Please. I mean for German products, of course.
We’ll know more on Sunday – Monday over here.
Volkswagen took a gamble by releasing the spot before the game — something most advertisers didn’t do last year. But the move paid off: the ad quickly became a viral hit on video-sharing website YouTube, with 49.4 million views since. And it came in No. 3 on USA Today’s Ad Meter, which ranks Super Bowl commercials.
Now that the command center for NATO’s missile shield program will be based here in Germany, it’s time for the German Left (that’s the middle of the road here, by the way) to start telling us why this is an awful bad horrible idea.
My guess is that that we will find out that there are actually no such things as rogue states like Iran (only morally challenged ones), that a missle shield like this is absolutely positively technically impossible to implement, and that putting one into operation (even though it is absolutely positively technically impossible to implement) would hurt Russia’s feelings.
There’s not much happening on the Peace Front either these days, you see. And spring is just around the corner. And folks do get easily bored, you know?
The United States insists that the missile shield aims to counter missile threats from Iran, but Russia has voiced concerns that it would target its own strategic deterrent.
Very, very, discretely, that is. If at all.
After all, what are draconian measures against Chinese civil rights activists, state censorship and unrest in Tibet compared to all those trillions of dollars of Chinese currency reserves just waiting to be invested in debt-ridden euro zone countries like, well, her own? And waiting and waiting and waiting, I might add.
Who says grovelling will get you nowhere? Maybe I did. But at least it’s worth a try.
“Chinese investments are expressly welcome. They will be sought, used and appreciated — both in Germany and in the rest of the euro zone.”
Although not necessarily in that order.
Germans are notorious pessimists, as you know. And they’re always bitching and moaning, especially when they don’t have anything to bitch and moan about. Take this latest Gallup survey, for instance:
“The 4 in 10 Germans who rated their lives highly enough to be considered “thriving” throughout 2011 was lower than in 2010.”
That could have been a whole lot worse, though. I’ve been living here so long that the first time I read that sentence I swear I was sure it read
“The 4 in 10 Germans who rated their lives highly enough to be considered “LIVING” throughout 2011 was lower than in 2010.”
Come on Germany, you’re giving me a complex. Go out there and live a little already!
In addition, the percentage of Germans who are “suffering” ticked up slightly in the fourth quarter of 2011, amid escalating economic turmoil in the eurozone.
When the Bundestag isn’t being shut down due to power failure…
Unintentional spam attacks from Bundestag employees can take their toll, too.
You’ve all seen this happen, I’m sure. Somebody on a huge distribution list receives an internal email and accidently responds to everyone (instead of just to the person who sent it). Dozens if not hundreds of the recipients who then get that person’s response feel the desperate need to respond to that in some smart ass way (to everyone here, too) and on and one it goes, for hours on end, until a systems administrator finally loses his/her patience and pulls out the plug.
Well, that happened today in the halls of German government. Just your normal everyday dumb office behavior kind of thing again. Or was it maybe a diabolical terrorist attack doch?
“Liebe Britta, wenn Ihr Euch eindeckt, bringt Ihr mir eins mit? Danke und herzliche Grüße.”
Like when it comes to anti-Semitism and bad old fashioned anti-Jewish thought crime.
Honestly, let’s put this latest study in perspective and maybe not paint the Germans as being the Hollywood Nazis they aren’t for once (but just this once).
Sure, 20 percent is a lot. But you know that you know you thought it was higher (or wanted it to be). And “the study — which draws on several different surveys and other research — puts Germans in the middle of the pack in Europe, showing more latent anti-Semitism in countries such as Poland, Hungary and Portugal, and less in Italy, Britain, the Netherlands and France.”
And what happens to that 20 percent once you subtract the extremist right/Islamic fringe and those who think like and/or support them? I’m all for subtracting them, by the way, but we don’t live in a perfect world. What can I say? It’s a never ending story.
