The Topic of Education for the New Immigrants

At some point this morning....the German Interior Minister....Thomas de Maizière....spoke to the refugee crisis and the education models that likely come in the near future to fit the new immigrants.  It probably won't make many Germans happy, but he is suggesting that some standards at schools or vocational training be lessened.

He tried to use the comment "improvised, with common sense" to fit the occasion better.

The overall strategy of the German government is to create a funnel where an approved immigrant will enter into language training (likely to take six months), then integration training (figure a minimum of one month), and then onto school or vocational training.  All of this....is to limit the time sitting there on welfare and doing nothing productive.

Negativity from opposition parties?  Well, yeah.  They kinda say that these quick-funnel ideas are inadequate, hurt Germany as a whole, and limit the new immigrant in the long-run.

How would one create a masterpiece of a funnel with massive education?  Maybe if that immigrant kid was six or seven....it'd all make sense.

But when you stand back and see different blocks (teenagers, mid-twenties adults, and guys over forty)....it would cost tens of billions per year to build some massive program that would fit and deliver the best opportunity to each of these people.   Then you have to measure up the national levels of other countries and admit that education for a fourteen-year-old against the German system....is seventy-percent of what you'd typically expect.  Country-group by country-group.....you'd have to have several thousand tutors around and assigned to various individuals to bring them through an entire year of school....in three months.

The Interior Minister is likely correct.....you have limits and you will have to just admit up front....getting this guy to speak 5th-grade German language skills might be totally acceptable as long as the work he is doing is strictly brick-mason type work.

If you had an unlimited pot of money....maybe you could do unlimited schooling.  I just don't see that type of money pot existing.

The Friday Vote

Tomorrow, four different bills will be introduced in the German Bundestag and put to a vote.  They all center around assisted suicide.  Oddly, the news media has barely covered the debate.  There's been one single focus hour on it this week....mostly to bring viewers up to the point and inform them of the discussion.  I think the political folks have taken this angle....to avoid public debate and just hope that no media campaign occurs.

No one will say much over the odds of the bills passing.  They may all be voted down....they may all be voted upon and passed.

What the general public will say is that there is a segment of society that would like to have the option of assisted suicide.  These are mostly people with health conditions that are terminal or putting the individual in a great deal of pain.

If you look around Europe.....Switzerland, Netherlands and Belgium currently have the most proactive assisted suicide laws on the books.  Some in Germany think that the nation will progress to the same level of Switzerland within the next decade.

Don't Connect Dots to One Particular Group

I noticed off RP-Online (a regional press service) a note or two on commentary by a Catholic Bishop at a conference on refugees with the deputy chancellor (Sigmar Gabriel).

The "crusaders" (my term for the highly enthusiastic group being pro-refugee)....often get in front of the cameras and say some stupid things (in the same course as the "anti-crusaders" who hate dislike the refugee strategy of the German government).

So, the Bishop from the Ruhr region.....Franz-Josef Overbeck....wanted to make an analogy or comparison.....then noted that concept of transit zones for refugees....looked an awful lot like concentration zones.

No one says much about the tone of discussion after that comment or if some quiet moment came to envelope the room....but anytime you just barely hint of Nazis or Hitler....Germans freak out a bit and get a bit disturbed.

Typically....there are three general German reactions that you might see.  First, there's the hyped up intellectural who will bend over backwards to show that he's or the group simply are the opposite of such an accusation.  Second, there's the group automatically note that it's over seventy years since the war and there's just no need to connect any German to this previous past.  Third, there's the smaller group who live in the Kadashian-era and they really don't remember much on Nazi-history or anything before 2005, so they are curious about this history-stuff.

If you wanted to terminate some discussion group or chat-forum....just trying make some Nazi comparison and watch the tone of the episode go dramatically in a negative way.

What happened in this case is that the Bishop got cornered shortly after making the comment.....probably during a break.....and someone spoke to him about this being a pretty stupid comment.   Reality set in and the Bishop woke up from his fantasy vision of refugees.....to agree....it's best not to make some Nazi comparison.

So, the Bishop made another public statement within hours....suggesting that he said some harsh things and meant them in another totally different way.

In some ways, the 'crusaders' are making the entire topic of refugees, asylum seekers and immigration into a five-star discussion.  The enthusiasm has no limits and they can't understand why anyone would have opposition or limits to this thrilling new multi-cultural environment coming soon to the local neighborhood, city and state.

The 'crusaders' will accept the idea that a very small minority might be against their wisdom or brilliant design....figuring that only a mere ten-percent of society ought to be against them.  When some flash of reality occurs and they suddenly start to realize that between a quarter to half the population have some kind of problem with the wisdom or brilliant design....well, that's a harsh blow to the mass movement they were pumping up.

