A few posts ago I wrote,
…Germany is the Ground Zero where rationality and mysticism intersect.
Boy, was I off! I had no idea Teutonic Elektrizität had gotten so…what’s German for SNAFUBAR?
Because there are almost no storage options, the excess energy has to be destroyed at substantial cost.
Good thing solar power is available 24/7, then! The Germans have gotten so power-screwy that even the opposition to budget-devouring Sọnnenkraftwerks is insane. Am I reading this right?
Berlin energy economist Georg Erdmann, a member of the monitoring group on the energy transition appointed by Chancellor Merkel, views the expansion of solar energy as a threat to the planned nuclear phase-out.
His objection isn’t the engineering and financial albtraum . Nope, no problem there. But it’s such a gigantic–what’s German for fustercluck?—that nothing but nukes could save their power grid!
And of course after Fukushima, German nukes are simply unthinkable. Because what if Biblis gets hit with a thirteen-meter tsunami? We all see the danger, right?
Hey!! I believe this is the very first image ever customized for here. So ignore the German grammar mistakes sure to make edo and the GSB wince. Just note that we’ve advanced all the way to photo manipulation.
At this rate, your promised “wormme-3D” will arrive right after commercially viable time-travel. Rendering the delay moot!
World's Only Rational Man 
German for “clusterf—” is basically “Rudelbumsen”. It was used in the German dub for Clint Eastwood’s Heartbreak Ridge for exactly that.
The exit from nuclear power will likely cost 1.7 TRILLION Euro, so Siemens estimates. And that’s not counting the massive issues with “green energy” when it comes to engineering, nor does it take into account the lawsuits coming in from energy companies over the exit.
Oh, right, I’d forgotten all the busted deals.
And all because the average German is too
a) stupid
b) stubborn
c) deluded or
d) all of the above
to see that nuclear power is currently the only sane way to go. Take your choice. I know I’m going with d).
This is one of my many reasons for NOT wanting to go back to Germany. I’d end up trying to kill all those brainless, smug “green” excuses for a human being. And there are probably not even enough bullets in the whole country to do it.
I tend to call the Germans “collectively meshugge” these days.
When I was a kid and later a teen, we used to look to our northern neighbor and were like “wow, Germany is so great.” 20+ years later… I even avoid getting into Germany when flying to Japan. I fly via CDG or LHR. I’m not setting foot into this country anymore.
Some 200,000 Germans protested against nuclear power in the wake of the Tohoku quake. Geiger counters were sold out. I personally checked Conrad, which is basically the super-duper-mega store for any electronics that you may or may not need in your house (Geigers included), and they were expected to be ready for shipment in late April (that was in March, shortly after the catastrophe.) It scared me. Meanwhile books on physics or even globes and maps were not sold out.
Angela Merkel (who, these days, tends to get called Ferkel (piglet) and Mutti (mommy) by those Germans who already hate her, and that number has grown since the “Sarrazin Incident”, where she elevated herself into the presiding judge over what is free speech and what isn’t) violated the law by declaring an exit from nuclear power. Lawsuits are now starting to come in. Billions of euro.
Meanwhile the Green party milked the deaths of almost 20,000 people for their own political gain by stating that Fukushima could happen in Germany tomorrow and the voters bought it in provincial elections. The Green party won a lot of votes.
However, the “meshugge-ness” doesn’t just stop there. You know the game Mass Effect? I finally got to pick up the last add-on to the very first game in the trilogy (ME3 soon to be released.) And I bought it via Electronic Arts’ online store system Origin. Origin always took me to the German version (couldn’t get past that.) And, now get this… I could by the add-on Pinnacle Station only after 2300 hours, because it’s apparently rated age 18 in Germany. Mass Effect 1 itself is rated age 16, and can only be bought after 2200 hours from EA’s Origin Germany. The rating of the original game in the UK is age 12. Those online sell-times are based on German law as far as I know. Because “youths” aren’t up after 2200 hours these days I guess… *facepalm*
But wait, it gets even more ridiculous. When the re-launched Doctor Who finally ran in Germany (HUGE delay there), the episode with the “gas-mask zombies” (The Empty Child) was re-cut in Germany. The transformation scene of the human doctor into a gas-mask zombie was cut from the episode. Doctor Who is usually rated suitable for the age 12 in the UK. The season 1 with Ecclestone and Piper was rated 12. It’s a family series. Except in Germany.
