Beautiful German weapon sale of the week.
Because somebody has to admire them.
German weapons firms have found eager buyers in the United States. Stats show that stock prices of US gunmakers rise after shootings like the one in Las Vegas…
Heckler & Koch (H&K), based in Oberndorf, southern Germany, is currently building a $23 million (€19.55 million) gun factory in Columbus, Georgia, that will exclusively make “sports and hunting” weapons for the US civilian market.
“We’re the Porsches.”
But no more tongues.
Already head of the shareholders’ committee for Nord Stream (majority-owned by Russian state gas company Gazprom), Vlad Putin’s point man/gas man Gazprom Gerd Schroeder (he’s a former German chancellor (SPD) or something) has now been named head of the board of directors of Russian state oil giant Rosneft.
Rosneft is on the European Union’s list of companies facing sanctions following Russia’s annexation of Crimea, for starters, but who’s going to make a stink about that?
The chair of the Bundestag’s Foreign Affairs Committee, Norbert Röttgen, told German public broadcaster ZDF on Friday that it was “completely unbelievable” that Schröder would “cash in” on his earlier role as chancellor at a Russian company.
Rosneft was a “central building block” in Russian President Vladimir Putin’s system of power, Röttgen said. He went on to accuse Schröder of working to heighten Germany’s energy dependence on Russia.
Completely unbelievable? This has been going on for years, folks. What’s there not to believe about it now? We live in a world where there are no consequences for behavior like this. Get used to it already.
Die Mitte (the middle) is where it’s at, folks. Well it’s certainly where I’m at. And you can’t have visions from here in the middle. I mean, I may not always know what I stand for but I always know where I’m standing..
And that’s what Germans want, the middle. The middle of the middle, even. The middler the better. No meddling with the middle. We’re right in the middle of an election campaign, after all. Did you know that Mittelmaß (literally “the middle measure”) means mediocrity in German?
Sure, there was a little Abweichung (deviation) from the middle with that batshit crazy refugee number of mine. Quite a big deviation, actually. But I apologized. Sort of. And now I’m back home, smack dab in the middle of where you want me to be. Just call me. Mutti. Mutti in the middle.
See you on Sunday!
Perhaps the closest she came to setting out a vision was a year ago, as she presented this year’s budget in parliament. Germany, she said, has seen a lot of change since World War II, and “change isn’t a bad thing.” But she also vowed to defend the status quo in the broadest sense of the term: “Germany will remain Germany, with all that we love and hold dear about it.”
“Whoever has visions should go see a doctor.”
– Helmut Schmidt
That’s what one regional director among the “public-sector broadcasters” (state TV) earns here annually – that guy down there. There a dozen or two of these directors out there, by the way.
Why that’s more than the President of the United States makes (not that our current President particularly cares about what he gets paid).
Is TV that good here in Germany, you ask? Why yes, it is. Just ask that regional director. It is in fact so good that all Germans are permitted to finance it with a so-called Abgabe, or contribution. Contribution sounds better than tax. Contribution contributes more to the warm and fuzzy feeling everybody has here about state-run TV. And it also contributes to that guy’s ridiculous salary, too. But quality has its price. And as viewers are told time and time and time again, what they are watching is Quality pur (pure).
Wenn man immer geringere Bezahlung fordere, könnten sich am Ende nur noch Milliardäre leisten, eine öffentlich-rechtliche Anstalt zu leiten.
It’s not all that mysterious, really. And certainly nothing new.
After finding 51 migrants in a Turkish truck at the Polish border on Saturday, 48 of those 51 detained have now disappeared without a trace from the initial reception facility they had been placed in. That’s German efficiency for you, I guess. No wonder this migrant smuggling business is booming here these days. It’s a piece of cake.
Authorities said that the migrants were traveling from Iraq, adding that none of them had passports or other papers.
In einem türkischen Lkw brachten Schleuser 50 Flüchtlinge nach Brandenburg. Jetzt sind 48 von ihnen aus einer Erstaufnahme-Einrichtung verschwunden.
That means non-voters.
And who do German non-voters vote for? Die Partei, of course.
