paper chase or then ‘tis like the breath of an unfee’d lawyer

In Shakespeare’s Henry VI Part II, one of the henchmen of the pretender to the throne and usurper, Dick the Butcher, famously proposes, “The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.”
While maybe this seems in a modern context like an avenue to restore balance in an overly litigious society, it was meant rather as the most expedient route to counter counter-insurrectionists: regarded as the possibly the last and best defense against disorder and oppression, lawyers were regarded as unbiased keepers of justice and independent thought and a nuisance to revolutionaries.

Dick the Butcher, however, never met the courtly ranks of a secretive group of lobbying legal professionals called arbitrators. European Corporate Observatory presents an interesting and revealing treatment on the law firms and their retainers who pose exclusively to profit from injustice and pilot public policy in favour of private interests and enterprises. Though not precisely a new or isolated phenomena, the concerted efforts of these new ambulance-chasers are behind all the big headlines and points of contention, from energy companies’ prosecution of Germany for abandoning nuclear energy, the push for allowing G-M crops in Europe, aggravating independent research on the topic and science in general (at least in matters that might confound profits), labour equity and pensions—and all at the tax-payers’ expense since the unobliging defendant is the government. It seems that the interpretation of the butcher’s plan has become a backward-construction.  Be sure to check out more revealing stories at this watch-dog’s website.

in sextus novembris

Reflecting on the upcoming and rather secularized celebrations of Guy Fawkes Night, commemorating the foiled Gunpowder Plot of the Fifth of November where the triggerman Guy Fawkes is burned in effigy, it is curious how in some four centuries of historical memory documenting revelry, sentiment and celebration, we witness perhaps the process of transposition and myth-making. The many hypotheses regarding Christianity supplanting pagan feasts with their own holidays in order to ease the tradition, like All Saints’ Day and Halloween for Nordic and Celtic Samhain or Christmas for Roman Saturnalia, cannot be tested and accounts are only implicit and worked backwards.

From the evolution of children making and parading straw men (guys—the word entered the English language because of Guy Fawkes) to burn, the excuses for partying, the waxing and waning of traditions to the modern day trappings and personae of anonymity and disestablish- mentarianism. A roundly reviled character has been elevated and romanced as a folk-hero, but as a charitable abstract of their original motives, to return the monarchy to a Catholic throne and stop the persecution and punitive taxation of recalcitrant Catholics. Such movements, I think, would not like to swap one dominating authority for another, nor order for chaos neither. The celebratory mood may have been co-opted or evolved convergent with the close lying customs of Halloween and poses a strange puzzle to unravel, despite being faithfully recorded. This year there is quite a bit of healthy competition, with the election, as to what day might be the scariest. The choice of symbols is often a bit ironic, I think, like the Alamo where the Texan freedom fighters lost and their ranks decimated or the sign of the Cross. This year, on the eve of the presidential elections of the United States, there are some vague and unclaimed threats to kidnap and ransom the executive and legislative branches until the government is returned to the people. I only fear that the plotters’ ambitions will be forgot and the aftermath celebrated as another reason to brag and to continue girding ourselves against all threats--real, imagined and opportunely rebuffed.

elective-affinities or great caesar's ghost

Every moment is rich with buried news, especially at times like these when there are so other championed causes demanding attention: rebellions and reform in the Middle East and North Africa, unprecedented and frightening devastation in Japan, dirty political and corporate laundry. All this chaos is not in competition and lessons and opportunity to help abound, but resources are rarified in these on-going tumults. Events do not often have well-defined conclusions, neatly categorized and relegated to special studies and advocates, and never without ripples, ancient and disperse but still with potency. Triangulating among all the headlines and raw bursts of information can help one get bearings and better guess how these incidents interact and bear on one another on higher, resounding levels. It is maybe just as much those less nightmarish events that form a moment, non-doctrinaire. Many things are just nightmares and insurmountable traumas, and there is no discounting urgency for those things that cannot be undone, and channeling the incidental and supporting might prevent similar events, no matter how baroque with influences, from occurring again.

vexillology

Since following closely the uprising in the Middle East, I have come to fondly identify our big mood lamp in the living room--"horned," originally, but now decidedly crescent, especially when viewed from outside on the balcony--as a sign of solidarity with the protesters, a sort of Bat-Signal, beacon, that this will ultimately turn out for the best for everyone. 

