L’Etat, C’est You

Or at least the national deficit is all yours, my German friends (and mine – I live and pay taxes here, too).

Debt

But there’s good news, at least. Sort of. It’s only going to get worse!

It’s a paradoxical situation: The economy is braving the euro crisis, tax revenue is making the coffers ring and the German state still goes further into debt. The public sector deficit climbed to 30 billion euros during the first nine months this year. First and foremost the federal government, but also social security and other benefits have gone into the red.

And economists fear that this is just the beginning. Billions of new burdens have been tucked away in the coalition agreement just signed between the Union and the SPD. Tax, social insurance and other contribution increases are right around the corner.

Hey, you voted this coalition government into office, Germany. Oh, that’s right. You didn’t.

Trotz guter Konjunktur und steigender Steuereinnahmen macht Deutschland Milliarden neue Schulden. Jetzt befürchten Ökonomen: Das wird die Bürger teuer zu stehen kommen – und zwar schon bald.

“Has the climate change brand been ruined?”

I’d say yes. At least when it comes to films and documentaries, it seems. It’s just like way too “bo-ho-horing” to make it at the box office.

Climate

It (“An Inconvenient Truth”) made a ton of money which made some people think that suddenly the topic was unboring. Which produced a spate of climate documentaries that were all boring, and eventually resulted in an Oscar-nominated documentary filmmaker friend saying to me they all blend together — all the same shots of melting glaciers, polar bears, carbon emissions … blah, blah, blah. By 2008 another friend was at a gathering of indy film distributors in which they were saying, “no more environmental documentaries!”, there’s no audience for them. And by 2010 a producer friend of mine said, “Even the Green Channel doesn’t want “green programming…”

Climate definitely interests the climate crowd at some science magazines, talks or blogs. Some blogs are amazing. They will post one comment about one graph of temperature records from tree rings and get over a thousand comments. Which is boredom so purified and crystalized it’s in an unadulterated form that could make even a robot want to commit suicide.

Global Boring is a term used to describe the widely accepted scientific conclusion that the world is getting progressively less and less interesting, and will ultimately become so incredibly dull it will no longer be able to support human life.

From Russia With Love?

I think it’s more like Goldfinger.

Khodorkovsky

Or maybe Live and Let Die?

Khodorkovsky will make a statement to the media from Berlin later on Sunday.

Chodorkowski verlässt Russland – wie viele Milliarden Dollar vor ihm (Khodorkovsky leaves Russia, like the many billions of dollars before him)

PS: I think it’s really Edward Snowden in one of those Mission Impossible mask thingies.

I Got The Power

The power bill, I mean. The Power Bill Blues, actually. Just like everybody else here in Germany.

Power

The electricity prices in Germany are the highest in the EU. A household here shells out 1000 euros annually (approx. $1,370). The French pay half. The EU average is around 700 euros.

Is this what they meant by the Energiewende (energy turnaround)? The power may be renewable here but I’m not sure how much longer the money is going to be.

Well, at least the electricity prices in Germany will be going up even higher again next year.

Bei den Strompreisen gehört Deutschland innerhalb der EU zu den Spitzenreitern. Ein Haushalt zahlt mehr als 1000 Euro, der EU-Schnitt liegt bei 700. Und im kommenden Jahr dürfte es noch teurer werden.

Heul-TV

Or Cryin’-Time TV, if you prefer. Or how about it’s-time-for-those-particularly-crappy-end-of-the-year-flashback-shows TV? Anyways, I got really emotional watching this collection of “The 25 Most Emotional TV Moments of the Year” last night on RTL.

Cry

Then I got an upset stomach, a bad case of the hives and had to barf.

Natürlich durfte die Sequenz aus „Supertalent“ nicht fehlen, in der Dieter Bohlen überrascht seinen Entdecker Rainer Felsen als Kandidaten auf die Bühne gestellt bekommt.

Real Germans Don’t Tweet

According to Semiocast, an analyst, Germany ranks 31st worldwide in terms of public tweets, with 59m per year. Germany’s 82m people have just 4m Twitter accounts. That puts it 22nd in the world, behind not only European neighbours like Britain (population 63m, 45m accounts) or Spain (population 47m, 16m accounts) but also Turkey (population 75m, 11m accounts) and the Philippines (population 98m, 8.6m accounts).

Junglecamp

But they do like to google, however. Although what they googled most in election year 2013 is another matter. The number one German search item was Wahl-O-Mat, an online election tool that tells you who to vote for.

And Amazon didn’t even make the short list. That’s because it’s “designed for world domination,” I assume.

“Innovation erfordert den Willen, über einen langen Zeitraum missverstanden zu werden.”

“On The Run From The Henchmen Of His Homeland”

Concerned Germans everywhere (note the red scarf) weren’t quite concerned enough to actually offer poor and misunderstood professional leaker/Russian tourist Edward Snowden political asylum, but now they all hope in unison that Brazil will (tons of Germans have found refuge there in the past, you know).

Snowden

Otherwise those awful henchmen/bogeymen from that horrible homeland of his might just get him and, well, we don’t even want to THINK about what could possibly happen to him then!

Ex-NSA-Mitarbeiter Edward Snowden will auf seiner Flucht vor den Häschern seines Heimatlandes offenbar nach Brasilien weiterreisen.

That’s Almost German

The language, I mean. “Was Mir Sorgen?” Nice try. But way cool image, I must say.

Alfred

Well, it is a weird state of affairs when you cannot give away free porn to anonymous people who only visit your site because it has free porn.

Yes it is. But welcome to Germany, sort of. What, me worry (was, ich soll mir Sorgen machen)?

It was originally thought that the letters were sent because of a court error. However, Thomas Urmann of the legal firm U+C told the German newspaper Welt am Sonntag that they plan to investigate more infringements on porn streaming sites next year, a move that would set a worldwide precedent.