So now we have our own fake Republicans on this side of the salt-watery divide. A few hours ago there was a big^ protest gathering, a proper "Volksfest" (the ZEIT reports on-line), by those so very "worried" Mad Hatters of the Pegida: A hardcore subset of the mainly East-German crowd in our republic, that contains quite a few ultra-right Neo-Nazi types as well as the now radicalised remainder of the once mainly anti-€ political party AFD, which has swapped in big chunks of anti-migrationism into its ever-populist agenda.

At least as many "#nopegida" people marched against that crowd in historic Dresden, though. And the famous Semper opera house paid for a huge LED poster in front of its main entrance, showing the picture of the German majority, "colourful" Germany, many of them welcoming refugees, putting their hearts before any possible hate. Interspersed with texts like "we are the wrong background for racism".

Free speech is a burden as well as a boon. I learnt that again, today.

It means I get to occasionally pick up rhetorically banal crap like, "if you don't love Germany, leave it"; implying that only these dull-brained dealers in fear - probably mainly their own, coupled with insecurities of all sorts - really love their country. They're playing on leftist folk in Germany having a tradition of denying national pride of any kind, which they have been doing ever since the Nazis so badly abused that concept just seven decades ago.

Well, I'm proud to be German - if you'll please excuse these "partying" retro idiots. Who are a small minority. Who abuse the right to free speech, e.g. by calling Moslem women "baby throwing machines"* - a hateful label that I think is too denigratory to be legal.

Utterances of the kind that probably led to the knifing of the front runner of the Cologne mayoral election day before yesterday. Well, she's still alive! And she won!

I've decided to, in my life, put away these texts and posts and tweets by this ugly German version of the Tea Party. Because they are in fact a minority who have gotten far too much traction in sensationalist (print) press (on its last legs?) and the o so social Social media.

I put them out of my mind and look at what I can do, here in the Kreuzberg quarter of the capital, to make refugees welcome. Offer some clothes, games, sanitary accessories, whatever. Donate a hundred Euro or so. Go out to actually meet some of them.

I'd far rather be doing that than watch/read some Germans-by-name-only gush on about their fears, and people from other countries as if they had the slightest idea what motivates these people to go on such terrible, arduous journeys...

These "partyers" are a minority, constantly complaining about their lot in one of the richest countries in the world, where everyone has medical aid coverage, and a living minimum provided by the state. That same state I, ever of average income, have constantly paid taxes for, for the last three decades, never taking a cent's support at any time in return. In contrast to most of them.

Begone! And stay out of my sight (in the Twitterverse, on TV, in parliament). I have better things to do. And more worthwhile people to meet.

Goodbye, Dresden. Hello, world!

Synchronous with Germany's current national effort at decency - "for once", our chancellor must have thought, after so much bad press about G€rman motivations during recent calamities - there was a guy recently on US radio, NPR, who said it was time for modern man to refocus on decency.

Decency seems to me to be one of those highly malleable unscientific concepts, like trust. Or sanity. Or even intelligence.

Probably decency is a subset of sanity. I have always found the latter concept disturbing. Who decides what is sane? Isn't that always just a function of what the majority of surrounding society deems normal? E.g. it doesn't seem sane to drive heavy metal cars faster than 5 km/h, since the metal, plus the incredible momentum built up by faster-moving one-ton-or-more wheeled apparati, causes most of the traffic deaths in a given society. (To the order of several "9/11"s every year in most developed countries!) But it is seen to be - even by me, I admit, partly.

Decency seems to me a little more definable, and it even sounds more like its true core, normalcy. Even by its name, it indicates a subjective standard which may soon change.

I suppose, in Germany, decency is what Prussians meant about 150 years ago with the concept of the Prussian "Ehrenmann" - the good German, who is guided by her/his own conscience. This of course didn't stop the last Prussian emperor from helping to start the 1st World War, and laying the ground work for the anti-semitism that followed (and was then "blown up" into the Holocaust a quarter of a century later).

Today, a German's decency to my mind ought to be decidedly humanitarian & plutocratic. Let people be! Suppress egoism in daily and more general spheres.

Our asylum laws (German: "Asylrecht") are a countermeasure remnant of the crazed bloodlust our governing/tyrannical representatives displayed just 7 decades ago. They allow people who are fleeing from desparate situations to find a place to stay, and live. Here in the erstwhile land of thinkers and poets. Before Nazi boots stamped that reputation into the dark dirt of Northern Europe & later the world.

Let's see how long we manage to announce - and physically support - this current form of decency. Here.

P.S.: There's a very decent proposal made by a SPIEGEL op. ed. about 3 weeks ago. Here's hoping you have the vocabulary, the time and the extra cash to have a look at it! :-)

A lot of commentators - and, of the politicians, at least our finance minister, Mr. Schäuble - are treating the Greek national finance crisis like a sort of Titanic-after-the-iceberg. They all "know" it's sinking, but at least want to have all the deckchairs in a line, looking proper. Worse: They constantly cluck & fuss about the silly or "blind" current Greek government...

While they are apparently blind to the "elephants in the room"!

I'm an economic layman, but even I remember that off and on, major blame for Greece's badly worsened & constantly worsening state has been put on these figurative pachyderms. That is hardly mentioned now.

Let's do the quiz: Is it the politicians - Tsipras / Merkel / Juncker? Not recently. Is it the greedy Greek state officials & their pensions? No. Could it be the banks? YES!

Not solely (before, during & after 2008) but also the Greek banks*.

Before 2008 they, like many others in Europe (instrumentally e.g. Deutsche Bank, as one of the major architects of the crash & thus the crisis) played the derivative speculation game on the world's stock exchanges. Credit default swaps & suchlike.

Just after the 2008 crash, the big banks had to be rescued by their corresponding state, which put up emergency capital to prevent them from defaulting: 'After the [Lehman] collapse [..] most countries - incl. Greece - made exhaustive guarantees for their banks. In addition many countries shored up their badly shaken financial institutions with new [..] capital & provided billions [of EUR] for gigantic market reflation packages [..].'

This i.a. means that most of the emergency bale-out loans already provided by the EU did not reach the Greek populace - even those bad, bad state officials - but got sunk into the country's banks.

In the meantime, most recently just 48 hours ago, Greek banks have received additional "emergency aid" from the ECB to prevent breaks in cash flow to increasingly nervous depositors, beginning a slow but increasing bank run at time of writing. If I remember reading somewhere correctly, this alone comes to about 80 billion EUR in total since 2008. And is not reckoned into the national Greek debt, of course!

And, finally, this layman's guess how the Greek banks will do after a "Grexit": All positive EUR bank balances - like people's savings in bank accounts - will be devalued along with the soon following devaluation of the drachma, which would then replace EUR as national currency. But: Most negative bank balances - plus the mounting debts the banks owe to creditors outside of Greece - would "grow" as fast as the drachma is devalued.

Not only would Greece after a "Grexit" then have a multiplied debt toward the EU & IWF immediately after ousting the EUR. But its banks would be even more likely to default, in that event bringing even most of the daily exchange of monies within the economy to a massive standstill. (What follows after that - bartering?)

This 7-year-old crisis was and is one of bad banks! Thus it doth seem to dumb old me...

P.S.: So, are the politicians - like the Greek government of recent years, like Merkel & her diverse finance ministers - to blame at all? I quote experts: 'Above all the governments of the greater countries are co-responsible for the financial crisis. They believed economists preaching the efficiency of financial markets, & were wooed successfully by the mighty & well-endowed banking lobby. So [..] they continually deregulated financial markets and bank trading, and thus made the crisis possible [..].'