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It'd be interesting to know how many of the people killed were Muslims themselves. I'd guess a majority in any year.

If we're only counting Al Qaeda and its franchises, this is correct. They kill more Muslims than non-Muslims by around a factor of eight.

The linked site seems to easily exceed its bandwidth and the article is also quite bad.
Here's a better one from Reuters:
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/06/05/china-austria-idUSL3E8H42VJ20120605

For those who understand German or just want to see a short video of the Chinese copy of Hallstatt:
http://www.spiegel.de/video/china-baut-oesterreichischen-ort-hallstatt-nach-video-1200461.html

I'm not sure the Germany is going to replace any of it's industrial infra-structure in the future in fact SpiegelOnline has an article. The Downside of Germany's Nuclear Phaseout is strongly hinting that the increasing energy prices due to phasing out nuclear in favor of renewables will cause active industrial flight to cheaper energy regions.

Comments like yours fill me with a sense of despair for the future because there are so many people like you.

You despair for the wrong reason.

Essentially, you're the kind of person who would be absolutely shocked if, after you smeared dog shit on someone's face, they got mad at you for smearing dog shit on their face. Rather than note the obvious fact that they got pissed because you just smeared dog shit on their face, you'd have to come up with some justification for what you did, like, "he has freckles and hates people who don't."

I think you would be shocked to actually learn what is going on since you don't actually seem to know, or really have a good idea. This ultimately isn't about the US, it is about them - the Islamist extremists, their goals, and aspirations. Their kind was conquering and killing for hundreds of years (more like 1,000) before the US came along. Read Bin Laden's demands in his Letter to America. His first actual demand is that the United States convert to Islam. Second, he wants the Constitution replaced with Sharia law in all its glory: stone the adulterer, crush homosexuals under walls or throw them off of buildings, whip the immodest, chop off the hands of thieves, no drugs or alcohol, no interest charged on loans, and all the rest. That isn't a demand to "stop smearing shit on my face", that is the demand of a man determined to see the world under Islamic rule even if it takes 1,000 more years. This was a man who wanted to see the restoration of the Islamic Caliphate, which existed until ~ 1924. Their grievances is that Islam has fallen from its former glory, and they intend to restore it. They want to retake Spain which pushed out Islamists rulers hundreds of years ago.

  What al-Qaida Really Wants

If you want to despair, then do it over the fact that this conflict could easily continue for 20, 50, or 100 more years as these flare ups of Islamist extremism do. Or Londonistan , or Eurabia

In a shrinking world, the extremists will probably never be far away.

Think about this: POVERTY, EDUCATION, AND TERRORISM

These facts should be well known by now. How is it that people keep getting this wrong eleven years after 9/11/2001?

At the The Other September 11th, the Battle of Vienna, the Islamist attackers were outside the gates trying to get in. In future battles, we will find them inside the gates, and too many of the defenders of the West ignorant and in doubt, or even ready to throw in with them.

As I wrote, you despair for the wrong reason.

On the other hand....
Forever is a long time. There is no reasonable expectation of forever in any legal contract for goods or services in any
industry I'm aware of. Even contracts for burial plots do not last much more than 200 years.

Soo...what happens in year 201? Do they figure you're finished with it?

braainnnss...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cemetery#Re-use_of_graves
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-13357909
http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/0,1518,527134,00.html

O_O

I was being facetious, but...suddenly my commitment to cremation is a whole lot firmer...

On the other hand....
Forever is a long time. There is no reasonable expectation of forever in any legal contract for goods or services in any
industry I'm aware of. Even contracts for burial plots do not last much more than 200 years.

Soo...what happens in year 201? Do they figure you're finished with it?

braainnnss...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cemetery#Re-use_of_graves
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-13357909
http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/0,1518,527134,00.html

Honestly, they aren't popular at all. They're huge financial failures. They do get wedding photographers, but that's it, and certainly not what they were designed for. And everywhere gets wedding photographers, wedding photographs are one of the most important parts of Chinese weddings.

