Category Archives: Habeas Corpus

Drink Your Fracking Beer Already

May 24, 2013 By in Habeas Corpus, Habitudes, Heconomy, Hideology, High Art, History, Home Cooking, Hurt Feelings, Hypocrisy, Hysteria Tags: , , , , , , Leave a comment

Uh oh. Germans are suddenly worried about their Reinheitsgebot or “German Beer Purity Law” again. And Fracking, I mean.

Fracking

This has to do with the fact that fracking does not stick soley to the only ingredients that may be used in the production of beer: Water, barley and hops. As a matter of fact, I don’t even think that fracking uses barley and hops at all.

I’m interested in tradition, too, of course. But let’s face it, if you’re going to start quoting a 500-year-old “purity law,” quote it right: The law also set the price of beer at 1-2 Pfennig per Maß.

The Brauer-Bund beer association is worried that fracking for shale gas, which involves pumping water and chemicals at high pressure into the ground, could pollute water used for brewing and break a 500-year-old industry rule on water purity.

“Das Reinheitsgebot darf nicht beeinträchtigt werden. Es müssen alle Maßnahmen ergriffen werden, damit das Brauwasser geschützt wird.”

More Senseless Violence

May 13, 2013 By in Habeas Corpus, Hard Facts, Hate, Helplessness, Home Cooking, Hurt Feelings, Hysteria Tags: , , , , , , , , , 1 Comment

In Germany. In Berlin, as a matter of fact. This time without guns.

Jonny K.

A suspect has pleaded not guilty to the beating death of a young man at Berlin’s central Alexanderplatz train station last October – along with five other men who allegedly helped him – as the victim tried to help a friend who was being attacked.

Criminals are criminals and they don’t need guns (or at least not legally obtained ones) to kill or hurt people like this. And I wouldn’t have even mentioned this with the guns if I hadn’t have seen this article today, reminding me of a recent post about gun control:

Gun violence in US has fallen dramatically over past 20 years, Justice Dept. report finds

As for where crime guns came from, the study notes that less than two percent of convicted inmates reported buying their weapons at gun shows or flea markets. The highest number, 40 percent, said the guns came from a family member or a friend. About 37 percent said the weapons were stolen or obtained from an illegal source. The rest say the guns were bought at a retail store or pawn shop.

More German Gun Control In Action

May 10, 2013 By in Habeas Corpus, Habitudes, Hard Facts, Health, Helplessness, Hideology, Hurt Feelings, Hypocrisy, Hysteria Tags: , , , , , , , , , 8 Comments

Germany’s gun control laws are some of the most restrictive in Europe. Unfortunately, not all armed criminals and nutcases who live here appear to have been properly informed.

Gun control

Some idiot just killed three people and injured three more near Aachen, before shooting himself into a coma.

Shootings like this happen quite regulary in this country. Nobody likes to address the issue, other than to suggest introducing even stricter gun control laws, but it happens here quite regularly all the same.

Discussing shootings that take place in US-Amerika, on the other hand, is a downright popular obsession here. This is because Germans feel that Americans need more gun control legislation like the Germans have here in Germany, get it? Me neither.

Der Hintergrund des Amoklaufes ist noch unklar. Man könne nur spekulieren, sagt der Oberstaatsanwalt.

Swabians In Berlin Soon To Be Wearing Yellow Mercedes Stars

May 5, 2013 By in Habeas Corpus, Habitudes, Hard Facts, Hate, Heconomy, Helplessness, History, Home Cooking, Humor, Hurt Feelings, Hypochondria, Hypocrisy, Hysteria Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 2 Comments

Remember that Nazi boycott of Jewish businesses in Berlin back in the bad old days with all those signs and scribblings about “Don’t Buy from Jews!” and the like? Of course you don’t.

Schwaben

But many from Berlin’s enlightened anti-gentrification left do remember and have now come up with the breathtakingly brilliant idea of introducing this same simple asymmetrical tactic against the “hated” Berlin Swabian community by spraying “Don’t Buy from Swabians!” on the walls around town, too.

