Blame the foreigners / immigrants whatever, which is where we have been for the last few weeks in Germany. For the record the number of Muslims among the immigrant community (how you count that is controversial enough) is approximately 25% - which means that 75% of immigrants here are not Muslims! Some of us like myself are EU citizens (and as in my case committed atheists). My wife is a practising Buddhist, and works here for a living working long hours for not so substantial a reward (and she has a university degree to her name NB). Anyway as the German government's popularity rating falls by the day and they show little sign of knowing how to get everyone back to work earning decent money, we turn to the old distraction tactic of "don't blame us, it's someone else's fault".
Of all the countries in the world, this is the last place I would have expected it. In the UK and the US, it is always someone else's fault when things go wrong, Germans normally know how to own up.
There is a world economic crisis, there is a massive shortage of good jobs, thousands of talented people are expected to scrape by on next to nothing until things get better (the US congressional elections voting in a large number of Republicans will only make things worse - we need more controls, not less). Meanwhile Merkel, Seedorfer & Co raise this old "canard".
The following is an item that I wrote of MyLot.com. Not sure what the copyright situation is, but anyway, as I wrote it once, I should have some right to it.
0230 - have nightmare that last weekend Angela Merkel was telling German young conservatives that all foreigners who cannot speak German need to get out of the country 😡 (for this example, Britons and Americans are not for some reason "foreigners"!😕).
0300 - wake up and realise that it was not a nightmare and she did do that.
0302 - realise that my wife still has not mastered German to the extent required, and while she is working and they love the job she is doing and they have just extended her work contract, the police may be round shortly to put her on the next plane to Bangkok (at our expense).
0305 - ignore warning voice in my head that this was the usual typical "Turk-bashing" (or Muslim-bashing) by German conservatives, as ever, and that all other foreigners are excluded from this thinking. Bar all the doors and windows, tear the doorbell out so I cannot hear it ring.
0310 - switch on PC. Take 25 minutes for the anti-virus program to decide to switch on. Turn off warning messages that I have no anti-virus screen in place about 14 times. Go make coffee.
0335 - finally get on Internet. Check email. Throw out 34 more job rejections. Throw out 72 notifications from MyLot from American conservatives indicating that the unemployed are all lazy and of course they could get a job if they wanted.
0340 - read through today's 207 emails about what jobs are available, wonder why I bother, but note all the ones that are worth applying for for later in the day when it is a sensible time to send them off (like 0545).
0345 - read German news. Pick up items like discussions on immigration. Read items like the one thing they don't need here is IT specialists (really, you could have fooled me - look at my email queue, all the offers ....). Wonder why Gerhard Schröder a few years ago imported 20,000 IT specialists from India as there weren't enough IT specialists here, couldn't be 'cos they were cheap????
0350 - try to think of other ways of making a living - translation work (tried it, getting nowhere), writing (very slow progress - maybe in 15 years I might make a living from it), robbing banks (no gun), building my own nuke (no, that is last week's joke).
0400 - make more coffee, wonder how I am gonna be awake at 0740 to go and get the bus so I can be on my JOOMLA / XHTML / CSS course at 0800 and stay awake until 1300.
0415 - plan what item(s) I will be writing on Helium.com today.
0430 - replan my CV/resume/cover letters so that it sounds less brilliant and spectacular and successful and motivated. Let's face it the other approach isn't working. It makes me sound like I can do a good job.
0445 - finish planning, go off and play stupid contract bridge game or minesweeper on the new laptop (which we cannot connect to the internet yet - plan what time I need to talk to Deutsche Telekom about this) ....
All times CET
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