big brother and the holding company

The always interesting TYWKIWDBI directs our attention and sadly abject resignation to this non-descript office building in Wilmington, Delaware that dwarfs other company registers—like Ugland House, as the source article from the Guardian reports, of Georgetown in the Cayman Islands.
Though only hosting a fraction of letterbox businesses, Ugland House was incredulously called “either the world’s largest building or the biggest tax-scam on record”—but as the official address of some three-hundred thousand companies, ranging from the portfolios of politicians (making for some strange mingling of assets) to the world’s richest and most powerful corporate entities, this little yellow building is a clear and unequivocal answer as to why no Americans were tripped up in the Panama Papers.  After all, why risk engaging an offshore tax-haven when there’s something far closer to home? More than a million firms (including the media outlet cited), foreign and domestic, have been lured by the state of Delaware’s business-friendly posture, opacity and low-tax burden, whose structure openly encourages companies to shift earnings from other jurisdictions, costing other states and countries untold billions in tax-revenues.  Obviously such loopholes like this inspire rage and indignation, but given its prevalence and the duplicity of custodians, is it any wonder that this sort of thing is happening and no one is willing to do a thing to stop it?

asia-minor or turkish delight

The middle of next month (16 May 2016) marks the centenary of the signing secret pact known as the Sykes-Picot Agreement that carved up the Middle East in an arbitrary fashion, drawing the modern borders of Iran, Iraq, Syria and Palestine. Covert negotiations went on for the previous five months, in anticipation of the defeat of the Ottoman Empire by the Triple Entente, Britain, France and the assenting third party, Imperial Russia, but pivotal battles of the Great War were yet to be fought.
The outcome on the fields of Amiens, Ancre, Marne and Megiddo did not negatively diminish the apportioned claims of the UK for Jordan, Palestine and strategic points along the Mediterranean and for France, the Levant, represented by the eponymous ambassadors—however, Imperial Russia, who had been promised Constantinople, the straits of the Bosporus and Armenia (but consulted in matters as much as the Arabs or the Persians were) lost their territory due to the intervening destabilising of the Bolshevik Revolution that transpired in November of the following year. This forfeiture allowed the other powers to proceed with a second wave of colonialism and though the resulting architecture has fuelled overwhelming sectarian strife but did also engender a framework of protections, tolerance for minorities in the region. This imperfect and shaky geopolitical architecture endured as a legacy for nearly a century and though the formal lines in the sand still exist, what precious little about the Agreement that was sheltering and steadying was dismantled with violence and prejudice by the Cosplay Caliphate. The Agreement only came to light thanks to a leak from the Bolshevik brokers to the newspaper Pravda, in retaliation for having their claim denied, and later picked up by the Manchester Guardian. The revelation led to massive uprisings in the Middle East as World War I itself drew to a close, which was countered with damage-control measures that were not more flattering than the secret partitioning , the buzzards circling, to begin with.

lèse-majesté

The leader of the Berlin faction of the Pirate Party was detained by law enforcement for conducting a literary analysis of the infamous poem about the Turkish president on the street in front of that country’s embassy (the Turkish mission to German in der Tiergartenstraße, Berlin, mind you, and not in Ankara) over the weekend.
This development comes just after the Chancellor expressed second-thoughts on her initial condemnation of the comedian’s satire though still feeling that the case of the prosecution should go forward. The last time paragraph 103 from the German book of criminal code (Strafegesetzbuch—essentially a left-over from the days of European monarchy, criminalising the insult to the dignity of a foreign head of state, lèse-majesté) was invoked was by the Shah of Iran in an attempt to muzzle the critiques among the Iranian diaspora settled in Germany, and perhaps the Chancellor, announcing the intent to sunset the antiquated law within two years, was quietly hoping that it would similarly backfire. Norway, Denmark and the Netherlands, who have comparable laws in their penal codes (and constitutional monarchies all), announced that they would be repealing them post-haste.

voice and accountability indices

Broadcast on BBC Radio 4, professor and gadfly Timothy Garton Ash recently presented a series of sobering and important essays on the state of free speech, which distills the ideas and necessary dialogue found his comprehensive and engaging internet presence.
Positing that no subject should be taboo in the pursuit of knowledge, we see liberty of expression under assault not only—and paradoxically—by the synapses that an intimately connected world but also in those corridors of learning and ivory towers of educational institutions—also being the last place one would expect to find the aura of censorship and sophistry, Professor Garton Ash elucidates interlocutors with a treacherous trio of veto-powers that elegantly present the threat: the heckler’s veto—wherein in all dissent is lost in the noise and chaos, the assassin’s veto—the threat of violence or litigation, and the veto of the offended—the intimidating prospect of violating the safe-space of another group. What do you make of these mute-buttons and has the internet facilitated the creation of this sort of timorous bully-pulpit?

