5 August 2025: Germany: Five Things

 1.  Lot of talk going on within CDU-CSU-SPD coalition.....massive reform  likely coming for welfare and pensions.  'Hard line' is used over and over.

Burger-Geld (the welfare program) amounted to 9-percent of the total gov't budget in 2024....roughly 47-billlion Euro.  

It would appear that if you are collecting welfare, without working....there's going to be intense pressure applied to force you into a job.

2.  Gov't statistics released......within Germany, 200 packs of wolves....1,600 total wolves in the country.

Talk is getting blunt....wolf hunting likely to be approved by the end of 2025.  Limited hunting to be allowed in 2026....my humble belief. They aren't saying the number of permits....but I would imagine at least 100 minimum per year to be issued.

3.   CSU Party pushing hard to lessen welfare payments to Ukrainians in  Germany.  Based off a slide I saw last night....around 20-percent of the total sum of welfare, is hooked to Ukrainians in Germany. 

4. The deportation flight to Afghanistan, which departed from Leipzig in mid-July, carried 81 folks.....3 of which  were housed in psychiatric hospitals.

This started up a discussion over if it's right to take mental cases out of Germany.

The curious thing...as folks enter Germany, there is no mental eval to determine if you are crazy or sane.  So if the gov't accidentally discovers 3 years later that you are a severe case of paranoid schizophrenia....there's not much they can say or do.

5. In this judge nominee case brewing....yesterday, a 86-page report was published....where plagiarism hunter Stefan Weber made new allegations against Frauke Brosius-Gersdorf (the SPD candidate for the German supreme court). He argues in the news piece that the husband of Brosius-Gersdorf....likely "authored almost or entirely his doctoral thesis."

So it's not only the wife, but the husband as well.

Pretty odd situation brewing.

I would offer the humble observation....if you opened up 10,000 thesis projects and sent AI to audit them....more than a quarter would have 'problems'.