But three films about Fukushima are being shown this year at the Berlinale.
That was to be expected, I guess. Especially now since Fukushima hysteria has all but disappeared from the Bildfläche (screen), even here in Germany.
It’s hard to keep people scared for months on end, now matter how important you think your agenda is. They just get tired and want to move on with their lives. The latest media stunt I just barely heard about had a lot of potential, for a few minutes, but then it rolled over and died, too.
I am looking forward to the big one-year anniversary media terror show bombardment to be held here in Germany next month, of course. But what are they going to be able to scare us with then? The German nation threatening to shut down all it’s nuclear power plants? Been there, done that. It makes you wonder sometimes why they even take the trouble to keep on agitating at us like they do. Now that the war is over and all, I mean. There’s just no place else to agitate at the moment, I guess (thanks for nothing, “Occupy Movement”). It must be hard being progressive sometimes. Much less all the time.
The 11-day film festival, which prides itself on its generally edgier and more politically-overt line-up over other film showcases, was perhaps a fitting backdrop for the documentaries.
Five minutes of excitement is better than no excitement at all.
A group of young conservative politicians, concerned about Germany’s catastrophic demographic development (or the lack of it), received less than a warm welcome by their very own Chancellor Angela Merkel herself today: They’re pushing for a tax on the childless, you see.
Although most politicians are normally crazy about raising taxes or introducing new ones, Frau Merkel made it quite clear that the buck (the euro?) stops here. Like practically everybody else in Germany, she doesn’t have any kids, either.
„Ich glaube, die Diskussion der Einteilung in Menschen mit Kindern und ohne Kinder ist hier nicht zielführend.“
Those filthy-mouthed British. “Shitstorm” just won Germany’s Anglicism of the Year award (2011). Wow. I wonder if “Crap Tornado” came in second?
The punchline: “The jury’s decision is meant to emphasize the positive influence of English on the German language.” I don’t make this stuff up, people.
Mit der Wahl will die Jury den positiven Einfluss von englischen Ausdrücken auf die deutsche Sprache hervorheben.
As usual. But at least we get to look at Angelina Jolie for awhile this year.
She and her husband what’s-his-name have been here for days now and refuse to go home, giving the notoriously anti-Hollywood Berlin Film Festival that all important Hollywood touch.
But as for the movies, the only Lichtblick (bright spot) I have heard about so far is a film called Barbara, “a harrowing reminder of what life was like two decades earlier behind the Iron Curtain and Berlin Wall that stood just a few meters to the east of theatres where the Berlinale is based.” You know, it’s a film about how suffocatingly horrible communist East Germany was. But who wants to see that? Here in Berlin of all places, I mean.
“It’s not a film about East Germany, it’s a film about how people survive in a country that was on its way out.” – Hmm. Sounds like a film about Syria.
“An Islamic extremist who admitted killing two U.S. airmen at Frankfurt airport last year has been convicted of murder. The state court in Frankfurt found 22-year-old Arid Uka guilty Friday and sentenced him to life in prison for the March 2 attack on Afghanistan-bound servicemen as they boarded a bus at the airport.”
Well, that simply isn’t true. You may have known that there is no death penalty in Germany, but don’t be tricked by that ridiculous “life in prison” misnomer that Germans like to use all the time (lebenslänglich). Nobody spends life in prison here.
What Germans mean with a life sentence (in Germany) is 15 years. After that the convict gets paroled. Or, as in this terribly severe case, paroled and then “threatened” with possible deportation.
Germany’s power operators have requested that reserve generators at a power plant in southern Germany and two plants in Austria be activated because, well, the lights are fixin’ to go out here (it’s c-c-cold).
But don’t think for a moment that this has anything at all to do with eight of Germany’s 17 nuclear reactors having been switched off because of an earthquake in Japan last year because it doesn’t. You got that?
“We do not have a problem of supply, of quantity, it’s principally a question of stabilizing the network.”
Here’s a little tidbit about the dark side of “Germany’s jobs miracle.”
“BEST LOW WAGE SECTOR IN EUROPE”
Job growth in Germany has been especially strong for low wage and temporary agency employment because of deregulation and the promotion of flexible, low-income, state-subsidised so-called “mini-jobs”.
The number of full-time workers on low wages – sometimes defined as less than two thirds of middle income – rose by 13.5 percent to 4.3 million between 2005 and 2010, three times faster than other employment, according to the Labour Office.
Germany can only hope that other European countries do not emulate its own wage deflationary policies too closely, as demand will dry up: “If everyone is doing same thing, there won’t be anyone left to export to.”
PS: Like I noted on a post the other day, the USA and Germany have more in common than they think. Now the Greeks are burning German flags, too.
Even German scientists can reach a saturation point when it comes to all that incredible global climate change hype still blowing in the wind out there.
Normally more than willing to dutifully follow the party line (and the Party is always right, I mean left), two German green-as-they-get researchers have taken the leap and jumped ship to defect to the West, I mean to the dark side. Basically, they think that more CO2 will have little to no effect on the overall climate. This is indefensible, inexcusable, reprehensible and unjustifiable, of course. So now they must die or something.
