FOLLOW me on my popular Twitter feed. Just click this photo! @hbbtruth - David - Common sense on #Politics #PublicPolicy #Sports #PopCulture in USA, Great Britain, Sweden and France, via my life in #Texas #Memphis #Miami #IU #Chicago #DC #FL 🛫🌍📺📽️🏈. Photo is of Elvis and Joan Blackman in 'Blue Hawaii'

Beautiful Stockholm at night, looking west towards Gamla Stan
Showing posts with label Europe. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Europe. Show all posts

Monday, March 20, 2017

A Promise Kept, A Message Delivered: President Trump delivers a much-needed reality check on Germany and Chancellor Angela Merkel re their longstanding failure to honor their NATO pledge. Trump bluntly says what Americans have wanted to hear: It's time for Germany to pay what they owe and live up to their promise. No more excuses!; Anne Applebaum continues to disappoint me

Screenshot of The Drudge Report of March 18, 2017: U Owe Us





Last Friday during her visit to the White House, German Chancellor Angela Merkel received a strong dose of unfiltered President Donald J. Trump, who delivered the reality check he promised to deliver to NATO allies during the 2016 election campaign regarding their longstanding failure to live up to their own past pledges to spend at least 2% of their GDP on their own defense spending. 

 Instead of doing what the U.S. foreign policy elites in Washington wanted him to do, which was to allow this unproductive behavior of Germany -and so many other NATO members- to continue, or, if brought up at all, to talk about it away from the prying eyes of cameras of the U.S. news media and the American people, President Trump delivered on yet another important campaign promise, and did so in an honest away that neither Presidents Obama, Bush or Clinton ever did, that left no room for any misunderstanding.
We are talking about you, Germany.











Spiegel
FEBRUARY 21, 2017
Germany’s Self-Imposed Obstacles to Increasing Defense Spending
Washington is threatening consequences if NATO member states don't increase their defense spending. Germany is the primary focus of the demand. But the Defense Ministry in Berlin is already having trouble spending the money it currently has at its disposal.


By Konstantin von Hammerstein and Peter Müller
http://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/natosource/germany-s-self-imposed-obstacles-to-increasing-defense-spending
http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/pressure-on-germany-to-increase-defense-spending-for-nato-a-1135192.html























Message to Brussels: People on the Left in the U.S. and Europe who think that Germany is right on this issue, and that a government foolishly spending money on #ClimateChange but NOT honoring its pledge to its own allies regarding the amount of money it will spend on its own self-defense, are dreaming if they think Americans will support defending any nation that consciously chooses NOT to defend itself.
They won't. Period!




Both before and after I lived and worked in the Washington, D.C. area and was very much involved with then-current passing developments and perspectives from people involved with foreign policy and defense policy in DC, whether at the myriad Think Tanks and non-profits, Left and Right, or at the House Foreign Affairs Committee or the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, I was an admirer of Anne Applebaum, @anneapplebaum, and a longtime reader of her outstanding foreign policy/defense columns in the Washington Post.

 More times than I can count, Applebaum's column was the best thing in the entire newspaper that day, combining genuine insight, forthright candor and an original POV, relative to the stuffy/fussy and self-reverential nature of much of what passes for insight in 99% of the American Foreign Policy establishment, whose journals I subscribed to for years, with walls of past issues that lined my Arlington County garage in banker boxes.

For many years I was, in the abstract, Anne Applebaum's ideal reader: someone who not only devoured her Washington Post columns and shared them with friends around who were very involved in a direct way with foreign policy, but also someone who actually purchased multiple copies of her books with my own money as gifts for friends and colleagues, as opposed to people who bought them on a corporate account.
I even bought copies of the decidedly non-holiday-friendly books, Between East and West: Across the Borderlands of Europe and Gulag: a History.

 (As many of you longtime readers of this blog know, I have a longtime interest in Eastern European history and politics, especially Poland. My maternal ancestors fled Prussian-controlled Silesia and arrived in Texas right before Christmas of 1854, after a three-month boat trip from Bremen, eventually setting in the beautiful Hill Country of Texas and becoming Bandera County Pioneers.)

So, it's with all of that history in mind that I tell you now that it's been VERY disappointing to me the past few years that despite lots of opportunities for her to use her very important and very visible perch at the Washington Post to push for more honest and resolute critical thinking and reporting about the issue of NATO members finally delivering on their promises to pay 2% of their respective GDP for their own defense, she's punted.
Specifically, she's been far too quiet and NOT been publicly critical about Germany's failure.
Not that Gemany is alone, because only 5 of the 18 NATO members hit their marks.



