Tuesday, January 15, 2008

Tree raided, execution stayed

German police have raided an illegally occupied beech tree in Dresden which was scheduled for execution in order to make room for the construction of the controversial Waldschlößchenbrücke (say that ten times really fast) bridge. The tree had been the temporary home for dozens of Robin Wood activists who had been living there since December 12 and have now been scattered in all directions to look for other trees to save, or at least hug.



That the building of such a beautiful new bridge (Germans make way cool bridges) could cause such a fuss may seem strange enough for outsiders like you or at the very least me, but it is actually quite a common phenomenon here. Anything that is new and big and "technological" is immediately suspekt (dubious) to a substantial portion of the population here, in Germany of all places, and usually stays that way for a generation or two until their views become too much of an embarrassment for their children and grandchildren, should they choose to have any, which is doubtful of course.

This tree is old, relatively small and non-technological, you see. Or it at least it uses a technology that we do not fully understand yet.

How much time the tree has been given before the next execution date is set is not clear at the moment, but most feel nothing can save it now, except perhaps a German girlfriend.

Das nenne ich Präventionsstaat.

Kommentare auf Deutsch? Selbstverständlich.

Posted by clarsonimus at 07:41:23 | Permanent Link | Comments (4) |

Monday, December 03, 2007

No climate contradictions here

By being the world's sixth largest emitter of greenhouses gases, manufacturing some of the most polluting cars on the road, rejecting speed limits to cut CO2 and replacing its nuclear power with coal-burning plants, Germany hopes to set a good example for other nations at the upcoming Bali climate conference, Chancellor Angela Merkel said in her weekly podcast.



Merkel, who made fighting climate change a keystone of her government's program during Germany’s presidencies of the G-8 and EU this year, said the Bali conference will be a crucial one for explaining to other nations what they need to do to help the Germans in their heroic effort to stop catastrophic floods and droughts, melting ice caps, disappearing coastlines and deadly heat waves while they eat their climatic Kuchen (cake) at the same time.

“A timetable for countries other than Germany must be decided upon in Bali under which we can negotiate a successor agreement to the Kyoto agreement by the end of 2009,” she said. “Our self-imposed timetables are much more stringent than anything anyone at the conference can possibly imagine anyway so none of this will apply to us, of course,” continued the determined Chancellor.

“Or do you think any other country in Bali will be able to claim that it can reduce its CO2 emissions by 40 percent while simultaneously building 26 new coal-burning power plants? I didn’t think so.”

Do what I say and not what I do.

Kommentare auf Deutsch? Selbstverständlich.

Posted by clarsonimus at 07:11:03 | Permanent Link | Comments (2) |

Wednesday, August 29, 2007

Germans actually friendly when drunk

Editors at the Deutsche Welle were more than a little surprised recently when another type of Welle (wave) consisting of three or four letters poured into their offices praising the politeness, generosity and even friendliness of their fellow countrymen. Immediately suspicious as to the authenticity of these letters, investigative reports Bodo Holtzwart and Karl Bernstein quickly delved into the matter and soon discovered that the Germans in question only behaved this way when thoroughly smashed to the gills.



“I mean what was that?” asked an incredulous Holtzwart when commenting about the juvenile hoax. “You could smell that one from 1.6 kilometers away. We’re not playing in the sandbox here, people. This is the friggin’ Deutsche Welle. And if we don’t know what Germans are really like, who does?”

“And besides,” added Bernstein. “If you take a closer look at that photo up there that one of these pranksters mailed in, anybody can see that the whole thing was rigged. That guy on the right is clearly French. Nice try, so-called visitors to Germany, but you’re going to have to get up a little earlier in the morning to get one like this by us. Again, I mean.”

The “Germans” on the said photo could not be reached for comment as they are unfortunately the figment of someone’s twisted imagination.

Ich wollte ja nur freundlich sein. Oder wenigstens so tun als ob.

