Saturday Evening Open Thread
I have the honor to post a Saturday Night Open Thread. Yes, it is an honor and privilege, because never have I felt I had to say something worth to be written up here as an essay. The last week was a terrible roller coaster on my mind and I oscillated between never again saying a word in a comment on c99p and shouting to the world: "You damn idiots!". This morning (Thursday Jan.26) these women made me come to my senses. Yes, I am afraid to say anything, but started to think about it. Thanks to these sisters.
That's what this thread is all about. Not keeping quiet. So, please use this weekend Open Thread to make all the noise you feel comfortable with. Thank You!
On Tuesday the 24th, I started writing something up, really a bit desperate, because I was uncomfortable with the whole idea of writing an OT. So I wrote something that I thought was not 'dangerous' to say. I leave it here to make the Open Thread a bit more meaty.
I don't know for the life of me what to write in the OT, so I just talk a little about personal stuff.
Right now I am in transition between the NEW WORLD and the OLD WORLD, yes, I am an Old Europe girl (for sure to Mr. Rumsfeld's great disappointment), he wanted a New Europe and meant a neo-Europe under the tutelage of a NATO that grew new friends and allies over night in early 2003, seven to be precise and all of them former communist countries. Those underground deep US-Russian relations ... error 404 - source page not found.
Old Europe Germany is the Germany I grew up into adulthood in the sixties and seventies. New Europe Germany is, if it exists in the Rumsfeldian meaning, foreign to me. I am facing the fact that I lost my home country. 35 years in the US have created a yuuuge black hole in my mind and therefore I don't understand and have no feeling for the reunited Germany. In my imagination I had hoped somehow to be able to come here and find it. Aside from not having the means to travel and explore all of Europe's countries, I also feel lost, literally and spiritually.
Where is "The Wall"? How could they have belittled the Wall and the (first) Cold War with it by disappearing it in the pavement of streets?
The course of the over forty kilometer-long urban border is no longer documented “continuously” in the current cityscape. Double rows of cobblestones now mark the course of the Wall over 5.7 kilometers in the center of the city. At certain intervals, there are metal plaques in the ground bearing the inscription: “Berliner Mauer 1961–1989” (Berlin Wall 1961–1989). A double row was chosen because the Wall was (almost) everywhere a double wall: the Grenzmauer or border wall abutting West Berlin and the Hinterlandmauer, the wall facing East Berlin. The row of cobblestones is not without gaps, however. Some of the “Berlin Wall stones” were long ago built over with houses, buildings, etc. In certain areas, nature has reclaimed the land. And the cobblestone marking is also absent wherever the land of the former Mauerstreifen, the military zone between the two sides of the Wall, is now in private hands (again). It is easy to find, though, at the Brandenburg Gate and the Potsdamer Platz..
It feels like the "Old Berlin" has been buried and its graveyard is in the asphalt and its gravestone some sporadically laid out cobblestones. Not a grave well kept. What a shame, at least to my mind. They have a "Berlin Wall Trail" for tourists with maps and information posts. May be I should walk it once. I am now a tourist in my own country. Who would have thought? May be I shouldn't be that saddened about the missing "Berlin Wall". In my new home country, the US, we will soon have a much longer 'Wall'. That will make up for it, for sure.
I plan to visit Synagogues in Berlin and the Holocaust Museum there. I feel it's inappropriate to remember victims of the holocaust with small cobblestone-sized brass placettes in the cement of Berlin's and other German street sidewalks. .
(Guenther Demnig is the artist and sculptor behind the stumbling stones. Here, he installs new bricks in Berlin. He says formal memorials are too abstract. Not so with the stumbling stones. "Suddenly they are there, right outside your front door, at your feet, in front of you," he says.
Esme Nicholson/NPR)
Yeah, right, there they are at your feet and you walk over them or even stumble or trample on them. I really feel uncomfortable with it. The project though seemed to have been highly appreciated. This article describes it in detail.
STUMBLING OVER THE PAST - In Berlin, victims of the Nazis are being remembered with brass plates, embedded in concrete in the streets where they lived.