One of the things that gets lost in talk of the Chinese boom is that the whole thing is a bubble market, where development is controlled by fucking Commies and people who happen to have good family connections, but can't even hope to compete with the invisible hand of an efficient marketplace. A whole lot of stupid shit gets built, two lane freeways that can't be expanded cross over Shanghai, the whole infrastructure is just idiotic.

In Germany there is this town which has the long tradition of turning into Chinese during the week of carnival:
http://www.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/bavaria-s-chinese-carnival-long-live-the-emperor-of-dietfurt-a-677961.html

While I'm sure saying it was secret makes the story more exciting.. let's try to stick with things that are true. Here's an article from a year ago. The Chinese real-estate developer arranged a partnership between the two cities. Halstatt's Mayor knew of the development. That's the opposite of a secret.

And if you think this is for some sinister purpose:

This isn't the first time a Chinese firm has used a European place as inspiration. The Chinese city of Anting, some 30 kilometers from Shanghai, created a district designed to accommodate 20,000 residents called "German Town Anting." Modelled after a typical mid-size German city by architecture firm Albert Speer & Partner, it includes Bauhaus style architecture and a fountain with statues of Goethe and Schiller.

In 2005 Chengdu British Town was modelled on the English town of Dorchester. One year later Thames Town was finished near Shanghai, complete with a 66-meter tall church that bears a striking resemblance to a cathedral in Bristol. Also near Shanghai are mini versions of Barcelona, Venice and the Scandinavian-inspired Nordic Town. The architectural plagiarisms are popular destinations among middle-class Chinese, even serving as backdrops for wedding photos.

That's right: it's for tourism.

Except for the fact that in deep winter (obviously not a time of large photovoltaics energy production) France was importing electricity from Germany. http://www.spiegel.de/wirtschaft/service/winterkaelte-franzosen-brauchen-deutschen-strom-a-814008.html (sorry only found german sources for this)

The German magazine "Spiegel" mentions that the GW are not a measurement, but a number extrapolated from the total of registered solar plants and their expected performance. The Reuters article mentions government support for the German solar industries, but neglects to mention that financial support was recently cut, leading to a series of bankruptcies. -- http://www.spiegel.de/wirtschaft/unternehmen/solarzellen-liefern-leistung-von-20-atomkraftwerken-a-835417.html -- http://www.n-tv.de/wirtschaft/Weitere-deutsche-Solar-Pleite-article6262036.html

http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/05/25/voerde-insolvency-idUSL5E8GP8ZR20120525

That's second or third biggest aluminium producer in Germany, if I recall correctly. Remember kids, the more solar electricity Germans send to the grid, the less capacity for normal priced kinds remains ("renewables" can't be switched on and off according to demand, law assures their preferential treatment). Also, if you're from Poland or Czech Republic, kids, you're gonna pay for German ideology too, even if your government's folly wasn't that great (well, it was, German stupidity was just additional cherry on top of this shit cake).

Germany's most certainly not abandoning old gas plants (but maybe some were retired because of old age) as some good American or "Grün" tried to tell above, it's keeping them online and building new ones, same goes for coal plants on even greater scale - 14 new plants with 11 GW of installed capacity, mostly coal ones, some gas. Also it contracted reopening of already closed monsters, like Austrian mazut plant in Graz, that's right kids, mazut. But don't worry, 'tis a clean, healthy mazut, because it's backing up wind and solar, so it's okay.
Remember, it's true if Uncle Norbert says so. Oh, yeah, aunt Angie kicked his sorry ass out of gov't but we still gonna block any lowering of subsidies, as well as building of those 3600 km of high-voltage power lines, necessary for getting our grid out of state of permanent near-failure. Those Poles and Czechs will never get to installing those phase shifters nor will their grids afford to fail under overload from our sources, cause that would be BAD.

And remember: Energy Revolution is in full swing! So careful, it might hit you.

0 of course. That's when they're buying power from France's nukes though. Not to forget that they're already scrambling to find some way to subsidize all of this, because it cost too much taxpayer money. At the end of the day, the government is going off about how it'll pay all for itself, and the public is still left wondering where all the money is coming from, while the euro is tanking, and the economy looks like shit.

