Beautiful German weapon sale of the week.
Because somebody has to admire them.
Israel is seeking to buy advanced missile boats from Germany to protect drilling operations in its offshore natural gas fields.
I’ve never made any secret about being an unrepenting communist.
This is another one of those “only in Germany” kind of things. Well, to be fair, it’s more like an “only in Berlin” kind of thing.
It goes like this: The Left Party – a “democratic socialist” party stemming directly from the PDS (some of us referred to it as the Partei der Stasi) which in turn was a creature that had stemmed directly from the black lagoon of GDR SED East German Communism, never stops going through the motions of pretending that it isn’t communist in nature (if not in deed) while everyone here knows of course that it is. It’s just some kind of weird parlour game that Germans play.
The Left Party is the refuge for all of those hundreds of thousands of incorrigible die-hard Ostalgie dinosaurs who cannot except the fact that their worldview is in fact irretrievably gone (I feel for some of them in a way, it is unrealistic of us to think that the older ones can except it). Check out this election map of Berlin from two months ago if you don’t believe me.
Occasionally this game gets a little out of hand, however, and folks have to speak up to have them tone it down again for awhile so the game can continue in a more civilized and orderly fashion. That just happened once again with the Left Party attempt to have their ex-party boss Gesine Lötzsch herself (hardliner is the nice word for her) placed at the head of the Bundestag‘s Budget Committee.
Now everyone is suddenly surprized and concerned, it seems – to include the “regular” green kind of left-wing dream-world crowd, albeit from the West – that she is not prepared “to distance herself” from her communist past. This is unfair irgendwie (somehow). I understand completely why she has no business being there in the Bundestag and all. But how can you be expected to distance yourself from a past that is still your present?
Abgeordnete von Union und Grünen wollen die Linke Gesine Lötzsch als Vorsitzende des Haushaltsausschusses los werden. Der Grund dafür ist ihr unkritischer Umgang mit der DDR-Vergangenheit.
Datenschutz! Datenschutz, Datenschutz, Datenschutz Datenschutz. Robot insects.
Drones. Datenschutz. Robots. Amazon. Amazon drone robots. New ideas. Bad technology. Technology bad. Bad ideas.
Then there’s the Datenschutz part.
Jeff Bezos. Darth Vader. Das Imperium schlägt zurück (The Empire Strikes Back).
Technisch ist es möglich, der Datenschutz aber ist heikel.
Zwangs- = compulsory. Umlage = levy, share in the costs. Put those two together and what do you get? Forced to share. But we’re talking about money here folks so let’s just call it another tax and get it over with already.
This latest planned tax consists of forcing German households to purchase so-called “smart meters” or modern electricity meters that are supposed to regulate energy consumption by drawing electricity from that so wonderfully green German energy grid whenever this energy is cheaper. You know, like when hell freezes over?
This will only set back German consumers another 70 or 80 euros after already having been hit with a seven percent energy bill increase planned for next year, too (the seven can and will change, of course, and we all now in which direction it will be going).
Turn it around as much as you want. Anyway you turn this German energy turnaround around, you’ll always get the same result. Once you’ve turned it around, I mean. She is like way too expensive, señor.
But what can you expect from a government that is about to go retro and way back in the Wayback Machine to the good old days of SPD Never-Never Land again?
“Verbraucher sollten mit attraktiven Angeboten überzeugt, statt mit immer mehr ordnungsrechtlichen Einbaupflichten gezwungen werden.”
PS: The next German word of the day will be Abzocke. Here’s a tip: It means rip-off.
And maladaptive reaction. Berlin, a counterculture paradise? I guess. A privacy haven? Keep on dreaming.
But it’s a lot more than that. Berlin has always been a place to hail heros who aren’t heros. That’s why this Snowden asylum nonsense fits like a glove here.
An international cadre of privacy advocates is settling in Germany’s once-divided capital, saying they feel safer here than they do in the United States or Britain, where authorities have vowed to prosecute leakers of official secrets…
One wants to be glad that Berlin (and Germany) is a sanctuary for people who have been subjected to inappropriate, excessive snooping by U.S. and U.K. authorities. Still, it’s always worth it, I think, to be a little skeptical of individuals, or groups, or cities and countries whose attitudes carry a whiff of neurotic impulse and maladaptive reaction. Berlin positively reeks of it…
It is an ironic twist for a sometimes-bleak city that was once better known as a backdrop to John le Carré novels.