I have mixed feelings about it. I don't want to step on what is a gravestone. If I visit my parent's grave I wouldn't walk over their gravestone either, so why is it supposedly a "great an idea" to step on the gravestones of holocaust victims? You tell me.
It's hard to believe that we have a German "politician" in the AfD (Alternative for Germany Party - right-wing demagogues), who called the Holocaust Museum in Berlin a shame.
Anti-Semitic and inhuman’: Outcry as AfD branch leader calls to forget Holocaust
Hoecke remarks came while addressing the “Young Alternative Dresden” group in Dresden on Tuesday. He urged to put an end to Germany’s culture of remembering Holocaust, calling for a significant change in the way the country sees its past, German media reported.
He described the well-known Holocaust Memorial in memory of to the murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin a “monument of the shame in the heart of the capital.”
He also compared the bombing of Dresden during the WWII to the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to loud applause from the cheering crowd. According to Hoecke, bombings of German cities should have “rooted out our [German] roots.”
Oh, well, Mr. Rumsfeld, that's our NEW Europe Germany now. Are you happy? I want my Old Europe back.
I learn about my country now through German televion's documentaries. I am quite pleased of how many there are, covering not only everything from the Weimar Republic onwards, but also lots of documentaries of the last four decades and former East Germany. No way I could have seen that in the US.
Now that you got a "New United States of America" with President Trump, are you missing "Good old America"? Or may be the Old America and the Old Europe were never 'Good Old ones'?
Friday, January 27th: I stumbled into this interview of Daniel Cohn-Bendit, published in the "The New European". I thought you might enjoy reading it.
Daniel Cohn-Bendit: Democracy is now paying the price for its most precious offering: Freedom..
Daniel Cohn-Bendit, former leader of the 1968 student protests, explains what it is that links those protests in 1968 to Brexit and Trump, explains where the EU has failed and how there is a simple way for the EU to succeed. Here is a paragraph that makes the link from the 1968 protests to the Brexit and Trump today:
MVR: Have we gone too far in claiming individual freedom, provoking a nostalgia for the forms of authority challenged in the 1960s? Does May 1968 bear some responsibility for the current return of nationalism, conservatism, religion and fear of the immigrant?
DCB: That’s a very funny question. It suggests that there are occult forces that continuously control evolutions or ruptures in societies. Those movements for the liberation of individuals took place throughout the world and were a response to the authoritarianism that existed in the 1950s. Communist authoritarianism gave rise to revolts in Poland and other countries. The authoritarianism of capitalism gave rise to the revolts that we saw in the West, from Paris to Berlin via the United States, all embracing opposition to the Vietnam War. From the moment these societies became emancipated, loads of theories and ideologies flourished and nobody was able to master them.To ask if it went too far is a false question: it went to where it went. Yes, experiments have gone too far and have run counter to the original intention, but when a dynamic is launched, no one controls it. The liberating dynamic of ‘68 followed its hopes and contradictions and ended up banging its head against walls. That is true. Today there is a real reverse, a conservative backward tumble in response to the 1960s. ...
MVR: Well, the tide is going down very far nowadays ... to the point that freedom often seems no longer a fundamental value but an accessory. The autocratic Putin arouses admiration, François Fillon (on the right) does not see Russia as a threat, Ségolène Royal (on the left) praises democracy in Cuba, Theresa May’s government suggested counting foreigners in companies ...
DCB: That is scary, yes. It was thought we had really arrived at something after the collapse of Nazi, fascist and communist totalitarianisms. Now, you can’t believe your ears and eyes: the very essence of liberty in a democracy is no longer a fundamental requirement. When democracies are weakened by economic conditions and international politics, people are turning to authoritarian solutions. In France, Putin has become a model for some; for others, Chavez and Castro are positive symbols of the struggle of the dictatorship against imperialism. In Britain, democracy is being severely challenged by nationalist forces and this so-called post-factual era. Democracy is a constant debate on the best solutions to organise political, economic, social and cultural life, and this debate only makes sense if those who confront each other for a democratic majority exchange arguments. But the arguments have disappeared. You are allowed to talk rubbish. Trump was elected on false arguments. The two great demands of Brexit – redirecting money from Europe to the NHS and closing the borders – were forgotten the next morning. That they were lies was not an issue. The moment societies organise themselves on words that no longer have any meaning, their democratic foundations are weakened. Democracy is paying the price of what it is and its most precious offering: Freedom.
