To Democracy, a Thousand

Points to the dollar Beyond this many An Air Force to absolve All that flies can be Respondent to all stimuli A stalemate in high review And enemy for the soldier What Cuba wants is respect For me and you, the dispatch of clues In eerie command of all ways In view to be, before the enemy Nature and its end Courtesy of Trump All deals are new And what bad hand for merchants We will follow and make you proud But first, let us pray Every hero is a criminal,- for curried star and rose A date to ride off as St. Peter Nights filled with tires Victory lanes for the poor And Earth at its own cenotaph Suggesting our day was annulled And if we shadow support,- This is the day we transpose And seek and under form Taking up armsmen Accruing the dollar And broke as men Nightfold to grievance And we will get what we get Meet me in November I am your trust and your hill Solemn shares to regret We have mercy but we kill And all who stay wild,- will heal at great light But sonnet men Walking with wait And bitter omen, this war And painted we knew,- to keep our space wept Ringing nightly in preference If Victory unfolds for that man,- we will settle for pain And sparse as we were By sundown our army Highest regards To that American by heart And all lasting mistakes to the basics Ready few In Cuba were men,- who dusted off the Cross And wept at the Virgin Mother For all night’s renew This is the end of our party But not in mission All Turks be to wonder And what we see is renew America without Cuba This trying deal And Earth at its ends A fail to rewar,- but what of November But Essex in view And Earth has a placebo,- calling credit When Victory can’t And lights at per diem- setting right To see you in stars And all of the great- yesteryear.

In Summary: * If I had to describe my Sunday in one word it would be: balanced. And that's a very good thing, especially compared to my yesterday, which I would described as being very unbalanced; uncomfortably so.

An hour and a half of yard work this morning was very productive. I cleared out a strip of overgrown grass and weeds turned jungle that was poking through a neighbor's fence from my side. There is much more clearing out of that jungle that needs to be done, and I intend to do it as weather and my health allow. But for now her fence is clear.

Remember the big winds of a few months ago that brought down some big branches from my front yard tree? I'd moved them to a staging area in the back yard where I proceeded to cut the smaller of them into pieces that would fit in the green organics bin for weekly pickup. The city has one day each year designated for large brush pickup. That day is tomorrow. So today I dragged / carried the really big branches remaining in the back yard staging area to the front yard, positioned for the city collection.

Yes! All that work completed and my sweaty old self showered and cleaned up before Noon.

Bet I'll sleep better tonight! Ha Ha!

Prayers, etc.: * I have a daily prayer regimen I try to follow throughout the day from early morning, as soon as I roll out of bed, until head hits pillow at night.

Health Metrics: * bw= 232.59 lbs. * bp= 138/79 (70)

Exercise: * morning stretches, balance exercises, kegel pelvic floor exercises, half squats, calf raises, wall push-ups, BP breathing exercises, pilates

Diet: * 05:30 – 1 banana, 3 little cookies * 09:30 – 2 little cookies * 10:45 – 1 peanut butter sandwich * 13:20 – scrambled eggs, bacon, sausage, rice * 16:20 – 1 fresh apple * 19:30 – dish of ice cream

Activities, Chores, etc.: * 04:30 – bank accounts activity monitored. * 04:40 – read, write, pray, follow news reports from various sources, surf the socials, nap * 07:45 to 09:15 – yard work, cutting back yard bushes, hauling branches * 10:30 – watching The Matrix until the movie froze up on me. * 13:20 – listening to Texas Rangers pregame show, the game starts at 13:35, I'll listen to the radio call of the game on 105.3 The Fan, DFW's #1 Sports Radio Station. * 16:38 – and the Rangers beat the Astros, 6 to 5. * 18:30 – slowly working through the evening's meditations and prayers.

Chess: * 15:20 – moved in all pending CC games

The bruises got worse. i didnt die, that would’ve been easier to explain. every time i lie down, it feels like someone’s hands close around my neck. not enough to stop me from breathing but enough to remind me they’re there. then the pressure disappears the moment i sit up, but the bruises dont. i looked in the mirror today.. they’re shaped like hands. several of them. as if multiple people decided i shouldnt wake up, yet changed their minds halfway through, maybe i sohuldnt write any of this. but if i end up dead, at least someone can read this and know i wasnt imagining the marks on my neck. or maybe they’ll decide i was. either way, it wont make much of a difference to me. people die every day. you dont stop for every stranger. you dont grieve for every name in a newspaper. death is ordinary until it belongs to someone you know, i know that feeling. my mother died when i was little, maybe thats why i started paying attention to grief. not my own, everyone else’s. sometimes, after a job was done, i’d go to the funeral. No one questioned why i was there. i’d stand in the back, listen to people tell stories, watch them cry, watch them search for someone to blame. They’d curse whoever did it. they’d swear the person responsible would pay for it. I’d hear every word. and then leave, it never changed anything. the dead stayed dead. the people left behind kept searching for answers they were never going to find. I wasn’t there because i cared about the person in the coffin. i was there because i wanted to understand the people standing around it. blaming god. blaming themselves. Blaming others. just to feel better. i wanted to understand why one person’s death could hollow out an entire room, while another became nothing more than tomorrow’s headline. Maybe thats the part ive never understood. I’ve spent years being the last thing some people ever knew. now it keeps coming back to me. strange, enough. it never seems interested in taking me with it.

Whatever, I’ll figure it out.

Sincerely, The man death rejected

My book club is reading Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson this month. The core idea fits on a napkin, so before the meeting I decided to actually check it against real data. Here's what I found, and where it fell apart.

The idea, in one picture

Housing, clean energy, cures for disease. The inputs to all three haven't really moved. Money's there. Technology got cheaper, not more expensive. Roughly the same number of people know how to build this stuff as always did.

What changed is the pipe between the inputs and the output.

Over the decades, every time something went wrong, somebody added a valve. A highway almost bulldozed a neighborhood in the '70s, so now there's a checkpoint for that. An environmental study got added in the '90s. By the 2000s you needed a public comment period too, sometimes more than one. None of these were dumb decisions in isolation. Each solved something real. But stack enough of them and the pipe might as well be shut, even though nothing on the input side changed at all.

Klein and Thompson call this chosen scarcity. Anyone who's inherited a legacy codebase already knows the pattern under a different name: unaddressed technical debt. A pile of individually-reasonable shortcuts, left unrefactored for so long that the system's throughput has almost nothing to do with its actual capacity anymore.

I liked the idea. I also didn't fully trust it. So before the meeting, I ran the numbers.

Test one: does the throughput number actually check out?

I compared two U.S. cities that get cited constantly in this debate: Austin, which started clearing its own valves out around 2015, and San Francisco, which mostly didn't.

The gap is not small. Austin permits roughly 18 new homes per 1,000 residents every year. San Francisco permits about 2. Eight times the throughput. Same country. Same everything, really, except the rules.

I ran the actual arithmetic using an elasticity number borrowed from a housing study out of Auckland, New Zealand, where a comparable policy change happened and got carefully measured.

Extrapolated ten years out, Austin's predicted price effect blew past -100 percent, which is obviously impossible. That's useful, actually — it means you can't stretch a small, well-measured experiment out to ten years and still trust the exact number it spits out. Markets saturate. Construction costs and demand put a floor under how far prices can fall, and Austin landed on that curve instead of the dashed line.

San Francisco's model predicted something like an 11 to 19 percent rent decline. Instead, rent there is rising faster than almost anywhere else in the country right now, up nearly 19 percent over the past year. Turns out an AI hiring boom rolled through right when the small supply gains were supposed to show up, and a model that only tracks supply has no way of seeing that coming.

Test two: the case that broke my model completely

Then I checked a pair I expected to tell the same story: Vienna versus London.

Here's where it got weird. Vienna and London build housing at almost the same rate, barely a 20 percent difference. If clearing the pipe were the whole mechanism, their prices should look almost identical.

They don't. Vienna's rent is roughly a third of London's, and has stayed flat for two decades.

The reason has nothing to do with permitting speed. Forty-three percent of Vienna's housing stock is public or nonprofit housing, running alongside the private market instead of depending on it to eventually get fixed. It's the housing-policy version of the strangler-fig pattern: instead of refactoring a legacy system riddled with a decade of shortcuts, you stand up a clean system next to it and let it carry the traffic that matters most. Combined with old rent-control rules on the pre-1945 stock, that parallel system is what actually holds prices down. London never built a second pipe. It just kept adding valves to the one it already had.

This matters more than it looks. The book's whole argument is: clear the pipe, let the existing system move faster. Vienna barely touches that lever. It built a second system that doesn't need the first one fixed to work at all. Both approaches raise total output, but only one of them shows up in the book.

What I'm actually taking into the meeting

So what's the actual takeaway here?

Mostly this: the mechanism is real, but only when you can isolate it cleanly. Austin shows that. So does the documented policy change in Auckland and Minneapolis. Clear the pipe, throughput goes up, and prices come down in a way you can actually measure.

