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Trump

Passion Fruit | phb POTUS and Corruption How Power corrupts ... Casino Deals, jeder ist zu kaufen, die Macht des Geldes. The ZDF documentary series Trump — Die Spur des Geldes arrives at precisely the right moment — and asks precisely the right question. Do Trump's politics and his family's business dealings merge into one? A look at global deals, loyal networks, and their consequences for the United States and the world. https://www.zdf.de/dokus/trump-die-spur-des-geldes-100 LinkedThis is not tabloid journalism. It is investigative documentary filmmaking in the European public broadcasting tradition — methodical, sourced, and uncomfortable.The series, by authors Tristan Söhngen and Jörg Levsen, follows the connections between politics and private enterprise during Trump's second term, with filming locations including New York, Washington, Singapore, Southeast Asia — and even a small town in North Rhine-Westphalia. (https://www.prisma.de/news/tv/Die-Trump-Connection-Das-Geschaeft-mit-der-Macht-ZDF-Dokumentation-ueber-Donald-Trump-und-sein-politisches-Amt-sowie-seine-persoenlichen-Interessen,55922075) That last detail alone is worth pausing over. The reach of Trumpian financial entanglements into the German heartland is not a metaphor. It is a documented fact.The film shows how Trump governs without any separation from his business empire, and how political decisions, economic interests, and personal networks are interlocked — at crypto conferences, construction projects, and in regulatory decisions that place loyalty above competence. (https://www.magdeburg-klickt.de/doku-die-trump-connection-das-geschaeft-mit-der-macht-zdf-2015-2100-uhr/) The dismantling of anti-corruption mechanisms and the restructuring of the Department of Justice compound the picture: transparency and the separation of powers are being systematically undermined. [Magdeburg](https://www.magdeburg-klickt.de/doku-die-trump-connection-das-geschaeft-mit-der-macht-zdf-2015-2100-uhr/)For educators, the series raises…

Democracy, are you still in there? // Democracia, ¿Sigues ahí?

It has been a few weeks since I wanted to share this song. Finally, talking with my 100-years-self, I release it for all of you.Hace unas semanas que quería compartir esta canción. Finalmente, tras hablar con mi yo-centenario, la publico para todos vosotros. Democracy, are you still in there? // Democracia, ¿Sigues ahí?

Ken Follett & his Century Trilogy

History as Human ExperienceKen Follett's Century Trilogy: A ReviewPeter H Bloecker | Burleigh Waters, Gold CoastThere is a moment in Fall of Giants, the first volume of Ken Follett's Century Trilogy, when a young Welsh miner and a Russian revolutionary find themselves on opposite sides of a war that neither of them chose, yet both of them understand. It is a small moment in a vast novel — barely half a page. But it carries the weight of the entire project: history is not made by the powerful. It is endured, shaped, and ultimately survived by ordinary people who happen to be standing in its path.The Century Trilogy — Fall of Giants (World War I), Winter of the World (World War II), and Edge of Eternity (Cold War to 1989) — is an act of narrative ambition that few contemporary writers would attempt. Across three volumes and roughly 3,500 pages, Follett traces five interconnected families — Welsh, English, Russian, German, and American — through the defining catastrophes of the twentieth century. The result is something rare in popular fiction: a serious work dressed in the clothes of entertainment.The Architecture of the ProjectFollett is, above all, a structural engineer of narrative. His plots do not meander — they are load-bearing. Like the cathedral in his earlier masterwork The Pillars of the Earth, the Century Trilogy is built with extraordinary care: each family…

Learning

What is the last thing you learned? There is no last thing, as I learn about three new things per day. My definition of learning is very unique and only valid for myself: Observe and focus and reflect. Inspired by Atomic Habits and other authors. We all are standing on the shoulders of giants. Like Einstein. And many others. We are born to learn daily.

Abstractions

Credit phb From Mud to Mind: Geometry, Language and the Origins of Abstraction A meditation on how humanity learned to think beyond the visible There is a remarkable story hidden inside the word Geometrie. Its Greek roots — γῆ (gē, earth) and μέτρον (métron, measure) — tell us that this most abstract of disciplines began in the mud. Every year, the Nile flooded its banks and erased the boundary markers of Egyptian farmland. Surveyors waded back into the delta to remeasure, recalculate, and re-divide. Geometrie was, at its birth, a practical technology of survival and ownership — not of the mind, but of the foot and the rope and the saturated soil. And then something extraordinary happened. The Greeks took this earthy craft and asked: what are the principles behind it? Euclid, writing around 300 BCE, produced the Elements — thirteen books that never once mention a Nile flood, a piece of land, or a boundary dispute. Instead he offered points, lines, planes, and axioms: a world of pure relation, stripped of all material content. Geometry had undergone its first great Abstraktion — the leap from the particular to the universal, from mud to mind. Sprache: When the Word Detached from the World A parallel story unfolded in the origins of language itself — though we are still, millennia later, trying to understand it fully. The German word Sprache connects to…

