Maru's Mun Journal

In Stuttgart, which is a notoriously peaceful city of industry, engineering, productivity, technical innovation and annoying attention to details (suburbs are home to the headquarters of Mercedes Benz and Porsche, both), an unholy alliance of conservative politicians and a few big businesses (among them Bilfinger Berger, the large construction company implicated in the corruption scandal in Cologne where less materials were used in building a new subway tunnel than was billed, quality checks were falsified, and structures in the middle of the city collapsed in consequence, among them the historical archive, and two people died) is trying to put the train station underground and sell the swathe of inner-city land at a high price for business and residential development.

Usually something like that will be welcome to the Stuttgarters, whose motto notionally is 'Schaffe, schaffe, Häusle baue', that is 'Work, work, and build your own home' -- people dedicated to industriousness and the self-absorbed increase of their own wealth and security.

However, this projects has met with heavy doubts as a) an expertise conducted by a firm of civil engineers revealing that there are unexpected cavities and potentially unstable gypsum pockets in the city's underground has been summarily ignored by the conservative politicians and the corporations involved, shocking the over-careful, security-minded Suebian bourgeois population with unheard-of arrogance and dismissal of measurable facts, which simply is not done there, b) most of the current main station would be torn down -- and that is a momentous monument of very early modernist architecture, and c) 300 very old trees in the city park will have to be felled.

The volume of protests was remarkable. Anything from school children to old age pensioners turned up in droves every since the first parts of the historical buildings were demolished. At once point, there were 40,000 protesters at one single protest march -- remarkable in a city of 600,000!

German chancellor Angela Merkel, of the Christian Democrats (= conservatives) was quoted with the remarkable words that politicians can't ignore valid contracts, no matter how many people are standing around on the street at one point, but have to enforce decisions made. For great ironic context: Merkel is from the former East Germany and started out her career in the grassroots movement that toppled the East German regime and ultimately the iron curtain, ending the cold war that way, almost entirely through pressure from the street and mass protest of completely ordinary people.

Yesterday, the politicians in the pockets of Bilfinger Berger and the other companies involved sent out the riot police against completely non-violent protesters who were chaining themselves to the trees and trying to stop the destruction of their park. Without warning, they fired tear gas and water cannons at the protesters (the usual mix of school kids, concerned housewives, old age pensioners, students, and some opposition politicians, plus random freelancers like one writer of detective novels quoted in some news blogs, who can pick when they work and when they protest -- the rest of the people who'd come to a demonstration on a Saturday were of course busy with the 'schaffe, schaffe' part of the Suebian lifestyle), broke them up using mounted police, riot batons, armoured and/or sand-filled gloves, and possibly even rubber bullets.

This vid shows random eight minutes from the protests, with a policeman spontaneously spraying pepper spray on people doing exactly nothing at 4:10. Oh yes, and German police don't have to wear name tags, don't have to give their names when asked, and are allowed to cover their faces in any situation. Similarity to Star Wars' Imperial Stormtroopers has been remarked on several times around German language blogs.

Here, for example, is a number of pictures on one of the blogs that come up on my blogroll at Blogger.de, taken by the blogger himself.

Hundreds of protesters were injured, some of them badly; one person had at least one eye shot out by the water cannons.

Scenes ensued that remind you of a) the movie 'Avatar', b) police and army trying to squash the 1989 protests in East Germany which our present politicians laud for its great civil courage, and as the foundation of a renewed and reunified modern democratic Germany, and c) what happened in Iran in the summer of 2009.

For some reason, the horrifying scenes have not yet spread out into international media (even the English language version of Der Spiegel doesn't mention it with a single word as of now -- compare the Love Parade disaster going international within a day!), which is why I offer this write-up. It probably belongs on ontd_political, but I don't like dealing with large and busy comms.

There is one picture from the protests that is already becoming sort-of iconic after only one day. It shows an old man bleeding from his eyes because of the tear-gas, supported by a middle-ages man and a very young man. From their looks, they might be three generations of the same family.

I put it under a cut because nobody ought to have a picture like that sprung on them on their open flist. Nobody died (yet), but other than that, it shocks you in the way video footage from Iran did...

( Picture under cut for serious RL gore and shock value )

Remember, this happened yesterday, in a park, during a protest about a contested infrastructure project, and some old trees.

Something is very wrong here.-

We have a new president. Unfortunately, the government's candidate was elected. Fortunately, they only managed to do so at the third go.

It was the socialists that didn't get the heads out of their rear ends, in the end. That was the one thing why the opposition candidate was defeated.

Otherwise, it would have meant the end of our ridiculous government.

Damn.-

Inner!Urq thinks that another crusade to 'save' the Holy Land for Christianity would be a really, really bad idea...

The cats tried killing the Nazgul and me with cute again.

And in Cologne, they might be killing people with corruption, graft, neglect, and stealing of building materials...

This is the disgraceful political mess that Sirona gets pissed off at in her canon.

Not interesting to anybody else! Link is in German!

AIG -- Arrogance, Ignorance and Greed, by Show Of Hands

There were elections here today, and the conservatives were re-elected. But instead of the social democrats, they are going to be in a coalition with the cat discrimination party.

Who got 14% of votes.

14%?? Where the fuck did 14% of utter morons come from to vote for a party that stands for nothing but raging predatorial capitalism, a maximum of exploitation, and unchecked financial markets that started the fucking crisis in the first place?

Pissed-off Maru is pissed off.-

A brilliant article on 'How 9/11 Should Be Remembered' from a news source named UTNE I never heard of before -- why not?

Coming home from work just now (after a decompression stop at Massimo's, the little Italian café on the way to thee station), I saw a woman taking pictures of that incredibly badly photoshopped election poster I posted about.

I made a remark along the lines of my other post (including Vernon Dursley because, hey, Harry Potter is common knowledge and not arcane geekery!), and she said that yes, she could hardly believe it was genuine and not a joke.

But I think she meant the worshipful, almost loving, expression with which the local candidate is gazing at the minister, almost as if it was a slashy manip.

But of course it's not, because anybody doing slashy manips knows how to smooth over that harsh cut on the minister's sleeve.-

ETA: OMG that guy has his own Wikipedia page, and he's already a member of parliament. People here have voted for him!!! Well, the constituency isn't just Haidhausen; people here would rather vote for Father Christmas than for that guy, from that party. But the rest of the eastern outskirts of Munich? Gah!

I felt moved to protest the discrimination of my cats, using purple felt marker at the dead of night:



In the meanwhile, Vernon Dursley is running for parliament here in Munich, as I said:



Funnily enough, he seems to be using a different name.-

Note the incredibly bad photoshopping of that candidate together with his party's new great white hope, the relatively recently appointed minister of economy. I would bet that slick shark would never have the time of day of such a measly local candidate, he's faaaaaaar too important. (Eurgh!) Of course, they're both from that party which Has Always Been Elected In Bavaria, but they should look to Japan, tremble, and stop doing content-free electioneering, and incredibly bad DTP...