calling doctor bombay, emergency! come right away

Though Czech is the adjectival form and perhaps the additional republic makes the country sound as if it has to legitimise its standing somehow, the proposal of the Czech Republic (Česká republika) to change its English and hence international handle to Czechia smacks to me like a page from Gregor Samsa’s metamorphosis, in waking up to find oneself transformed in order to keep up with the times—those times being rather fickle and unperturbable.
Since the divorce from Slovakia, the country has been known as Tschechien in the German Sprachraum, which to my ears sounded too close to Tschetsschenien (Chechnya) and I feel that this forced change is confusing as well—though not exactly without some historical precedence, going back to latinate-loving Englanders observing the Holy Roman Empire’s tenant states. One has to wonder about exonymy and endonymy and the success rate of rebranding.

allthing or all that’s fit to print

Boing Boing’s Iceland correspondent reports on a wonderful and antithetical response to the scourge of off-shoring and out-sourcing (and indeed even proxy-wars) in the plan, having already secured parliamentary endorsement, to make the country a designated safe haven for the freedoms of expression and information.

Advocates, who hope to create a Switzerland of bits, hope that this stance will compel other governments to be more transparent and forth-coming about legislation and its enforcement. Cobbling together some of the best whistle-blower protection and anti-censorship laws from different jurisdictions—for instance, the attorney-client privilege that any conversation with a journalist enjoys in Belgium or the public registry of all government documents (even classified ones) in Estonia, is creating a forum where witness to corruption can come forward without fear of reprisal. As if meaningful reform and mindful democracy weren’t occasion enough, perhaps this new media landscape might be able to attract internet start-ups to recover some of the jobs-prospects lost to Iceland’s former dignities where laws are not biased towards copy-holders and a select few with political heft—besides, surely the land of fire and ice is probably an ideal place to operate with a smart labour pool and totally green geothermal energy to power it all.

whiter than white

This artefact circa 1976 from the doomed town of Scarfolk—which has still not managed to advance beyond 1979, in the form of an advertisement for the popular if not pricey laundry detergent, Panama Automatic, is a brilliantly savaging critique and allegory of the entire erupting scandal, which has become sadly all too common-place. Be sure to visit the council notes for the account of the rather devious wash-day practises that surrounded this brand.

providenciales

Since 1917, Canada has sought to incorporate the Crown suzerainty of the Turks and the Caicos Islands in the Caribbean as its southerly province in order that the expansive nation be able to offer its residents the full-spectrum of tourism-opportunities without leaving the country, as TYWKIWDBI informs. When devolution has occurred in the past, it is not without precedent, like Australia or New Zealand administering even farther removed UK possessions in the Pacific, that such associations can be arranged. Previous polling as shown enthusiasm on both sides, and although the long, unusual quest has been going on for almost a century, the matter is on the docket for discussion for this weekend’s plenary party talks of Canada’s new government. I wonder if we will have anything new to report on this front soon.

muzzled oder totem und taboo

In a chilling development, a German comedian could face hefty fines and a prison sentence for a encore act directed at the president of Turkey—who has gone on record (as some other choice demagogues) saying while he welcomes criticism, those critics will be sued. Adding to the list of not just taboo subjects of conversation in Turkey, like defaming Ataturk’s memory zum Beispiel, or questioning the official party line on the Soviets’ allegiances in World War II, but illegal ones, Germany’s diplomatic corp was called to the carpet—well, rug—for this satire, causing the Chancellor to intervene, perhaps out of fear that her tenuous deal for a refugee-exchange with Turkey might be jeopardised over this spat.
Germany, along with a few other European nations, has a law on the books regarding the slander of foreign heads of state, which is rarely but selectively enforced and carries with it a possible jail-term, if relations are not smoothed over. What do you think? This is horrible, but I suppose that libeling a dictator in this instance carries a punishment less than that for sacrilege.

petard hoist much?

VICE magazine has an interesting dialogue about the broader political ramifications of the Panama Papers, whose depths are barely plumbed but the biggest travesty so far to me appears to be that much of what will be uncovered is (barely) legal and within that exculpable framework of protection that skirting the law has crafted.
The immunity of the elite to the tax-regimes of their own creation, fashioned as a cushion in some instances to buoy what’s too big to fail in this whole global Ponzi scheme, adds insult to the injury of pervasive economic injustice. The early analysis is pretty captivating, mooting its impact, whatever the revelations, on the US elections, as antithetical to America’s zealous persecution of Swiss and European banks and the expatriate population, that country is a tax-haven itself, with many splintered jurisdictions. Despite what bombshells might drop, sadly probably no more heads will roll and we’ll be made to suffer less transparency and distracting debate of gilded escapades that draw attention away from bigger social problems—still I am hoping that this preliminary assessment is wrong and there will be some gore and shame to watch.

