You Can Always Count On Us

To not be counted on.

Don’t thank us. It’s just what we do. Or don’t do, in this case.

German minister expects Bundeswehr shortages beyond 2030.

German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius has said the country’s military, the Bundeswehr, will not be able to bridge gaps in funding and supplies by 2030.

“We all know that the existing gaps cannot be completely closed by 2030… It will take years. Everyone is aware of that…”

Chancellor Olaf Scholz announced a special fund to raise €100 billion for the Bundeswehr last year, although this has not yet been put to use. The government last week also earmarked €12 billion over the next nine years to supply Ukraine with newly produced weapons and ammunition rather than from German stockpiles.

Scam? What Scam? Me?

How could I have played a role? I don’t remember anything. I know nothing, nothing!

And German state media does its duty and doesn’t know anything either. Scholz is one of the good guys, you see (SPD).

Germany: Pressure grows on Scholz over tax scam ties – Germany’s main opposition party has called on Chancellor Olaf Scholz to explain his role in a large-scale tax evasion scam while he was mayor of Hamburg.

Germany’s main opposition party has called on Chancellor Olaf Scholz to explain his role in a large-scale tax evasion scam while he was mayor of Hamburg.

Scholz has been dogged by questions about meetings he had with private bank M.M. Warburg in 2016 and 2017. Hamburg officials later dropped demands for the bank to repay millions of euros in tax refunds it had wrongly claimed for share trades.

New Business Model

Man Got 87 Doses Of Covid-19 Coronavirus Vaccines – On some days, he got as many as three separate shots.

Reportedly, each time the man showed up to get vaccinated, he was armed, so to speak, with another blank vaccination document so that the vaccine batch number could be filled in the document after he got the shot. He could then sell these documents to people who wanted to pretend that they had gotten vaccinated and needed faux Covid-19 vaccination records. This scam may have worked, oh the first 80 or so times. But eventually staff members recognized the man, caught on, and notified the police.

German Of The Day: Fabrizieren

That means to fabricate.

The science is settled or something. Or at least that’s what political scientists tell us every day. And it seems to be settled and living comfortably in a nice villa somewhere in southern France.

The study in question was a €2.4 million survey of staffing levels and quality at nearly 100 German psychiatric facilities. Working for TU Dresden’s Association for Knowledge and Technology Transfer (GWT), Wittchen was the principal investigator of the effort, which aimed to examine workloads at the clinics and inform government regulations.

But in February 2019, German media reported allegations, stemming from whistleblowers close to the survey project, that study data had been fabricated. The university launched a formal investigation, led by law professor Hans-Heinrich Trute.

“If these observations were true, they would be within the realm of criminal sanctions.”

Easy Money

A government program that’s easy to scam? Wow. That’s never happened before.

COVID

It’s not the government’s money in the end anyway so who cares, right? Money for nothing and the click’s for free.

The government of North Rhine-Westphalia, a province in western Germany, is believed to have lost tens of millions of euros after it failed to build a secure website for distributing coronavirus emergency aid funding.

The funds were lost following a classic phishing operation.

Cybercriminals created copies of an official website that the NRW Ministry of Economic Affairs had set up to distribute COVID-19 financial aid.

Crooks distributed links to their sites using email campaigns, lured users on the sites, and collected details from locals. They then filed requests for government aid on behalf of the real users but they replaced the bank account where funds were to be wired.

The Scandal Nobody Wants To Talk About

Because it reveals the Media Brain Police for who they are.

Relotius

Granted, this guy was a real artist but can you imagine the armies of lesser charlatans out there who furnish us with our news each and every day? No media bias or fake news here, right?

The furore surrounding Der Spiegel journalist Claas Relotius is back, with a book by the colleague who exposed him –

Fiction and non-fiction can feed off each other in unusual ways. In the winter of 2018, Germany was shaken by the biggest media scandal since the forged Hitler diaries, after it emerged that the country’s bastion of investigative journalism – DER SPIEGEL – had published stories by a reporter who had “fictionalised” his prize-winning articles with armies of invented characters. Now the “Relotius scandal” has gone into its second round, with the publication of a non-fiction book by the journalist who exposed his fraudulent colleague: a detective story about the search for truth in the era of fake news that makes a more gripping read than most novelists could have managed…

Before he was exposed, he had won the top prize for German reporters, the Reporterpreis, four times in six years. One judge praised his stories as jumping off the page “almost like literature”. He was in line for a promotion at Der Spiegel.

German Of The Day: Kindergeld

That means child benefit payments. The “Kindergeld” benefits consist of monthly payments for each child in a family, starting at €192 per month per child for the first two children. Payments are then staggered depending on the number of children.

Kindergeld

The funny part is – hardy, har, har – these German Kindergeld payments are also going to parents of children who don’t even live in Germany but in other EU countries (€600 million per year). It’s another big scam, in other words. This has raised some concern here in Germany, believe it or not, and attempts have been made to restrict this.

So the really funny part is – hardy, har, har, har, har, har – is that the unelected officials over at the EU Parliament’s Sozialausschuss (Social Committee) have just ruled that Germany has to keep on making these payments anyway or else face disciplinary action from the EU. Wow. When Brussels says “social” (something for free), they mean it. You wanted Europe, Germany. Now you’ve got it. And you can bet there will be more good stuff like this to pay for in the future.

Deutschland, Österreich und Dänemark hatten gefordert, dass das Kindergeld für Ausländer an das Preisniveau des jeweiligen EU-Landes angepasst wird. Der Vorstoß ist im Sozialausschuss des EU-Parlaments gescheitert.

How Poor Is Germany?

Why Germany is so poor it can’t even put its two cents in the conversation.

EU

Poor? Germany is so poor it scams the Nigerians.

Germany is poor. It’s so poor it drives a Poor-shh.

And to top these jokes off, Germany is so poor that German states like Brandenburg will continue to need aid from the European Union for, like, well… Forever.

Remember: “The state (or in this case the über-suprranational-EU-state) is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else.”

Brandenburg darf aus Sicht von Finanzminister Christian Görke (Linke) bei künftigen notwendigen Haushaltseinsparungen der Europäischen Union nicht belastet werden.

Who’s Your Daddy?

The German birth rate is suddenly spiking or something. I knew you could do it, guys.

Pregnant

German officials say growing numbers of pregnant immigrant women are paying German men to pose as fathers so that they can qualify for residency.

German broadcaster RBB found up to 700 cases in Berlin alone. “There are many unreported cases,” said Ole Schröder, a top interior ministry official.

Some pregnant immigrant women are reported to have paid fake fathers and solicitors as much as €5,000 (£4,356; $5,628) to get paternity registered. Once that is done, the baby automatically becomes a German citizen and the mother has the right to stay.

“Wir haben teilweise Personen, die über zehn Vaterschaften annerkannt haben.”

German Of The Day: Schwerbehindert

That means severely disabled. You know, like 10 percent of the German population?

Scam

Huh? I know what you’re thinking, but it’s true. No, I’m not thinking it’s just another big scam (I know it is). I’m thinking how could it only be just 10 percent?

Schwerbehindert sind laut Statistik Menschen, denen die Versorgungsämter einen Grad der Behinderung von mindestens 50 Prozent zuerkennen und die einen gültigen Ausweis haben.