Looking back at the debates on the MeatBall:BlackBloc and MeatBall:RaisingSocialCosts I can see now that I have changed. I read a book by Noam Chomsky, as I was told to do on one of the pages at the time. And I started to read an independent weekly newspaper here in Switzerland, I started to read the MondeDiplomatique. I saw *Bowling for Columbine* by Michael Moore, IMDB:0310793, I read about the Bush election fiasco in Florida, I notice how the US was driven to war by a group of unelected administration officials appointed by a president that rose to power because of widespread corruption of the voting process. I am “politisiert”, as we say in German. I don’t know, perhaps it has to do with my age, or with the fact that for the first time in my life I have been working at the same place for a long time, and I reduced my workload first to 80% and now to 60%. No longer being dog tired, no longer fearing exams, no longer bound by a tight schedule I was able to look around. And see. And now I realize how the struggle to legalize (soft) drugs in Switzerland is related to the US; I see how the ideas of the new right on Zero Tolerance affect political thinking in Switzerland; I understand why the right wing parties demand more flexibility by the workforce, why they demand improved elite education – so many ideas come from the US. In this aspect the US is far ahead of continental Europe, and it is high time that we learn as fast as we can about what worked and what did not, and why it did not, and what it caused instead. At the moment I am reading *Lockdown America* by Christian Parenti, ISBN 1-85984-303-4. I suggest it to anybody who cares about these issues.