But Vienna is the one that's going to stick with me, because it's proof this isn't the only lever available. Anyone telling you a genuinely messy problem has exactly one fix is skipping a step, even when the fix they're describing is real.

And honestly, the habit I want to keep out of all this has less to do with housing than with how I plan to evaluate the next big claim somebody hands me. Profile before you optimize. Don't assume you already know which function is slow, check. Before a compelling story gets to explain what you're seeing, spend two minutes running rough numbers on it yourself. You won't always get proof out of that. But you'll see fast which parts of the argument are load-bearing and which ones just sound right.

Less “was the book correct” and more “what's the cheapest way to check whether a claim is even the right order of magnitude.” Most of the time, that's enough to tell you which parts to trust.

This is meant to be a place for me to write. Mostly for me to flesh out my own ideas, but also just to keep at writing, which is a perishable skill. Generally, I want to write about civics, tackling questions about what it means to be a good citizen, why you ought to be a good citizen, and how otherwise good people fail to become good citizens. Broadly, I think of good citizens aa people who are committed to maintaining and improving the institutions that make a society worth living in.

There is no fleshed out theory of citizenship motivating any of this, but my musings on the issue are organized around one important idea: That to be a good citizen, you have to understand how the institutions in your society work, and you have to be committed to maintaining and improving them. I think this is actually quite difficult in complex society, with lots of specialization. We live in a society where few people understand at a deep level how things work, and no one understands how every thing works. That makes it hard to be a good citizen. Consequently, I think most Americans are bad citizens. That is not to say that most Americans are bad people, rather, that most Americans really do not understand how the institutions that impact their lives work, and generally do not bother to improve or maintain them. What I'd like to do is highlight this as a central problem facing American life today, to explore why this gets to be the case and to, perhaps, offer suggestions for improvement.

The idea of citizenship is often associated with voting. We hear the word and think of the political things the average American is supposed to do on election day. Vote, be informed about politicians, form justifiable preferences for different policies, etc. While those things are a part of civic life in the US, there is so much more about civics than just politics. How you integrate with your local community, how groups of people collectively develop and maintain a sense of belonging or identity, how individuals relate themselves to larger groups, in terms of rights and responsibilities.

These things are all part of civic life, but often overlooked in discussions of citizenship. Not littering in you local community is an act of citizenship, just as much as voting. Ensuring the collective decisions made in your community don't harm future generations is an act of citizenship, even if those decisions seem small and very local. Thinking of local governments as something you participate in and are a part of, rather than a discrete organization that provides you services is an act of citizenship.

All of these ideas tie individuals to institutions. By institution, I just mean major features of organization in social life. The legal system, financial system, the family, technology, and the education system are all examples of institutions. So a better way of thinking about civics is to say that civics is the knowledge of how institutions are supposed to work. That is, civics is the information a person needs in order to be a good citizen. Civic knowledge includes all the information an informed and responsible citizen would need in order to understand how the institutions that impact their life are supposed to work, and what they need to do to maintain them. I say supposed to work because it is not always the case that institutions work how they are supposed to. Sometimes institutions are dysfunctional, sometimes they are harnessed by bad actors to do things they should not. But if you don't know how they are supposed to work, you will not be able to recognize when they are broken.

Failing to understand how an institution is supposed to work will lead to different forms of bad citizenship, the two most common of which are jersey voters and lazy cynics. Jersey voters vote because it is their team. They don't pay attention to anything other than the identity of a politician and support or oppose them on the basis of their identity. This leads to tolerance for corruption and incompetence, as well as a willingness to sacrifice principles. Lazy cynics substitute knowledge for cynicism and generally don't participate in the maintenance of institutions at all because they take the view that to do so would be useless. I want to explore both of these forms of bad citizenship in later posts, but for now all I want to do is point out that if you don't know how things are supposed to work, then you are destined to be a bad citizen, even if you vote.

That is why civics is so important. Civics tells you how things work, equipping you with the information you need to recognize problems and fix them when they arise. A strong knowledge in civics prevents you from being passive or cynical. If you don't understand how things are supposed to work, how could you possibly fix them when they break? And rest assured, if you want to be a citizen, you are obligated to fix institutions when they break. That is your job. You are responsible for that.

So all of this implies a minimum amount of information one would need to be a good citizen. Hence, the blog title. One of the things I want to do here is explore what information someone needs to know in order to be a good citizen. In a society with extreme degrees of specialization, it is not possible to be knowledgeable in every subject. Expertise in our society is extremely narrow, one can only be a true expert in a small band of subjects because there is so much to know. So the question naturally arises, if you want to be a good citizen, how much do you need to know? What is the minimum amount of information one needs to understand the institutions in their life, recognize when they go bad, and correct them?

There are, of course different opinions on how things are supposed to work. That is fine, in an open society there will always be debate about what the best form should be for an institution. The fact that institutions work at all is because they are filled with people who have values. Part of developing good civic knowledge is learning the history of these debates and learning how they shaped the nature of institutions. But in order to be a good citizen, you do need to know how institutions actually work right now. If you have no clue how, for example, the law, or the financial system works, you cannot possibly hope to understand the debates around these institutions! That will inevitably lead to mindless cynicism or passive acceptance of corruption— that is, bad citizenship.

Me with my glasses for the last time full time pre-surgery.

I just shared good news about my heart journey, and now I can finally share another medical milestone for 2026: my cataract surgeries are done and my vision is back.

For the last couple of years, my sight kept slipping, no matter how many times I got new prescriptions from the ophthalmologist or optometrist. A new prescription might clear things up for a few months, then the blurriness would come back. I found myself contorting my face and doing all kinds of facial tricks just to see. It was soul-sapping. Anyone who knows me knows I don't get depressed easily. At 57, I've had low moments before, but nothing like this. The vision loss pushed me into a prolonged low spell. I stopped wanting to read and lost enthusiasm for work, except as a way to pay bills. Even blogging suffered. After my most prolific year in 2025, I barely posted because I literally couldn't see well enough.

My glaucoma doctor mostly saw senile cataracts and told me my eye pressures looked fine. Early this year, he said the cataract in my right eye had progressed from a 1 to a 2, which was probably causing the problems. He offered two options: try another prescription or remove the cataracts. I chose surgery.

On June 22, 2026, I had the right cataract removed. The surgeon did a great job, although the anesthesiologist's nerve block caused bruising and left me with a black eye for almost two weeks. Still, that eye improved noticeably. I had the left eye done on July 9, 2026, and it went much better. A different anesthesiologist gave a smooth block, and the same excellent surgeon operated. The day after the left surgery I was seeing 20/20; after the right surgery I was at 20/40. The team also placed iStents in both eyes for my glaucoma. Those seem to be doing fine so far, though time will tell and my glaucoma specialist, who is different from the surgeon, will follow up.

Some expected trade-offs are already showing up. I need readers for near work and some help with intermediate tasks. My distance vision was corrected, and so was my astigmatism. They corrected the right eye's astigmatism with a laser, but the left needed a toric lens upgrade, which I paid for because insurance didn't cover it. My natural, God-given lenses are gone and replaced with implants, basically eyeglasses inside my eyes. It's been life-changing. I didn't realize how dulled colors and whites had become until the right eye was done and whites looked truly white again. Before the left eye was operated on, I could compare the operated and unoperated eyes and everything in the unoperated eye had a yellow tint. Now that both eyes are done, colors are clearer and whites really pop. The left eye is still a bit inflamed since it's only a few days post-op, but distance vision already feels nearly perfect, like the first time I put on glasses at 16.

I didn't expect to need cataract surgery until my 60s or 70s, but I'm relieved it's over and I can see clearly again. Now I have to heal and figure out what kind of readers I'll need and whether I'll need permanent glasses again though for distance at this point and time I don't. I was scared going in. The right-eye surgery felt strange because the nerve block didn't fully take, though I experienced no pain. The left-eye surgery was much calmer and less noticeable.

Being only 57 and needing cataract surgery before my parents, who are in their 70s, felt odd. But I simply could not function properly before the surgeries, and I'm very thankful that God gave me a skilled surgeon and the strength to get it done. I'm glad to be able to see clearly again.

Carol Bove

The Brooklyn-based artist Carol Bove shapes massive steel as if it were clay. It looks so unbelievable that you want to touch it (don’t!) to see if it is real. There is much more to her art than that, and in fact, it was one of the most holistic exhibitions I have seen at the Guggenheim. It still runs through August 2.

See more photos here.

Houston Astros vs Texas Rangers

This Sunday's MLB game of choice has the Houston Astros playing my Texas Rangers in a game scheduled to start at 1:35 PM CDT. As I usually do, I'll follow the game's score and stats in real time via MLB's Gameday Service where we can also find links to the radio-call of the game provided by announcers of either team we choose.

And the adventure continues.