Projektwoche in Deutschland

Projektwoche Klasse 11 – Wenn die Erde bebt | Bloecker Blog Gymnasium Oberstufe · Projektwoche · Klasse 11 Wenn die Erde bebt — Literatur,Krieg und die Fragenach dem Menschen Ein fächerübergreifendes Unterrichtsprojekt mit KI-Unterstützung · Voltaire · Kleist · Geschichte Fächer Deutsch · Geschichte · Politik · Philosophie Stufe Klasse 11 · LK & GK Dauer Eine Projektwoche von P. H. Blöcker Zwei Texte. Dasselbe Erdbeben. Fünf Kriege. Eine Frage — lernt die Menschheit aus Katastrophen, oder wiederholt sie dieselben Mechanismen unter neuen Namen? 01 · Konzept & LernzieleWarum diese Projektwoche? Diese Projektwoche verbindet zwei kanonische Texte der deutschsprachigen Schullektüre — Voltaires Candide (1759) und Kleists Das Erdbeben in Chili (1807) — mit fünf historischen Kriegs- und Konfliktzenarien des 20. und 21. Jahrhunderts. Ziel ist keine bloße Wissensvermittlung, sondern die Entwicklung einer analytischen Grundhaltung, die für die Facharbeit in der Oberstufe unverzichtbar ist. Übergeordnete Leitfrage der Woche „Lernt die Menschheit aus Katastrophen — oder wiederholt sie dieselben Mechanismen unter neuen Namen?" Die Schülerinnen und Schüler erwerben dabei folgende Kompetenzen: Kompetenz Fachverankerung Textanalytische Tiefe LK/GK Deutsch Historisch-politisches Kontextualisieren Geschichte, Sozialkunde Ethisches Argumentieren Philosophie, Religion Medien- und Quellenkritik mit KI-Tools Fächerübergreifend Strukturiertes wissenschaftliches Schreiben Facharbeitvorbereitung 02 · WochenstrukturMontag bis Freitag im Überblick Montag Literarische Grundlegung „Zwei Texte, eine Frage" Vormittag · Plenum (LK/GK Deutsch gemeinsam) Einstieg mit einer einzigen Frage, unkommentiert an die Tafel geschrieben: „Wer trägt die Schuld, wenn eine Welt zusammenbricht?"…

W. G. Sebald und andere Autoren

— Blogbeitrag Literatur im DaF-Unterricht — W.G. Sebald und andere Autoren Ein Blogbeitrag von Peter H. Bloecker | Gold Coast, Queensland | 2026 Das Projekt Dieser Blog-Beitrag entsteht im Rahmen einer persönlichen Beschäftigung mit der Frage, welche Rolle deutschsprachige Gegenwartsliteratur im modernen Deutsch-als-Fremdsprache-Unterricht spielen kann und sollte. Als ehemaliger Deutschlehrer in Niedersachsen und langjähriger Fachlehrer für Deutsch und Englisch liegt mir dieses Thema besonders am Herzen. Es geht nicht nur um Methodik. Es geht um die Frage: Welche Texte berühren, fordern und öffnen gleichzeitig Türen zur deutschen Sprache und Kultur? Zu den bundesdeutschen Lesern, auch jungen Lesern? W.G. Sebald steht dabei vorerst im Mittelpunkt> Ein Autor, der selbst zwischen zwei Sprachen und zwei Welten lebte, zwischen dem bayerischen Allgäu und dem englischen Norwich. Seine Werke laden ein zur Auseinandersetzung mit Erinnerung, Verlust, Identität und dem langen Schatten der deutschen Geschichte nach den beiden Weltkriegen nach 1945. Die Stunde Null. Warum Sebald? W.G. Sebald (1944–2001) ist kein einfacher Autor, und das ist genau der Grund, warum er m E so wertvoll ist auch fuer Lernende der deutschen Sprache und Kultur. Seine Prosa ist langsam, nachdenklich, tief verankert in europäischer Kulturgeschichte. Der charakteristische Sebald-Satz, lang, mäandernd, voller Einschübe, ist oft eine Herausforderung für fortgeschrittene Lernende, aber auch ein Modell für stilistisches Bewusstsein. Besonders Die Ausgewanderten eignet sich für den akademischen DaF-Unterricht auf dem Niveau C1/C2: Vier Lebensgeschichten, thematisch verbunden durch Exil und Entwurzelung…

