Germans have been dying off faster than they can replace themselves for over forty years now. It’s just what they do.
And here are last year’s numbers: 2.2 percent fewer German babies were born in 2011 then in the year before. Strangely, though, the number of inhabitants actually grew last year (them damned durn foreign immigrants again).
It’s the demographics, stupid.
Schon seit 40 Jahren sterben in Deutschland mehr Menschen als Kinder geboren werden.
Flag waving still leaves a bad taste in many a German mouth, I guess. Especially if the flag in question is 220 square meters in size.
EM 2012 nor not, Berlin officials have refused to let a Turkish store owner mount a huge German flag above his storefront in Neukölln. Ordnung muß sein (order must prevail) again already. “It was not connected properly and covered up a few windows.”
Go Germany!
“Die Entscheidung lag im Ermessen der Beamten vor Ort.”
Unable to compete in the global market without the subsidy drug, state-ordained “energy turnaround” or not, Germany’s solar energy industry is getting eaten alive by cheap Chinese imports as we speak, so-to-speak.
“Ah, screw it,” German industrialists elsewhere in the country say to that. “We’ll just keep making a killing producing what we’ve always produced best: War technology. Tanks, Saudi Arabia!”
“But it’s not like we don’t continue to support the Arab Spring or anything,” another tankful German industrialist added ruefully.
German paper says Saudis want 600-800 tanks.
Well, there’s disillusion and there’s disillusion.
A new survey indicates that German disillusionment with the US president is “widespread.” Wow, like what a surprise or something. Even the Germans catch on eventually.
But wait, please look a little closer. The real news story has to do with the numbers behind this so-called disillusionment. “Disillusionment with Obama” over here means:
Nevertheless, they (the Germans) still have overwhelming confidence in Obama’s overall international leadership. In fact, at 87 percent, Germans are the most supportive in Europe… And nine out of 10 Germans want to see Obama re-elected.
Huh? OK. Unbelievable as usual. It never ceases to amaze me. In a nation so openly sensitive to the concept of Gleichschaltung (enforced political conformity, as in the Third Reich kind), how can you get more gleichgeschaltet than that?
In retrospect, hopes for an Obama presidency were unrealistically high, especially among Europeans.
Boy oh boy, German President Joachim Gauck is in hot water with the German Left now. Bless his heart.
During a visit to something called the Leadership Academy for the Bundeswehr in Hamburg, he had the gall to demand “more openness” when it comes to Bundeswehr operations abroad.
He then had the nerve to say that there are once again German fallen (as in the soldier kind) no longer amoung us “who are hard to handle for those living in our pleasure-addicted society.”
And then he even had the chutzpah to say that violence can be “necessary and sensible when used to prevent violence itself.”
Needless to say, German lefties of all 57 varieties are now having a collective cow and lecturing him and the rest of us (I mean you) about how irresponsible such utterances can and must be whenever they come out of a German mouth. The same old same old, in other words.
You just can’t say stuff like this in Germany. It’s verboten. It’s taboo. And this guy says it anyway. In case you haven’t noticed, this is a President I like.
Schäfer nannte Gaucks “Äußerungen, um Opfer zu rechtfertigen, völlig falsch und fatal.”
The submarines they have furnished Israel with will certainly be keeping the peace.
Israel is arming these Dolphin class subs with nuclear-tipped cruise missiles. Any nation that attacks Israel with a nuclear weapon will live to regret it. Not for very long, though.
Now this is gun control that really works. And here we thought the Germans were so down on nuclear power and all that.
“Darauf kann Deutschland stolz sein.”
Just in case you were wondering, I mean (this time they’re not considering them for Syria).
Not like anybody would ever expect them to consider otherwise. I mean, is the Pope a Catholic? Do chickens use fowl language? Do vacuum cleaners suck?
Germans never consider military options, even when they maybe ought to. Unless it’s an Angriffskrieg (war of aggression), I mean. And that’s been a while. It’s just what they (don’t) do. They don’t use weapons, people. They just, you know, sell them.
“We want to avoid a wildfire in the region.”
Europe Doesn’t Need the Euro? Another religious tract to study on Sundays.
All of this is kind of like religion, don’t you think? First you’ve got some prophets who come out of the wilderness (the political class preaching the virtues of the euro, come hell or high water), then what they say gets labeled as heresy by the faithful (by the “man on the street” who wants to keep his deutschmark), then the euro faith overcomes this persecution, establishes itself as the true universal teaching and becomes orthodoxy. Then the next voice out of the wilderness comes along and the game starts all over again, etcetera and so forth already.
Don’t get me wrong, I don’t beleive that Thilo Sarrazin is a full-fledged prophet or anything (I just think he wants to make a buck, I mean euro). But he’s not a full-fledged heretic, either. And that’s something the euro high priests could never admit to.
The euro, in Sarrazin’s view, is just the old German deutschmark extended to a lot of countries with less robust currencies.
Germany, in other words, is being used as a guarantor of other countries’ debts.
“The German political class bet that the political union would follow shortly thereafter almost as a matter of natural law, because without that the common currency wouldn’t be stable. That bet has failed.”
Germans are hostage to their sense of not wanting to be responsible for Europe’s failure.
Germans are hostage to their sense of historical guilt.
“Pro-euro Germans are driven by that very German reflex, that we can only finally atone for the Holocaust and World War II when we have put all our interests and money into European hands.”
“Angela Merkel to like the friendly woman on the navigation system in my car.”
Something called the Peace Wall, being part of Berlin’s Biennale, which will focus on political art this year (isn’t all art political?), has been constructed just down the road from Checkpoint Charlie by a Macedonian artist to “underline the gap between the upper Friedrichstrasse – characterized by fancy shops and expensive flats – and the poor southern part of the road which heads to the multi-ethnic Kreuzberg district.”
You know, it’s all about the gentrification “issue” and that terrible gap between rich and poor so prevalent in, uh, Germany.
“A wall is a symbol of division,” the artist says. “And is in itself capable of highlighting invisible gaps.”
True, I guess. But this lady clearly doesn’t know what the real Berlin Wall was about (the fewest out there who make comparisons like these do) or she would have chosen another object to work with. There were no invisible gaps about the Berlin Wall at all. It was for way real, concrete in the truest sense of the word, and had nothing at all to do with any of these fairy tale divisions artists living in free societies today have to struggle with all the time like they do, or seem to want to.
Hey, this is art. And art doesn’t have to have anything to do with reality, does it? Whether you call it political or not.
„Sie erreichen mit dieser Mauer, dass Sie diese Ecke erst recht sterben lassen.“
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.”
Observing Hermann 