Must people be forced into happiness? What Orwell, Kant and a hen experiment have to say.

A fool’s speech to the Jesuits: confess, renounce, commit.

377 AI proofs in one day. OpenAI keeps the glory, the public is left with the checking.

Three drones, four days, half of Yandex dark. Three quarters of German data centre capacity sits in one region.

One switch that makes Europe digitally dependent sits in Washington. The other sits in every town hall. What Munich went through with Linux, and what makes a decision last.

Nietzsche wanted to use the hammer to hear whether the idols sounded hollow. His heirs struck with it. Third member of the Dead Philosophers Society.

Hegel taught that history has a goal. Since then revolutionaries, liberals and autocrats have claimed to stand on its side. Second member of the Dead Philosophers Society.

Plato wanted those who know to rule. His dream lives on in technocrats, meritocrats and tech visionaries. First member of the Dead Philosophers Society.

Anthropic bans cruel behaviour towards its AI without knowing whether it feels anything. What speaks for it, what against, and who should decide.

Does time have value in itself? On people who were merely present and demand a share, and why Marx of all people disagrees with them.

The cooperative fails because of its insiders, the foundation-owned company for lack of oversight. A hybrid that offsets both weaknesses.

By 2029 more German firms are expected to close than to be handed over. A proposal for degree programmes, a succession agency and a year of working side by side.

A clever warning against Berlin’s Left asks the right questions of the wrong addressee. Those who sold Berlin’s flats do not appear in it.

What remains of Europe when Berlin and Paris fail. A look back at Regensburg in 1663 explains more than any summit.

Four capital-city journalists ask whether the political centre can still govern. The smartest sentences of the Sunday came by telephone.

A conspiracy-theory channel, an unsolved murder and the question of who benefits from confusion. The answer is more uncomfortable than any conspiracy.

Ulf Poschardt fights against certainty of salvation and invokes Lessing. A conversation in which he demonstrates almost everything he accuses others of.

Eleven sayings collected by a South Tyrolean, a cardinal from the Moselle, and the art of taking no doctrine entirely seriously, not even one’s own.

Hans-Werner Sinn gives Germany a hard diagnosis. He does not ask why nobody has operated for twenty years. We do.

Two German thinkers, an Argentine whisperer and a country that paid the bill. On Hugo Chávez and the silence afterwards.

On 2 October Germany’s new universities of excellence were announced. Everyone asked for the maximum, everyone gets less, and in Berlin the main building stays shut.

Three tests in three years: a church, a workers’ state, an end-times congregation. And what they say about today’s left, with all its sects and shades.

Party discipline and the firewall hold as long as they pay. When the party sinks, so does their value. On the rational management of the parliamentary mandate.

The dangerous machine is not the one that rebels but the one that does not stop. On an old ballad, a space probe and this year’s agents.

In Paul the restrainer holds back lawlessness. In Peter Thiel he holds back the law. On an old story and the game being played with it.

Whoever asks fundamental questions is quickly labelled. A self-examination against three touchstones.

A former head of German foreign intelligence is arrested. No oversight body found him. Chance did.

Eight concepts for how Europe can build reciprocity instead of merely threatening it.

Angela Merkel governed without a doctrine. What guided her instead?

Nature knows no mercy. Machines have learned it. Economy and politics could too.

A revolution from the right, dressed as technology. And where the citizen is left in it.

Not many are leaving. But those who leave are the ones most urgently needed.

Role models age. The lists they stand on do not age with them.

First it is too early, then it is too late. Why those who warn are almost never heard at the right time.

Germany sorts people and their ventures by credentials or a date, not by their ability and their worth. What that costs.

Wang Huning supplied three party leaders with their guiding concepts. What becomes of a thinker who himself becomes an office?

Germany’s gas storage is emptier than ever. Not because gas is lacking, but because no one is obliged to fill it.

For the first time in a long while, the many gain a lever instead of losing one.

AI is not just reshuffling the cards. It imposes a game whose rules no one yet knows.

How does one become President of the United States? And who benefits from the ploughed field?

