Beautiful German weapon sales of the week.
Because somebody has to admire them.
But when it comes to SPENDING money for defense in Germany, well… German officials are scrambling to make sense of the latest twist in the brewing war over U.S. steel and aluminum tariffs, which could see Washington dole out exemptions based on allies’ defense-spending levels.
Me, neither. Nobody else over here did, either.
That just goes to show you how, uh, desperately needed this latest GroKo government is.
Chancellor Angela Merkel and her partners met to formally sign their agreement on a new “grand coalition” government on Monday and admitted it was a political necessity, not a “love match”.
„Wir haben uns sehr viel vorgenommen und es ist Zeit auch mit der Arbeit zu beginnen.”
PS: I think I’ve finally figured out why Angela Merkel has been behaving so strangely these past few years. She smokes fish. And with Vlad Putin, of all people.
No, not the Frank Zappa record. If you’ve ever wondered why folks on the left freak out the way they do you really out to read this.
And if you happen to do German, pick this up sometime.
He and his colleagues Brian Nosek and Jesse Graham sought to discover how well conservative and what Haidt terms ‘liberal’ (ie: progressive) students understood one another by having them answer moral questions as they thought their political opponents would answer them. “The results were clear and consistent,” remarks Haidt. “In all analyses, conservatives were more accurate than liberals.” Asked to think the way a liberal thinks, conservatives answered moral questions just as the liberal would answer them, but liberal students were unable to do the reverse. Rather, they seemed to put moral ideas into the mouths of conservatives that they don’t hold. To put it bluntly, Haidt and his colleagues found that progressives don’t understand conservatives the way conservatives understand progressives.
Give or take 1000 billion? Fur European taxpayers, I mean. When the financial system “Draghi crases” and burns after the interest rates start heading up again.
Bank expert Markus Krall shows in the book “The Draghi Crash” what drastic measures are needed to save Europe from the death of the financial system. Five measures are necessary – otherwise threatening costs up to 4500 billion euros.
The vast abuses in the banking sector hang like a sword of Damocles on Europe. “We are all trapped in the trap that the ECB has dug for itself and us with its Keynesian interest rate policy,” warns Markus Krall. The imbalances in the credit sector are so huge that even a small turnaround in interest rates could lead to a crash.
The problem: the Eurozone countries do not have the resources to deal with the consequences this time around. In Germany 3000 billion euros of national wealth are at stake. Krall estimates the total amount of defaulted loans in the European banking system to be at least 1000 billion euros. And when interest rates rose, an unprecedented wave of bankruptcies threatened Europe’s zombie companies. “That costs again up to 1500 billion euros,” said the consultant.
Staatsschulden, Lebensversicherungen, Bankbilanzen – Banken-Experte Markus Krall zeigt in dem Buch “Der Draghi-Crash”, welche drastischen Maßnahmen nötig sind, um Europa vor dem Exitus des Finanzsystems zu retten. Fünf Maßnahmen seien nötig – sonst drohen Kosten bis zu 4500 Milliarden Euro.
That means chamber of horrors – although cabinet of horrors is also possible here and is definitely more appropriate in this case.
Germany’s Social Democratic Party (SPD) on Friday officially unveiled the six members bestowed with a ministerial post in Chancellor Angela Merkel’s new coalition government.
After suffering record losses in the last election — scoring its worst results since World War II — the SPD is vying to renew its fortunes by bringing some fresh, dynamic figures into the cabinet.
Vast majority of German voters think SPD is unfit for government.
Not. And don’t let the door hit you on the way out.
German Foreign Minister Sigmar Gabriel has been informed that his services will no longer be needed in the next awful German coalition government. They will manage to be awful enough without him.
The reason for this being the replacement of this annoying whiner by a comrade of his who whines even better, or penetranter (more overpoweringly), as the Germans like to say; Heiko Maas. This guy is a natural born wonder-whiner whose whining has even been know to shatter whine glasses. He’s wearing a pair of whine glasses right now, by the way.
So, in other words, he’s the perfect pick to be Germany’s Foreign Minister. Nice work if you can get it, I guess. It’s not like you ever actually have to do anything. Other than a little whining, I mean.
Der bisherige Justiziminister Heiko Maas wird offenbar Außenminister in der nächsten Regierung unter Kanzlerin Merkel.
Where’s the enthusiasm? That’s what Spiegel Online asks regarding Germany’s next coming grand coalition government.
I know that’s not a serious question but how could there possibly be any enthusiasm for the forming of a government that the electorate expressly voted out of office just a few months previously? Everybody but Merkel & Co. are depressed about this depressing matter and are going to stay that way until the new GroKo government – that isn’t even in power yet – finally exits the political stage for good.
Imagine that. You aren’t even in office yet and everybody already hates you. That’s never happened before, right?
With the Social Democrats having approved a new coalition with Chancellor Angela Merkel, Germany finally has a government. Despite the breakthrough, however, enthusiasm is in short supply in Berlin.
But not even Mutti wants to remove Vaterland (fatherland) from the German national anthem. And if Mutti don’t want it, ain’t nothing going to happen. “Equality czar” or not.
Equality czar? What is that? Why don’t they introduce a common sense czar instead? They could call him the sense czar. And he could get rid of all this nonsensical sense-czar-ship going around here these days.
Germany’s equality czar wants to remove words like“fatherland” and “brotherly” from the country’s national anthem, following Canada and Austria in adopting gender neutral phrases.
Kristin Rose-Moehring, equality commissioner since 2001, made the proposal to strike male-specific references from the anthem in a letter to staff at Germany’s family ministry ahead of International Women’s Day, German media reported on Sunday.
Ahead of Women’s Day? How you figure? Every day is Women’s Day over here.
Die Kanzlerin sehe “keinen Bedarf einer Änderung.”
PS: I’m going to ask this woman to look into “mother nature” while she’s at it. It irks the hell out of me every time I hear somebody use that term. The nerve. Person nature will do just fine, thank you.
That means foot soldiers, as in rank and file. And special thanks need to go out to the SPD’s Fußvolk today.
Thanks for nothing. You failed. First make a lot of noise as if you will vote down Merkel’s latest grand coalition government plans so you can take your rightful place in the opposition instead (where you belong – your forty years in the desert) and then cave in to your worthless party leadership and give your blessing after all.
Not that anyone has ever taken your bitching and moaning about “showing those folks up there” all that seriously in the first place, nobody without a party membership card will ever believe a word of it again. You had your chance to do something and you blew it. You have the leadership you deserve. Pitiful.
SPD-Mitglieder stimmen zu 66 Prozent für GroKo-Neuauflage.
A senior German politician has confirmed today that hackers have been able to collect confidential information from Germany’s government network.
He quickly stressed, however, that this information was expressly labeled confidential and he is therefore quite confident that the hackers won’t read it.
“Confidential means in confidence, after all,” he said. “So when one indicates confidentiality it imparts that this information is a private, even a secret matter. Intimate even, although we certainly don’t have any of that kind of material in our network. Strictly forbidden, you know. So why would one who is not in confidence read confidential information? Would you? Of course not. I wouldn’t, either. I just wouldn’t have the confidence to do so. Well, it’s been a long week everybody. Have a nicer weekend!”
According to reports in German media, the hackers focused their attack on the foreign ministry, which in the view of some lawmakers would suggest a foreign intelligence agency as the orchestrator of the hacking operation.