The interview is long, but it answers some questions, I am sure you always had in your mind and were afraid to ask./s Here they are:
- MVR: How do you explain that it is Great Britain, the country of freedom and free trade par excellence, which gives the first signal of nationalist withdrawal?
- MVR: Who is a scapegoat? Europe or Germany?
- MVR: Then Germany would be a country without national pride? The only truly great European nation in Europe?
- MVR: Brexit is the absolute symbol of European failure. The regulatory madness of the single market has exasperated people, the welfare state has not been able to adapt ... What have we missed and why? Is it the fault of the Brits?
- MVR: Is Europe messed up?
- MVR: The problem is that Brexit will happen in the short term: we build slowly, we destroy quickly.
- MVR: In Britain as in France, it becomes more and more common to admire authoritarian figures and see dictators as heroes. Putin enjoys an extraordinary aura. Are we seeing the return of personality cults? Are comparisons with the 1930s really relevant?
- MVR: Bizarrely, this taste for authoritarianism goes with freedom to express yourself without any ethical limit on social networks, and, in this post-factual society, an acceptance of the most enormous lies from the new leaders.
- MVR: Obama worried that Trump, whose advisers cannot even control his compulsive tweets, would soon have control of the nuclear button...
- MVR: With Trump, an ally of Putin, we are facing, for the first time, the scenario that the greatest global power is not representative of Western values. What can Europe do about this?
- MVR: But Europe has not managed to convince. What can you still inspire dreams with?
- MVR: Europe, Europe ... De Gaulle would repeat his memorable phrase that you jump around like a kid goat! How do you make it a political reality? ... With British candidates?
I haven't read through all of them and posted the questions without the answers. So that you may become curious and actually read them. 
What's on your mind about old News and new News this weekend?. Any news are welcome, no matter what kind. Share your thoughts. May you all have a weekend with some love, joy and peace. And if some of it or all is missing, don't despair, there is always a new weekend coming up.
Reverse it.
Saturday, January 28:
Ok, one last comment, I lied to you. I started out during the week with my sisters song about "I can't stay quiet no more". I like it much and support its message. It's worth to repeat it here.
You should talk.
Please!
Comments
no kidding ... :-) /nt
85% of humans live under corrupt governments
link
yes, and there is the question why
sometimes rich countries in the developing country category are so corrupt.
Equatorial Guinea: Why Poverty Plagues a High-Income Nation
.
Raila: President Uhuru Kenyatta is the patron of corruption cartels
I guess these are no new news but same old, same old...
Hi Mimi
Thank you for suggest evening weekend open threads. Thank you for volunteering to take one on. I enjoy your posts. I think you have good things to say.
"Religion is what keeps the poor from murdering the rich."--Napoleon
Thanks for the thread - a lot of very interesting material
to go through later.
Am very pleased to see the interview with DCB
"The justness of individual land right is not justifiable to those to whom the land by right of first claim collectively belonged"
thx, you know that what DCB says is all
as new to me as it may be to you. I have missed all about the development of the "leftists" here and learn just very slowly. Too much "stuff" is getting in my way still. But I am getting there.
Red Danny:
"the authoritarianism that existed in the 1950's"
I think people are badly mistaken when they praise President Eisenhower as some sort of moderate. Ike loosed the Dulles brothers on the world and was OK with repression and black lists and McCarthyism at home. His Attorney General, Brownell, made it his personal and public crusade to destroy the National Lawyers Guild. Under Ike, loyalty oaths were the order of the day.
"The justness of individual land right is not justifiable to those to whom the land by right of first claim collectively belonged"
to be honest
Americans have never been dependent on other nations' people (not counting the nations of the native Americans in here) At least examples of when that might have been the case don't come to my mind. May be the only glimpses of how that dependence could feel are the latest economic dependencies in a global finance world and economy. But that's beyond my paygrade. May be the lack of the experience to be dependent and oppressed makes their political elite more vulnerable and prone to feel less empathy with those people who have.