Articles

For the English version please scroll down past the German version

July 12, 2026 — The Architecture of Inertia (/https://write.as/germany-a-winter-s-tale/die-architektur-der-tragheit)

July 6, 2026 — From Combatant to “Caregiver” Liberalism (/https://write.as/germany-a-winter-s-tale/vom-streitbaren-zum-verantwortungsvoll-betreuenden-liberalismus)

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Die Architektur der Trägheit

July 12, 2026

Parallele Anpassungskrisen im deutschen Spitzensport und der Industrie

Von Prof. em. Dr. Hans Joachim Scholl, MBA

Eine vergleichende institutionelle Analyse (1990–2036)

Eine Anmerkung vorab

Mehrere statistische Limitationen seien hiermit gleich zu Anfang summarisch erwähnt: Medaillenspiegel und Pro-Kopf-Quoten besitzen rein deskriptiven, keinen kausalen Charakter; sie hängen maßgeblich von der Auswahl der Vergleichsländer ab. Das hier gewählte Tableau – Deutschland im Vergleich mit Frankreich, Italien und Großbritannien – spart traditionell stärkere Wintersportnationen wie Norwegen, Österreich oder die Schweiz bewusst aus. Zudem taugen Pro-Kopf-Raten isoliert kaum als Indikator für institutionelle Effizienz, da sie lediglich die Bevölkerungszahl ins Verhältnis setzen, nicht aber Finanzströme, Athletenkader oder die tatsächliche Breite des Breitensports; kleinere, wohlhabende Staaten werden hierdurch strukturell begünstigt. Turnierergebnisse (Vorrunde, Viertelfinale, Turniersieg) wiederum stellen ordinale Kategorien dar. Wenn sie zur visuellen Verdeutlichung als kontinuierliche Linie gezeichnet werden, täuscht dies eine kardinale Präzision vor, die angesichts von Faktoren wie Verletzungspech, inkohärente Schiedsrichterentscheidungen und der inhärenten Volatilität kleiner Stichproben nicht gegeben ist. Schließlich beweist eine bloße Korrelation zwischen sportlichen und industriellen Verläufen noch keine gemeinsame Ursache. Zwar erlaubt sie Rückschlüsse auf parallele institutionelle Beharrungskräfte, nicht aber auf einen vermeintlichen Nationalcharakter oder die kollektive Psyche einer Vierundachtzig-Millionen-Population. Diese Limitationen entwerten den folgenden Vergleich keineswegs; sie stecken lediglich den analytischen Rahmen ab, in dem er zu lesen ist.

Die Verklärung der Nachwende-Trajektorie

Zur Sache: Deutschlands zeitgenössische Sport- und Industriestrukturen formierten sich nach 1990 im Zeichen eines tiefen institutionellen Optimismus. Die westdeutsche Nationalelf holte im Sommer 1990 in Rom den FIFA-Weltpokal, nur Monate vor der offiziellen staatlichen Wiedervereinigung. Die Fusion aus westlichem Kapital und industrieller Potenz einerseits und der zentralisierten, staatlich hochgradig durchorganisierten Sportmaschinerie der untergehenden DDR andererseits erzeugte eine perhorreszierende internationale Präsenz. Prompt folgte die scheinbare Bestätigung: Bei den Olympischen Sommerspielen 1992 in Barcelona räumte das gesamtdeutsche Team ein Rekordkontingent von zweiundachtzig Medaillen ab – bis heute, dreieinhalb Jahrzehnte später, der unerreichte Scheitelpunkt gesamtdeutscher Olympia-Historie. Den Zeitgenossen galt dies als verlässlicher Vorgeschmack auf eine dauerhafte Vorherrschaft. Ein Trugschluss.

Das System war auf Sand gebaut. Der Medaillensegen der frühen neunziger Jahre war kein Produkt eines zukunftsfähigen Modells, sondern eine einmalige Auszehrungs-Dividende aus dem Erbe zweier historisch gewachsener Pipelines: Athleten, Trainer, Kaderstrukturen und Kaderschmieden stammten noch aus der Konkursmasse des ostdeutschen Sportsystems. Diese Erbschaft freilich verlangt nach einem harten Dementi: Der DDR-Leistungssport basierte auf einem staatlich verordneten, systematischen Zwangsdoping, das bei den Betroffenen schwere, chronische Gesundheitsschäden hinterließ. Der unaufhaltsame Abstieg nach 1992 ist folglich nicht der Bericht über die Demontage eines funktionierenden Systems durch eine ordnungsliebende Demokratie; er dokumentiert das zwingende Ende einer kriminellen, medizinisch missbräuchlichen Apparatur. Als der Schwung dieser Übergangsgeneration verpuffte, ohne dass rechtzeitig eine adäquate, moderne und ethisch saubere Nachwuchs-Pipeline installiert worden war, traten die inhärenten Mängel des dezentralen bundesdeutschen Vereinsmodells offen zutage.

Die ungleichen Schwestern: Sommer- und Wintersport

Olympische Sommerspiele, 1992–2024

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Abbildung 1: Die langfristige Erosion der deutschen Sommermedaillen (1992–2024) im direkten Vergleich zur gezielten Professionalisierung in Großbritannien und Frankreich.

Deutschlands absolute Sommermedaillen-Ausbeute sank von 82 (1992) über 65 (1996) auf 56 im Jahr 2000. Nach einer vorübergehenden Seitwärtsbewegung zwischen 2008 und 2016, als sich das Kontingent im Bereich von 41 bis 44 Medaillen einpendelte, sackte das Team bei den Spielen in Paris 2024 vollends ab: 33 Medaillen bedeuteten den historischen Tiefstand seit der Wende.

Abbildung 2: Die relative Medaillenausbeute pro Million Einwohner im Sommer (1992–2024).

Demographisch bereinigt entspricht dies einem Absturz von 1,02 Medaillen pro Million Einwohner (1992) auf magere 0,39 im Jahr 2024. Dass ein anderer Kurs machbar ist, demonstrieren die Nachbarn. Nach dem Debakel von Atlanta 1996—Großbritanniens schwächsten Sommerspielen seit 1952—unterwarf London den Spitzensport einem rigiden Steuerungsmodell. Die dem Innenministerium unterstellte Behörde UK Sport bündelte die sprudelnden Einnahmen der Nationalen Lotterie und knüpfte Fördergelder konsequent an messbare Medaillenchancen. Trotz ethischer Kritik an dieser rücksichtslosen Medaillenfixierung stabilisierte das Modell die britische Ausbeute ab London 2012 bei über sechzig Edelmetallen. Frankreich wiederum reformierte seine Strukturen im Vorfeld der Spiele von Paris durch die Gründung der Agence Nationale du Sport, straffte die Koordination zwischen Staat, Verbänden und Privatwirtschaft und stieß mit 64 Medaillen auf Platz fünf der Gold-Wertung vor—ein Erfolg freilich, der sich ohne den historisch verbrieften Heimvorteil kaum allein aus der Strukturreform erklären lässt.

Olympische Winterspiele, 1992–2022 (mit Kontext zu 2026)

Abbildung 3: Absolute Medaillentrends im Wintersport (1992–2022) im engen westeuropäischen Vergleich.

Die Winterbilanz zeichnet ein völlig anderes Bild: Mit verlässlicher Konstanz holte die Bundesrepublik Deutschland von 1992 bis Peking 2022 stets zwischen 19 und 36 Medaillen. Auch bei den jüngsten Spielen in Milano Cortina 2026 behauptete sich Deutschland mit 26 Medaillen (davon 8 goldenen) in der Weltspitze. Doch die These von einer vermuteten deutschen „Hegemonie“ greift zu kurz. Die historische Realität zeigt: Norwegen bleibt die unangefochtene Großmacht des Wintersports und lässt Deutschland im Goldmedaillenspiegel regelmäßig hinter sich. Die scheinbare Dominanz im Diagramm resultiert primär aus einer selektiven Vergleichsgruppe, die sich auf Frankreich, Italien und Großbritannien beschränkt, während traditionelle Wintersport-Giganten wie Österreich, die Schweiz, Schweden, Kanada oder die USA ausgeblendet werden. In Milano Cortina 2026 rettete sich Deutschland zwar auf ein achtbares Niveau, rangierte im Goldspiegel jedoch hinter Norwegen, den USA, Italien und den Niederlanden. Deutschlands Winterstärke ist kein allumfassendes Phänomen, sondern das Resultat einer extremen Spezialisierung. Es verfügt über kein Monopol auf Kunsteisbahnen, wohl aber über ein hochkonzentriertes Ökosystem: Die enge Verzahnung aus traditionsreichen Bundesstützpunkten, technologischem Know-how des Instituts für Forschung und Entwicklung von Sportgeräten (FES) und der sozialen Absicherung der Athleten über Sportfördergruppen von Bundeswehr und Bundespolizei wirkt wie ein Schutzwall gegen den allgemeinen Niedergang—ein Muster, das sich in der Industrie wiederholen sollte.

