Germany's Freefall

Hermann RochholzGermany's FreefallHow Ideology Destroys a Country a Second Time

Even if everyone agrees,everyone can be wrong.Bertrand RussellPhilanthropic people lose all sense of humanity.It's their distinguishing characteristic.Oscar Wilde

1st Edition 2021: 2021/09/03(coincident to 2nd German edition)Text and Cover:© Dr.-Ing. Hermann RochholzFreefall_202109_A1_epubV51Typesetting: LibreOffice WriterDiagrams: LibreOffice CalcCover: LibreOffice Draw(epub converter: Calibre)

Everything’s just fine in Germany, isn’t it?

Everything’s being converted to organic. People want to live healthy, long lives. That’s why all herbicides are being banned from our farmlands. Somehow we’ll manage without them. The fields are being “re-naturalized” through reforestation. Moreover, corn is being planted in order to produce biodiesel. Food will surely come from somewhere.

The climate problem and environmental protection can be easily solved simply by installing wind power plants, expanding photovoltaics and shutting down those coal and nuclear power plants. At the same time, people are protesting against wind turbines, power lines and new storage power stations for the sake of preserving the environment. Electricity will soon be used to charge the batteries in electric cars, produce hydrogen or, better yet, “liquid fuels” – something that should have been done a long time ago. No problemo!

The plastic in the oceans can be dealt with by banning plastic straws, and many “celebs” are campaigning against plastic waste on television. We simply dump our plastic waste free of charge in China in order to explain environmental protection to them. Wow!

Innovators like Elon Musk are promising a wonderful future: Mars flights, “hyperloops” and electric cars will revolutionize life. Just what everybody needs! Artificial intelligence will help – somehow. Air taxis are regarded by visionaries as a future means of transport because in five years’ time we’ll all be surely flying out and about in them. They’ll help us save the world!

Well, a few tiny problems persist. Germany’s railways have punctuality issues with their ICE (Intercity Express) fleet of high-speed trains. The opening of Berlin’s Brandenburg Airport was delayed by nine years in November 2020. There’s the “Stuttgart 21” railway project, the Hamburg opera house, and the Gorch Fock (tall ship) overhaul – all more than 10 times as expensive as estimated. The G36 light rifle shoots around street corners. German ammunition depots only have enough in reserve for one week at most. And the car industry is cheating on its reported 2003 to 2017 emissions figures. Replacement windows cost €10,000 each in public buildings. Refurbishing the federally sponsored swimming pools is taking a bit long at eight years, and big newspaper publishing houses are telling stories that have been completely invented as fact.

But even that’s very easy to get a grip on: The EU simply passes a regulation to ensure that cars produce almost 40% less CO2 from 2030 onward – problem solved! After all, star journalist Claas Relotius was fired. “DER SPIEGEL” magazine is doing proper reporting now. Starting today, Volkswagen is honest once again, as they declare that they only want to build electric cars. Starting today, the managing directors of Berlin Brandenburg Airport LLC are telling the truth as they assure us that the airport will open “by the end of the year”. All problems are solved! Wonderful, isn’t it?

The unemployment figures are as low as never before, and that just happens to always be the case prior to every election. Great!

This is what the “quality” press is reporting. It now boasts a “Fact Finder” that guarantees not to report false stories because it’s a “Fact Finder”, after all; and journalists who find facts can easily judge what is indeed a fact or what’s nonsense due to their excellent technical-mathematical training. Down with the fake news!

We simply ditch all our pesticides and everything’ll be solved! For centuries, farmers only wanted to support the chemical industry and poison the population and, of course, themselves, too. What morons!

You get the feeling that everyone in Germany nowadays carries the surname Baerbock, Habeck (Green politicians) or Longstocking. Mrs. Longstocking is, of course, a Swede, who, as Pippilotta Långstrump, is acting as a certain role model for her young audience.

