Beautiful German weapon sale of the week.
Because somebody has to admire them.
Israel is seeking to buy advanced missile boats from Germany to protect drilling operations in its offshore natural gas fields.
Supersturm! Angst everywhere! People are running for shelter wherever you look. Berlin has been closed for business. Germany is shuddering with fear. And all of this due to global warming. Or something.
If we must die now, let us do so in an orderly manner and close the Christmas markets first. Then we can head home and die there in dignity. Where it’s safer. After the Tagesschau.
LEIPZIG SCHLIESST WEGEN „XAVER“ JETZT SOGAR DEN WEIHNACHTSMARKT!
I’ve never made any secret about being an unrepenting communist.
This is another one of those “only in Germany” kind of things. Well, to be fair, it’s more like an “only in Berlin” kind of thing.
It goes like this: The Left Party – a “democratic socialist” party stemming directly from the PDS (some of us referred to it as the Partei der Stasi) which in turn was a creature that had stemmed directly from the black lagoon of GDR SED East German Communism, never stops going through the motions of pretending that it isn’t communist in nature (if not in deed) while everyone here knows of course that it is. It’s just some kind of weird parlour game that Germans play.
The Left Party is the refuge for all of those hundreds of thousands of incorrigible die-hard Ostalgie dinosaurs who cannot except the fact that their worldview is in fact irretrievably gone (I feel for some of them in a way, it is unrealistic of us to think that the older ones can except it). Check out this election map of Berlin from two months ago if you don’t believe me.
Occasionally this game gets a little out of hand, however, and folks have to speak up to have them tone it down again for awhile so the game can continue in a more civilized and orderly fashion. That just happened once again with the Left Party attempt to have their ex-party boss Gesine Lötzsch herself (hardliner is the nice word for her) placed at the head of the Bundestag‘s Budget Committee.
Now everyone is suddenly surprized and concerned, it seems – to include the “regular” green kind of left-wing dream-world crowd, albeit from the West – that she is not prepared “to distance herself” from her communist past. This is unfair irgendwie (somehow). I understand completely why she has no business being there in the Bundestag and all. But how can you be expected to distance yourself from a past that is still your present?
Abgeordnete von Union und Grünen wollen die Linke Gesine Lötzsch als Vorsitzende des Haushaltsausschusses los werden. Der Grund dafür ist ihr unkritischer Umgang mit der DDR-Vergangenheit.
Only Germans can come up with Pretraumatic Stress Disorder. But now we can take this puppy up a notch higher.
“German Taliban” Josef D. (the guy in the middle with the skin problem) joins a terrorist group, gets himself a Kalaschnikow, goes to Afghanistan intending to do that jihad thing but then gets Durchfall (diarrhea) and therefore cannot take part in all the cool attacks planned on US installations there so he has to return home to Germany where he promptly gets busted (I’m not sure for what, though).
Now his lawyer informs us that his Schuldfähigkeit (legal culpability) needs to be looked into very intensely and thoroughly-like because not only does this guy have terrible awful diarrhea problems, he also suddenly seems to be suffering from some kind of mysterious mental disorder. Uh, wait a minute. Don’t all terrorists suffer from some kind of mysterious mental disorder?
Anyways, this all has a certain logic to it if you ask me. Germany is the number one country when it comes to doctor visits, after all. Politicians get sick and throw in the towel here all the time. German intellectuals regularly get ill or “burn out” while analyzing the world around them. A huge portion of German youth suffers from “social phobia” and half a million Germans are hopelessly “addicted” to the Internet. Hell, even the German Pope gets sick and has to go into early retirement, for crying out loud.
It’s just not easy being a German, I guess. Without getting sick, I mean. But like doesn’t somebody out there – who is German – have to do it?
Wegen einer chronischen Durchfallerkrankung habe er aber nicht an Anschlägen und Angriffen der Gruppe auf afghanische und US-Einrichtungen teilnehmen können, so die Bundesanwaltschaft.
Datenschutz! Datenschutz, Datenschutz, Datenschutz Datenschutz. Robot insects.
