“Obama and I have very much in common.”
“We are both really good-looking, we are both congenial and we are both able to unleash hype like this. Both of us are very good speakers, we both have leftest ideological positions which we can in no way ever implement and which, I believe, will eventually bring us both to despair.”
“Inhalte überwinden!”
Who cares? It’s election time! And that’s the Berlin equivalent to Karnival, sort of.
So what if Berlin’s unemployment rate is twice that of the national average and its schools are the worst in the country and the S-Bahn (the local commuter rail system) is still broken after three or four years and will remain so indefinitely and cars are set ablaze every night by a group of unknown arsonists who aren’t politically motivated in the least, honest, so what? Berlin is still Berlin, whatever that means. And that’s why everyone will be re-electing Klaus Wowereit on Sunday (or so the experts say – they just love to announce election results beforehand here for some reason).
No, he and his SPD aren’t doing anything about the problems here (malicious tongues would say that they are the problem), but what does that matter in the end? They aren’t doing it with style. Sounds vaguely familiar somehow…
Wowereit himself is their program. The whole city has been covered in posters featuring the native Berliner holding hands with a granny, or having his face bitten by a crocodile glove puppet in a child’s hand. His campaign slogan is “Understanding Berlin” — that’s not much of a vision, but Wowereit doesn’t appear to need one.
Large portions of the German political left have announced that they will not attend Pope Benedict XVI’s upcoming speech in the Bundestag.
At least half of the Left Party delegates will boycott the visit as will over one quarter of the SPD politicians. The Greens will be protesting around the corner at the Brandenburg Gate during the speech.
“We have nothing against the Pope’s visit per se,” said one anonymous spokesman in clear and palpable angst hooded in black and lurking in the sinister darkness of one of the parliament building’s more eerie delegate seating areas late the other night, “It’s just that we don’t care for all those crosses and the prayer. And the number 7. And the garlic.”
“Er kommt ja nicht ungebeten, sondern alle Fraktionen haben zugestimmt.”
Believe you me, Europe, President Barack Obama knows what he’s talking about when he’s talking about debt.
And that is why he wants YOU to solve your eurozone debt crisis pronto. He is, after all, “deeply engaged” with European nations about solving the eurozone debt crisis, if less so about solving the American one, and is deeply convinced that European countries need to coordinate fiscal policies just like the American administration and Congress have not.
“Right now you have a single currency but you don’t have a single set of economic policies, and that’s created great difficulty,” the President said. “Like duh, we know all about that. Just look at us if you want to see what that kind of clueless leadership gets you.”
“Europa hat derzeit zwar eine geeinte Währung, aber es verfügt über keine gemeinsame Wirtschaftspolitik. Und das schafft große Probleme.”
“To stabilize the euro, there can no longer be any taboos. That includes, if necessary, an orderly bankruptcy of Greece.”
You know, like an “orderly” divorce? Only this time nobody is getting the house because there’s no house to get (unless a house of cards counts).
It is not clear who is in the stronger position in the latest round of brinkmanship between Greece and the German bloc. If pushed too far, Greece can set off a powderkeg. The International Monetary Fund says European banks are highly vulnerable and need to raise their capital by €200bn. Many of the weakest are in Germany.
The Fukushima worst case scenario has now actually happened, in Germany. And the Fukushima worst case scenario is that the Fukushima worst case scenario never happened. Sometimes the truth raises it’s ugly and pointy little head, even here. Only for a second or two, but still.
I read the news today, oh boy. And not that any of you out there really care or anything, but I discovered that even journalists with the best of politically correct intentions can screw up from time to time. In this case it was in a Zeit article entitled Stress und Strahlung (Stress and Radiation) by Hans Schuh*. It was about how, well, something called “psychosocial stress” resulting from the Fukushima incident will now be producing more victims than the radiation did (I think he meant in Japan because psychosocial stress victims have been dropping like flies here in Germany for months now).
Like duh, Hans. Something has to produce victims when the “Super-GAU” everyone was banking on never materialized, right?
My favorite line in the article: In hindsight it has been revealed that with regard to one aspect of the accident’s occurance the world community (he actually means Germany here, of course) was taken in by an error: The “worst case scenario in the fuel cooling basin” never took place.
I’ve got to know, folks: How on earth did this ever get past the Brain Police?
