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Dr Seán Ketchem

@cskwriter.bsky.social

An American/German in Berlin. Berkeley alum (Go Bears!). Erstwhile Texan. Credo: “There are other forces at work than those of evil. And that is an encouraging thought.”

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Dr Seán Ketchem@cskwriter.bsky.social · 6h ago

It is really something that today's Republican Party is completely incapable of running campaigns on policy issues. All they have in their arsenal are personal attacks. "AbdulRAHMAN is an AY-rab!" "That low-T Talarico sure looks like a homo!" I mean, that is literally it. It is all they've got.

Dr Seán Ketchem@cskwriter.bsky.social · 9h ago

Though what should probably be my last comment on this topic: "establishment theories of electability" have failed pretty spectacularly in the Trump era. www.nytimes.com/2026/08/05/u...

El-Sayed Won a High-Stakes Michigan Primary. Now Comes the Hard Part.

Abdul El-Sayed’s Senate candidacy poses a critical test of Democrats’ ascendant progressive wing: Can an insurgent candidate, with unabashedly liberal positions, win a general election in a moderate s...

nytimes.com

Dr Seán Ketchem@cskwriter.bsky.social · 11h ago

Of course there's much to celebrate here for many folks, but also reasons for concern. If Ds don't hold Michigan, flipping Maine and Texas and taking back Ohio and North Carolina will all have been for naught. The next two years of American politics may well come down to D turnout in metro Detroit.

Dr Seán Ketchem@cskwriter.bsky.social · 9h ago

One thing I notice about U.S. punditry is how frequently the folks on the cable news shows like to say "Michigander" over and over with special emphasis, apparently to remind us that they know what people from Michigan are called, and so are therefore local politics experts.

Some historical accounts suggest that Michigander was created by combining the word “Michigan” and “gander,” which means a male goose. The first use of the word is often credited to former President Abraham Lincoln. While he was in the U.S. House of Representatives, Lincoln used the word in an 1848 speech criticizing Senator Lewis Cass. He sarcastically referred to Cass, the first governor of the Michigan Territory, as “the great Michigander.” According to the Detroit News, that was a sick burn: “In the mid-19th century, however, goose was an insult, according to Myers, the rough equivalent of "ninny." When U.S. Rep. Lincoln called senator and presidential candidate Lewis Cass "the great Michigander" in 1848, accounts say he was also suggesting that Cass was but a goose-like follower in a campaign against a true leader, Gen. Zachary Taylor.” More recently, though, the idea that Lincoln coined the term has been refuted. A 2019 MLive article noted several newspaper archives show Michigander was in popular use years before Lincoln’s lampoon. Those citations, from 1838 and 1842, make no reference to geese of either gender.
Dr Seán Ketchem@cskwriter.bsky.social · 9h ago

I am always shocked how early German stores put the Christmas stuff out. In my neighborhood it is in full swing by September. Who is the market for this? In the U.S. there is always the creepy moment when the Xmas decor goes up before the Halloween stuff comes down, like Nightmare Before Christmas.

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Dr Seán Ketchem@cskwriter.bsky.social · 11h ago

Of course there's much to celebrate here for many folks, but also reasons for concern. If Ds don't hold Michigan, flipping Maine and Texas and taking back Ohio and North Carolina will all have been for naught. The next two years of American politics may well come down to D turnout in metro Detroit.

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Dr Seán Ketchem@cskwriter.bsky.social · 13h ago

The gentlest of memorials to mark a scene of horrific violence. The tree the Berlin Pride attacker crashed into had to be pulled down, but it will be replaced by a French maple encircled by a safetyrailing that will be designed so people can hang mementos from it. And a rainbow park bench beside it.

scene of the 2026 Berlin Pride attack with a tree stump, a rainbow flag, and a rose.
Dr Seán Ketchem@cskwriter.bsky.social · 2d ago

As tame as it is by today's standards, Ponyboy still can't watch the original Friday the 13th all the way through. I keep telling him that if you don't watch the violence, you'll never get desensitized to it.

cat on a bed with a paw over his eyes
Dr Seán Ketchem@cskwriter.bsky.social · 2d ago

The Berlin Shakespeare Company performs in this cool little theatre in the woods near our local swimming pool (it is actually a hill formed by the rubble of the neighborhoods after WWII). Though granted I barely understand Shakespeare in English, much less the lofty 19th century German translation.

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Dr Seán Ketchem@cskwriter.bsky.social · 2d ago

Apropos of nothing, there does seem to be a hotness gap between American and European politicians. Over here we've got Macron (face it folks, the man is smokin'), Sánchez, Magyar to name a few, but US male politicians (other than slick pinup boy Newsom) mostly look like toads. And OLD toads to boot.

