I'm tired of the big world - and will focus more on my Berlin locality for a while.

Because... everywhere shallow - but sometimes truly deadly - extremism is hyped and held forward as the big thing (it often isn't, on the ground), and those advocating saner content as well as the art of compromise are ridiculed. So I'd rather not participate in that!!

To back that contention up a little, three cases, all non-Islamist for once (whaddyaknow?):

• US primaries: Frontrunners at the moment are two extremists, one sweet older guy who constantly builds imaginary castles in the air of all the great reforms he will initiate, and a laughably narcissistic bully who doesn't really suggest anything constructive - except a new Great Wall across the bottom of North America, particularly distasteful to a Berliner - but tells everyone they will "love" whatever he does whenever he gets around to doing it, because it's all "for you". Guys like these will either be zero-movers or dictatorially destructive catastrophes if they get elected. They offer hardly any content (e.g. on who will pay for all of that), and only hype one-word explanations on their strategy like "revolution" and "carpet-bombing".

• Russian interventionism: Apart from real military & thus deadly forays into Syria & earlier Ukraine, the last-but-one SPIEGEL issue (no. 5/'16) documents how Russia is trolling Internet chats/forums on a major scale, how it's even getting involved in a murky kidnap/rape story of a teenage daughter of Russian-German immigrants, implying that German lawmakers are blind & inhumane. At the same time, the Kreml seems to be financially chumming up to nationalist extremists in Germany (& the above-mentioned favourite of US nationalists, in words, anyway).

• Refugees in Germany: Rather than face facts - i.a. that things are hardly as dire as they are painted by nationalists like the AfD & CSU political parties - Germans are mesmerised by crazy slandering (the CSU's top dog has just compared the German state indirectly to East Germany under communism, a state of which his party is part of the government!), and hollow demands (an "Obergrenze" - i.e. "maximum boundary count" - to the no. of refugees entering the country, which, since there is no practical/civilised way of stopping them, can never be enforced).

In a world rife with fatal developments, partly due to bad decisions made earlier by the Western powers, surely we need some (slow) reflection and more compromise. But demand for both is low, and ever fewer folk offering these qualities still prepared to stump on.

I need to Phone Home, now.

... snapped by 2 people close to me, who maybe haven't taken too many. I liked that as much as the fact that they sent it! Good New Year, all.

I'm sitting in an Austrian ski resort hotel (though I don't ski) and have finally finished reading all the texts on Angela Merkel in the TIME issue of 9 days ago. She's on the cover as Person of the Year.

Since recently, also in this blog, I've questioned whether the US, for all its many advantages, can still carry the flag of the Leadership of the Free World... Has something changed this last turbulent year?

• PRO: The U.S. have basically thrown down the Leadership crown since the last few decades, by their extreme interventionism & military "solutionism" to all the world's problems, quite a few of which are, totally or in part, clear consequences of their actions. -- Germany's attempted absorption of two orders of magnitude (!) more war refugees than any of the "Great" Western nations, like France or the U.S., makes it a candidate. Also, Germany defines freedom in a 21st century way, i.e. without guns in every household, and has done so for half a century.
   
  
• CON: The U.S. for year after year have taken on millions of de facto immigrants from South of its borders. Under Obama, they've even stepped up programs to make studying and citizenship for young Latino immigrants, & children of Latino immigrants, possible. -- Merkel's new reputation for humaneness isn't backed up by the many years of not doing a thing for integration of foreigners in places like Berlin & Hamburg, both cities I know relatively well. On TV, there just ran a small documentary on one of the most integrating series ever to be presented in moving pictures: The Bill Cosby Show, once the most popular show on U.S. TV for several years running. -- In addition, Germany is still too close to that vast crime against humanity, the Nazis and all they did. Just seven decades ago. And populist extremist political talk is still rife everywhere, especially in recent months. Double shame!

One thing Merkel has definitely done: Show the world that the time for patriarchal machos, like TIME's 2nd runner-up, Donald Trump - and many Austrian men, apparently - is finally coming to an end for good.

Let's see what the history books - and political commentators - say in, say, a decade.