0 of course. That's when they're buying power from France's nukes though. Not to forget that they're already scrambling to find some way to subsidize all of this, because it cost too much taxpayer money. At the end of the day, the government is going off about how it'll pay all for itself, and the public is still left wondering where all the money is coming from, while the euro is tanking, and the economy looks like shit.

0 of course. That's when they're buying power from France's nukes though. Not to forget that they're already scrambling to find some way to subsidize all of this, because it cost too much taxpayer money. At the end of the day, the government is going off about how it'll pay all for itself, and the public is still left wondering where all the money is coming from, while the euro is tanking, and the economy looks like shit.

Just a suggestion, but stop fucking up peoples shit around the world and people wont have a grudge against you and you wont have to intimidate people. . . . Contrary to popular opinion in the US, the reason for extremists from the middle east and areas of asia isn't because "they hate freedom", . . . . I swear, how people don't see the cause and effect in all this is beyond me...

The reason it's beyond you is that you really don't understand what is going on. Here is some starter material. Yes, they do hate our freedoms - including the freedom of religion, and self governance under the Constitution. Their ultimate goal is to restore the Caliphate, which existed up until ~ 1924, and conquer the world for Islam.

bin Laden's 'letter to America'
Goal - coerced religious conversion, replacement of Constitution with Sharia law, with an end to drinking, gambling, fornication, etc., etc.. Noncompliance means they will keep attacking.

What al-Qaida Really Wants

Given your handle, you might find this interesting.

How many GM cars are sold in China? What is the number 1 selling car in China, and what does it look like?

The top selling car right now is the Buick Excelle manufactured by GM Daewoo and assembled in China by Shanghai General Motors Company Limited. This is a legitimate arrangement.

This is why you won't see a Chinese manufacturer open a plant in America.

Suntech Opens New U.S. Manufacturing Plant
China offshores manufacturing to the U.S.
Chinese Open First Car Plant in Europe

IP created in China belongs to the people

The United States successfully ignored international copyright and patent claims for over a century; it is hardly surprising that other nations that do not have a developed IP industry would follow the same route: An Economic History of Copyright in Europe and the United States

The U.S. was long a net importer of literary and artistic works, especially from England, which implied that recognition of foreign copyrights would have led to a net deficit in international royalty payments. The Copyright Act recognized this when it specified that "nothing in this act shall be construed to extend to prohibit the importation or vending, reprinting or publishing within the United States, of any map, chart, book or books ... by any person not a citizen of the United States." Thus, the statutes explicitly authorized Americans to take free advantage of the cultural output of other countries. As a result, it was alleged that American publishers "indiscriminately reprinted books by foreign authors without even the pretence of acknowledgement." The tendency to reprint foreign works was encouraged by the existence of tariffs on imported books that ranged as high as 25 percent.

The United States stood out in contrast to countries such as France, where Louis Napoleon's Decree of 1852 prohibited counterfeiting of both foreign and domestic works. Other countries which were affected by American piracy retaliated by refusing to recognize American copyrights. Despite the lobbying of numerous authors and celebrities on both sides of the Atlantic, the American copyright statutes did not allow for copyright protection of foreign works for fully one century. As a result, American publishers and producers freely pirated foreign literature, art, and drama.

You are quite off with your hot air remark. They do avoid this like the plague. In fact they remain silent if they don't have anything to say.

Let me give you an example how this not having a stance on everything manifests itsself.

In Germany a very popular question to ask a politician is his opinion on Israel. That's a political minefield. Anything you say will be used against you.
Some media bozo asked the new head honcho of the PP. His reply was that they didn't need to have an opinion on Israel and that the voters wouldn't punish that. Shimon Stein(former ambassador for Israel in Berlin) went on record that this is potentially the right way to start a constructive public discussion in Germany and Schlömer does deserve credits for his authentic and and honest answer instead of giving the usual knee-jerk formulaic answer any hardened politician would give. Which would have been that safety of Isreal is important as is the end to the Israel/Palestinian conflict.

Stein's original opinion piece(German): http://www.spiegel.de/politik/deutschland/0,1518,830968,00.html Honesty is a forgotten virtue in politics. It's nice if established politicians notice that. I wouldn't mind if this were common place.