Leonardo’s Notebooks

The Road of Learning does not come to an end. This text is about curious young minds. Understanding The World of Young Adults The Developmental Moment: Between Specialization and Wholeness Students at 17-18 stand at a critical threshold where educational systems increasingly demand specialization - choose your major, select your track, commit to a career path. Leonardo represents the countervailing force: the conviction that deep understanding requires integration across domains. His notebooks demonstrate that anatomical study enhances artistic representation, that understanding water flow informs both engineering and painting techniques, that observing bird flight connects mechanics with aesthetics. For students being pressured toward premature narrowing, Leonardo models what German educational philosophy calls Bildung - the formation of a whole person through diverse, interconnected knowledge rather than mere vocational training. The Question Method: Curiosity as Intellectual Practice Leonardo's notebooks reveal a mind that never stopped asking "why" and "how." His relentless questioning - Why is the sky blue? How does the heart pump blood? What makes an old person's face different from a young one? - mirrors the natural intellectual restlessness of adolescence before it gets socialized out by examination systems. He shows students that the questions themselves have value, that sustained curiosity is a legitimate intellectual method, not a distraction from "real work." In an era of algorithmic answers and AI-generated responses, Leonardo's process-oriented investigation reminds students that the journey of inquiry…

Panama

The most important invention in your lifetime is... For me the old style iPhone, as this device is with me all the time. Not wasting my time with Facebook or SM or Non Sense, rather use it for Navigation and my own reading plus research and more. Walking mostly without my iPhone. Why? The Mother of all questions, indeed ... Think and find your own answer, pls … How Beautiful Is Burleigh Beach? Once upon a time there lived an old swimmer in a little house in Burleigh Waters. Every morning he would go down to the beach and swim in the great ocean. The water was sometimes wild and sometimes gentle, but the old swimmer loved it dearly. "Oh, how beautiful is Burleigh Beach," he would say each day as he came out of the water. One day he found an empty coconut on the sand. Written on the coconut were the words: "Gold Coast Paradise - Queensland." "Aha," thought the old swimmer. "Gold Coast Paradise must be even more beautiful than Burleigh Beach. Everything there must be golden – the beaches, the waves, the fish, simply everything!" He went home and told his wife Maria Inés about the coconut. "We must travel to Gold Coast Paradise," he said. "I'm certain everything there is far more beautiful." "But we already live on the Gold Coast," said Maria Inés. "Yes, but…

Road Trip

Think back on your most memorable road trip. Quite a few, actually, when living in Windhoek Namibia: The first three years from 1988 we travelled around 10 weeks into the Namib and National Parks annually and slept on our Landrover with a roof top tent, we had imported from Germany by container, awesome experiences, indeed! Credit phb

Quote of the day

Successful Life“A man is a success if he gets up in the morning and gets to bed at night, and in between he does what he wants to do.” Bob Dylan Maria Ines with me | Credit phb Credit phb

Duerrenmatt

Credit phb Next to Max Frisch one of the authors I wish to recommend for young readers and Teachers and Learners of the German Language and Culture. Inspector Bärlach, dying of cancer and with only a year to live, investigates the murder of his colleague Schmied in a rural area near Bern. The case leads to the wealthy industrialist Gastmann, whom Bärlach has suspected of numerous crimes for forty years but never been able to prove guilty. The investigation reveals that Schmied was actually working undercover on Bärlach's orders to gather evidence against Gastmann. The ambitious young Lieutenant Tschanz becomes Bärlach's assistant, but the dying inspector gradually realizes that Tschanz himself murdered Schmied out of jealousy over a woman. Rather than arrest Tschanz through conventional means, Bärlach manipulates him into killing Gastmann, then allows Tschanz to believe he's gotten away with both murders - only to have him arrested at the novel's end. The title's meaning crystallizes: Tschanz becomes Bärlach's "hangman," the instrument of justice against Gastmann, even as he himself is guilty.Why It's So Masterfully WrittenDürrenmatt achieves something quite extraordinary here - he's written what appears to be a detective novel but is actually a profound meditation on justice, morality, and human nature. The crime plot becomes a vehicle for philosophical inquiry in the best Swiss tradition of skeptical humanism.The narrative structure is deceptively simple yet brilliantly constructed. Dürrenmatt inverts…

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