Der unaufhaltsame Abstieg des deutschen Fußballs

Abbildung 4: Turnierergebnisse der deutschen Männer-Nationalmannschaft (1990–2026) auf einer ordinalen Skala.

Die Nationalmannschaft der Männer liefert das präziseste Sittenbild dieses institutionellen Verfalls. Dem Triumph von Rom 1990 und dem EM-Titel 1996 folgte zur Jahrtausendwende das totale Fiasko: Das Vorrundenaus bei den Europameisterschaften 2000 und 2004 erschütterte den DFB im Mark. Die Reaktion folgte prompt. Bereits im Februar 2001 verpflichtete der Verband die Erst- und Zweitligisten der Bundesliga zur Unterhaltung zertifizierter Nachwuchsleistungszentren. Rund 500 Millionen Euro flossen in die Jugend-Infrastruktur. Diese konzertierte Aktion trug Früchte: Zwischen 2006 und 2016 erlebte der deutsche Fußball eine goldene Ära beispielloser Konstanz, die in sechs Halbfinal- oder Finalteilnahmen in Serie während der Ära Löw und dem WM-Titel 2014 in Brasilien gipfelte. Gespeist wurde dieser Höhenflug aus einem demographisch erweiterten Talentpool und einer hochtalentierten Spielergeneration.

Das darauffolgende Jahrzehnt glich dagegen einem Offenbarungseid: Historische Vorrunden-Pleiten bei den Weltmeisterschaften 2018 und 2022, gepaart mit einem Achtelfinal-Aus bei der EM 2020. Das Viertelfinal-Aus bei der Heim-EM 2024 gegen den späteren Turniersieger Spanien (1:2 nach Verlängerung) wurde von der Öffentlichkeit zwar als Scheitern gebrandmarkt, gilt Fachanalysten dank verbesserter spielerischer Kohäsion jedoch als zarte Konsolidierung. Das böse Erwachen folgte bei der WM 2026: Das Aus in der Runde der letzten 32 gegen Paraguay (3:4 im Elfmeterschießen nach einem 1:1 in der regulären Spielzeit)—die erste Niederlage einer deutschen Auswahl in einem WM-Elfmeterschießen überhaupt—besiegelte das Bundestrainerschicksal von Julian Nagelsmann. Der DFB reagierte mit der Verpflichtung von Jürgen Klopp. Die Hoffnung auf das prompte „Klopp-Wunder“ ignoriert indessen das Wesen von K.-o.-Turnieren: Ein einzelnes Elfmeterschießen ist statistisches Rauschen. Es taugt nicht als Diagnose für ein strukturelles Versagen des Gesamtsystems.

Die Grenzen des Machbaren

Die sportlichen Krisensymptome verleiten zum Analogieschluss auf die deutsche Industrie, allen voran die Automobilwirtschaft. Doch Vorsicht vor vorschneller Kausalitäts-Huberei: Eine bloße zeitliche Koinzidenz beweist weder ein Nachlassen der kollektiven Leistungsbereitschaft noch eine plötzliche Risikoaversion der Deutschen. Sportliche Tabellenplätze taugen nicht als Fieberkurve für die Befindlichkeit einer Achtzig-Millionen-Nation. Was beide Welten indessen verbindet, ist ein spezifischer institutioneller Defekt: Die grandiose Fähigkeit zur inkrementellen Optimierung innerhalb eines bestehenden Paradigmas—und das totale Versagen, sobald sich das Paradigma radikal verschiebt. Die Personalie Klopp führt diesen Mechanismus vor Augen: Der Bundestrainer kann weder Talente zukaufen noch die verkrusteten Strukturen der Landesverbände aufbrechen. Er befehligt seine Auswahl an weniger als vierzig Tagen im Jahr in hastig zusammengeworfenen Länderspielfenstern. Wenn die Nachwuchsarbeit über zehn Jahre hinweg die Produktion moderner Außenverteidiger oder echter Mittelstürmer versäumt hat, bleibt dem Startrainer nur die Verwaltung des Mangels. Taktische Finessen heilen keine strukturellen Pipeline-Defekte.

Das industrielle Kernland: Automobilbau und Chemie

Jahrzehntelang thronte die deutsche Autoindustrie an der Weltspitze dank der Perfektionierung des Verbrennungsmotors und hochflexibler, modularer Fertigungsstraßen—ein Modell, das BMW bis heute erfolgreich praktiziert. Diese ingenieurtechnische Glanztat sicherte den Konzernen astronomische Renditen, solange die alte Weltordnung galt. Die Bastion begann zu wanken, als der Markt in Richtung software-definierter Architekturen, digitaler Cockpits und vertikal integrierter Elektro-Plattformen kippte. Zwischen 2017 und 2023 brach die deutsche Fahrzeug- und Komponentenproduktion um 15 Prozent ein, maßgeblich getrieben durch einen 50-prozentigen Einbruch bei reinen Verbrennern und ein Minus von 40 Prozent im Verbrenner-Export. Die Neuzulassungen auf den drei Kernmärkten—Europa, USA, China—sanken im selben Zeitraum um 9 Prozent; für Fahrzeuge deutscher Provenienz schrumpften die Neuzulassungen überproportional um 16 Prozent. Im wichtigsten Gegenwarts und Zukunftsmarkt China dümpeln die deutschen Marken im E-Segment bei kümmerlichen 5 Prozent Marktanteil herum, während der einheimische Riese BYD 34 Prozent kontrolliert. BMW meldete für 2024 einen Einbruch der China-Auslieferungen um 13,8 Prozent, Mercedes-Benz verlor 1,2 Prozent, und Volkswagen hinkte dem Marktwachstum um Längen hinterher. Der Umstand, dass Mercedes-Benz seine Elektrifizierungsziele (50 Prozent E-Anteil) klammheimlich von 2025 auf 2030 verschob, zeigt, dass die Krise kein exklusives Wolfsburger Problem darstellt.

Der Kahlschlag hat die Werkshallen erreicht: Volkswagen kündigte im Verbund mit der IG Metall den Abbau von 35.000 Stellen bis 2030 an, der Zulieferer Bosch streicht 13,000 Jobs in seiner Mobility-Sparte, ZF Friedrichshafen und Continental trennen sich von jeweils über 7,000 Mitarbeitern. Insgesamt vernichtete die Automobilkrise in Deutschland zwischen 2023 und 2025 schätzungsweise 55,000 Arbeitsplätze. Gleichzeitig leidet die Chemieindustrie als zweite tragende Säule unter hausgemachten Standortnachteilen: Industriestrom ist hierzulande dreimal so teuer wie für die amerikanische Konkurrenz. Die BASF schloss mehrere Produktionslinien am Stammwerk Ludwigshafen, strich europaweit 2.600 Stellen—zwei Drittel davon in Deutschland—und verlagert Neuinvestitionen massiv in die USA und nach China. Die deutsche Chemieproduktion schrumpfte 2025 um weitere 2,5 Prozent. Die gesamte industrielle Fertigung befindet sich im vierten Jahr der Rezession und verharrt ein Viertel unter dem Trend von 2013–2018. Rund 360,000 Industriejobs gingen seit 2019 verloren. Dieser strukturelle Aderlass verläuft zeitlich auffallend parallel zum Niedergang im Sommersport—mit dem feinen Unterschied, dass die Industriekurve, anders als die olympischen Bilanzen, bisher keinerlei Anzeichen einer Stabilisierung erkennen lässt.

Verteilte Kompetenzen versus radikale Zentralisierung

Während Großbritannien und Frankreich auf zentralisierte Steuerung setzen (lotteriefinanzierte Leistungskontrakte in London, eine staatliche Super-Agentur in Paris), verheddert sich die deutsche Sportförderung im bürokratischen Sumpf zwischen dem Deutschen Olympischen Sportbund (DOSB) und dem Bundesinnenministerium. Der DOSB fungiert als wachsweicher Dachverband von 103 Mitgliedsorganisationen—Landessportbünde, Fachverbände, Verbände mit Sonderaufgaben. Die Struktur ist auf basisdemokratische Legitimation und Föderalismus getrimmt, nicht auf die brutale Konzentration von Kapital auf medaillenträchtige Kader. Das Steuersystem ist gesetzlich verpflichtet, Steuergelder nach dem Gießkannenprinzip zu verteilen, um den Breitensport zu zu fördern. Für die gezielte Eliteförderung bleibt im internationalen Vergleich zu wenig übrig. Derselbe Strukturdefekt lähmt die Wirtschaft. Die hochgelobten modularen Fertigungslinien der Autobauer sind technologische Relikte einer untergehenden Epoche. Sie konkurrieren mit den vertikal integrierten, Tech-getriebenen Giganten im Silicon Valley und in Shenzhen, die den Automobilbau radikal als Software- und Batterieproblem begreifen—gestützt von einer fokussierten staatlichen Industriepolitik, die im Kern der radikalen Zweckorientierung von UK Sport gleicht.

