Now if they could only get the Bundeswehr to misbehave this badly with the Taliban whenever they come around

The German Navy has this quaint little training ship called the Gorch Fock with this quaint long tradition blah, blah, blah but now it’s coming out that these sailor/soldiers are acting quite scandalous these days (like sailor/soldiers in other countries are actually expected to act) and so Defense Minister zu Guttenberg has pulled the plug on the ship’s captain way down in Argentina and has ordered an investigation and holy shit let’s call the whole thing off.

The Gorch Fock (some are now calling it Germany’s biggest floating brothel) appears to have become the one place where modern German military types have lost all sense of inhibation and political correctness and where all kinds of bad misbehavior (of the non-German kind) is taking place big time. Scandalous, never-heard-of-things-happening-with-German-sailors-at-sea before have been hitting the fan. Here are just a few to name just a few:

The sailors on the Gorch Fock drink lots of alcohol on board.
The boy sailors are always hitting on the girl sailors really hard, sometimes on the other boy soldiers too.
The officers yell at the sealors a lot and often hurt their feelings, sometimes even “insulting” them.
Then there’s that bizarre ritual of eating raw pig’s liver and washing it down with even more alcohol.
And the drop-the-soap games in the shower.
And the freakin’ Aryan Brotherhood dudes on board.
Oh yeah, and mutiny and stuff like that too.
And, of course, the two women who have recently died on board under somewhat mysterious circumstances.

I think all of this is being caused by having to sail around the world in an old ass ship like that. But maybe that’s just me. Or maybe they’ve just got scurvy or something.

Today a 70-page annual report on the armed forces criticised the “inexperienced” officer class for not possessing “the knowledge and intuition to realise when the line has been crossed into criminality.”

Talk about coming right (I mean, left) out of left field!

OH MAA GAAAWD! Who would have ever in a zillion years expected a shocking Bekenntnis (confession) like this?

Sit down immediately and take your chill pills if you got ’em. Left Party Head Honcho of the East Gesine Lötzsch, of all people, has announced in the marxist (go look it up yourself) daily Junge Welt that she actually kind of sort of leans a bit toward communism at times if not always has and always will. She said, among other things: “We can only find the paths to communism if we go down these paths and try them out.”

And here is where I obviously missed something yet again, I guess. I never would have expected an acknowledgement like this from her in a zillion years either, but only because I was under the distinct impression that being a communist was one of the basic requirements for joining the Left Party in the first place.

No, but seriously, folks. Is this really supposed to be a news item or something?

“Wären morgen die Voraussetzungen dafür gegeben, die Linke hätte keinerlei Skrupel, wie nach 1945 die Demokratie zu nutzen, um sie erneut abzuschaffen.“

Dean vs. Reagan?

No, not Dean Reed, James Dean.

Although Red Elvis would probably have more supporters here in Berlin’s Senat today if it came to such a bout–and might yet get a street named after him here one day too, which is more than you can say for Ronald Reagan.

What the hell am I trying to get at here, you ask? I don’t know anymore. I seem to have forgotten. Oh, yes. Now I remember.

Germany’s defense minister Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg has just called to name a street or a square in Berlin after Ronald Reagan on the 100th anniversary of his birth coming up on February 6.

No big deal, right? Only you must keep in mind that this is red-red Berlin (SPD and the Left Party) and that we are still in the here and now and folks like these don’t even want to commemorate Mr. Tear-down-this-wall-Mr.-Gorbachev’s birthday, much less name a street after him. They only name streets after romantic revolutionary figures like Rudi Dutschke.

Or as zu Guttenberg put it so well: “It would be a welcome event to name a street after this great honorary citizen and provide evidence that red-red gratitude doesn’t have to end with Rudi Dutschke.”

FDP Berlin representative Martin Lindner hastened to add “You are being blind to history and presumptuous not to properly acknowledge this great and steadfast friend of Germany.” Lindner had proposed renaming Berlin’s Central Station’s Washington-Platz in Reagan’s honor back in 2004.

Quite provocative from Guttenberg & Co., I find. They know perfectly well that there’s no way in hell Wowereit and his Linke friends (link can also mean deceitful in German, by the way) would ever allow themselves to stoop to honoring such an über-Feindbild (longstanding mega-enemy stereotype) like that.