The evil Swabians are hated here, you see, because they work hard and are successful and make lots of money (and the cliché goes that they’re  tightwads, too, but that’s beside the point) and, through their very presence, therefore increase Berlin property values which is an awful thing to do because those of the enlightened left (like most other Germans) do not own property but prefer to pay rent instead and this pushes the rents up and laber, laber, laber (blah, blah, blah) been there done that.

There can be no losers in Germany in general and Berlin in particular, you see (it’s verboten or something). That’s why there are so many of them here, I guess.

Der anonyme Unmut regt sich gegen die Schwaben, weil sie angeblich die Besonderheiten des Stadtviertels veränderten und die Preise auf dem Wohnungsmarkt in die Höhe trieben. In Berlin leben schätzungsweise rund 300.000 Schwaben.

„Kauft nicht bei Schwab’n!“

This Was Not Planned So It Cannot Be Happening

April 25, 2013 By in Habeas Corpus, Habitudes, Hard Facts, Heconomy, Helplessness, Hideology, High Art, Home Cooking, Humor, Hurt Feelings, Hypocrisy, Hysteria Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Or will not be happening, I should say.

Fracking

As you know, Germany is green. And Germans are greener than green. Why, Germans are so green that Jamaicans want to roll them up and smoke them.

And Germans also like sticking to “the plan,” too (think Stalingrad). So they do not, I repeat do not appreciate it when, as in this case, their ambitious environmental plans get disturbed by unforseen technological developments that were not considered in the original plan and therefore start turning the whole Schlamassel (mess) into a really, really big and annoying, well, Schlamassel (think Stalingrad again).

It goes like this: “Ambitious environmental goals are far less meaningful if the economy withers in achieving them.” So when something really tempting comes along like shale gas drilling (hydraulic fracturing or “fracking”), a technology that could give Germany access to enough reserves to feed natural gas demand for 20 years, then that gets not-so-thoroughly-green people (yes, there still are a few specimens left) to thinking, plan or not.

So there we have it. And that’s the end of it (ask any German Green Shirt). Fracking can’t happen here. It is ideologically inadmissable. Fracking is something that those crazy Americans and their evil multi-national oil companies do, not us (multi-national oil companies are always American, by the way – don’t ask). Nope, fracking can never happen here. Never in a million years. Not this year anyway.

“We are sitting on Swiss cheese. The risks are just too high.”

Where’s The Enlightenment When You Need It?

April 24, 2013 By in Habeas Corpus, Habitudes, Helections, Helplessness, Hideology, Humor, Hurt Feelings, Hypocrisy, Hysteria Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 4 Comments

This is German regulation madness at its best. Or, to be fair, Berliner Green Shirt regulation madness at its best.

Mendelssohn

The city district council of Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg (the Greens) is currently causing not just a little bewilderment by refusing to name the square in front of Berlin’s Jewish Museum after Moses Mendelssohn, the German Jewish Enlightenment philosopher. No, not because they’re anti-Semites (at least not openly). It’s because Mendelssohn was not a woman.

You see, the district parliament decided back in 2005 (Greens and SPD) that 50 percent of the district’s streets and squares had to be named after women. Until that goal is reached, no new streets or squares will be allowed to be named after men, except in exceptional cases. Which this one isn’t, I guess.

This is about as small-minded as you can get, of course, and it fits perfectly with mainstream Green ideology, I find, in that nothing the Greens ever do or say can ever be allowed to be labelled as being small-minded or petit bourgeois in any way. But of course practically everything they do, well, is.

Die kleingeistige Posse spielt vor der Tür des weltweit bekannten Jüdischen Museums. Die Hauptakteure hocken in der mit Abstand stärksten Fraktion des Bezirks: Es sind die Grünen. Sie schämen sich nicht, „das leider falsche Geschlecht“ Mendelssohns in einem Satz mit dem „Projekt Unisextoiletten“ abzuhandeln.

PS: Speaking of Berlin city government in action: Oh boy! The new tourist tax is here! The new tourist tax is here!

Justin Bieber To Spank His Monkey

April 23, 2013 By in Humor, Hysteria, Hypocrisy, Habeas Corpus, Helplessness, High Art, Hard Facts, Hurt Feelings Tags: , , , , , , , , , , 1 Comment

For not having any papers on him after landing in Munich in March. Or he sure would like to spank him now, I bet.

