Angela Merkel To Be Deported

Although it looks to me like they may have picked the wrong one.

Merkel

Late last year, a Syrian woman gave birth to a girl at a former hospital that had been repurposed into a refugee shelter in Duisburg, Germany. She and her husband had only recently arrived in Germany and wanted to honor their new home. So, they named their daughter Angela Merkel.

But less than a month before the infant’s first birthday, the Al-Hamza family’s future in their adopted country isn’t looking so sure. According to the Bild newspaper, the family was told their asylum application had been rejected by Germany’s Federal Office for Migration and Refugees. Instead, the Al-Hamza family has been offered “subsidiary protection,” a separate legal status that protects people from deportation for an initial period of one year but does not allow them to bring their family to Germany. They may stay longer if they are shown to be working and learning German to a sufficient level.

“There are no indications that the Syrian state puts everyone under general suspicion of belonging to the opposition.”

Rent A Sozi?

As in rent a social democrat? Sure, OK. But who would want to do that?

SPD

I always thought that “social” was code for “here’s something for free.”

According to a German media report, the social democratic SPD party is granting access to ministers and officials in exchange for payments of up to 7,000 euros. Experts say this may violate the law on political parties.

Eine erste Konsequenz hat man bereits beschlossen: “‘Vorwärts-Gespräche’ – ob mit oder ohne Sponsoring – wird es in Zukunft nicht mehr geben.”

SPD To Announce Candidate Later

Now that Angela Merkel has opened the campaign for next year’s parliamentary elections in Germany by announcing her intention to run for a fourth term, the folks over at the SPD have made it clear that they intend to wait until they are good and ready before announcing their candidate, probably sometime in 2018.

SPD

They don’t have a candidate who has a chance in hell, get it?*

Am Montagmorgen hatte SPD-Vize Ralf Stegner erklärt, die SPD werde “bald” über ihren Kandidaten befinden.

*Chancellors aren’t directly elected here, of course, but the SPD is now an under-20%-party.

German Of The Day: Multikulti

That means multiculti, as in multicultural. And this is a word that is suddenly “out” for Angela Merkel’s CDU, for some inexplicable reason.

Multikulti

But to compensate for the loss, Modernisierungsverlierer (modernization losers) is now officially “in” with them. And just in case you were wondering, we are once again moving into election season in Germany and these “losers” are the same ones who have helped parties like the AfD become “winners” in recent years. Sounds vaguely familiar somehow but I can’t seem to put my finger on it at the moment.

Im Entwurf für den Leitantrag, der beim Parteitag Anfang Dezember beschlossen werden soll, sprechen die Christdemokraten ausdrücklich jene Bürger an, “die sich als Modernisierungsverlierer sehen und derzeit noch bei populistischen Parteien von rechts und links ihre Zuflucht suchen”.

German Army Now In Hot Water For Defending Itself

After Germany’s consulate in northern Afghanistan was attacked by a suicide car bomber, killing six and injuring more than 120 others, Bundeswehr soldiers there clearly overreacted by killing two men on a motorcycle who refused to stop when ordered to do so.

Bundeswehr

Or at least that’s what we will most likely be hearing in the German Reichstag in the coming days, weeks and months to follow.

The Bundeswehr killing people? What will they be expected to do next? Go to war?

Nach dem Anschlag auf das deutsche Generalkonsulat in Masar-i-Scharif hat die Bundeswehr in der nordafghanischen Stadt zwei Motorradfahrer erschossen. Die beiden Männer sollen sich über die Aufforderung, sofort anzuhalten, hinweggesetzt haben.

Expat Democrats Utterly Speechless But Vow To Remain Smug

Smug

The crowd of expats who packed the Democrats Abroad election night party in Berlin to watch live election coverage by American broadcaster CNN was conspicuously young and conspicuously female. There had been much talk about apathy among so-called millennials in this campaign, but you wouldn’t have known that in the German capital…

Of course that was then and this is now.

“I’m in too much of an emotional state,” said expat Democrat X, when asked what she thought about the new President-elect. “No comment. But wait. I will say that you can bet we will bounce back from this and be just as self-righteous, priggish and self-satisfied as we ever have been. Mabe even more so. But just not right now, OK?”

German Engineering At Its Finest

Fortschritt durch Technik. That’s Audi’s motto and means progress through technology.

Audi

And their latest advance in defeat device technology is a great step forward in consumer deception indeed.

Audi’s defeat device, camouflaged as a warm-up function, keys in on movements of the steering wheel to detect if the car is in the lab or not. Once in normal traffic, however, this warm-up function is deactivated and the vehicle switches to a higher fuel consumption mode, thus producing more CO2. Brilliant, don’t you think?

Come on, America. Why can’t you produce technology like this? These new fangled electric cars everybody is talking about these days don’t have any of this cool stuff.

So schummelte Audi bei CO² – Mit einer Software sollen Messergebnisse manipuliert worden sein.

Kraut EU Commissioner Sorry He Called Chinese Slitty-Eyed

He actually meant to call them Chop Sticks. Or maybe Chinks. Or at the very least Ping Pongs.

Oettnger

What a Herm. This Boxhead Hun needs to get with the times already and call up the Racial Slur Database on that Heinee Handy (smartphone) of his. He is responsible for EU digital policy, after all.

Frei von der Leber, as we say in German.”

Young Germans Shamelessly Copying Americans Again

Or at least that’s what the latest “Generation What?” survey taken by a German media group indicates to me: More than 70 percent of the young people here have no confidence in politics.

Confidence

When asked about political institutions, only 27 percent replied that they “more or less” had confidence in them. Only one percent asked said they trusted these institutions completely.

They were nearly as skeptical when it came to confidence in religious institutions and in the media itself.

Mehr als 70 Prozent der jungen Menschen ohne Vertrauen in die Politik.