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.