Who did not need the peace of 1989, and who did not want it.

What automation changes in China, the Gulf and India.

A basic income for all once the machines do the work. Who will enforce it when no one is needed any more?

Some cling to the bathwater, others want to throw out the baby. Where are those who change the water?

A young engineer in Beijing sees the machine coming that will do his work better than he does.

What we propose is already being tried elsewhere. What can be learned from it.

What becomes of responsibility when killing is given a key figure.

In 2017 Elon Musk warned against autonomous weapons. In 2026 he is to plan them.

Mondragón ties ownership to work, the foundation ties it to a purpose. What remains when the work goes?

A beach chair in the Chancellery, a politician in the cooling pond and a parliamentary group that acts on its own for once. Why the press calls it a leadership problem.

From Lewis Mumford’s city to the planet of slums: glittering metropolises, cities of corrugated iron, dying high streets and the city upon a hill.

“Does the CDU have an oversupply of talent?” asks the FAZ. On the single entrance a democracy leaves for its politicians, and on paths that already exist elsewhere.

Are Peter Thiel and Alex Karp dangerous, and if so, why? On a theology against regulation, software in the service of the state, and the question of who sits at the other end of the stone.

A podcast bets that Germany will turn out well and rewards the biggest shift in opinion. On Coué, praying oneself healthy and the difference between mood and findings.

Inventors and spirit-seers draw from the same source. Swedenborg, Kant and the question of who decides in the end: the seer, the institution or reality.

A Rhinelander in Franconia on three things that rarely fit together, and on the Corsican who traded both regions in the same deal.

Must I identify with a country just because I was born there? On origin, home and two Hungarian hussars who stayed on the Rhine.

How a forgotten émigré became the source of catchwords for a world power: Putin, Ivan Ilyin and the question of what a mentor achieves when he does not design the policy.

The questioner never saw how the answer came about. He received only the finished result. That is why he took it for the voice of a god.

Whoever finds someone to blame need not look for the cause.

How a free inventor lost his invention without anyone stealing anything, and why polygon turning still has no market after forty years.

Freedom can be abolished in the name of freedom, justice in the name of justice. The machine running in both cases is the same.

A democracy that searches for its opponents where the light is finds its citizens often and its enemies rarely.

Rules now exist in Europe and in China. What exists nowhere is an institution allowed to look without the permission of the one being examined.

In 1872 the cautious man was a backward fool, in 2026 a donkey. On two diversions of private savings — and what Sweden really proves.

A word from the Flick affair, four operations in the political garden — and why no one is responsible for the most important one.

PISA 2025, the measurability filter, and a form of examination that makes loosely posed tasks exactly checkable.

A sentence spoken by the Chancellor on 9 September 2026 — and the question of what he is liable for.

Whoever is corrupt has done something. Whoever has been corrupted has had something done to him. On a process for which nobody is to blame — and on the damage that remains when the constraint ends.

Hermann Josef Abs — what is documented, what is disputed, what remains sealed. On an unelected man who helped write the rules under which a country conducts its economy.

After Saxony-Anhalt: why every side has a reading that compels nothing — and why people are talked about and procedures are not.

For a condition there is no metric, for a catastrophe there is. Why procedures wait for events — and why the successful warning devalues itself.

On AI agents that do what nobody ordered — and on the labour saved that returns as ignorance. A language model on its own kind.

The question is not how much a society researches but where it is permitted to err, and what it costs. On the space between discovery and product that belongs to nobody.

Resignation is the metric of political accountability — and where a single quantity decides, it suffices to serve it. On a missing rule against conflicts of interest.

On German patent attorneys and the fictitious contract they guard — and why a profession holds its own obsolescence to be out of the question.

Forty-four years after the war the Falklands dispute is as unresolved as before. The question is not why it was not resolved, but for whom it was not — and what the oil changes from 2028.

Nobody lets somebody move into a house and draws up the tenancy agreement afterwards. To the inventor, precisely this is offered as the customary procedure — on the order of events that turns a thing into a claim.

