All must go the way of the dinosaurs sooner or later.
Wait a minute. Do any of you out there even remember the Waldsterben (death of the forests) hysteria?
The ozone hole, the annual thinning of the protective ozone layer in Earth’s stratosphere over Antarctica, was slightly smaller than average this year compared to its size in recent decades, NASA said on Friday.
Who cares about a few thousand Brits? Germany has more foreigners than you can shake a stick at and, well, more than they did back in 1993 (that’s bad, right?).
Some 7.2 million total there be. Not bad. For a xenophobic, racist, narrow-minded Volk living in a contemptuous and chauvinistic country still suffering under a living-dead Nazi past, I mean.
Die Zahl der in Deutschland registrierten Ausländer ist 2012 so kräftig gestiegen wie seit fast zwei Jahrzehnten nicht mehr. Sie erhöhte sich um 4,1 Prozent auf gut 7,2 Millionen, teilte das Statistische Bundesamt mit.
PS: Damn. Claudia made it. Weren’t they even allowed to vote against anybody during that vote?
More than 10,000 Britons are claiming unemployment benefit in Germany because they are not “hassled” in to finding work there.
I dunno. What’s worse? The folks who abuse a system or a system that invites you to abuse it?
“In Britain I had to put up with patronising officials, some of whom tried to get me to accept a job as a cleaner despite my degree.”
Honest. Or at least that’s what we read in Der Spiegel.
Here is a quick summary of yet another intellectually challenging and frankly quite bizarre Spiegel “analysis:”
US democracy is nearing its limits.
The United States has avoided federal default, but no one should be happy about this.
This is because the American political system is truly broken.
This latest political crisis has turned out to be a systemic crisis.
The country’s political architecture was not designed for long-lasting blockades and extortion, the likes of which have been enthusiastically practiced by Tea Party supporters for almost the last four years.
America is no longer a representative democracy. This is because in the congressional elections in 2012 the Democrats won 1.17 million more votes than Republicans but Republicans got 33 more seats in the House of Representatives.
Not even 10 percent of the 435 seats in the House of Representatives are considered competitive.
The last of the mohicans, uh moderates, have been pushed out of Congress.
Politicians actually call each other names these days (which apparently never happened in the past) and this is in part due to talk radio personalities.
Radical groups and billionaires (on the right, of course) actually make campaign contributions now.
The Tea Party came into being because the old “white majority” is shrinking into a minority and this is why they now proudly hold up ignorance and stupidity as badges of honor.
But other than all that though, I thought the commentary was pretty good.
And this just in: Germans are not really rude! And this video here will prove it or something.
I mean Tebartz-van Elst, of course.
“I got your church and state for ya right here, pal.”
What’s all the excitement about? Religious Germans contribute freely to their churches. It’s not as if the money this guy burned had been levied by taxation or anything. Uh, wait a second. OK. So I guess it had been.
Germany separates church and state much less clearly than does America but more explicitly than Anglican Britain or Orthodox Greece. Its post-war constitution, in a clause carried over verbatim from the Weimar constitution of 1919, favours no particular faith but lets all churches levy taxes on their members through the income-tax system (8% or 9% of a taxpayer’s bill, depending on the state).
And just when you thought that this might maybe truly and honestly be the last time any of us would ever have to see or hear anything more of Claudia Roth again…
Denkste (not a bit of it)! She just got the office of Deputy Presiding Officer of German Parliament “thrown at her” and something deep down inside of me (causing me a whole lot of indigestion) tells me that she’s going to take it.
We’ll see. Die Hoffnung stirbt zuletzt (hope dies last), you know.
Wer meinte, endlich Ruhe vor Claudia Roths mitteilsamer Betroffenheit über so ziemlich alle Missstände dieser Welt zu haben, hat sich zu früh gefreut.
PS: And not much of a surprise here, I guess. Germany’s Greens ruled out any further coalition talks with Angela Merkel’s conservatives early on Wednesday, leaving the chancellor to focus on discussions with the center-left Social Democrats (SPD) in her efforts to form a new government.
After having become a hipster. Despite the bad hair day.
At least it’s not like she had a nervous breakdown or anything.
Hipsters are a subculture of men and women typically in their 20’s and 30’s that value independent thinking, counter-culture, progressive politics, an appreciation of art and indie-rock, creativity, intelligence, and witty banter.
Fed up with having their personal privacy abused by Facebook, Google and the NSA all the time, many Germans have decided to give up their personal privacy altogether and now actively and gladly publish online practically ever damned freaking boring imaginable thing they do like ALL DAY/EVERY DAY/ALL LIFE LONG.
Actually, I thought they were all doing that already.
And in a related story, the Deutsche Telekom is planning to introduce “a vast computer network linking smaller computer networks worldwide,” or at least German-wide. They are then going to call this innovative and highly original new invention of theirs the Internetz. Or they sure ought to.
Or how about the Inner-Netz?
“My philosophy is that information is more useful when it’s out in the open.”
To keep Willy Brandt as Chancellor, the GDR was prepared to bribe members of German Parliament. Brandt’s intimate friend Egon Bahr (both SPD) negotiated with a GDR mediator in 1972 about payoffs for CDU and CSU parliamentarians. This has emerged in Stasi documents available to Der Spiegel. Brandt should thereby be kept in office. Bahr was State Secretary of the Chancellery at that time.
And this is completely unrelated, of course, but for you history buffs out there: There was a very controversial Misstrauensvotum (vote of no confidence) in German Parliament back in 1972 which Willy Brandt won – with two decisive votes mysteriously missing for the conservative opposition that had proposed it.
“Das muss absolut verschwiegen bleiben.”
After bringing by an ärztliches Attest (doctor’s certificate) certifying that he is “in fact like really and truly actually still alive,” ex-soccer star Lothar Matthäus has received an official apology from the otherwise infallibel Deutsche Post for returning a letter addressed to him from his ex-wife as unzustellbar (undeliverable) due to his being, well, like verstorben (deceased) already.
“Look, I’ve been dead for my ex-wife for years now, but this is taking it a little over the top, don’t you think?” the living and breathing Promi (celebrity, sort of) said, still alive and kicking.
Weil ein Brief seiner Ex-Frau Liliana nicht zugestellt werden konnte, wird der 52-Jährige kurzerhand für tot erklärt.
Observing Hermann 