You can squat, but you can’t hide.
Not for more than twenty years or so, I mean. Time moves differently in Berlin.
The house in the former East Berlin was occupied as Germany was reunited in 1990. Residents were given rental contracts at one stage but those were later terminated when private investors bought the building.
But some of them aren’t all that dumb because they are the ones buying the big German ones. That’s the essence of the article anyway.
Inexplicable, really. German intellectuals everywhere are aghast at the United States failing to do what it is supposed to do yet again. Despite Der Spiegel‘s recent pronouncemnt of the end of US-Amerika as we know it (in black and white and color too), US-Amerikaner are suddenly buying big fat politically correct automobiles as if there were no tomorrow.
Or maybe that is the explanation. Perhaps this is our last collective gasp as a nation before the whole culture (excuse me, I meant lack of culture) implodes with a tremendous groan and rolls over to die, I dunno, in Nevada or someplace. Everybody must sense instinctively that this will be our last chance to drive off into the sunset of our American oblivion in our monstrous ‘merican automobiles in hyper-heroic, High Noon style.
Or maybe… Maybe the experts at Der Spiegel (and experts in general) are just too stupid to poor piss out of a boot.
Der Autoabsatz in den USA boomt.
When it gets to the point where even 24 German beauty queen types notice that there’s something going on in Egypt and flee the country in haste, some even without make-up (they had been preparing for the “Miss Germany 2011” pageant down there), then there’s definitely something going on in Egypt.
The German Foreign Office wasn’t much quicker in noticing either, by the way. They didn’t start issuing real travel warnings until yesterday.
„Nachdem aber alle wesentlichen Fotoshootings und Aktionen im Kasten sind, haben wir uns vorsorglich zur frühen Rückreise entschieden.“
You know, like the 80 percent of all Germans (at least) who love Obama no matter what he does or does not do.
Or how about the 80 percent of all Germans who are fervent pacifists and yet clearly have no problem with their country being the world’s third largest weapons exporter (NOBODY cares here, honest)?
But this one really kills me, and it’s quite a surprise. It turns out that 80 percent of all German Auswanderer (emigrants) who demonstratively leave their homeland forever (well they do on the numerous TV shows that document their adventures) toss in the towel after a bit and come back home to Deutschland again.
I guess once you go red, gold, black (the German flag), you never go back.
Deutsche entpuppen sich als “Ich bin nur kurz weg”-Auswanderer
Yeah, Herr Brüderle, you guys are the best thing since sliced toast. You’ve done everything right, right?
But please, enjoy it now, while you still can, fast. Because here’s what might just happen next: Mr. Sarkozy putting your money where his mouth is (“Germany and France will never let the euro fail) and your temper tantrum behind the scenes at Davos might be an indication that you have already been pushed down the road you didn’t think you would have to travel:Spending whatever it takes to bankroll your near-bankrupt euro neighbors.
And should it come to that, let’s see how much admiration you’ll be getting from German taxpayers back home.
Germany is getting boxed into a corner. Somehow, the ideas that the bailout-funding European Financial Stability Facility needs to be much bigger, that it should buy government debt, and that the interest rates charged on aid need slashing, have all dodged Frankfurt opposition and moved to the top of the bond market’s agenda.
The latest statistics say that they’re the poorest in the land. Nearly a quarter of all Berlin households have to get by on roughtly 1100 euros (about $1,500) per month.
So If you’re looking for rotten work that’s grossly underpaid, Berlin is like, I dunno, El Dorado or something. No skills required, either. Come on down!
And money isn’t everything, of course. Unless you don’t have any, I mean.
Das passt ins Bild von der „armen“ Hauptstadt und hat vor allem mit der hohen Arbeitslosigkeit zu tun. Sie liegt in Berlin bei 12,8 Prozent – so hoch wie in keinem anderen Bundesland. Mehr als 600.000 Menschen beziehen Sozialtransfers.
We’re close-fisted because it’s one of our defining national obsessive compulsive disorders and the one over which we have the least control.
When it comes to the euro crisis, Germany is about to be slapped around a bit by some folks at the Davos World Economic Forum for not being willing to make more money available than it already has. There is not enough money in circulation in Europe, they believe, yet this is necessary for certain ailing economies to be able to crawl back out into growth again.
Germany’s critics also believe that more money needs to be set aside for the European “safety chute” fund, something Germany steadfastly refuses to do. This extra capital would convince financial market investors that the euro is properly “covered.”
Needless to say, the Germans will listen politely and refuse to budge an inch, their fists tightening automatically, close-fistedness being one of their defining national obsessive compulsive disorders and the one over which they have the least control.