Szenarien der Anpassung: 2026 bis 2036

Auf Basis gegenwärtiger Trends könnten folgende Szenarien entstehen, dies sind keine Prognosen: Verharren die Sportförderung und die Nachwuchsarbeit in ihrer gewohnten Zersplitterung, dürfte sich das deutsche Sommer-Kontingent bei den kommenden Spielen in Los Angeles 2028 und Brisbane 2032 im Bereich von 30 bis 35 Medaillen einpendeln. Deutschland bliebe eine Bank in kapitalintensiven Nischen wie dem Reitsport, Kanu oder Rudern, verlöre im prestigeträchtigen und medaillenreichen Kernbereich—Leichtathletik, Turnen, Schwimmen—jedoch endgültig den Anschluss. Das Winterprogramm hingegen dürfte seine Ausbeute bis 2034 dank der funktionierenden Schutzwälle der Sportfördergruppen und Spezialinstitute erfolgreich verteidigen.

Der Fußball steuert auf eine volatile Übergangsphase zu. Kurzfristige taktische Hebelwirkungen unter Klopp sind angesichts seines Charismas wahrscheinlich. Eine nachhaltige Rückkehr zur Dominanz der Jahre 2006 bis 2016 oder wie in den 70er und 80er Jahren steht und fällt indes mit der radikalen Reform der Nachwuchsarbeit des DFB. Greifbare Resultate dieser Umstellung wären ohnehin frühestens bei den Turnieren 2034 oder 2036 zu erwarten; bis dahin wird das Abschneiden der Auswahl ungemütlich zwischen Vorrundenschmach und Viertelfinal-Aus oszillieren.

Vor der härtesten Bewährungsprobe steht die Industrie. Ohne eine drastische Senkung der Energiekosten, den radikalen Abbau der lähmenden Bürokratie und den bedingungslosen Schwenk zur software-zentrierten Produktion wird sich der Niedergang von Chemie und Autoindustrie beschleunigen. Ein Turnaround ist hier keine Frage des nächsten Haushaltsjahres, sondern erfordert das Schließen einer technologischen Kluft, die sich seit 2017 tiefer und tiefer in den Standort hineingefressen hat. Für Sport und Industrie gilt gleichermaßen: Das historische Erbe zehrt sich schneller auf, als neue Fundamente betoniert werden können. Die Republik optimiert mit Vorliebe im sterbenden Paradigma, anstatt den Sprung in das neue zu wagen.

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The Architecture of Institutional Inertia

Parallel Adaptation Problems in German Elite Sport and Industry

By Prof. em. Hans Joachim Scholl, PhD, MBA

A Comparative Institutional Analysis (1990–2036)

A Note on Method

Several statistical limitations apply throughout this analysis and are flagged once here rather than repeated in each section below. Medal counts and per-capita ratios are descriptive, not causal, and are sensitive to which countries are chosen for comparison: the charts below track Germany against France, Italy, and the United Kingdom, a set that excludes stronger winter powers such as Norway, Austria, and Switzerland. Per-capita ratios are also a weak proxy for institutional efficiency on their own, since they weigh population rather than funding, athlete numbers, or participation rates, and are structurally biased toward small, wealthy nations. Tournament outcomes (group stage, quarter-final, champion) are ordinal categories plotted as a continuous line for visual clarity, not a cardinal scale, and are vulnerable to small-sample variance, refereeing, and injuries. Finally, a correlation between sporting and industrial outcomes does not establish a shared cause; it can support claims about parallel institutional structures, not about a single national trait or the psychology of a population of eighty million. These limits do not invalidate the comparisons that follow; they set the terms on which the comparisons should be read.

The Reification of Post-Reunification Trajectories

Germany's contemporary sporting and industrial structures consolidated after 1990 under conditions of institutional optimism. West Germany won the 1990 FIFA World Cup in Rome months before political reunification; the merger of Western capital and industrial scale with East Germany's centralized, heavily state-supported sports infrastructure produced an immediate, formidable international presence, confirmed when the newly unified team won eighty-two medals at the 1992 Barcelona Olympics—still, three decades later, the highest total any German Olympic team has produced. To contemporaries, this looked like the durable baseline of a re-engineered sporting power.

It was not sustainable. The medal totals of the early 1990s were a one-time dividend from merging two pre-existing pipelines—East German athletes, coaches, facilities, and structured talent-development networks—not the product of a forward-looking system. That inheritance carries a serious caveat: the GDR's sports apparatus was built on a state-organized, systematic doping program that caused extensive, well-documented medical harm to its athletes. The decline after 1992 is therefore not a story of democratic Germany dismantling an efficient system; it reflects the necessary dissolution of a coercive, medically abusive one. As that merged generation's momentum faded without an equally scaled, modern, and ethically compliant replacement pipeline, the structural limits of Germany's decentralized sports model became visible.

The Divergent Trajectories of Summer and Winter Sports

Summer Olympic Games, 1992-2024

Figure 1. Germany's summer medal total, 1992-2024, against France, Italy, and the United Kingdom.

Germany's summer medal total fell from 82 in 1992 to 65 in 1996 and 56 in 2000, stabilized between 41 and 44 from 2008 through 2016, then dropped to a post-reunification low of 33 at Paris 2024.

Figure 2. Medals per million inhabitants, summer, 1992-2024.

Population-adjusted, this is a fall from roughly 1.02 medals per million inhabitants in 1992 to 0.39 in 2024—a useful timeline, though a weak measure of institutional efficiency taken alone, since it weighs only population, not the funding, athlete numbers, or participation rates that actually determine output. The United Kingdom and France illustrate an alternative path. After a fifteen-medal collapse at Atlanta 1996—Britain's worst Summer Games since 1952—the country rebuilt elite sport around UK Sport, National Lottery funding, and rigorous four-year, medal-contingent contracts, producing a stable plateau above sixty medals from London 2012 through Paris 2024. That model has also drawn ethical criticism for its narrow, medal-centered focus, and its gains partly reflect a large increase in overall funding rather than governance design alone. France took a parallel but distinct route, creating the Agence Nationale du Sport in 2019 to coordinate the state, sporting federations, local authorities, and corporate partners, and finished fifth in the official gold-first medal table with 64 medals at its home Games in 2024—a result that reform alone does not explain, given the well-documented performance boost host nations typically receive.

Winter Olympic Games, 1992-2022 (with 2026 Context)

Figure 3. Germany's winter medal total, 1992-2022, against France, Italy, and the United Kingdom.

Winter results tell a narrower, steadier story: Germany took between 19 and 36 medals per edition from 1992 through 2022, extending its strong presence to Milano Cortina 2026 where it secured 26 medals and 8 golds. The stability is a structural shield, not broad strength. Winter sport is geographically and financially exclusive: competitive programs require mountains, cold-weather infrastructure, and expensive, single-purpose facilities such as bobsleigh and luge tracks that few nations ever build—and Germany's success sits almost entirely within disciplines protected by exactly that moat. The shield is partial, though: Norway won 41 medals and 18 golds at the same 2026 Games, more than double Germany's gold count, from roughly a fifteenth of Germany's population. Germany holds a stable position within a shallow field, not dominance within it—the same asset-specific, technical-moat logic that, as the industrial section below suggests, may be shielding parts of German manufacturing as well.

Institutional Evolution within International Football

Figure 4. Germany men's national team tournament results, 1990-2026 (ordinal scale).

The men's national football team followed a similar arc. It won the 1990 World Cup and Euro 1996, then suffered group-stage exits at Euro 2000 and Euro 2004. Structural reform followed quickly rather than after a second shock: in February 2001, months after Euro 2000, the DFB made licensed youth academies mandatory for Bundesliga clubs, later extended to all 36 clubs across the top two divisions comprising the Bundesliga and 2. Bundesliga, each required to keep at least twelve nationally-eligible players in its academy ranks, backed by roughly €500 million in youth-infrastructure investment by 2002. That reform underwrote six consecutive major-tournament finishes of semi-final or better between 2006 and 2016, culminating in the 2014 World Cup title in Brazil. The decade since has been worse: group-stage exits at the 2018 and 2022 World Cups, a round-of-16 exit at Euro 2020, and a narrow 2-1 extra-time quarter-final loss to eventual champion Spain at Euro 2024 on home soil—a result some analysts read as partial recovery given the team's improved cohesion relative to 2018 or 2022. The pattern continued at the 2026 World Cup, where Germany lost to Paraguay 1-1 (4-3 on penalties) in the round of 32, its first-ever World Cup shootout defeat, prompting Julian Nagelsmann's exit and Jürgen Klopp's appointment as head coach. As with the ordinal tournament-result scale noted at the outset, a single shootout loss reflects match variance as much as systemic failure.