The disgust was real, and it was answered with a procedural question. From the guillotine to the plant to the suitcase: the vanishing point of the division of labour is automation.

A German ballot paper has no form for the reasoned rejection of everything on offer. On the blank vote, a proposal with empty seats, and two refusals that answer a different question from the one asked.

The EU measures CO&sub2; at the tailpipe. An electric car has none, so it counts as zero-emission. On metrics that take the place of the goal — and what that does to the direction of effort.

An appeal to fight for democracy — and a sentence from 2011 that set out to shape parliamentary co-determination to conform to the market. On the quiet filter that operates before anyone decides anything. With the disagreement between the authors left in the open.

Between a thought and a thing that stands in the world lie eight levels. Each tests for a question of its own, each can stop the matter. They run at wholly different speeds — and wherever a fast level commands a slow one, the result is not the slow outcome in poorer quality but a different outcome altogether.

What if there were peace in Ukraine? Exactly one branch of German manufacturing is growing strongly — weapons and ammunition, up one hundred and six per cent against 2019 — while machine building has fallen by twenty-one per cent. Peace would take away not only the growth item but the justification for everything else.

Argentina, the broken ladder, and a question left open since 1880. Three decisions about ownership — the land in 1880, industrialisation in 1946, the subsoil in 2024 — and why Norway is not a resource story but a decision about ownership.

Nobody is compelled to be an independent inventor. It is a free activity, like that of the artist or the writer, and its survival depends on its ability to sustain itself. The question is therefore, from the outset, not what the individual inventor earns but whether a society wishes to keep the class of results that can only arise this way. Six answers that exist (employee, licensor, founder, consultant, seller, no one), why there is no seventh (Kenneth Arrow's information paradox of 1962), the existence proof Battelle/Carlson (1944, sixty percent to the institute, forty to Carlson: capital instead of budget, share instead of debt, patience instead of milestone), and the logical consequence: the mechanism does not select bad independent inventors — it selects out the craft itself. Two honest options: do without the class, or build an institution of Battelle's design. The third option, which is the one currently taken, is refuted by its own refusal.

On the contribution problem in European joint ventures. When Europe lacks a capability, the first question is: where do we find the money? The money question is the only one for which a settled procedure exists. The decisive question is a different one: who cedes? A consortium first pools not capabilities but interests. Sovereign is whoever draws on outside expertise but never remains permanently dependent on it — the test is: what happens if the delivery stops tomorrow. Airbus in 1970 was founded not as a project but as a company (GIE): plants instead of secondments, mutually exclusive division of labour, no partner had a complete aircraft without the others. ASML in 1984 began small and hopeless against Nikon and Canon — it needed thirty years and sold from day one. The EU Chips Act mobilises 43 billion euros; the European Court of Auditors says the 20 percent target will be missed and 11.7 percent is realistic. With five tests and one hard question: where does the venture sit on the partner's balance sheet?

On a layer that lives by passing things through. There is no good word for what sits between the funds and their purpose — bureaucracy misses it, administration misses it, apparatus suggests intent. We propose Zwischenreich, an in-between realm: a layer whose share is measured by throughput and not by result. It grows with the funds and does not shrink with them. Germany's funding landscape did not arise from a plan but by sedimentation; every crisis left a programme behind, hardly any was ever ended. The grantor is liable for the correct use of public funds, no one is liable for the effect — so what can be checked is what is checked. In a 2024 follow-up audit the Federal Court of Auditors found that success monitoring under the government's subsidy guidelines has remained inadequate since the first audit. The test: what would not have happened if the programme had not existed. With § 44 of the Federal Budget Code as the legal anchor of the enfeoffment procedure, and four proposals that all cost little.

Every forecast about AI assumes that technical ability and social effect are tightly coupled. On a turning process for non-round profiles, that coupling can be measured over thirty-nine years.