Even worse in my mind, if possible, Applebaum has held her tongue about Germany's incredibly feeble response to the rise of ISIS (ISIL, IS) which I have talked to many of the people reading this blog post about over the years, as well as tweeted about when German-friendly individuals and groups seemed to be trying to give them a pass nd make excuses for them.

Instead of Applebaum being a leader for actively confronting manageable issues that a clear majority of Americans are quite justified in wanting to see FINALLY resolved, she has continued to champion the POV of the Foreign Policy elites in the U.S. and Europe, who are owners of so many broken Conventional Wisdom crystal balls that have not worked properly in many years. 
As Brexit proved to a fare thee well, as I predicted months before last year's June vote in the UK.

 She's exactly the sort of person who ought to be championing Trump on this issue because he happens to be right on the facts and right on the public's perceptions of it being an issue where supposed allies have failed to deliver.

 Plus, Applebaum's too smart to think that Trump and his supporters will simply allow the issue to evaporate. Trust me, Trump supporters like me will tell him that if Germany does not change course in tangible ways in the near-future that Americans can see with their own eyes, he will need to do something publicly to show his displeasure in a way that will leave no room for misunderstanding.

 Is that really what the folks at the German Embassy up on Reservoir Road NW, a place where I spent so much time in the late 1980's and the '90's, and the place that now continues to do such a consistently piss-poor job of public outreach to the U.S. public at large and Congress in particular, wants?
Because the truth is, that day where Trump is pushed into doing something is much closer than they think.
Every day Germany continues status quo brings it closer...

 I continue to be surprised at the large number of usually well-informed people who do NOT know that Germany's response to ISIS has been to dispatch, after more than a year's worth of debate in the Bundestag, 100 UNARMED men in non-combat positions located far from the fighting. 
That's the response of Europe's largest and most economically powerful country?
To place one-hundred unarmed men far from where the fighting against ISIS is? 
Really?

For many well-informed Americans who care about U.S. foreign policy and defense issues, regardless of their party preference, Germany's efforts of late, esp. vs. ISIS, seem incredibly underwhelming and not cause for thinking that cooler heads in Berlin are prevailing.
Just the opposite. :-(

In its own way, this Le Nouvel Observateur article makes the point.





 To which I replied with cool hard facts:

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Monday, September 1, 2014

As usual, Anne Applebaum is 100% correct: If war is coming to Europe, shouldn't we prepare? Meanwhile, Strobe Talbott & Kateryna Kruk notice the very same ominous signs that I do; You ought to start following them today: @anneapplebaum, @strobetalbott, @Kateryna_Kruk














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Wednesday, July 31, 2013

"Which European country has the most attractive citizens?" Sweden won in a landslide with almost four times as many votes as second-place France, with Spain third and Norway fourth. Yes, seeing is believing!; Norwegian.com's non-stop flights from Fort Lauderdale to Oslo start in 4 months! :)



A Boredpanda.com poll of Europeans asked, "Which European country has the most attractive citizens?"

As the above map on the tweet above shows, Sweden won in a landslide, with almost four times as many votes as second-place France, with Spain third and Norway fourth. 
Yes, seeing is believing!

 But trust me, Norway is a very, very competitive fourth!
Even the armed female Customs officers at Oslo Airport Gardermoen are very, very attractive, which at 6:45 a.m., in the middle of January, after a LONG overnight flight from Newark, was not something I was expecting.
But adapt I did!

 I really like the Oslo Airport, too, since it's very clean and tidy, and if you didn't know any better, you would think it opened last year.

Remember, too, as I've written about here previously, four months from now, low-fare carrier Norwegian Airlines starts non-stop flights from Fort Lauderdale to Oslo on November 30th.
With flights to Stockholm and Copenhagen days later.
No more need for pointless flights first to Newark, Chicago, Detroit or Dulles just to fly to Scandinavia.

