Jobs). While Gerhard Schroeder, a socialist chancellor, negotiated with the German unions to cut down employment regulations and free the jobs market in the early 2000s, France added so much legislation that French employers are now hobbled by the highest payroll taxes in the world, as well as a 3,350-page Employment Code. French influence in Brussels has concentrated on increasing regulation even when it hobbles its businesses and farmers. The French housing crisis has been increased by Green regulation that has already pulled some 30 per cent of available rentals out of the market for “energy inefficiency”. French taxes are the first or second highest in the OECD (depending on year), while redistribution now exceeds Sweden’s. And yet, a majority of the French tell pollsters that “the rich” can pay and should be taxed more – music to the ears of most politicians, Left and Right... The French are an unhappy people – worldwide studies, time and again, show more positive answers on personal happiness from the Philippines to Ethiopia than from depressed Gauls. Change is mostly seen as negative: losing something we were sure of (however we complained about it). Positivity itself is deeply suspect, even foreign: the worst insult citizens levied against Nicolas Sarkozy, a forceful one-term president who was dammed for suggesting that people could “earn more by working more” was “l’Américain”, worse than which is hard to conceive here. When many voted for Emmanuel Macron, it was despite his youth and brashness: his unsaid promise was to deliver more while not rocking the boat. He had the usual diplomas and pedigree of the French civil servant and technocrat: when a changing world showed that this was not enough, many of his voters felt swindled. They had hoped to see France transformed without pain, and while retaining old luxuries, from a competent technocracy to an efficient welfare net: blood, sweat and tears do not belong to the French vocabulary."
The awful spectacle of la belle France dissolving makes me fear for Britain - "When Emmanuel Macron glided into office in 2017, he was hailed as a beacon of hope not just for l’hexagone but wider Europe. The BBC gushingly called his victory a “repudiation” of the populist tide sweeping across the continent. Eight years on, the gloss has worn off. Macron has presided over the total unravelling of what was once a vaguely coherent, moderately high-trust society. Homicide rates and drug-related violence have risen significantly, particularly in cities such as Marseille. There are a growing number of areas into which the police will venture only in strength, and a latent volatility which erupted during the gilets jaunes protests. The country is being bogged down by ungovernable producer interests and paralysed by strikes, which wreak havoc on a different order of magnitude to those here. The public are painfully aware of this systematic decline, even if snooty elites look the other way. Polling suggests nearly three-quarters of French citizens no longer trust the presidency – hardly surprising after Macron’s cynical decision to call snap legislative elections last summer. The government is again on the brink of collapse. Some 70 per cent believe their living conditions are worsening – reasonably enough, given that growth has stagnated since the financial crisis. Public debt is a staggering 114 per cent of GDP. France’s tax burden is among the highest in the OECD. The young are either out of work – youth unemployment has reached over 15 per cent, compared to 9 per cent here – or utterly disillusioned. Hence the 2020 viral Twitter meme, Le Contrat Social, which captured the sense of despair gripping this generation. Its protagonist, “Nicolas (30 ans)”, works hard, pays his taxes, yet receives nothing in return. His contributions fund generous pensions for Boomers and benefits for migrants, while his own prospects shrink. No wonder he’s depressed. The French are in a permanent state of anxiety over migration and the failures of integration. Many of France’s immigrants come from North Africa: its Muslim population is around 10 per cent (in Britain it is 6.9 per cent). Islamist terrorism has taken a terrible psychological toll with the attacks on Charlie Hebdo and the Bataclan concert hall – 10 years ago this November – just the most visible. Other dreadful incidents – at a Jewish school, a kosher supermarket, and the brutal murder of a teacher following a classroom discussion – have seared deep scars... There were more than 1,500 reported anti-Semitic incidents in 2024, far higher than the 440 recorded in 2022. The French president’s words of sympathy towards the Jewish community ring hollow when he later declines to, for instance, take part in a Paris march against anti-Semitism... France, for all its faults, has not embraced self-sabotage with the same zeal as Britain. It isn’t pursuing ruinous net zero policies in some delusional bid to “lead the globe” on decarbonisation; it is a net exporter of electricity. Its trains run. Its housing stock stands at roughly 570 dwellings per 1,000 people compared with our 450 – all too many of which Yvette Cooper now wants to pack with illegal migrants. Its healthcare outcomes far outperform our own. Britain may have a stronger record on integration but that too is fast fading. The immigrant share of England and Wales is 17 per cent compared with 10 per cent in France. Net migration to France in 2024 was 152,000; ours was three times that figure. Much as British taxpayers may loathe us punting £500m to French authorities only for them to stand idly by as packed dinghies make way to our shores, at least they are acting in their national interest. But if there’s one key difference between two countries which are swiftly converging, it’s this: in France, regime change has long been the nation’s second favourite pastime after le cinq à sept. Since 1789, there has been a tradition of radical transformation through revolutionary activity. Now, as Prof David Abulafia tells me, the tension between far-Left and far-Right is potentially explosive. The UK political culture, by contrast, has for centuries been as bland and stodgy as its native cuisine. Then again, we could soon have a taster menu of exotic new choices. If Labour continues to obfuscate as the migrant crisis intensifies, nothing can be discounted."