And never has anyone ever come up with the idea of running transport vehicles in a vacuum before. Elon Musk is certainly the very, very first to do so; and fires have never existed in Australia before: Even 1,000 years ago, the Aborigines had boasted an army of volunteer firefighters who arrived immediately on the scene with their fire flappers and water-filled bladders – or was that an alien fire brigade? I’m not sure anymore.

This is the revision of a book that has not yet been published in the English language. It has been updated and restructured. The introduction was shortened, diagrams were added and, among other things, the chapters “Manipulation Instruments of a Democracy”, “Framing”, “Fact Finder” and “Press” added as well. Calculations were moved to the appendix, which is marked using curly brackets or braces {}. Examples of journalistic reporting are depicted in a magazine that sold fairy tales as facts, and there’s a glossary.

I hereby thank all those people who provided me with material and with constructive criticism. I also thank my Internet discussion partners who opened my eyes. Some “visions” were far beyond what I could have imagined myself as an engineer.

Table of Contents

Introduction

Evaluating the System

Opinion versus Facts

The Other Point of View

Statistics

Statistical Errors and Statistical Abuse

Imagination

Consequences

Physics, Technology and Math

Efficiency

The Last Percentages – Cutting Losses

Standards and Guidelines

Technical “Spoilsports”

Wind Turbines

Electric Scooters

Outer Space Transporters

Carbon Fiber Concrete

Elbow Pads and Citybike Frames

Summary of the “Spoilsports”

Perfection Mania

“The Good Old Days”

The Terrible New Times

Fashion – Perfecting the Body

Delusional Causes

Religions of the Modern World

Plastic Waste

Burning (Plastic) Materials

Consequences

“Side Effects”

Our Luxury Problem: Food and Toxin

Toxins in Food

Organic – What’s That?

Poison – What’s That?

Psychological Tricks and Manipulations

DDT – Modern Colonialism Included

The Good German Chlorine Chicken

Gene Food

“Superfoods”

Measuring and Detecting Poisons

Argument s …

Energy and Supply

Systems

Unit of Energy

The Energy Requirement

Origins of Energy

Energy Demand of Humans

Society, “Devourer” of Fossil Energies

Germany’s Energy

Power Plant Types

Nuclear Power Plants

Coal and Gas Power Plants

Renewable Energies

Installed Power and L oad P eaks in Germany

Modern Energy Problems

Fossil Energy – Unanswered Questions

Population Density

Mobility

The Efficiency of Internal Combustion Engines

Electric Cars

Comparing Combustion Engines and E-Cars

Additional Power Plant Capacity for E-Cars

Hydrogen

Network Overload from Electric Cars?

Charging Stations

Positions of Professor Quaschning

Science and Faith

Conspiracy Theories and Their Parallels

Technical (Il)logic

Methods and Psychology of Conspiracy

Faith or Knowledge

Modellings

Limits of Knowledge

Knowledge of the Basics

Delusional Believers

Nuclear Power is Cheap. Safety makes it Expensive.

The Risk is Small, but Present.

Compromises

Compromises vs. Private Interests

Normal Insanity

Elon Musk

Flight to Mars

Starlink

Hyperloop

Electric Air Taxis

Japanese Trains

“Carbon Dioxide Fans”

Rezo’s “Evidence”

Green Counterproductivity

Nuclear Power Plants

Raccoons, Wolves, Beavers and Other Invasive Species

Dying Bees

Killing Weeds with Heated Steam

Grain, Corn and Organic Potatoes

“Renaturalization”

Australian Bushfires

Causes

Kant Sends His Regards

Self-Deception

The Modern Trade in Indulgences

Implementing Demands

Anti-Logical Psyche

Cognitive Dissonance

The Addiction to Conformity

Dunning-Kruger Effect

Backfire Effect

Secondary Effects

Creating Personal Truth

Opinion, Prejudice and Conviction

Affect Heuristics

Hand-Picked, Universally Valid Standards

“The Normals”

Normal Pathological Traits?