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Dr Seán Ketchem@cskwriter.bsky.social · 3d ago

Important point here. Many EU leaders, including Merz, allowed the implication that once people got in to Ceuta, the way into mainland Europe was free and clear, when in fact they would never have been able to cross the strait without the required documentation. Part of why many gave up so quickly.

Alberto Alemanno@alemanno.bsky.social · 3d ago

EU Ministers discuss Schengen this week over a crisis that never threatened Europe's free-movement area: no one leaves Ceuta without a border check. Instead, the EPP & far-right allies use this manufactured crisis whose price was paid by real lives to attack Spain's different stance to migration.

Dr Seán Ketchem@cskwriter.bsky.social · 3d ago

Más fun facts: the Berlin House of Deputies (Abgeordnetenhaus) meets at the former Prussian House of Deputies building, which amazingly survived down the years despite WW2 bombing and being hard against the Berlin Wall. Its sister building, the House of Lords, is now the Federal Council (Bundesrat).

In 1899, the House of Representatives (Abgeordnetenhaus) moved into a building on Prinz-Albrecht-Straße No. 5 (present-day Niederkirchnerstraße), close to Potsdamer Platz and situated opposite to the Martin Gropius Bau. During the German Revolution of 1918–19 the Reichsrätekongress (national Workers' and Soldiers' Council) held its assemblies here from 16 to 20 December 1918.  On 1 January 1919, the Communist Party of Germany was founded here. Since 1993 the building has been the seat of the Abgeordnetenhaus of Berlin: colloquially it is still named Preußischer Landtag just as the nearby building accommodating the Bundestag is still generally referred to as the Reichstag. The seat of the Prussian House of Lords on Leipziger Straße was inaugurated in 1904. Both buildings were built back-to-back according to plans designed by Friedrich Schulze, they intercommunicate via a common restaurant wing. Upon the Nazi Machtergreifung, the Herrenhaus building served as an annex of the neighbouring Ministry of Aviation and Hermann Göring's Preußenhaus foundation. After World War II it housed several departments of the (East) German Academy of Sciences and since 29 September 2000 is the seat of the German Bundesrat.
Dr Seán Ketchem@cskwriter.bsky.social · 4d ago

We are now six weeks out from the September state election in Berlin, so political campaigning can officially begin as of noon today. The campaign placards are going up all over town (they just came through my street in fact).

The next election to the 20th Abgeordnetenhaus of Berlin is scheduled for 20 September 2026 for a legislative period of five years. Due to the repeat election for the Berlin Abgeordnetenhaus in 2023, in which members were elected only for the remainder of the 19th legislative period, the original 2021 election date remained decisive for determining the timing of the next regular election.
Dr Seán Ketchem@cskwriter.bsky.social · 3d ago

The implication of the Berlin election at the Federal level is that if the conservatives go down heavily both here and in the Saxony-Anhalt state election, Merz's already tottering chancellorship will almost assuredly fall, just as Starmer's premiership did after the English local council elections.

Dr Seán Ketchem@cskwriter.bsky.social · 4d ago

We are now six weeks out from the September state election in Berlin, so political campaigning can officially begin as of noon today. The campaign placards are going up all over town (they just came through my street in fact).

The next election to the 20th Abgeordnetenhaus of Berlin is scheduled for 20 September 2026 for a legislative period of five years. Due to the repeat election for the Berlin Abgeordnetenhaus in 2023, in which members were elected only for the remainder of the 19th legislative period, the original 2021 election date remained decisive for determining the timing of the next regular election.
Dr Seán Ketchem@cskwriter.bsky.social · 4d ago

We are now six weeks out from the September state election in Berlin, so political campaigning can officially begin as of noon today. The campaign placards are going up all over town (they just came through my street in fact).

The next election to the 20th Abgeordnetenhaus of Berlin is scheduled for 20 September 2026 for a legislative period of five years. Due to the repeat election for the Berlin Abgeordnetenhaus in 2023, in which members were elected only for the remainder of the 19th legislative period, the original 2021 election date remained decisive for determining the timing of the next regular election.
Dr Seán Ketchem@cskwriter.bsky.social · 4d ago

Fun facts to know and tell: there has been an American diplomatic presence in Berlin since 1797, when John Quincy Adams was put in charge of the U.S. legation (as embassies were called at the time). In fact, the guy who put him in charge was his own father, John Adams, who had just become President.

