A Leaner Non-Fighting Force

October 27, 2011 By Hermann Observer in Habitudes, Heconomy, High Art, Hypocrisy Tags: Berlin, Bundeswehr, Defense Industry, Exports, German, Germans, Germany, Humor, Military, Satire, Weapons industry 2 Comments

Germany has announced 31 military base closures and the significant scaling back of 90 others as part of a major overhaul of the country’s armed forces which everybody here knows will never be used in any real combat situations anyway.

“Cuts or not, the German military must remain able to not deploy in an entire range of situations,” one high-ranking, unnamed Bundeswehr official said.

“This includes in particular missions in dangerous armed conflicts as well as high-intensity combat missions our government will regularly forbid us to participate in.”

When asked if these cuts might have a negative effect upon German defense industry firms involved in the extremely lucrative production of systems like the Eurofighter combat jet, the A400M military transport plane and the Leopard 2 and Puma tanks, to name just a very few, the official reassured all who cared to listen that the German military will do all in its power to seek other options to extend the orders for such weapons and will most certainly continue to order more of the same in the future.

“Our function as alibi army for the German defense and weapons export industry will continue to be our number one priority,” the official said, clicking his heels loudly or something.

The elimination of the draft will require making a career in the military more attractive in a country where part of the population is skeptical of military interventions. Germany didn’t support the international campaign in Libya.

Evil Internet Giant Now Within City Limits

October 26, 2011 By Hermann Observer in Habitudes, Helplessness, Hi-tech, Higher Education, Hysteria Tags: Berlin, Espionage, German, Germans, Germany, Godzilla, Google, Humor, Paranoia, Satire 1 Comment

Google Inc., that highly mistrusted and ruthlessly vilified corporate world dominator and spy on all things German (I got two words for you here: Street View), has just done an end-run around sleeping data privacy officers stationed at Berlin’s city gates and bought its way into Humboldt University itself by funding a new so-called Institute for Internet and Society, supposedly “based on a philosophy of openness and open access” which will “explore the impact of the digital age.”

Yeah, right. We all know what they’re really up to (or at least you do, I assume). Just don’t come crying to me later and say that I didn’t warn you. The next thing you now Googlezilla will be “approaching the power plant.”

Google Inc. has committed €4.5 million ($6.26 million) to the institute for the first three years as part of its recent push to invest in Germany, which has often been critical of the Internet giant’s practices.

Neidgesellschaft

October 25, 2011 By Hermann Observer in Habeas Corpus, Habitudes, Helplessness, Hypocrisy Tags: 99%, Anarchism, Berlin, Chaos, Crime, Envy, German, Germans, Germany, Humor, Neid, Occupy Wall Street, Satire Leave a comment

This is a German word meaning a society based on envy (Germany, in other words).

A 27-year-old Berliner told police that being unemployed and in debt led him to set 67 cars alight over three months.

Damn. This guy must have been one of those 99% out there, if you know what I’m sayin’. If you follow their thinking to his logical conclusion, I mean.

“I’ve got debts, my life stinks and others with fancy cars are better off and they deserve this.”

“Er fand, dass es vielen Menschen besser ging als ihm.”

PS: Speaking of Wall Street, sort of… What’s the real problem with Wall Street? “When you subsidize recklessness, you unsurprisingly get a lot more of it.”

99% Plus 53% Makes How Much Percent?

October 24, 2011 By Hermann Observer in Hard Facts, Heconomy, Helections, Higher Education Tags: 53%, 99%, Berlin, German, Germans, Germany, Humor, Occupy Berlin, Occupy Wall Street, Satire 5 Comments

Now that it’s getting cold and wet on Wall Street (and elsewhere) the 100% of the 99% are beginning to reevaluate whether or not they will be able to continue whining at 100% or whether it might not be better for them now to just shut up already and start biting the bullet like that ugly 53% does.

There could never be a 53% movement in Germany, you know. Germans are always in the upper 80s to lower 90s.

