Alles wie Immer*

When it comes to reliable news sources, I mean – ‘Refugee’: A keyword that gets German media every time.

Refugee

Let’s see. Here’s what’s coming out of German media outlets these days: A dead refugee who isn’t, a thirteen-year-old girl raped by refugees who wasn’t and a hand grenade attack at a refugee facility done with a hand grenade that doesn’t explode… Tell me when to stop or something.

Police said the grenade still contained its explosives but it was not clear whether it still had a detonator. Forensics experts are investigating.

* alles wie immer means the same as always.

You Can Only Buy So Much Pepper Spray

Damn. These are gettin’ to be purty near amerikanische Verhältnisse, folks.

Guns

For weeks arms sellers and regulatory agencies have seen increased demand for gun permits. Enrollment in self-defense courses is also up. Police say that is not yet a problem…

Germany has strict gun laws which stipulate that weapons may only be purchased under very specific circumstances. But with the so-called small arms permit, citizens are allowed to own weapons, such as gas cartridge guns or signal pistols. These may also be carried outside the home. The permit costs between 50 and 60 euros and the only restriction is that the applicant be a minimum 18 years of age.

PS: Dead refugee who died waiting in line outside a Berlin government office yesterday turned out to be not nearly as dead as originally reported. Uh, why is everyone in Germany prepared to believe a story like that and nobody wants to hear about a story like this?

And speaking of Sweden

German Of The Day: Antanzdiebstahl

Antanzan = to “dance” up, as in to show up, make an appearance. Diebstahl = theft or robbery.

Antanzdiebstahl

Antanzen + Diebstahl = Antanzdiebstahl. This new German word refers to a new method of pickpocket robbery that certain new arrival-types to Germany are now using all across the country, “a type of con in which thieves approach victims and hug or otherwise surprise them, with the aim of distracting them in order to pick their pockets.”

Sex attacks and thefts like the ones that happened in Cologne on New Year’s Eve were also reported in 12 other German states, German media say. The information comes from a leaked report of the federal criminal police.

The Freak Show Must Go On

Runway? No way. Me prefer run away instead.

Freak Show

At the Berliner Mode Salon, a sub-event at Berlin Fashion Week , established and young German designers are putting their best face, and designs, forward.

But remember to wear some Mundschutz (a surgical mask) if you attend, folks. There’s some really gross sounding contagious disease spreading like wildfire over there. It’s called gender fluidity. And I, for one, DO NOT want anybody to tell me how I can tell if my fluidity has become gender or not.

Gender fluidity is at the heart of Berlin’s style, ethos, and history. Unisex garments, cross-dressing, and celebrations of androgyny have been prevailing statements in Berlin’s ateliers and on its streets since the city’s cultural inception.

Pepper Spray’s Scarce These Days

As you all well know, Germans don’t do guns (unlike uncivilized American types). They are a peace-loving, law-abiding Volk.

Pepper Spray

But hot diggity damn do they ever love buying pepper spray! Some would say da liegt der Hase im Pfeffer (the rabbit’s in the pepper) = And that is crux of the matter.

A spate of hundreds of sex assaults allegedly committed mostly by North African men on New Year’s Eve in Cologne has sparked an “explosion in sales” of pepper spray and non-lethal guns, German officials and an industry chief said.

Authorities are investigating more than 670 criminal complaints — almost 350 of them sexual offenses — after hundreds of women were groped and robbed by groups of men outside the main railway station in the western city.

“Die Verkäufe von Pfefferspay sind seit Sommer 2015 angestiegen. Momentan verkaufe ich an einem halben Tag so viele wie sonst in zwei Monaten, 30 bis 50 Stück können da schon mal über den Tresen gehen.”

German Of The Day: Realitätsverweigerung

That means denying reality.

Invasion

It is very popular in Germany at the moment due to the refugee invasion currently taking place, part of the denial process here being that this invasion isn’t even being referred to as one. They call it the refugee question or situation or policy or crisis instead (crisis is clearly leading at the moment).

