"Liebich has vigorously resisted suggestions of taking this step to satirise the authorities, rather than out of a wish to live as a woman."

Link to the London Times.

It should be noted that "Alexander Dobrindt, the interior minister, said Liebich had 'abused' the new gender self-identification law and it needed to be tightened up."

I always had a complicated relationship with the United States, which was far from perfect, but the U.S. was always the shining city on the hill."

"But now. we’ve lost not only the power that protected us, but also the guiding star in the sky."

Joschka Fischer, identified by the NYT as "a former foreign minister, radical leftist in his younger days and now a Green party stalwart."

He's quoted in "In Germany, ‘Orphaned’ by U.S., Shock Gives Way to Action/No country in Europe is as much a product of enlightened postwar American diplomacy. Now adrift, it has begun to reckon with a new world."

Who said "orphaned"? Who viewed Germany as America's child?

"My absolute priority will be to strengthen Europe as quickly as possible so that, step by step, we can really achieve independence from the USA."

"I never thought I would have to say something like this on a television program. But after Donald Trump's statements last week at the latest, it is clear that the Americans, at least this part of the Americans, this administration, are largely indifferent to the fate of Europe."

Said Friedrich Merz* quoted in "Germany’s Merz vows ‘independence’ from Trump’s America, warning NATO may soon be dead/Election winner likens the Trump administration to Putin’s Russia as he bids to take Europe in a new direction" (Politico).

_____________________

* Suggested sobriquet: "The Landlord."

"The vice president singled out his German hosts, telling them to drop their objections to working with a party that has often reveled in banned Nazi slogans...."

"He did not mention the party, the Alternative for Germany, or AfD, by name, but directly referred to the longstanding agreement by mainstream German politicians to freeze out the group, parts of which have been formally classified as extremist by German intelligence. 'There is no room for firewalls,' Mr. Vance said, bringing some gasps in the hall.... The billionaire Elon Musk, a top adviser to Mr. Trump, endorsed the AfD late last year... [and] publicly interviewed [Alice Weidel, the AfD’s candidate for chancellor in this month’s election].... Mr. Vance’s remarks drew a furious response from German leaders across most party lines. They immediately rejected Mr. Vance’s suggestion that they should drop their firewall against the AfD, pointing to past comments by the party’s members in support of the National Socialists, or Nazis.... The AfD and its members have a history of use of Nazi language and antisemitic and racist comments, along with plots to overthrow the federal government. The party has surged to second in the polls with its call to crack down on immigration. Mr. Vance did not note that baggage...."

From "Vance Tells Europeans to Stop Shunning Parties Deemed Extreme/His comments shocked attendees at the Munich Security Conference and seemed to target efforts to sideline the hard-right party the Alternative for Germany" (NYT).

What is that "history of use of Nazi language"? The link on that phrase goes to another NYT article, from last May, "German Court Fines Far-Right Leader for Using Nazi Phrase/Björn Höcke, a state leader of the nationalist Alternative for Germany party, used the phrase 'Everything for Germany,' a slogan of the Nazi paramilitary wing, during a campaign stop." Excerpt:

"Some measures under discussion would give law enforcement and domestic intelligence agencies more latitude...."

"The interior ministry has proposed a 13-point plan that would, among other things, enable security forces to investigate the finances of anyone viewed as having 'threat potential,' as opposed to only those people being investigated for incitement or violence. Another would allow civil servants to be dismissed based on suspected ties to extremists, placing the burden of proof on employees rather than the state...."

From "Germany Looks to Stop the Far Right From Assuming Power/Mainstream parties are changing laws to protect government institutions. Critics say the changes risk undermining democracy" (NYT)(free access link).

"How far should a democracy go in restricting a party that many believe is bent on undermining it?... Today, German lawmakers are rewriting bylaws and pushing for constitutional amendments to ensure courts and state parliaments can provide checks against a future, more powerful AfD. Some have even launched a campaign to ban the AfD altogether...."

