From an US-exports (or non-American) viewpoint there is one more “thing” you make: Intellectual property/media – music, movies, tv-series, video games, multi-media franchises (Disney, DC & Marvel, and so on). Dwarfs practically every export to Europe except maybe aerospace products and cars. Having the global lingua franca as your mother tongue is an extremely valuable [...]

“Let the banks eat the Greek default.” I share that sentiment, but most of Greeks debt here in Germany is owned, some way or another, by the taxpayer not private banks (~20 billion owned by the federal and state governments vs ~6 billion owned by private banks). And most of Greeks sovereign debt globally is [...]

” and I intend to (ab)use the term socialist to get their attention. ” Don’t try to out-crazy the crazy or ignorant, it will not work. Facts are facts, and words have meanings. The correct word for “social democracy” is “social democracy,” not “socialism.” To say that most of the countries on that list are [...]

Defaults are considered something bad because after that you have a hard time borrowing. Because nobody trust you to pay it back. If on the other hand you pay back the debt by simply switching on the printing press, your lenders get paid back. With nicely colored paper witch is now very little worth, because [...]

Specifically, former Chief Justice Warren Burger and DC Circuit Judge Malcolm Wilkey have both stated the same thing.

What?

One proof of the irrationality of the exclusionary rule is that no other civilized nation in the world has adopted it.

and

police do no get warrants for search of homes or wiretaps-they just do it

are obviously not [...]

Regarding Germany, I worked with their narcs and they did not get warrants for diddley

That would be highly illegal. See the German Constitution Article 13 (2) and the Code of Criminal Procedure Section 105 (1). Oh, and the distinction “inquisitorial system vs adversarial system” is way more narrowly defined (by the inquisitive role of the [...]

Just this year Germany, for the first time in its history, has Greens controlling two of its states after its April elections

Only one state (Baden-Württemberg) if by “controlling” you mean that the Prime-Minister (think Governor) is a member of the Green party. But anyhow: if you want a multi party system you’ll need some kind [...]

What you call the “coordinator class” is called “intelligentsia” in orthodox Marxism. In most Bolshevik systems the intelligentsia was actually quite disdained. Just think of Lenins remarks about them, and their fate in the Maoist East Asian regimes. Heck, the Khmer Rouge killed people for wearing spectacles… A somewhat different example was the East German [...]

No, there is no “free treatment clause” in the Hippocratic oath. And I can hardly imagine that American doctors would have to take it, because the oath is very unsuited to modern medicine. Especially the general ban on surgery and the master-apprentice “secret art” training system which is totally incompatible with modern university study and [...]

It is actually expected that the EU Council of Ministers will evoke directive 2001/55 for refugees from Libya at their meeting in April, 11. This would give refugees from Libya one year visas. The interesting part of the April, 11 meeting will be the question of quotas. That has less to do with outright racism, [...]

Infratest dimap, the polling/forecast institute associated with the public network ARD, publishes state polls (called LänderTREND) once a month here. Forschungsgruppe Wahlen, the polling/forecast institute associated with the public network ZDF, has interesting weekly reports called Politbarometer. here on their page and here on the ZDF page . For example a 20 year graph of the Sunday Question: PDF file [...]

To make thins complicated even further: the parties aren’t monoliths. One party can differ wildly from one state to the other. For example the Hamburg CDU/Green coalition you mentioned, many (especially CDU supporters) thought this would be a trend. But it really only worked because the Hamburg CDU was socially so liberal (von Beust was [...]

Some remarks: 1) For people associated with the classical labor movement the German Greens aren’t an unalloyed blessing. They aren’t part of that movement, their main clientèle are relatively affluent white-collar employees or self employed, in class terms the “small bourgeois”. And their economic policies reflect that. Even the “triangulated Third Way SPD” is slightly [...]

Who said anything about “unhealthy”? You said: The thing is that canned vegetables have one *additional* heating process that fresh or frozen vegetables don’t have. How much difference that makes depends on the care the producer gave this step. But the difference is never less than zero, i.e. the nutritional value/”freshness” will never *increase* because [...]

Canning (as a preservation method as opposed to “putting stuff in a can”), unlike freezing, includes either pasteurization or sterilization. Otherwise the food wouldn’t be preserved, it would simply spoil inside a can. And the most common mechanism for pasteurization or sterilization, heat, tends to destroy nutritional value. Using exactly the right temperature and duration [...]

Thor rods sound deceptively easy: “just take a chunk of tungsten, slap on a sensor and a guiding system, and drop it from space: viola, instant pinpoint destruction” But if you look at it more closely, it becomes (luckily) really difficult to hit anything smaller than a “metropolitan area” with these things: “reentry” means “plasma sheath,” [...]