From my observations, the people of Europe are evenly divided into two groups: those who want Obama to win and think he will, and those who want Obama to win, but think "they" won't let him.

Remember, if the world ends in about a week, it's all Europe's fault.

Check out this PDF file (in German, but still readable enough for English speakers). It tracks the number of people who are either Protestant ("evangelisch"), Roman Catholic ("römisch-katholisch"), no affiliation/non-believing ("ohne Konfession"), Muslims ("moslemisch"), and Other ("Sonstige").

The basis of this data is the official registration of each person. In Germany, you have to declare your affiliation for tax purposes, so that your church or other group gets their share of the tax support (if they collect it). There are predefined abbreviations to use for each major religious group. For those groups that do not actually collect church tax, there is still usually a separate registration to track them.

One thing anyone will notice is that the two mainline church groups, Protestant (actually an umbrella of the main Protestant churches, but not counting "free churches" that don't receive state support, such as Baptists) and Roman Catholic, have lost huge chunks of the population over the last 50 years, going from roughly 45-50% each in 1950 to in the low 30s today. Thus on that score, those who are fearmongering about Islam taking over Europe would seem to be right, in that mainline Christianity is indeed collapsing in Germany (a bellwether for Europe), and the trend is accelerating.

Muslims went from not even being on the radar in 1950 to 3.9% of the population today. That too seems to support the fear expressed that Islam is taking over.

However, note two things. One, Islam is growing, but its growth is dwarfed by the "Konfessionslosen". Two, the study notes that the data registers "Muslims" as being such not just by tax cards, but also by origin -- so that many people who are registered as "Muslim" are not actually believers, but are culturally Muslims, such as Turks. They estimate that no more than half are actually in any Islamic groups of any kind, and the bulk of them are in a Turkish Muslim association mainly noted for its mild form of Islam. And many Turks have actually registered as being "Konfessionslos", that is, officially nonbelieving. Indeed there is even a Central Committee of Ex-Muslims (the name is a tongue-in-cheek reference to the Central Committee of Muslims and Central Committee of Jews in Germany).

Of course, before the atheists among us get too slap-happy, I should note that the "Konfessionslose" statistic is itself somewhat misleading. It primarily registers those who do not wish their tax money to go to the churches or organizations in the church tax system (though the churches that do collect church tax require their members to pay it), not what they actually believe. Thus not all those people are actually atheist or agnostic -- not even close (though that group is indeed growing dramatically). Anglicans in Germany, for example, do not pay church tax -- and thus aren't listed in the statistics, and my tax card claims I'm "Konfessionslos", even though I most certainly am not. Same goes for Baptists, Pentecostals, Mormons, and many other Christian groups not in the church tax system (while Buddhists, etc. are summed up under "Other"). Put them all together, and you get pretty significant numbers.

The other hitch with the "Konfessionslos" numbers is that many people game the system, a side effect of the church tax. There is a loophole in the law that is increasingly being exploited, where married couples with only one income earner (which is still very common in Germany) have the non-earning spouse register with the church, and the breadwinner declare himself or herself be "Konfessionslos" -- thus entitling the family to weddings, baptisms, outreach and so on, while not paying any church tax. The churches know about this and are trying to figure out ways of "fixing" the problem (such as it is), but even so, there are very many supposedly non-Christian people who are, at least notionally, Christian.

Even so, these numbers do put the phobia of a supposedly soon-to-be Islamic Europe into perspective. Not only is Islam still tiny in Germany in spite of generations of massive immigration from Turkey, what little Islam there is -- no more than 2% of the population, roughly in line with the percentage in America -- tends to be of the very mild variety. There is little chance of extremist Islam taking root.

The US health care system now ranks dead last among 19 industrialized countries in a Commonwealth Fund survey of preventable deaths and timely health care. (To my surprise, Germany only ranks only eighth.) In the late 1990s it still was 13th on the list, but has failed to improve as quickly as the other countries.

Even the UK ranks higher. (And that, dear friends, is saying something.)

Ye gods.

I was pretty bemused to see the slogan of Fred Thompson's Presidential campaign.



Security, Unity, Prosperity.

That happens to be almost exactly the words used by European politicians (particularly from the socialist left) for what they want for the European Union (Sicherheit, Solidarität, Wohlstand).

Hey, his campaign colors are even blue and gold.



O...kay. Well, maybe this is a sign that a President Thompson won't be saying any "Old Europe" nonsense. :-D

This was originally in response to a post by neim0 in Some Woman's journal. I moved it here. neim0 asked if Germany's population was still increasing, and if so, if it was due solely to immigration; he also asked about what life is like for Jews in Germany.

