International Olympic Committee To Disqualify All East German Olympic Medals

Just kidding.

The Limpics.

That the IOC seems determined to find a way to strip Armstrong’s time trial medal prompted Bill Mallon, one of the world’s leading Olympic historians, to ask in an email why the Olympic officials can’t do it for the medals won by doped East German athletes.  

It’s a good question.  

There actually is more documented evidence of East German doping than there is of Armstrong’s.  The Stasi (East German secret police) files opened after the 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall gave names, dates, and dosages, implicating many East German Olympic medalists from 1972 through 1988.

Know What This Is?

 

London

 

An interactive map of every single bomb dropped on London by the German Luftwaffe during the Blitz of World War II.

During that period (the London Blitz), London was attacked 71 times. More than one million houses were destroyed or damaged, and more than 40,000 civilians were killed.

“Wenn man diese Karten und die Verbreitung der Bomben über der Hauptstadt betrachtet, wird klar, was das Wort Blitz bedeutet.”

How Shocking

Or something. 30 protesters stormed the grounds of the Iranian mission in Berlin Dahlem and pelted the building with stones and paint and stuff.

Uebergriff auf Iranische Botschaft in Berlin

Uh, so what’s the problem with that, Guido? It’s not like they’re going to be taking hostages are anything.

“Just as we expect other states to provide adequate protection for our embassies, so we must ensure German authorities are doing everything possible to protect diplomatic missions.”

 

Is Possession Really Nine-Tenths Of The Law?

Strange. Stored abroad since the Cold War in case of a Soviet invasion, nearly half of Germany’s gold reserves are stored in the United States.

Stranger still: The Bundesbank or other independent auditors have never actually physically checked the gold’s authenticity or weight but have relied on “written confirmations by the storage sites” instead.

Now folks are starting to, you know, wonder (paranoia runs deep)? Hey, central banking at its best is all I can say. It’s not that we don’t trust you, it’s just that we don’t trust you.

“Ein Teil der Diskussion in Deutschland ist schon einigermaßen grotesk.”

Merkozy This Is Not

How about Hollmerk?

The two capitals (Berlin and Paris) always begin from very different positions, whether there is a socialist or conservative administration in Paris.

The concern in Berlin is over what is seen as the absence of a clear strategy on eurozone reform from the new French government. There is a deep suspicion that France is happy to have a weaker euro, higher inflation, and a looser monetary policy than Germany.

Mr Hollande’s refusal to incorporate the recent “fiscal compact” into the French constitution is one reason that Germany is now pushing for every country to sign a bilateral budget “contract” with the European Commission, that can be enforced by a powerful budget commissar… But Paris regards Ms Merkel as being overly focused on building deeper European political integration in a way that ignores deep-seated reticence in France reflected in the 2005 referendum defeat of the then-planned EU constitution. 

Back Then When The World Was Still In Order

This is just what we need these days: Uplifting communist photography. More specifically, a nostalgic retrospective of art photography produced in communist East Germany.

They just don’t make German democratic republics like they used to.

Do you have that in brown?

“I didn’t know how much the name would disturb people.”

He added that to him Hitler was just the nickname given to his business partner’s grandfather, who was known for his “strict nature.”

Nicht zum ersten Mal gibt es in Indien Ärger um den Namen Hitler. Mal nannte ein Restaurantbetreiber sein neues Café “Hitler’s Cross”, mal nahm ein Händler eine Bettwäsche mit dem Namen “The Nazi Collection”, bedruckt mit Hakenkreuzen, ins Sortiment auf.