Personal Truth
Opinion, Prejudice and Conviction
Hand-Picked, Universally Valid Standards
Normal Pathological Traits?
The Addiction to Please
Planned or Unplanned Obsolescence
Manipulated Unemployment Figures
Expropriating the Elderly
Manipulation Instruments of a Democracy
The G36 Rifle
Fire Protection at Berlin Brandenburg Airport (BER)
Soft Skills Are Not Hard Skills
Official Denigration of Science Education
How Do You Come Up With These Ideas?
Dissemination
The Fun and Happiness Society
Analyses
If You Want It – Then Do It Skillfully!
The Circumstances
Smartphones and Computers
One-Dimensional System Analyses
Abuse of Education for Political Purposes
Anxiety-“Education” of the Germans
Framing
Additional Communication Unculture
“Application Example”: A Discussion about CO2
Framing Manuals
Analysis of Journalistic Opinion Making
Examples of Journalistic Morality
Incompetence at its Finest
The “Fact Finder”s
Democratic Press Censorship
Introduction
How can you spread a doomsday mood when everything’s fine and the quarterly figures of the German Federal Government regularly promise a surplus? Even former East Germany, the GDR, had only disseminated positive things to say about the state. Conversely, people in the west of the republic had mainly heard about the bad things happening in the east. Why should that be any different today? Most facts are freely accessible. However, they have to be interpreted and put into context. It’s not necessary to recount a lot of new material. You have to know, interpret, link and possibly even compare information. Only then can it be evaluated. It was known, for example, that the automotive industry alone intends to lay off at least 50,000 workers in Germany in 2019. “Socially acceptable” this was called to make it sound upbeat. But the jobs are gone. “Economically viable” this ain’t. It’s, after all, the economy that has to bear the burden of a social system that pays the unemployed.
I’m not a clairvoyant – nor am I a futurologist. If that giant volcano erupts under Yellowstone National Park before this book is published, then the predictions made in this book will be false. But that’s unlikely to happen.
Some people think they know what the world will look