On the other hand, I believe few people outside the US, can really understand the extent and depth with which Americans oppress and exploit groups of their own population.
With both sides not "grasping" the other side, it's hard to come to a fair conclusion.
Mr.Trump talked to Angela Merkel for 45 Minutes....
oh my ...
It's amusing how our nightly news in "Tagesthemem" hinted that though the call was a long and detailed one it didn't say anything about being a constructive one. Both released written statements in which they say that the NATO and the transatlantic relations are of fundamental importance. Trump put in his written statement the sentence that all NATO members must pay their appropriate share. They both left out describing the atmosphere of the call. Trump has accepted an invitation to the G20 summit in Hamburg. Our new Sec. of State, Gabriel, then talked "Tacheles" from Paris saying something about showing President Trump clearly... what our values are (referring to refugees intake etc).
Heh, may be I will be still here and try to shake hands with Mr. President and get his autograph? What do you think? I could color my hair a little orange for the sake of showing my true love for being a loyal allie.
Purple
color your hair purple! Always my advice. And I thoroughly enjoyed this thread. I lived in Belgium and Amsterdam for several years in the dim dark past, and was confronted with the deep scars,caused by destruction and oppression, which Americans never felt even though we suffered many personal losses from the war. Keep writing please.
The Clintons and Soros launch America's Purple Revolution
they have ruined the color purple for a long time, clever marketing for shame. Wear cyan instead, blue and green combined, no red. I'm not against red but it is kind of angry color it goes with R while blue goes with D. Purple is their third way yet again. Torches of Freedom. Nope! Not wearing it, if I do it's under cover until they are gone.
The last thing the world needs is another billionaire funded Clinton scheme, I think. The enemy of an enemy is still an enemy. Make friends with people of conscience, not Soros not Clintons not Trump.
Peace
Hi Mimi,
Hi Mimi,
You did a great job with this. The questions you shared are important and I will be thinking about them for a while.
I already love that song, too.
I think that people are not looking for authoritarian government so much as noticing how much freedom has been lost in the last few decades.
We have lost almost all privacy. This is not just a personal matter, employers demand to look a Facebook pages and they collect huge amounts of personal information about us. We do not even have a way to find out if the information they share with each other is true. They have no reason to be careful.
At most I can select half of the candidates I am allowed to vote for. Then the people elected can be legally bought off by the rich.
When I was younger I used to sign petitions if I agreed with them. Sometimes I sent letters or called my representatives. I almost always got a letter in response. In those days people like me still had some influence because there was a limit to how much money rich people could give to politicians. Now I feel that I do not matter at all to the [self-]Important People.
I am a US citizen and I have always lived here. This country is not the one I grew up in and it has not become the better place so many of us worked for and dreamed about. I cannot fully understand your disorientation on returning to Germany, but even here much of the country changed very quickly in 2008.
Before 2008 working people were not normally homeless and people who wanted a job could normally get one. People had hope and believed that things would get better if we worked hard. Most of us thought we, the People, were in charge of our democracy. Then the bankers who run things threw a lot of us out of our homes and gave themselves huge bonuses for doing it. They stopped paying us decent wages. We had no say.
The 1% and their media and their political correctness enforcers keep trying to make us blame each other. This has worked to some extent, but most people know that it was Wall Street and the bankers that stole our homes and decent jobs. Occupy helped people see this.
I hear you and pretty much know about it - thanks for your
long and kind comment. I just want to clarify that I didn't return to Germany as a response to the horrible primary process and the election of Donald Trump. My reasons were all private ones and though I have to say that I enjoy to use the German Health Care system for a while, I intend to not leave the US permanently. Actually I want to come back very soon. I hope Mr. President Trumpf will still let me in with my green card. I really have to ask Angela to be nice to Mr. President, so that he will not end up to put Germany among the disloyal and bad countries and refuses to let me back in.
Oh I think it will all work out nicely. Angela will be nice and Trump will feel great about himself. And as you know "when the going gets tough, the tough get going" ... to the United States.
Has been so since ever.
[video:https://youtu.be/lIxUKbV0UEM]
Heh, the US will go through this and "Democracy is coming (back)" one day.
