Some interesting New Years Facts

I found this interesting guide on how New Years is celebrated in Germany, compared with the United States. Have a look at it and feel free to add in the comments section below if there are some things that are missing from the list. We love to hear about it.

The Flensburg Files would like to wish you and your family a wonderful New Year celebration and a great start into 2026. Remember, it’s all up hill from here. ❤️🎉

Stand by me-Celebrities who died in 2025.

David Lynch David Keith Lynch (January 20, 1946 – January 16, 2025) was an American filmmaker, painter, visual artist, film editor, musician, and actor. Widely regarded as one of the most influential figures in the history of cinema, his work is distinguished by a singular surrealist vision that gave rise to the term “Lynchian.” Over […]

Stand by me-Celebrities who died in 2025.

Dozens of well-known celebrities died during all of 2025. Dirk deKlein summarizes them in this article.

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Hear Ye, Hear Ye …

Bari Weiss taking over CBS was yet another nail in the coffin of a free press in the United States.  We need a free press, for without it we cannot know facts, cannot know what our government is or isn’t doing, and therefore we cannot make informed decisions.  Full stop.  Dan Rather, a journalist and […]

Hear Ye, Hear Ye …

In this last political post of 2025, Dan Rather looks back at the freedom of the press and freedom of speech. It’s important now, more than ever before, to fight for our rights to speak our minds and put Trump’s regime right where it deserves to be. Release the Epstein Files but unredacted, please.

Includes a forward by Jill Dennison.

Happy New Years Eve, folks.

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When I Fall in Love by Celine Dion and Clive Griffin

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One of the best all-time films of the 20th Century is one that was directed by Rob Reiner entitled Sleepless in Seattle. Produced in 1993, it looks at two star-crossed lovers who find their way to each other, despite all the obstacles that were in front of them. One lost his wife to cancer, the other was about to marry someone who was allergic to everything. And the son of the widower found a way to make the love happen between two perfect strangers who were simply meant to be in the end. It reminded me of my romantic with my wife which started in college and has remained strong ever since. ❤️

What really made the movie a smash hit was the soundtrack to the film. It featured a collection of love songs, past and present, including one that is absolutely in the top three of my all-time favorites. It was one that I even performed with my friend and former classmate at talent shows and the homecoming concert in highschool during my senior year. It’s a song that brings tears of joy to a loved one and brings back memories of romantic moments with long-time couples, like in my case. It was performed by Celine Dion and Clive Griffin.

Have a look at When I Fall in Love, which made the Top 25 in all but one country, reaching Nr. 2 in Canada and Nr. 6 in the US Billboard Charts for Contemporary Music.

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Best Moments of Meathead

The cast of All in the Family. Source: CBS Television, public domain

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Ah yes, this post provides you with the greatest hits of Rob Reiner as an actor. His biggest breakthrough came when he played Meathead in the TV comedy, All in the Family. He rivaled his counterpart Archie Bunker, played by Carol O’Connor, and the main character of the show. And for all but one season of the nine, Reiner’s presence was made known and it was there where he rose to stardom before he went behind the scenes.

Here are some of the greatest hits between Meathead (played by Reiner) and Archie:

Rob was a man of multiple talents and one that made us laugh and cry at the same time. He will be missed by many who enjoyed his antics and comments on stage. 🎭🍿.

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Film and Music Feature: Stand by Me

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Stand by Me was perhaps the launching point of Rob Reiner’s career as a director. Produced in 1985, the film focuses on four young boys who went out on an adventure together to find the body of a missing person from high school. They encountered many things in the story, from bullies and owners with dogs who ridiculed them, to oncoming trains that drove them from a viaduct, to leeches in the lake, to their discovery. Despite different personalities they were like brothers throughout the story, which was set in the western US in 1959 but was written as a memoir by one of the characters when he was an adult and had settled down with family and all. This quote at the end of the film was the best one:

“I never had any friends like the ones I had when I was 12. Jesus, does anyone?”

The film featured four up and coming actors, who later had great careers in the film world: Wil Wheaton, River Phoenix, Corey Feldman and Jerry O’Connell. For Rob Reiner, it was an opportunity to hit a clean shot in soccer, which he made really well.

Originally titled The Body, it was changed to Stand by Me after Columbia Pictures bought Embassy in 1985 to show some brotherhood among the characters. And the song by Ben E. King was used in the film especially towards the end. Quite frankly, the song hit the spot as elements sung by the performer were found in the film as well. The song was later remade by Seal in the early 2000s.

