Jacobin Magazine: Against Janša, Against Brussels

Miro Cerar’s party presided over, nominally speaking, an extremely successful economic era, with economic growth among the highest in the EU. High economic growth, however, came at the cost of growing precarization among young people and unending austerity. Discontent festered below the positive headlines, and union activity increased in both the private and public sectors, as well as in previously nonunionized areas. Then in March of this year, at the very moment when negotiations between the state and the public sector unions had reached a deadlock, Cerar stepped down, bringing an abrupt end to his three-and-a-half-year tenure. [...]

And what, then, of the Right? The base of SDS is quite different from, say, those who attend Hungarian Guard marches. Still, this election marked the first time an SDS leader openly supported far-right organizations (for example, the Slovenian branch of Generation Identitaire / Generacija identitete, a racist movement originating in France). Another new development is the public and financial support from Hungary’s ruling far-right party, Fidesz, and the media companies around the prime minister, Viktor Orban. Orban and SDS leader Janez Janša started their friendship in January 2016, when Orban was visiting Slovenia on official business. After meeting with then-Prime Minister Cerar, he proceeded to a closed-door conference with Janša. Hungarian investments into SDS media outlets followed. Today, three Hungarian media companies connected to Orban own 45 percent of SDS’s media-company shares. Hungarian media also owns 52 percent of Nova Obzorja, which publishes a SDS newspaper, and Nova24tv.si (SDS TV) and New Horizon share the same address. Hungarians have so far invested over 2.2 million euros into SDS media, some of it in the months leading up to the elections. If there was any question of their tightening relationship, Orban also took part in the SDS Congress in May, where he declared his full support for Janša’s party. [...]

During the election campaign, Janša’s party emitted right-wing rhetoric on a whole host of topics, including the migrant crisis, women’s and LGBT rights, and the credibility of mass media. At the same time, the election results do not amount to the so-called Orbanization of Slovenia. SDS won 220,000 votes on June 3, 70,000 less than in 2011, when it came in second. For a party with an especially stable voter base (86.6 percent were return voters), this was a mediocre finish. The success of SDS is always in direct correlation to the amount of broken promises and lack of alternatives coming from the centrist and left-of-center parties. Slovenian society is culturally rather left wing, and can be mobilized against the Right — but it has to consider left parties worthy of support.

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Cuck Philosophy: Did the Sokal affair "destroy postmodernism"?

Politico: Bavaria’s man in Berlin pushes Merkel to brink

By threatening to implement his plan even without Merkel’s approval, he risks forcing the veteran chancellor to fire him — a move that would likely bring down the government and mean the end of both their careers.

It would probably also spell the end of a decades-long alliance between Seehofer’s Christian Social Union (CSU), which campaigns only in Bavaria, and Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU), which runs for elections in the rest of Germany.  [...]

Seehofer has made no bones about where his loyalties lie, even after bowing to party pressure to give up the state premiership. At a CSU convention in Nuremberg last December, he quoted Franz Josef Strauß, his legendary predecessor, saying “Bavaria is our home, Germany our fatherland and Europe our future.” But he also made a key clarification: “For us, Bavaria will always be first.” [...]

Polls suggest the CSU could lose its absolute majority in the state parliament in a replay of its general election disaster from last September, when Merkel’s conservative bloc suffered its worst result since 1949 and hemorrhaged votes to the AfD.

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Al Jazeera: Calls for coup, firing squads: Greek far right angry at name deal

Nikos Voutsis, a member of the ruling Syriza party and president of the Greek parliament, on Friday called for an emergency meeting to temporarily ban the neo-fascist Golden Dawn party from parliament.  [...]

"The extremists of Golden Dawn are threatening democracy and threatening their political adversaries, saying that they want their heads," Kiritsis told Al Jazeera, explaining that Barbarousis's remarks are part of a broader wave of far-right "incitement to violence". [...]

On Wednesday, Ilias Zagoreos, the head of Athens's First-Instance Prosecutor's office, ordered the investigation into potential incitement to commit a crime and other infractions by a right-wing tabloid.

The move came after the tabloid, Makeleio, published an edition with a front-page image depicting the prime minister, president and foreign minister being executed by a firing squad for supposedly "selling out" Greece's exclusive right to the name 'Macedonia'.  

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FiveThirtyEight: Nuclear Power Won’t Survive Without A Government Handout

There are 99 nuclear reactors producing electricity in the United States today. Collectively, they’re responsible for producing about 20 percent of the electricity we use each year. But those reactors are, to put it delicately, of a certain age. The average age of a nuclear power plant in this country is 38 years old (compared with 24 years old for a natural gas power plant). Some are shutting down. New ones aren’t being built. And the ones still operational can’t compete with other sources of power on price. Just last week, several outlets reported on a leaked memo detailing a proposed Trump administration plan directing electric utilities to buy more from nuclear generators and coal plants in an effort to prop up the two struggling industries. The proposal is likely to butt up against political and legal opposition, even from within the electrical industry, in part because it would involve invoking Cold War-era emergency powers that constitute an unprecedented level of federal intervention in electricity markets. But without some type of public assistance, the nuclear industry is likely headed toward oblivion. [...]

Instead, it’s the cost of upkeep that’s prohibitive. Things do fall apart — especially things exposed to radiation on a daily basis. Maintenance and repair, upgrades and rejuvenation all take a lot of capital investment. And right now, that means spending lots of money on power plants that aren’t especially profitable. Historically, nuclear power plants were expensive to build but could produce electricity more cheaply than fossil fuels, making them a favored source of low-cost electricity. That changed with the fracking boom, Morgan told me. “Natural gas from fracking has gotten so cheap, [nuclear plants] aren’t as high up in the dispatch stack,” he said, referring to the order of resources utilities choose to buy electricity from. “So many of them are now not very attractive economically.”

Meanwhile, new nuclear power plants are looking even less fetching. Since 1996, only one plant has opened in the U.S. — Tennessee’s Watts Bar Unit 2 in 2016. At least 10 other reactor projects have been canceled in the past decade. Morgan and other researchers are studying the economic feasibility of investment in newer kinds of nuclear power plants — including different ways of designing the mechanical systems of a reactor and building reactors that are smaller and could be put together on an assembly line. Currently, reactors must be custom-built to each site. Their research showed that new designs are unlikely to be commercially viable in time to seriously address climate change. And in a new study that has not yet been published, they found that the domestic U.S. market for nuclear power isn’t robust enough to justify the investments necessary to build a modular reactor industry.

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