Dr. Werner Forssmann -- GERMAN, HERO

Okay, "Mark Wineters", you drunk piece of trash, I will grace you with one reply because it's such a great occasion to sock it to you and your ilk.

You call me a "self loathing" German because you obviously don't like that I reject the populist approach here in Germany to blame America and President Bush even for the bad weather and to forget about what we, historically, owe the United States. But never mind, I can quickly change that tune to a more subtle, realistic and certainly more just approach.

Here it goes: I think you Americans are, in your vast majority, a bunch of semi-educated, pompous hicks with grotesquely over-inflated egoes.

Only a bunch of near-illiterate dolts would let the political climate in their country degrade to the all-time low you have reached. On BOTH sides of the political spectrum, mind you.

I find your mentally retarded president, who can't even make a speech without a teleprompter and of whom I still have to see a picture where he does NOT look like the moron he clearly is, as ridiculous as, for example, at the opposite side of the political spectrum that disgusting fat blob Edward Kennedy who let one of his many adulterous interests drown while he went home to sleep and to have breakfast, only to call the police when he could be sure that the girl had well and truly died a horrible death by suffocation.

I find a country where a man with the lack of intellectual honesty and proneness to goofy conclusions like your friend the NaughtyChicken is able to get any, let alone a higher, academic degree both: despicable and ridiculous. In Germany, even a teacher for six-year-old firstgraders would have to prove that he can distinguish the important from the unimportant and some basic intellectual stringency, an academic qualification seemingly not required in your academia.

Alright. Here it goes. This is Germany. Keep popcorn ready.

In 1929, in a small hospital in Eberswalde, Germany, Werner Forssmann, a young surgical resident, anaesthetised his own elbow, inserted a catheter in his antecubital vein and, catheter dangling from his arm, went to a basement x-ray room where he documented the catheter's position in his right atrium — proving that a catheter could be inserted safely into a human heart.

Forssmann's aim was to find a safe way to inject drugs for cardiac resuscitation. He was determined, and determined to prove, that catheterisation was the key, but at that time it was believed that any entry into the heart would be fatal. Forssmann was a man with enough personal courage to jeopardise his own life to prove his theory.

He was immediately fired when his self-experimentation became known in spite (or maybe because) of the scientific importance of his discovery. The popular press lauded his work, but the medical establishment denounced him as a madman, ignoring his work for over a decade.

He continued to experiment with catheterisation in dogs. It is said that he stopped self-experimentation only when he had used up all of his own veins.

Discouraged by this lack of acceptance, he turned to urology and eventually became a country surgeon. He never returned to cardiological research.

In 1956 he was rehabilitated and awarded the Nobel Prize for his outstanding pioneering efforts in medicine.

Now tell me, you barely literate piece of human flotsam: Do you Americans have ONE Nobel Prize Laureate with the drive for knowledge and innovation and the personal physical courage of a Werner Forssmann?

Please don't mention any Americans of German-Jewish ancestry from whom you only profiteered, and very hesitatingly so, by the way, because the Germans threw them out. (Yeah, the self-loathing Hun speaking here!) They don't count. You were just lucky to get them -- and quite undeservedly so to boot.

Only an American is able to make a fool of himself to prove to some German stranger in the Internet how "erudite" he is, in spite of the fact that he is a non-conversant soak who can't even spell "Hefeweizen".