Peter Felser, September 11, 2020, Artificial Intelligence

German Bundestag, September 11, 2020, Plenarprotokoll 19/174, pp. 21897-21898.

Many thanks, Herr President. – Dear colleagues. Dear guests.

What actually is in this White Book KI [Künstliche Intelligenz] of the EU? Artificial Intelligence shall promote the values of the EU, shall implement freedom and human rights around the world. Artificial Intelligence shall advance the Green Deal, impel climate protection, enhance Germany’s competitivity. Artificial Intelligence shall conjure up a citizen-friendly administration, maximize all economic and social well-being and naturally prevent discrimination.

Ladies and gentlemen, with this, you are world champions in the abstractions of naïve, feel-good prose. You thereby wish only to veil an inherent ineffectiveness and lack of deliberation in regards these important topics. For KI, the greatest hindrance – as we have certainly heard here – is the people’s lack of trust. We hear ever again exactly that in the inquiry committee “Artificial Intelligence”. Ja, dear colleagues of the Federal government, then for once speak clearly with the citizens. Stop with the unspeakable buzz. Tell people, clearly and substantively, where lie the advantages of an installation of KI systems and where lie the disadvantages of an installation of KI systems. With such an open discussion, you would build trust in this country.

You want a “world-wide pioneering role for the EU in KI systems” – world-wide. Europe, by fundamental research into the practical application of “globally successful business models” shall assume a “leadership position” – leadership position. Hopefully, nobody in China or the U.S.A. is reading this White Book. What then do you wish to do for this leadership position? Provide skilled personnel and, before all, you wish to regulate. Ladies and gentlemen, we do not thereby overhaul the deficit.

Europe has no hardware production worthy of the name. Except for one German firm, we have no significant software manufacturer; you know that. We in Germany and Europe also have no platforms. Non-European players dominate in all three areas. Yet here lie the principal problems which we must address. You can have as many skilled personnel, standards and rules as you wish: If you have no data platforms, build no mainframe computer, do not program the software and do not yourself manage the networks, then your standards are a waste. That sadly I must say, dear colleagues.

An example of an utterly naïve digital prestige project – backed by you in the motion – : Gaia-X. Gaia-X as a European cloud infrastructure shall be an alternative to the offerings of the great market masters in the U.S.A. and China – sounds good for once. But why in all the world should small and mid-sized firms store their data in the Gaia infrastructure? What is the unique feature? You say: European standards as a unique feature. Yet the big American and Chinese firms are already here. They offer European data storage on their cloud servers. They have long since recognized the demand for European standards. As a a businessman in the IT area, I decide according to performance, speed, availability, security and price, as to which cloud servers I ultimately hand over my data. I am sure that many firms in Germany will act  exactly the same. And even you, dear colleagues of the Greens, host your national site on Google.

The problem lies elsewhere. Gaia-X stands for digital sovereignty, you say. Yet even that is false. We have no digital sovereignty. From where comes the hardware for these servers and routers which you wish to construct? From where comes the network technology? In each case, not from Europe; keyword: “Huawei”.

For months already, I have in this place spoken of Europe’s scandalous dependence in the areas of data storage, hardware and software. We must solve that before we push any other projects.

I am grateful.

 

[trans: tem]

Jörg Meuthen, September 16, 2020, State of the European Union

European Parliament, Brussels, September 16, 2020, P9 CRE-PRO (2020) 09-16 (3-103-0000)

Frau Commission President, Herr Parliament President, esteemed colleagues.

Frau von der Leyen, you have here delivered a most pathetic speech on the State of the Union. Ascribing this title to your speech was unquestionably done with consideration. It is nevertheless ultimately only an additional, shameless labeling swindle by the Commission. The loan is clear: It is a transference of the speeches on the State of the Union like those we know of by the President of the United States, or of the speeches on the state of the nation occasionally undertaken by European heads of state or governments.