This weekend was a major election weekend throughout Europe. Of course there were lots and lots of political talkshows featuring the usual talking heads. One of those had Jo Ponader from the PP in it. He spent most of his time twittering and listening. The most noteworthy thing he said was that he only had to sit there and smile since the representatives of the other parties did all his campaigning and called them a garrulous lot.
At the moment the PP gathers the votes of the disappointed and propably is a protest party. But over the past few months they have gained much substance and have the potential to become more than an experiment. At the moment they have a couple of teething problems. But the next few years will show what becomes of them.

I'm willing to vote for the experiment. Any party you vote for potentially fails you, so I willingly went with the experiment. It does help that they lean into the social-liberal direction I prefer and interestingly there is no party in Germany that fits into that political spectrum. This has a lot of potential.

Telecom services (including everything internetty) are a convenience even to criminals. They know it can be monitored and a large percentage of them still use it in some kind of (semi-) plaintext mode. It works for quite some time and then they go to jail. The "pros" have learned this and use different modes of communication - mainly meeting people in meatspace. Allegedly, the IRA used couriers with paper-in-mouth messages, ready to be swallowed and digested upon police search. The German army had motorbike courier and special edible paper for the same purpose until recently. If you think about that, it makes a lot of sense, as it thwarts both SIGINT and HACKINT (my term). An American Admiral apparently fucked his buddy generals/Admirals with that tactic in a war game, a few years ago. They were totally reliant on SIGINT. http://www.spiegel.de/spiegel/print/d-43375922.html http://www.multi-board.com/board/index.php?page=Thread&threadID=38363

No they haven't. Or did you have a source for that?

Indeed I do.

Let's see if they can explain this guy.

Africa is perfectly capable of growing enough food to feed its people. Many nations are capable of growing enough food to export the surplus. The problems are distribution, largely related to corruption and violence. It seems nearly everything we do just makes it worse. The free food shipments have a list of unintended consequences long enough to terrify you. It simultaneously props up the craven warlords that don't like us while depressing the prices for locally grown food so the farmers can't sell any excess they might grow for the tools that they need to buy the tools the need to continue to farm, much less other life expenses like clothes. Tools and clothes wear out, and if you destroy the local economies with our generousity, it does not help these people. The road to hell is paved with good intentions, as the old saying goes. And hell, I'm not the only one saying it. Good intentions don't matter. Bad results do.

http://www.spiegel.de/international/spiegel/0,1518,363663,00.html

The German Wehrmacht (and the other regular branches of the German military in WWII) had little to do with the Nazi party. The only "Nazi" military was the Waffen-SS, whose notable accomplishments include running death camps and overall pathetic performance in actual combat. The American stereotype of branding anything related to Germany in the 1933-1945 era as "Nazi" is just wrong.

Conversations between captured soldiers of the Wermacht were recorded by the Allies, and the recordings prove that they knew about the death camps and that many of them had taken part in war crimes themselves. Source.

If you're going to advocate something environmentally harmful, you had damn well better have a pretty good answer on how we're going to live that way without destroying our ecosystem. It's nice to have shiny things, but we humans can't live without the environment.

I dunno, keep doing what we're doing? The forests are coming back, wolves are returning, acid rain has been significantly decreased, and even the Brazilian rainforest is relatively stable (growth is keeping up with cutting, although with some loss of diversity and the nutrients leach out of the soil due to high rainfall).

So, yes, the wild eyed quasi religious environmentalists DO sound like Chicken Little to a lot of us. So now they don't like CO2, great. We've managed to address a lot of other problems pretty successfully, so we're not gonna panic. Other than throwing all of civilization into chaos, what do they suggest?

