Not a landing.
And Berlin is not nearly as green as it used to be, folks. Fallen trees everywhere.
Thanks for that early warning (not), weather people. What the hell was that?
Tag Archives: Germans
USA
Beautiful German weapon sale of the week.
Because somebody has to admire them.
German weapons firms have found eager buyers in the United States. Stats show that stock prices of US gunmakers rise after shootings like the one in Las Vegas…
Heckler & Koch (H&K), based in Oberndorf, southern Germany, is currently building a $23 million (€19.55 million) gun factory in Columbus, Georgia, that will exclusively make “sports and hunting” weapons for the US civilian market.
“We’re the Porsches.”
Deutsche Post Introduces New Robotic Technology To Deliver Packages Late More Efficiently
Intent on keeping up with the times, the German Post is now in the process of introducing a so-called Postbot that will help human postmen deliver their packages later than ever before, or not at all.
Based on their human counterparts, the Postbot will regularly call in sick, inexplicably lose letters and packages assigned to it once it leaves the post office and regularly pretend to have ringed at apartments located two floors or higher before leaving a notice in the mailbox claiming that nobody was home when they were there. The Postbot will do this noticably faster and more efficiently, however, failing to deliver up to seven times the number of undelivered packages normal German postmen fail to deliver.
Union officials have expressed concern that the Postbot could threaten Deutsche Post jobs and insists that the robot must be granted obligatory union memborship to help slow down this frantic pace of technological advance.
In zwei Zustellbezirken wird das vierrädrige, 1,50 Meter hohe Gefährt den Boten hinterher fahren. Es könne bis zu 150 Kilo Briefe und Pakete transportieren, stoppe vor Hindernissen und überwinde Bordsteine. Mittels Sensoren erkennt er die Beine der menschlichen Postboten und folgt ihnen in Schrittgeschwindigkeit.
What Does NSA Stand For?
For Narcissistic Street Art, of course.
Teufelsberg, meaning “devil’s mountain,” is actually the name of the man-made hill on which the Field Station sits. The site was chosen for its height rather than its obscure location, but the fact that it’s situated slap-bang in the middle of the Grunewald forest, requiring at least 30 minutes of uphill hiking to reach it from an S-Bahn train, does enhance the sense that it’s shrouded in mystery…
When the NSA left in the early ’90s, it took all its equipment with it. Reports about the activities that took place at Teufelsberg are classified until 2022. But even then, we may not find out much.
Angela Merkel Won The Election?
Sure, she won. But just what did she win?
She won a much more streamlined CDU, for instance. That’s her party. Although still the biggest fraction in the Bundestag, they are a whole lot smaller now and will therefore be much easier for her to manage.
She won a junior partner that now has foam all over its mouth, the CSU in Bavaria. They lost even more votes than her party did. The CSU folks are so furious about this that they are preparing to fire their boss, Horst Seehofer, someone who she never got along with so that’s cool, but they have had it SO up to here with her Kuschelpolitik (cuddle policies) that they are also about to make some big demands she could still dodge in the past but will now have to agree to if she wants to stay in power (a ceiling for the number of refugees allowed to enter the country, for example).
She won a once in a lifetime opportunity to form a three-way government with two parties having completely different world views – the Greens (green counter-culture romanticism) and the FDP (free market liberalism). She has to make it work with them because that’s the only realistic option she’s got so they have her more over the barrel than the CSU does.
She also won a brand new political party in Germany, the AfD, her very own creation, which now sits fat and sassy as the third biggest fraction in the Bundestag, still completely radioactive but thoroughly able to slow everything down and make things ugly as the second biggest opposition party after the SPD – a former partner of hers she just helped murder on Sunday.
Wow. No wonder she looks so happy.
I’m telling you, either that woman has entered a completely different realm of human consciousness or they keep her pumped up with some REALLY good stuff the rest of us will never, ever be able to get our hands on.
Angela Merkel started her election campaign hoping for a wealth of options for forming a coalition government — from a repeat of the grand coalition with the Social Democrats to alliances with either the centrist Free Democrats (FDP) or the Green party. After Sunday night, the chancellor’s dance card contains just one name: Jamaica.
Can We Keep Schönefeld Open, Too?
Tegel was only voted 8th worst airport in the world recently, after all. Schönefeld was numero uno. But now another vote is in.
Berliners voted to keep the historic Tegel airport open even after a new international hub is completed, creating a headache for the German capital’s government, which wanted it closed.