From the comments over there: "I'm alarmed by these proto-fascist movements but it's neither correct nor a winning strategy to reflexively label them 'threats to democracy.' Unfortunately they are products of democracy. They're reflections of society, and this is what democracy can and very often does look like."

"Mimi and Fluffy refused to use a litter box for weeks, but Tredwell couldn’t open the windows for fresh air, lest the cats escape."

"The cats threw up, shredded the furniture, and clawed her face while she slept. She was allowed to let them roam with expensive G.P.S. tracking collars, but the cats ran away from her when she tried to steer them away from lark territory. She gave Mimi and Fluffy to her mom, who lived outside the lockdown zone, but they disappeared and turned up at Tredwell’s door two days later. When she was finally allowed to let them out again, on September 1st, they disappeared for another three days. Many residents of Walldorf started to think that efforts to enforce the lockdown went too far. 'There were people running around taking pictures, trying to gather information about the cats'.... When I visited Tredwell at her home, she seemed exasperated. 'I’m vegetarian,' she said. 'I’m really trying to take care of my carbon footprint. And now I’m getting treated like I’m a bad person.'"

From "The Cat Lockdown That Divided a German Town/Cats in Walldorf, Germany, can’t go outside when crested larks are breeding. Is it cruelty or conservation?" (The New Yorker).

"For those that look at a gym as a selfie opportunity, a place solely dedicated to performance-oriented training or a workout that needs to be done, you can probably find a gym that’s more affordable..."

"... that can deliver those things. We are not looking to bring in people who keep to themselves and don’t see the value of mingling with like-minded people."

Said Sebastian Schoepe, an executive at a fitness outfit called Heimat, quoted in "Think Getting Into College Is Hard? Try Applying for These Gyms. A new crop of luxury gyms requires referrals, interviews and even, in some cases, medical evaluations. And that’s before paying a monthly fee of up to $2,750" (NYT). 

So... they discriminate fiercely, but against whom? Is it too subtle to puzzle out — too hard to identify as something known to be wrong, like the admissions process at an elite law school? 

I thought maybe the name was a signal. What's "heimat"? Sounds German. Oh! It's the German word for "homeland"! Here's the Wikipedia page, "Heimat":

"I spent the afternoon yesterday at Twitter HQ at the invitation of @elonmusk to find out more about the trend 'blacklist' that twitter placed on me & more."

Tweets Dr. Jay Bhattacharya.

Twitter 1.0 placed me on the blacklist on the first day I joined in August 2021. I think it was my pinned tweet linking to the @gbdeclaration that triggered the blacklist based on unspecified complaints Twitter received.

Twitter 1.0 rejected requests for verification by me and @MartinKulldorff . Each time the reasoning (never conveyed to us) was that we were not notable enough. They should have asked Francis Collins -- he would have vouched for our standing as "fringe epidemiologists."

It will take some time to find out more about what led Twitter 1.0 to act so imperiously, but I am grateful to @elonmusk, who has promised access to help find out. I will report the results on Twitter 2.0, where transparency and free speech rule.

It's a little melodramatic but I'll admit that the first thing that flashed into my head was the scene in "The Lives of Others" — spoiler alert — when the main character enters the Stasi Records Agency and is able to read his file. How exciting to enter the domain of the entity that has persecuted you, to be treated with respect and deference, and to be handed the written record of what they had been doing to you in secret!

Here's a news report on the Stasi Files (not from the movie): 

A monument to transparency.

"Attempts to find a gender-inclusive pronoun equivalent to 'they/them' are also complicated by the fact that the German equivalent to 'they' ('sie') sounds identical to..."

"... the formal form of 'you' ('Sie') and the word for 'she' ('sie'). Carolin Müller-Spitzer, a professor of linguistics the Leibniz Institute for the German Language, in Mannheim, said that adapting existing pronouns 'doesn’t work in German, so we need to create something new. And creating a new pronoun is difficult.' Müller-Spitzer added that since the end of the Third Reich, debates about inclusive language in Germany often become a forum for people to express views about gender or race."