Only, the thing has a decisive catch, which was supposed to be concealed by this wording: The United States of America is a state, Germany, France and Italy are states. The European Union is however not a state and you, Frau von der Leyen, are no head of state, even if you gladly would be one. You can still flourish ever so many long speeches over the State of the Union. 

And I assure you, we will bitterly oppose your desires, already far too advanced, of constructing for the EU its own affairs of state along with its own right to loot the citizen by means of guaranteeing taxation and also lately indebtedness competences. The EU – please note – is not a state and we will do all within our powers to see that it never becomes one.

If you, in the usual hypocrisy of this house and of the Commission, therefore accuse us of being opponents of Europe or even of being enemies of Europe, then I on the contrary recall to you: We are not the real enemies of Europe, no, you are! Since the ideals upon which our wonderful and various continent historically and culturally stands are the ideals of freedom and democracy. You trample underfoot both of these with your super-state fantasies with its corresponding power over the citizen.

You are presently using the Corona crisis, which in fact actually is a crisis but which is in no way an unprecedented catastrophe as you wish us to believe, for the purpose of amassing ever more competences at the level of the EU where they can in no way be justified. For you, Covid-19 actually is of the greatest convenience. You speak of an unprecedented crisis. You find therein the welcome opportunity for an ever further communitarization.

You speak of a Recovery Fund, as if we find ourselves at the end of disastrous war with cities laid waste and millions of people to be mourned, as was the case in 1945. That is offensive. It is a knowing, purposeful exaggeration of this crisis which we actually have as a result of Covid-19 and also of the fully over-done lockdown of business life. Your so-called counter-measures, Frau Commission President, will not by the means of indebtedness and taxation orgies help us out of the crisis. On the contrary, it will intensify the crisis because it leads us down a completely false, essentially socialistic path. It is no accident that here in this house it is the greens and the communists who applaud the loudest.

So I ask: How blind to history can one actually be? The lessons of the terrifying 20^th Century to a great extent and for hundreds of millions of people– you still have not grasped. You are on a fateful, false way. The price will be an enormous one, not for you personally, but for the citizens whose interests you here pretend to represent.

 

[trans: tem]

Bernd Baumann, September 18, 2020, Moria

 German Bundestag, September 18, 2020, Plenarprotokoll 19/177, pp. 22293-22294.

Frau President. Ladies and gentlemen.

In Greece, migrants set fire to their tents and reception camps, churches were laid waste. The goal of the arsonists was a permanent admission to Europe, preferably in Germany.

The Linke and the Greens support this goal today here in the Bundestag. All shall come: Then you could remain – And the Federal government wishes to take in thousands; that is the signal. That is a catastrophic signal. All shall come. So set fire to your camps, then you could remain, might even continue on to Germany. – The smuggler mafia rubs its hands, since its business is enlivened by the Federal government; all of you here support the international traffickers, extortionists and fraudsters. That must be clearly stated. The Greek government protested against that in the summer of 2019.

The example of Hungary is still visible to all: Initially, only a few thousand camping at the Budapest train station. For them, Merkel opened the borders. The pictures released a gigantic suction – to the last corner of the Orient and Africa. Suddenly, millions of people are set in motion. In endless lines of humanity, they break through all borders. Is that no lesson to you? Have you learned nothing from the history?

You make of Germany a settlement territory for any who wish to come, a kind of public buffet at which any can serve himself. We will not allow that. We will preserve Germany and its culture as the only spot on Earth – Listen up! – where we Germans can feel at home.

Contrary to your assertion, your policy is anything but humanitarian. You are cynical because you send false signals. Innumerable people throughout the world will be uprooted. They sell their land, their cattle, give thousands of dollars to the north African smuggler mafia and allow themselves to shipped to Europe in leaking boats.

For all of you here, it is certainly not about the people. For you, it’s about the pictures, ultimately about a populist self-presentation; that is the situation, ladies and gentlemen. Berlin’s Interior Senator of the SPD, Green chief Göring-Eckardt,

            Steffi Lemke (Greens): Delegation chairman!