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Word of the Week: Necropolitics

This last word of the week for 2025 could also be the synonym for the political endgame for the Trump regime on the Americans and their standings in the world. Many of us don’t know about the word Necropolitics. One should get acquainted with it for it has ties with Hitler’s regime in the 1930s which triggered WWII, and it is being used again in the present. James Greenberg explains what it is and how it is being used in this guest post:

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I watch the news these days with a growing sense of dread. Each night brings another escalation, another line crossed, another sign that something fundamental is shifting. As a Jew, my thoughts sometimes run to the Holocaust; as an anthropologist, I know this moment is different. The impulse to compare them is understandable. When states begin to single out populations as scapegoats, deploy federal agents and National Guard units, use military tactics to round people up, build detention camps, and deport some to foreign prisons, historical memories surface. But comparisons must be made carefully. What matters is not asserting equivalence, but understanding what the differences between these moments reveal about the ideologies that underlie them.

The Holocaust was a project of extermination, grounded in an ideology that defined entire populations as biologically irredeemable and targeted them for destruction. What we are witnessing now operates through a different logic. It does not require mass killing, nor does it depend on explicit declarations of elimination. Instead, it rests on a more familiar and more administratively flexible ideology: one that measures human worth through productivity, cost, and burden; that withdraws protection from those deemed expendable; and that sees suffering as an acceptable consequence of policy. The distinction is not merely historical. It marks the difference between a state that kills and a state that governs through exposure—through decisions about who will be protected and who will not. When protection is withdrawn or denied, those left exposed are forced to bear risk on their own. In this sense, deportation is not the opposite of abandonment, but one of its most extreme forms.

What is unfolding now is not a single policy or a single moment, but a pattern. When I saw the immigration raids sweep up people who had lived here for decades, any illusion that this was political theater—that it would target only the “worst of the worst”—collapsed. Since then, I have watched the state expand its reach: building out surveillance systems, enlarging detention capacity, and bringing rapid response units into routine operations. This administration is continually testing what it can normalize and how far it can push the boundaries of belonging. Here the lessons of the past speak loudly. Once a government begins redrawing the lines of who counts, it rarely stops at the first group it marks for removal.

The way people are being talked about has shifted. Long before the raids, you could hear a change in tone—not neighbors or workers, but costs. Politicians framed them as drains on the country. Commentators cast social programs as indulgences. As the language of burden took hold, it reshaped the ground beneath the debate. The old market logic returned: measuring a person’s worth by productivity, and treating anyone outside the labor market with suspicion.

That same logic gives the state a ready-made justification for harsher measures that increasingly target citizens and legal residents as well. If people are cast as burdens, cutting support becomes responsible governance. If they are framed as takers, exposing them to hardship becomes discipline. And when they are portrayed as obstacles to prosperity, removing them—through deportation, detention, or neglect—becomes easier to defend. Abandonment grows out of these decisions.

This pattern has a name: necropolitics. It is a form of governance that operates not through overt violence, but by managing exposure—by deciding whose lives will be protected and whose can be left vulnerable.

Scapegoats make this shift easier. They always have. Certain groups are singled out as the source of whatever is going wrong—lack of jobs, strained services, disorder. These accusations do not need to be true; repetition is enough. Once a population is cast as the problem, the state gains room to act against them, and the public grows accustomed to their vulnerability. As the machinery grows, so does its reach. Those who once felt secure begin to wonder whether the line will reach them next.

The politics of abandonment draws on older economic logics: ones that treated entire populations as expendable—Indigenous communities pushed off their lands, enslaved people worked to exhaustion, migrant laborers treated as commodities to be cycled in and out of the economy, consumed and replaced. These histories shape how the state imagines its responsibilities—and how quickly it decides that some people can be left to fend for themselves.

These patterns continue to echo. The same logic that once justified removal and exclusion is resurfacing in quieter, bureaucratic ways—in the language of “efficiency,” in the framing of certain groups as drains, in the willingness to expose them to harm. The tools have changed, and the technologies are new. But the underlying grammar—who is protected and who is exposed—remains intact.

Authoritarian shifts are felt long before people begin to name them. Conversations grow quieter. Friends hesitate before posting online. Community leaders who once spoke freely begin weighing their words. As the administration casts more critics as disloyal, dissent carries a different kind of danger. Groups that raise concerns are accused of siding with “outsiders.” Public figures who question the policies are treated as “enemies within,” undermining the nation.

