Five Things: Defending Europe, Hibernation, Global Food Supply, Despair, Optimist's Dilemma
Your Sunday Morning starts here. Really.
Hello and welcome back to Five Things!
It’s December 1st and that means the Christmas countdown has really started here in Germany. Our kids are looking forward to getting to open the first little bag of their advent calendars, which is a beautiful tradition my wife started with our first child. So she quilted a large advent calendar, in which we stuff 24 little paper bags filled with candy and some small things. So of course now we have to do 96 bags (and she quilted three more advent calendars), which is just a bit insane and every year I suggest to just get a cheap chocolate advent calendar, but somehow nobody listens to my advice around the house anymore. Anyhow, my wife continues to improve the process every year and I’m sure we will continue this tradition until long after the youngest kid has moved out, because it works kind of like muscle memory in late November.
Today in the car my wife mentioned that there was ice on a car and that we must have had frost the night before and immediately our 12-year old daughter yelled “Grünkohl!”, which means that she knows when kale season is starting. This is now, after the first frost. For us Northern Germans, this is one of the best culinary seasons of the year. Kale is the palmtree of the North and I cannot wait to cook this and share pictures of it on Instagram!
The electoral campaigns in Germany are just getting started and a powerpoint presentation surfaced on Friday which showed the strategy of the FDP to sabotage the German Government from within while publicly declaring to do everything to find a new common ground. Interestingly enough, they called the presentation “D-Day Strategy” and included military terms like “open field battle” in it. Two party managers had to resign, but the former Minister of Finance is hanging on to his position as leader of the party, claiming that he was not involved, even though his former bureau chief drafted the powerpoint and then resigned on Friday. This really is absurd theater and a total disgrace for the German political landscape. Everybody now knows that nobody should trust Christian Lindner and the FDP.
But you can trust me that I picked out five interesting articles for you to read!
Europe Has Run Out of Time
“Europe now has no choice but to manage its own security. There is no doubt that it has the economic potential to do so; the combined GDP of the European Union is roughly ten times that of Russia. What holds Europe back is a lack of political will. That deficiency of will is glaringly obvious when it comes to military support for Ukraine: the technologically backward and economically decrepit North Korea is estimated to have supplied more artillery shells to Russia during the past year than the entire EU has provided to Ukraine over the same period. This pitiful state of affairs has arisen even though the EU has a strong industrial base and counts four of the world’s ten largest arms exporters among its members.” - Norbert Röttgen is a conservative Member of the German Parliament who I really respect for his thoughts on foreign policy, but since he’s in the opposition right now, it is easy for him to tell everyone what to do, as he is not able to follow through on this.
Could Humans Hibernate?
It sounds much better than taking a cruise for four years to avoid Trump.
Eating the Earth
Germans are crazy about bananas, not exactly a fruit that grows here. Yet we have a rule at our family that we only eat strawberries from Northern Germany, with some exceptions when the season starts to late. We also only eat white sparagus during late spring when it is in season here. Also, we only eat kale after the first frost, because then it has its superpowers, they say. But aside from that, we even eat apples from Chile although we have the largest continuous area of fruit orchards in Northern Europe right here in Hamburg and Lower Saxony. It’s really bizarre how we deal with the food we eat.
How Not to Fall Into Despair
“At a moment when it can seem that all is lost, we’d be wise to embrace tragic optimism, wise hope and wise action. In this we recognize we can exert our agency, even if limitedly, even if only in increments, however we can. These attitudes and skills, and our willingness to adopt and practice them, are essential to not only our individual resilience but that of our communities. We need both now.”
Bill Gates: The Optimist’s Dilemma
“Here, then, is the optimist’s dilemma in microcosm: the world is not as Bill Gates wishes it to be or believed it once was or would like to imagine. History does not move progressively forward in a linear way. In a world in turmoil the gains of progress can be reversed or lost. His priorities – as one of the world’s richest men and greatest philanthropists – are increasingly not shared by nation states committed to national exceptionalism and to spending more of their GDP on defence and security. The potential for technological innovation, Gates believes, is boundless, and yet something has been lost, the spirit of transnational and multilateral collaboration that illuminated the early years of the century. How do we encourage every nation to do what it can to help the poorest in a zero-sum world? Gates seeks light but darkness is visible everywhere.” - even though I think that there is not one product from Microsoft that does not genuinely suck and that the global economy is losing gazillions of dollars every year because of these products, I think Bill Gates is a really smart person who reflects deeply about our global future and wants to change it for the better. Yeah, I know I’m really good at compliments…
That’s it. Have a great Sunday! If you missed last Sunday’s edition of Five Things, have a look here:
— Nico