A German store for outdoor supplies sells cheeseburgers in cans. Isn't that an abomination of food and a crime against US culture? (Even worse than drinking French red wine out of a plastic cup.) Or is it a sign of how much Germans love US food: They event want to eat it on hiking trips? It's certainly not environmentally friendly due to the waste of energy for producing the can and the potential trash in nature. One guy at Reddit calls it a sign of the "downfall of humanity."

The stereotype of the fat Americans with their daily diet of fast food is pretty popular in Germany, but more and more Germans are obese themselves. According to a new study, "two thirds of German men and 51 percent of the women carry something called excess fat around with them all the time. This is up from 39 percent of the men and 47 percent of the women determined in a study done 20 years ago," writes Observing Hermann.

Related post in the Atlantic Review from last year: Germans are as fat as Americans and Up-Scaling Junk Food in Europe.

Left-wing and right-wing Americans reduce Europe to Amsterdam, Brussels and the Hague and misunderstand Europe, writes Patrick J. Deneen, associate professor of government at Georgetown University:

In America, it is our liberals who praise the liberties of Europe while overlooking the conservative impulse of its self-restraint. Meanwhile, our conservatives condemn the statism of Europe without understanding that efforts to conserve - to be conservative - require the active support and laws of government in order to combat the tendencies of markets to produce waste and undermine thrift. Americans of both the left and right have lost the ability to perceive a form of liberty that is achieved through restraint.

America's culture warriors ignore the small towns and villages, which Prof. Deneen visited in southern Germany, central Switzerland and western Austria:

The Europeans I have seen are light years ahead of us in energy conservation and will weather the storm of rising energy costs better than we in America. Indeed, the combination of local economies, nearby productive farmland outside every town, viable public transportation and widespread use of alternative energies points to a culture that has never abandoned sustainable communities in the way that America willfully and woefully has done over the past 50 years.

You can also get some sense of why there is resentment toward America even here in a nation that generally has positive regard toward the U.S. Europeans pay higher prices for everything in an effort to use less and to create less waste in order to leave a sustainable world for their children, and whatever "give" there is in the worldwide production of resources is a kind of unintended sacrificial gift that many Europeans are making so that America can continue its energy gluttony.

The excellent German blog  Antibuerokratieteam asks: Who does not know that the moon rotates around the Earth? The stereotypically stupid and obese Americans or the graduates of a highschool in a tough district of Berlin or the French?
Answer is to be found in the first video here. It gets funnier when the quiz show moderator asks the studio audience. The second video is not for softies.

Stupidity is universal. Fascination with conspiracy theories is as well.

Black Germans? Non-Germans may be understandably surprised to learn that there are Afro-Germans (Afrodeutsche), but many Germans themselves are unaware of the concept of a German who is also black (ein Schwarzer). While compared to other minorities, such as the 2 million Turks living in Germany, blacks are definitely a tiny minority among Germany's 82 million people. While EU countries do not keep track of ethnicity, there are an estimated 300,000 to 500,000 Blacks living in Germany today.
The history of black people in Germany goes back much further than most people think. One of the first Africans known to have lived in Germany was Anton Wilhelm Amo (1703-1759). Born in what is today's Ghana, Amo came under the protection of the Duke (Herzog) of Wolfenbüttel in Lower Saxony (Niedersachsen) and grew up in the duke's castle. He was both the first African known to attend a German university (Halle) and the first to obtain a doctorate degree (in 1729). As a professor, under his preferred name of Antonius Guilelmus Amo Afer, he taught at two German universities and published several scholarly works, including a Latin treatise entitled De Arte Sobrie et Accurate Philosophandi (1736, "On the Art of Philosophizing Soberly and Accurately"). Knowing the level of his achievements, it is all the more surprising to learn that Amo returned to Africa in 1747. Most accounts claim the reason for his return to his native Africa was the racial discrimination he encountered in Germany.

The Pentagon is, of course, making some decisions on Iraq. The Pentagon is trying to convince Germany to send more troops to the war in Iraq. Yeah. This marks the first time anyone has asked the Germans to send more troops.