Armin Laschet, who already sees himself as Merkel’s heir: You all fly with a big media crowd to Greece to pose with little children. A couple of disconcerted words for the camera and then back on the comfy planes.

            Marie-Agnes Strack-Zimmermann (FDP): Where exactly were you falsely                                                diverted?

And all the leading media send these pictures into every living room; many of the public media are right at the front of that. You heat up the mood yet further. What an ultimately cheap dramatization! What an inhuman, public spectacle!

            Steffi Lemke (Greens): What an agitation!

            Karamba Diaby (SPD): What a character!

In the end, you distort our once rational, well functioning state into a left-green, feelings and mood democracy: Sentimental, defenseless, irrational and incapable of solving all the urgent problems, just as we again see here today, ladies and gentlemen. Therefore, almost every country in Europe rejects Germany’s refugee policy. They reject it! Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic abhor it; the Austrians and Danes turn away; the Italians, Spanish, French and Dutch admit no more migrants. Germany is isolated!

On the Greek island, not only a couple of tents are burning. The European idea is also being burnt,

            Steffi Lemke (Greens): As if you understood what Europe is!

the solidarity, the stability and the close cohesion of the nations of Europe. And for that, you with your policy are to answer!  

So why does Germany stand so alone?

            Filiz Polat (Greens): How much speaking time does he still have?

How is it your neighbors do not wish, at any price, to follow your ostensibly good policy, your good example?

            Vice-president Claudia Roth (Greens): Herr Baumann, come to an end, please.

Because they have no heart? No! Because they have more brains, ladies and gentlemen!

            Steffi Lemke (Greens): All of which you must read! Not once can he                                                        speak freely!

 

 

[trans: tem]

           

 

 

Rainer Kraft, September 18, 2020, Nord Stream 2

German Bundestag, September 18, 2020, Plenarprotokoll 19/177, pp. 22317-22318. 

These two motions under debate deal with either the continuation or the discontinuance of the Nord Stream 2 project, a gas pipeline which shall yearly bring 55 billion normative cubic meters of natural gas via the Baltic Sea to Germany and the EU. The predecessor project has been completely utilized since 2018.

This energy will be urgently required in Germany. With the planned withdrawal from nuclear and coal energy, power plant capacity in Germany will by 2022 be reduced by some 8 terawatt hours which last year had been delivered to industrial sites in Germany – predictable, reliable, of good value; so to say, sustainable. This electricity will be lacking.

Business associations and the Federal Ministry for the Economy agree that gas power plants must in the future fill this deficit. That this, as opposed to electricity generated by nuclear power, increases CO₂ emissions is apparently a consequence desired by you. In a land of little green elves, it is of course believed that by a building-up of so-called renewables the deficit can be closed. That however is, with permission, complete humbug.

The missing 80 terawatt hours correspond to about half the amount of electricity which wind and solar altogether have generated in the past year. The creation of this wind and solar capacity has cost 20 years and hundreds of billions of euros.

The most hopeless dreamers in your ranks do not believe it possible to now procure an additional 50 percent build-up by 2022, especially when in the coming years many of your installations are omitted from the assessment and then, on account of being uneconomic, will be permanently shut down.

Your electro-fidget installations [Zappelstromanlagen] generate electricity for a great diversity of regions and not for where it is needed. The necessary electrical distribution lines have in part still not been planned. In contrast to that, there exists in Germany over 500,000 kilometers of presently available natural gas lines which can be connected to any of the newly planned power plant sites. Furthermore, a gas and steam power plant, in contrast to the low-value energy generation methods compelled by you, delivers great amounts of valuable district heating.

And while it may not actually interest you, let us nevertheless speak for once of the citizens’ money. Gas is currently more expensive than brown or bituminous coal. With the withdrawal from coal and nuclear power, price increases are to be expected here which then must be borne by businesses and the people. However, thanks to Nord Stream 2, the delivered amounts will evidently be increased and energy experts in fact expect a price reduction per cubic meter of gas – not only in Germany, but also in the bordering European states. For all the European nations and for the transit nations Ukraine and Poland, for whom you are constantly concerned, a reduced gas price is expected, as per the experts of the EWI and the University of Cologne.  