Bottom line....if you are in some focus group or intellectual chat club....don't get all unhinged and try to connect the dots to Nazis.  It'll freak people out one way or another.

The Unregistered?

On Monday evening....I sat and watched a news conference with the German vice-chancellor....Sigmar Gabriel (SPD).  He's generally a guy who is competent and says whats on his mind without any fancy words.

He gets to this point....noting that roughly forty to fifty percent of all refugees in Germany today....are NOT registered. I sat there and pondered upon this.  It didn't make any sense.  He wouldn't say this....unless evidence demonstrated it.  The news folks at the time....just let it go and didn't say nothing much.

So Tuesday evening comes and there's some details.

The BAMF folks (who handle all immigrants) simply say that it's impossible to register everyone at the border.  You might have ten-thousand who show up in Bavaria today, and amid the chaos and developing situation....maybe half of them get registered and maybe half of them don't.  They all get tossed onto buses and sent to some camp where there is a bunk and a hot meal.  Fresh clothing will be provided, a shower, and a chance to rest.....before being shuttled onto the next camp.

Then the BAMF guy says this odd thing....those who don't want to be registered....won't be.

You can't really be in Germany unless you are a German (with papers), a EU-member (with papers), or a foreigner (with a visa).  So the BAMF guy admits that there is some fourth category which they've allowed to develop which is the undocumented guy who doesn't want documentation or the mere chance for documentation.  In essence, it's the US-system.....you just walk around and be illegally in the country and we pretend we won't notice you.

In the real Germany....you can't work or open a bank account or register a car....without some proof of residency.  In this 'fantasy-Germany'.....it's entertaining to imagine no papers and Germans just accepting this.

All of this lead to one summation comment by the BAMF guy at the end of this discussion....they need more administrative help.  Why they can't hire out-of-work single mothers or some folks on the unemployment list begs more questions, but I guess I'm being too logical about this.

I'm guessing that after the refugee guy has gotten to the semi-permanent camp....he kinda walks around to Host Huns, and in some question and answer situation....asks Huns about his status.  Huns asks the guy for his papers and then discovers that he's not registered.  So they visit Deter at the desk and five minutes later....the guy gets registered.  End of the problem.

Could some guy live in a refugee camp for months and months, without detection.....never registering.....just eating from the free chow each day and enjoying the comforts of Germany?  Well....yeah.  I doubt that you get the free pocket-money deal without registration, but if you were some mid-twenties guy with nothing much on your mind and just wanted to hide out for a year or two....it might make sense to just lay low and not worry about complications from such behavior.

Presently, if you asked the various centers for an accurate count of who is there and registered....I would imagine that they'd grin and just say that they aren't absolutely sure.  People come, and people go.

How a German perceives this?  I think most thought that the minute some refugee came into Germany....during that first day of handling....the individual got registered.  They are probably standing there like the vice-chancellor....muttering about how this could go on.....with possibly tens of thousands of refugees in Germany....not just for days but for possibly weeks....being here and unregistered.  In truth, there might be million refugees for 2015 already in the country.....there might even be 1.5 million in the country.....there could even be 2 million in the country.  If they aren't registered, they don't count.

All of this will sharpen public perception for the March elections in 2016.  What bureaucrats and Berlin political players can't fix.....the public will maneuver themselves into the middle of this mess and just start making suggestions and the news media will be pushed beyond the moderation point of control.  It promises to make the run-up to the three state elections a fairly heated event.

The Chase

Monday evening, I had gone into Wiesbaden and sat down in Karstadt (the upscale store in the middle of town), on Kirchgasse Strasse (street).  I had a coffee in the basement cafe....an outstanding place which I would recommend.

So forty minutes before closing, I wrapped up the coffee....took the escalator up and came to exit through the watch department and the perfume department.

There stood Huns (the security supervisor.....my name for the guy) and Franz (the junior security guy.....my name for him).  They were eyeballing this kid....maybe fourteen years old....southern European look....deep back in the women's perfume area.

Huns was chatting over the cellphone with some guy.....I would assume the video cam guy.  I was probably a meter away from the two and had kinda slowed down to view the scene.

The kid moved and now faced Huns and Franz.....realizing they had him in full view. It was like a bolt of lightning.  The kid took off.

As the kid hit the exit door, he had maybe four seconds ahead of Huns and Franz.  Huns was probably late 30's and looked like a good runner.  Franz, the younger guy, looked lean and probably had a fair amount of speed on his side.  I followed, with an absence of speed.