Kommentare auf Deutsch? Selbstverständlich.

Posted by clarsonimus at 07:47:44 | Permanent Link | Comments (1) |

Tuesday, July 17, 2007

Boobs endanger bus, boobs' owner reprimanded and offended

Some quick thinking on the part of a distracted and offended bus driver in the southern German town of Lindau probably saved his passengers from several rough turns, unpleasant acceleration and an abrupt stop when he impolitely asked a woman passenger wearing a low-cut blouse sitting near him to either find another seat or get out.



The boobs’ owner, deeply offended by this, decided to switch seats and continue her journey but later complained to the bus company. A company representative, offended by her reaction, not only defended the offending offended driver, he flipped out and began ragging her about being so easily offended, as well.

Pulling out a newspaper he had just been reading, he referred to an interview with psychologist Margarete Mitscherlich in which she noted that that Germans are much too easily offended in general (and that there probably wouldn’t even have been a Nazi era if they weren’t this way), the company rep then went on to offend the offended passenger some more by saying she was holding up other people waiting in line behind her who had come there to be offended about something else.

Beleidigte Leberwurst mit Zwiebeln ist mein Lieblingsgericht.

Kommentare auf Deutsch? Selbstverständlich.

Posted by clarsonimus at 10:01:38 | Permanent Link | Comments (3) |

Thursday, June 14, 2007

Schröder actually call girl

Recent disparaging remarks about former chancellor Gerhard Schröder’s dealings with Vladimir Putin and Gazprom made by US Democratic Congressman Tom Lantos have deeply offended German Social Democrats everywhere.



After leaving office as chancellor, Schröder immediately became chairman of the North European Gas Pipeline, a 51-percent Gazprom-owned company, a move which provoked outrage with literally dozens of Germans across the nation for nearly thirty-six hours on end. Being more of an honorary post with a mere symbolic salary of $300,000 a year, Schröder, referred to by many here (in my neighborhood, at least) as The Teflon Chancellor (Bismarck was the iron one) has yet to understand why anyone anywhere at anytime could ever have anything bad to say about his actions.

So imagine the surprise and the outrage here when Lantos actually said what so many other non-Germans have been thinking all along and charged that Schröder's close business ties to Russia's energy sector amounted to "political prostitution". He said he would like to call Schröder "a political prostitute, now that he's taking big checks from Putin. But the sex workers in my district objected."

“Political prostitute is an ugly and highly-inaccurate term,” said one of Schröder’s countless outraged supporters in Berlin, gasping for breath and foaming profusely about the lower mouth area. “Especially when, uh, you’re talking about all the incredible moves this guy can make and the giant sums of money involved here. We think political call girl is a much more appropriate designation in this case.”

Lass mich dich verwöhnen, Kleiner.

Kommentare auf Deutsch? Her damit!

Posted by clarsonimus at 07:28:48 | Permanent Link | Comments (6) |

Wednesday, May 23, 2007

Neurotic German escape ape escapes again

“They go wild when they see me coming because they know they are going to have fun,” says professional German ape clown Christina Peters, clearly unaware of what the hell she is talking about.



Germans have this weird thing with zoo animals. And I don’t even want to start discussing the Knut phenomenon. It’s bad enough what they do to their apes and chimps. They take them out for pizza or let them slide down slides in the zoo playground or hire friggin’ clowns to keep them from being bored. I swear they do. Is it any wonder that these poor, tormented creatures try and break out any chance they get?

And that’s probably why Bokito the ape went ape last Friday in Rotterdam. He was raised here at the Berlin Zoo, know what I’m saying? He may have even received “the clown treatment”. They ruined him here, in other words.

And Bokito has a long record of breakout attempts under his belt, too. He managed to escape from his cage on two occasions here in Berlin, one time even going over a three meter high fence to scare the ape you-know-what out of visitors and send their silly asses back to the parking lot. Maybe that’s why they had him transferred to that high-security zoo facility in Rotterdam. They call it The Rock, The Rotterdam Rock.