From "Bending Gender’s Rules, in Life and in German Grammar/The victory of Kim de l’Horizon, a nonbinary writer, in a top literary prize stirred a debate about how the German language can accommodate people who don’t identify as male or female" (NYT).

The article drops that reference to the Third Reich then goes back to discussing this one writer, Kim de l'Horizon. I would really like some elaboration of the "difficult" problem!

In that context, this quote from de l'Horizon is unsettling: "Life is messy, it’s sweaty, it’s dirty, it’s playful and fun. And that’s what this whole process should be."

"We take a human-centered approach to design a future massively better for everyone."

I love this phrase, painted on the window of a design firm in Munich, Germany:

 

Massively better.

The photo was taken by my son Chris, who also made this video walking around the Marienplatz ("Mary's Square"):

"People are being prescribed how they should talk, how to write, and now how to party. This prudish nannying of the politically correct brigade must stop. We are heading for an anti-fun society."

That's a quote from Bild, "the powerful German tabloid," in "Schlager louts? Row erupts over ‘sexist’ pop hit in Germany/Town festival authorities refuse to play chart-topping Layla by DJ Robin & Schürze, prompting complaints of censorship" (The Guardian).

They are loud in volume, unsophisticated in tune and often offensively bawdy in content. With titles ranging from Sex With a Bavarian to Big Tits Potato Salad, the ballermann sub-genre of schlager pop is a big hit in German-dominated nightclubs on the Balearic island of Mallorca.... 

Layla, by DJ Robin & Schürze, which has sat atop the German singles charts for the last three weeks, is a song about a madam at a brothel who is “more beautiful, younger, foxier” than the other sex workers at her establishment....

I'm surprised anyone cares about sexy lyrics anymore. It's almost touching. I looked up the lyrics to "Layla" (which is obviously not the old Derek and the Dominoes number). Here's the English translation. It says "more beautiful, younger, hornier," by the way. I'm glad The Guardian protected me with "foxier," even as it went out of its way to say "Big Tits Potato Salad."

This is the second time today — and it's only 6:49 a.m. — that I've been smacked in the face by "tits" when I was just trying to read a stodgy old mainstream publication. I was looking up the word "slurp" in the OED, because I wanted to see if it did in fact originate in onomatopoeia, as implied by a crossword puzzle clue I'd just seen. Well, look at the the 1971 quote under the figurative use:

"You think we imprison people on a whim? No, if you think our humanistic system capable of such a thing, that alone would justify your arrest."

Says a Stasi interrogator in the 2006 film "The Lives of Others." The "humanistic system" was East Germany.

I just watched for the first time, on the urging of my son John, who warned me that it was about to leave the Criterion Channel. John chose that movie as the best movie of 2006, noted on his blog about the best movies from 1920 to 2020.

William F. Buckley Jr. said it was "the best movie I ever saw."

The director, Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, got the idea for the movie from Maxim Gorky's description of a conversation he had with Lenin about music:

And screwing up his eyes and chuckling, he added without mirth: But I can't listen to music often, it affects my nerves, it makes me want to say sweet nothings and pat the heads of people who, living in a filthy hell, can create such beauty. But today we mustn't pat anyone on the head or we'll get our hand bitten off; we've got to hit them on the heads, hit them without mercy, though in the ideal we are against doing any violence to people. Hm-hm—it's a hellishly difficult office!

In the movie, a character quotes Lenin — about Beethoven's "Appassionata" —"If I keep listening to it, I won't finish the revolution."

"Lieutenant Halvorsen and his two crewmen joined with fellow American airmen to drop a total of 23 tons of candies, chocolate and chewing gum wrapped in tiny parachutes from their planes..."