I know how. “The people” will automatically understand that the worst case scenario took place anyway, sort of, irgendwie. They have long been aware of the fact that their reality must be made to comply with your/our ideologically motivated fear agenda, so it ain’t no big thing, this one little slip-up. This type of thing only makes Newspeak stronger, I think, although I can’t claim to be fluent in it yet myself.
Im Rückblick offenbart sich auch, dass die Weltgemeinde in Bezug auf das Unfallgeschehen zumindest in einem Punkt einem Irrtum aufgessen ist: Der “GAU im Abklingbecken”, der global Schlagzeilen machte fand gar nicht statt.”
* You won’t be finding this article online for some reason. I guess it’s not fit for the masses just yet.
News Alert! Here’s the article after all. They publish these online a little later, I guess.
A new study from the R+V Insurance Company (hmmm, an insurance company) indicates that Germans have a whole new list of things to scare the Hosen off them that they didn’t have last year. Is there a pattern developing here or something?
Some of this year’s top favorites (so far) are ecological catastrophes (a perennial hit), the “super worst case scenario” that took place after the earthquake in Japan, the so-called EHEC scandal (go organic sprouts!) and those bloody and yucky revolts still going on down there in the Arabian World.
But what really scares them most is, well, their money. Or the thought of losing it, I should say. Along with their fear of rising energy costs (hmmm, where might those rising energy costs be coming from?), over 70 percent of Germans asked are scared to death of the imminent bankruptcy of a few of them there EU countries down south which will cost the German taxpayer dearly.
Hey. No angst, no fun.
70 Prozent der Deutschen befürchten, dass die drohende Pleite einiger EU-Länder den deutschen Steuerzahler teuer zu stehen kommt – keine Angst erreichte 2011 höhere Werte.
Munich and Düsseldorf have clearly overstepped their legal boundries by placing a ban on beer bikes on the grounds that they are obnoxious, which they are, and is the point, but still.
According to Article 1 of the 1968 Vienna Convention on Road Traffic drafted by the United Nations, a bike or cycle is “any vehicle which has at least two wheels and is propelled solely by the muscular energy of the persons on that vehicle, in particular by means of pedals or handcranks.” And there’s not a word in there about beer, is there? So what’s the deal?
“The world is calling for the abolition of these pedalling village idiots.”
Assange HIMSELF just spoke in Berlin (at the Consumer Electronics Unlimited, or IFA), sort of.
Although why he would be asked to speak (via satellite) at an electronics fair is unclear to me, unless it’s to show off that snappy new electronic ankle monitor he is wearing.
But seriously folks, even über popstars (popüberstars?) who speak in the majestic plural while being held under house arrest for, uh, something, I forget (we all do), can contribute greatly to our über pop culture in an über dimensional way, I guess. One just has to be über enough.
And he is, I’m told, and this was it (his über contribution): “We present the truth to the public. We must know how the world functions. We must be clever and brave enough (brave new world enough?) to uncover conspiracies.”
And we must be ready and willing to irresponsibly endanger the lives of other people just to feed our way gone out of control egos for our own sake, ahmen, because we are, after all, nothing but a bunch of insufferable assholes.
“Dass sie ihn wie einen Popstar behandeln, nervt.”
Breaking up is hard to do. But it’s about freakin’ time already, don’t you think?
Now that it is becoming clearer and clearer that the euro crisis is not going to get fixed with the institutions at hand and the will that isn’t, Chancellor Merkel HERSELF has finally had enough and appears ready to do the one thing that will finally make everyone out there happy: Create new institutions and a “two-speed Europe” that won’t work either, but still.
What this means is, uh, I’m not sure really (can someone out there please explain this plan to me?), but I think it means creating something called a “core Europe” (the countries that haven’t filed for bankruptcy yet) run by Germany and then a “rotten to the core Europe” (all the other loser countries that nobody wants anymore) run by nobody. I mean, running on empty.
This won’t really solve anything, of course, but it’s an elegant European way of tossing in the towel and passing the buck on to someone else, in this case someone with absolutely no accountability who nobody out there has ever even heard of before: European Council President Herman Van Rompuy.
Are we having late Roman decadence yet? This divide and conquer stuff, I mean divide and save, makes me wonder sometime.
Van Rompuy doesn’t seek the limelight and enjoys writing haikus about nature in his free time.
Observing Hermann 