Even if Russia didn't do anything, how the hell is Germany even going to cross the Atlantik without getting blasted into oblivion? If they actually wanted to attack the US they'd have to start with the tens of thousands of US soldiers and secret service agents on their own soil.
Germany is voting for a new national government this sunday and the next chancellor is most likely going to be a former BlackRock employee who is decidedly on the anti-woke side of the culture war. If Trump "offers him a deal", chances are pretty good that he'll take it.
Being moderately well-off doesn't mean anything when the government decides to deport you or otherwise deny you rights (abortions, anyone?). USA is also the country with (one of?) the worlds highest prison populations per capita, which is seriously fucked up. They even made inmates do firefighting in the LA fires, without proper safety equipment.
I go back and forth between lamenting that corporate propaganda created this state of things, and lamenting that so many people are dumb enough to fall for it. Calling voters dumbasses doesn't solve anything, but I'm definitely thinking it a lot lately.
Yeah, in games like Morrowind or Gothic it definitely got annoying sometimes trying to find the destination of a quest. I just hate it that the markers will often be directly on an item to the point that I can't even really see the item before picking it up, because smaller items often get completely covered by the quest marker.
It's a great innovation that has been overused and abused.
It's a general trend in modern gaming, similar to how RPGs usually have quest markers that not only show you the general location of your quest objective, but often the exact target - and it's one thing to do it like that when the NPC you need to interact with is out in the open (when IRL you could just ask someone for directions) but often games will have quests like "go to this place and search for an item" and mark the exact location of the item down to the centimeter. And you can't just deactivate the quest markers (I've seen that option in some games, plus this should be relatively easy to mod), either, because most games won't actually tell you with words where you need to go.
For roughly Jetta-sized cars by Volkswagen, it's usually Passat or Golf (including the 'Golf variant' station wagon). VW Passat is fairly common as a police car, too.
BTW, human tissue might not be targeted by a bacteriophage virus, but our gut is filled with beneficial bacteria. This is why people get the runs from antibiotica and why there's shit transplants.
Most viruses are probably not surviving the acid bath that is our stomach, though.
The global population doesn't really matter for this, homicidal fanatical christians or jews aren't known to travel halfway across the globe to murder people who insult their religion. They're quite rare in Sweden, and with the Swedes' penchant for extreme metal and general lack of religiousness, there are a lot of potential targets in that country - shouldn't be that hard to find someone who burned a bible on stage in Sweden in the last 10 years.
Islam fanatics' violent response is probably part of their point, it's going to be a bit hard to prove that point by burning a bible or torah in Sweden. I agree that they were counterproductive, though.
First we'd need to define "internet" for this purpose. Does classic mail qualify? It certainly can carry more data than pidgeons, and if you can still have computers you might get relatively close to the 90s internet by sending data by mail (especially when you're communicating with people within a day's travel, rather than on the other side of the earth).
Other than that, you can do a lot with visual signals. In the Discworld novels, they developed a kind of optical telegraph network with a technique that is somewhat similar to ship flag communication, and optical telegraphy exists/existed in the real world, too, though it never got much traction. If you have computers, you might be able to get pretty alright data rates with something like that.
Sapient creatures are people, yes. Especially when they speak human/humanoid language, which is true for many (most?) dragons in tabletop settings and even Lord of the Rings. In Faerun (D&D) they can even easily transform into humanoids.
There's a German word for that, Machtergreifung.