53 Prozent, weil dies die Menge derer sei, die mehr Einkommensteuer zahlen, als sie an Abschreibungen und sonstigen Entlastungen zurückbekommen. “Wir sind diejenigen, die für diejenigen zahlen, die sich gerade über dieses und jenes und irgendwie alles beschweren.”

Revolutionary Masses (Yearning To Be Seen)

October 23, 2011 By Hermann Observer in Habitudes, Heconomy, Helplessness, Hysteria Tags: Banking, Berlin, Finance, Financial crisis, German, Germans, Germany, Humor, Occupy Berlin, Occupy Wall Street, Satire 1 Comment

Hampered by nice weather and apathetic compatriots who actually have to work for a living, a massive crowd of some 300 (three hundred) global democrats and worldwide social revolutionaries nevertheless managed to occupy the city of Berlin over the weekend again already.

Denouncing banking and financial industry practices and other unspeakable injustices of the new century – and possibly having been inspired by something called the “Occupy Wall Street” movement in New York (the weather there is less nice at the moment I’m told) – the German revolutionary masses doing the occupying this week were notably smaller than the already rather puny ones amassed at German protests a week ago, but still.

“Derweil will die OccupyBerlin-Bewegung nach eigenen Angaben ihre täglichen Mahnwachen vor dem Bundestag fortsetzen. Seit Sonntag vergangener Woche kämen zwischen 100 und 200 Teilnehmer.”

ROSAT Soon To Become ROASTSAT

October 21, 2011 By Hermann Observer in Habitudes, Helplessness, Hi-tech, Higher Education, Hysteria Tags: Berlin, German, Germans, Germany, Humor, ROSAT, Satellites, Satire, Science, Space Leave a comment

The defunct and smashingly successful 2.7-ton German ROSAT satellite will finally be making its fiery, uncontrolled and less than successful re-entry into our planet’s atmosphere sometime within the next 48 hours.

Important questions to answer here are (there is actually only one): What are the odds that a piece of ROASTSAT debris will hit someone?

Unless you are a German, the likelihood of getting injured as a result of ROASTSAT’s re-entry is extremely low. The probability of a non-German speaker somewhere on Earth getting hit is about 1 in 2,000. Those odds are for any one of the nearly 7 billion people (minus 80 million Germans) on the planet.

The odds that debris will hit you in particular — or your dog, say, unless he or she is a German Shepherd — are still just one in several trillion.

Experten warnen: Teleskop-Spiegel wird zur Bombe.

Dumb Broad Talking

October 19, 2011 By Hermann Observer in Habitudes, Hate, History, Hypocrisy Tags: Berlin, German, Germans, Germany, Hollywood, Humor, Ignorance, Nazis, Pope Benedict XVI, Satire, Susan Sarandon, The Pope 6 Comments

Or was it Dead Man Walking?

A favorite tactic of left-wing wanna-be moralists everywhere (and of those flashy Hollywood types in particular), fading actress-with-a-cause-but-I-forget-which-one-it-is-this-week Susan Sarandon successfully boosted relations with her public and her vaunted sense of self by tossing around Nazi analogies at Pope Benedict XVI over the weekend. The current Pope is German, you see. And old. Get it?

And being a good Catholic girl who played a well-known nun in a film called Dead Man Walking way back when in 1995, when Christ was a corporal, she certainly shows that she knows what she is not talking about (knows what she is not talking about?).

Some, however, believe that she might actually be “ignorant” of lots and lots of things, which can’t really be though, can it?

“No, the last one. Not this Susan Sarandon we have now.”

The Scam That Keeps On Giving

October 18, 2011 By Hermann Observer in Habitudes, Hard Facts, Health, Heconomy, Helplessness, High Art, Hustle (Hoax), Hypochondria, Hysteria Tags: Berlin, Early Retirement, German, Germans, Germany, Humor, Hypochondria, Retirement, Satire, Scams, Shams 6 Comments

Word has clearly gotten out now. What used to be a Geheimtipp (insiders’ tip) has now become a full-fledged and nationally recognized Volkssport (national sport): Early retirement due to mental illness.