It has a long tradition. If German reality deniers don’t like the facts, the facts – or at least the ways they view them – just get twisted around (or we are informed by them that “there are no facts at all”). And that’s a fact. Happens all the time. Everything is relative, you see. See moral relativism.

Latest example: The vast majority of perpetrators committing those infamous New Year’s Eve sex attacks were newly-arrived “migrants” from Morocco and Algeria, for instance. Rather than addressing this very real problem, German reality deniers prefer organizing protest rallies against racism instead. Needless to say, these are always well-covered by the media.

This kind of predictable, incoherent reaction makes me feel sometimes like I’m Donald Sutherland’s character in Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Have the minds of these people been replaced while they sleep by copies of themselves having some weird, extraterrestrial and, in this case, irrational intelligence? Why are there so many of them acting this way? Is their number increasing? Are the body snatchers going to get me next? I’m going to lay off the sleep for a few months now just to play it safe.

Auch wenn jetzt alle davon reden, man dürfe nichts “unter den Teppich kehren”. Der so hochmoralische wie unehrliche Umgang mit der Flüchtlingsfrage droht uns um die Ohren zu fliegen.

Finally, A German Non-Word Of The Year For The Rest Of Us

Please, someone please have this 2015 winner introduced into the English language ASAP, please (did I say please?): Gutmensch.

Gutmensch

A Gutmensch is a do-gooder or a starry-eyed idealist. Or the term can also be seen as a blanket reproach for being “naive, dumb and worldly innocent, or being someone suffering from helper syndrome or moral imperialism.”

Or if you want a more concrete example of what this kind of non-word ailment can lead to, take a look at what’s going in in Germany right now. That’s right. The Gutmenschen are behind all of this.

Wer Gutmensch sagt, verdient sich seinen Shitstorm.

The Recklinghausen Connection

No, not staring Gene Hackman. This thriller stars an asylum-seeker French police killed as he tried to storm a Paris police station last week.

Paris

This guy was registered at a German asylum center in the city of Recklinghausen, had a phone with a German SIM card and carried a paper on him in which he pledged allegiance to the leader of the Islamic State. He had also been registered under four different names in Germany.

I don’t think that’s fair. That a poor refugee gets welcomed to Germany four times like that, I mean. Then there are fewer welcomes left to go around for the next wave of folks that comes in. And the next, and the next…

Der Mann posierte in seiner nordrhein-westfälischen Flüchtlingsunterkunft mit einer IS-Fahne. Die Landesbehörden stuften ihn demnach als Verdachtsfall ein, doch im Dezember 2015 verschwand er spurlos aus Recklinghausen.

PS: There’s this German turn of speech I really like: Ich glaub ich bin im schlechten Film. That means I think I’m in a bad movie. I’ve been hearing it more and more these days, too, for some reason.

German Of The Day: Wutbürger

That means outraged citizens. And although they’ve always been around (Germans are always empört/outraged about something), Angela Merkel’s ongoing open-arms refugee policy seems to be generating more and more of them all the time.

Wutbürger

And whoopee! 2016 just happens to be a big regional election year. Unless things start to change real fast (ha, ha, ha), I wonder who’s going to be getting all these votes? Not.

Originally founded as a eurosceptic movement a few years ago, the party Alternative for Germany (AfD) came close to its demise – until it split in two. Now, it has experienced a surge in public opinion. Euroscepticism is barely mentioned any more; the new party is acting as an anti-refugee party. If elections were to take place today, the AfD would probably enter parliament with a double-digit election result.

Lyrics Aren’t Everything

Especially when you don’t have any.

PEGIDA

A wordless song released by the anti-Islam group PEGIDA has knocked Adele off the top off the top of Amazon’s German downloads chart.

The song, Gemeinsam sind wir stark! or Together We Are Strong!, is being sold to raise funds for the protest movement, short for Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamisation of the Occident.

“Unfortunately, the product does not work,” Party-Idiot Patriot wrote. “I have repeatedly listened to the song with friends, but we are neither stronger nor more German.”