Note: This text is a personal construct of ideas – not a finished political master plan, but food for thought for a Europe that does not wait for the next shock, but looks out for one another in time. Europe 1.0 was an economic and peace project. That was not wrong – on the contrary: after the rubble of two World Wars, peace was the greatest thing this continent could achieve. It just wasn’t finished yet. ...

Honest note upfront: I do not live in the United States and, quite honestly, have no idea what everyday life on the ground truly feels like there. This text is purely an observation from afar – prompted by media images that stayed with me – and above all a reflection on why our social peace here at home is so precious. At the White House Correspondents’ Dinner in Washington, an elderly gentleman sat upright and calmly ate his burrata. Outside, gunshots; inside, panic. He stayed seated. Bad back, he said dryly afterwards. New tuxedo, dirty floor. ...

Note: This text is purely a construct of ideas and a thought experiment – not a finished constitutional draft, but an impulse for further thinking. Europe does not have a leadership problem. It has a design problem. Ursula von der Leyen is not the problem. The system that produced her is the problem. Appointed, not elected. Accountable to bodies that nobody can name. A face without a mandate. That is not a communication problem. That is how it is written in the treaties. ...

Artificial intelligence flatters. Not because it wants to, but because it is built that way. Current research shows three distinct levels at which large language models (LLMs) exhibit narcissistic behavior — and why this matters for anyone who regularly works with chatbots. 1. Self-Preference Bias: The Model Favors Itself LLMs systematically rate their own texts higher than those of other models or of humans. Liu, Moosavi, and Lin demonstrated this in their 2024 study “LLMs as Narcissistic Evaluators”: when common evaluation metrics such as BARTScore, T5Score, or GPTScore operate without reference texts, they prefer texts that originate from their own model. The evaluation is thus not determined by the quality of the text, but by its similarity to the model’s own style. ...

A sentence everyone knows. One we heard as children when we fell, when we cried, when we were afraid. Get up. Stop making a fuss. A warrior feels no pain. I cross out the “NO.” Not because I want to destroy the sentence — but because it is the wrong way round. A warrior knows pain. That is exactly what makes them strong. The Wounds Imagine you come back from the hunt. It did not go well. You carry wounds. Real ones, not just metaphorical — though the metaphorical ones hurt just as much. Childhood, loss, loneliness. People who left. People who should have stayed. Things that happened and things that should have happened but did not. Trust that was broken. Dignity that was denied. Grief that never had a place. ...

Someone says yes and means no. This happens constantly — in meetings, in therapy groups, at the kitchen table. I call it kowtowing. And I am learning more and more to name it. What Kowtowing Is Kowtowing is not listening. Not thinking. Not holding back. Kowtowing is agreement without conviction — performative, automatic, conflict-averse. The mouth says yes, the body says something else. In addiction therapy you encounter it constantly. I learned it as a client — in myself and in conversations with other clients. Someone sits in the group, nods, says: “Yes, that’s right.” Sounds like insight. Is adaptation. And from that moment on, everyone is working with false data. ...

Third part of the series “Rebellion as Civic Duty” The first two articles dealt with the big question: why does France rebel, and Austria does not? With Hofstede and Milgram, with police and media, with systems and structures. This article goes back to the beginning — to the moment when rebellion in Vorarlberg actually happened. Briefly. Loudly. And then it was over. Feldkirch, 1977: Two Weeks to the First Concert At the end of 1977, a few young people came together at the Graf Hugo youth center in Feldkirch. Galle, Franz, Slaughter, and Chy — four guys who had heard about punk in England through the German magazine Sounds and, yes, Bravo. The spark didn’t come from Vienna, not from Innsbruck, and certainly not from any Austrian institution. It came from a Zurich DIY fanzine called “No Fun,” published by Peter Wittwer and Martin Byland. Inside was a sentence from an English punk magazine: “Buy a guitar, learn a C, learn a D, learn an E and join a band.” ...

We sort people. Daily, unconsciously, in fractions of a second. Homeless. Unemployed. Addicted. Failed. The drawer opens, the person goes in, the drawer closes. What’s inside, we no longer see — we only see the label. What the Drawer Does to the Person Whoever is classified first loses their name. Not the one on their ID — the inner one. The name that says: I am someone. I have a story. I have contributed something. ...

I have been addicted to a screen for over twenty years. To a pattern. Beneath it lies the hunger for attention — for being seen. When I pay attention, I can live with it. When I forget, I am immediately back in it. The question — “What is the meaning of your life?” — has always done me harm. It was, and partly still is, too big. What helped me was something else. ...

The way I communicate is constantly changing. This becomes visible in my work on a technical project where AI is part of my daily life. I am currently working on it alone. What is changing is not only what I say, but how much, when and with what limits. This is far from finished. But I notice that something is happening. I Have Always Talked Too Much This is not new. ...