Didn’t do much good though, right Bokito? Some kid with a clown mask must have ventured just a step too close to his cage last Friday and the rest was history.

Eins, zwei, drei… Lasst die Tiere frei!

Kommentare auf Deutsch? Klaro.

Posted by clarsonimus at 07:41:19 | Permanent Link | Comments (5) |

Friday, April 27, 2007

Dreckecken

Achtung, Achtung already! It seems that all of a sudden, out of nowhere so-to-speak, countless Dreckecken (dirty corners) are cropping up wherever you care not to look in Berlin. Parks are being buried in picnic rests, old sofas are piling up on every other street corner, and countless tons of Elektroschrott (electronic junk) are lying around unplugged and unattended in your Hinterhof (backyard) while we speak. And the city’s sanitation department, in an unholy alliance with the dreaded Office of Order, is so alarmed about the matter that it has decided to begin a new cleanup campaign called “Working Together for a Clean Berlin.” And no, Rudy Giuliani has nothing at all to do with any of this.



Sounds harmless enough at first, right? Sure it does. It always does here… at first. But if you look a little closer, you will detect a less obvious and more sinister design. The sanitation department wants to “sensitize” Berlin’s citizens, you see. It wants them to be aware of the ever-growing “illegal waste” problem. That’s right, some types of waste are actually “illegal” here, and it doesn’t even have to be nuclear (no, come to think of it, practically every type of waste is illegal here). And worst still, the BSR (that’s the sanitation department) is even asking Berliners “to report” on any suspicious piles of Dreck they might happen to step into out there.

Well it’s all over but the crying now if you ask me. This gives this Garbage Police stuff a whole new dimension.

By the way, my own personal Dreckecke can be found way down on the bottom right of this very page. Or at least one of my many Dreckecken is down there, I should say. I prefer to call it my Schmuddelecke (nasty corner), however. That makes It sound nastier. Which, of course, it is.

Ordnung muss… sein oder nicht sein.

Kommentare auf Deutsch? Selbstverständlich.

PS: Thanks for the cool Elektrosmog link, Joe.

PPS: Thanks for the shape of things to come link, Kurt.

Posted by clarsonimus at 10:09:57 | Permanent Link | Comments (8) |

Saturday, March 17, 2007

Gulf Stream not cooperating

German researchers are clearly disappointed that a long-term ocean circulation and climate dynamics study of theirs has shown no slow-down of the Gulf Stream. Up until now, practically all climate models which have been projecting an oncoming climate catastrophe have based their predictions upon this taking place.

Many renowned scientists like Internet inventor Al Gore* have maintained that if enough cold, fresh water from the melting polar ice cap and melting glaciers of Greenland flows into the northern Atlantic, it will basically shut down the Gulf Stream, which keeps Europe and North America warm. This will usher in a new mini-ice age (like the one that took place a few centuries ago?) which will disrupt worldwide weather patterns and lead to extremely harsh winters, droughts, desertification, crop failures, wars, electromagnetic interference, broken families, and higher rates of teenage pregnancy, obesity, tooth decay, and halitosis around the world. And it might even lead to a collision with Mars – which is now growing a polar ice cap, by the way.

“The measurements taken in the North Atlantic since 1996 show strong natural fluctuations,” said Professor Claus Böning of IFM-Geomar. “But a weakening of the Gulf Stream cannot be confirmed.” The scientists’ disappointing study will be released as quietly as humanly possible during a symposium which will be held in Kiel on Monday.

But I could have told you that the weather (climate) is a funny thing here in Germany (ha, ha). Without the study, I mean. I have always found it strange that a culture like Germany, so fascinated with the weather report (everything comes to a screeching halt here when the weatherman pops on the TV screen), has never noticed that the weather forecast for the following day is only correct half of the time at best. Write these forecasts down and compare them with reality for two weeks, if you don’t believe me. Yet not only does everyone keep believing the weatherman (acutally they have two), they are also perfectly prepared to believe the most bizarre climactic scenarios about what the weather is going to be like here in fifty years from now.