Berlin Embassy is a non-fiction book written by American diplomat William Russell (1915–2000) which was first published in late 1940. Russell, who worked at the American Embassy in Berlin, details his experiences of living and working in Nazi Germany between August 1939 and April 1940 during the early phases of the Second World War. The book describes William Richard Russell's experiences between August 31, 1939 to April 10, 1940, dealing with long queues of desperate people seeking emigrant visas, the outbreak of the Second World War, the German invasion of Poland and Phoney War, as well as touching on the beginning of the invasion of Norway. Russell was a clerk on the consular staff of the American Embassy in Berlin. The book consequently reflects his personal experiences of life in Berlin during the early stages of the war through anecdotes, press cutting, rumours and jokes rather than covering the political and diplomatic aspects of his job in any great detail: The bilingual Russell socialized extensively with random Germans in pubs and nightclubs, on trains while conducting business, in rural villages as well as in the capital. I am not a politician, so I have not written a political book. I have put down the small things that happened to small people in the hope that they would give the best picture of Germany as it is today.[3] Despite this professed objective, the final chapter is devoted to a study of the character of Adolf Hitler. The central argument which Russell attempts to communicate in his work is that, contrary to opinion in America and elsewhere, the majority of Germans were politically apathetic or even anti-Nazi, with only a small minority actually being overtly in favour of the status quo: There are, perhaps, 2 million members of the Nazi party. That is not many in a nation of seventy million people. The new 180 million euro Embassy building, conceptualized in 1996 by Moore Ruble Yudell, has its main entrance facing north towards the Pariser Platz. Its eastern side abuts an existing bank building, and the west side of the land faces Ebertstraße. The south side also faces a street, towards the German Holocaust memorial. Pariser Platz has the Brandenburg Gate at its western entrance. The small Haus Sommer building, also housing a bank, is in between the northwest corner of the new U.S. Embassy and the Brandenburg Gate. Close to the Pariser Platz and the new embassy is the Reichstag building, home to the German Bundestag. Located on Pariser Platz, or on the same city blocks that surround Pariser Platz are the French and British embassies as well as the Hotel Adlon. With the exception of the Brandenburg gate, which was heavily damaged in World War II, all other former structures that surrounded Pariser Platz were destroyed during the war, or were demolished by the East German government by about 1960. From 1960 through German Reunification in 1990, Pariser Platz held only open fields on both sides of the major boulevard Unter den Linden. In 1992, the governments decided that a new American embassy building would be built on the site, and in 1993 a memorial announcing these plans was placed in the open field. Construction of all of the replacement buildings on Pariser Platz was begun in the mid-1990s, and by the late 1990s, this construction was complete, with one exception: the proposed building for the American Embassy. The United States was the last large Allied nation to have its plans for an embassy building in Berlin carried out. France moved into its new embassy in 2000, and the United Kingdom in 2002. Both of these are in the area of the Pariser Platz.At war's end the U.S. Embassy, now even more severely damaged by months of Allied bombing, was just barely inside East Berlin (Soviet sector), straddling the demarcation between the Soviet and British sectors. The East German government would later demolish the ruins of the embassy building in April 1957. In 1949 Bonn became the capital of West Germany, and a U.S. Embassy was opened there. The Soviet-supported state of East Germany (GDR) was set up at the same time, and despite Allied objections, East Berlin was made its capital. For many years, the United States did not recognize East Berlin as the capital of the GDR, asserting that a reunified Berlin should only be the capital of a reunified Germany, thus the embassy in the temporary West German capital in the small college town of Bonn. However, in lieu of an embassy, the U.S. State Department had a presence in West Berlin called U.S. Mission Berlin (also sometimes referred to with the acronym USBER). Mission Berlin was located on Clayallee in an upscale suburban part of West Berlin called Zehlendorf. Throughout the time Berlin was under four-power control, the U.S. was insistent that Berlin, East or West, should not be considered a capital until Berlin was unified. Relations with the East German state were hampered because of this policy, and by the erection of the Berlin Wall in 1961. The wall made the site of the former U.S. Embassy, still owned by the U.S. government, an inaccessible vacant lot that was part of the security zone separating east and west Berliners. The site became accessible after the Berlin Wall came down in November 1989, but remained a vacant lot until the 2004 groundbreaking for construction of a brand new U.S. Embassy. In the early 1970s the U.S., along with most other western states, decided to grant diplomatic recognition to East Germany. However, this recognition did not extend to recognizing East Berlin as part of the GDR or its capital. The treaties establishing the U.S. Embassy in East Berlin referred only to East Germany's "seat of government". Since 1977, the facility was located at Neustädtische Kirchstrasse 4-5, several blocks from the former Palais Blücher site in the Mitte district. The embassy building was built in the late 19th century as a club for Prussian officers, and after World War I became the home to a craft guild. This five-storey, gabled building was leased to the U.S. by the East Germans. The building no longer retains any of its original interior features. The exterior retains much of its original stone facade.
Dr Seán Ketchem@cskwriter.bsky.social · 4d ago

I can relate. "'I have a lot more life here,' Dreyfuss, who is originally from Texas, tells CNN Travel. 'I was ready to get away from the political situation in the US,' she admits. She feels at home in Europe and can’t imagine ever returning to the US permanently. edition.cnn.com/travel/retir...

