Category Archives: Hard Facts

Günther Jauch Goes Der Schwarze Kanal

November 17, 2014 By in Hard Facts, Helplessness, Hideology, Higher Education, Home Cooking, Hurt Feelings, Hypocrisy Tags: , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Take about slipping into a time warp. Günter Jauch’s exclusive Putin interview last night brought back visions of GDR propaganda and communist commentary vom Feinsten (at its best).

They let Vlad and his hand-picked German Putin-Versteher journalist bud have the platform all to themselves for the first half hour of the show. That was a real scoop alright. A scoop of… A scoop of something that rhymes with scoop. I wonder if Kremlin TV is this good…

Industrie gut, Wachstum gut, alles gut – so stellte Wladimir Putin in der ARD die Lage der russischen Wirtschaft dar, untermauert mit vielen Beispielen. Doch der Faktencheck zeigt: Der Kreml-Chef nimmt es mit der Wahrheit nicht genau.

Why Germans Are Desperate To Ignore A Dangerous World?

November 16, 2014 By in Habitudes, Hard Facts, Helplessness, Hideology, High Art, Home Cooking, Humor, Hypocrisy Tags: , , , , , , , , , 6 Comments

Desperate? I think determined is the better word. Why? Because they can. And this is just what Germans do. It’s never been any different here (not in our lifetimes).

Disneyland

Imagine being born and raised in a place that is cut off from the rest of that yucky world “out there,” just like your parents before you. In an amusement park kind of way, I mean. You know, kind of like Disneyland? Only they call it Deutschland instead.

I spoke about the relative weakness of NATO, about the failures of European foreign policy, about Russia’s use of money and disinformation to divide Europe and the United States. The crowd and the other panelists nodded—and then almost immediately changed the subject. Instead of NATO, the German audience wanted to discuss genetically modified food and chickens washed in chlorinated water.

“When I think of politics I think about my neighborhood, street lights and construction permits.”

Germany Best Brand Ever!

November 13, 2014 By in Hard Facts, Helections, Home Cooking, Humor Tags: , , , , , , 2 Comments

I mean nation. Sorry, Germans. I mean country.

Best

Germany knocks USA off Best Nation top spot after 5 years

At least according to something called the Anholt-GfK Roper Nation Brands Index, that is.

Hmmm. I smell a Ratte (rat). GfK stands for Gesellschaft für Konsumforschung (Society for Consumer Research) and is on organization located in a city called Nuremberg. In the best little country in the whole wide cotton-pickin’ world. Jiminy Crickets. Talk about your conflict of Interesse (interest).

German Of The Day: Der Elende Rest

November 7, 2014 By in Hard Facts, Helections, Helplessness, Hideology, High Art, Home Cooking, Hurt Feelings Tags: , , , , , , , 2 Comments

That means “the miserable remnants” and that’s what singer-songwriter and former East German dissident Wolf Biermann just called SED leftovers the Left Party today at a ceremony commemorating the fall of the Berlin Wall. To their faces. In the Reichstag itself.

Somebody’s got to remind folks about this now and then. Not that anybody here cares…

“Eure Sprüche, die habt ihr drauf … ihr müsst mir gar nichts erzählen.”

Germans Being Assured That Bad Republicans Didn’t Actually Win

November 5, 2014 By in Hard Facts, Helections, Helplessness, Hideology, Humor, Hurt Feelings, Hypocrisy, Hysteria Tags: , , , , , , , , , , 1 Comment

“Why the Democrats’ debacle isn’t really a victory for the Republicans,” the title of this here article goes, for instance.

Bad Republican

I would have loved to have read what was surely the profound explanation for just how on earth that can possibly be but then that scary photo of that evil Republican lurking in the shadows wearing a black hat there caught my eye and I just had to click away real pronto-like before he could get the chance to draw me into a maelstrom of evil and villainy and consuming despair.

Die Republikaner feiern einen Erdrutschsieg im Senat. Doch der Machtwechsel wird an der Lähmung der US-Politik kaum etwas ändern.

Once An Ex-Communist Always An Ex-Communist

November 4, 2014 By in Hard Facts, Helections, Helplessness, Hideology, History, Hypocrisy Tags: , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Another Ex-cellent chance to ex-ceed, I’d say. And a great way to celebrate the coming 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall!