Politiker von CDU und FDP unterstützten die Forderung Guttenbergs und äußerten Unverständnis dafür, dass der Berliner Senat keine Gedenkfeier für Reagan plane.

Remember when it was European Germany?

Now it’s German Europe.

Huh? Where did this come from all of a sudden? Out of the blue like that?*

It was another “good day for Europe” when, as usual, nothing was actually resolved during the latest EU summit the other day, other than the fact that that nothing had a big Made in Germany stamp on it. The times they are a changed. The country that used to moan about being the paymaster for so long (and still does, of course, don’t get me wrong)  is now “the taskmaster of the entire community” and doesn’t even have the decency to make a secret about it anymore.

But don’t complain about it, my (as in Germany’s) fellow Europeans. This is only what the “fathers of Europe” had envisioned right from the start. Think of  what Jean Monnet had to say about the plan, for instance:

He wanted to guide European countries into a super-state “without their people understanding what is happening. This can be accomplished by successive steps, each disguised as having an economic purpose.”

I admit that this wasn’t quite the purpose he had envisioned but, well, now you “have the salad,” as the Germans like to say (the fat is in the fire). It doesn’t really matter that Berlin has a lack of vision when it comes to dealing with the current euro crisis, Germany calls the shots now and doesn’t need a vision if it doesn’t want one. So get used to it already.

“This is all about Germany, and it’s all about the end of the German appetite for writing checks to the periphery of Europe.”

*Have any of you ever read Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle? Germany and Japan win World War II. This is kind of like that.

Shoot-’em-up German style!

In case you didn’t already know… Except when it comes to American “shooter” computer games, of course, “computer games as a medium are often quick to be judged without being more closely examined.” So that’s what I’m about to do now.

Sure, there seems to be a little token outrage here and there, but for the most part no one over here seems all too terribly beunruhigt (troubled) now that the German online game 1378(km) (the name refers to the length of the old Cold War German-German border, by the way) finally went online last week. This game is, well, German after all so it must be, I dunno, OK. Right?

The aim of the game? Some players are East German border guards with guns and other players are East German refugees trying to escape to the West. Get the picture? It’s quite a vivid one actually. But don’t worry, it’s politically correct political incorrectness, I’ve been told. More or less. I think.

“1378(km) does not force someone playing the border soldiers to shoot the refugees. Players are left with the freedom of choice. You are only able to win 1378(km) when you do not shoot. The rules of the game are inspired by the situation at the former Inner German Border. Border camps, death strips, and orders to shoot are what make the game brutal.”

Only in Germany, I tell ya.

Godchild should be Goodchild but actually Badchild

Well sheesh, it’s not the kid’s fault. Tradition is tradition. And wacky is wacky. And wacky tradition is… You get the picture.

Anyways, it’s a German tradition that the German president becomes an honorary godparent to the seventh child born to any family here (this doesn’t happen very often of course so it’s not like he’s ever overworked or anything).

This is all fine and gut, I guess, but unfortunately this latest kid’s family is, well, of the neo-Nazi persuasion.

On the seventh hour, of the seventh day, on the seventh month, the seventh doctor say…

„Unsere biologische Substanz durch Geburtenarmut und Masseneinwanderung von Ausländern gefährdet.“

Mardi Gras is a little early this year

The Jecken (carnival revelers) are out en masse in Gorleben again.

Much like the famous Karneval celebrations in Cologne and other German cities held in February, the jolly and popular annual German Gorleben Riot Ritual, held in November, is an ancient Teutonic tradition (going back some 33 years now) in which large numbers of Green and mean-spirited anarchists protest against nuclear energy in general and the still quite vague government plans for nuclear waste disposal in particular at a charming little hole-in-the-wall interim storage facility located in a quaint little piece of Zauberwald (magic forest) in which all participants reach their collective climax simultaneously once the transport of “Castor” dry cask containers by rail through northern France and Germany, well, reaches its climax too–and everything gets Molotov cocktailed big time.

“Karneval? Sich albern verkleiden, laut rumgrölen und anderen auf den Sack gehen.”