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.

James Rosen starts his FOX News article with: "A recent decision by German officials to withhold support for any new sanctions against Iran has pushed a broad spectrum of officials in Washington to develop potential scenarios for a military attack on the Islamic regime, FOX News confirmed Tuesday."

Rosen claims to have obtained some highly sensitive information from a meeting in Berlin of German officials with the Iran desk officers from the five member states of the Security Council:

The Germans voiced concern about the damaging effects any further sanctions on Iran would have on the German economy and also, according to diplomats from other countries, gave the distinct impression that they would privately welcome, while publicly protesting, an American bombing campaign against Iran's nuclear facilities.

The hour-long drama, "Zero Degree Turn," centers on a love story between an Iranian-Palestinian Muslim man and a French Jewish woman. Over the course of the 22 episodes, the hero saves his love from Nazi detention camps, and Iranian diplomats in France forge passports for the woman and her family to sneak on to airplanes carrying Iranian Jews to their homeland. (...)
Iran is home to some 25,000 Jews, the largest population in the Middle East outside of Israel. Iran's Jews -- along with Christians and Zorastrians -- are guaranteed equal rights in the country's constitution. Iran's Jews are guaranteed one member of parliament and are free to study Hebrew in school, pray in synagogues and shop at kosher supermarkets. Despite Mr. Ahmadinejad's statements, it isn't government policy to question the Holocaust, and the country's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, hasn't endorsed those views.

North Korea agreed to relinquish its nuclear programs. One has to be cautious with all North Korean announcements, but this deal seems to be more promising than any agreement reached in the past.

The Washington Post reports that Pyongyang has invited nuclear experts from the United States, China and Russia into North Korea to survey and recommend ways of disabling all of its atomic facilities by the end of the year. Assistant Secretary of State Christopher Hill, who has led the negotiations for many years, called the overture "another significant step toward the de-nuclearization" of the Korean peninsula. He said it was the first time a team of international nuclear experts had been invited into the country and pointed out that there are many different ways to disable a nuclear facility so that it would be extremely difficult to bring it back on line: "You can drill a hole in the side of a reactor. You can fill it with cement," he said. "You can do various things, but it helps if you have a site survey and have a look at the reactor first."

The German press is not celebrating the agreement, but the US press is not doing that either, I believe. Good news don't sell very well. Besides, it's good to be skeptical about North Korean promises. It might be too early for celebrations. I just think that President Bush and his administration deserve some praise for their work on North Korea, which was (is) a danger for the entire world. International politics is about much more than just Iraq and Guantanamo.

If things in Iraq are beginning to move in the right direction, and if General Petraeus’ update report in September is positive as well, European governments could have more domestic political leeway to provide additional political, economic, and police/military training support for Iraq’s stabilization and reconstruction. For far too long, European public opinion has viewed the Iraq war as a lost-cause--a quagmire caused by an unwarranted unilateral U.S. military invasion--that is now essentially Bush’s problem to solve. In the coming months we will see whether improving conditions on the ground in Iraq can also improve public perceptions outside of Iraq, not only in Europe but also in the United States.

Despite his affinity for German culture, Janssen has hardly been welcomed with open arms. "I don't like having to play diplomat here," he complains. Many of the roughly 3,200 US students enrolled in foreign study programs in Germany share Janssen's experience. They are reluctant ambassadors, routinely taken to task by students and even complete strangers for the perceived offences of their government at home -- an affront that visiting students and academics from China, Russia and Arab countries rarely encounter.

While the British public reacted to the latest terrorist strike there with stoicism and a practiced determination to get on with their lives, Germany has erupted in a rancorous dispute over how to deal with a terrorist threat that has yet to materialize here.

It's not for the first time, that I got the impression that Mr. Landler is exaggerating things and is actually drawing a picture of Germany which strucks me as... inaccurate.

In the United States -- once the home of aggressive investigative reporting -- troubling signs have emerged at some of the nation's top newspapers. The Los Angeles Times has been ruthlessly re-organized, and the Boston Globe has closed all of its overseas bureaus. At a time when the U.S. is fighting two wars. Habermas, whose 1962 Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere is considered a classic of modern sociology, warns of a similar process on the horizon in Germany. News and information, he warns, cannot be treated as consumer products. I note that Habermas does not mention blogs or other online information sources even once during the entire piece. Yes, blogs are still in their infancy and, and their influence is often exaggerated by fans. Still, Habermas' lack of curiosity about this looming transformation is disappointing. That caveat aside, Habermas, as usual, makes interesintg points.

It is too easy—and too partisan—to simply place the blame on the policies of President George W. Bush. We are all responsible for the decisions our country makes. We have a Congress. We have an independent judiciary. We have checks and balances. We are a nation of laws. We have free speech. We have a free press. Have they all failed us? Why has America's public discourse become less focused and clear, less reasoned? (...)
American democracy is now in danger—not from any one set of ideas, but from unprecedented changes in the environment within which ideas either live and spread, or wither and die. I do not mean the physical environment; I mean what is called the public sphere, or the marketplace of ideas. It is simply no longer possible to ignore the strangeness of our public discourse. (...) While American television watchers were collectively devoting 100 million hours of their lives each week to these and other similar stories [stories about celebrities and missing women, ed.], our nation was in the process of more quietly making what future historians will certainly describe as a series of catastrophically mistaken decisions on issues of war and peace, the global climate and human survival, freedom and barbarity, justice and fairness.

The US Embassy in Berlin is a near total failure in its efforts to engage the German mass media so as to reach the largest possible German audience. The American taxpayer is being under-served by his or her representatives in Germany. Frankly - the public diplomacy officials at the US Embassy in Berlin ought to send Eric Staal half of their annual paychecks - because he just did more to engage the German people in 2 minutes than they have done in the past year.

We have our hands full with the fight against al Qaeda and the Taliban. Why do we have to go against Iraq right now? Are you really sure that containment has failed?

A group of experts advising the intelligence agencies are arguing that the harsh techniques used since the 2001 terrorist attacks are outmoded, amateurish and unreliable. The psychologists and other specialists, commissioned by the Intelligence Science Board, make the case that more than five years after the Sept. 11 attacks, the Bush administration has yet to create an elite corps of interrogators trained to glean secrets from terrorism suspects. While billions are spent each year to upgrade satellites and other high-tech spy machinery, the experts say, interrogation methods — possibly the most important source of information on groups like Al Qaeda — are a hodgepodge that date from the 1950s, or are modeled on old Soviet practices. (...)
President Bush has insisted that those secret “enhanced” techniques are crucial, and he is far from alone. The notion that turning up pressure and pain on a prisoner will produce valuable intelligence is a staple of popular culture from the television series “24” to the recent Republican presidential debate, where some candidates tried to outdo one another in vowing to get tough on captured terrorists. A 2005 Harvard study supported the selective use of “highly coercive” techniques.
But some of the experts involved in the interrogation review, called “Educing Information,” say that during World War II, German and Japanese prisoners were effectively questioned without coercion. “It far outclassed what we’ve done,” said Steven M. Kleinman, a former Air Force interrogator and trainer, who has studied the World War II program of interrogating Germans. The questioners at Fort Hunt, Va., “had graduate degrees in law and philosophy, spoke the language flawlessly,” and prepared for four to six hours for each hour of questioning, said Mr. Kleinman, who wrote two chapters for the December report. Mr. Kleinman, who worked as an interrogator in Iraq in 2003, called the post-Sept. 11 efforts “amateurish” by comparison to the World War II program, with inexperienced interrogators who worked through interpreters and had little familiarity with the prisoners’ culture.