Germany's population is more or less holding steady or very slightly decreasing, and even then it's not imploding wholesale because of immigration. (Though Hannover actually managed a slight increase in its birth rate for once this year -- woo-hoo!)

There are literally whole towns being dissolved (as in, torn down and wiped off the map) and counties being merged in eastern Germany to save administration costs. Even here in Lower Saxony, our state, some towns are struggling to survive with occupancy rates of less than 50%. There is also some talk of merging entire states. (Imagine merging, say, Vermont and New Hampshire to save money, and you get the picture of the direness of the situation.) Yet a lot of people here have a "what, me worry?" attitude about it...

Some regions are still growing strongly (not surprisingly those that are heavily Catholic), while the former east is pretty much collapsing wholesale, in spite of the massive (and I mean massive) amounts of money being pumped into it in the form of subsidies and investments by the government (the so-called Solidaritätszuschlag -- an extra tax paid by all Westerners and paid out in the east in the form of investments, tax breaks and subsidies) and much lower cost of living.

As an aside, what gets me is that after the war, they carved up apartments and houses left and right to make space for people (our apartment is actually a third of what was a much larger one before the war -- when it was rebuilt they just carved it up into smaller units). But rather than re-combine them, they just tear them down or leave them standing empty. You can't get larger apartments even if you want them -- 3 and 4 room apartments (plus kitchen, hall and bath) are the norm, 5 and 6 room ones are nearly impossible to find.

Anyway, as for Jews in Germany, it's actually kinda funny. Jews today have the opposite problem of being almost worshipped by a lot of people. I've heard that it's hard to be "normal" as a Jew in Germany just because some people try so hard to be nice to you. Some carry it to the extreme of wanting to be Jewish themselves (which I suppose there's nothing wrong with that, but it does seem a bit odd and some Jews get annoyed by it). Meanwhile there are unfortunately a few idiots running around who wouldn't know a Jew if a bar mitzvah happened right around them, but they spray swastikas on Jewish monuments and so on just to be dumbshits.

Either way, Jewish life is actually starting to come back pretty strongly, so things can't be too bad. Today there's 100,000-200,000 (depending on how you count them) living here and a Jewish rabbinical school, Abraham-Geiger-Kolleg, recently graduated its first students (the first such students since the war), and a number of synagogues have been founded (not least in Munich). We have a synagogue in Hannover, for that matter, though their website is a serious eyesore...and it sure doesn't compare to the original pre-war one destroyed in Kristallnacht.

SiliconJesus predicted in another blog that there won't be an EU in 50 years.

I say poppycock. I think there will be.

What will likely happen is that it will end up as a sort of multi-tiered organization (which it is now anyway, more or less), with varying levels of membership. Germany, France, the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, Spain, Portugal, and Italy, possibly also Austria will likely form a "core" Europe that will get ever more united, while other countries will pick and choose portions of the agreements that make up that unity.

That is what is already happening now and has been happening all along ever since the end of World War II. The EU never was a clearly defined entity like the United States, and the attempt to make it one -- the EU Constitution -- failed. So now it's back to the ad hoc patchwork process that came before, and everyone seems to be more or less happy with it.

Germany and France in particular constantly look for ways to get closer, even now, and the Benelux countries tend to go along with it, as do Italy, Spain, and Portugal. For example, there has been talk of joint German-French citizenship for years (even though it was largely rendered moot by the EU) and of a joint currency (which became the Euro) and even of a joint parliament (once in a while joint Franco-German sessions take place, like this one -- sorry, text is in German). Even if the EU itself went down in flames, the next day those countries would get back together.

The EU and its related organizations are already multi-tiered. The UK has its opt-outs in some areas of policy. The UK, Sweden and Denmark stayed out of the Euro. Various EU members are not part of the Schengen immigration area. Some are part of the EU's defense arrangements, some aren't (Ireland and Sweden in particular stayed out in order to stay "neutral"). And then there is the European Free Trade Area, a free trade zone surrounding the EU, whose members have agreed to adopt EU directives but are not actually EU members -- such as Norway, Switzerland and Iceland. (A pretty daft arrangement, but still.)

There is no particular reason this can't continue. The EU itself may need some reform (and it does) but there is no reason that the general arrangement can't continue to work. People predicted doom when it expanded to 27 members, because the consensus model would supposedly destroy it. It works fine anyway.