SPIEGEL alert

My favorite quotes (in order of the article0:

1.  "Sometimes I get up in the morning and find a couple of totaled cars in the front yard," he says... Still, he finds the wind turbine behind his garden fence harder to cope with.

2.  Some are angry at the way the landscape, celebrated by German Romantic poets such as Hölderlin and Mörike, is being butchered.

3.  Even valuable tourist regions... are to be sacrificed.

4.  There are 83 such three-armed bandits in Germany's largest wind farm,

5.  As they drive their SUVs through these turbine forests, tolerantly minded city-dwellers sometimes comment on how ugly eastern Germany has become.

Ach, what's the sense of continuing. There are much better ones i left out because they're on another page or two. Also interesting is how they take certain facts out of technical context. One example is writing about the IWES test center in Bremerhaven testing an 83.5 meter blade (which it is) but then assuming the blades will be used for inland turbines (which it won't, as the test is specifically for offshore, where pigs don't stampede, causing the farmers to receive compensation (paraphrase).

Of course, complaints about primitive high speed turbines built in the early 90's close to residences should be used to discredit modern slow speed turbines with specially designed low noise tips.

6.  Just the masts of today's wind turbines can reach up to 160 meters high. When active, they kill so many insects that the sticky mass slows the rotors down. (the rotors don't slow down, they do lose aerodynamic efficiency to a minor enough degree that blades do get washed from time to time.)

Yes, Der Spiegel, leader in defending insect rights.

"Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage." - Anaïs Nin