Speaking Of Predictability

August 13, 2013 By Hermann Observer in Habitudes, Helections, Helplessness, Hideology, High Art, Higher Education, Humor, Hurt Feelings, Hypochondria, Hypocrisy Tags: Aging, Günter Grass, German, Germans, Germany, Humor, Left Party, Oskar Lafontaine, Politics, Satire, Sommerloch, SPD, The Nobel Prize Leave a comment

Zum Sommer gehört auch Günter Grass (Günter Grass is also a part of sommer – predictable as he is, just like those other Sommerloch monsters mentioned below).

This time the grand old man of letters suddenly felt the urgent need to attack former SPD boss (and now over-the-hill ex-Left Party boss) Oskar Lafontaine as being a sleazy traitor to the grand old SPD’s grand old cause, whatever the grand old hell that was.

I can only assume that this little outburst must have something to do with the upcoming federal elections. The SPD has ruled out ever forming a coalition government with the Left Party (one of the very few things they have managed to do right), but this is mostly because the Left Party, like the SPD itself, is already extinct (nobody has broken the part about the SPD being extinct to the SPD yet, however). Grass, of course, is about as SPD and as extinct as you can get.

And it doesn’t really matter that Grass is actually right about Lafontaine here. All it points out to me is just how much he and Lafontaine have in common. Nobody out there takes them seriously anymore.

Günter Grass gehört zum Sommer wie das Reptil zum Badesee.

German Outrage Industry At Full Production

August 7, 2013 By Hermann Observer in Habitudes, Hard Facts, Helections, Helplessness, Hideology, High Art, Home Cooking, Hurt Feelings, Hustle (Hoax), Hypocrisy, Hysteria Tags: Berlin, Data Security, German, Germans, Germany, Intelligence, NSA, Political Parties, Politics, SPD Leave a comment

When it comes to Germany’s BND foreign intelligence service having forwarded massive amounts of data to the NSA – legally, I mean.

Take the good old SPD, for instance. They’re hollering the loudest at the moment. And this despite the fact that this particularly evil cooperation with US-Amerika is nothing new at all to them. So not new, in fact (an agreement made in the year 2002), that the SPD’s Frank-Walter Steinmeier was the guy wearing the responsibility hat when this agreement was made – the current governing coalition was not even in power.

But hey, you know how it is when a political party is out of power (in more ways than one) and crawling and scratching to get back into the game. In an outrage and all. In a panic, I mean.

“In my view, the opposition has only itself to blame. Pretending to be the firefighter just to be caught as the arsonist – you can’t play both of these roles with any credibility.”

Meat Me At The Barbeque

August 6, 2013 By Hermann Observer in Hard Facts, Helections, Helplessness, Hideology, High Art, Higher Education, Home Cooking, Humor, Hurt Feelings, Hypochondria, Hypocrisy, Hysteria Tags: Berlin, Elections, German, Germans, Germany, Greens, Humor, Meat, Paternalism, Political Parties, Politics, Satire, Vegetarians, Veggie Day 2 Comments

How smart was the Green Party’s election pledge to introduce a weekly vegetarian day? Oh, I dunno. But more than 85 percent of Germans eat meat daily or almost daily. So you do the math.

Massive web surveillance by the US? German voters seem to have lost interest. The euro crisis? Boring. Comprehensive minimum wage? Zzzzzz. It has been a somnolent election season thus far. At least until this week. Suddenly, the German electorate is up in arms, furious with a proposal made by the Green Party which, many fear, could violate one of their most cherished rights: that of eating sausage whenever they want.

Veggie Day Will Just Be The Start

August 5, 2013 By Hermann Observer in Habitudes, Helections, Helplessness, Hideology, High Art, Home Cooking, Humor, Hypochondria, Hypocrisy, Hysteria Tags: Berlin, Cuisine, Elections, Food, German, Germans, Germany, Green Shirts, Greens, Humor, Ideology, Political correctness, Satire, Vegetarians, Veggie Day 4 Comments

If the Greens get their way, I mean.

