A friend of mine tweeted recently that our world seems broken at the moment. When I jokingly replied I hadn't noticed & that I was feeling okay in mine, he gave me a list of current happenings/politicians as proof of breakage.

With my school debating society background, I can tell a debating challenge when one comes knocking, so here I go down some of the list...

Security agencies (USA & FRG)
The greatest threat to our world first... Yes, it is a great one. But here comes a perhaps specious argument: It's an age-old threat. Current is only Mr. S.'s "leaking" of what they are currently capable of doing, and how foolish we Internet users have been in opening up our public and private lives, right down to the camera pointing at us on every laptop, to these illegal observers. Illegal because of the implicit total foregoing of the presumption of innocence. -- This is a long-term problem truly threatening to break our world, and we need to address it by forcing our governments to put their monies where their big mouths are re privacy protection. And to accept less national security because of it.

Saxony
The police in a major city in this federal German state were handed a likely IS terrorist - by other Syrians! - including plans to set off a (probably suicide) bomb in a near future, that will now not happen, luckily. At first the cops couldn't admit it wasn't them who had brought in the potential culprit. And then they left him alone in a holding cell with enough materials to hang himself. Which he apparently proceeded to do. The home minister of the state apologised, but did not resign. -- I'm sorry but this reminds of me of much worse cases during Apartheid in the 80s in South Africa. In one of them, evidence of major mistreatment of the dead suspect came to light, and the minister of "Law & Order" didn't bother commenting, much less resigning; after a week, the newspapers had dropped the story. As long as German media & the public are as upset about this as they are now, and remain that way for a while, and perhaps even get the Saxon police in line, things are much better here than they have been, or still are, in many other countries.

Syria
Yes, d' accord, that one can't be argued against. One true sad blight on our happy planet. Let's never forget the thousands & thousands of civilian dead.

AfD
This pretty ridiculous party's not going away after a few months is actually a blessing in disguise. It makes Germans - yes, like me - wake up to the real yesteryear (fantasy) thinking in the heads of at least a fifth of the voting population. And it allows those of us who say "never again Nazism" to sharpen our arguments, and build our courage (& muscles if worst comes to worst). Pre-AfD times were just a little too stupidly comfy in Germany.

May
I'm not sure that Mrs. May means all the nationalist tilting she's doing to the British political consensus of recent decades. Perhaps she is just playing a hot poker game right now. Look at the hopeful gist of the next-to-last ECONOMIST's cover (right), for instance. So the new Iron Lady with the Shoes is a potential crack, I agree. But not quite broken through yet, I feel.

Putin
Yes, this guy is a new major Fascist "world leader" waiting to happen, especially after the crazily genocidal bombing sprees in Syria of recent weeks. The new twist is that he keeps calling everyone else - except Assad & his army - fascists. Which will also be his downfall, I feel. Without any friends, an already weak Russia will fail. Soon.

Trump
A badly-smelling dog star already starting to fade again. A longer-term - but not yet current - threat is the wave of anti-elite sentiment he - the biggest gold-fingering member of an elite consisting of only his family - is surfing so profitably. So, to help prevent a future broken world, here I just hand over to the late great s.f. master Kurt Vonnegut (courtesy of the Engl. Wikipedia):

"The two real political parties in America are the Winners and the Losers. The people don’t acknowledge this. They claim membership in two imaginary parties, the Republicans and the Democrats, instead."

If you correspondingly substitute local political parties near the end, applicable more and more to all Western nations at the moment, it seems to me...

P.S.: The older I get, the more local my world gets. So the hardest counter argument I can bring against my friend, my tired mind tells me, is homely-cobbled Friesenstraße near where I live... As I walk up it: Great book shops on the left, the wonderful Brezel Bar - ah, the taste of a truly freshly baked pretzel - on the right, then a great soup joint (only open during work days, not evenings!), further up the best video rental in the world. And if you feel threatened by Cross Mountaineers, the district's police station is at top left...

The other day I was waiting in a cinema, dressed in a dinner jacket and sporting a nifty umbrella - and the person I was waiting for had forgotten our meeting. I'd been invited to something like a premiere and was allowed to bring one guest along.

When I phoned the intended guest 5 minutes after the arranged time (which for once had to be kept absolutely, since there was an i.d. check queue we had to be at before the film began), they were sitting in a good mood at their desk. I was flabbergasted. Too hectically, probably, I said, i.a.:

I meant that perhaps 5% as it was said. It was just shorter to say than "You've forgotten your appointment with me". That's what I really meant to transport.

