8 Gs in a Fenced-In Playpen

For 12.6 million euros the Berlin government has built an impenetrable fence around a place at the Baltic shore whose name translates as "holy dam" to create a gigantic fortified playpen for angie and the bushbaby and putin and the lapdog blair and prodi and sarko and a guy from canada and somebody from japan, oh, and a smiling rights-trampler from china to come to no decision in, attend some glamorous banquets, smile at the cameras, ignore the protesters, and all of them with no intention of doing anything of any consequence - except maybe to agree to build more impenetrable barriers to protect themselves against terrorists. They can wrap themselves in barbed wire and call that the outside and claim to have fenced in everything dangerous.
But the climate will continue to deteriorate, the poor to starve, the migrants to move, the fundamentalists to threaten, and freedom to diminish.
Even a teleconference would have been too great an expense for the little these 8+ leaders are about to agree not to agree on and "announce" after a summit of no height whatsoever, but it would certainly have been more appropriate and less expensive. €12.6 million would treat a lot of severely ill people, feed a lot of starving children, employ a lot of jobless, etc., etc....

The circus is certainly not worth the expense, the effort, or the curbing of civil rights entailed.

And the whole area has been sealed off to humanity, as of today, until the fiasco ends on June 8-9.