What can I say? This is New Europe, people. Germany does what it wants and everybody else here has to like it.
Für die deutsche Delegation geht es in diesem Jahr nicht so gemütlich zu wie üblich.
The German Navy has this quaint little training ship called the Gorch Fock with this quaint long tradition blah, blah, blah but now it’s coming out that these sailor/soldiers are acting quite scandalous these days (like sailor/soldiers in other countries are actually expected to act) and so Defense Minister zu Guttenberg has pulled the plug on the ship’s captain way down in Argentina and has ordered an investigation and holy shit let’s call the whole thing off.
The Gorch Fock (some are now calling it Germany’s biggest floating brothel) appears to have become the one place where modern German military types have lost all sense of inhibation and political correctness and where all kinds of bad misbehavior (of the non-German kind) is taking place big time. Scandalous, never-heard-of-things-happening-with-German-sailors-at-sea before have been hitting the fan. Here are just a few to name just a few:
The sailors on the Gorch Fock drink lots of alcohol on board.
The boy sailors are always hitting on the girl sailors really hard, sometimes on the other boy soldiers too.
The officers yell at the sealors a lot and often hurt their feelings, sometimes even “insulting” them.
Then there’s that bizarre ritual of eating raw pig’s liver and washing it down with even more alcohol.
And the drop-the-soap games in the shower.
And the freakin’ Aryan Brotherhood dudes on board.
Oh yeah, and mutiny and stuff like that too.
And, of course, the two women who have recently died on board under somewhat mysterious circumstances.
I think all of this is being caused by having to sail around the world in an old ass ship like that. But maybe that’s just me. Or maybe they’ve just got scurvy or something.
Today a 70-page annual report on the armed forces criticised the “inexperienced” officer class for not possessing “the knowledge and intuition to realise when the line has been crossed into criminality.”
Bowing to excessively strict German privacy law pressure, Facebook has grudgingly agreed to allow German users to protect their email contacts from unwanted social network solicitations that could lead to possible “friendships” or other related gross infringements of privacy.
Although there are more than 10 million Facebook users in Germany, none of them appear to be particularly friendly, much less know one another, nor do they “get” the Facebood Friend Finder concept in the first place, nor want to, because we’re not kids anymore damn it and we are all perfectly aware of what these so-called “friendships” are all about and where they eventually lead to and if any one of us wanted a find a friend he or she would go to the local pound and buy a freakin’ dog like God had intended us to.
“We are pleased that we have come to a solution with the Hamburg DPA regarding concerns about Friend Finder and look forward to continue our constructive discussions and dialogue in the future,” although they weren’t particularly friendly.
I dunno. Mark Twain liked that awful German language, I guess. And of course the German language has often been “sanitized” in the past, just like Mark Twain’s English is getting sanitized right now.
This makes me angry. And sad. Because, well, it’s so sad. And the people doing it are so clueless. Or, worse still, they are perfectly aware of what they are doing.
Just in case you might care, here are some thoughts on Politically Correct English from David Foster Wallace that I, for one, find very interesting indeed:
“Traditionally, Prescriptivists tend to be political conservatives and Descriptivists tend to be liberals. But today’s most powerful influence on the norms of public English is actually a stern and exacting form of liberal Presciptivism. I refer to Politically Correct English (PCE).”
“The same ideological principles that informed the original Descriptivist revolution–namely, the rejections of traditional authority (born of Vietnam) and of traditional inequality (born of the civil rights movement)–have now actually produced a far more inflexible Prescriptivism, one largely unencumbered by tradition or complexity and backed by the threat of real-world sanctions (termination, litigation) for those who fail to conform.”
“PCE’s various pre- and proscriptions are taken very seriously indeed by colleges and corporations and government agencies, whose institutional dialects now evolve under the beady scrutiny of a whole new kind of Language Police.”
“PCE is not just silly but ideologically confused and harmful to its own cause.”
“PCE’s core fallacy is that a society’s mode of expression is productive of its attitudes rather than a product of these attitudes.”
“PCE purports to be the dialect of progressive reform but is in fact–in its Orwellian substitution of the euphemisms of social equality for social equality itself–of vastly more help to conservatives and the US status quo than traditional prescriptions ever were.”
If interested, take a look at Authority And American Usage (pages 110 and 111 or thereabout) in Consider The Lobster.
“Many thinkers and bloggers are understandably aghast at this Ministry of Truth-style fiddling with a classic text.”
Observing Hermann 