Flag waving still leaves a bad taste in many a German mouth, I guess. Especially if the flag in question is 220 square meters in size.
EM 2012 nor not, Berlin officials have refused to let a Turkish store owner mount a huge German flag above his storefront in Neukölln. Ordnung muß sein (order must prevail) again already. “It was not connected properly and covered up a few windows.”
Go Germany!
“Die Entscheidung lag im Ermessen der Beamten vor Ort.”
And in this case it will be about 300,000 euros per day.
European authorities have taken Germany to court for failing to implement the E.U. Data Retention Directive.
The European Commission announced on Thursday that it wants the European Court of Justice to impose a fine of just over €315,000 (US$391,866) a day.
The Data Retention Directive requires telephone companies and ISPs to store huge amounts of telecommunications information, including data about email, phone calls and text messages, for law enforcement purposes.
So much for Germany being the Musterschüler (model student) in all things EU. Germans don’t like this law because they live in a POLICE STATE or something (albeit one that’s all in their minds). It’s not that Germans don’t trust their fellow Germans or anything, you see, it’s just that they don’t trust their fellow Germans.
Hey, they should know. Where there’s smoke there’s fire and all that? I guess I’d pay up, too.
Weil Berlin geltendes EU-Gesetz über die Vorratsdatenspeicherung nicht in nationales Recht übertragen hat, hat die EU-Kommission Deutschland vor dem Europäischen Gerichtshof verklagt.
Damn. It seems just like yesterday that Berlin’s first May Day March Freak Show Riot began. And it ain’t ended yet, 25 long years later. It’s just become more, well, ritualized, profesionalized and – you guessed it – commercialized.
But tradition is tradition. So please remember, all you hotheads out there (despite all the commercialization), just what this day really means, what it’s all about: Violence for violence sake.
YOU are here for a reason, people. So get out there and make me proud.
„Die Berliner haben dieses Ritual satt.”
Is that a German word, or what?
And it looks like it’s a word that’s going to cost Germany millions in fines for not being willing to go along with the guidelines concerning it as determined by the EU.
I mean, we all know that Vorratsdatenspeicherung is a touchy subject and all. Some countries do their Vorratsdatenspeicherung this way, other countries do their Vorratsdatenspeicherung that way. But any way you cut the Vorratsdatenspeicherung cake, Vorratsdatenspeicherung is Vorratsdatenspeicherung and I, for one, find it irresponsible of Germany to just ignore the EU’s Vorratsdatenspeicherung guidelines like that, just because they’re Germany, I mean. All Europeans are in the same Vorratsdatenspeicherung boat, after all.
Who do they think they are, anyway?
You should be ashamed of yourself, Germany. Put that in your Vorratsdatenspeicherung pipe and smoke it.
“Was wir auf den ersten Blick sagen können ist, dass Deutschland anscheinend keinen Fortschritt bei der Umsetzung der EU-Richtlinie zur Vorratsdatenspeicherung gemacht hat und weiterhin EU-Recht verletzt.”
PS: Vorratsdatenspeicherung means data retention (the EU wants to retain data for six months, Germany doesn’t).
And it’s all been downhill, if you ask me.
“A Munich disc jockey held for five hours as a sex slave by a 47-year-old German woman said on Monday he would press charges of sexual coercion and deprivation of freedom against a woman he had met just a few hours earlier in a local pub.”
So let me get this straight. The consenting man goes home with the consenting woman to, you know, consent and all that. And then this, uh, man, ends up calling the police to have them “rescue him” after she locked him inside her place, “hid the key and forced him to have repeated sex with her?”
This is beyond me. Am I the only one who doesn’t understand this? I don’t get grossed out easily but I think I’m about to barf.
“She was sex mad and there was no way out.”
This must have been a big misunderstanding or something. A German-owned freighter loaded with weapons from Iran bound for the Syrian regime of Bashar Assad and stopped on Friday near the Syrian port of Tartus has now disappeared off the watery face of the earth.