There seems to be genuine progress, condemnation and empathy in a united front however much that may be wanting to stave off interference and the potential to meddle and vouchsafing the people's security, safety and precariously delicate revolution.  It is more than a talent of statecraft to strike the right accord between talk and action, especially when the revolt itself was in part made possible by the byways and transparency of communication that make it more and more difficult to make one's self-interest and motives diffuse and deniable. 

Some governments have not yet invented (or forgot) the vocabulary to express honest and undisguised intentions, and such intrusion might be checked within a larger framework.  It is difficult to say what the international community could or should do, beyond being receptive to developments, not unfairly burdening the people's business of change with future projections and fears--the cost of oil and the flood of refugees--and applying the lessons that these cautionary leaders have been teaching all along. Incidentally, notice how one of the banners of the Franconia region of Germany, of which there are many standards of state, has a strong, inverted likeness with the flag of Bahrain.

renaissance or day of days

With less than three weeks of revolt, the Egyptian people have managed to overcome three decades of rule that smacked of tyranny and despotic under-achievement.  This is a monumental first step.  Though for many the joy and relief was also a fair mix of shock and surprise, to find that there was an alternative to the powers and the treatment that they had nearly become inured to.  Blossoming freedom and democracy, and not the sort foisted on people by some calvary on the charge, is a rare and precious thing, to be nurtured carefully.  The people have begun to remove the obstacles to their self-determination, and with awareness and support all around, I am sure that they will continue on the right path.

sabbatical

The German English daily the local has picked up on a rumour propagated that has Egyptians' disenfran- chised president taking extended convalescent leave in Germany. This would be a controversial maneuver as getting Mubarak out of the country might defuse the violent clashes and placate the protesters to some extent. The intent, however, seems less than satisfactory since it will allow the vice-president designate the chance to act with the authority and autonomy vested in the presidency, in Mubarak's absence. There is precious little guarantee that this change of power will work towards legitimate coalition talks, however well-intentioned Germany's hosting of the president would be and promising that no possibility of sanctuary, asylum was in the offer--nor not of true exile, neither. It would mark a popular victory, exit the king but not exuent omnes, but I am sure it would not curry much favour for Germany, whose residents are staging parallel protests in Berlin and Nuremberg and all across the country in solidarity with the people.

baud

At the risk of ignoring all the other suffering endured, Egypt's censorship and blockading of internet services and trying to hide and hinder the people's voice is a rather grinchly thing to do.  After a long succession of insults, this one may seem slight, but the history written by the victors may be vanquished, ignored and forgotten in a day when all else is documented, finger- and foot-printed, live and as it happens.  But they came--they came all the same, without bizzle-binks and floondazzlers.  The major internet players have teamed up to bridge the government imposed digital divide and cobble together a network accessible without the internet, helping to focus the movement's leadership and continue to report from Cairo to the outside world.

simoom, samoom

The popular uprising in the Egypt has many hopeful and many pensively watching. Either through revolt, control slouching away in great chunks like with the military forces, or peaceable retirement--however, concessions, negotiations, revisions are not none too convincing, emanating from the same tenacity that has kept the country under a never-changing aegis of emergency powers called regional stability, called peace.

Elite security forces are policing in the original sense of the word, busting up idleness and giving general vagrancy no quarter, and though it may deflect the feeling of chaos, state police seemingly, however ranks splinter, are only interested in preserving the arena, the conditions that have provided them with prosperity and power. The military forces, however, have pledged to safeguard the public welfare, and because of Egyptian's compulsory service requirements, the army is the public and its welfare, all ranking as someone's son, brother or father and some exclusive force of mercenaries working for graft and bribe and job-security. There is an overwhelmingly influential and democratic apparatus in this, unlike deputized goons that by turns seize and are ceded too much authority.  This support, tacit but growing, is significant, and ought to awaken intolerances and apathy for divisiveness and injustice.