Ladies and gentlemen, so you see: We need this gas line – in fact on account of your energy policy. Had we an energy policy built on modern nuclear and coal power plants, we could have the luxury of questioning the project. Yet you yourselves with your bungled energy transformation have left no alternative to piping the gas.

            Johann Saathoff (SPD): What has that to do with sustainability? How is that                                             defined as sustainability?

Not only we see it so but, according to a poll by the ZDF “Politbarometers”, so do 70 percent of the citizens of this country. The best for last: Nord Stream 2 would be a significant economic factor in an otherwise structurally weak federal state. This gas supply can produce what you so happily promise in flowery speeches in the Bundestag: Sustainable workplaces with which people in their Heimat may have an honorable living and so contribute to a social, progressive Mecklenburg-Vorpommern.

Thanks.

 

[trans: tem]

 

Alice Weidel, September 16, 2020, Sustainability

German Bundestag, September 16, 2020, Plenarprotokoll 19/175, pp. 21976-21977.

Right honorable Herr President. Right honorable ladies and gentlemen. Worthy colleagues.

Sustainability, that is one of the most abused terms of our time. Sustainability is a conservative idea which in essence says: Act with full responsibility, think in terms of generations, maintain the fundamentals of life and economy and plunder not der Substanz. Thus, the protection of environment and nature is a most profoundly conservative matter.

It is thus yet more ominous that these matters have been pirated by green and leftist eco-marxists and perverted into their opposite and the Union simply joins in that. The consequence is a dialectical revaluation and contortion of terms which drips from every line of this UN resolution. Sustainability must now serve as a pretext for eco, climate and environmental socialism, for global redistribution and for a planned economy on a worldwide scale. Your policy systematically plunders the bases of our welfare, of our cultural identity and of our very existence.

Sin number one: Climate defense and energy transformation. You squander billions and billions of euros on the illusion that Germany could influence the climate by demolishing its industrial core. The result is a gigantic waste and mis-allocation of resources and the crippling of productive economic power which will be wanting for future challenges. You disfigure our forests and fields with windmills which kill innumerable birds of prey and insects

            Marianne Schieder (SPD): Gott, oh Gott!

            Matthias W. Birkwald (Linke): It’s getting good!

and yet you know not from where in the future shall come more secure and more affordable electricity for households and businesses, and are quite silent as to the enormous additional requirement for E-mobility.

            Matthias W. Birkwald (Linke): Better windmills than nuclear reactors!

You ruin our auto industry, the backbone of our national economy, with absurd EU limitations on combustion engine vehicles and the planned economy promotion of non-competitive electric autos. Over 50,000 additional jobs are on the verge in the automobile branch: At Schaeffler, Daimler, MAN and other firms. The unemployment of hundreds of thousands will follow and for that Corona is not guilty.

The second, great ordnungspolitische case of sin: The euro rescue and the handling of the Corona crisis. Mountains of debt, bail-out packages and record taxes are the exact opposite of sustainability. It is the billions of euros which you give away at the stroke of a pen that are however lacking in this country.The monetary socialism of the ECB portends the impoverishment of the Mittelstand and the middle class by inflation and financial repression, creeping statism and the annihilation of independent livelihoods.

And you learn nothing from your failures. You mis-use the pictures from Moria to force a second 2015 on our own citizens. The costs of what is in fact unlimited migration rupture the social system and destroy the basis of our economic and social welfare. The accompanying loss of freedom of opinion and security undermine the fundamentals of the democratic Republic. A hyper-moral migration policy, which leverages right and law and ignores the facts and limits of carrying capacity, divides society and it divides Europe.

He who without limit imports the poverty of this world does not help the poor but impoverishes himself and in the end can no longer help anyone. Only a country which knows and advocates its own interests and which preserves and increases its welfare can determine its place in the world and attend to a responsibility for others. You however do the exact opposite and that is certainly not sustainable.

 

[trans: tem]