Although most German works canteens (the place where most working Germans take in their main meal of the day) offer one vegetarian day per week voluntarily already, this is clearly not enough for certain of the more nervous elements pacing the floors at Green Shirt Campaign Headquarters. A federal election is coming up people, so it’s time for a little agitprop sommertime theater already (agitprop Sommerloch theater?).

Once in absolute control – uh, I mean after the coming election in September – the Greens apparantly plan to introduce legislation indroducing “Veggie Day” for the good of all of us, animals included, whether we like our veggies or not (most animals hate them). Like how Organic Bourgeois of them is that?

You see, it’s not like the Greens are into Bevormundung or anything (paternalism, condescension, tutelage, bureaucratic PC dictatorship, etc.). It’s just that they’re into Bevormundung.

One guy from the FDP put it well: “What’s next? Jute Shopping Bag Day? Bike Day? Green Shirt Day?”

“Man muss nicht jeden Tag zwei Burger essen.”

Three Bad Reasons Why German Newspaper Publishers Simply Won’t Trust Google News…

August 1, 2013 By Hermann Observer in Habeas Corpus, Habitudes, Helplessness, Hideology, Home Cooking, Humor, Hurt Feelings, Hypochondria, Hypocrisy, Hysteria Tags: Angst, German, Germans, Germany, Google, Google News, Humor, Journalism, Journalists, News, Newspapers, Paranoia, Publishers, Satire, Schizophrenia Leave a comment

And vigorously push for any and all legislation aimed at making life for Google & Co. as difficult as newsworthyly possible. They seem to have three main bad reasons, as far as I can tell, like I said, but if you can come up with any others, please don’t hesitate to let me know:

1) The Google News aggregate makes money off said German newspaper publishers by displaying snippets of said German newspaper publishers’ stories, only… Google doesn’t make any money with Google News by virtue of the simple fact that Google doesn’t place any advertising on Google News pages so, well, there is no German newspaper publisher money here to be made off with.

2) Google shamefully steals readers away from said newspaper publishers’ publications because, uh… Google News is actually one of the major sources of traffic to these German newspaper sites so, well, it’s the publishers who are getting the readers and making the money off of Google.

3) Google needs to be controlled ever more closely with ever stricter regulation and be restricted from including any of these said news articles without a publisher’s expressed written permission to “opt in” because, well… These newspapers can already “opt out” any old time they like simply by having their webmasters do so (a simple change to the robots.txt file will suffice).

And now that all of these outraged German publishers have decided to opt in to Google News anyway – now that they have been given the choice to do so – well, that makes all of this yet another typically complex German news story all in its own write and one which of course nobody else who is not German will be able to understand just right yet.

German Newspaper Publishers Seem Not To Understand Google News

German Of The Day: Baden Gehen

July 31, 2013 By Hermann Observer in Habitudes, Hard Facts, Helections, Helplessness, Hideology, High Art, Humor, Hurt Feelings Tags: Berlin, Ecology, Elections, German, Germans, Germany, Greens, Humor, Jürgen Trittin, Politicians, Politics, Satire, Schadenfreude, The Green Shirts 3 Comments

Yes, baden gehen can mean to go swimming. But it can also mean to go belly-up or to flop horribly.

And that’s precisely what the German Greens’ top candidate Jürgen Trittin just did while taking part in an election “paddle outing” on the river Werra.

Me? Schadenfroh? Hell yeah. But hey, the federal election here is just 53 days away and you know how it is. Politicians just can’t avoid doing dopey stuff like this at times like this. So give him a break or something. And besides, this guy was all wet to begin with anyway.

The real question here is whether or not this is a portent of things to come. You know, for the Greens? We certainly wouldn’t want them to erleiden (suffer) a Schiffbruch (shipwreck) in the coming election, now would we? Or you wouldn’t, I’m sure.

Trittin, der in Göttingen für den Bundestag kandidiert, war mit Parteifreunden vom nordhessischen Witzenhausen bis ins südniedersächsische Hedemünden auf der Werra gepaddelt, um damit für einen Stopp sämtlicher Salzeinleitungen in den Fluss einzutreten.

