Germany Best Brand Ever!

I mean nation. Sorry, Germans. I mean country.

Best

Germany knocks USA off Best Nation top spot after 5 years

At least according to something called the Anholt-GfK Roper Nation Brands Index, that is.

Hmmm. I smell a Ratte (rat). GfK stands for Gesellschaft für Konsumforschung (Society for Consumer Research) and is on organization located in a city called Nuremberg. In the best little country in the whole wide cotton-pickin’ world. Jiminy Crickets. Talk about your conflict of Interesse (interest).

Anti-Semites, Pogroms, Nazis…

Racists, shylocks, Asryans, faschists, subhumans, Untermenschen… Did I say anti-Semites?

And Goodwin’s Law, of course. Sheesh. This “endless Hitler vocabulary” ain’t never gonna end. I guess that’s why they call it endless. No class, these guys.

Sheen and Blumenthal had been invited by other parliamentary members of the Left party, Thalheim said. Gysi canceled the meeting because of their “radical” views on Israeli settlement policies, he said.

Anybody Can Land On A Comet

10 years and 6.5 billion kilometers later (give or take a few inches)…

The spaceship Rosetta’s landing probe Philae will be landing on 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. Tomorrow. We hope.

The comet is currently hurtling through space at 24,600 miles per hour and its nucleus is only 2.5 miles wide. Scientists compare the task to a fly trying to land on a speeding bullet.

PS: Why couldn’t they have scheduled this thing to land on 11.11 at 11 o’clock 11 in the morning?

Well There Was No More Wall To Take

So we’ll just steal the balloon stands from last night’s show!

Balloons

They’re going like hotcakes, folks. Or they went like hotcakes, I should say, before the organizers had a chance to clear all of the 7000 away. And the first ones have shown up on eBay, for crying out loud.

Die Ballon-Halter der Lichtgrenze werden offenbar zum Sammlerobjekt. Einige verschwanden nach der Aktion zum 25. Jahrestag des Mauerfalls noch in der Nacht. Der erste war bei Ebay aufgetaucht.

German Of The Day: Der Elende Rest

That means “the miserable remnants” and that’s what singer-songwriter and former East German dissident Wolf Biermann just called SED leftovers the Left Party today at a ceremony commemorating the fall of the Berlin Wall. To their faces. In the Reichstag itself.

Somebody’s got to remind folks about this now and then. Not that anybody here cares…

Eure Sprüche, die habt ihr drauf … ihr müsst mir gar nichts erzählen.”

Let There Be Wall

I mean Lichtgrenze.

The LICHTGRENZE is the light installation along the former path of the wall through the city center. It will trace the division of the city over a stretch of approximately 12 kilometers and with thousands of illuminated balloons as an impressive installation in Berlin from 8 to 9 November, 2014. At once emotional, poetic, and serious, this installation remembers the recent historical event, the fall of the Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989.

Germans Being Assured That Bad Republicans Didn’t Actually Win

“Why the Democrats’ debacle isn’t really a victory for the Republicans,” the title of this here article goes, for instance.

Bad Republican

I would have loved to have read what was surely the profound explanation for just how on earth that can possibly be but then that scary photo of that evil Republican lurking in the shadows wearing a black hat there caught my eye and I just had to click away real pronto-like before he could get the chance to draw me into a maelstrom of evil and villainy and consuming despair.

Die Republikaner feiern einen Erdrutschsieg im Senat. Doch der Machtwechsel wird an der Lähmung der US-Politik kaum etwas ändern.

Once An Ex-Communist Always An Ex-Communist

Another Ex-cellent chance to ex-ceed, I’d say. And a great way to celebrate the coming 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall!

Communist

Well isn’t this special. Germany’s main center-left party, the Social Democrats (SPD) – currently in power in Berlin with Merkel & Co. – said Tuesday a party ballot in eastern Thuringia state showed 70 percent favoring negotiations to join a regional government led by Left Party candidate Bodo Ramelow. The Left Party used to be the PDS which used to be the SED (the East German communist party), of course, but nobody with any manners likes to put it that way so I figured I would.

Do you think this coming ex-communist coalition with the SPD upsets anyone over here? Of course not. The only thing that ruffled a few folks’ feathers was the audacity Germany’s president Joachim Gauck had – a former East German pro-democracy activist – by openly questioning whether a party with communist roots like the Left Party could really be trusted or not. Can you imagine that? Who does this president of Germany think he is anyway? The president of Germany?

“There are parts of this party where I, like many others, have problems developing this trust (he means like the openly Stalinist folks).