Morgen wird es regnen. Irgendwo.

Kommentare auf Deutsch? Selbstverständlich.

* He actually just invented an important al-gore-rithm that makes it work.
Posted by clarsonimus at 07:52:57 | Permanent Link | Comments (4) |

Sunday, February 18, 2007

Not even heroin is free here anymore

Everybody knows that German state spending has gone down the tubes. Financial Engpässe (bottlenecks) wherever you look, a steady drumbeat of rising costs and reduced services for citizens and non-citizens everywhere, bankrupt cities, crippled social programs, higher taxes, lower expectations, oh-my-god-we’re-all-going-to-die.

And now they’re going to come along mir nichts dir nichts (just like that) and shut down seven state-run heroin injection clinics? Like, when is this ever going to end? Oh, they’re not going to shut them down, you say? Whew. That was a close one. Sorry, false alarm.

That would have taken the Kuchen (cake). The day that Germans decide to stop handing out free diamorphine to the country’s worst drug offenders based upon simple ideological or financial grounds will be a very dark day indeed. It will also be the one when hell freezes over. How else would these junkies be able to live a relatively normal life of state-sponsored drug addiction? And what about all of those people giving them all that free psychiatric support (for the addicts, I mean, not for the politicians)? What would become of them?

You see? Once you start fiddling around with a running system, one question after another always starts popping up. And I’m sure it won’t be long before last year’s proposal to make heroin available by prescription will be back on the table to question again, too.

Wozu zahle ich schließlich meine Steuern nicht, huh?

Kommentare auf Deutsch? Logisch.

Posted by clarsonimus at 10:00:06 | Permanent Link | Comments (1) |

Monday, December 11, 2006

Naked EU commissioner enraged at accusations of impropriety

Whenever the EU bureaucracy revolts (and it has always been revolting, of course), it tries to be more revolting than it was the last time. And this time it has gotten just about as revolting as it can get. Germany’s European commissioner, Günter Verheugen is now facing calls to resign after photographs showing him naked on the beach with his girlfriend (no she’s not, yes she is etc.) chief of staff were “obtained” by a German magazine.

Sources at Focus, where a small army of lawyers is currently debating whether to publish six photographs of Verheugen and his chief of staff which could breach Germany’s strict privacy laws, say that these photos are so revolting that they are almost too revolting for even their magazine to publish and that one of them actually shows Verheugen on the beach in Lithuania wearing nothing but a white baseball cap. And this guy doesn’t even play baseball. Well, certainly not hardball.

Of course the really revolting part has to do with what Verheugen has been trying to accomplish at the EU these past few months and years. "There is a view that the more regulations you have, the more rules you have, the more Europe you have," Verheugen recently said. "I don't share that view."

He has made no secret of the fact that he is on a drive to simplify EU laws and old ways of thinking and that his fight against bureaucracy keeps falling behind schedule because bureaucrats inside the Brussels-based monstrosity, who technically work for him, continually obstruct his campaign to streamline the organization. Now is that revolting or what?

And although I don’t want to jump to any conclusions here I’m going to do so anyway and suggest that this is simply a well-planned “palace revolt” kind of revolt. Bah, pfui (how revolting)! The forces that be are the forces that is and they want to keep it that way. And now that they’ve fed the media machine with what it needs to help them put pressure on this pest, this Störenfried (trouble maker), they can finally get him to leave and get back to business as usual. 

You can leave your hat on. That way you won't forget to take it when you go.

Kommentare auf Deutsch? Klar. 


PS: Thanks for the cool head link, Vij. I'm laughing my head off about that one now, too.
Posted by clarsonimus at 08:41:38 | Permanent Link | Comments (5) |
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