Britain and France are racing towards a new crisis - "On either side of the English Channel, the spectre of a bailout from the world’s financial paramedics, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), looms. Eric Lombard, France’s finance minister, is using the threat to scare his paralysed parliament into backing measures that would rein in the country’s ballooning debt and soaring borrowing costs. In Britain, opposition leaders and leading economists are warning of the prospect of an IMF bailout amid a similar runaway debt problem. The bond market has heard the message. British and French 10-year bond yields – the interest rate the two governments must pay to borrow money from the markets – are now higher than in Greece. The two European giants are lumbering towards the precipice of a financial crisis... At final tally then, France has slower growth than the UK, higher deficits and debt, and its higher taxes and polarised politics give it little room to move."
How silly. Don't they know that the solution is to 'tax the 'rich'', or that Covid taught us that you could finance social spending by printing money?!
Europe’s weak leaders will be brought down by their slavish devotion to welfare - "He will have done President Macron a favour if he stressed this to him, and the need for France – Germany’s closest political partner – to reform its own welfare state. That is the reality from which our Government fled earlier this summer. In Britain, too, it will have to be confronted eventually. In all three countries, there are too many claimants and too few contributors. Many claimants do not need to rely on the state, and if the contributors are pushed any further they will either leave or go under. If even Germany, Europe’s economic powerhouse, realises this cannot go on, the rest should take notice. It is also interesting that economic collapse, which the British were confidently told by George Osborne and others in 2016 would be an inevitable consequence of leaving the European Union, appears these days more likely to happen inside it than outside it. France’s deficit is almost double that permitted by EU rules: the Union is useless at handling its economy, and Remainers should stop pretending otherwise. If they refuse to heed the realities indicated by Chancellor Merz, perhaps they will finally wake up if the IMF takes control of the ruins of the French economy. The French, however, seem determined to go down the British Government’s route, and pretend the situation can somehow be avoided, or profound reform delayed indefinitely."
Chaos reigns in Macron’s court – while Meloni goes from strength to strength - "Until now, the relentless political churn of tumbling governments was a famously Italian pastime. France is now stealing the limelight from its neighbour, after Emmanuel Macron lost his third prime minister in a little over a year and his seventh since 2020. Meanwhile, Giorgia Meloni is sailing serenely towards three years in office, making her Italy’s longest-serving prime minister since Silvio Berlucsconi. The reversal of traditional stereotypes does not stop there. Italy is an oasis of comparative fiscal rectitude far from the stereotype of free-spending southern Europeans that took hold in the financial crisis. Italy has debt at 138 per cent of GDP, compared with 114 per cent for France. But Rome has done more than Paris to balance its books and cut public spending. On the markets, the gap in interest rates between the two countries has nearly vanished... It took painful austerity measures to pull Italy back from the edge, a bitter medicine the French show no sign of being willing to take... When once it was Italy on the naughty step for breaching EU fiscal rules, it is now France facing punishment from Brussels."