Bieber

The popular god-awful and astoundingly annoying suckling superstar clearly had no idea that German customs authorities don’t cut slack for anybody, not even for monkeys – or a guy who’s last name means “beaver” in German.

His dumbass animal of a monkey “Mally” is still under animal shelter arrest and won’t be going anywhere until Bieber or an actual grownup get in touch with the German customs authorities directly (that is the custom here) and he’s running out of time fast.

This gives Leave It to Beaver a whole new meaning, if you ask me. Whether he spanks his monkey or not.

“Ward, I’m worried about the Beaver.”

Ausgeliefert

April 15, 2013 By in Habeas Corpus, Habitudes, Hard Facts, Helplessness, Hi-tech, Hideology, Higher Education, Home Cooking, Hurt Feelings, Hypocrisy, Hysteria Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 9 Comments

As in being at the mercy of.

Ausgeliefert

Everbody agrees that big American hi-tech companies are fundamentally evil, right? Well they do here in Germany. In Germany’s state-run media, I should say (they actually call these channels “public-service broadcasters” here because that sounds better).

Anyways, the latest greatest twist to the anti-Google/Facebook/Apple/Microsoft/Amazon agitpop over at the ARD is breaking new ground (or maybe it isn’t) by unabashedly inventing witnesses and working/living conditions in one of Amazon’s German plants in a scarry documentary about that horrible company called Ausgeliefert - and all of this while using the generous funding provided by the compulsory charge every German household has to pay to support objective “public-service broadcasters” like these, of course.

Germans have to pay this charge now whether they even own a television or not, by the way. Hmmm. The ARD called their documentary Ausgeliefert (as in being at the mercy of Amazon), and that’s something every German knows about personally already. Being at the mercy of the ARD like they are, I mean.

Dort, gezeigt wurde das in einer angeblichen E-Mail, würden Menschen “abgefüttert wie die Schweine”, hieß es. Eine Behauptung, der CoCo von Anfang an widersprochen hat und nun vor Gericht zunächst Recht bekam. Der besagte Speiseraum existiere gar nicht, so das Unternehmen: “Das ist schlicht eine Erfindung der ARD-Journalisten, gegen die wir auch juristisch vorgehen.”

Der HR hat bereits vor der Gerichtsentscheidung bestätigt und eingestanden, dass der strittige Screenshot der E-Mail “fingiert” gewesen sei. Zudem musste der Hessische Rundfunk über seine Rechtsabteilung zugeben, dass auch eine im Film porträtierte polnische Leiharbeiterin namens Agnieszka Lewandowska “niemals als Leiharbeiterin bei Amazon beschäftigt war.”

German Government’s Concern About NGO Raids Has Russians Shaking In Their Fur-Lined Boots

March 27, 2013 By in Habeas Corpus, Habitudes, Hard Facts, Helplessness, Hideology, Higher Education, Hurt Feelings, Hypocrisy, Hysteria Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

After German Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle himself summoned a Russian envoy to “express the German government’s concern” about a series of raids on German NGOs in Russia, the envoy broke down in tears of regret, fell to his knees, grovelled around for a bit and then promised that his country would never ever ever do anything bad like that again.

Guido

The Russian offices of the Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung and the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung have both come under intense scrutiny recently by Russian authorities seeking “foreign agents” who support domestic dissidents because, well, that’s what Russian authorities do. But all of this will come to a screeching halt now, I guess.

“Hampering the activity of German foundations could inflict lasting damage on bilateral relations.”

Empörungsprofis

March 5, 2013 By in Habeas Corpus, Habitudes, Heconomy, Helplessness, Home Cooking, Humor, Hustle (Hoax), Hypocrisy, Hysteria Tags: , , , , , , , , 1 Comment

Outrage professionals.

Farce

A farce, this “protest movement” at the East Side Gallery. And a well-written article, this is. But sorry, I don’t have the time or the energy to translate it today.

Wo war eigentlich Claudia Roth?

Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.

Join 97 other followers