Up some 6,000 from the previous year, more and more Germans (71,000) are now being “forced” to retire early each and every year because they suffer from things like anxiety disorder, generalized anxiety disorder, multiple generalized anxiety disorder, mega ultra super mulitple generalized really really bad anxiety disorder and other such imaginary diseases.

In fact, being mental is now the number one main excuse used to have to go into “involuntary retirement” in Germany, with the average age of these hapless victims being 48, by the way.

Fear industry profiteers, I mean experts, are happy to report that the increased number of diagnosed cases is due to a greater willingness of sufferers to openly admit their problems, although none of these experts are able or willing to explain where this sudden willingness comes from.

Über das Thema werde jetzt “offener geredet und deshalb diagnostizieren Ärzte jetzt eher psychische Ursachen von Leiden.”

Nice Mellons, Mom

October 17, 2011 By Hermann Observer in Health, Higher Education Tags: Berlin, German, Germans, Germany, Humor, Online Pornography, Pornography, Satire, Sex, Sex Education 3 Comments

Mother Knows Best (Father Knows Best got cancelled long ago)? Well it sure ain’t Leave It To Beaver we’re talking about here.

German sex experts (and there’s a whole bunch of those, let me tell you) think that parents’ porn fears are exaggerated and that online pornography is actually a wonderful and thoroughly wholesome way to change the way young people learn about sex.

Well hot diggity dog, it’s still changing mine and I’m as old as the hills.

Carl’s mother holds a PhD in cultural studies. She has done research on pornography herself and now writes erotic novels.

She explained to her son that he shouldn’t worry if his first girlfriend didn’t moan loudly during sex and that the actors in porn movies use lots of lubrication.

“My mother told me that the positions they do are all just for show.”

“I learned some things from porn,” Carl says, “like licking, for example.”

Germans Mobilizing For World Financial Revolution

October 16, 2011 By Hermann Observer in Heconomy, Helplessness, Hypocrisy, Hysteria Tags: Berlin, Financial crisis, Financial Industry, Frankfurt, Germans, Germany, Humor, Occupy Frankfurt, Occupy Wall Street, Satire 1 Comment

Man oh man is this country ever ripe for revolution again already.

Literally a dozen or two protesters took part in the “Occupy Frankfurt” campaign a week or two ago and some reports indicate that a few of them even stayed there to continue protesting overnight. And that was just the start of it, folks. There were surely even dozens more occupying Frankfurt during protests now being held against the ECB this weekend although I’m having trouble finding news reports covering them because most Frankfurters leave Frankfurt over the weekend, it seems, as nobody here really seems to care.

One has to stop for a minute and consider the dreadful conditions under which the German people have to live in order to really understand why “casino capitalism” opponents will soon be taking down the financial world as we know it (or at least the German one). Unemployment is drastically lower here than in the US, for instance (and the unemployment rate keeps on dropping), but still. Obama is still Mr. Clean over here and always will be (so he can’t be the ineffectual disappointment that many of his compatriots are now taking to the street about). And despite the fact that “the ECB is one of the most powerful democracy-free zones in the EU and has acted in accordance with the interests of the financial industry for years,” many a thinking German financial expert can’t understand “why the ECB, of all financial institutions, should be declared the root of all evil rather than, say, Deutsche Bank or the Frankfurt Stock Exchange.”

No matter. This revolution is another in a long line of historical necessities and it is time for all of us to prepare for the coming cataclysmic change. It will not be televised, however. The ratings are simply too low.

One other important element is lacking in Germany: disappointment over Barack Obama, the man many Americans had pinned their hopes on to improve their society.

Observing Hermann

“Was interessiert mich mein Geschwätz von gestern?”

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