(captcha - existing . Not making that up)

What would have happened to the world after the Third Reich had an atomic bomb?
http://www.spiegel.de/international/0,1518,347726,00.html
"Once the robberies had begun, a sort of "snowball effect" ensued and in order to stay afloat, he says Germany had to conquer and pilfer from more territory and victims. "That's why Hitler couldn't stop and glory comfortably in his role as victor after France's 1940 surrender." Peace would have meant the end of his predatory practices and would have spelled "certain bankruptcy for the Reich."
Instead, Hitler continued on the easy path of self deception, spurring the war greedily forward. And the German people -- fat with bounty -- kept quiet about where all the wealth originated, he says. Was it a deplorable weakness of human nature or insatiable German avarice? It's hard to say, but imagine if today's beleaguered government of German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder could offer jobs and higher benefits to the masses. "No one would ask where the money came from and they would directly win the next election," Aly says.
The Nazis helped themselves to Jewish wealth and used it to feed the war machine.
Likewise, in the 1940s, soldiers on the front were instructed to ravage conquered lands for raw materials, industrial goods and food for Germans. Aly cites secret Nazi files showing that from 1941-1943 Germans robbed enough food and supplies from the Soviet Union to care for 21 million people. Meanwhile, he insists, Soviet war prisoners were systematically starved. German soldiers were also encouraged to send care packages home to their families to boost the morale of their wives and children. In the first three months of 1943, German soldiers on the Leningrad front sent more than 3 million packages stuffed with artifacts, art, valuables and food home, Aly says.
"About 95 percent of the German population benefited financially from the National Socialist system. The Nazis' unprecedented killing machine maintained its momentum by robbing from others. ... Millions of people were killed -- the Jews were gassed, 2 million Soviet war prisoners were starved to death ... so that the German people could maintain their good mood." By contrast, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill cajoled his people in 1940, just after France had fallen, to "brace ourselves to our duties" so that in a thousand years, "men will still say, this was their finest hour." ...
Perhaps, says Aly, that is partly because German historians weren't ready to look at what he calls "secondary" questions about the structural and financial underpinnings of the Nazi war machine. "Writing about them would have reduced the human scale of the tragedy," he says. Plus, he insists, it is always "much easier to say it was the fault of a small group of elites, the power-crazed SS commanders, or even big businesses" than to point to your own greed. German society has spent decades digesting and "perhaps now we have reached a new level," he says.
Current politics seems to mirror this sentiment. These days, making use of an agile word and mind flip, Germans have begun to insist that they -- like the rest of Europe -- were also liberated on May 8, 1945. They say it marks the day they and their children were freed from Nazi oppression. Still, in 1945, says Aly, Germans didn't think they were being liberated. "They had to be liberated from themselves," he says. "That's the problem." "

The Germans, from what I read somewhere, also essentially killed off all their own people who were old or infirm and so on...

So, the Nazi regime was like a fire burning on the abundance of Germany and the globe. That would have had to end eventually. How would it have transformed? It would have had to, whether it won WWII or not, whether it had atomic bombs or not.

And then would there have been uprisings? Same as the Arab Spri

Actually Germany is trying to increase its peek demand capacity via renewables. They already produce well over 20% of their energy from green sources, and the focus now is not just expansion but on increasing the amount of peek demand and base load that can be covered by them.

Water and geothermal in particular are suited to peek demand coverage. All you need is a reasonable mix of sources. It isn't rocket science, although if it were the Germans are pretty good at that too.

one of the things that irks me about the nuke debate is how much it hinges on how much it costs to build a nuclear plant, while for example germany spends 8 billion euros a year in direct moneys to solar producers, and god knows how much it spent on subsidizing the panel build, added infrastructure, elastic supply to get in when solar output falls, etc.
All of this money, and I quote, "Solar energy has gone from being the great white hope, to an impediment, to a reliable energy supply. Solar farm operators and homeowners with solar panels on their roofs collected more than €8 billion ($10.2 billion) in subsidies in 2011, but the electricity they generated made up only about 3 percent of the total power supply, and that at unpredictable times." To summarize: only in transfers, NOT in total subsidy costs, Germans each years are paying themselves, meaning some taxpayers are paying other taxpayers through electricity bills, the amount of money needed to build one of finland's new reactor from scratch, after cost overruns, and a simple neat multiplication by 2. Ain't life splendid?

"...put them closer to the actual users and cut transmission losses and costs. Why the hell aren't we doing it yet?"