The Addiction to Please

Asia

Europe

Computers

Professorships

Shortage of Skilled Workers

Real Work

Non-Knowledge

Volkswagen (VW)

Planned or Unplanned Obsolescence

German Press Strategies

Manipulated Unemployment Figures

Expropriating the Elderly

Manipulation Instruments of a Democracy

Pseudo Solutions

“Coffin Nails”

The G36 Rifle

Fire Protection at Berlin Brandenburg Airport (BER)

Soft Skills Are Not Hard Skills

Insider of German politics

Education and Training

Education

The Education-Suicide Society

Official Denigration of Science Education

How Do You Come Up With These Ideas?

Dissemination

Lack of Frustration Tolerance

The Fun and Happiness Society

Analyses

If You Want It – Then Do It Skillfully!

The Circumstances

Smartphones and Computers

One-Dimensional System Analyses

Results of this Policy

Abuse of Education for Political Purposes

Anxiety-“Education” of the Germans

Germans “Democracy”

The Error Unculture

Politically Opportune Lies

Idealized Frauds?

Intelligence and Profession

Pigeonhole Arguments

Framing

Additional Communication Unculture

“Application Example”: A Discussion about CO2

The World of Politicians

The World of Journalists

Framing Manuals

Analysis of Journalistic Opinion Making

Examples of Journalistic Morality

Incompetence at its Finest

The “Fact Finder”s

Democratic Press Censorship

Summary

Calculations

Glossary

Quotes

Bibliography

Introduction

How can you spread a doomsday mood when everything’s fine and the quarterly figures of the German Federal Government regularly promise a surplus? Even former East Germany, the GDR, had only disseminated positive things to say about the state. Conversely, people in the west of the republic had mainly heard about the bad things happening in the east. Why should that be any different today? Most facts are freely accessible. However, they have to be interpreted and put into context. It’s not necessary to recount a lot of new material. You have to know, interpret, link and possibly even compare information. Only then can it be evaluated. It was known, for example, that the automotive industry alone intends to lay off at least 50,000 workers in Germany in 2019. “Socially acceptable” this was called to make it sound upbeat. But the jobs are gone. “Economically viable” this ain’t. It’s, after all, the economy that has to bear the burden of a social system that pays the unemployed.

I’m not a clairvoyant – nor am I a futurologist. If that giant volcano erupts under Yellowstone National Park before this book is published, then the predictions made in this book will be false. But that’s unlikely to happen.

Some people think they know what the world will look like in 100 years, wavering between their idea of utopia and dystopia. When I was growing up, one utopia could be found in the book “The Basics of the 21st Century”. The author was Mr. Gustav Schenk. He extrapolated technology and physics to the present century. The approach was a technical-physical one. To him, as a scientist, it was obvious: Any development will follow logic, which it did at the time.

Great famines still existed forty years ago; reports on the “Biafra children” went around the world. This was taken up in the dystopian movie “Soylent Green”, a portmanteau of “soy” and “lentils” – dyed green. It wasn’t veggies but human flesh as it turned out. By the way, nutrition won’t be a problem since a continuous yield increase and yield security could be achieved through the development of highly specific equipment. However, this is being slowly eliminated in Europe now.

The title of the book is “Germany’s Freefall”. When you jump from the 30th floor of a high-rise building, nothing will happen to you during the fall because you’re weightless. It will, however, become “slightly problematic” when you hit the ground. When I predicted the opening of Berlin Brandenburg Airport in 2013 (planned for 2011) to be 2022/23, it merely elicited a head-shaking response. Unfortunately, I was pretty correct (It was late 2020 now – a 9 year delay). If only 4% of the defects there could have been eliminated by 2012, then it would have been completely unrealistic to achieve the remaining 96% by 2013. Mathematics is real and has nothing to do with “pessimism” or “optimism”.