France credit score downgrade mounts pressure on Macron
Sean Speer on X - "Poilievre has crushed his right flank. That’s quite the commendable feat Conservative Party leader Pierre Poilievre has pulled off something that deserves far more recognition than it gets. At a time when right-wing populism has fractured conservative parties across the Western world, he has consolidated the Canadian Right into a single, mainstream political vehicle. His success in effectively decimating Maxime Bernier’s People’s Party, undermining talk of Alberta separatism, and holding together a broad national coalition is a major accomplishment for the Conservative Party and Canadian democracy itself. As party leader, Poilievre has stitched together a coalition that stretches from former People’s Party supporters to the median Canadian voter. The result was 42 percent of the popular vote in April’s election, including gains across most regions of the country. This is no small feat. Especially since in virtually every other advanced democracy, centre-right parties are ceding space to populist rivals who are hostile to open markets, free trade, and even liberalism itself. Canada could easily have gone down the same road. Justin Trudeau’s wedge politics on immigration, class warfare, and pandemic restrictions created fertile conditions for the rise of our own version of right-wing populism. Yet the opposite has happened. Under Poilievre’s leadership, Max Bernier’s People’s Party has gone from nearly 5 percent of the popular vote in 2021 to less than 1 percent in this year’s general election and not much more in this week’s Alberta election. A big part of this story has been Poilievre’s careful responsiveness to his right flank. Time and again, he’s hit issues and messages that appeal to these disaffected voters that’s kept them in the Conservative tent or brought them back after their previous populist defection. Poilievre’s sharpness, by the way, shouldn’t be underestimated as part of his overall resonance. Of course, there are trade-offs in this strategy. One can fairly argue that Poilievre has sometimes gone further than necessary to appeal to these voters. But those who say he should ignore them altogether miss the point. If he repositioned himself as a centrist tomorrow, the immediate effect would ostensibly be to push them away to a political alternative that would almost certainly be more radical and less responsible. By keeping them inside the Conservative tent, there’s a case that Poilievre isn’t just serving his party’s interests but the country’s broader political stability. The counterfactuals are worth considering. Imagine a Conservative leader who ignored his or her right-wing flank and allowed Bernier to grow in unpredictable ways. Or one who leaned too far into the populist sentiment and risked remaking the Conservative Party into something unrecognizable. Both paths would weaken Canadian conservatism and destabilize Canadian politics. Instead, Poilievre has managed to both shore up the party’s base and expand its broader reach. He’s crushed a populist rival while keeping the Conservative Party firmly in the political mainstream. That’s an outcome that virtually no other conservative leader in the Western world has achieved in recent years. His critics won’t give him credit. It’s far easier to focus on his edginess or to assert that he’s polarizing. But if one’s prepared to be dispassionate about it, Poilievre has strengthened the Conservative Party, tempered the forces of right-wing populism, and built a coalition that is as broad as any in the party’s modern history."
Clearly, the real solution is to refuse to work with "far right" parties even if they have the most votes, then ban them to "defeat 'fascism'" and "protect 'democracy'"
The sweet silence of Pierre Poilievre. Enjoy it while you can. : r/Ontario_Sub - "Yes ,for sure. Nobody say anything oppositional !"
Italy’s ‘pasta grannies’ go on strike after police raids - "A band of “pasta grannies” in Italy who have achieved worldwide fame with their handmade products have gone on strike after they were targeted in police raids... police conducted a series of raids this week, alleging that some of the grannies have been selling commercially produced orecchiette that they secretly buy from retailers and then pass off as homemade to unsuspecting customers... The subterfuge emerged when cardboard boxes that had contained commercially made pasta were found dumped in wheelie bins on the outskirts of the old town. There is simmering resentment among the grannies over stricter hygiene and food safety controls, which were imposed by the council earlier this year... The “pastaie”, as they are known in Italian, were featured in one of Jamie Oliver’s cookbooks and Dolce & Gabbana shot a commercial featuring some of the women with the lingerie-clad daughters of Sylvester Stallone, whose family originates from Puglia."
Britons should be learning more modern languages, not fewer - "Its learning has roots in the trivium, which demands rigour, logic, and memory. It strengthens mental discipline in a way few other subjects do. It teaches students to pay attention to structure, nuance and someone else’s rules. It’s also good for the brain. Research shows that language learners perform better across maths, literacy, and science. Learning languages delays cognitive decline, builds curiosity and teaches humility. A 2022 Cambridge study found that studying a second language especially helps children with poor working memory — often those from disadvantaged backgrounds. Once again, those who need it most are getting it least. Even Britain’s diplomats struggle. Data from the Foreign Office shows that only around 55–60 per cent of civil servants in language-designated roles reach the required proficiency level. For Arabic, the rate is just 30 per cent. Despite heavy investment in training, the number of diplomats with advanced Mandarin certification has fallen from 45 in 2016 to just 22 in 2025... In Britain, the game seems stuck between proud monolingualism and politicised identity-speak. Serious language learning is dismissed by many as elitist, even as they embrace the performance of “language awareness”; applauding borrowed words and celebrating accents. Anything that doesn’t require actual fluency or effort. For a country obsessed with asserting “identities”, it’s strange how little appetite there is for understanding anyone else’s."