emphasis added

Alternet hosts a excellent article from the younger son of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, where he faces surely a lifelong demon in the Espionage Act of 1917, a blatant beast that has mostly been a "dormant Sword of Damocles" but could also prove very plastic and serviceable, thanks to an array of wounded egos laid bare and selective reading. What an awful burden for anyone to be yoked with--that one's parents were executed as traitors, especially considering that Americans do not believe such things happen in America. With so much constitutional steerage and political fundamentalism, recourse to original sources seems often frustrated and arbitrary, though in its argument that the Espionage Act violates the principles of America's founders, the article highlights the Constitution's own reckoning of what could be traitorous:

"'Treason against the United States shall consist only in levying war against them, or in adhering to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort' (Article III, section 3). The framers felt this narrow definition was necessary to prevent treason from becoming what some called 'the weapon of a political faction.' Furthermore, in their discussions at the Constitutional Convention they agreed that spoken opposition was protected by the First Amendment and could never be considered treason."

History is littered with countless examples of despotic regimes wielding high treason, unilaterally defined and investigated, as an effective political tool to remove inconvenient people and inopportune laws, and the people who drafted the founding documents did not want their republic to devolve in that manner. Let us hope that America never again goes down this path, and if already committed to that course, can at least be turned. Apparently, the incoming US Congress, led by those same fundamentalists and literalists, wants to open their session with an unprecedented reading of the US Constitution in chambers. I wonder how much of more choice parts will be mumbled over, or what amendments, including the Bill of Rights, will be skipped to reinforce the myth that their constitution is eternal, sacred and infallible, especially if construed to one's own ends.

another brick in the wall or please don't feed the tigers

Columnist Laurie Penny of the New Statesman sends a dispatch from the latest round of student protests in England against tuition rate hikes. This anger follows demonstrations in Germany and many other European countries where budgetary shortfalls, real or imagined, and austerity measures, imposed or voluntary, have undermined the ideal and priority of the equitable promotion of a literate society.  This is something worth fighting for and the students' efforts from Dublin to London to Paris to Bamberg and all points beyond and in between are valiant and should not go unnoticed or unheeded.

For those outside of the European education system, and not counting only those laureates and their families who have been direct benefits because the whole society benefits, the nominal tuitions and selective admissions process might seem unfamiliar: it amazes me that the approach to education in the States compared to the rest of the world could have diverged so greatly, on the one side, merit-based and underwritten by the state and on the other prohibitively expensive and undiscerning where even public universities are run for-profit through the Ponzi scheme of student loans and financial aid, which seems likely to be the next bubble to burst, and not to mention overcrowded, unrealistic and generally unremarkable in all disciplines. Perhaps thinking such targets of budget cuts would be forgivably (or forgettable) unpopular, politicians have been unprepared for the backlash, especially in England and Ireland, where rescue-loans from the EU and the IMF came with too many strings attached, and putting university fees on the line was one way to portend fiscal balance. This sort of sacrifice, however, is unwelcome and ill-advised, like the tragedy that will be facing Iceland--again over finances--when the next generation is forced to leave over lack of opportunity. Tripling tuition will have the same effect, leaving one's native landscape diminished and becoming more like the university system of America in price and quality, and that kind of collateral is on terms that no one can afford, regardless of their credit-worthiness.

Hanseatic or A Fistful of Hamas

A very mere few of the gurus and soothsayers, jilted and can't be bothered, saw this one coming: that rather than celebrating another calendar-brand holiday, like the two decade old anniversary of the collapse of the Soviet Union, which incidentally was caused in part by unsustainably cheap petroleum prices wrought by changes in the way Arab states sell fuel despite the pretenders to its overthrow, we're instead looking at absolute financial-meltdown, carnage and dreaded reevaluation. Is this the bequest of Hope, the yes-we-can? The next president of the United States of America may have been handed a much-diminished superpower, which never was that much different than the Soviet Union (though neither party would want to hear that). Both sulking monsters and accomdations of survival--of unity. Now the whole world is going insane. There is nothing new under the sun, but now American empire tilts on the brink, surreptitious wars are raised, and those on the sidelines, like powerhouse Germany, say they had little to do in causing the problem and should therefore suffer lesser consequences. The former may be resoundingly true, but the latter has dire consequences.