In mid-May 2019, a headline from the German newspaper “Die Welt” declaring “Why the German Prophets of Doom are Wrong” asked: “Where does this German Angstlust (or “delight in fear”) come from?” The first sentence of the article reads: “The unemployment rate is lower than ever before...” But this isn’t correct: Germany has renamed more than half of its unemployed in a law: All those over the age of 58 who have not found employment after one year are to be dubbed the “underemployed”. Why was such a law passed, and why does an article with this kind of information start with the word “unemployed?” Exactly this kind of thing demonstrates that things are going downhill because these sorts of arithmetic gymnastics should normally not be necessary. In a separate chapter, I will unravel exactly these kinds of statistics in detail because it shows the care used to manipulate them. By the way, this seems to be what Germany does best. Other statistics also reveal that an enormous amount of effort was put into presenting figures in a way that achieves an optimal manipulative effect.

The above reports, which gloss over current politics with “crooked figures”, were published just prior to the German elections. Nobody cares two hoots about them. In contrast, bogus slogans and pseudo-arguments to be found in YouTube videos (“Rezo”) “The Destruction of the party CDU” virtually trigger a government crisis.

When you, like me, predict company bankruptcies (“Cassandra syndrome”) and back these up with the facts (losses in the millions combined with technical incompetence) you aren’t taken seriously. A friend had predicted another bankruptcy with these words: “All he does is jet around the world – that can’t go on very much longer.” The company owner had later declared that he “had trusted the wrong people”. I could have told him that beforehand. I knew some of them personally: managers who just blew a lot of hot air (wind power).

Therefore, you can predict the future with relative certainty when you look at it from a neutral, critical point of view and without prejudice at the current time. The sense of reality of the people involved doesn’t change. It allows you to conclude how things will continue. Incidentally, this company owner is starting all over again now and is blindly trusting in his Chinese counterparts. People don’t change and, apparently, they can’t be helped.

I was wrong predicting the insolvency of another company (it occurred 10 years later). It had squandered millions in the triple digits. This exacts its revenge when the company doesn’t happen to be Volkswagen. An insolvency at VW could place the German state of Lower Saxony, which holds large blocks of its shares, in financial straits. That’s a risk we know from the banks: Whenever a company is in really bad shape, the taxpayers have to foot the bill. How big this risk is yet to be carefully assessed. To date, people assume something like this won’t happen – which is what we thought regarding the banks.

“Stupid German money” is making the international rounds. Germans can now be sold all kinds of junk because when you lack the necessary expertise you’re forced to rely on other people. That’s why Germany is increasingly becoming a state of consultants [33]. The stupid thing is that consultants have to sell themselves and, in most cases, deliver (consulting) results that a client exactly wants to hear.

This “fall” is progressing ever faster as follows: Europe and Asia are swapping places. Asians will soon be telling the Europeans what to do. They’re doing so already today, which everybody’s noticing but nobody has fully realized yet. That’s also why the Asian and European systems are being scrutinized. China, by the way, will be the second country to have humans landing on the moon. They’ve already landed on the dark side of the moon with robots. This was an innovation because any data transmission to and from it requires a satellite to orbit the moon.

In summary, it is apparent that the system has become unstable. However, the local systems are still stable, therefore the swap cannot be halted at this point.

When it comes to the facts, this post-factual and quixotic point of view and German politics and industry are all working hand in hand for the purpose of maintaining power. The press uses pseudo-competent reporting to direct the focus onto the wrong things. This is obviously their usual practice and an expression of “political correctness” or “morality”.

The press must sell itself, and problems don’t sell. This word, “problem”, isn’t supposed to be used anymore anyway; it’s a no-no or “No-Go” in new German speak/Denglish. The strategy of the press is to predict a golden future while reporting indignantly about the “idiots” opposed to this future. This allows their readers to feel “educated”.

