Now if only it would stay there.
Damn. This is becoming quite a ritual (yawn). But this is just what folks at Berlin Fashion Week do, so deal with it. Thirty-four models, four hundred passengers and seventeen labels on one subway train, what’s that get you? An underground catwalk – for the seventh time now already. Sheesh.
“This year is all about kitschy kitsch.”
North, south. Inferiority, superiority. It’s all the same to me.
Germans export more to their European partners than they consume, benefiting from this asymmetrical situation even as they expect everyone else to be exporters and savers like them.
Germans have been dying off faster than they can replace themselves for over forty years now. It’s just what they do.
And here are last year’s numbers: 2.2 percent fewer German babies were born in 2011 then in the year before. Strangely, though, the number of inhabitants actually grew last year (them damned durn foreign immigrants again).
It’s the demographics, stupid.
Schon seit 40 Jahren sterben in Deutschland mehr Menschen als Kinder geboren werden.
Is this the end of “the European way of life” as we know it?
European leaders have been muddling through instead of properly tackling the debt crisis. Now it threatens the very foundations of the European Union and could destroy a lifestyle that millions of Europeans take for granted.
Funny. I thought taking things for granted was what the European lifestyle was all about.
“We need fiscal discipline because we have a debt problem… No euro bonds as long as I live.”
German government debt keeps climbing relentlessly higher and reached an all-time high during the first three months of this year. The federal, state and local governments then reached a debt to the tune of 2 trillion euros.
That was 2.1 percent or 42.3 billion euros higher (deeper?) than in the previous year’s quarter, reported the Federal Office of Statistics in Wiesbaden on Monday.
Now if only Greece and Co. could learn to control their government spending like the Germans do. Oh, wait. They already have. Or do. Or whatever.
Deutschlands Staatsschulden auf Rekordhoch gestiegen
Is it termination time yet? For the booming German economy, I mean?
The Spiegel says: German manufacturing activity has hit a three-year low and export orders have also seen a big drop. This data suggests that the crisis is starting to hit the previously robust German economy.
Hasta la vista, baby? Maybe.
Unable to compete in the global market without the subsidy drug, state-ordained “energy turnaround” or not, Germany’s solar energy industry is getting eaten alive by cheap Chinese imports as we speak, so-to-speak.
“Ah, screw it,” German industrialists elsewhere in the country say to that. “We’ll just keep making a killing producing what we’ve always produced best: War technology. Tanks, Saudi Arabia!”
“But it’s not like we don’t continue to support the Arab Spring or anything,” another tankful German industrialist added ruefully.
German paper says Saudis want 600-800 tanks.
That’s the thing about a crisis: There’s always a winner, too. Take the euro crises, for instance. And the demand for German bonds these days.
Demand for German bonds, seen as the safest haven in the euro zone, has pushed Berlin’s borrowing costs so low that some investors are effectively paying Germany for the privilege of lending it money.
Damn. This gives German bondage a whole new meaning.
Low interest rates on German bonds are translating into billions in savings. Now economists have calculated that the country should be able to balance its budget by next year — something that is likely to increase criticism of Germany’s crisis management.
…The perception that Germany is benefiting financially from the crisis while imposing strict austerity measures on countries in southern Europe is unlikely to win many friends for Chancellor Angela Merkel, who is already highly unpopular in countries such as Greece.
Who cares if genetically-modified crops are now making up a large proportion of harvests in North and South America?
Germans aren’t buying any of this dangerous, hi-tech agro-terror crop, I mean crap because, well, genetically-modified crops are now making up a large proportion of harvests in North and South America (the key word here is North).
After all, any German you ask will tell you that the effect of consuming GM crops is unknown. Other than becoming hungry if you don’t eat them maybe, which is also unknown here. And this only backs up their argument, I think, sort of.
Nach den Plänen der EU-Kommission sollen die weniger strengen Gentechnik-Regelungen für Futtermittel auf Lebensmittel übertragen werden.
The next wave of vociferous protests by residents complaining about excessive aircraft noise is being preprogrammed in Germany. Even if the airport in question is in the middle of German nowhere.
California-based XCOR Aerospace is developing a suborbital aircraft called the Lynx space plane which will carry paying passengers to the stratosphere. Unfortunately for them, capable engineers that they surely are, none of these guys has ever been to Germany. Otherwise they wouldn’t have had the not-so-bright idea to try to use an airport near Cuxhaven for their so-called Sea-Airport.
Germans don’t like airport noise, you see. They don’t like technology that isn’t German, either, or any of that other futuristic Scheiß (crap). And they don’t like “neoliberal” globalisation plans for world revolution (literally, this time). And they don’t like millionaires, either. A ride aboard the Lynx will retail at around $95,000. That means it’s time to agitate again or something, before the project can even begin. Bah! Hamburg! I mean Humbug!
Das Projekt sei freilich erst “in den Anfängen einer Ideenfindung.”
Observing Hermann 