oration or the sound and vision

Thanks to a sharp eye perusing a 1984 edition of some teen Tiger Beat magazine, the response to an inquiring reader’s question about the rumoured role of the Great Emancipator to be portrayed by none other than David Bowie, we learn about an unperformed but still immense spectacle that was to be played at one of the Olympic venues of the Los Angeles games that summer.
Far outstripping those cross-over, special guest-star sitcom episodes that kept my rapt attention (like when Fred and Ethel Mertz appeared as Darinn Stevens’—the second Darrin—parents or when the Harlem Globe-Trotters were shipwrecked on Gilligan’s Island or the angry ghost of Valerie Bertinelli haunted the Love Boat), an experimental, day-long bit of musical theatre was being orchestrated, called CIVIL warS, it was to feature the musical stylings of Mister David Byrne with libretto that included Mister Bowie as Abraham Lincoln, delivering the Gettysburg Address in Japanese. Corporate sponsors were a little anxious, and with the boycott of the American games by the polarised Communist world, the project was shelved. Read more about this amazing opera that would have perhaps been too grand and overwhelming for this Universe at Dangerous Minds. The closing ceremonies did include a UFO landing to the fanfare of Thus Spake Zarathustra and a giant grey alien that saluted humanity’s peaceful coming together.

hacktivist or equities and securities

The US Federal Bureau of Investigations dropped its suit against one global technological giant, served a backhanded measure of victory to the company for having the integrity not to relent in the face of the governments dragnet policies of surveillance, once the agency realised that there was a back-door way, a security flaw to exploit, to access a user’s data, telemetry, call logs and contacts despite (or perhaps in spite of) the company’s refusal to cooperate.
This one subpoena was arguably a matter of national security and public safety but there would be no way of putting this genie back in the bottle once even one exception was made. The company begged-off, in fact, that they were unable to engineer a work-around to the device’s security protocols, but now the FBI has contracted its work out to another company that could apparently bypass the safety measures, but no one is quite sure how. I find it a little incredulous that purely technical means were applied, but it’s hard to say—especially not that the FBI is magnanimously offering its newly-acquired expertise to help local law-enforcement to shoehorn their way into the phones and gadgets of relatively small-fry criminals (or suspected criminals) to keep tabs on their entire networks and supposed syndicates. There’s a legal provision that could be invoked called “equities review” that could force the former plaintiff to disclose what recourse they found that led to them dropping the case, arguing that it’s better for companies to be made aware of an exploitable flaw so they can patch it instead of affording a few then a lot of parties entry, but I suspect it will be hard to compel the FBI to reveal its sources and stooges.

We wholeheartedly agree with Belgium’s reaction to this assault, as this further attempt at destructive social-engineering—baiting the innocent and peaceful with yet more aspersions as it’s exactly what the Cosplay Caliphate is hoping to engender. Sewing distrust and fear only promotes their cause by backing those who fled that way of life and outlook into a corner, and those who recruited a handful of listless losers to do their bidding did so that we as hosts could no longer discriminate and assault those migrants living among us and block the escape-routes of those who have no share in this and are themselves terrorised. Our thoughts and prayers are with the suffering, but this, as the corridors of power of the European Union, is an affront to us all. “French-fries” are of course Belgian cuisine become a contribution to the entire world.

super nintendo chalmers

Though Ralph Wiggum may have had professional aspirations to be either a caterpillar or a principal when he grows up, some—nay, all—of the prodigy’s one-liners make are suitable and believable stump-speeches for a higher office. Dangerous Minds graces us with the collected quotations from one cartoon character put into the mouth of another.

gatekeeper and key-master

The European Union is reaching out to Turkey in order to help stem the tides of humanity washing up against the Greek coast and halted at the Macedonian border. The agreement currently being tendered has the country that spans two continents offering to take one migrant in limbo on the edges of Europe in exchange for resettling one Syrian refugee hosted by Turkey in EU lands.  Presumably, non-Syrian refugees deported from Greece and Italy back to Turkey will be then returned to their countries of origin—Pakistan, Afghanistan, etc. after an appeals process, which could not be conducted in the chaos of camps and choke-points along the Balkan route.
I don’t know what to think, and know there’s real terror and reason to flee and that determination to survive and protect one’s family is not broken by the bartering going on in Brussels, but as if this deal did not seem tenuous enough already, Turkey (knowingly, as the EU needs Turkey just now more than Turkey needs the EU) has asked for extra concessions to include three billion euro in aid, visa-free travel for its citizens to the EU and accelerating its ascension into the economic bloc. While I truly hope the lives and aspirations of millions are not subject to such political horse-swapping—all the more exacerbated by the upcoming plebiscite over the so-called Brexit—or become a political hot-potato over the leverage that the Turkish government has garnered. Seldom is heard a discouraging word—however, as no one dare speak about deportment past and recent that this new partner has displayed on the international and domestic stage: internal political and ethnic strife that is approaching a civil war of its own, aggression towards Russia, collusion with smugglers, terror attacks, and a despotic suppression of press-freedoms that barely register a mention. What do you think? Should Europe enter into this pact?

