Category Archives: Habitudes

Three Bad Reasons Why German Newspaper Publishers Simply Won’t Trust Google News…

August 1, 2013 By in Habeas Corpus, Habitudes, Helplessness, Hideology, Home Cooking, Humor, Hurt Feelings, Hypochondria, Hypocrisy, Hysteria Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

And vigorously push for any and all legislation aimed at making life for Google & Co. as difficult as newsworthyly possible. They seem to have three main bad reasons, as far as I can tell, like I said, but if you can come up with any others, please don’t hesitate to let me know:

Google

1) The Google News aggregate makes money off said German newspaper publishers by displaying snippets of said German newspaper publishers’ stories, only… Google doesn’t make any money with Google News by virtue of the simple fact that Google doesn’t place any advertising on Google News pages so, well, there is no German newspaper publisher money here to be made off with.

2) Google shamefully steals readers away from said newspaper publishers’ publications because, uh… Google News is actually one of the major sources of traffic to these German newspaper sites so, well, it’s the publishers who are getting the readers and making the money off of Google.

3) Google needs to be controlled ever more closely with ever stricter regulation and be restricted from including any of these said news articles without a publisher’s expressed written permission to “opt in” because, well… These newspapers can already “opt out” any old time they like simply by having their webmasters do so (a simple change to the robots.txt file will suffice).

And now that all of these outraged German publishers have decided to opt in to Google News anyway – now that they have been given the choice to do so – well, that makes all of this yet another typically complex German news story all in its own write and one which of course nobody else who is not German will be able to understand just right yet.

German Newspaper Publishers Seem Not To Understand Google News

German Of The Day: Baden Gehen

July 31, 2013 By in Habitudes, Hard Facts, Helections, Helplessness, Hideology, High Art, Humor, Hurt Feelings Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , 3 Comments

Yes, baden gehen can mean to go swimming. But it can also mean to go belly-up or to flop horribly.

Baden

And that’s precisely what the German Greens’ top candidate Jürgen Trittin just did while taking part in an election “paddle outing” on the river Werra.

Me? Schadenfroh? Hell yeah. But hey, the federal election here is just 53 days away and you know how it is. Politicians just can’t avoid doing dopey stuff like this at times like this. So give him a break or something. And besides, this guy was all wet to begin with anyway.

The real question here is whether or not this is a portent of things to come. You know, for the Greens? We certainly wouldn’t want them to erleiden (suffer) a Schiffbruch (shipwreck) in the coming election, now would we? Or you wouldn’t, I’m sure.

Trittin, der in Göttingen für den Bundestag kandidiert, war mit Parteifreunden vom nordhessischen Witzenhausen bis ins südniedersächsische Hedemünden auf der Werra gepaddelt, um damit für einen Stopp sämtlicher Salzeinleitungen in den Fluss einzutreten.

Germany’s Eight Unplugged CO2-Free Atomic Reactors Have Increased Air Pollution For A Second Year In A Row

July 29, 2013 By in Habitudes, Hard Facts, Health, Heconomy, Helections, Helplessness, Hideology, Home Cooking, Humor, Hurt Feelings, Hypocrisy, Hysteria Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

No, wait. It’s the German coal-fired power revival doing that.

Green

Green shift? Sounds more like a green shaft to me.

Coal is the most polluting fossil fuel and is blamed by scientists for contributing to global warming. Merkel opted to shut nuclear power plants after an earthquake in Japan two years ago resulted in meltdowns at reactors owned by Tokyo Electric Power Co.

“Climate protection is a key target of the government and greenhouse gases should fall, not climb.”

The Lives Of Others

July 11, 2013 By in Habeas Corpus, Habitudes, Hard Facts, Hate, Helplessness, Hi-tech, Hideology, Home Cooking, Hurt Feelings, Hypochondria, Hypocrisy, Hysteria Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , 2 Comments

Spy

One in two of the country’s (Germany’s) citizens regard Snowden as a hero, according to a June 29 survey of 504 people by Emnid for Bild am Sonntag newspaper.

“It looks like the NSA picked up where the Stasi left off.”

PS: Didn’t this German cop know about his country’s gun control laws?

Gun

He murdered his ex and then killed himself. All of this strictly illegal, of course.

United Stasi of America

July 9, 2013 By in Habitudes, Helplessness, Hideology, High Art, Hypocrisy, Hysteria Tags: , , , , , , , , 2 Comments

Get it? A protest at the US embassy in Berlin and stuff.

Protest

The National Security Agency can gather about one billion times more information than the sinister Stasi police that were used to hunt down the targeted people of Nazi Germany.

And just in case you were wondering, Germans only do “strictly legal” spying. But you probably weren’t wondering.

Darunter war das Konterfei des umstrittenen Internet-Unternehmers und Multimillionärs Kim Schmitz alias „Kim Dotcom“ zu erkennen. Der gebürtige Deutsche lebt in Neuseeland und ist Gründer der – mittlerweile geschlossenen – Internetplattform „Megaupload“, über die die Nutzer auch illegal an Musik und Filme gelangen konnten. Seit 2012 warten die USA auf die Auslieferung des Unternehmers, weil ein Haftbefehl gegen Schmitz vorliegt.

More Cutting-Edge Berlin Fashion

July 4, 2013 By in Habitudes, Heconomy, Hi-tech, High Art, Home Cooking, Humor, Hysteria Tags: , , , , , , , 2 Comments

And we’re really talking cutting-edge here, people.

Fashion

I think you have to have a freakin’ fashion Waffenschein (weapons permit) to wear one of those. Or at least you ought to.

Berlin Fashion Week is THE international location for fashion and lifestyle topics.

Germans Bugging Americans Now

July 1, 2013 By in Habeas Corpus, Habitudes, Helplessness, High Art, Home Cooking, Hurt Feelings, Hypocrisy, Hysteria Tags: , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Germans have begun bugging Americans to no end by bugging them about how bugging friends is unacceptable (OK, OK, certain Americans).

Bugging

Given the high sensitivity of data privacy issues in Germany, which bugs the hell out of everybody already, the NSA spying scandal is bound to give Germans the gift that keeps on giving them ample opportunity to continue bugging us for as long as anyone is still willing to listen and even long after anyone is not.

“Every country in the world that is engaged in international affairs of national security undertakes lots of activities to protect its national security and all kinds of information contributes to that. All I know is that is not unusual for lots of nations.”

Outrage: Registered

June 30, 2013 By in Habeas Corpus, Habitudes, Hard Facts, Helplessness, Hi-tech, Home Cooking, Hurt Feelings, Hypochondria, Hypocrisy, Hysteria Tags: , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Now this is what I call a news item. Who would have thought that? The NSA, a US-Amerikan cryptologic intelligence agency expressly responsible “for the collection and analysis of foreign communications and foreign signals intelligence” has been found to be collecting and analyzing foreign signals intelligence. In ze Europe, of all places.

NSA

Europeans would never do such a thing, you see. Nor would the governments of the Netherlands, France, Germany, Spain, Italy and Britain among others ever never ever admit to having secret agreements with Washington to hand over their citizens’ private data to said agency.

Outrage: registered. Now, the issue of how far spy agencies in other countries actually knew, participated in or made use of the NSA’s surveillance program is another question entirely.