APRIL 20, 2013
Scandinavian Delight! Starting November 30th, fly nonstop cheaply between Ft Lauderdale and Oslo or Copenhagen on Norwegian.com, and starting December 1st, fly from FLL to Stockholm Arlanda; @Oslo, @norway, @stockholm, @sweden, @copenhagen, @denmark

APRIL 22, 2013
Tourism game-changer for South Florida travelers & Fort Lauderdale-area businesses -but only if they're smart and start planning now. Ruminations on the upcoming Norwegian.com flights b/w Ft. Lauderdale and Oslo, Stockholm & Copenhagen, and the need for Broward's hospitality industry to take full-advantage of the opportunity; @Oslo, @norway, @stockholm, @sweden, @copenhagen, @denmark


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Wednesday, August 18, 2010

Fascinating Deutsche Welle TV video of innovative architect Thomas Rau in Amsterdam, and what he's done with the WWF HQ in The Netherlands

I originally came to this short report -in English- on Deutsche Welle TV after reading a story on FC Bayern Munich boss Karl-Heinz Rummenigge's efforts to bring salaries down and keep at least some ticket prices family-friendly, and I'll be posting that story soon.

This video explains why architect Thomas Rau decided to rent (instead of buying) his office interior, why this is, supposedly, better for the environment and financially attractive for manufacturers, though the truth is, he makes the disposition of the furniture the manufacturer's problem, not his, when he tires of it.

Then, Deutsche Welle visits a client that he has worked his magic on -the head office of WWF Netherlands in Zeist- and explains how their building became the first energy neutral building in the land of the Orange.

http://www.archicentral.com/wwf-zeist-the-netherlands-rau-architects-11212/ http://sustainablecities.dk/en/city-projects/cases/zeist-home-to-the-wwfs-innovative-new-dutch-headquarters

"A key maxim he follows is the use of 100% recyclable materials. Rau has committed himself to designing environmentally-responsible architecture."
http://www.dw-world.de/dw/article/0,,5887227,00.html

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=66ZA-kfjBUA



Some day, if I can remember to, I'll write here about my plans circa 1990 to travel and write from Eastern Europe after the Berlin Wall fell.
Among other things, I was going to write about how rural communities were coping with the rapid economic and social changes that lay before them, the effect of decades of pollution on the communities and foreign investment, and the employment prospects of the young people who suddenly had choices their parents never had, and who could now move west and leave their problems -and families- behind.

Marie Ciganek, who was from the then-Czechoslovakia, was the savvy and friendly woman who was then in charge of Eastern Europe at the D.C. office of the WWF, and she couldn't have been more helpful and encouraging, even suggesting some folks I contact to make my goal a reality. http://www.worldwildlife.org/who/

But despite lots of hard work on my part to make a real go of it, the plan could never be worked out financially, which was very depressing, as I had some very definite plans for doing some very interesting things once I got over there.

It was while going around talking to people in Washington and doing some investigating that I first found out for myself how many of D.C.'s think tanks and foundations that have funds that are supposed to be used to help and encourage Young Professionals in their career efforts, were actually not much more than wink-wink slush funds/vacation jaunts for well-known establishment types already working at mainstream American news media outlets, print and electronic -and they were NOT so young, either!

I won't name names here but... well, I could.
It was quite an eye-opening experience for me to see how routinely "requirements" were flouted by well-connected media types to secure things they weren't really eligible for!

This was also roughly when I was routinely plowing thru Foreign Affairs magazine in one week, often on MARC train trips up to Baltimore from D.C's Union Station on weekends for Oriole home games at Camden Yards.

Somewhere, in the archives, there are photos of me reading it in-between innings out in the centerfield bleachers, my favorite area for watching a game there. Perhaps even this essay from 1993, The Collapse Of 'The West' by Owen Harries
http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/49202/owen-harries/the-collapse-of-the-west

Those were the days!
Yes kids, once upon a time, not so long ago, the Orioles were very, very good...

When I was at IU in Bloomington, I used to routinely listen to Deutsche Welle's English-language radio broadcasts on my shortwave radio, http://www.dw-world.de/ which was even more interesting when I had a girlfriend at the time who spoke fluent German, one of the languages I never quite cracked.
http://www.dw-world.de/popups/popup_multi_mediaplayer/0,,4128016_type_audio_struct_4703_format_WMedia,00.html

Talar ni tyska, Dave?
Nej!

For more information:
http://wwf.panda.org/who_we_are/wwf_offices/netherlands/

http://rau.eu/en

RAU Architects YouTube Channel: http://www.youtube.com/user/RAUarchitects

http://www.foreignaffairs.com/

http://www.timothygartonash.com/

http://www.spiegel.de/international/
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