a man for all seasons

The British Library, as the Guardian reports, will be digitising the only known surviving script written by William Shakespeare in his own hand. The piece, on the subject of Sir Thomas More, Catholic martyr, who managed to rise to the rank of Lord Chancellor in the court of Henry XIII. Focused on More’s divided allegiance by the king’s schism with the pope in Rome and witness to the persecution of the Huguenots who had sheltered in London—having fled violence of France who considered them heretical, the play was not authored by the Bard himself, but rather re-worked by a committee of playwrights in hopes of bringing this anonymous work finally to the stage.
Though feeling audiences were ready for a less than favourable portrayal of king and country, the play remained unscreened for fear it would incite a riot, much like those limned in the manuscript. The lines that Shakespeare form powerful soliloquy for the protagonist, which speak to current tensions over the refugee crisis:

You’ll put down strangers,
 Kill them, cut their throats, possess their houses,
And lead the majesty of law in lyam [by a leash]
To slip him like a hound. Alas, alas!
Say now the King
As he is clement if th’offender mourn,
Should so much come too short of your great trespass
As but to banish you: whither would you go?
What country, by the nature of your error,
Should give you harbor? Go you to France or Flanders,
To any German province, Spain or Portugal,
Nay, anywhere that not adhere to England:
Why, you must needs be strangers.

in the year 2525 or ecumenical patriarch of splayhair

Thanks to the Happy Mutants’ ansible—though a somewhat defective model, sort of like a TARDIS without a functioning chameleon drive—the wondrous Boing Boing is occasionally able to furnish us with dispatches from the far distant future (in Wikipedia article format, which is comforting for the coming generations) and has we’ve rendered over the millennia Cæsar to Kaiser and Tzar, Tzump may be a future high office. Hopefully this future is not pre-destined.

snakes and ladders

In 1971, a company decided it might be a good idea to release a Monopoly-style board game knock-off called Beat the Border, reports Dangerous Minds. The objective of trafficking in the game was far less fraught with danger and intrigues—and less rewarding, although one’s friendly neighbourhood pusher was careful to put out the disclaimer that it was all in good fun and reinforce the message that drugs are bad and the “dope” peddled was left up to imagination—though handy conversion charts were included. In these times, rather than exploring one’s hidden fantasies of being the head of a Mexican drug cartel—which does not strike me as particularly wholesome family-fun for the 1970s, in the same rather vicious spirit, I detect “Run for the Border” to be a new gladiatorial reality television franchise for the presidential-pretender.

hermit kingdom or thirty-eighth parallel

With North Korea in the headlines again over ballistic missile testing and general aggressive behaviour towards its neighbours and the mounting calls for sanctions in response, I had been engaging in a little bit of research into the matter and came across a really astounding relic of bureaucracy in a presidential commission in South Korea charged with the administration of the five provinces of the North.
Although this powerless (as those lands are governed already by North Korea) shadow-government, called the Committee for the Five Northern Korean Provinces (이북5도위원회) and established in 1949, seems today like a sinecure posting, I suppose following the aftermath of the Korean War, hopes for reunification and reconciliation seemed within reach and uniting the Koreas remains a goal for both sides—although the prospects for that seem to be receding. The constitutions of both states define their countries as the whole, undivided Korean peninsula. I wonder what these conscientious bureaucrats do all day, with no access to the provinces in their respective areas of responsibility, and having no jurisdiction in the arena of foreign relations, as that role is handled exclusively by the Ministry of Unification. The situation and perhaps the hope too is in some ways similar to the state of affairs for the divided Germanys but there was never such a government-in-exile, as it were, operating jenseits the border.

les propheties

Of course the prophesies of soi-disant seer Nostradamus are generally poetical ramblings of tenuous woo that each age can find some kind of resonance for, if one applies himself hard enough, but if not the most helpful of forecasts are mostly harmless fun.

This mystic and creature of the court, a favourite of Queen Catherine de Médicis much like Rasputin to his Tsarina, was prolific and scholars, perhaps driven by unacknow- ledged bias, have found certain correlations to historical figures, as well as contemporary commentary. Wondering where the presidential candidacy that has inspired chills on an international scale might be secreted among the quatrains (if they’re truly still relevant), Rob Beschizza of Boing Boing teased out several disturbing findings in short order: there are quite a few references to the “false trumpet” bringing wrack and ruin. Beschizza offers his own interpretations of the stanzas and invites us to research for ourselves.