Exactly! Here in Europe we had a cold spell of a few weeks and the French, with their dozens of nuclear reactors had to import electricity from Germany, who shut theirs down after the Japanese 'incident'. French officials were grinding their teeth, they had predicted the Germans the opposite would happen in winter. The Germans have tons of solar roofs and while it was cold as hell, the sun shone quite nicely as well as the wind was blowing.

Sources? I freely admit that I do not speak german, but a friend of mine who does told me that Der Spiegel had this article stating that net net, solar production was negligible this winter."[..]The only thing that's missing at the moment is sunshine. For weeks now, the 1.1 million solar power systems in Germany have generated almost no electricity. The days are short, the weather is bad and the sky is overcast.[...]"

Let's stop protecting all our crops from pests and thieves and see how that turns out.

Protecting good, going overboard on protection bad. Makers of recombinant herbicide-resistant crop seeds have gone overboard; Roundup Ready soy just leads to Roundup Ready weeds. Everyone outside the entertainment industry realizes that copyright has gone overboard, and some people posting here claim that the concept of copyright itself is overboard.

Let's just accept that people are going to die in road accidents and ignore all traffic laws.

Taking away road signs has been shown to improve safety in some (I admit anecdotal) cases. See for example unsafe is safe.

...and they keep coming in...
http://www.spiegel.de/netzwelt/web/0,1518,813224,00.html
http://www.lemonde.fr/technologies/article/2012/02/03/anonymous-met-en-ligne-une-conversation-du-fbi_1638768_651865.html
Le Monde has real trouble to hide the giggles :P

Most of Europe gravitates towards the US.

http://www.spiegel.de/netzwelt/netzpolitik/0,1518,810131,00.html has some pretty pictures. And that excludes Google stuff. Otherwise it would look even more star and stripey.

Just not current affair news. I have yet to find something remotely intersting that comes over the net and the US. Remember: primaries in Europe are filed unde "WTF are they doing?". It's election coverage in a country you don't live in. Or are you interested that the German head of state is under fire for having dodgy friends who helped him with dodgy gifts and services?
Thought so.

Khaled el-Masri http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khalid_El-Masri was "released" at night on a desolate road in Albania after US rendition.
More at http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/0,1518,490514,00.html
The NSA may be at Shkoder http://cryptome.org/jya/nsa-scs.htm

Der Spiegel has some video, the commentary is all in German, but at least it's better than still pictures...

That was the situation for centuries, and copyright was not introduced because of some moral imperative -- in England (whose laws served as the basis for American and Canadian laws), copyrights were introduced to improve the public's access to written works.

Wrong. Copyright originated as a tool of censorship. When the censorship expired, the same measures were repackaged and reintroduced (sans government oversight of book content) as the copyright we know today under heavy lobbying of publishers who most profited from the monopoly warranted by government oversight. Comparison to copyrightless 19th century Germany shows that copyright did the exact opposite of improving public's access to written works.

You seem to get most of this wrong.

Bin Laden wasn't a buddy of the US during the Soviet / Afghan war.

Bin Laden was attacking the United States in the 90s, including the bombings of two African embassies and the attack on the Cole.

The others were just formalities to sound good to his extremist followers.

You don't know what you are talking about.

What al-Qaida Really Wants

And that's not even the worst part. Citing from an interview with a kenyan economist:

"[a] portion of the shipment ends up on the black market where the corn is dumped at extremely low prices. Local farmers may as well put down their hoes right away; no one can compete with the UN's World Food Program. And because the farmers go under in the face of this pressure, Kenya would have no reserves to draw on if there actually were a famine next year."

The "aid" is, in effect, ruining all hopes for any kind of agricultural self-sufficiency in those countries.

(read the whole thing here.)

I wasn't specifically singling out the US. In fact in Africa, the US isn't nearly as bad as some European nations, such as France and England, which still haven't gotten over the idea that these countries are their colonies. The US has been much worse in its treatment of South American nations, however.

Furthermore, I'm not denying that rich nations don't provide money for infrastructure or education, or provide funding to NGOs that provide these things. But the money quite often gets in the hands of corrupted governments, which are helped or put in power by the West. There are a few genuinely helpful programs, but these seem to be exception.