Even further back, now I’m going to out myself as a very old-school gamer, There was a game called “A-10 Tank Killer”. It was a flight “simulator” similar to Fighterbomber, Falcon F-16 or F-22 Retaliator. However, this game was outright banned in Germany. Why? Well, you could destroy buildings in it. And the government’s censorship agency, pardon the federal examination office for youth-endandering media, deemed that one could assume that there were people in the buildings… Not that our rigs back then had the computing power to show any of that, nor was any of that in the game.
Yeah, so my respect for Germany is somewhere in the basement these days.
Also let me link back to the translation of Prof Zöllner’s letter about how the German media and Germany in general dealt with this catastrophe: https://wormme.com/2011/11/22/apocalypse-now/
Zöllner said it right. With friends like Germany you don’t need a nuclear catastrophe.
And I’m not even touching certain political things, like how anti-semitism is “in” again in Germany, and how “Germans! Don’t buy Jewish!” is allowed again.
endangering, not endandering… bah…
Also, take the Gorleben Protests, which usually turn violent, require hundreds of cops to protect the CASTOR (unlike in France) and lead to the attempted murder of police offices (the last protest I saw featured the eco-terrorists fire-bomging a police APC, with crew inside, luckily the LEOs got out in time.)
Your posts like this are better than 5,000 word “man in the street” essays by thumb-sucking American magazines.
I had trouble following some of this, as an Euro-ignorant Yank. The Dr. Who “gas-mask” episode was verboten to youth? Meaning the descendents of the Brothers Grimm?
Actually, that explains a lot.
Oh, they ran The Empty Child (with a horrible dub), but they removed this:
They removed the transformation part at the end, some 20-odd seconds.
Funny detail? The transformation is on the German dvd release, but it was just “too scary” for tv…
I love you GSB!
And I will prove it this weekend by frying you an entire turkey.
It saddens me deeply that we’ll never know the back story or follow-up with regards to that comment.
Well, the back story is that I bought two frozen turkeys, two days ago. The current situation is that they’re thawing. And the script calls for them to be fried on Sunday, though I’m prepared to take Monday off if necessary.
One more thing, before I return to my observer’s post in the back row: you really weren’t “off” on your analysis of the German mentality (you’re the WORM, it’s inconceivable that you were wrong!); you said it yourself:
“Millions of people all catch the same passion at the same time then simultaneously execute it with exacting precision.”
(sorry, I don’t know how to format my comments)
Well, the German paranoia about nukes is one of those passions…
Yes…yessss…it’s not that I was wrong…I just hadn’t gotten here yet. That’s totally different!
This is fascinating, because…how do you extrapolate from here? Germany is a nexus of Western trends, and I don’t know if it has some of the “outs” other nations do. “Fracking”, for example, could relieve North America from gigantic energy pressures, if we follow through on exploiting those shale/natural gas deposits. Does Europe have that option? (Even then, of course, “environmentalists” will ankle-grab productive people.)
You other readers won’t believe me when I say I’m not sucking up to the GSB. But my absolute favorite word, from any language, is this one. It defines a basic part of us that we never really see until we encounter the word.
“Irony” is another fave of mine. And now, like chocolate and peanut butter, they come together! How ironically Schadenfreudetastic would it be if the Germans renounce power and engineering! We’d need an entirely new word for that! Awesome!
Ironischadenfreude!
The Germans these days are so “aware” about all those “phobies”. You know, xenophobia, homophobia and, yes, islamophobia (none of which are real phobias anyway). They do have one particular, real phobia: nucleophobia.
Nuclear power = baaaaaaaaaaaaad
Heck, here in Vienna, near to the main university building, the “nuclear power – no thanks” crowd has crawled out of their holes and have been “campaigning” against “evil nuclear power” for the past 3 years. By “campaiging” I mean bringing out their anti-nuclear stuff from the 80s and using Chernobyl as an “argument”. They’re now using Fukushima as well. When confronted it’s very clear they have no idea about anything and just repeat the same old ill-informed stuff from the 80s.
I really have to take a photo of that booth. It’s like a time machine. Suddenly… 80s. And the folks running it are all old hippies from those days, too.
Hi GSB!
MG gave us a nice tutorial about formatting here.
The Greens are REEEEEALY getting on my nerves at this point
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