There's horrible news about an attack on a demonstrating mass of people today in Munich. It was not a demo against the far right, but a protest against too-low wages - and still. A car was driven into the marching people from behind, with several partly badly injured people as a result.

And I would not be surprised at all if the man doing this had been paid, or been promised payment, by the right-wing extremists. Something like that, ten days before elections, when the right-wing party has done their best to fuel hate and fear regarding anybody not having a pure German pedigree? It stinks. To me, it reeks of something behind the bushes here. 

It will be an interesting ten days until the elections now, and I would not be surprised if that flavours all the rest of the debates massively. It's horrible, in so many ways.

So. Excuse me if I will not blog tomorrow, I will be off on a demo (against the far right, because acts like this are still not a reason to make Germany Nazireich 2.0). 

And please keep your fingers crossed for sanity in our land. 

(Sorry, German today.)

Leute, geht raus auf die Straße. Der Rechtsruck darf nicht unkommentiert bleiben. 

Termine für Demos gibt es hier: https://demos-gegen-rechts.de/

Und dann, ganz wichtig:

Geht wählen und wählt eine der demokratischen Parteien, die uns noch verblieben sind. Und vielleicht nicht gerade die CDU/CSU, denn mit dem momentanen Verhalten ihres Kanzlerkandidaten steht zu befürchten, daß sie nach der Wahl genauso wortbrüchig werden wie vor der Wahl.

Some things are really made easier and more accessible by modern technology. Case in point? 3D scans and then digital models of items that you can look at, from your own cosy home, without ever setting foot in Norway.

Or, to make it a little more straightforward: The Uni of Oslo's Kulturhistorisk Museum has made 3D-scans from some of their items and put them online. So now you can look at a medieval incense burner or at wooden items from the Oseberg ship. And yes, that includes the niddy-noddy found there, in great detail.

So you will probably want to head over to https://3d.unimus.no/ now and fall down the rabbit hole yourself... have fun! 

So. Stuff going on here? Madness, if you ask me. The right-wing extremists (AfD) are still at a solid 20% in the predictions for the upcoming elections, and CDU/CSU still at an incredible 30%. Incredible because they - or, if you want to be personal - their chancellor candidate Merz broke his word and welcomed the votes of the AfD for a "5-point programme" that would not change anything, only heats the artificial panic about migrants being a danger to Germany (spoiler alert: they are not), and would in some parts even break German and European law. 

So far, so shitty. 

In case you're not also in the middle of this shit, here's an English language video explaining a bit more what happened: 

After this, there have been lots and lots of demonstrations against this action, and against letting the far right dictate the topics for the election (which they still do, because neither Scholz nor Merz, who have recently done a TV debate, have gotten the memo that there's other topics and it might not be helpful if they just tell each other who is more enthusiastic about kicking people out of this country). 

There were, alltogether, millions out on the street. Now, instead of saying "well, yes, looks like there are quite a few people not agreeing with this, maybe we should think things over" they are saying the peaceful demonstrations are too much, and they are helping to further divide the population.

Divide my ass. We don't have a migration problem, we have an integration problem. A lot of the people who have come here would like to work, but are not allowed to. There's been people deported out of the country who had work here and were normal, regular tax payers, with their children going to school here, and yet they were kicked out. How does this make ANY sense? 

A lot of the people whose parents immigrated to Germany have no other home. They are Germans, paying their taxes and their dues, working and living here. But Merz is so far removed from anything regarding a normal life, within normal means, it's really ridiculous. How can we trust someone who owns several millions of Euros, but considers himself "not wealthy" with anything, let alone the country's finances?

I still hope that a miracle will happen in the elections. I will do my best to help. And if you are living in Germany, and have voting rights: Go and vote for a democratic party, please!

Sorry for yesterday's blog silence - I was travelling, and I was all out of internet when I tried to post something to the blog. (In theory, there was wifi on the train - but the connection was very sketchy and not enough to load a single site.)

Apart from the very helpful pro tip in the title, here's something nice and fruity among all the current doom and gloom: Tasting history has taken a look into Nostradamus's book and came up with... a cherry jelly recipe. 

So if you'd like something to brighten up your toast... here you go. In case you prefer reading to watching, you can also take a look at the backstory, and the recipe, on the Tasting History website.

It does sound really nice! Now our little cherry tree only has to deliver next year...

There's a lot of implicit associations we all have - and they will influence our lives, our decisions, our everything. If you're curious about your implicit associations - such as those regarding science and gender, for instance - you can take the test (on a number of topics) here. And there's a lot of topics!

(This should have gone up yesterday, but the "publish" button needs clicking twice, and if the second click does not go through, there you are with a missing blogpost.)

I feel like I'm out of words, and, well, running out of hope, looking at how political stuff here in Germany is going right now. The AfD with its horrible rhetoric has voted together with CDU (who were supposed to be a democratic party), and now said CDU is showing a face that's almost as ugly as that of the fascist right-wing extremists. They are using the same rhetorics as well.

So here we are, a few weeks before the elections 2025, and it feels more like we're in 1933 again. When I was a teen in school, we got to watch the play "Die Welle" (The Wave) in our local theatre. One of the big questions that arose in the discussions afterwards was - what would we have done? How would each of us have reacted, and acted? 

I never really thought there would come a day when I'd be able to find out. I am horrified, really, to see that so many people today are STILL considering to give their votes to those from the AfD, or the CDU/CSU. We're running into rampant fascism, and a replay of 1933 and the following years, if they are given control. 

Germany is my home country. I grew up here, and while there's a lot of not-so-spiffy stuff going on, I feel at home here - but I am seriously considering options to go somewhere else now if the right-wing parties take over. Because I don't want to see how everything goes crash and burn, and I also don't want to be a victim of said crashing and burning. (Yes, my name is not German. My father came to Germany as a child. And no, I have no intention of finding out whether the fascist would still generously consider that as "German enough" or if they'd prefer to send me off somewhere.)

So. If you are in Germany, and have the right to vote, please think carefully about where you make your crosses. There's always the Wahl-O-Mat if you'd like to see how the parties' aims line up (starting on February 6 for the upcoming elections), and now there's also the Real-O-Mat to show you how the parties' actual decisions and votes match or do not match with your opinions. 

And if you feel like protest voting, there are plenty of parties who have no chance to do a lot - like Volt, or even Die Linke. Or you might actually vote for the green party, who does have a chance to really turn things around, and who have been trying hard to keep things civil, and do a decent job at running the country while the FDP was busy with killing the government, and the black parties busy with trying to copy the fascists. 

Voting far right is not protest voting. It's democratic suicide. Please keep our country safe for everybody. Vote left, or green.