Germany’s Eight Unplugged CO2-Free Atomic Reactors Have Increased Air Pollution For A Second Year In A Row

July 29, 2013 By Hermann Observer in Habitudes, Hard Facts, Health, Heconomy, Helections, Helplessness, Hideology, Home Cooking, Humor, Hurt Feelings, Hypocrisy, Hysteria Tags: Air Pollution, Atomic energy, Berlin, Climate Change, CO2, Coal, Fukushima, German, Germans, Germany, Global warming, Green energy Leave a comment

No, wait. It’s the German coal-fired power revival doing that.

Green shift? Sounds more like a green shaft to me.

Coal is the most polluting fossil fuel and is blamed by scientists for contributing to global warming. Merkel opted to shut nuclear power plants after an earthquake in Japan two years ago resulted in meltdowns at reactors owned by Tokyo Electric Power Co.

“Climate protection is a key target of the government and greenhouse gases should fall, not climb.”

The Lives Of Others

July 11, 2013 By Hermann Observer in Habeas Corpus, Habitudes, Hard Facts, Hate, Helplessness, Hi-tech, Hideology, Home Cooking, Hurt Feelings, Hypochondria, Hypocrisy, Hysteria Tags: Berlin, Edward Snowden, Films, German, Germans, Germany, Gun control, Movies, NSA, PRISM, Spying, Stasi 2 Comments

One in two of the country’s (Germany’s) citizens regard Snowden as a hero, according to a June 29 survey of 504 people by Emnid for Bild am Sonntag newspaper.

“It looks like the NSA picked up where the Stasi left off.”

PS: Didn’t this German cop know about his country’s gun control laws?

He murdered his ex and then killed himself. All of this strictly illegal, of course.

Our Energy Turnaround Will Work

July 10, 2013 By Hermann Observer in Hard Facts, Heconomy, Helplessness, Hi-tech, Hideology, Hurt Feelings, Hysteria Tags: Energiewende, Energy Turnaround, German, Germans, Germany, Nuclear energy, Solar energy, Wind Energy Leave a comment

But only as long as we keep using the nuclear energy we supposedly turned around from.

According to an analysis by the Breakthrough Institute, Germany’s current installed solar panels will end up costing ratepayers $130 billion over the next 20 years through above-market-rate feed-in tariff contracts, compared to $15 billion for a state-of-the-art nuclear reactor that will generate over half the electricity of Germany’s entire solar fleet over a similar 20-year period…

The largest advantage of nuclear power is its ability to provide reliable, baseload power year-round 24 hours a day. Solar and wind can be economical as distributed energy resources, whose greatest value is suppressing demand load on the grid. But nuclear power provides baseload power and will therefore be the most technically optimal replacement for large fossil-fueled power stations like coal plants.

United Stasi of America

July 9, 2013 By Hermann Observer in Habitudes, Helplessness, Hideology, High Art, Hypocrisy, Hysteria Tags: Berlin, Espionage, German, Germans, Germany, NSA, Protests, Stasi, Surveillance 2 Comments

Get it? A protest at the US embassy in Berlin and stuff.

The National Security Agency can gather about one billion times more information than the sinister Stasi police that were used to hunt down the targeted people of Nazi Germany.

And just in case you were wondering, Germans only do “strictly legal” spying. But you probably weren’t wondering.

Darunter war das Konterfei des umstrittenen Internet-Unternehmers und Multimillionärs Kim Schmitz alias „Kim Dotcom“ zu erkennen. Der gebürtige Deutsche lebt in Neuseeland und ist Gründer der – mittlerweile geschlossenen – Internetplattform „Megaupload“, über die die Nutzer auch illegal an Musik und Filme gelangen konnten. Seit 2012 warten die USA auf die Auslieferung des Unternehmers, weil ein Haftbefehl gegen Schmitz vorliegt.

Observing Hermann

“Was interessiert mich mein Geschwätz von gestern?”

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