“One of the fathers of Germany’s modern green movement, Professor Dr. Fritz Vahrenholt, a social democrat and green activist, decided to author a climate science skeptical book together with geologist/paleontologist Dr. Sebastian Lüning. Vahrenholt’s skepticism started when he was asked to review an IPCC report on renewable energy. He found hundreds of errors. When he pointed them out, IPCC officials simply brushed them aside. Stunned, he asked himself, “Is this the way they approached the climate assessment reports?”
Vahrenholt decided to do some digging. His colleague Dr. Lüning also gave him a copy of Andrew Montford’s The Hockey Stick Illusion. He was horrified by the sloppiness and deception he found. Persuaded by Hoffmann & Campe, he and Lüning decided to write the book. Die kalte Sonne cites 800 sources and has over 80 charts and figures. It examines and summarizes the latest science.
Skeptic readers should not think that the book will fortify their existing skepticism of CO2 causing warming. The authors agree it does. but have major qualms about the assumed positive CO2-related feed-backs and believe the sun plays a far greater role in the whole scheme of things.”
Daher treibe ihn als Vorsitzender der Geschäftsführung die Sorge um, dass die Menschen zur gleichen Erkenntnis bei erneuerbaren Energien kommen, wie es jüngst bei der Atomkraft war. “Wenn die Leute merken, dass die Warnungen vor dem Klimawandel stark überzogen sind und der Treibhausgasausstoß nicht die ihm zugeschriebene überragende Rolle spielt, könnten sie sich von den erneuerbaren Energien abwenden”, führt er aus.
I call it Hurt Feelings Burnout Syndrome (HFBS). With an emphasis on the BS. Oh man, I had to laugh out loud while reading the latest on the poor, misunderstood German front.
It appears that many German intellectuals are very concerned about how their European neighbors think of them (Germany) these days. Needless to say, it isn’t very highly at all. And some have come to the stunning conclusion that they are so disliked at the moment because, now get this, they are so big and strong. Imagine that.
Germany is the USA of Europe – only with a different history.
You don’t need to puzzle for very long about the question of why so much Nazi name-calling is going on at the moment: For the first time since 1945, Germany has appeared in full strength again. Not because anybody wanted it, but because the European debt crisis has made the most economically powerful country the most politically powerful one, as well. Germany is now intervening in the internal affairs of others in a big way.
Slowly but surely, the country is taking over a role for Europe that the USA has played for the rest of the world for so long, as being the country that uses (and sometimes misuses) its power, the country that is to blame for everything, the country that is supposed to save everything and is reviled for the way it does it. What has America not been accused of? The CIA has always been behind everything and American imperialism has always been the motivation.
How moving. Or something. And the rest of the story? Now folks are calling Germans Nazis again (as if they had ever stopped). Boo-hoo-hoo already. Come on, Germany. Wake up and smell the coffee. You’re the big kid on the block. Run with it. Enjoy. It comes with the turf.
And in a related story (I find), it turns out that Germans are also now “burning out” like flies (it’s hard to carry on when nobody likes you, I guess). This imaginary disease (yet another American import – are we having irony yet?) is currently running rampant among Germany’s workforce, with nearly 1 out of 10 sick days in Germany in 2010 being attributed to it (tendency rising). Another connection to US-Amerika? Oh my God. No wonder so many Germans are getting sick. Please note: The high-brow daily Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung questioned why burnout was being written so much about in Germany, while in France, which is economically a lot worse off, “it’s hardly a preoccupation at all.”
Remember: HFBS is incurable, but there are many effective treatments. One of them is shutting the #!?#! up.
Man braucht wirklich nicht lange an der Frage rumzurätseln, warum die Nazi-Vergleiche im Moment so oft gezogen werden: Zum ersten Mal seit 1945 tritt Deutschland wieder mit voller Macht auf, nicht weil man das gewollt hätte, sondern weil die europäische Schuldenkrise das ökonomisch stärkste auch zum politisch mächtigsten Land gemacht hat. Deutschland greift nun tief ein in die inneren Angelegenheiten Dritter.
Allmählich bekommt das Land für Europa eine ähnliche Funktion, wie sie die USA lange Zeit für die ganze Welt hatten. Als jene Macht, die ihre Kraft gebrauchte, manchmal missbrauchte, die an allem schuld war, die alles retten sollte und sich dafür beschimpfen lassen musste, wie sie es tat. Was wurde den Amerikanern nicht alles Übles angedichtet, immer steckte die CIA hinter allem Bösen, stets wurden die Amerikaner des Imperialismus geziehen.
PS: I hate to admit it, Germany, but I guess we’ve got more in common than we would like to admit (thanks for the idea, Old Phat Stu).
Now that the command center for NATO’s missile shield program will be based here in Germany, it’s time for the German Left (that’s the middle of the road here, by the way) to start telling us why this is an awful bad horrible idea.
My guess is that that we will find out that there are actually no such things as rogue states like Iran (only morally challenged ones), that a missle shield like this is absolutely positively technically impossible to implement, and that putting one into operation (even though it is absolutely positively technically impossible to implement) would hurt Russia’s feelings.
There’s not much happening on the Peace Front either these days, you see. And spring is just around the corner. And folks do get easily bored, you know?
The United States insists that the missile shield aims to counter missile threats from Iran, but Russia has voiced concerns that it would target its own strategic deterrent.
Observing Hermann 