Attack is the best defense. Granite self-confidence plus selective perception help you ignore all the troubles of the present and imagine the future even more brightly. Bavaria can do that, just like Bavaria can actually do everything. The “Attack Department” was finally founded in Munich-Untergiesing at the world’s best football club. And Markus Söder, who is world-famous in Munich, begins his night prayer with the incantation “Bayern is better anyway.” This passage has already been included in the state constitution, and employees of the State Chancellery are threatened with imprisonment if they do not take the oath of the greatness of this region.
What Bavaria can’t do: After 40 centimeters of fresh snow, six days later, let the Munich S-Bahn trains run outside – as if Tutzing or Geltendorf were high plateaus in the Himalayas. The Munich transport company uses an almost hundred-year-old tram (codenamed “Grandmother”) because it has a snow plow, but the entire country only has 13 rail clearing vehicles. The Free State is not free of ice, not even in the state capital, and is even accepting aid deliveries from Hesse, which from Munich’s perspective has long been considered a “failed state”.
Instead of artificial intelligence, the natural intelligence of the state government should be promoted
And what is the Prime Minister doing while his country has to complain about millions in lost earnings due to traffic disruption? In his government statement, Markus Söder dreams of Bavaria’s space travel (“Our goal: to develop Oberpfaffenhofen into a Houston of Germany”) and a “pure” AI University in Nuremberg. Sure, this is technology that people are missing when the bus doesn’t come, there’s no train and the S-Bahn can’t decide whether it’s in the depot because of broken branches, frozen switches, defective overhead lines or this new phenomenon called snow. At the “Franconian University of Artificial Intelligence” (that’s what the thing is seriously called) the best excuse will soon be determined from the gibberish of false platform announcements.
Now the bratwurst metropolis of Nuremberg is certainly underestimated as a center of cutting-edge technology. Nevertheless, a lot would be gained for the country if the state government’s natural intelligence were promoted instead of artificial intelligence. Politicians keep falling for research bling-bling. They subsidize fashionable topics, often purely chic science, which sound good, but have nothing to do with people’s everyday lives nor bring lasting research success. The main thing is that the whole thing can be sold as a prestige project.
For years, CSU transport ministers have ruined local and long-distance transport. Humanly understandable, but politically irresponsible, to turn away from this earthly misery and seek salvation in distant galaxies. This is called flight forward, specifically: upwards. But one Munich in heaven is enough. And if Markus Söder dresses up as Commander Spock on the USS Flugtaxi Veitshöchheim for the next carnival in Franconia, that is completely sufficient as a Bavarian mission in space.