Und das ist auch gut so (and a good thing, too), as we all know that Germans would never disregard a weapons embargo, neither for fun nor profit, being the pedantic pacifists they are, so this must have been one of those Fata Morgana things that happen out there on the high seas from time to time.
Weapons from Iran? Maybe it was that infamous ghost ship the S.S. Günter Grass.
Der Frachter, der schweres Militärgerät geladen hat, schaltete seinen Transponder aus und ist nicht mehr zu orten.
And throw away the key. Those no good criminals. Those German tax collectors who have been trading in stolen Swiss goods.
Switzerland has issued arrest warrants for industrial espionage for three German tax collectors who bought (with German government approval) the bank details of German tax evaders in Switzerland.
“For Germany, the issue is one of tax fraud, leading the country to authorize three tax inspectors to buy leaked stolen data on tax evaders in 2010. This legally dubious approach wasn’t an issue domestically because of the common belief that the state was collecting its alleged due and it effects only ‘the rich.’ But in reality, because Switzerland has different laws, the officials acquired stolen property to use as evidence, and paid the thieves €2.5 million for it. Anyone who dismisses this as a trifle needs legal tutoring.”
“Just imagine how Germany would react were the Chinese government to buy automobile designs from German car company employees to speed up industrial development — with the argument that patent laws are too strong in the West.”
An evicted group of about 20 subculture artist/activist types chained to the remains of Berlin’s graffiti-covered Tacheles alternative scene “living space” ruin is about to be forcibly dragged out kicking and screaming into German reality by black-clad gentrification special forces troops right here live on TV, I hope, but nobody can tell me when. Or on which channel or anything (maybe later in the Internetz?).
The group is defending “one of Berlin’s last bastions of alternative subculture, and are fighting eviction ahead of plans to develop it (the Tacheles) as an office and luxury apartments complex” and has to be dealt with accordingly, of course. After years of pussyfooting around with them first, I mean.
I would advise them not to let the door hit them on the way out but there are no doors at the Tacheles as they were surely used as firewood long ago during one of those quaint, Stone Age let’s-not-freeze-to-death-tonight gettogethers so popular with artist types there and elsewhere here in Berlin.
Tacheles “is just the latest in a long line of public spaces that have been lost to private investors” and will surely be missed by all, myself not included.
Darko stands behind an iron gate, his bare chest daubed in red paint with the words “victim of bank.”
PS: This German subculture is not to be confused with this other German subculture here.
To protect the climate. And while we’re at it we’ll tax you Americans even more.
A “departure tax?” Then I’ll just stay here. Germany’s Air Transport Tax – somehow meant to save the climate but no one can explain to me just how this works – is penalizing American carriers by taxing them the maximum amount of 45 euros per passenger.
These carriers are now suing the country on the grounds that “Germany cannot arbitrarily close its budget gap on the backs of US airlines and their passengers, who already pay taxes at excessive rates. This is a short-sighted cash grab.”
Of course it is. But they’re going to keep on taxing us anyway. Americans don’t vote here.
Die kurzsichtige Maßnahme werde der deutschen Volkswirtschaft größeren Schaden zufügen als möglicherweise an Steuereinnahmen wieder hereinkomme.
Actually, it’s only the older, digital immigrant kind of Germans who are still scared of the Veb. You know, around 85 to 90 percent of the population?
And these are the folks who want politicians to introduce ever more stringent anti-Internet legislation (more is more here) and get all hysterical about data privacy for data that nobody’s interested in and ran Google Street View out of town and would never think of ever putting their faces (or anything else) on Facebook, provided they could even find the dad dern thing, and think that flash mobs are real mobsters with machine guns and stuff like that and on and on and on. And, oh yeah, these are also the folks who vote here. So there we have it. Old dogs, nix tricks. Tricks are for kids.
Sogenannte Digital Outsiders hält die Angst, die Kontrolle über ihre persönliche Daten zu verlieren, davon ab, überhaupt online zu gehen. Sie fürchten zudem, mit einem versehentlichen falschen Tastendruck das Internet zu löschen.
Observing Hermann 