Category Archives: Hard Facts

If I Had A Vision I’d Go See My Doctor

September 21, 2017 By in Habitudes, Hard Facts, Helections, Helplessness, Home Cooking, Humor Tags: , , , , , , , , 3 Comments

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..

Mitte

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

399,000 Euros

September 20, 2017 By in Habitudes, Hard Facts, Helplessness, Hideology, Home Cooking Tags: , , , , , , , 2 Comments

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.

Intendant

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.

 

Speaking Of German Efficiency…

September 19, 2017 By in Habeas Corpus, Hard Facts, Helplessness, High Art, Home Cooking Tags: , , , , , , Leave a comment

Sure, border control authorities losing 48 of the 51 illegal migrants (undocumented migrants?) they placed in their detention facilty is certainly a tough act to follow but I live in a place called BLN (that’s how some folks refer to Berlin here) so let’s give it a try.

Polizei

In Berlin they like to take things a level higher, you see. Take the police, for instance. Please. Berlin has the only big city police department where the robbers break in and nobody seems to care. Thieves broke in to Berlin’s police headquarters near the Airlift Memorial in Tempelhof on Monday night and stole some militaria. The cops tried to keep a lid on it, of course, but the Lügenpresse got their hands on the story someehow.

I don’t care much about this robbery, either, I must say. House break-ins have risen dramatically in Germany these past years but the police have increased their solve rate to around two percent of the cases. So, like, what on earth is there to worry about?

Getting back to German Efficiency; the thieves are the really efficent ones here. But that’s only because they are rarely German.

“Wenn jemand hier einen Anschlag plant, rennt er durch, und keiner der dort Angestellten wäre fähig, es zu verhindern.”

The Case Of The Missing Migrants

September 18, 2017 By in Habitudes, Hard Facts, Helplessness, Home Cooking, Hurt Feelings Tags: , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

It’s not all that mysterious, really. And certainly nothing new.

Migrants

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.

 

Germans Higher Than You Thought They Were

September 13, 2017 By in Hard Facts, Higher Education, Home Cooking Tags: , , , , , Leave a comment

I mean Germany is. Higher.

Index

No. not that kind of high. Actually, yes. Precisely that kind of high. But Germany is also highest when it comes to something called the Quality of Nationality Index.

Consistently securing the top spot for the last six years, Germany scored 82.7% out of a possible 100% on the index – the first of its kind to objectively rank the value of every nationality of the world in terms of legal status in which to develop your talents and business. The global mean in 2016 was 39.32%, with Afghanistan sitting at the bottom of the index with a score of 14.6%…

The US, meanwhile, ranked only 29th on the QNI with a score of 68.8% — mainly due to its relatively low Settlement Freedom compared to nationalities of the EU Member States, and its weak showing on the Peace and Stability element of the index.

So, getting back to that other kind of high… Now I know why everybody wants to come here.

The Case Of The Cryptic Cross

September 12, 2017 By in Habitudes, Hard Facts, Helplessness, Hideology, Home Cooking, Hurt Feelings, Hypocrisy Tags: , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Somebody call Sherlock Holmes. Pronto like.

Cross

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.

German Of The Day: Angst

September 8, 2017 By in Habitudes, Hard Facts, Helplessness, Home Cooking, Hysteria Tags: , , , , , , , 1 Comment

That means angst. And here is the latest German angst check:

Angst

Terrorism wins again. But does it really? German Angstforscher (angst scientists – how could they be anywhere else but in Germany, right?) point out that terrorism, for example, is a socially accepted angst that everybody can openly get all angst-like about, without getting any angst about getting any extra angst on top of that. The real close up and personal kinds of individual angst, however, that’s a different matter. People don’t like to talk about that kind of angst because they have too much angst to do so. I have angst, for instance, that these angst studies are creating more angst about angst than they need to. And that frightens me.

“Man weiß, dass es sich bei der Terror-Angst um eine sozial akzeptierte Angst handelt. Die Leute berichten doch nicht gerne einem Menschen in einer Telefonumfrage über ihre ganz individuellen Ängste, die sie sonst allenfalls mit den engsten Freunden und Familienangehörigen teilen.”

Let Us All Learn Together

September 6, 2017 By in Habitudes, Hard Facts, Helplessness, Hideology, Home Cooking, Hypocrisy Tags: , , , , , , , , , 1 Comment

And hold hands together. And show solidarity for one another. You know, all that kind of wonderful gooey fooey social activist stuff that “Social” Democrats do.

School

But even though I’m a big time SPD public school education advocate and multi-cultural integration cheerleader poster girl kinda woman – and former Federal Minister for Family Affairs, Senior Citizens, Women and Youth and current Minister President of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania – I still prefer to send my kid to a private school, if you don’t mind. Even if you do mind I’ll be sending my kid to a private school. There’s way less riff-raff there.

Mecklenburg-Vorpommerns Ministerpräsidentin Manuela Schwesig (SPD) steht wegen der Entscheidung, ihr älteres Kind, Sohn Julian (10), zum Schuljahresbeginn auf eine Privatschule zu schicken, in der Kritik. Nach Ansicht der Links-Opposition im Landtag offenbart der Schritt die Mängel und Lücken im staatlichen Schulsystem.

Maybe The Taliban Could Run For Election Here, Too

September 3, 2017 By in Habitudes, Hard Facts, Helections, Helplessness, Hideology, Home Cooking, Horror, Humor, Hurt Feelings, Hypocrisy Tags: , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

The German election system certainly is a transparent one. It is easy for anyone here who is interested to see, for instance, that Germany’s Bundeswahlleiter (Federal Election Commissioner), whoever that might be, has one hell of a sense of humor.

PLFP

He/she has allowed the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), an Iran-backed terror group, to campaign as a political party in this month’s parliamentary election. The punch line, I guess, or one of them, is that the PFLP plans to run with the Marxist-Leninist Party of Germany.

No one here is interested, however. Why should they be? The PFLP is just another one of those boring, everyday German political parties that puts everybody asleep. Sure, it’s been linked to numerous terror incidents and killings and all that but it’s not like it’s the AfD or anything.

Die MLPD betreibt jetzt Wahlkampf als internationalistische Liste/MLPD, unter anderem mit der palästinensischen Terrororganisation PFLP, die durch Anschläge bekannt wurde.

US-Amerika Somehow Behind AfD’s Rising Popularity

August 30, 2017 By in Hard Facts, Helections, Helplessness, Hideology, Home Cooking, Hurt Feelings, Hypocrisy Tags: , , , , , , , , , 3 Comments

Like duh. I suspected it all along. Who else could have possibly been behind it?

AfD

After all, as Spiegel Online reports in its inimitable fashion, the advertising company the Alternative for Germany party has now turned to “has worked with Donald Trump.” So there’s no need to read on. We don’t need to know anything more about them.

To assist in its efforts, the party has tapped Kunkel’s contacts to engage the services of advertising professionals in the United States with experience on the right-wing spectrum. The party is working together with the Texas-based agency Harris Media, which recently presented its plans to the AfD’s national committee. With its provocative and aggressive campaigns, the agency has already contributed to the success of a number of controversial politicians. In Britain, it worked with the anti-EU UKIP party; in Israel, it worked with the governing Likud party; and in the United States, news agency Bloomberg has dubbed company founder Vincent Harris “the man who invented the Republican internet.”

“Burkas? We prefer bikinis.”