[PEN-L:3874] Braindead In Britannia

[Dennis R Redmond <dredmond@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

So there I was, contemplating the savagely-deindustrialized wasteland of
the Pax Post-Britannia, when a line in the Economist's February country
survey of Germany caught my eye. Amidst the usual loathesome bleatings
about how the second-richest industrial country in the world (behind
Japan) just can't afford its poor people anymore, the article said: "It
all [the pension funds scare, the European equivalent of our own
Rightwing's assault on Social Security] sounds pretty disastrous... And
yet, and yet. This is Germany, and Germany is rich." (pg 9, Germany
survey)

Ye Gods -- could the Economist be finally *growing a brain*? But I scanned
further, and the breathless promise of cool britannia, where everything is
lower-case but not lower-class, evaporated faster than the words on
Blair's Teleprompter:

"And even Bavaria, which sees itself as the land of laptops and
Lederhosen, has yet to produce a Bill Gates." (pg 11, Germany survey)

That's because Dr. Klaus Tschira, doyen of SAP, the Godzilla of ERP
software, is in Walldorf, not Munich. Nah, it's the same old bunch of
idiots running Ukania into the ground as ever. Let's just hope Ireland,
Wales and Scotland secede completely before the wreckage really starts to
burn.

-- Dennis