Twelve straight years of Angela Merkel have left politics feeling a little dry for young people in Germany. But now a satirical party is experiencing a surge in popularity after it was set up as a joke at the expense of the old system…
In the last few months the party has seen its membership swell to reach more than 25,000, just shy of the 26,000 members of the rising and much-publicised extreme-right party Alternative fur Deutschland (AfD), which is expected to enter parliament for the first time this year.
Nichtwähler wählen: Die Partei.
Then overhang it on a balance seat. That’s how Germans vote, folks. And they smirk at our electoral college? Of course we do, too when we lose. But still. No wonder they can’t vote Merkel out of office. Es ist einfach kompliziert. It’s simply complicated.
How are seats calculated in the Bundestag?
The system starts to get complicated when Germans split their votes, meaning they vote for a candidate from one party in the first vote and for a different political party in their second vote. That can throw off the balance of seats in parliament so that one party is more strongly represented than they should be based on the results of the proportionate second votes.
So Germans created “overhang” and “balance seats.” Those are extra seats in the Bundestag that ensure every candidate who was directly elected gets a seat while political parties are still proportionally represented based on the number of votes they received. A German state’s population is taken into consideration when votes are converted into seats.
After Germany’s 2013 parliamentary elections, there were 631 seats in the Bundestag, including 33 overhang and balance seats.
Somebody call Sherlock Holmes. Pronto like.
Berlin police and media are clearly puzzled by this unsolvable criminal case. An Afghan wearing a Christian cross was viciously attacked by two young men at S-Bahn station Neukölln after asking him “Why did you become a Christian?”
“We just can’t figure it out,” one investigating officer said later at the scene of the crime. “Why would Germans do such a thing? Sure, Berliners aren’t exactly religious but to just attack some guy because he’s a Christian in a Christian country like this? At least nominally a Christian country, I mean? Too strange.”
“Any ideas who could have done this awful thing?” asked his Partner, Barney. “We’ve asked all the shop owners around here but no one saw a thing. I think we’ll head a few steps down the street to that radical Al-Nur Mosque over there and see if any of those folks know anything. They’re religious at least.”
Laut Experten richtet sich die Aggression von Tätern oft gegen Zuwanderer aus muslimischen Ländern, die sich für den christlichen Glauben entscheiden.
PARTEI officially stands for “Partei für Arbeit, Rechtsstaat, Tierschutz, Elitenförderung und basisdemokratische Initiative,” or “Work, Rule of Law, Animal Protection, Elite Promotion, and grass-roots democratic Initiative.”
Finally, a political party for the rest of us. I mean, you.
“If it doesn’t matter to you who sits in the Bundestag, wouldn’t it be great to be represented by someone who could care less that he does sit there?”
What I like about a satirical party like the Party is that its meaninglessness, as compared to the meaninglessness of a number of serious political parties here, has a meaning.
As for its campaign goals, Die Partei’s election manifesto is replete with meaningless political platitudes pushed to the edge of absurdity: “Die Partei supports the implementation of all-encompassing, universal, total justice, at least twice as much justice as the SPD (Social Democratic Party). Any complaints about supposed injustices will be suppressed with the utmost force.”
„Wenn es dir egal ist, wer im Bundestag sitzt, wäre es dann nicht schön von jemandem vertreten zu werden, dem es egal ist, dass er im Bundestag sitzt?“
I certainly want it. Remember these guys? They travelled here in a DeLorean from the 1980s. A DeLorean station wagen or something.
They materialized again in front of Ramstein Air Base for an anti-war protest rally protest. US-Amerikan warmongering is warmongering again or something. I honestly had no idea. Hey, it’s election time in Germany again but I’m not sure which party is supposed to be getting the votes here. The Marxist-John-Lennonist-68-Internatinal-Front?
Zuletzt hatte die bundesweite Kampagne die Atomkrieg-Drohungen von US-Präsident Donald Trump gegen Nordkorea scharf kritisiert. Sie forderte die Bundesregierung auf, “öffentlich den USA jede Unterstützung für ihre Kriegsvorbereitung zu verweigern”.
Observing Hermann 