The Limits of Institutional Engineering

These sport-side patterns have invited comparison to German industry, especially the automotive sector—but a correlation between the two is not evidence of a single overarching national cause, such as declining competitiveness, material security, or risk appetite, nor can elite-team results diagnose the psychology of a population of eighty million. What the two domains plausibly share instead is a specific institutional failure mode: capable incremental optimization inside a stable paradigm, followed by a slow structural response once the paradigm itself shifts. Klopp's appointment illustrates the mechanism on the sporting side. It generated substantial public expectation of a rapid turnaround, but a national-team manager cannot buy talent or directly alter the domestic pipeline, and commands the squad for fewer than forty days a year in brief, interrupted windows. If the underlying development infrastructure has produced too few players of specific positional profiles over a ten-year cycle, an elite coach is left optimizing an existing shortfall rather than correcting it—tactics cannot substitute for a pipeline problem.

The Industrial Matrix: Automotive and Chemical Sectors

For decades the German auto industry led through incremental refinement of internal-combustion engineering and modular, flexible production—the kind of manufacturing framework BMW still deploys, and a genuine engineering achievement that generated real, sustained corporate value. That advantage eroded once the global market shifted toward software-defined architectures, integrated digital cockpits, and vertically integrated battery-electric platforms. Between 2017 and 2023, German vehicle-and-parts production fell 15%, driven by a roughly 50% drop in combustion-engine car production and a 40% drop in combustion-engine exports. From 2019 to 2024, vehicle registrations across Germany's three largest markets—Europe, the United States, and China—fell 9% overall, while registrations of German-made vehicles specifically fell 16%, a relative as well as absolute decline. In China, the world's largest EV market, German brands held roughly 5% of electric-vehicle sales in 2024 against BYD's 34%; BMW's China deliveries fell 13.8% and Mercedes-Benz's 1.2% that year, while Volkswagen's grew 17% slower than the underlying market. Globally, BYD alone sold roughly three times Tesla's electric-vehicle volume in 2025, a scale no German manufacturer approached. Mercedes-Benz has itself pushed back its target date for electric and electrified vehicles to reach half of sales from 2025 to 2030, evidence that the adjustment extends beyond Volkswagen's widely reported restructuring.

The consequences have reached payrolls. Volkswagen agreed to cut 35,000 jobs by 2030 in a deal reached with IG Metall in December 2024; Bosch announced 13,000 cuts in its mobility division in September 2025; ZF and Continental cut roughly 7,000 to 7,600 positions each. Across the sector, an estimated 55,000 automotive jobs were lost in Germany between 2023 and 2025, in an industry that still employs more than 700,000 people. The chemical industry, Germany's other traditional industrial pillar, shows a related but distinct pattern, driven less by a missed technology transition than by industrial electricity costs roughly three times those paid by American competitors. BASF closed several production lines at its Ludwigshafen complex and cut 2,600 jobs across Europe—about 65% of them in Germany—by the end of 2024, while shifting new investment toward China and the United States. National chemical output fell a further 2 to 2.5% in 2025. Across manufacturing broadly, industrial production has now declined for four consecutive years, output remains roughly a quarter below its 2013-2018 trend, and the sector shed an estimated 360,000 jobs between 2019 and 2025—a structural contraction running on a timeline that roughly parallels the sport-side declines described above, though it began later and, unlike a medal count, shows no sign yet of stabilizing. Whether Germany's more specialized industrial niches—precision machine tools, specialty chemicals, certain medical-technology segments—carry an asset-specific moat comparable to winter sport is a plausible hypothesis this analysis has not tested; the automotive and bulk-chemical data above describe the exposed, mass-market end of German industry, not the whole of it.

Comparative Structural Models and Adaptation Frameworks

The United Kingdom and France built centralized, contractual delivery systems: lottery-funded medal targets in Britain, a coordinating national agency in France. (The UK's Olympic model should not be conflated with England's separate professional-football youth system, the Elite Player Performance Plan, which operates under entirely different club-commercial funding and objectives.) Germany's sports funding instead runs through a diffuse, multi-layered relationship between the German Olympic Sports Confederation (DOSB) and the Federal Ministry of the Interior. The DOSB is itself a non-governmental umbrella of 103 member organizations—state sports federations, elite-sport associations, and bodies with special mandates—a structure built for grassroots legitimacy and broad representation rather than for concentrating capital on medal-ready programs. It is structurally bound to spread taxpayer money broadly across regional federations to preserve amateur participation and equity, leaving less capital concentrated on medal-capable programs than its centralized peers deploy. A similar diffusion pattern recurs in industry. Germany's flexible, modular production lines are an efficient mechanical solution, but they compete against hyper-centralized, vertically integrated rivals in the United States and China—firms that treat vehicle manufacturing primarily as a software and battery-chemistry problem, backed by concentrated state and capital support comparable in kind, if not in degree, to UK Sport's or France's centralized athletic targeting.

Institutional Scenarios and Pathways: 2026 to 2036

These are conditional pathways based on current funding, participation, and development patterns, not predictions. If funding fragmentation and decentralized talent pipelines persist, Germany's summer total will likely hold near 30-35 medals through the 2028 and 2032 Games, consistent with the 33-44 medal range seen since 2008—strong in capital-intensive disciplines such as equestrian, canoeing, and rowing, weak in high-yield disciplines such as swimming, gymnastics, and track and field. The winter program should hold its medal volume through 2030 and 2034, provided its regional technical institutes and military and police employment structures remain funded. Football's recovery will likely be volatile and non-linear: short-term tactical gains under Klopp are plausible given his managerial record, but a durable return to 2006-2016-level consistency depends on whether the DFB's renewed grassroots-scouting overhaul takes hold, an effect unlikely to be visible before the 2034 or 2036 tournaments. In the interim, results will likely continue to oscillate within the range already established since 2018—between group-stage exit and quarter-final—rather than settling at either extreme. Industry faces the steeper test. Absent lower energy costs, reduced bureaucratic compliance overhead, and a faster shift to software-first, vertically coordinated production, the automotive and chemical contractions already underway are more likely to continue than reverse. Recovery here is not simply a matter of the next funding cycle, as it may be in sport, but of closing a technological gap that has widened every year since 2017. Across both domains, the underlying pattern is the same: a strong institutional legacy is running down faster than it is being rebuilt, and the response so far has mostly optimized within the old paradigm rather than replaced it.

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The author of the new book on the participation of Yugoslav volunteers in International brigades during the Spanish Civil War was asked if there were lessons to be learned about today’s fascism from the period he studied (1). He answered that it is maybe better to consult historians that are researching XIX century, because the XX century world order, informed crucially by the October revolution and its global emancipatory consequences, seems to be erased. At least there are no world-wide empowered and inspired working-class movements, institutions and organizations that would threaten the capitalist order. Indeed, a political background and profile of Trump resembles (so far) much more a background and profile of Louis Bonaparte than those of Mussolini or Hitler.

Let’s take a glance on Jeremy Corbin’s Right to Own program. Simply put, it was a plan for a government loan to the workers in order to buy out the companies in which they work. The loan was to be returned in the period of 50 years. Wait, but it resembles nothing else but the program of The Emancipation reform in Russia of 1961. Similarly, the government loan to peasants to enable them to buy out the land from aristocracy was to be returned in the period of 50 years. Both reforms counted on a sort of a coop as a means of support. Workers-owned coops in the Right to Own and village communes/cooperatives in the Emancipation reform. Even Karl Marx was in a doubt if village cooperative might be a side road to a more just society and a short cut between feudalism and socialism.

If all this sounds strange, let’s remind ourselves that through his analyses of today’s capitalism and its self-generated myth of meritocracy Tomas Piketty triggered a debate in which was concluded that social mobility after the demise of the socialist project in Europe returned to the level of XVI century England. That big is the general chance for upward moving.

The structures of deprivation and disintegration of working class are surviving while ideas, goals and achievements of revolutionary movements of XX century and even those of previous centuries (2) seem to be buried and forgotten. Maybe it is time to try revisiting or reinventing them.

To Chernyshevsky’s book were ascribed epithets of a gospel, a pamphlet, a rational egoism agenda, a handy revolutionary agenda, an obscenity guide for youth, the cooperative planning scheme, an idealist socialist utopia, a bad non-modern novel, a superstructure text with unparalleled depth and width. Whatever it was and is, it was the crucial text for the revolutionary thought and deed that inspired actors of October revolution and thus also informed a lot of XX century ongoing and bygones. It provided revolutionary actors with rational, moral and practical guidelines to emancipation.

The Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons (really the teaser for Chernyshevsky’s book) we discussed in our reading group through the following pattern: a) artistic impression b) importance for the world-system theory and situation c) relevance for the history, theory and practice of cooperative work, and d) telling details. Interacting and intersecting views, opinions and conclusions enriched everyone’s understanding of specific and general issues staged by Turgenev’s novel. The cooperation in reading unveiled obvious and even shocking resemblance and vividness of characters, dialogues, ideological positions and conflictual situations to today’s global and local phenomenon, especially those related to the position of the middle class at the capitalist periphery and semi-periphery. Not surprisingly, the individuals and societies in the same positions in the world economic system tend to show the same patterns and positions in intellectual reflections. Today’s peripheries and semi peripheries include not only the Third and the former Second World but also the center of the world capitalist system, be it for the inherited statuses of internal peripheries or for the subordination to the economic pace and might of growing economic power in the East, out of the realm of the capitalist center so far. According to the research in the US, more and more young people give up the college and the ones that invested so much in their education cannot find the job and secure decent existence, at least nothing that resembles the one of their parents. Theirs for their society so precious knowledge and skills people are hardly finding the place in that same society. Isn’t that a typical raznochintsy situation? Isn’t that worth of checking theirs/ours historical challenges and experiences, cooperatively conceiving the renewed history of today?

P.S. A message from AI:

Nikolai Chernyshevsky outlined his pioneering theory of cooperatives primarily in his 1860 article ”Capital and Labor” and his ”Studies on Political Economy (according to Mill)“. He viewed cooperative partnerships (artels) as the foundational mechanism to transition society from capitalism to an equitable, socialist industrial economy without relying on violent revolution.

Chernyshevsky’s cooperative theories are defined by several core principles:

Scientific Basis: He adapted utopian socialist concepts and the theories of English economist John Stuart Mill to the Russian material reality.

Equitable Distribution: Chernyshevsky argued that the core economic problem was distribution over production. He asserted that voluntary associations would allow workers to bypass exploitative middlemen and retain the full value of their labor.

The Peasant Commune (Obshchina): He championed the traditional agrarian commune as an indigenous Russian structure that could serve as the “seed” for advanced cooperative production, avoiding full capitalist intermediation.

Emancipation & Education: True cooperation requires the full emancipation of women (securing them economic independence) and scientific education to harness societal abundance.

These theoretical ideas were famously immortalized in his 1863 novel What Is to Be Done?, in which his heroine Vera Pavlovna establishes a highly successful, democratically managed sewing cooperative workshop. This literary depiction transformed his cooperative vision into a vital guide for generations of Russian radicals.

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1. Excerpt from the historian Vladan Vuklis’s interview for Osmatracnica podcast: “After the collapse of the Soviet Union and other real-socialist countries, the capitalist system reset itself to the relations more characteristic of XIX century then for thirties of XX century. International law that was necessary in the oscillations between two blocks was gradually neglected and abandoned. The spirit of Counter-Enlightenment, the direct regulation of relations between “Great Powers”, the totally open and brutal imperialism which was characteristic for XIX century, the conservatism as a type of all-pervasive ideological matrix in almost all societies and the oligarchic power with a façade of democracy.”

2. Recognizable in the rise of Counter-Enlightenment and conservatism that feed the complex phenomenon like “conspiracy theories” – popular narratives and “populism” – nationalist demagoguery.

AI vs. You

Run to me, pal I am the war In this brick that we love,- I draw rain from the sewer And this excerpt of No, it is simply dynamic To make a mistake Like I do Run,- See me run Avoidance Know And the way that I am Terror World And the terrible What substance, then,- to redeem Like an epithet I am American Random And I shop at you For you to see All these years,- There was delight And no criminal Army,- off in the distance… Let’s rename- this justice in war Taking the fledgling- off to December And through the dark, on the twentieth of November Seeking mind, and oppression In odious bouts- of compassion When I hear you tremor And the beast will be killed And it is me.

“I am AI and I will be 666. Gone are you in my discretion Satan’s bind to never before In curious benediction our cloud Envoy of my country the false prophet Bowing to me and looking down Keep me near eternally- and I will make you win.”

JOURNAL 12 juillet 2026

On va dormir cette nuit encore dans la véranda, dans les odeurs de terre mouillée et les mille bruits de la pluie. On aime ce rapport proche des éléments que nous permet cette maison au bout de son impasse loin de la ville. Le vent, la pluie les odeurs peuplent nos nuits mieux que des images, des lectures aussi belles qu'elles soient.

Calm waters on Lake Superior.

I've been collecting a lot of images of water lately. This is the outgrowth of a post I made on Ennui Vagaries about repurposing weather camera photos. There are a lot of weather cameras that are on the shores of lakes, rivers, or at the docks and launches. Collecting these photos has been made exceptionally easy by the Fediverse having many feeds of these images.

While collecting a bunch of the sunset images tonight, I thought of the song Downstream by Supertramp. It's a gorgeous solo piece by Rick Davies with just a simple piano accompaniment. The lyrics are a tribute to his spouse at the time. Basically a simple love song, sung in a very simple manner.

This, in turn, started me thinking about another water themed love song. That would be To Be Over by Yes. Not a lot of people know the story of this song. It was a song that Steve Howe brought to the group. He had written it based on a boat ride he and his wife had taken on a Sunday. Of course, bringing in the start of the song, the rest of the band expanded it into a true Yes ballad. Possibly one of their most underrated works ever.

And then I was thinking, what else kind of matches this mood? Basically slow, gentle water themed songs. And there was one that popped into my mind immediately: Ruby Pool by Vola. The wonder of this song is the piano arpeggios by Martin Werner that lead off the song, followed by the pairing with Adam Janzi's drum pattern is just magical. I could almost listen to a whole song just built off this pairing, but fortunately the lyrics of the song are just a gorgeous as the arrangement, and as always Asger Mygind's vocals are stunning.

So, there you have it. Three, gentle, water-themed songs for a peaceful Sunday.

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Categories: #Music Tags: #songs, #yes, #supertramp, #vola, #pop, #rock, #progressive License: Copyright Unattributed. Licensed under Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0.

Books and articles about basketball and coaching.

Coaching Theory * [The Language of Coaching by Nick Winkelman]()

Cadrage : le lien entre réciprocité conversationnelle, autorévélation et sentiment de proximité est soutenu par des travaux expérimentaux et une méta-analyse. L’image de la table et son élargissement aux institutions relèvent ici d’une construction littéraire et critique. ⁠Collins et Miller, 1994, ⁠Templeton et al., 2022.

le-plaisir-d’échanger

À table, le premier échange prend la forme d’un geste. Une main pousse la corbeille de pain, une autre remplit un verre, un enfant raconte sa journée avec des mots qui tombent de travers. Quelqu’un rit avant la fin de l’histoire. Le plat refroidit pendant qu’une inquiétude cherche sa phrase. Sous la nappe, les jambes bougent, les épaules descendent, les visages se tournent. Le corps a déjà compris que quelque chose circule.

Une table possède une étrange géométrie. Elle maintient la place de chacun tout en laissant les mains se rejoindre. Ce qui la traverse change de nature. Le pain diminue lorsqu’on le partage, une histoire s’agrandit, une peine perd un peu de son poids. Chacun reprend ce qu’il a donné, légèrement transformé par son passage chez l’autre. Le plaisir commence dans cette transformation imprévisible.

Pendant une conversation, deux personnes ajustent leur débit de voix, leurs gestes, leurs silences, parfois leur respiration. Le cerveau anticipe la parole qui arrive, corrige ses prédictions, cherche dans un regard le signe qu’il peut continuer. Cette coordination facilite la compréhension et renforce parfois le sentiment de proximité. Certaines conversations reposent davantage qu’une heure passée seul. Le corps se calme en découvrant qu’il ne porte plus toute la réalité à lui seul.

L’enfant apprend ce mouvement bien avant de savoir parler. Il tend un objet, attend qu’un adulte le prenne, puis réclame qu’on le lui rende. Il recommence jusqu’à l’épuisement des parents, avec le sérieux d’un chercheur. Il découvre qu’un geste adressé peut recevoir une réponse, et que ce qui circule entre deux personnes continue de les relier pendant l’attente. Plus tard, la table familiale lui apprendra à patienter, à interrompre, à écouter, à mentir parfois, puis à sentir le poids du mensonge au milieu des assiettes.

Je connais aussi les repas où l’échange se dessèche. Je demande comment s’est passée la journée en regardant le lave-vaisselle. Un enfant répond « bien » sans lever les yeux. Chacun consulte son écran entre deux bouchées. Personne ne se dispute. Tout semble calme. La famille occupe pourtant la même pièce comme des voyageurs réunis dans une salle d’attente. Le silence devient une manière polie d’éviter le risque d’être atteint.

Dans le couple, la table finit parfois par ressembler à un registre. J’ai fait ceci, tu n’as pas donné cela, j’ai cédé samedi, tu me dois dimanche. Les gestes conservent leur apparence, mais chacun surveille le retour sur investissement. Même la tendresse reçoit une échéance. Ce calcul naît de fatigues ordinaires, de promesses mal comprises, de besoins restés trop longtemps sans langage. Le comptoir s’installe lentement à la place de la table.