"... while preparing to touch down at Tempelhof airfield with vast quantities of other supplies in an effort to break a Soviet land blockade of Berlin’s Allied-occupied western sectors.... A 9-year-old named Peter Zimmerman sent him a homemade parachute and a map providing directions to his home for a candy drop. Lieutenant Halvorsen searched for the house on his next flight but couldn’t find it. ... Peter sent another note reading: 'No chocolate yet.... You’re a pilot... I gave you a map.... How did you guys win the war anyway?' Lieutenant Halvorsen sent Peter a chocolate bar in the mail. 'Gail Halvorsen enchanted the children of Berlin,' recalled Ursula Yunger, who had been one of those children and later settled in the United States. 'It wasn’t the candy,' she told The Tucson Citizen in 2004. 'It was his profound gesture, showing us that somebody cared.' Ms. Yunger had met Mr. Halvorsen for the first time at a reunion of airlift veterans in Tucson in September 2003. 'I was just shaking,' she said. He hugged her and handed her a Hershey bar."

From "Gail Halvorsen, ‘Candy Bomber’ in Berlin Airlift, Dies at 101/Lieutenant Halvorsen came up with the idea to drop candies, chocolate and chewing gum for the children of West Berlin during a tense Cold War standoff" (NYT).

Urban dreams.

Well this is quite the proposalhttps://t.co/HMvZekXzzo pic.twitter.com/T1Ps2Od1YF

— Samantha Maldonado (@sssmaldo) January 14, 2022

Berlin is planning a car-free area larger than Manhattan. The citizen-driven plan would create the largest car-free area in a city anywhere in the world.

Leadership can come from many places when it comes to transforming cities. Via @FastCompany https://t.co/3xfDHrNv5q pic.twitter.com/1gNwMlaA3v

— Brent Toderian (@BrentToderian) January 15, 2022

ADDED: Click on the first image to see the full extent of the proposed add-on to the island of Manhattan. Why would you build vast new land vulnerable to the rising sea levels you've got to believe are coming? From the article:

"Germany has been named the world’s best-regarded country for the fifth-year running..."

"... in an international soft-power survey that asked 60,000 people to score states on categories including culture, governance and exports. The UK fell from second place to fifth, dropping below Canada, Japan and Italy, partly because of a small decline in its global reputation for welcoming foreigners and protecting the environment. The US also recovered a little from tenth to eighth following the end of the Trump presidency."

The London Times reports.

In Germany, they are trying a 95-year-old woman in juvenile court — because she was under 21 at the time of her alleged crimes.

From "Woman, 95, Indicted on 10,000 Counts of Accessory to Murder in Nazi Camp/German prosecutors indicted the woman, who once worked as a secretary to the commander of the Stutthof concentration camp, after a five-year investigation" (NYT). 

“It’s about the concrete responsibility she had in the daily functioning of the camp,” said Peter Müller-Rakow of the public prosecutor’s offices in Itzehoe, north of Hamburg.... 

With the last people involved in carrying out atrocities for the Nazi regime close to death, German authorities have been pushing hard to bring as many of them as possible to justice.... 

“It’s a real milestone in judicial accountability,” said Onur Özata, a lawyer representing survivors in the trial of the former camp secretary. “The fact that a secretary in this system, a bureaucratic cog, can be brought to justice is something new.” 

Something so new, for someone so old, who was once someone so young.

"It was like a Popeye cartoon: the street was like madness, sailors and tourists and police. Halfway through singing my first song, the wall behind me collapsed and the club behind broke into mine, and everybody was fighting."

Said Donovan, about performing in a club in Hamburg in 1965, quoted in "Donovan: 'Can you believe the Beatles and I were paying 96% tax?'" (The Guardian).

“I realised television was for me; I picked it up very quickly. Everything – jazz, blues, folk, pop music, literature, feminism, ecology – I just absorbed it like a sponge, and I was prepared, because I had had poetry of noble thought read to me as a child.”...

