Tuesday 13 January 2015
swiss cheese
catagories: ๐จ๐ญ, ๐, foreign policy
Monday 12 January 2015
/self-/determination
Though this article may not be complete and totally up-to-date, the Wikipedia entry, yet loving tended for its apparent faults, on separatist and succession movements in Europe provides a pretty powerful illustration—with a map of the tensions and disputes—of how we regard outsiders and insiders even on the smallest regional levels.
harmonic trap
heaven can wait
A group of seniors, nostalgic and saddened over the decline of their village of New Port on the Isle of Wight, the once great piers now neglected and decaying decided to do what they could to revitalise their community.
touchstones oder sonderweg
Democratic reforms elsewhere in Europe—including France, culminated in 1848 in Frankfurt am Main with a Constitutional Convention, which rejected the decimated gerrymandering of the former Empire, from some three-hundred fifty quasi-independent states to a confederation of a mere thirty-seven, as not being representative of the people. This revolution, though uniting and healing and never quite killed, did rather die on the vine, with Prussia and other regional powers tossing out democratic ideals, feeling that they had served their purpose and were in the environment of security and renewed prosperity were dangerous and subversive.
In the two years, however, that a united and republican Germany prevailed—not to be taken up again until after the defeat and horrors of World War I in the short-lived Weimar Republic—convened under the auspices of the Bauhaus Movement, in an opera house like the Frankfurt summit in a church, a few trappings and symbols that were destined to return were popularised:
the German tri-colour of gold, black and red (supposedly inspired by the uniforms that a group of resistance fighters worn during the Napoleonic Wars) and without the insignia of any particular royal-holding but rather of the people was briefly flown, and the German national anthem was sung. “Deutschland, Deutschland รผber Alles,” was not a lyric of dominance but rather a plea for an end to Kleinstaaterei and internal division, though now replaced with the excusable and admirable trinity of Einigheit und Recht und Freiheit (Unity, Rule of Law and Freedom) originally extolled in the third verse. These events were not an abortive revolution but rather sentiments that came before their times. One other premature development came about this same year, with social scientists and agitators Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels first publishing a thin pamphlet in Kรถln called the Manifesto of the Communist Party (Manifest der kommunistischen Partei) which described all of history as class-struggles, but this too garnered little attention at the time.
catagories: ๐ฉ๐ช, ๐ซ๐ท, ๐ท๐บ, ๐, ๐ถ, foreign policy, Hessen, labour, language, revolution, Saxony, Thรผringen
Sunday 11 January 2015
current affairs or crashing the pips
The British Broadcasting Company’s journalistic branch was created by royal charter in to establish a bureau independent of government influence for reporting for the public
benefit.
Its first radio broadcasts came in November of 1922, but were
relegated to the end of the day and were exclusively fed by the wire
services and syndicates, wanting to avoid competition. The introduction
that followed the pips (the series of electronic beeps first aired in
1924 that is the Greenwich Time Signal for the top of the hour) was “This is London calling. Here is the general news bulletin, copyright by Reuters, the Press Association, Exchange Telegraph, et al.” The embargo of the newspaper publishers came to an impasse when on Easter Weekend—18 April, in 1930, the announcer had to concede that there was emphatically no news to report today and played piano music instead. With the holiday, no stories were filtered into the radio station with enough time to prepare, plus there were indications that the public-relations ministries of the government were not above taking advantage of this lag in coverage to bury embarrassments. Soon afterwards, however, the BBC had marshaled an army of journalists and began producing original copy and stories.
Saturday 10 January 2015
sylvan
The mysterious and dangerous wood was the only place where good might triumph over evil, the brothers observed long after trees were considered as sacred markers but yet subconsciousness ones and that character was made a recurring one. In any case, I suppose Germany’s caretaking and conservation would have greatly impressed the warriors and the myth-makers as much as the environmentalists and important to acknowledge it as a part of one’s collective identity in all its aspects.
catagories: ๐ฉ๐ช, ๐ฑ, ๐, Baden-Wรผrttemberg, Bavaria, environment, Hessen, myth and monsters, Thรผringen