[video:https://youtu.be/vHI9BTpGkp8]
For sure, don't give up on it.
I love a lot about the American people and learn from them daily. I love the country, but can't stand the szene (right now). Leonhard Cohen always says it right.
Any news? Fine then :)
I bring this here for no reason other than it's making me laugh. It's directly connected to politics but not in a normal way. So here's the story.
My wife is a figurative portrait artist just on the very early rungs of her art career. A few months ago my wife did a graphite portrait of a local guy's poodle. I admit, it was a nice rendering. Well, today she got an email she'd been CC'd on. It was between the original client and Justin Trudeau suggesting that my wife do a portrait of him.
OK, I admit I often laugh about which reality a certain "reality based community" is based in. But in this instance I'm wondering what the heck reality I'm based in. In what world does a no-name artist do a sketch of someone's poodle and then find herself in an email conversation with a sitting world leader? We are both just shaking our heads at the absurdity of it.
Neither of us is holding our breath that she is actually chosen to do the portrait but still... *shakes head*
For those who care, here's the poodle at the root of it all. Warning... link to my wife's website so I suppose also shameless promotion.
Linkage
I feel like Alice. Has anyone seen my looking glass?
A lot of wanderers in the U.S. political desert recognize that all the duopoly has to offer is a choice of mirages. Come, let us trudge towards empty expanse of sand #1, littered with the bleached bones of Deaniacs and Hope and Changers.
-- lotlizard
oh, your wife has lots of talent, I mean who could
look at this cute little poodle face and not think immediately of Justin Trudeau? Same melancholic eyes and all those curly hair and long nose.
Or may be Rand Paul?
or my all time favorite?
They are all cute poodles, but Trudeau is the best. So, good luck, and post your wife's drawing of Trudeau when it's done. I am sure she'll get the job.
Is Rand Paul wearing a hairpiece? /nt
Beware the bullshit factories.
ok, it's beyond my bedtime, I hope you use this OT
til tomorrow for any news that you come across and would like to share. Let me know if I expressed myself too offensive and I will be nicer next time around. It's 1:20 am here and I am too tired to stay awake. Hope to see something posted by tomorrow. Thanks for you kind cooperation.
Hey mimi
Loved your OT. I often think about stumbling over the past way out here in the boonies...homeland of the cherokee. There is an old pioneer cemetery on our place, and my elder neighbor says there's an ancient cherokee cemetery on the mountain. People have lived here for 1000's of years...like much of the world. We can't help but stumble over the past.
Thanks for sharing your German experience...sleep well!
“Until justice rolls down like water and righteousness like a mighty stream.”
With Joey and Georgie, California style
Thanks Mimi, living among thousands of immigrants in Cloverdale I cannot believe what is occurring in the news. Nothing has actually happened here as far as I know. The cops made a statement before, nothing since. My downstairs neighbors are from Laos and across the street from Mexico. Last year I helped my neighbor study for the citizenship test and she did pass it. Anyone seen those study materials? lol wow. Most people probably would fail if quizzed nowadays. Those are the days I long for, I don't know what schools teach anymore.
Diversity is why people come here I think, it makes so many "edges", so many ecotones. Without them we'd suck, maybe cannot function at all. If the bosses would JUST pay fairly and supply some housing it would be terrific, now it is terrible. Local employers and landlords keep the giant sucking sound alive, it is not the workers out there every day toiling in the fields, or serving up a latte, or making a bed, or whatever. It is the owners making life miserable, the politicians are complicit.
What would Francis Coppola do? I used to admire him until I moved here, they all have same insatiable greed and displaying obscene wealth is supposed to be an attraction. Now the millionaire owners are scaredy-pissed people could all join together to inflict change, but we are still too divided with corporate loyalties intact. Apple, Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Twitter, Exxon, Disney, etc.. Oligarchy cares not what is voted for as much as what is purchased, er I mean rented.
Thomas Dolby - Eastern Bloc
Jimmy Dore really speaks to the Irish in me, great grandpa emigrated from famine to paradise in California late 1800s. I go hungry when the budget demands food holidays, it makes me grouchy right to down to my bones. Ancestral legacy.
Peace & Love