Yes. There is no call to session.connect(). As I'm running the app on GAE I wanted to avoid the default file system based session. If this is not default any more and there is no session at all until explicitly created I can safely remove it.
The bigger problem here are the logs though. Why would example logging.conf silence the errors like this? I thought it redirects everything >= warning level to the console handler which passes it to stdout. Am I missing something here?