I exited the door and could see as darkness was around the street.....streetlights showing the chase in progress.  The kid had already crossed the street and probably had forty meters of space between him and the two chasing him.

I sat down on a bench by the shopping zone and figured in roughly ten minutes that Huns and Franz would return.....strong-arming the kid and dragging him back.  Fifteen minutes go by and the the security guys return....without the kid.  He apparently out-ran both guys.

My humble guess is that the kid had at least one 40-Euro perfume box on him.....maybe even two or three.  You will see street vendors around Wiesbaden on occasion, with more expensive perfumes for sale....discounted off thirty-percent from what you'd pay in the store.  Generally, when you see that....it's stolen goods being marketed by some middle-guy who probably paid a quarter of what the perfume is worth to the kid who scored on the item.

You can go back twenty years ago and almost never saw any security around German department stores.  Today?  I can walk through the shopping district and weave through various stores to note at least a dozen-odd security guys.  Even city cops now are more apparent in the shopping district than years ago. All of this relates to the perception by the public and the stores themselves....of an increasing problem.

The Index Story

A number of months ago in Germany....the political folks (both CDU/CSU and SPD) got all hot and hyper over rising rent costs in the country..  So they invented a "brake" which was to stop escalation of rent prices.

From a persona prospective....if you looked at the broad picture....there were significant numbers of apartment houses in major urban areas of Germany which had been put up in the 1960s or 1970s....never renovated or updated....and syndicates or companies swept in to buy the buildings....putting down capital to fix and renovate the structures, and after years of reconstruction....yep, big shocker....rent was going up by double and triple what it was before.

The folks who kinda complained a decade ago about this building being out of date but seemingly happy to pay 650 Euro for a two-bedroom place....got real enthusiastic to see new bathrooms and updated doors put in.....with landscaping updates.  But when the note came of a six-month warning.....rent going up to 1700 Euro in some cases....they were forced into moving and discovering that there just aren't that many 500-to-700 Euro apartments out there.

This brake deal was the temporary fix to all of this.

So, I noticed that the ARD folks commented on the applied nature of the law..  They say....roughly 259 cities in Germany fit the profile and could use the brake to slow down rental prices.  But presently, a quarter of them are NOT applying the new law.

Reason?  Well, you need rent data and a rent index to base the new controls upon.

What they generally say is that you need to take information.....hire out some expert, and he invents a mythical formula to cover the situation, thus giving you an index number for the city to control rent.

The cost of this expert?  The journalists claim ten thousand Euro for a small city, and into six figures for big cities.   Oddly, by the way they wrote the law.....the data isn't really a recent collection but can go up to four years in age.

This is kinda like the heat-index law thrown onto renters....where you can only get a heat-index form from some certified heat specialist, and for a house...it could go up into the 500-to-700 Euro range to get one simple certificate to provide for a rental situation or sales situation.

Will the index dilemma dump a political mess onto local mayors?  I'm guessing eventually newspapers will release the cities with the names and try to shame the city councils into going ahead and spending money to get this index.

Political Chatter

Baden-Wurttemberg is one of the three states in March of 2016 holding a state election.  Prior to this immigration crisis going on....no one much would have cared about the election.  Now?  Folks are paying attention and there's more rhetoric going on than one would expect.

The prime candidate for the CDU?  Guido Wolff.

If you were to write totally opposite character to Chancellor Merkel on immigration....I think this guy would be it.

Yesterday, Guido Wolff came out to say part of his platform for the election is a burqa ban.  He didn't indicate the wording but I would suspect the French wording and effect would be the target choice.

It's hard to say how this would be taken by the general public.  My humble guess is that roughly sixty-percent of Germany would readily support some ban on the burqa or niqab....leaving the facial open style (hijab) acceptable.  At least twenty percent would strongly go against the ban and it'd be dragged up to the German Constitutional Court in short order. The Basic Law has elements to protect religious persuasion....but it's very simply worded and garments of the faith isn't listed.  The fact that well over half of all Muslims would declare that the niqab or burqa is NOT within the religion....would likely leave the judges in a mess.

Guido Wolff also noted that there has to be a limit to immigration, with real numbers....something that the Berlin crowd probably doesn't want to hear.

Guido Wolff spoke to the issue of Muslim men who require their wives to wear a burqa....are not really integrating into German society.  Pressure penalties should be utilized as he suggests.....to bring change....possibly even imprisonment if the guy can't cooperate.

Naturally, in this interview with Bild....Wolf noted that he is for 'transit-zones'....which got brought up over the weekend in meetings between the CDU, the CSU and SPD.