‘I have a lot more life here’: She couldn’t afford retirement in the US, so she relocated from California to Portugal | CNN

Since relocating to the Portuguese city of Porto five years ago, former teacher Paula Dreyfuss says she’s able to live the kind of lifestyle she could never have afforded in the United States.

edition.cnn.com

Dr Seán Ketchem@cskwriter.bsky.social · 4d ago

TIL that the Spanish port city of Algeciras etymologically shares its name with the cable news channel Al Jazeera, both meaning "The Island". In the former case, it is a reference to Isla Verde, an island and former military post in the harbor (in the latter case, it refers to the Qatari peninsula).

Algeciras (Spanish: [alxeˈθiɾas]) is a city and a municipality of Spain belonging to the province of Cádiz, Andalusia. With a registered population as of 2020 of 123,078, it is the most populated municipality of the Campo de Gibraltar. The city is located in the western shore of the Bay of Gibraltar (Bahía de Algeciras) opposite the Rock of Gibraltar, around the mouth of the Río de la Miel, now mostly culverted in its lower course, near the southernmost end of the Iberian Peninsula and continental Europe and the Strait of Gibraltar.Qatar is a peninsula in the east of the Arabian Peninsula, bordering the Persian Gulf and Saudi Arabia in a strategic location near major petroleum and natural gas deposits. The State of Qatar occupies 11,571 km2 (4,468 sq mi) on a peninsula that extends about 160 km (99 mi) north into the Persian Gulf from the Arabian Peninsula.[1] Varying in width between 55 and 90 km (34 and 56 mi), the land is mainly flat (the highest point is 103 m (338 ft)) and rocky.[1] Notable features include coastal salt pans, elevated limestone formations (the Dukhan anticline) along the west coast under which lies the Dukhan oil field, and massive sand dunes surrounding Khor Al Adaid, an inlet of the Persian Gulf in the southeast known to local English speakers as the Inland Sea.
Dr Seán Ketchem@cskwriter.bsky.social · 4d ago

This is fascinating. Why would a loyalist and true believer like Pirro publicly defy the Cheeto Jesus and admit that the entire "vandalism" story was a hoax, and it really was shoddy construction the whole time? www.nytimes.com/2026/08/01/u...

In Dropping Reflecting Pool Case, Pirro Draws Trump’s Wrath

Jeanine Pirro, the U.S. attorney in Washington, blamed shoddy construction, contradicting President Trump’s pet theory. Mr. Trump said he disagreed “100%” with her.

nytimes.com

Dr Seán Ketchem@cskwriter.bsky.social · 5d ago

Aaahhhh. A cool soggy Saturday here in Berlin as a brief interregnum from the summer heat. 🌧🌧🌧 Back to the 30sC/80sF weather again starting Monday, but hey, I still have two more weeks of luxuriant summer holiday. The "balcony vacation" continues...

A German breakfast spread on a balcony table with a Mickey Mouse coffee mug and a tablet on a rainy day
Dr Seán Ketchem@cskwriter.bsky.social · 5d ago

It turns out the government of Morocco itself likely started the rumor that Spain had opened the border, and that people would be given work and transportation. Apparently as retaliation for Spain's courting of Algeria, knowing the far right would go into hysterics. www.nytimes.com/2026/08/01/w...

How 50,000 People Surged Into a Spanish Exclave in Africa

On Thursday, tens of thousands of Moroccans broke into Ceuta, a Spanish territory that neighbors Morocco. By Friday evening, most of them had left, hungry and disappointed.

nytimes.com

Dr Seán Ketchem@cskwriter.bsky.social · 5d ago

Disgusting. Just disgusting. It is purposeful cruelty devoid of any rational public policy goal. "The White House tried but failed to block funding for preschool for poor children. Instead, it will seek to strip away standards on health, literacy—and brushing teeth." www.nytimes.com/2026/07/31/u...

Trump Administration Plans to Upend Head Start by Deregulating It

The White House tried but failed to block funding for preschool for poor children. Instead, it will seek to strip away standards on health, literacy — and brushing teeth.

nytimes.com

Dr Seán Ketchem@cskwriter.bsky.social · 5d ago

The open grift and corruption never stop. "It's insane," said one Wall Street executive, who requested anonymity for fear of retaliation from the Trump administration. "We're not getting anywhere near this. In any other administration, this would be considered criminal." www.npr.org/2026/08/01/n...

For sale: early access to Trump's Truth Social posts

The president's media company is offering investors early access to his Truth Social feed for up to $100,000 a month. Experts say the service may violate insider trading laws.

npr.org