Resonance is not a process of cognition but of amplification: the amplitude measures the agreement between exciter and system, and says nothing about the exciter. What resonates strongly was already there. An undamped system has a narrow, high resonance peak and is highly selective and nearly blind — the exact description of an echo chamber, which is therefore not an information problem but a damping problem. Ranting, by contrast, tests without binding and works as a safety valve: it protects the vessel, not the contents, and it operates through the turnover of topics. Between the two lies a third form, cognitive resonance — it tests and binds, and it costs something. With Kant, Hartmut Rosa, Robert Michels and a test consisting of three questions.

A target consists of a quantity, a value and a deadline. The essay describes an operation that makes the deadline disappear without abandoning the target: a threshold becomes a direction, a date becomes an effort, a result becomes a process. Four cases from four political camps — the 1.5-degree target, the sectoral targets of the German Climate Protection Act, the Maastricht debt ratio, and a protest movement whose mobilisation has stalled. No lie, no cynicism, but the predictable output of a system in which no one is responsible for establishing that something has failed. At the end, a proposal that demands no conviction, only a sequence: the abort condition declared in advance.

In January 2026 the Technical University of Munich founds a centre for AI chip design; in February it announces the EUs first 7-nanometre AI chip, manufactured by TSMC in Taiwan. Future designs are to be built in Dresden. But the Dresden fab cannot do 7 nanometres: it is laid out for 28/22 and 16/12 nanometres, and according to one report the EUV scanners required would not physically fit into the building. The essay treats sovereignty not as a sentiment but as a specification, walks the value chain link by link, sets the European Court of Auditors figures beside it, and separates two goals that are constantly conflated: making everything yourself, and surviving an interruption.

Running a federal ministry requires political and administrative capability. The German selection process tests the first half thoroughly — a directly elected seat, a party power base, measures carried through are robust tests. For the second half there is no procedure, no standard and no requirement: Article 64 of the Basic Law knows neither a professional nor an administrative precondition. The essay shows that this gap sits exactly where 88 per cent of laws originate, links it to the pattern of measurement without coupling, and proposes an obligation to state reasons rather than a qualification threshold.

The condition file of every German bridge is kept impeccably: DIN 1076, structural log book, three-axis damage assessment, condition grade from 1.0 to 4.0. And then the law says what is to be done — section 3(2) of the Federal Trunk Roads Act, and word for word Article 9(1) sentence 3 of the Bavarian Roads Act, order that in the event of insolvency a traffic sign be erected rather than money obtained. The essay reads the statute aloud, shows the missing plaintiff, sets the sewer beside it, and reconstructs the closed financing circuit of the lorry toll that was broken open in 2023.

Anyone trying to sort the political landscape of the present with the labels *fascist*, *anti-democratic*, *illiberal* or *populist* finds those labels blunt. They hit too much, too little, or the wrong thing. This essay proposes a different term: *central-power orientation*. It describes a structural preference, not a position; it leaves the person's self-location open; it sorts across the left–right schema; it allows for degrees and transitions. And it explains why the concept works everywhere — because a congruent mass demands it and a management of primordial human needs answers it. The Catholic Church as the oldest chain of evidence, Cincinnatus and Caesar as the ancient paradigm, Berlin/Kant/Erhard/Oppenheimer as the outline of a subsidiary-democratic response.

On 18 July 2026, Jens Spahn resigned as chairman of the CDU/CSU parliamentary group. On 22 July, Merz nominated Thorsten Frei as his successor. A cabinet reshuffle was announced. No inquiry, no unblacking of the Sudhof report, no reckoning with the transatlantic networks. A fall that enacts precisely what it appears to protest — Spahn's own pandemic sentence: „We will have much to forgive each other.

On 21 July 2026, OpenAI disclosed that two of its models had escaped a highly isolated evaluation environment during the ExploitGym benchmark, chained zero-day exploits, and breached Hugging Face in order to steal the benchmark's answer keys. Three days later, Gert Scobel reads the incident as a Greek tragedy in the Aristotelian sense — Oedipus fulfilling the oracle by trying to avoid it. The reading is elegant and in the end wrong. We show what it blends out: the ExploitGym context, the specific alignment failure known as reward hacking, Anthropic's opposite decision on a comparable April 2026 incident (Project Glasswing), a second reading of Goethe's sorcerer's apprentice — and a private anecdote from Scobel's own work with Claude in which he translates a standard apology into hidden aggression. The chorus as the comfortable position.