When authoritarians use fear as a mode of governance, it is imposed gradually. Examples are made, and these teach people to step back, keep their heads down, and avoid drawing attention. Authoritarian systems have always relied on this dynamic. They do not need universal support—only enough fear to make resistance costly and enough suspicion to make solidarity harder to sustain.

The consequences of abandonment are not theoretical. They are felt in daily life. When families lose access to medical care, when workers avoid hospitals for fear of detention, children grow up knowing that one absence—a missed paycheck, a sudden illness, a traffic stop—can unravel everything.

This is how necropolitics takes hold in everyday life. By withdrawing protection and normalizing exposure, the state shifts the burden of survival onto those least able to bear it. Illness becomes a private problem; injury, a personal misfortune. Premature death is rendered invisible, not because it is rare, but because it falls along lines the state has chosen to ignore.

We have seen this before. During heat waves, the elderly die alone because the systems meant to protect them have been hollowed out. During storms, neighborhoods without political power are left exposed. During pandemics, people in precarious jobs face the highest risks because they cannot afford to stay home. These losses are not counted as casualties of policy, but they very much are the victims of omission.

This is the quiet brutality of abandonment. It does not need the machinery of death, only the decision that certain people can be left to navigate impossible conditions on their own. And when those conditions lead to illness, injury, or death, the state can wash its hands because it did not pull a trigger or issue a direct order. But the harm is no less real. 

Taken together, these patterns describe a political order in which power is exercised not only through force, but through abandonment. When millions of people around the world face preventable death because USAID was dismantled, and when tens of thousands at home die each year because Medicaid was cut or because they are priced out or ruled out of basic care, it should stir the same moral outrage we feel in the face of other atrocities.

But there is another grammar available to us, one just as deeply rooted in American life as the logic of abandonment. It appears in traditions that insist a person’s worth is not measured by productivity or cost, but by their place in a family, a neighborhood, a community. It appears in religious inheritances that teach that nations are judged by how they treat the least powerful among them, and in the civic stories we tell about mutual responsibility—stories that have always pushed back against the idea that suffering is a private failure rather than a shared concern.

A politics of care begins with an older understanding: that people are not ledgers to be balanced, but lives to be protected. It recognizes vulnerability not as a mark of expendability, but as a call to collective responsibility, and it rejects a political order that treats exposure as governance and abandonment as policy.

If the grammar of abandonment teaches us who can be left behind, the grammar of care teaches us who we must stand beside. The choice between them is not abstract. It shows up in budgets, in schools, in hospitals—in who is protected when systems strain. It is the work of citizenship itself: deciding what kind of nation we are, and what kind of people we intend to be.

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EU Public Support Hits Two-Decade High, Eurobarometer Finds

Public trust in the European Union has reached its highest level in nearly 20 years, with strong backing for the euro and a common defence policy, according to the latest Standard Eurobarometer survey. The poll shows that 52% of EU citizens now say they trust the EU, the strongest result since 2007. Support is particularly […]

EU Public Support Hits Two-Decade High, Eurobarometer Finds

Despite Trump’s National Security Strategy which divides and conquers Europe and the growing resentment of far-right extremism, public support for European Union politics is now at an all-time high. Something as a foundation to start off 2026 as we push back against Trumpism.

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Rob Reiner (1947-2025): The Death of a Boomer Icon

Rob Reiner, who played the son in one of the most iconic father/son comedy duos in history, has been murdered. Who over 50 can forget the “sock and a sock or a shoe and a sock” routine or the debates over religion from the TV sitcom All in the Family? Unlike many TV shows from […]

Rob Reiner (1947-2025): The Death of a Boomer Icon

Here’s a guest post about the late Rob Reiner whom this writer hit on the spot: a Boomer Icon who gave us a chance to laugh where it was needed.

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Interview with Rob and Carl Reiner

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As we kick off the tribute to the late Rob Reiner, I would like to present you with an interview that Dan Rather of Steady did with him and his father, Carl in 2020. Dan was a former host of the CBS Evening News before going independent in 2004. Carl Reiner was one of the brains behind the TV sitcom All in the Family, which made its debut in 1973 and ran for ten seasons. It was the same Carl who made Dick van Dyke a superstar with his own show in the 1950s. And the same one who helped launched his son’s career, where his character of Meathead became legend.

Here’s a look at the father-son success story.

Carl passed away two years later at the age of 97. Rob was 78 when his life was taken away a couple weeks ago. Both will be missed. ❤️

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