Communist

Well isn’t this special. Germany’s main center-left party, the Social Democrats (SPD) – currently in power in Berlin with Merkel & Co. – said Tuesday a party ballot in eastern Thuringia state showed 70 percent favoring negotiations to join a regional government led by Left Party candidate Bodo Ramelow. The Left Party used to be the PDS which used to be the SED (the East German communist party), of course, but nobody with any manners likes to put it that way so I figured I would.

Do you think this coming ex-communist coalition with the SPD upsets anyone over here? Of course not. The only thing that ruffled a few folks’ feathers was the audacity Germany’s president Joachim Gauck had – a former East German pro-democracy activist – by openly questioning whether a party with communist roots like the Left Party could really be trusted or not. Can you imagine that? Who does this president of Germany think he is anyway? The president of Germany?

“There are parts of this party where I, like many others, have problems developing this trust (he means like the openly Stalinist folks).“

GedächtnisEsser?

November 2, 2014 By in Hard Facts, Helplessness, High Art, Higher Education, Home Cooking, Humor Tags: , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

You say ‘tomato’, I say ‘tomato’… You say ‘Wesen‘, I say ‘vessen’…

The stupid creature names are fine. What isn’t, however, is that for the entire duration of the show, every single actor on it has mispronounced the very easy German word for creature…

I kept hearing “vessen” this and “vessen” that, and I had no idea what the characters were talking about, until I saw an episode summary on Hulu with what I surmised was that word written out: Wesen, which literally translates to being or creature (from gewesen, of one of the past-tense forms of the verb to be, sein)…

Trouble is, any German 5-year-old will tell you that word is pronounced VAY-zen, with a V sound (which Grimm gets right), a long E (in the German sense—pronounced like in dreidel), and a soft S (that approximates the English Z).

Foreigners Have Lower Chances Of Getting A Job Than Germans Do?

October 29, 2014 By in Habitudes, Hard Facts, Helplessness, Higher Education, Home Cooking, Hurt Feelings, Hypocrisy, Hysteria Tags: , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

In Germany? Wow, that’s a real shocker. Who would have expected that?

Ausländer

Maybe they’ve been applying at the wrong places, though. This radical Salifist dude here had no trouble getting a job working in the highly sensitive baggage handling section at Düsseldorf Airport, for instance. Despite having an intensive security check done on him first, I mean.

Think positive, folks. You can do it. You just have to get out there and show a little private initiative, I always say.

Der 27-Jährige wird zum Umfeld des deutschen Salafisten Sven Lau gerechnet. Er soll zu jenen Männern gehören, die Anfang September in Wuppertal als “Scharia-Polizei” aufgetreten waren.

PS: “The best thing in sports, period: Game 7.” Go Giants!

Only One-Third?

October 28, 2014 By in Habeas Corpus, Hard Facts, Helplessness, Hideology, Home Cooking, Hurt Feelings, Hypocrisy Tags: , , , , , , , , 1 Comment

Only about one third of German students are interested in current events and politics these days.

German far-right groups and hooligans sure seem pretty interested, though.

German authorities were considering measures to limit the right to demonstrate, after dozens of policemen were injured as a protest by far-right groups purportedly aimed against Islamic extremism turned violent.

North Rhine-Westphalia’s interior minister said freedom of assembly was misused by neo-Nazi groups and members of Germany’s football hooligan scene who held a rally in Cologne, western Germany, on Sunday 26 October.

“This was no political demonstration, but a platform for violence.”

 

A Third Of The World Wants To Work In Germany?

October 27, 2014 By in Habitudes, Hard Facts, Heconomy, Higher Education Tags: , , , , , , , 1 Comment

That’s strange because 56 percent of Germans would prefer to work abroad (and 35 percent of those would like to work in the United States).

Jobs

Germany is the number one non-English speaking destination for migrant workers, according to a global study. It ranked as the fourth most popular place to work abroad globally, after the US, UK and Canada respectively. One third of the 200,000 respondents surveyed said they’d like to move to the country.

“German jobseekers don’t necessarily associate going abroad with getting a better job offer or more money. Germans are much more likely than workers elsewhere to say that interesting job content and challenging work assignments are important to them.”