Which is bad. Every dolt knows that German universities only do research for things having to do with goodness and niceness so these absent-minded professors clearly must have been tricked or something.
Word is that 22 German universities and research institutions have received more than $10 million from the US Defense Department’s budget since 2000. And this just has to be a bad thing. Doesn’t it?
Maybe the UN or Star Fleet Command could pass a resolution ensuring that science only be used for goodness and niceness in the future, the world over, just like it is here in Germany. Except sometimes when folks get tricked.
Yet once something is researched and published, it is available to anyone for any use. This gives rise to what researchers call a dual-use dilemma. Rockets that transport satellites into space, for example, could also be used to carry nuclear weapons. Knowledge about pathogens can be used to develop new medicines or biological weapons. Nuclear technology can harvest energy or build atomic bombs.
Not. In other countries you usually get the government you vote for. But not here in Germany. At least not this time.
Close only counts in horseshoes and dancing (and hand grenades). And Angela Merkel getting close to having an absolute majority in the German election two months ago just wasn’t close enough. So let’s hear it for proportional representation! The FDP is gone. The Greens are still licking their wounds. What’s left? The SPD and the Left party are left, that’s who’s left.
So now the losers are dictating the agenda. In more ways than one.
No, it’s not good news. And it gets worse. As part of his pivot to the left, Gabriel has promised that the Social Democrats will be open to coalitions with the Left party, the heirs of the East German Communists. Since the SPD, the Left and the Greens already hold a majority in parliament, the temptation for Gabriel to break with Merkel in, say, two years to form a “red-red-green” coalition with himself as chancellor could become irresistible.
Please read the following out loud in that classic monotone el cheapo Hollywood movie robot voice:
We are all robots here. No one talks. It is ghostly quiet here in the Amazon warehouse.
We are forced to wear these weird orange signal jackets. Amazon wants us to hand over our brains at the door once we enter here. There is no turning back.
Only the customer is allowed to have any individuality.
Everything is fully conform. Every step is standardized. Deviations would disrupt the calculation.
They have got me so far that I now do everything they say (just like I already do outside when watching the Tagesschau or when reading Spiegel Online).
I have no free will. We are all victims and are being ausgebeutet (exploited) to an unbearable degree. This is Kapitalismus pur or something. Oh my God we are all going to die. No, wait. We are dead already.
“Mich haben sie jetzt so weit. Ich mache, was man mir sagt.”
My, how time flies. It’s been two months now. Talk about the tail wagging the dog.
Time for new elections, I’d say.
The SPD got 25.7% of votes compared with Mrs Merkel’s 41.5%. Mrs Merkel’s supporters are growing frustrated…
The bizarre situation has arisen because Mrs Merkel, her strong showing notwithstanding, fell just short of a majority of seats…
Mr Gabriel made another concession to the SPD’s left wing: a formal resolution on November 14th to be open in future to coalition talks with Die Linke. The two “red” parties used to detest each other, Die Linke considering the SPD sell-outs to capitalism and the SPD viewing Die Linke as a chaotic troupe of Marxists nostalgic for East Germany and dangerously hostile to NATO and America. Now, however, there is speculation that the SPD could break a coalition with Mrs Merkel in mid-term and go on to form an all-left government, unprecedented at the national level, dubbed “R2G” for red-red-green.
Just get it over with already, already, and call for a new election. They’ll never stop wasting your time otherwise.
The most important country in the European Union is thus being run by a caretaker cabinet, unable to take important decisions.
NGOs went home, I mean. Or at least a whole bunch of them just did.
It’s either our way or the highway said spokesmen at Oxfam, the WWF, Nabu, BUND and Friends of the Earth, among others, shortly before heading for the highway today.
They had been attending something called a “United Nations Climate Change Conference” in Warsaw and suddenly got completely and totally pissed off at the slow speed of progress and the lack of, well, media interest or ambition among those doing the negotiating. And at Poland, the host country. Poland is bad because, unlike Germany, for instance, it burns coal in its power plants.
Although holding their collective breaths until turning blue in the face hadn’t worked earlier in the day, the impulsive Weltverbesserer (starry-eyed idealists) are now convinced that this impressive act of pouty petulance is sure to put back more urgency and agitation into the ever so humdrum and tedious global climate change debate.
So you asked for this, world. Don’t say you didn’t.
“Der Zynismus hier ist nicht mehr auszuhalten.”
Observing Hermann 