Spotted at my favorite bakery, Cafe J-----, a few days ago:
They were in a big display with a several other petit fours with geometric decorations (no, not swastikas). I had to specifically ask for the 'Moor' and the 'Chinaman'. The woman who served me was, by the way, Turkish.
Anyway, ah done ate me one Negro and one Chinaman. They wuz dee-licious, and the Negro wuz full o' rum. Typical!
Previous coverage of German ethnic insensitivity here.
...throwing Greece under the bus:
Angela Merkel has cast doubt for the first time on Europe's chances of saving Greece from financial meltdown and sovereign default, conceding that Europe's first ever multibillion euro bailout coupled with savage austerity was not working after a two-year crisis that has brought the single currency to the brink of unravelling.
Just curious here: has any German-language news outlet cataloged the number of confident statements / predictions made by EU leaders in the past three years that turned out to be (a) wrong; or (b) lies?
The list would, I imagine, be quite long. Yet in the mainstream German media, all of this seems to get swept under the rug, and Merkel is congratulated for facing up to tough realities when, in fact, she's often simply backtracking on earlier promises or abandoning earlier predictions.
Yesterday's Tatort (g), "Kidnapped", was a creepy psychosexual affair which dealt with someone who kept little girls locked away in a basement for years, but never touched them sexually (which makes his behavior even creepier). Instead, he created a bizarre subterranean concentration-camp scenario, where the girls were forced to constantly wash and clean their bare-metal chambers in return for water and food. There were a number of nice touches, including the fact that the perpetrator's house had framed 'family' photos on the wall which were, in fact, pictures of himself, and some pretty breathtaking dolly-style shots vertically downward into the earth, to show us how far underground the secret chamber was. I've never been a huge fan of the Saarbrücken investigators as personalities, but they were pretty good in this one. And, of course, one can't overlook the enchanting Lale Yavas as the coroner, Dr. Rhea Singh.
This Tatort also marked the re-appearance of a stock Tatort staple every bit as familiar as a commedia dell'arte character*: the Misunderstood Molester. After one of the abducted girls escapes, triggering a girlhunt for the remaining abductees, suspicion immediately focuses on a middle-aged man, living along, who was fired from his job as a lifeguard for exposing himself to some of his young charges. The police pay him a visit, naturally, and yell at him a bit. Whenever the plot flags, we get more indications of his guilt: he smokes heavily (like the perp), he buttons his polo shirts to the top button like any self-respecting child molester, he lives near the scene of the abduction, his apartment overlooks a playground (and he has a pair of binoculars), his pet ferrets seem suspiciously high-strung, he's stopped taking the anti-testosterone medication prescribed by his therapist, and he even has a dress worn by one of the abducted children in his underground storage space.
But, of course, he's not the perp. It turns out there's an innocent explanation for all these factors. He is, after all, the Misunderstood Molester. Shortly after police focus on him, his therapist visits the cops to lecture them: his client deserves a second chance, therapy can prevent him from acting on his impulses, being scapegoated harms his chances of re-entering society, etc. The well-established pattern is followed:
It's interesting how frequently the MM comes up in Tatort scripts. Recently, at a lecture about crime fiction in Germany, I met a man who had written some scripts for German TV, and who complained of the heavy interference by editors, who frequently returned scripts with suggestions intended to make them more politically-correct. Evidently, the German cultural elite believes that ordinary Germans have a dangerously low opinion of convicted child molesters, and that this is an important problem that must be remedied by public education. Why else would there be (seemingly) at least one Misunderstood Molester per every 5 Tatort episodes?
As far as changing Germans' opinions of child molesters, good luck with that! I'm not complaining, though. I find the constant recurrence of the Misunderstood Molester one of Tatort's most comforting qualities. You can spot him (and it's pretty much always him) coming a mile away, and then the suspenseful sub-plot begins: how much evidence of guilt can the script dump on the MM's head before the real killer is found?** Sometimes this sub-plot is lots more exciting than the main plot!
