Silvester Still More Deadly Than Atomkraft

More Germans get injured and die EVERY year by fireworks while celebrating on New Year’s Eve than have ever been injured by German nuclear power plants (no fatalities).

Fireworks

Especially now, I suppose, now that the last few reactors running will soon be turned off for good.

No, I haven’t the slightest idea what the connection is here, either. Ha! Other than perhaps… Germans FEEL that nuclear energy is more dangerous although they KNOW that getting drunk and shooting rockets at one another is a very real and present danger. And hey, what you FEEL wins. Loses?

System One Thinking: System one thinking is automatic, unconscious, lightening fast and generates strong feelings of certainty. System one decisions are difficult to put into words other than ‘it feels right’.

Zerfetzte Hände, schwere Verbrennungen, Tod: Die Silvesternacht hat nicht nur viel Freude, sondern auch einiges Leid gebracht. Mehrere Menschen starben durch Raketen und Böller, andere stürzten aus dem Fenster oder vom Balkon.

L’Etat, C’est You

Or at least the national deficit is all yours, my German friends (and mine – I live and pay taxes here, too).

Debt

But there’s good news, at least. Sort of. It’s only going to get worse!

It’s a paradoxical situation: The economy is braving the euro crisis, tax revenue is making the coffers ring and the German state still goes further into debt. The public sector deficit climbed to 30 billion euros during the first nine months this year. First and foremost the federal government, but also social security and other benefits have gone into the red.

And economists fear that this is just the beginning. Billions of new burdens have been tucked away in the coalition agreement just signed between the Union and the SPD. Tax, social insurance and other contribution increases are right around the corner.

Hey, you voted this coalition government into office, Germany. Oh, that’s right. You didn’t.

Trotz guter Konjunktur und steigender Steuereinnahmen macht Deutschland Milliarden neue Schulden. Jetzt befürchten Ökonomen: Das wird die Bürger teuer zu stehen kommen – und zwar schon bald.

Nekkid Germans Everywhere Again

There must be something about the Christmas season that makes Germans want to take their clothes off, I guess. This year’s lack of snow?

Femen

While German police are looking for a motorcyclist who went riding naked through Münster’s Christmas market, A FEMEN lady with “I AM GOD” painted on her body jumped up on the altar and started screaming in the middle of a Mass on Christmas at Cologne Cathedral.

This “social nudity” is social enough already, if you ask me. Do they really have to introduce anti-social nudity now, too?

„Es gibt kein Argument, das eine solche Aktion rechtfertigt.“

“Has the climate change brand been ruined?”

I’d say yes. At least when it comes to films and documentaries, it seems. It’s just like way too “bo-ho-horing” to make it at the box office.

Climate

It (“An Inconvenient Truth”) made a ton of money which made some people think that suddenly the topic was unboring. Which produced a spate of climate documentaries that were all boring, and eventually resulted in an Oscar-nominated documentary filmmaker friend saying to me they all blend together — all the same shots of melting glaciers, polar bears, carbon emissions … blah, blah, blah. By 2008 another friend was at a gathering of indy film distributors in which they were saying, “no more environmental documentaries!”, there’s no audience for them. And by 2010 a producer friend of mine said, “Even the Green Channel doesn’t want “green programming…”

Climate definitely interests the climate crowd at some science magazines, talks or blogs. Some blogs are amazing. They will post one comment about one graph of temperature records from tree rings and get over a thousand comments. Which is boredom so purified and crystalized it’s in an unadulterated form that could make even a robot want to commit suicide.

Global Boring is a term used to describe the widely accepted scientific conclusion that the world is getting progressively less and less interesting, and will ultimately become so incredibly dull it will no longer be able to support human life.

I Got The Power

The power bill, I mean. The Power Bill Blues, actually. Just like everybody else here in Germany.

Power

The electricity prices in Germany are the highest in the EU. A household here shells out 1000 euros annually (approx. $1,370). The French pay half. The EU average is around 700 euros.

Is this what they meant by the Energiewende (energy turnaround)? The power may be renewable here but I’m not sure how much longer the money is going to be.