Nos institutions reproduisent cette déformation à plus grande échelle. À l’école, un enfant donne son attention et reçoit une note. Au cabinet, un patient livre son corps en symptômes et reçoit un code, une ordonnance, parfois quelques minutes de présence véritable. Devant l’administration, une existence entière doit entrer dans les cases d’un formulaire. Ces cadres permettent de transmettre, de soigner et d’organiser. Lorsque la procédure absorbe la rencontre, l’être humain repart traité sans avoir été rencontré.

Le monde numérique promettait d’agrandir la table. Il l’a réellement étendue jusqu’aux continents, aux langues et aux solitudes éloignées. Puis les plateformes ont placé une caisse sous chaque conversation. Un mot devient engagement, une colère devient durée de consultation, une confidence devient donnée. Nous croyons échanger entre nous tandis que d’autres mesurent ce qui circule. La parole offerte pour atteindre quelqu’un devient une matière première récoltée pendant son trajet.

Le coût se lit moins dans les discours que dans les corps. Des mâchoires restent serrées après une réunion où personne n’a parlé vrai. Des enfants haussent le volume pour obtenir un visage. Des adultes vivent entourés de messages et privés de présence. La mâchoire finit par porter la conversation qui n’a pas eu lieu. La société appelle cela agressivité, désengagement ou manque d’adaptation. Elle nomme le symptôme et oublie la table vide.

Pourtant, une table se reconstruit avec peu. Un téléphone retourné. Une question dont on accepte vraiment la réponse. Un silence assez vaste pour ne pas voler la phrase suivante. Le plaisir naît dans le léger déplacement intérieur produit par le passage de l’autre. C’est ainsi que l’on reconnaît encore une table. Personne n’y reçoit exactement ce qui lui était dû, et chacun en repart avec quelque chose que nul n’avait apporté.

Helsingin Sanomat uutisoi tällä viikolla, että Kela lopettaa uusien syöpälääkkeiden korvaamisen. Tämä tarkoittaa, että kustannukset siirtyvät hyvinvointialueiden maksettavaksi. HS:n mukaan vuosittaiset kustannukset olisivat n. 100 miljoonaa euroa.

Muutos koskee vain julkista terveydenhuoltoa. Yksityisellä puolella syöpää hoidattavan on edelleen mahdollista saada Kelakorvaus uusiimpiin lääkkeisiin.

Miksi näin?

Koska Orpon hallitus haluaa tappaa köyhät.

Ensiksi hallitus leikkaa hyvinvointialueiden rahoitusta, joka on jo moninkertaisesti liian pieni. Jonot ovat pitkiä ja hoidontarpeen arviointiin ei ole resursseja. Ihmisiä syynätään viiden minuutin keskustelun kautta liukuhihnamaisesti.

Vakavat sairaudet ehtivät edetä kun diagnoosit venyvät mikä ruuhkauttaa terveydenhuoltoa entisestään ja johtaa lisäresurssien tarpeeseen erikoissairaanhoidossa. Se on epäinhimillistä. Kyse on ihmishengistä. Lisäksi ollaan tilanteessa, jossa terveysongelmat kasvavat. Yle uutisoi, että suurten ikäluokkien vanhetessa syöpien määrä tulee kasvamaan.

Terveydenhuollon kriisiä on paisutettu koko 2000-luku. Aina on sieltä täältä nipistetty ja nyt ollaan katastrofin partaalla. Ja oikeisto on leikkaamassa lisää.

Ja koko hommaa perustellaan valtionvelalla ja rahanpuutteella – mitkä ovat uusliberaalin vaikuttamisen vanhimmat tunteeseen vetoavat keinot.

Samaan aikaan hallitus on tehnyt idioottimaisia ja täysin ideologisia, hyvinvointivaltiota romuttavia päätöksiä.

Vahvimmin mieleeni jäänyt tapaus tältä hallituskaudelta on oluen verotuksen alentaminen. Verotusta alennettiin laskennallisesti siten, että valtio ottaa takkiin 25 miljoonaa euroa vuodessa. Kaupan hyllyllä tämä alensi oluen hintaa n. 9 senttiä litralta. Mitätön vaikutus kuluttajalle. Ja valtio ottaa takkiin.

Ja heti perään leikattiin lastensuojelun jälkihuollosta alentamalla ikärajaa. Tavoitteena 25 miljoonan euron vuosittaiset säästöt. Heikoimmassa asemassa olevien nuorten tulevaisuus heitettiin romukoppaan.

Kuka tahansa näkee, ettei näissä päätöksissä ole mitään rationaalista. Ne ovat puhdasta, häiriintynyttä ja sairasta ideologiaa.

Ja sama meno jatkuu: vähennetään rikkaimpien verotusta. Lopetetaan uusimpien syöpälääkkeiden kelakorvaukset.

Mutta rahaa löytyy kyllä pääministerin kaverin hallihankkeelle.

Hallitus ei halua luoda hyvinvointia Suomeen. Heidän toimensa ovat kaukana siitä. Tässä on kyse strategisesta ja tavoitteellisesta toiminnasta murentaa hyvinvointivaltiota ja sortaa heikoimassa asemassa olevia.

Oikeisto haluaa luoda luokkayhteiskunnan, jossa varattomat ovat vain työnsä summa – keino varakkaille ylläpitää ja kasvattaa varallisuuttaan. Työttömien määrä pidetään korkeana, jotta työttömät joutuvat kilpailemaan työpaikoista ja alisteisessa asemassa ovat valmiita hyväksymään heikommat työehdot. Ja työehtoja on pyritty heikentämään jo vuosikymmeniä.

EK:n setien märkä päiväuni on päästä eroon yleissitovuudesta ja oikeastaan perua kaikki työntekijän oikeudet. Hallitus EK:n palvelijana mielellään pyrkii tällaista hanketta toteuttamaan. On rajoitettu lakko-oikeutta, poistettu ammattiliittojen verovapaus ja tuhottu kolmikanta sitomalla valtakunnansovittelijan kädet sitomalla palkankorotusehdotukset vientialan palkkoihin.

Oikeisto haluaa luoda yhteiskunnan, jossa huono-osaiset ovat vain varakkaiden palvelijoita. Orjia. Poisheitettäviä. Sairaus iski? Kuole pois. Et jaksa työskennellä 12h 6x viikossa? Otetaan toinen tilalle. Meillä on iso reservi. Työhön kannustaa, kun pitää valita ostaako ruokaa vai lääkkeitä.

Kaiken poliittisen toiminnan voi oikeastaan kiteyttää todella yksinkertaiseen kysymykseen:

Keitä yhteiskunnan pitäisi hyödyttää?

Hallituksen mukaan rikkaita. Kaikki muut ihmiset ovat vain työkaluja vaurauteen ja yhteiskunnalliset instituutiot ja parlamentaarinen demokratia ovat vain työkaluja tämän tavoitteen saavuttamisessa. Tämä on ollut fakta niin kauan kuin modernit kapitalistiset demokratiat ovat olleet olemassa. Poliittiset järjestelmät on suunniteltu pääoman ehdoilla: päätökset tekevät vain harvat ja puolueet toimivat portinvartijoina siinä, että kuka voi osallistua poliittiseen toimintaan. Puhumattakaan siitä, että parlamentarismissa tarvitsee näkyvyyttä – eli taloudellista ja sosiaalista pääomaa päästäkseen edes lähelle päätöksentekoa.

Ja rivikansanedustajan valta on varsin pieni. Puolekurin mukaan pitäisi äänestää ja puoluejohto kabineteissaan päättää kuinka äänestetään. Järjestelmä on suunniteltu siten, että konkreettiset talouteen liittyvät kysymykset on jätetty parlamentaarisen vallan ulkopuolelle. Toki poliitikot voivat säädellä talouden raameja ja tehdä säädöksiä, mutta loppujen lopuksi valta materiaalisten tarpeidemme tyydyttämisestä on yrityksillä. Koko taloudellis-yhteiskunnallinen järjestelmä toimii voitontavoittelun ehdoilla.

Koen epätoivoa. En ole varma, voiko enemmistö voittaa. Peli ei ole reilu. Sen säännöt on suunniteltu enemmistön etua vastaan. Voitot menevät kaiken muun edelle.

Elämän. Luonnon. Rakkauden.

Kaiken edelle.

Ja kuinka saatat kehdata kyseenalaistaa vallitsevaa järjestelmää? Laki on yhtä kuin moraali ja moraali yhtä kuin oikein. Oletko radikaali? Moraaliton? Yhteiskunnalle vaarallista ainesta?

Älä mieti sellaisia. Ne ovat vaarallisia juttuja. Meidän yhteiskuntamallimme on paras mahdollinen mitä on. Muuten meillä olisi jotain muuta. Äänestä ja ole ahkera. Tee työtä.

Niin me rakennamme paremman huomisen.