* America's favorite commedia dell'arte characters can be seen here.** Now, I'm operating on the assumption that it's never the convicted molester. But there may be an exception to the rule! Can anyone point me to a Tatort in which the previously-convicted molester is identified early in the show, investigated, and at the end turns out to be the real killer/kidnapper?
...and he's out.
Given a chance to repudiate or at least clarify his demented allegation that Turkey's rulers are 'Islamic terrorists' (which drew a furious response from Turkey), Rick Perry doubles down, in an interview whose cringe-inducing idiocy has to be seen to be believed:
I was always puzzled by Perry's decision to stay in the race even after he had been rejected as too dumb -- by Republican primary voters, no less. I mean, why expose yourself to the public humiliation? Why cram yet more gaffes to the footnote history will afford you? Perry is like a stand-up comic who's gotten nothing but crickets for 15 minutes, but instead of wrapping things up and scurrying off-stage, decides to plunge ahead for the remainder of the show, sweating, simpering, and droning off all the stale jokes he can remember.
Won't somebody please shut off the stage lights and put this sad man out of our misery?
From the Atlantic Wire:
News sites Dipnot and Son Dakika cited Foreign Ministry spokesman Selcuk Unal who pushed back against Perry's remarks calling them "baseless and improper" adding that presidential candidates should "be more informed about the world and be more careful their statements."
"The unfortunate views of Perry are not shared in any case by Republican party supporters, considering the weak support he has received in public polls and primary elections," he said.
One of the few highlights of the Republican Presidential primary is the heartwarming struggle of mentally challenged Texas Governor Rick Perry to be the first person with major cognitive handicaps to become the Presidential candidate of a major political party. At a debate among Republican presidential contenders last night, Rick Perry uttered this positively Breivikian statement:
“When you have a country [Turkey] that is being ruled by what many would perceive to be Islamic terrorists, when you start seeing that type of activity against their own citizens, then yes, not only is it time for us to have a conversation about whether or not they belong to be in NATO, but it’s time for the United States, when we look at their foreign aid, to go to zero with it.”
Finally, someone has the courage to speak the truth about the crazed fedayeen running Turkey. When I was there last year, you could hardly have a decent stroll along the Golden Horn without car bombs detonating right and left. If I hadn't followed Lonely Planet's advice to wear body armor wherever I went, the glinting scimitars wielded by turbaned fanatics would have cut me to pieces ere I saw a single sight. The high point of my visit was watching Prime Minister and Sultan-for-Life Erdoğan personally executing dozens of "heretics" with his bare hands as the capacity crowd in Atatürk Olympic Stadium shrieked in delirious joy.
Needless to say, the liberal media elites of the U.S. rushed desperately to cover up the ugly truth:
[Perry's] was the most jaw-dropping statement of the night.
The ruling party of Turkey is moderately Islamic, but it generally has not interfered with the country’s secular traditions. While Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton has prodded the leadership about its commitment to media freedoms, few analysts—if any—would say the Turkish leaders is made up of “Islamic terrorists.” We really have no idea what Perry is talking about.
As for foreign aid, Turkey is a wealthy country that already gets virtually no foreign aid from the United States. The State Department this year made a request for about $5 million, which was earmarked for peace-keeping and security operations—not what one could consider traditional “foreign aid.”
This improbable Swiss tourism ad made me hungry. Hungry with terror!
And naturally, reminded me of a certain Sprockets episode:
sprockets germany's most disturbing videos von pentakatharidis
Cory Doctorow highlights a new critique of English libel law:
The Guardian published a long excerpt from Nick Cohen's forthcoming You Can't Read This Book: Censorship in an Age of Freedom, a fantastic-looking book that reveals the dirty truth of English libel law, where "money buys silence" for some of the world's most notorious dictators, thieves, and bad guys. English libel law is so broad that it allows, for example, Russian oligarchs to sue Russian newspapers for punitive sums ("the cost of libel actions in England and Wales is 140 times higher than the European average") in an English court, merely by demonstrating that someone, somewhere in England looked at the paper's website. And yet, the libel law in England and Wales doesn't actually protect people from the most common forms of libelous publication: false declarations of criminal suspicion by the police, false claims of financial irregularities from credit reporting bureaux and false statements in former employers' reference letters are protected unless they can be shown to have been malicious and negligent.
