Gazprom Gerd Strikes Again

Former chancellor Gerhard Schroeder (SPD) is always good for popping a cork or two.

This time he’s ruffled a few German feathers by getting all warm and fuzzy about his good old buddy Vladimir Putin again. More specifically about Putin’s stunning (not) election victory over the weekend, praising him for being the “flawless democrat” that he is.

But this is nothing new. Schroeder has always been generous with praise for Putin. Especially since landing that 1 million euro-per-year consulting job from him at Gazprom’s Nord Stream consortium – just a few months (weeks?) after having left office.

It’s the gas, stupid.

Wes Brot ich ess, des Lied ich sing.

Being A Pirate Sucks

I got your “aye me buckos” for you right here. Even the best-run running joke gets old after a while (or in this case the worst-run).

It turns out that too much transparancy leads to too much transparancy after all. That is: Finally being able to see that if you want to accomplish something in life (or even in politics, yuk), you’re going to have to work really, really, really hard for it.

Top pirate wench Marina Weisband quit first due to “health reasons” (she was clearly sick and tired of all this adolescent nonsense). Swashbuckling chairman of the Berlin pirate pack himself Gerhard Anger quit not long after that due to “the immense pressure” of having to actually get up every morning to go to work.

Like, life in the Internet was never like this. You can stick this reality bite crap back up to where the sun don’t shine, dude. A party “in tune with the Berlin vibe” is still a party. And every party has to come to an end sometime.

 „Ich ertrage diese emotionale Belastung nicht.”

Germans Still Scared Of The Internetz

Actually, it’s only the older, digital immigrant kind of Germans who are still scared of the Veb. You know, around 85 to 90 percent of the population?

And these are the folks who want politicians to introduce ever more stringent anti-Internet legislation (more is more here) and get all hysterical about data privacy for data that nobody’s interested in and ran Google Street View out of town and would never think of ever putting their faces (or anything else) on Facebook, provided they could even find the dad dern thing, and think that flash mobs are real mobsters with machine guns and stuff like that and on and on and on. And, oh yeah, these are also the folks who vote here. So there we have it. Old dogs, nix tricks. Tricks are for kids.

Sogenannte Digital Outsiders hält die Angst, die Kontrolle über ihre persönliche Daten zu verlieren, davon ab, überhaupt online zu gehen. Sie fürchten zudem, mit einem versehentlichen falschen Tastendruck das Internet zu löschen.

“Tax Advice Mission” Impossible

How about a little more sensitivity here, Greece? Germans are only trying to help.

And it doesn’t look like they’re going to stop trying to help you anytime soon, either. That’s why if they can’t get that “budget commissioner” they proposed to help monitor the Greek government’s (lack of) management of its finances, some 160 German tax collectors have now selflessly volunteered for assignments in Greece to help gather Greek taxes more efficiently. And as you can imagine, when it comes to taxation and tax collection, German efficiency can really hurt.

A recent flurry of acrimonious exchanges between Athens and Berlin reflect deepening doubts among mainly northern members of the 17-nation euro zone about Greece’s ability and willingness to overhaul its economy to satisfy lenders’ demands.

Unterdeckungen

That’s German for deficient coverage. And German readers might be reading that word a lot in the weeks to come, at least when it comes to the electricity supply in Germany.

„We have been observing for weeks now that something with the system just doesn’t seem to be right,” one market expert said.

And in a letter from Germany’s Federal Network Agency to the power traders it deals with, it makes clear its concern about the rather volitile situation going on at the moment and has even warned of the collapse of the German power network. It almost happened on Febuary 6, already, they wrote, as “substantial undercoverage continuing over several hours” nearly brought the system to its knees.

Hmmm. Last year at this time, during one of the coldest winters ever, there wasn’t any problem with the German electricity supply at all. What on earth could have possibly happened since then and now to have caused this disturbing situation?

Nach dem Reuters vorliegenden Schreiben stand das Stromnetz in den vergangenen Tagen mehrfach vor dem Kollaps.