Ob auf Fußballplätzen, im Netz oder in islamistischen und rechtsextremen Milieus – Judenfeindlichkeit ist in der deutschen Gesellschaft noch immer gegenwärtig.
Greece’s finance ministry has named 4,152 individuals as major tax dodgers that owe the state a combined 14.9 billion euros in unpaid back taxes as part of a campaign to name and shame tax evaders.
And Germany is empört (indignant), as usual. The interesting thing about the list though are some of the Greek names, I find. These are names like Grundmann, Hutter und Elstner. They almost sound like, I dunno, like German names. But that can’t be. Germans don’t evade taxes, right? Not unless they live in Greece, they don’t.
Einige der Namen klingen für hiesige Ohren seltsam vertraut: Namen wie Grundmann, Hutter und Elstner. Schulden Deutsche den Griechen Geld?
I don’t usually tend to panic when reading newspapers, but when German journalists start writing articles critical of the media’s “eternal ramblings about doomsday,” I get very nervous indeed. This is news, in other words, primarily because this isn’t news to me.
Evelyn Finger’s main concern here is the German obsession with “the” Krise (crisis) in general (crises plural) and the latest so-called Krise der Demokratie (crisis of Democracy) in particular.
“In the meantime (it started out long ago with “the oil crisis,” she believes) we have become all too accustomed to terms like education crisis, energy crisis, climate crisis and, most recently, financial crisis, debt crisis and euro crisis. We have all hoped that these crises would not prove to become any more threatening than they already are, especially since our linguistic capacity to express more crisis seems to have been exhausted: World financial crisis! But a new threatening term has been spooking the debates as of late: A crisis of Democracy. Is there really such a crisis or is the chatter about it the real problem?”
We all know the answer to that question, of course. She rightly finds this obsessive German Angslust (passion for fear) ridiculous and has no trouble exposing it for what it is; mindless, self-indulgent, neurotic nonsense. But I do wish she would have had the decency to have warned me first. I don’t like stumbling accross articles like this in German newspapers, articles that make sense by expressing something we used to call “common sense.” If I had wanted to read articles like that I wouldn’t have bought a German newspaper in the first place.
But thanks anyway, Evelyn. You may have shaken me up a bit, but I really do hope you have a pleasant week.
Das Wort Krise hatte seinen Schrecken schon fast verloren. Es klang in den letzten Monaten auch bei dramatischer Nachrichtenlage etwas schwach und durch häufigen Gebrauch abgenutzt.
German lawmakers are like lawmakers everywhere else on the planet. At least when it comes to giving themselves raises, they are. They give themselves modest raises, of course, albeit at very regular intervals, and as quietly as humanly possible.
This time they’re giving themselves a ridiculously measly 500 euro a month raise, bringing the grand total up to a less than measly 10,700 euros per month.
Now that may seem like a lot to you, but it really isn’t. Ask any SPD man and he’ll tell you why: “Representatives cannot be compared to those in lower income brackets.”
Well there we have it. They have to be on equal footing with others out there with, uh, I dunno, lots of money? Otherwise they might be susceptible to corruption or something. And we (I mean you) don’t want that because in Germany, as you may know, there is no corruption. So shut up and pay up.
“Abgeordnete kann ich nicht vergleichen mit unteren Einkommensgruppen.”
Three percent. That’s how much solar energy contributes to Germany’s overall energy mix (now don’t go be a jerk and break it to the Germans that the sun doesn’t shine very much here).
But that doesn’t really matter because, jeepers, that measly three percent only costs consumers half of the total 17 billion euros they have to shell out for renewable energy here.
It’s the principle of the matter, you see. If the Germans left this solar energy stuff up to the free market (that means no subsidies), then solar power’s contribution would be even lower than three percent – at none of the cost – and just think about how ridiculous they would look then.
And (even) the Spiegel says: Solar Subsidy Sinkhole
Observing Hermann 