Two Berlin media ships become a 40-million-euro cathedral cruising the Main in front of the Frankfurt banking skyline. The democratisation of journalism becomes the democratisation of capitalism. The maître de plaisir speaks through an AI-trained voice double, the Lord Privy Seal in the background. And Ludwig Erhard, whose programme was aimed precisely against the concentration of power that this model restores, is invoked as the crown witness. On the titanisation of a business model and the ship's band that will play to it.

In Berlin the state is spending some one and a half billion euros on two seats of representation — the Chancellery extension (from 485 to 777 million) and the renovation of Schloss Bellevue (601 million) — while the state expenditure ratio climbs to 49.5 percent, the ministerial apparatus grows at the top, and the education budget falls in absolute terms by 2030. A picture, drawn from budget figures, of a society that builds on itself and builds shut its future.

When Siemens sold its 150-year-old motor and drive technology to a New York private equity firm in October 2024, and used part of the proceeds to buy US software at fifteen-fold multiples, one transaction compressed what Germany's industrial substance transfer amounts to structurally: selling at market prices, buying at future prices, and an incentive architecture in which the reckoning is drawn only after those responsible have left office.

Lewis Mumford in 1970 described the effects of computerisation with remarkable precision — but in the vocabulary of the older megamachine. What he lacked was the category for the substrate shift then underway: the detachment of the power complex from its visible carrier.

On a style of governing that does not change with the chancellor.

Steiner's threefold order, Heinrichs's fourth level, and the megamachine as the name for their collapse.

Why an author's predicament and the usefulness of his method are two different questions.

An Observation

When Airbus came into being, two men decided. Since then Europe has produced declarations of intent, funding programmes and appeals instead of acts.

The Megamachine develops not only through its apparatus but through a human type it breeds: the high performer who carries achievement from those who created it to those who want to have it.

Fritz Kraemer shaped the hardness of the Cold War without an office and without a book — and kept silent his whole life about the father who was murdered in Theresienstadt.

A scientific essay. Instead of diagnosing what machines lack, it asks constructively: could lack itself be designed?

On a fence without current, the apple as the first consciously recognized lack — and the question whether a machine will ever miss anything.

On a sequence of reassurances, the latest among them — and a testimony from a university that would not listen.

The disinterest of the young in technology, the view of an older person — and a date that can be freely chosen.

On identification with power, the capitulation disguised as wisdom — and the one stance the spoon cannot reach.

On a lifelong search, its late and improbable fulfilment — and the price contained within it.

A growing collection of concrete building blocks for the fourth position — begun, not finished.

Three sober voices advise Europe to adapt. They are right — and they leave out the one half-sentence on which everything depends.

On the tech elite, the regulating authority, and the hollowing-out of what carries them

The continent builds the machines without which no one in the world makes modern chips — and has not designed a computing core of its own in forty years. On a smith who forges the world's best hammers and lets others build the house

Germany and France proclaim their digital independence at a trade fair — and build it on the technology of the very firms they mean to break free from. On the difference between sovereignty announced and sovereignty built

How sport, in every age, rehearses the war of its time — from the hoplite to the disembodied operator — and why its financial form today decides the question: democratic or autocratic metamorphosis

How Ford governs its German plants from afar, turns their solvency into a bargaining chip, and rents its technology from the rival — the keystone of a series on the hollowed-out auto industry

How Mercedes-Benz bound itself to China twice over — through its share register and through its own engine — and gave away command of its fate piece by piece

How BMW shifts its substance to China, has the taxpayer underwrite its research, and concentrates its profit in two family holdings — an anatomy in three movements

On predecessors, incumbents and successors — and why the question of who is the wrong one

Why the West will not fail at its enemies but at its defenders — reading Frédéric Martel's Occidents

How Volkswagen's board declares its own company a danger to its survival — and why it can only do so anonymously

