God punishes us, I mean you, by giving you what you want.
The 1960s saw demonstrations across West Germany against the Vietnam war and the 1980s brought large protests outside some U.S. bases against plans to deploy new medium-range nuclear missiles. U.S. forces have always been viewed by some, especially on the political left, with hostility, as occupiers.
“We Germans fought for the Russians to go, now we are fighting for the Americans to stay.”
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.”
Like when it comes to anti-Semitism and bad old fashioned anti-Jewish thought crime.
Honestly, let’s put this latest study in perspective and maybe not paint the Germans as being the Hollywood Nazis they aren’t for once (but just this once).
Sure, 20 percent is a lot. But you know that you know you thought it was higher (or wanted it to be). And “the study — which draws on several different surveys and other research — puts Germans in the middle of the pack in Europe, showing more latent anti-Semitism in countries such as Poland, Hungary and Portugal, and less in Italy, Britain, the Netherlands and France.”
And what happens to that 20 percent once you subtract the extremist right/Islamic fringe and those who think like and/or support them? I’m all for subtracting them, by the way, but we don’t live in a perfect world. What can I say? It’s a never ending story.
Ob auf Fußballplätzen, im Netz oder in islamistischen und rechtsextremen Milieus – Judenfeindlichkeit ist in der deutschen Gesellschaft noch immer gegenwärtig.
I don’t usually tend to panic when reading newspapers, but when German journalists start writing articles critical of the media’s “eternal ramblings about doomsday,” I get very nervous indeed. This is news, in other words, primarily because this isn’t news to me.
Evelyn Finger’s main concern here is the German obsession with “the” Krise (crisis) in general (crises plural) and the latest so-called Krise der Demokratie (crisis of Democracy) in particular.
“In the meantime (it started out long ago with “the oil crisis,” she believes) we have become all too accustomed to terms like education crisis, energy crisis, climate crisis and, most recently, financial crisis, debt crisis and euro crisis. We have all hoped that these crises would not prove to become any more threatening than they already are, especially since our linguistic capacity to express more crisis seems to have been exhausted: World financial crisis! But a new threatening term has been spooking the debates as of late: A crisis of Democracy. Is there really such a crisis or is the chatter about it the real problem?”
We all know the answer to that question, of course. She rightly finds this obsessive German Angslust (passion for fear) ridiculous and has no trouble exposing it for what it is; mindless, self-indulgent, neurotic nonsense. But I do wish she would have had the decency to have warned me first. I don’t like stumbling accross articles like this in German newspapers, articles that make sense by expressing something we used to call “common sense.” If I had wanted to read articles like that I wouldn’t have bought a German newspaper in the first place.
But thanks anyway, Evelyn. You may have shaken me up a bit, but I really do hope you have a pleasant week.
Das Wort Krise hatte seinen Schrecken schon fast verloren. Es klang in den letzten Monaten auch bei dramatischer Nachrichtenlage etwas schwach und durch häufigen Gebrauch abgenutzt.
Three percent. That’s how much solar energy contributes to Germany’s overall energy mix (now don’t go be a jerk and break it to the Germans that the sun doesn’t shine very much here).
But that doesn’t really matter because, jeepers, that measly three percent only costs consumers half of the total 17 billion euros they have to shell out for renewable energy here.
It’s the principle of the matter, you see. If the Germans left this solar energy stuff up to the free market (that means no subsidies), then solar power’s contribution would be even lower than three percent – at none of the cost – and just think about how ridiculous they would look then.
And (even) the Spiegel says: Solar Subsidy Sinkhole
Remember how the Greens in Berlin shot themselves in the foot after elections last fall by sticking ever so stickily to sticky green principles by just saying no to a two-mile stretch of Berlin autobahn that everybody in town wanted but them?
It was a stellar performance in reality check checking and how not to form a coalition government with the SPD even though everyone seemed convinced up until then that the Greens were either going to take over the Berlin city goverment completely or at least play a major role as junior partner (neither happened).
Well surprise, surprise. Green shirt ideologues what’s upstairs have now just okayed a working paper calling for a more offensive and quite massive expansion of the German autobahn system in West Germany. This is not a sell-out of green principles, however, not that you were even thinking that.
Green autobahns, as you may know, are made of biodegradable concrete and recycled plastic ALDI shopping bags, constructed using environmentally friendly green technology (wind-, I mean hot air-powered) and progressive landscaping techniques which allow for low carbon tire prints, renewable eco-outhouse rest stop stops and an overal eco-friendly and very green if not rather high global environmental greenhouse impact.
Alles im grünen Bereich, wie immer.
So we can’t pull out completely yet.
But it is time to remove another couple of brigades of American troops from German soil again.
It has long been clear that the US military was going to minimize its presence in Europe. On Thursday, new details emerged, with Washington planning to withdraw two brigades. At least one of those units will be pulled out of Germany.
Europe’s strategic importance for the US military looks to be dwindling.
PS: Speaking of violence… The military is violent, right? And the American military is the most violent of all , right? And we live in the most violent of times, right? Forget it. Everything you know is wrong. Violence is a myth.
Not that anybody out there knows who the German President is or could really care less if they did, but a new German verb has just entered the language (in his honor?) referring to, well, referring to what, anyway?
The new German verb refers to the manner in which scandal-plagued President Christian Wulff has sought to manage revelations that he accepted a favourable home loan from a businessman, holidayed at the villas of the wealthy and left a threatening message for the editor of Bild newspaper.
It’s called wulffen and actually has two meanings (at least two), according to the director of the German Language Association in Dortmund. The first is to talk on and on unprompted. The second means to be evasive about a particular issue without actually telling a lie.
Damn. I really had no idea that politicians the world over have actually been wulffen with me the whole time.
“It means something in-between.”
Now that the German Energiewende (energy turnaround) is here, tens of thousands of new green jobs have been created. Well, not quite yet actually. But it won’t be long now.
After all, once Berlin decided to permanently switch off the country’s eight oldest nuclear reactors and close the remaining ones still online by 2022, everyone here was absolutely ecstatic (at least those who didn’t work in the energy sector were). Sometimes you just have to give the people what they want, you know? And now they’ve got it. What they wanted, I mean
The same day the Energiewende was announced saw the first case in Germany of a solar panel manufacturer (Solon) announcing it was going into liquidation, threatening the loss of some 500 jobs. Then you had EON, Germany’s biggest power supplier, deciding to cut up to 11,000 jobs worldwide while its rival RWE shed 8,000. Then you had Solar Millennium. Then you had, oh I forget which one (there have been so many recently), solar something or something.
Hey, what’s a little job loss when it comes to the common green good (rhymes with Robin Hood)? These jobs are coming, people, sooner or later or maybe not even at all because, well, not even green jobs grow on trees.
Optimistic predictions that Germany’s decision to turn its back on nuclear energy will lead to the creation of hundreds of thousands of jobs in the renewable energy sector have met with scepticism.
Why not 40 instead?
It could have been a lot worse, though, believe it or not. This Knutmania stuff, I mean. Just imagine if he would have drowned in the Arctic instead?
Knut arrived on the scene at a moment when global warming was a growing topic, born the same year that the climate-change film “An Inconvenient Truth,” starring Al Gore, was released… Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth” claim that polar bears were drowning in the Arctic because of melting ice packs has since been discredited.
Bis zum Ende der Ausschreibung in dieser Woche seien 40 Ideen, Skizzen Bilder und Modelle beim Verein der Freunde des Berliner Zoos eingegangen.
Observing Hermann 