Some citations for the West plundering the resources of poor countries, aided by corrupt governments they support and/or put in power, while the people starve (or worse) :

http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,686774,00.html

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/8126353.stm

http://royaldutchshellplc.com/2011/10/03/new-report-exposes-shell-complicity-in-nigerian-human-rights-abuses/

http://www.examiner.com/public-safety-in-national/blood-diamonds-zimbabwe-torture-camp-discovered-by-bbc

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/09/12/french-president-jacques-chirac-corruption_n_958043.html

http://foodwhistleblower.org/blog/22-2011/240-united-nations-report-contract-farmer-exploitation-imperils-food-integrity

You may say, well, these are almost all examples of corporations exploiting people, not governments. But let's not forget that these corporations are based in Western countries and have an enormous influence on their politics, the whole "revolving door" thing.

Google had been against censorship all along,

Don't be ridiculous. Google has a long history of supporting censorship in Europe and elsewhere.

"Look for Greece to default first..."

What I don't understand is why people are so surprised.

'France has been bankrupt before, Greece has been bankrupt five times in 200 years, and the German Reich was both insolvent and bankrupt. '

http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,721158-7,00.html

Probably because in the EU it's been banned (since 2006 for growth promotion purposes).

It looks like said ban is not being followed (or being worked around), at least in Germany.

http://www.spiegel.de/wissenschaft/mensch/0,1518,797970,00.html

The first German hybrid plant started operating in Berlin last month. Surplus wind power is used to produce hydrogen and oxygen. The hydrogen will be used to produce heat and energy, but will also be sold at local gas stations for use in fuel cells. So Vattenfall, Deutsche Bahn and Total seem to think that it's indeed worth it.

And there are projects starting next year that will built plants to convert the hydrogen into methane.

Recent inspections in Germany showed that over 90% of all chicken produced for consumption contain remains of antibiotics. So I guess you are right.
http://www.spiegel.de/wissenschaft/mensch/0,1518,797970,00.html (german),
http://de.babelfish.yahoo.com/translate_url?doit=done&tt=url&intl=1&fr=bf-home&trurl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.spiegel.de%2Fwissenschaft%2Fmensch%2F0%2C1518%2C797970%2C00.html&lp=de_en&btnTrUrl=%C3%9Cbersetzen (Yahoo Babelfish Translation)

I'll just quickly link to the German news site Spiegel Online where they've summarized the clues of a number of experts. Google translation here.

From the TFA (photos):
http://www.spiegel.de/fotostrecke/fotostrecke-74922-16.html

uh - just for the record.

lehman brothers *a us bank* started this whole crisis in 2008.

goldman-sachs *a us bank again* helped greece to mask their debt.

so - pay up for causing all this trouble.

What's the stuff they ship to Germany then? Nuclear aid?

In 2010, the german magazine "Der Spiegel" predicted there will be "Google Home View" in their comedy section - there is even a video (in german).

I hope your insightful post and related predictions are very wrong, but I am hard pressed to find flaws in what you say other than trying to stay hopeful.

Links you might find of interest:

"They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45"
http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/511928.html

"How Germans Fell for the 'Feel-Good' Fuehrer"
http://www.spiegel.de/international/0,1518,347726,00.html

"Voyage from Yesteryear"
http://www.jamesphogan.com/books/info.php?titleID=29&cmd=summary

My site with lots of alternatives to disaster:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/

On optimism and other things by Howard Zinn:
http://www.commondreams.org/views04/1108-21.htm
http://www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/zinncomrev24.html

Please make sure you are getting your vitamin D, eating lots of vegetables and fruits, and getting omega-3s to be in the best of health for any tough times to come.

Vaguely referenced in the original heise.de article the company responsible for programming the trojan is "digitask". They charged neighboring Bavarian state Baden-Württemberg 1,2 million Euros for some components of the software in 2007. From the Spiegel article below also looks like digitask was being commissioned to implement a complete digital "Big Brother" system from certain states. So looks like more German states than just Bavaria are implicated in this.

source german: http://www.spiegel.de/netzwelt/netzpolitik/0,1518,791112,00.html

Also another English article from spiegel :http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/0,1518,790944,00.html