Author Archives: davidly

Sloping Slipperily toward Anti-Semitism

Barely a sequel but related nevertheless to wde’s latest entry.

In Raving on stage: Concert by Roger Waters ends in scandal, Berliner Zeitung author Frank Junghänel, submits a commentary posing almost as a concert review. He has something to say about the blurry line between the criticism of the policies of the State of Israel and anti-semitism and last night’s performance by Roger Waters at the, cough, Mercedes Benz Arena is somewhere in his sights.

Caveat lector: This is my translation. My comment on/at the original follows:
Continue reading

Unity and Uniformity Reunified

This originally appeared at my place in 2007 on the eve of the anniversary of German Reunification. The title “zur Einheit” means both “To Unity” and “To Uniformity”. It was a commentary on the development of the area along the river Spree, particularly a stretch in my neighborhood that got dubbed “Mediaspree” because of the nature of some of the businesses set to move in.

I re-entered it as “zu unverbindlichen Bürgerentscheiden” (To Non-Binding Referenda) on Sunday, 13 July 2008, which was the day of a referendum on a choice of alternatives to the plans put in place. It basically involved the desire to delimit construction: first, that a 50 meter strip of publicly available space remain between any construction and the river and, second, that no structure exceed the height limit that had been standard prior to the massive sell-off that occurred with reunification. (There are stories, lots and lots of stories (pun intended)).
Continue reading

Scientactically-Told Truths

Raining capital in nineteen words:
They used to dub the leaders Great. Not because they were good guys & gals, but because they achieved the extreme. On horses. Call that ancient history along with the mid-twentieth century, but it’s not just recently that words like “marvelous” have been taken for “wonderful” and almost never WTF?! Such simple choices, little turns of phrase, sound uttered self-consciously if you listen really closely, as if there’s an ambiguity-minimum dishonesty requirement set forth in The Really Real Book of the Law somewhere. At any rate, quality propaganda requires retail twisting of truth as well as wholesale dissemination of dubious modern mythology. It’s when words matter most.

Continue reading

The Fist of May

As it relates to the fruits of labor beyond just harvest, this first day of May means a number of things, down to nothing, depending upon where one comes- or is coming from. Being an American by arbitrary birthright I can observe the spectrum from ignorance to disregard. The European perspective — which, perspectives being as they are, one should in no way claim capacity of even the most far-flung interpretive representation — is hardly of one voice as to the significance of International Workers’ Day, or how it should or shouldn’t be observed. There are non-Europeans who think they know how things are different in Euroland and are comfortable acting as authority on the matter. There are non-Euros who know better, but act as authority all the same. There are those who admit ignorance, but will say they get the general idea and don’t have too big a problem arguing a viewpoint on it. There are those who are less comfortable in this final regard, but not to the extent that you won’t hear plenty of peep out of them. Wherever the end of this line is, it doesn’t have anyone on it who’ll admit they don’t know what the fuck they’re talking about, counting myself. If there’s a silent majority, they ain’t sayin’ shit.About the First of May: Continue reading

Pentagon’s Deal with Siemens

I was first hipped to this by the Berliner Zeitung, whose angle includes a details I haven’t found elsewhere, perhaps down to the German perspective or company spin (translation and emphasis mine):

Munich – Siemens can look forward to two major contracts, respectively, from the USA and India. On the one hand, the medical technology division, which is facing a possible IPO, received a blanket order from the US Department of Defense for radiology systems of an unusually large magnitude, the company announced on Wednesday night.

The Pentagon can thus order technology, accessories and training for up to 4.1 billion dollars over the next five years with an option for an additional five years. Individual orders will be booked according to request, a Siemens spokesperson stressed.

Medical technology, which operates under the name of Healthineers, is one of the largest and most profitable portfolios for the Munich-based company. Orders of this overall scope are, however, extremely rare, especially since the US government under Donald Trump was rather expected to favor the domestic rival GE. Siemens CEO Joe Kaeser wants to bring the medical technology division onto the stock market in the current year and is considering a listing in New York.

Continue reading

Pop a gander

Over’t con- cum neofem Arianna Huff’n’Po’s e-RAGgregator, the mighty lame duck is takin’ action to save the future from sure destruction!

rama-saves-america

Purple is Green at AriannaOnLine. Who’s more cynical:  Me – for thinking this is a typical ploy to control the narrative (such as there is one, rather than just a stupid sense of the way things are), with the Forth Estate coordinating with Pennsylvania Avenue Ink to hijack key phrases like “Save Public Land”?  Or them – for doing it?

For those unfamiliar with the concept of keyword hijacking, it involves burying some other uncomfortable reality in close semantic proximity to the verbiage chosen for the burial. In this case, let’s call it Building a Presidential Legacy on Sacred Ground or Muddying the Waters of First Nations in the Name of the First and only ever Free World.

Wait. Am I being hasty here. Look at this:
savin viro mints.png

See that? He saves Viro Mints!!

One thing I love about wd’s letting me diarise here is that I can let someone else do my fact checking. Like, what say you about the following Café?

During his eight years in office, Obama has carved out an impressive environmental legacy. He helped broker the Paris Agreement, the most significant climate change deal in history; instituted the Clean Power Plan, described as the strongest action ever taken by a U.S. president to combat global warming; and protected more land and water ― more than 265 million acres ― than any other president in history, including the establishment of the world’s largest marine reserve, among other green initiatives.

One thing I do know is that that there Paris Agreement does not do anything to avert the certain global ruin we face. To deny that is to deny climate change.

Reunited? How the West was One.

[Edit: Since first making this entry I have added the first map of the districts and shifted the communal map downpage. I made changes to the second and third paragraphs following the communal map for clarity.]

You might recall from last year’s hoo-hah that the whirled‘s had a full generation to digest the reunification of the German state. Let’s take a look at the fascinating colour schemes as seen this morning compared to how it looked for the fifty years the sides were split. On the left you see the results of yesterday’s election- on the right, the city as parcelled out by the confederacy of belligerents at the Potsdam Conference:
berliner-wahl-16 Occupied_Berlin.png

Continue reading

By Nary

It’s true that the Euros got a leg up when it comes to the presence of a third, fourth, fifth, and even sixth party in their chambers of lawmaking, where the criminalization of *behaviour unbecoming of an entity without a passkey to the chamber’s backdoor is designated. This presence is where the differences, diverging as they do, find their way back to a natural order of confluence, in spite of all the intrigue of electoral gamesmanship.

* that’d be the Brexit U

Continue reading

Nothing more than a Scandal Jones

Update to Trumping the Alex Jones Effect:

In this video from the Jimmy Kimmel Show, the host makes light of an Alex Jones’ segment on the latter’s show regarding an alleged rigging of a pickle jar when the candidate came on the former’s show. Kimmel had arranged a gag where Clinton would open a jar of pickles to dispel talk of problems with her health.
Continue reading

Trumping the Alex Jones Effect

Dear readers and/or comrades of this here café,

Are you familiar with the Alex Jones Effect?  Do you know who Alex Jones is?  If so, my condolences, though for the purposes of this contribution, it would help. Continue reading