Tegel sprang up in just 90 days in 1948 to support the Berlin Airlift, a huge operation to ship supplies and thwart a Cold War Soviet blockade. It is much-loved by many Berliners and business travellers for its proximity to the city center.
Berlin’s government will now have to rethink its plans to close Tegel after some 56 percent of voters supported the non-binding referendum on Sunday, the same day as Germany’s federal election, to reconsider the proposal.
“The result has created a very, difficult situation that could be legally and financially challenging.” Another chance for the Berlin Senat to excel, I say.
Rocket Science This Ain’t
Wow, I’m so thankful that somebody finally cleared this up for all of us.
German far-right leader says Merkel’s refugee policy enabled his party’s rise.
Well I guess we’ll know more about this development later on today.
Washington Post: You were for decades a member of [Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union]. As far as you’re concerned, did you leave the CDU or did the CDU leave you?
Alexander Gauland: Angela Merkel changed the CDU from a party that had convictions to a party that’s an empty balloon. There’s nothing in it any longer. A lot of decisions of Angela Merkel — transitioning to renewable energy, refugees, changing of the military from conscription to volunteer — ran opposite to what we called in former times “the soul of the CDU.”
Washington Post: Do you find that Germany is more divided now than it has been in previous years?
Alexander Gauland: Yes. It is more divided now. Because in the beginning of the refugee crisis, all media and all politicians were for refugees. The people who didn’t like this very much didn’t find their opinion in the media. And they couldn’t discuss their fear about what was going on in Germany. And that did divide the German society into the people who want to help [refugees] and the other ones who said we have enough problems in this country.
Das Ende der Bundesrepublik
“The Slow Death Of Europe’s Social Democrats?”
How ya figure? They’ve been dead for years already, Spiegel Online. Don’t any of you over there ever read the papers?
I would even ALMOST venture to say that it’s ALMOST time for a social democratic walking dead rennaisance. But the key word here is ALMOST. It won’t be anytime soon. They’re going to get annihilated in this election on Sunday. Again.
In 2000, social democrats or socialists were part of the government in 10 out of the 15 countries that made up the European Union at the time. These days, though, the picture is a drastically different one. There is a real chance that German Social Democrats will no longer be part of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s coalition following Sunday’s vote and the same could happen in Italy after voters there go to the polls next spring. Were that to happen, center-left parties would only be part of six EU governments out of 28 member states, all of them on the European periphery: Malta, Portugal, Romania, Sweden, Slovakia and the Czech Republic.
If I Had A Vision I’d Go See My Doctor
Die Mitte (the middle) is where it’s at, folks. Well it’s certainly where I’m at. And you can’t have visions from here in the middle. I mean, I may not always know what I stand for but I always know where I’m standing..
And that’s what Germans want, the middle. The middle of the middle, even. The middler the better. No meddling with the middle. We’re right in the middle of an election campaign, after all. Did you know that Mittelmaß (literally “the middle measure”) means mediocrity in German?
Sure, there was a little Abweichung (deviation) from the middle with that batshit crazy refugee number of mine. Quite a big deviation, actually. But I apologized. Sort of. And now I’m back home, smack dab in the middle of where you want me to be. Just call me. Mutti. Mutti in the middle.
See you on Sunday!
Perhaps the closest she came to setting out a vision was a year ago, as she presented this year’s budget in parliament. Germany, she said, has seen a lot of change since World War II, and “change isn’t a bad thing.” But she also vowed to defend the status quo in the broadest sense of the term: “Germany will remain Germany, with all that we love and hold dear about it.”
“Whoever has visions should go see a doctor.”
– Helmut Schmidt
399,000 Euros
That’s what one regional director among the “public-sector broadcasters” (state TV) earns here annually – that guy down there. There a dozen or two of these directors out there, by the way.
Why that’s more than the President of the United States makes (not that our current President particularly cares about what he gets paid).
Is TV that good here in Germany, you ask? Why yes, it is. Just ask that regional director. It is in fact so good that all Germans are permitted to finance it with a so-called Abgabe, or contribution. Contribution sounds better than tax. Contribution contributes more to the warm and fuzzy feeling everybody has here about state-run TV. And it also contributes to that guy’s ridiculous salary, too. But quality has its price. And as viewers are told time and time and time again, what they are watching is Quality pur (pure).
Wenn man immer geringere Bezahlung fordere, könnten sich am Ende nur noch Milliardäre leisten, eine öffentlich-rechtliche Anstalt zu leiten.
Observing Hermann 