He... got his first TV performance before he had even released a single, and slips into the third person, awestruck. “And suddenly, he connected with millions of people. How did he do that? And the cameraman loved it, and the directors loved it, and the producers loved it. How did I learn it so early? Because, what I’m about to sing to you, you already know.” The Gaelic singer-songwriter tradition is actually four: “poetry, music, theatre and radical thought”....

"It is one thing to plan for better times. It is something different to suggest they are just around the corner, as Trump has done repeatedly..."

"... since the outbreak began.... If the immediate public-health challenge is still enormous, so is the task of preparing for a gradual reopening of the economy. The most detailed consideration of this subject I have seen comes from Germany... [T]he most striking thing about the German study is the list of things that it identified as necessary for such a policy to be successfully implemented.... The United States has none of these things. Despite widespread agreement among epidemiologists and economists that a massive increase in COVID-19 testing is urgently needed, it hasn’t been implemented yet. Although the over-all number of tests has ramped up, there is little consistency across states, which translates to huge uncertainty about the real rates of infection in different places.... One reason why the COVID-19 fatality rate in Germany is so low—less than two per cent—is that its universal health-care system provided widespread testing and high levels of care from the beginning... The German report pointed out that [reopening] would need to be explained clearly to the public in a way that was realistic and made explicit that the new policy didn’t amount to a return to 'business as usual.' Credible political leaders would need to 'appeal to common values and emphasize moral standards' and 'solidarity.' It would also help if the person communicating the policy 'acts as a "role model," i.e., a person who aligns his or her own behavior with the measures.' This reads like a definition of an anti-Trump...."

From "Trump’s 'Light at the End of the Tunnel' Is a Delusion" by John Cassidy (in The New Yorker). Beautiful photo by Chip Somodevilla — worth clicking of only for that.

Does the press have any responsibility for tearing down Trump's credibility right when we need it? I'd say they should be scrupulously careful not to do any of the ordinary political partisanship that had already badly infected journalism. There's a lot of ruined credibility out there. Everyone ought to be trying to crawl back toward the truth. I think Trump — in his daily briefings — has been "appeal[ing] to common values and emphasiz[ing] moral standards and solidarity." But the Trump-hating media will not help him do this. They're looking for ways to blame him, to worsen his credibility. Why not help?

Why is Germany's death rate from coronavirus so low — 0.5%?

NPR explains:

"I believe that we are just testing much more than in other countries, and we are detecting our outbreak early," said Christian Drosten, director of the institute of virology at Berlin's Charité hospital....

"We have a culture here in Germany that is actually not supporting a centralized diagnostic system," said Drosten, "so Germany does not have a public health laboratory that would restrict other labs from doing the tests. So we had an open market from the beginning."...

Only by testing everyone can you know the true death rate, so the more testing you do, the lower the death rate looks compared to other places that are not detecting the milder cases. The death rate in France is said to be 5% and in Italy, it's 10%. But what is it really?

"'In the beginning, especially, sometimes Americans would come in S.S. uniforms, and it was always a big, big problem,' said Alain Rappsilber, a chimney sweep..."

"... and a Folsom board member who described himself as 'kink-free.' (When asked his profession, he emphasized that being a chimney sweep was 'not a fetish, it is actually my job.') The ban on Nazis appeared to be more widely respected this year than the prohibition on nudity and public sex, which became more loosely observed as the crowd got drunker and the afternoon turned to evening. Organizers said the people who act out each year tend to be tourists. 'Here in Berlin, people don’t need to go crazy because it is normal for us to have a beer in public or to walk around and see someone’s uncovered backside,' said Mr. Ruester, the festival co-founder."

From "Classical Music and Fetishes Unite in Historical Center of Gay Culture/Folsom Europe, a five-day festival of concerts and street parties, celebrates gay life, the leather scene and hard-won freedoms in Berlin" (NYT).

(Folsom is the name of a street in San Franciso, there's a Folsom Street Fair in San Francisco, and that's why this is Folsom Europe.)