Drones. Datenschutz. Robots. Amazon. Amazon drone robots. New ideas. Bad technology. Technology bad. Bad ideas.
Then there’s the Datenschutz part.
Jeff Bezos. Darth Vader. Das Imperium schlägt zurück (The Empire Strikes Back).
Technisch ist es möglich, der Datenschutz aber ist heikel.
Zwangs- = compulsory. Umlage = levy, share in the costs. Put those two together and what do you get? Forced to share. But we’re talking about money here folks so let’s just call it another tax and get it over with already.
This latest planned tax consists of forcing German households to purchase so-called “smart meters” or modern electricity meters that are supposed to regulate energy consumption by drawing electricity from that so wonderfully green German energy grid whenever this energy is cheaper. You know, like when hell freezes over?
This will only set back German consumers another 70 or 80 euros after already having been hit with a seven percent energy bill increase planned for next year, too (the seven can and will change, of course, and we all now in which direction it will be going).
Turn it around as much as you want. Anyway you turn this German energy turnaround around, you’ll always get the same result. Once you’ve turned it around, I mean. She is like way too expensive, señor.
But what can you expect from a government that is about to go retro and way back in the Wayback Machine to the good old days of SPD Never-Never Land again?
“Verbraucher sollten mit attraktiven Angeboten überzeugt, statt mit immer mehr ordnungsrechtlichen Einbaupflichten gezwungen werden.”
PS: The next German word of the day will be Abzocke. Here’s a tip: It means rip-off.
And maladaptive reaction. Berlin, a counterculture paradise? I guess. A privacy haven? Keep on dreaming.
But it’s a lot more than that. Berlin has always been a place to hail heros who aren’t heros. That’s why this Snowden asylum nonsense fits like a glove here.
An international cadre of privacy advocates is settling in Germany’s once-divided capital, saying they feel safer here than they do in the United States or Britain, where authorities have vowed to prosecute leakers of official secrets…
One wants to be glad that Berlin (and Germany) is a sanctuary for people who have been subjected to inappropriate, excessive snooping by U.S. and U.K. authorities. Still, it’s always worth it, I think, to be a little skeptical of individuals, or groups, or cities and countries whose attitudes carry a whiff of neurotic impulse and maladaptive reaction. Berlin positively reeks of it…
It is an ironic twist for a sometimes-bleak city that was once better known as a backdrop to John le Carré novels.
In Berlin (all two or three of you?). Please sign this petition in support of the old baseball fields on Columbiadamm at Tempelhofer Feld (click the picture).
The Berlin Senat is planning to get rid of one of them to make room for a Friedhofserweiterung (cemetary expansion)? That about says it all, doesn’t it?
Thanks for the link, Indeterminacy. And yes, an ape may just have been keeping score there.
Ein weiterer Softballplatz in Zehlendorf wurde aufgrund zahlreichen Protestes eines Bewohners eines Einfamilienhauses vernichtet und steht ebenfalls nicht mehr zur Verfügung.
In a behavior study taking place at a German zoo, scientists have discovered that apes prefer popcorn to movies showing explicit ape sex scenes.
Maybe they would get better results if they did a misbehavior study instead.
“Maybe they are not so interested, as Bonobo apes very often have sex anyway.”
Which is bad. Every dolt knows that German universities only do research for things having to do with goodness and niceness so these absent-minded professors clearly must have been tricked or something.
Word is that 22 German universities and research institutions have received more than $10 million from the US Defense Department’s budget since 2000. And this just has to be a bad thing. Doesn’t it?
Maybe the UN or Star Fleet Command could pass a resolution ensuring that science only be used for goodness and niceness in the future, the world over, just like it is here in Germany. Except sometimes when folks get tricked.
Yet once something is researched and published, it is available to anyone for any use. This gives rise to what researchers call a dual-use dilemma. Rockets that transport satellites into space, for example, could also be used to carry nuclear weapons. Knowledge about pathogens can be used to develop new medicines or biological weapons. Nuclear technology can harvest energy or build atomic bombs.