Not One, Not Two…

But three films about Fukushima are being shown this year at the Berlinale.

That was to be expected, I guess. Especially now since Fukushima hysteria has all but disappeared from the Bildfläche (screen), even here in Germany.

It’s hard to keep people scared for months on end, now matter how important you think your agenda is. They just get tired and want to move on with their lives. The latest media stunt I just barely heard about had a lot of potential, for a few minutes, but then it rolled over and died, too.

I am looking forward to the big one-year anniversary media terror show bombardment to be held here in Germany next month, of course. But what are they going to be able to scare us with then? The German nation threatening to shut down all it’s nuclear power plants? Been there, done that. It makes you wonder sometimes why they even take the trouble to keep on agitating at us like they do. Now that the war is over and all, I mean. There’s just no place else to agitate at the moment, I guess (thanks for nothing, “Occupy Movement”). It must be hard being progressive sometimes. Much less all the time.

The 11-day film festival, which prides itself on its generally edgier and more politically-overt line-up over other film showcases, was perhaps a fitting backdrop for the documentaries.

Not With This Chancellor

Five minutes of excitement is better than no excitement at all.

A group of young conservative politicians, concerned about Germany’s catastrophic demographic development (or the lack of it), received less than a warm welcome by their very own Chancellor Angela Merkel herself today: They’re pushing for a tax on the childless, you see.

Although most politicians are normally crazy about raising taxes or introducing new ones, Frau Merkel made it quite clear that the buck (the euro?) stops here. Like practically everybody else in Germany, she doesn’t have any kids, either.

„Ich glaube, die Diskussion der Einteilung in Menschen mit Kindern und ohne Kinder ist hier nicht zielführend.“

Electricity Scarce In Germany These Days For Some Reason

Germany’s power operators have requested that reserve generators at a power plant in southern Germany and two plants in Austria be activated because, well, the lights are fixin’ to go out here (it’s c-c-cold).

But don’t think for a moment that this has anything at all to do with eight of Germany’s 17 nuclear reactors having been switched off because of an earthquake in Japan last year because it doesn’t. You got that?

“We do not have a problem of supply, of quantity, it’s principally a question of stabilizing the network.”

Left Party Victims Victimized Again

What a shock or something.

Around a third of Germany’s far-left Left Party’s parliamentarians are under observation by the country’s Verfassungsschutz or BfV (the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution), a domestic intelligence agency designed to, well, protect the German constitution.

This is outrageous, I guess, and Germans everywhere are empört (scandalized), as usual. How could it possibly be, they ask themselves, that a political party having members who…

belonging to the “Communist Platform,” claim that in order to introduce a new social order, “illogical, unobjective, unjust and pure power” will be necessary at first…

belonging to the “Marxist Forum,” maintain that “the ruling elite” must be removed from the “operating levers of state power” and have their “economical power base wrested from them…”

get enthusiastic about a party leader (Gesine Lötzsch) who congratulates Fidel Castro on his “fullfilled life of armed struggle and many accomplished works…”

having belonged to the Stasi (the GDR’s Ministry of State Security) still, in essence, belong to the GDR’s Ministry of State Security…

How could it be, like I said, that they could possibly, by any wild stretch of the imagination, ever be considered to be a threat to modern German democratic society based as it is upon the rule of law?

Like I said, what a shock or something.

Es geht nicht darum, eine Partei unter Generalverdacht zu stellen. Es geht darum, verfassungsfeindliche Bestrebungen zu orten, bevor sie Schaden anrichten. Hat man dem Verfassungsschutz nicht gerade – zu Recht – vorgeworfen, das Undenkbare nicht gedacht zu haben? Extremismus kann auf vielerlei Humus wachsen. Auch auf linkem.

PS: By the way, Left Party members are big fans of Iran and Syria, too, to name just a few. I’m just sayin’, it’s none of my business or anything.

@bundestag.de

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.”