Especially when they’re Boeing 747-8-Jumbos.
Mit einer Rumpflänge von 76,3 Metern übertrifft die 747-8 als jetzt längster Passagierjet den Airbus A340-600 um knapp einen Meter und den Airbus A380 um vier Meter. Das Boeing-Flagschiff kann bis zu 600 Passagiere aufnehmen.
I don’t know, man. Adding critical commentary to Mein Kampf? It’s pretty full of critical commentary already if you ask me.
And as a schoolbook? Not good. With kids the way they are these days, if you have to start including commentaries in the text of Mein Kampf to debunk Hitler’s “arguments,” you’re only going to give them ideas.
“Das Ziel ist die Entmystifizierung des Buches.”
I’m really starting to like these Pirate guys, honest.
I mean, everybody knows that it’s all a big elaborate practical joke anyway, so why not just calm down, folks, and kick back and enjoy their fifteen minute ride of fame in vollen Zügen (to the fullest)?
One of the latest Pirate humdinger zingers (there have been so many these days that I’ve lost count) is the Berlin state parliament floor leader’s comparison of his party to another German party that turned out to be a bit less of a joke: “The rise of the Pirate Party is as fast as that of the NSDAP between 1928 and 1933.” Just in case you didn’t know, the NSDAP was the Nazi party.
No politician in Germany, not even the geekiest of geeks, can say something like that by accident. So again: It was a joke. It had to have been. It really was a joke. A Pirate joke. Wasn’t it?
The remark was an outrageous transgression that can’t be excused by the party’s lack of experience.
On land, even. No, not these pirates. These pirates down here.
Well, they won’t actually be shooting at the pirates per se (that would be bad), but more like at their equipment and stuff. You know, at the loot and the booty on the beaches? This will make the pirates run away and never come back again or at least become good or something.
It is all part of the EU’s anti-pirate Operation Atalanta off the Somali coast so it’s OK for Germans to do this, really.
The German opposition continues to criticise the operation as risky overreach for the forces and has vowed to vote against it.
Is there anybody out there?
I like old Helmut Schmidt, and we’re talking old (93). I like that he goes out of his way to smoke in front of everybody, especially there where you’re not supposed to. I also think it’s cool that he doesn’t have a cell phone and prefers writing something called “letters” with something called “paper and ink.” And I don’t even mind that he thinks the Internet is “menacing.” I mean, why should he be the only one in Germany who doesn’t think that way?
I do wish, however, that he would take that big leap and finally leave the SPD while he still has the time to do so. I don’t think he ever belonged there in the first place. But maybe that’s just me.
„Ich telefoniere überhaupt nur noch selten. Wahrscheinlich habe ich das auch früher nie wirklich gern getan. Ich habe immer die Schriftform bevorzugt, und zwar die briefliche Schriftform.“
But we don’t have the confidence (investor or otherwise) to create one ourselves.
The project to set up a European rating agency to challenge the dominance of American firms is at risk of collapsing, the German business daily Financial Times Deutschland reported on Monday. International consulting firm Roland Berger can’t find enough investors for its plan.
Hey, you-know-what happens. But don’t worry about it, Europe. It’s not like anybody is going to be rating you on this or anything. When in doubt (and you always are), just keep on bitching and moaning instead.
Ihnen wird nicht nur wegen Fehlbewertungen eine Mitschuld an der Finanzkrise gegeben. Auch ihre Rolle bei der Beurteilung der dramatischen Rettungsbemühungen und -konzepte für hochverschuldete Euro-Länder wie Griechenland, Portugal und Irland ist umstritten. Das Urteil der Ratingagenturen prägt letztlich vielfach die Marktreaktionen auf solche Bemühungen.
Here’s more government in action for you, folks. German Beamte (civil servants). You can’t live with them, you can’t live without them (it’s verboten).
A retiring German public servant has signed off from work by emailing his 500 fellow staff to tell them that he had not done anything for 14 years.
The 65-year-old’s final words in the job were to crow over colleagues and say he had earned more than £600,000 without lifting a finger.
“I do not wish to say anything else.”
“We can continue to screw up our image just fine all on our own, thank you,” A party spokesman said.
With comrades like these who needs enemies?
“Seine Zeit ist einfach vorbei.”
Günter Grass has it all: That fat and sassy moral high ground he’s king of the hill of, that left-wing obsession for defending brutal regimes in the name of “world peace,” that Nobel Prize for literature and that SPD party membership book (I’m not sure which one gives him more legitimacy here).
But above all else, he’s got that which all successful peacenik artists and Künstler the world over must invariably have: That inability to keep their mouths shut when it comes to addressing issues they clearly know nothing about.
At the moment Grass is worried about how “the nuclear power Israel is endangering the already fragile world peace” (think Iran) and has written a shockingly predictable poem about it. It must be a real humdinger, too, but to be fair I must admit that I haven’t read it yet and most certainly never will because I’m waiting to read his poem about Iran’s threat to world peace first. I assume that he will publish that one next week, but you know what they say about when you assume things… Blah, blah, blah. Meet the new school. Same as the old school.
Israel currently has three Dolphin submarines from Germany – one half-funded and two entirely funded by Berlin – two more are currently under construction, and the contract for a sixth submarine was signed last month. Dolphin-class submarines can carry nuclear-tipped missiles, but there is no evidence Israel has armed them with such weapons.
This would be funny if wasn’t so funny. Where do we want to go broke today? Q-Cells is now the fourth major bankruptcy in the German solar industry sector of late and although they are sure to have made a lot of dumb mistakes themselves, they certainly couldn’t have gone bankrupt “this well” without the German government’s relentless and merciless help.
It’s all about drugs, subsidy drugs. And once these subsidy drugs had been administered – in this case promoting wonderful and environmentally friendly solar technology for the good of all German-kind (in a country where sunshine is still a news item) – most of these companies failed to wean themselves from their reliance upon them and made some bad business decisions as a result (decisions they wouldn’t have made if they had been clean).
In the meantime, Asian competitors in the real world learned to produce the solar technology cheaper (as usual) and, just to add a little insult to injury here, it turns out that the German government helped the Chinese solar industry with financial aid , too. Only they did this better than they did in Germany.
Then Berlin finally got tired of shelling out all this money back home and started reducing the dosage faster than the addicts could adapt to and, well, the rest is history, or Geschichte, if you prefer.
So what’s the moral of the story? Remember those nine most terrifying words in the English language: “We’re from the government and we’re here to help.”
Somehow the German government must have lost sight of the fact that its policy in fact encourages the demise of Germany’s own solar industry. The development bank of the government-owned KfW group of banks supports China’s green industry with low-interest loans. Ironically, the German Investment and Development Company (DEG), also a subsidiary of KfW, is one of the financial backers of Chinese industry giant Yingli Solar.
Observing Hermann 