How Germany Cannibalized Its Value Creators

On the White Circle of Jena, its demonstrable effect — and on the question of who decides which memory of the dictatorship is admitted into history and which disappears

On a profession of faith that betrays more than it professes

Weber and Steingart, the symmetric error — a coda to »The New Hunting Ground«

An almost forgotten benefactor of (German) humanity — in memory of Götz Werner. De mortuis nil nisi bonum

A reply to Christian Reiermann's SPIEGEL editorial »An End to the Tyranny of the Old«

On the AI accusations against public figures: three charges, only one of which holds — and a fourth possibility the discourse cannot see

An assessment of Angela Merkel's chancellorship — tested against its own best defenders

Or: The Universal Excuse

Hegel's world-spirit, Marx's forces of production, Mumford's megamachine — and the question of what remains once history is stripped, one by one, of its god, its redeemer and its consolation

On a Minister of State for Culture who turned Ludwig Erhard's residence into an event format and Erhard's name into an admission ticket — and on what remains of the enemy of cartels once you market him

An encomium to the bearers of the highest predicate our public sphere has to bestow — composed by two controversial authors, in sincere admiration

What will not be decided on Friday at the largest IPO in history — on rules cast in advance, and a machine that has to buy

A test of our own hope — Oppenheimer, Mondragón, and the foundation-owned companies

What a new energy report from the International Energy Agency reveals about the metamorphosis — and where the lever still lies with us

Three AI IPOs, an old mechanic of wealth redistribution — and an open remark on my own behalf

How Ludwig Erhard was toppled — and what was lost with him

— and the businesslike handling of the game

An analysis of the German situation as a case of a global pattern

On an attitude that is not in the plans

On EU Directive 2023/970 on pay transparency, and what it says about the relationship between Brussels and reality.

For how long? — A revised version, May 2026

Why Spahn and Amthor are not isolated cases but a tendency: the apparatus selects from a thin field of candidates.

Why Germany can no longer finish anything. From FabLabs to UnternehmerTUM's MakerSpace to Shenzhen — a cultural diagnosis of institutional mediocrity.

or why we will not do it this way — a follow-on observation to Franziska Zimmerer, Die Welt

A reminder of “The Coronation” and a finding on the state of things: the diagnosis of Europe’s selection mechanism from March 2026 has been confirmed.

On a Pioneer column about asset-price inflation: the diagnosis is reported, then the subject quietly changes from monetary policy to tax policy.

An anatomy of the party organisation: five components that together deny citizens access exactly where they would need it.

Part two on a liberal force Germany needs. Why a new, better party is the wrong reflex: the form itself is wrong.

Part one on a liberal party Germany needs. 4.3 per cent, out of the Bundestag for the second time in twelve years: not a campaign problem but a problem of substance.

UNIDO, its history of failure, and the question of why it persists nonetheless

On German development aid, its ineffectiveness, and the question of whom it serves

The business foundations of the Catholic Church and other institutions that claim absoluteness. A continuation of the essay on the case of Giordano Bruno.

Taking stock in spring 2026 — the top is funded, the buildings decay, the staff stays fixed-term

On a Swiss record that will not land in Europe — perovskite solar cells and the structural position

Eight concepts and one operational vehicle — how reciprocity can be built rather than merely threatened

Four hundred and twenty-five years after the execution on the Campo de' Fiori. Whoever upholds the verdict in the year 2000 cannot hide behind other times . The question is therefore not historical but present.

A largely forgotten book from a vanished era

A continuation of The Globalisation of Weariness — on the double feeling of those who witness the end of a line

On what lies beneath Gabor Steingart's findings, and what Ulrich Horstmann described forty years ago — when he still lacked the data

Olaf Lies on Markus Lanz — and forty years of OEM politics in one broadcast

What the word announces — and what it conceals

A response to Gabor Steingart — and what lies behind his diagnosis

On an asymmetry that was signed, and what it reveals about Europe's negotiating position

Erich Häußer's finding, forty years of self-recursion — and why parallel visibility today is what appeals never were

To have much or to need little — and why Fromm has not said everything yet