Time for another post that most of my readers will hate! Paul Krugman, on the recent S & P devaluation of European countries, quotes the agency's FAQ:
We also believe that the agreement [the latest euro rescue plan] is predicated on only a partial recognition of the source of the crisis: that the current financial turmoil stems primarily from fiscal profligacy at the periphery of the eurozone. In our view, however, the financial problems facing the eurozone are as much a consequence of rising external imbalances and divergences in competitiveness between the EMU’s core and the so-called “periphery”. As such, we believe that a reform process based on a pillar of fiscal austerity alone risks becoming self-defeating, as domestic demand falls in line with consumers’ rising concerns about job security and disposable incomes, eroding national tax revenues.
Needless to say, Merkel continues to flog more austerity as the solution, even as she warns her country that it will face "difficult times" (g) in 2012. Difficult times caused, in no small part, because of her policies.
This is a pretty remarkable moment in European history: major European players are betting the future of millions of Europeans on the existence of the confidence fairy and expansionary austerity, despite the evidence that they don't exist:
One lesson that the world has learned since the financial crisis of 2008 is that a contractionary fiscal policy means what it says: contraction. Since 2010, a Europe-wide experiment has conclusively falsified the idea that fiscal contractions are expansionary. August 2011 saw the largest monthly decrease in eurozone industrial production since September 2009, German exports fell sharply in October, and now-casting.com is predicting declines in eurozone GDP for late 2011 and early 2012.
Europe's mainstream leaders are plunging millions of citizens into a severe, and largely avoidable, depression, based on a theory of fiscal policy that is already, visibly failing. And the debate about this policy failure, unfolding even as we speak, is filled with silly distractions. Instead of soberly posing the simple, empirical question whether the current policy is actually working, most German politicians* are instead:
Overall, the debate reminds me of the American debate on the Iraq war in, say, 2005: even as things were going obviously pear-shaped, the war's most stalwart defenders resorted to basically the same kinds of distractions: shooting the messenger, impugning opponents' motives, etc. Just as in 2005, Europe looked on half in horror and half in bemusement as American shot itself in the foot over and over, the same thing is happening in reverse now -- but it's Europe doing the shooting.
* Except for the Left Party (Die Linke), of course. Remarkable how prescient the ex-Communists have been lately. And on this issue, they're pretty much the only real opposition.** Note that opponents of more austerity are somehow both Socialists and Anglo-Saxons, although usually Anglo-Saxons are dismissed by Europeans for advocating too little government spending (undermining our Cherished Social Protections™), rather than too much. Conflicting political cultures make for strange bedfellows...
My vicarious outrage has been placated by the person who will now be known to history as Patron X:
The man, called Patron X by the Philharmonic, said he was a lifelong classical music lover and 20-year subscriber to the orchestra who was friendly with several of its members. He said he himself was often irked by coughs, badly timed applause — and cellphone rings. “Then God, there was I. Holy smokes,” he said.
“It was just awful to have any role in something like that, that is so disturbing and disrespectful not only to the conductor but to all the musicians and not least to the audience, which was so into this concert,” he said by telephone.
“I hope the people at that performance and members of the orchestra can certainly forgive me for this whole event. I apologize to the whole audience.”
Patron X said he received a call from an orchestra official the day after the concert. He had been identified by his front-row seat. The official politely asked him not to do it again, he said, and the man took the opportunity to ask to speak to Mr. Gilbert, to apologize in person.
The men talked by telephone (it was a land line) on Thursday afternoon. Mr. Gilbert said he told Patron X, “I’m really sorry you had to go through this,” and accepted his apology.
...
Actually, Patron X said he had no idea he was the culprit. He said his company replaced his BlackBerry with an iPhone the day before the concert. He said he made sure to turn it off before the concert, not realizing that the alarm clock had accidentally been set and would sound even if the phone was in silent mode.
Still, all cellphones should be jammed during classical concerts. If you might need to get an allegedly super-important call during the concert, then don't go.