John Williams: I never liked film music very much - " He is arguably cinema’s greatest composer of film music, but John Williams has admitted to not enjoying the genre... “A lot of [film music] is ephemeral. It’s certainly fragmentary and, until somebody reconstructs it, it isn’t anything that we can even consider as a concert piece… “Just the idea that film music has the same place in the concert hall as the best music in the canon is a mistaken notion, I think.” Williams recalled that during his years of working at the Boston Pops, he would be asked to “play some great film music”. “Well, I go, here, this was a great score, and I’d look at it – and there’s no score there. There’s a couple of cues that have to be put together. Something over here doesn’t play because it’s two and a half minutes long, and it wasn’t good to begin with... “Film music, however good it can be – and it usually isn’t, other than maybe an eight-minute stretch here and there... I just think the music isn’t there. That, what we think of as this precious great film music is... we’re remembering it in some kind of nostalgic way.”"
Clearly he's an ignorant snob who doesn't know anything about film music and is just jealous of successful film music composers.
Angela Rayner and the hypocrisy at the heart of the Labour Party - "I am amazed by the reluctance to accept “film” music as “classical” music (Letters, September 1). The forerunners of film – opera and ballet – were the basis of so much great music. Think of overtures by Beethoven, Rossini or Tchaikovsky. It is also worth noting that Finlandia, by Sibelius, was written to accompany a series of “living tableaux”, surely the closest thing to film in 1899."
Taylor Swift’s mercenary merchandise machine is out of control - "When does a star’s relationship with their fans turn from mutual dependency to merciless exploitation?... if you or I treated our pals like Swift treats her fans, I think we might find our social circles shrinking rapidly... Swift’s last album, 2024’s Tortured Poets Department, was released in 19 physical variant editions, some with alternate bonus tracks spread across different packages. To have bought them all would have set a particularly devoted Swiftie back approximately $485 (£359). But why would anyone feel a need to buy them all, you might wonder. Well, in the case of her previous album, 2022’s Midnights, it was released in four vinyl variants with different back-sleeve artwork, each representing a quarter of a clock that could be assembled into one Taylor-made clock face, at a cost of approximately $120 (£89). The expectation that legions of fans would indeed be prepared to splash out on everything on offer might be inferred by the inclusion of a new “add all to cart” button when the first variants of Showgirl appeared in Swift’s web store. Musicians have been peddling merchandise to fans since the days of Beatlemania, but Swift’s one-click-captures-all approach takes it to dizzying new heights of commercial exploitation. Credible estimates suggest that Swift’s merchandising operation grossed around half a billion dollars during her 149-date Eras tour, with fans spending an average of $40 per head at pop-up shops selling all the usual branded tat... Part of this could be seen as a cynical but pragmatic gaming of the chart system, which is still weighted in favour of physical product over individual streams (one physical album unit equals approximately 1,000 streams in the UK charts). All those pre-orders will be added to Swift’s opening-week streaming numbers to guarantee her total chart domination. And (as we saw during Swift’s last campaign) whenever streaming numbers are flagging over time, it sure helps to have a new album variant to re-energise the hardcore fanbase and push your product back to the top. Swift is far from alone in doing this, she is just the best at it, which is why her “strategic genius” is lauded in publications not usually noted for their pop coverage, such as Forbes and Harvard Business Review. The multi-version release strategy has become pretty much standard practice for stars such as Olivia Rodrigo (her Guts album was offered in nine vinyl variants) and Carpenter (her forthcoming Man’s Best Friend album comes in 10 physical versions), who have been closely following the Swift playbook... Swift’s particularly intense relationship with her fandom partly springs from a trend she herself is spearheading towards the gamification of pop music. No artist has read the cultural moment quite like Swift, implicitly recognising that in our short-attention-span era, music itself will never be enough; it has to exist inside an ever-expanding multimedia narrative to keep listeners invested. The danger will be when the ephemera surrounding Swift utterly outweighs the music that ideally should be its core, when fans look at the latest expensive item they have just bought from the Swiftstore and question what actual value it adds to their lives. Sure, you can own nine versions of the same album in subtly different sleeve designs, but you can only listen to it through one set of ears. The Life of a Showgirl is going to have to deliver something special to avoid the creeping sense that Swift’s relationship with her Swifties is actually rather one-sided."
OnlyFans pays out £520m to Ukrainian-born owner - "Mr Radvinsky, a low-profile entrepreneur who was born in Ukraine and moved to the US as a child, previously owned the adult website MyFreeCams. The 43-year-old is in discussions to sell a majority stake in OnlyFans in a deal that could value it at up to $8bn. Forest Road Company, a Los Angeles-based investment firm, has been named as the front-runner in talks."
Eddie Cornell on X - "In my opinion a large majority of Canadians are snobs who feel they are better than everyone else particularly Americans. They look down their noses. They are anything but nice. We have become a nation of entitled feckless morons."