Well, at least the electricity prices in Germany will be going up even higher again next year.

Bei den Strompreisen gehört Deutschland innerhalb der EU zu den Spitzenreitern. Ein Haushalt zahlt mehr als 1000 Euro, der EU-Schnitt liegt bei 700. Und im kommenden Jahr dürfte es noch teurer werden.

Real Germans Don’t Tweet

According to Semiocast, an analyst, Germany ranks 31st worldwide in terms of public tweets, with 59m per year. Germany’s 82m people have just 4m Twitter accounts. That puts it 22nd in the world, behind not only European neighbours like Britain (population 63m, 45m accounts) or Spain (population 47m, 16m accounts) but also Turkey (population 75m, 11m accounts) and the Philippines (population 98m, 8.6m accounts).

Junglecamp

But they do like to google, however. Although what they googled most in election year 2013 is another matter. The number one German search item was Wahl-O-Mat, an online election tool that tells you who to vote for.

And Amazon didn’t even make the short list. That’s because it’s “designed for world domination,” I assume.

“Innovation erfordert den Willen, über einen langen Zeitraum missverstanden zu werden.”

“On The Run From The Henchmen Of His Homeland”

Concerned Germans everywhere (note the red scarf) weren’t quite concerned enough to actually offer poor and misunderstood professional leaker/Russian tourist Edward Snowden political asylum, but now they all hope in unison that Brazil will (tons of Germans have found refuge there in the past, you know).

Snowden

Otherwise those awful henchmen/bogeymen from that horrible homeland of his might just get him and, well, we don’t even want to THINK about what could possibly happen to him then!

Ex-NSA-Mitarbeiter Edward Snowden will auf seiner Flucht vor den Häschern seines Heimatlandes offenbar nach Brasilien weiterreisen.

Bah Humbug!

Hundreds of Amazon.com Inc workers in Germany went on strike on Monday, just as pre-Christmas sales were set to peak, in a dispute over pay and conditions that has raged for months…

Amazon

The Verdi union said up to 700 workers joined the strike in Amazon’s logistic center in Bad Hersfeld, plus 500 to 600 in Leipzig. For the first time, the union also called a strike in Graben, where Verdi said 600 workers took part.

Now that’s what I call having the Christmas spirit. Just replace the Scrooge part below with Ver.di.

Fred: Merry Christmas, Uncle Scrooge!
Scrooge: What’s so merry about it? I’ll tell you what Christmas is. It’s just another work day, and any jackanape who thinks else should be boiled in his own pudding!
Cratchit: But sir, Christmas is a time for giving… a time to be with one’s family.
Scrooge: I say, Bah humbug!
Fred: I don’t care! I say, Merry Christmas. Merry Christmas!
Cratchit: [clapping] Well said, Master Fred!
Scrooge: Cratchit, what are you doing?
Cratchit: [stops clapping] I was just trying to keep my hands warm, sir.

Amazon has recently announced it would build three new logistics centers in Poland and two in the Czech Republic, prompting speculation that it could seek to shift work across the border from strike-hit centers in Germany.

GroKo Is Just What It Sounds Like

Whoopee or something. Germany’s grand coalition is finally here – a government the Germans didn’t vote for.

groko

GERMANY’S language boffins were first: they coined “GroKo” (short for grand coalition) the German language’s word of the year 2013 (an accolade that is not automatically flattering). To some Germans, this neologism might evoke a “great crocodile” or something otherwise sinister.

What does this really mean? It means that the tail (SPD) has succeeded in wagging the dog (CDU/CSU) and will now force enough of its social democratic agenda (“social” = free lunch) upon the German ship of way-too-big-state to veer it off the proper course, once again. It had been heading, however timidly, toward more private initiative =  responsibility and away from your typical German been-there-done-that world of ever more government waste, meddling and control. The CDU/CSU has now become thoroughly social democratized, in other words.

Just like with the “energy turnaround,” everybody will wake up again once they figure out that this is actually going to cost them personally way too much money. Hey, life is a zigzag course. They’ll get back on track again eventually.

PS: Something actually happened on German TV last night that was apparently worth watching.