I didn't give it much thought, although I did wonder when hearing nothing more of the non-attendee for the next 36 hours or so. In fact, I thought that a bit heartless.

When an SMS came along, apologising for badly seating me (German idiom for not having turned up), due to time pressure and exhaustion, etc., I thought I'd just mention in a return SMS that the behaviour on the phone indicated that I'd simply been forgotten. Also to suggest a technical solution how I could help prevent this in future (it has happened a few times before, you see).

Unfortunately I began the SMS with the same sentence as the highlighted one above, this time in writing.

Again, I actually wanted to communicate the forgetting more than the "me". But, maybe since SMS texts need to be short, and because the brain likes repeating things it already "knows", I again chose the brief version.

Now a rather angry SMS came along from the other side, preaching that it hadn't been "m e" that had been "f o r g o t t e n", and that I shouldn't always take things personally. Of course, I shot back a too-dry defensive SMS.

Only (days) later, I realised we'd probably been "arguing" off-target, in parallel, constantly misunderstanding each other. I was set on addressing the other's (constant) forgetting; the other person's focus was on my double "me" - also probably explaining the 36 hours. Having forgotten that I'd gotten dressed up because they'd said that was how they would come.

But "dressed down" communication like brief phone calls and SMS texts aren't really designed for better understanding and less (mis)interpretation at all. So why don't we - yes, me, too! - learn to slow down during a crisis, and not use some macho tight-lipped Dirty Harry mode to transport important negotiation data?

I wonder if that's the reason Twitter has become such a source for storms of public indignation and even hysteria. Of course also a source preferred by ISIL.

We know - even if we may ignore - Slow Food. Let's also bring in more Slow Talk. E.g. in person, seated, in a neutral place. Considered communication, longer than 140 or 160 characters at a time, to de-escalate crises.

Even better (provided you survive the fight): Write a snail-mailed letter!

Today I'm hit by three "exes", each in turn capitalising on the punch of the one before...

The first "ex" is in the extraordinary heat of this, the hottest day so far in this year's Berlin summer. It was 30° in the shade yesterday, and today it's hotter.

The 2nd one is already an "Ex" - the Existence of Nokia in Germany tending toward zero. I finally realised because of some mails in the office today, that Nokia is now really an Indian firm (in Finland they are still managing some servers and the trademark name, no more, really) and will gather more and more of its data centre operations in and around Bangalore.

The final and most resounding "EX" is of course part of the BREXIT that mostly the English voted for till late last night, and that got counted & officially instated this morning. The pound almost immediately crashed by a mile, approaching minus 10% of its value yesterday against the dollar. The finance sector in London - a city that voted almost to a man to "Bremain" - is in an uproar regarding its future. UKIP have already - figuratively within minutes of the official result - gone back on one of their campaign slogans, that implied they'd do a whole lot for the NHS. Scotland, and, more urgently, Northern Ireland, will probably secede Real Soon Now.

And the ECONOMIST's well-written "Brexit Briefs" describe how the U.K. will soon have to decide whether to stay in the EEA - meaning it will now have to accede to most of those horrid EU regulations, anyway, to keep trading with it for free - or go the much harder way of setting up long-winded trade agreements with half of the EU countries, that it still wants to import from or export to, individually.

Mrs. Merkel has said the EU should now promote its ideas much more to individual EU citizens than before. I say that lame EU bureaucrats need to get up and do more listening to worries of their harder-up citizens - like the English fishers, who seem to me justifiably happy about being freed of their partly inane quotas. And then bending laws & finance to flow toward lightening those worries. Pronto!

The EU needs to be reformed - the whole cake needs to be rebaked from scratch, perhaps with several layers of participation. With built-in checks and balances, and much less red tape! With a less powerful & not just nominally representative Commission, and a more powerful Europarliament! -- So as to allow even hardy & proud island folk to find their way back into the project.

...

My personal feeling on the British affair my heart started at about age 10, back as an immigrant child in Africa, learning this strange but powerful new language called English, is that I'm just numb. And have to keep telling myself it's all only just Legalese. (Good luck!)

And that I shouldn't fall into the same rhetorical hole of nationalistic competitiveness, that millions of other Europeans seemed to have fallen into. Just yesterday.