Below is a brief analysis of educational systems, as the prosperity of any industrialized society is built on qualified education. Nobody seems to have properly understood this yet, although China, in particular, has demonstrated that its prosperity and food supply have improved significantly through education, despite its rapid population growth. At the same time, I will reference our political system, parliamentary democracy, an open, neutrally informed society and how the thinkers of our time assume that this will all work out in the long run.

The challenges resulting from technical and scientific progress

and its associated globalization are mounting like never before.

The issues are manifold: Education (this deficiency is etiological), German notions about the environment (these will get Germany into the biggest trouble regarding its own energy policies and food supply), and liberal do-gooderism (currently dividing society over the migration issue in the belief in the superiority of one’s own ethical views and economic might). It all interlocks (one system). It’s a vicious circle with a self-reinforcing, escalating effect.

The topics vary in complexity, so let’s start with a relatively simple subject that reveals the mindsets and their paradoxical effects. Germans like to be engaged in ecological discussions. Ancient Rome had bread and circuses to keep the populace happy. The “educated” German is more demanding in this regard with endless discussions about bottle and can deposits, glyphosate, dying bees, wicked pesticides, acrylamide and nitrogen oxides. It gets tricky when it comes to wind turbines because these were first touted as the “savior of the system”, but then made the bogeyman as their danger to birds, bats and, finally, insects became apparent. Year-long discussions were the result. The perfect occupational therapy.

Even when you were happy to have despaired and given up early on your science lessons back in school, these days you nevertheless want to join in and express your displeasure about “wicked German industry”. Some may indeed be wicked, no doubt, but they are, in fact, happy about any arguments made at this superficial level because these can easily be debunked. Environmentalists do a disservice to the real environmental sinners. One side effect is that farmers, for example, no longer find it worthwhile to farm in an environmentally friendly manner: They’re pilloried across the board by the media anyway.

The logic from large sections of the population seems questionable. The works council is bribed with hookers. Efficient cars are sold with magnesium tailgates and lead on the rear axle. Entire countries are defrauded on a professional scale. The entire German (and German only) clientele is left out in the rain when an entire series of improperly designed small engines is produced that breaks down in winter while diesel engine technology was being taken down the wrong road for an entire decade. You then commit yourself 100% to electric mobility and – poof – it’s “the good guys” again, i.e. those who’re doing everything right, even when these vehicles are supposed to be charged at 350 kW. Not even the Americans can “manage” something like that.¹

This makes Germany look ridiculous. “Baizuo” (“White Leftist”) is the Chinese derogatory term for a morally superior and naively arrogant white person.

Notes on my own behalf:

The book doesn’t primarily deal with climate and climate change. Certainly humans have their fingers in that pie, at least as far as the course of events is concerned because its rapid progression. However, climate change is often used to prove that the move towards alternative energy, i.e. “the energy turnaround”, will work out. Any causality that the move towards alternative energy will work out just because climate change is real, however, is not given. Apparently, it’s assumed that a solution is basically available for every problem. That’s certainly incorrect. Moreover, environmental protection first and foremost costs money and must be driven forward with a lot of technical knowledge. There are no “patent solutions” in this regard. Therefore, this book mainly describes subjects that can be evaluated on a scientific basis.

This book will most likely include (a few) false facts as well. If the author knew where to find them, he would have avoided them. But this is no proof that this book is only written with a lot of nonsense. If one were to argue in this manner, as is common practice these days, a person like Immanuel Kant would have been no where in sight: He thought to darken his room to keep out the vermin, a common plague at the time. No one would think of condemning Kant just because of a single weird, erroneous judgment, especially since he had created the Categorical Imperative that we (would like to) employ today (see Kant Sends His Regards).

When I speak about “the journalists”, for example, the author means the predominant part or their average. Reasonable journalists exist, too. Who these are can hopefully be assessed by the reader once he or she has read this book. The world is not as simple as it is made out to be. That’s why this book begins with a few chapters on possible strategies in how to evaluate the systems that abound around us.