To explain the transit-zone concept.....it's basically an entry point (you'd only have a limited number of such points) and you as a refugee would come to that point and enter some 'gate'.  There would be an administrative guy standing there and enter your case into the database.  There would be a determination about your visa.  No one says days, weeks, or months.....but you get the impression that this might be completed in a matter of week or two....maybe a month max.

Then, if you fail.....you get sent back across the border from where you came from.  Now.....a logical guy would immediately say....well, what if Austria doesn't want the refugee?  By letting the refugee pass through Austria's landscape.....they would have set up problem number one for themselves and be stuck with the clean-up mess.

Naturally, Austria would immediately want to have their own transit-zone, and repeat the same process.  Hungry, Czech, etc......would all repeat the process.  And in some white-paper world where reality and fantasy hardly ever meet.....this would all result in halting the immigration wave going through Germany today.

Generally, I'd say that such a transit zone....ought to be a complete failure.  You'd have to set up huge camp-like operations along the German-Austrian border....probably capable of handling 100,000 people minimum.  You would have tens of thousands of asylum-seekers who simply enter through another path and try to avoid the German zone concept.

Some people would say that it goes beyond the EU regulations and is simply not acceptable (the SPD for example, says this).  The weekend meeting between the three key German parties ended with such a discussion and it's apparent that the SPD will never agree to the zone idea.

Where does this put Wolfe in terms of votes in March?  This is an interesting discussion, which I will try to limit.  For March of 2011....the Baden-Wurttemberg election was strictly about Stuttgart-21 (a major rail project in Stuttgart which the Greens and SPD found something to engage the public upon and suggest that opposition leadership could help stop the project).

Roughly sixty-two percent of the voting public showed up, and the Greens and SPD Party had a major win.  The Greens picked up almost a quarter of all votes cast....shocking most everyone.

Oddly, other than a couple of pieces of Stuttgart-21 modified or changed....it continue right on track.  No one says much over this....except they grin when they tell this whole election gimmick and how the Greens came to power in the state.

For 2016?  I think the CDU woke up in the state and decided to use the immigration gimmick for their campaign, and putting the Greens and SPD Party apparatus in the state in conflict with the general public.  If you bring up transit zones, limiting immigration numbers, and burqa bans.....it's something that the Greens and SPD Party absolutely can't support because of their current platforms.

We are still more than a hundred days away from the election, and plenty of things might occur.  My best guess is that the CDU will draw a fair amount of interest, and might go higher than 40-percent in the state election.  As for influencing Merkel's policy?  The attempt by one single state (of the sixteen) to bring up banning the burqa would influence other states to discuss the same ban, and it'd be dragged into Berlin for some long-winded discussion....accomplishing little to nothing in the end. It'll end up being a state issue....not a federal issue.

Interesting election?  Yes, it might actually be an enticing chat forum for weeks and weeks.

The First Aid Kit

Last Friday, I had the car maintained....the winter tires put on, and a oil change.  Somewhere in the middle of checking out the car....the German mechanic came to note that I had an obsolete first aid kit.

By German law, you have to have a first aid kit in the car, and it's written in a very particular way as to what will be in the kit.  The TUV inspections will go through the kit and you could actually fail a car inspection if you don't have a first aid kit.  So, for roughly 4.90 Euro.....I got the replacement kit.

Now, I must be honest and note over the past twenty-odd years of having a German vehicle....I've never looked at the contents of this stupid first aid kit.  In fact, with the old Mercedes that I had....I didn't even know where the kit was 'hidden'.

So, for the first time ever....I opened up this first aid kit and looked it over.  There is just enough gaze and bandages to handle a two-star emergency at best.  I thought....well....if I did cut my finger while filling up the gas tank or scratched up an arm while doing something in the trunk....there might be enough there to handle the job.  Beyond that....it's worthless.

Now, I realize that Germans are always right, and there is probably some logic to this....going back to the 1950s, and the general idea of two kinds of accidents....one with minor issues, and one with serious wounds.  Maybe the idea is that you need to call for an ambulance with the serious wound deal and with minor issues....just have somebody at the site toss a bandage on you.  I don't' question Germans, but it just stands out to some degree.

As for the value of what they sold me being 4.90 Euro?  It's stuff made in China, and it couldn't have cost more than 1.50 Euro to make..  The garage probably made two Euro off the stupid box....which is the silliest part of the whole deal.

I'm giving you my best advice from a non-German prospective.  Take the TUV requirement serious and replace the obsolete stuff.  Don't ask stupid questions because it just doesn't matter.  And if you got some minor injury while driving around....rest assured, there's enough in there (minus the Bactine) to do the job.  Beyond that?  You'd best call for an ambulance real quick.