pollster or keep calm and carry on

One would think given the virtual omnipresence of America's spying-apparatus, some one in the US government—with influence—might have had an inkling at least of how unpopular and damagingly disruptive a government shutdown and the emergency furlough to follow would prove. Enough studious bureaucrats were wringing their hands over it for days, working frantically, mongering rumours and nursing disbelief to gauge public reaction and sentiment. For that matter, one would think that the intelligence agencies would have had some insider-knowledge and could have predicted the stalemate in the legislature and where the cracks are forming in each side's stance and whom will eventually give in. Though non-essential services have been curtailed, time is still of the essence and only after one full day of this new reality, panic and doom is setting in. As for the households directly impacted, dreading a pay-check even docked by a few days' pay that may never materialise because money is tight mostly already spent, the mounting inconveniences that lurk after funding is appropriated with weeks of catch-up, shuttered monuments, parks and museums, and science projects put on hold weren't already reason enough to find a quick resolution—there are attendant consequences.
Among the knock-on worries are the Federal Depositors' Insurance Commission (FDIC) being incapacitated and unable to launch any new investigations should a bank declare bankruptcy, the potential for delays in ship- and airfreight for a nation warehoused with vulnerable, interdependent just-in-time systems or that the federal courts will exhaust remaining funds in ten days or so. A few days more and business and the exchanges will begin to commiserate as well as more and more deadlines are trounced. So much for omnipotence, I guess.

limes or probeaufführung, échantillon, prova

Just prior to the plebiscite to keep in place mandatory military conscription in the Alpine nation, Swiss authorities revealed that the army staged some war games, called Operation Duplex-Barbara, whose scenario seems creative if not outlandish but contingencies for such threats probably are not too far-fetched if not outright prudent.

Planners imagined borders breached by hordes of citizens from a bankrupt and fractured France, desperate to retrieve pilfered treasure. The Swiss are not alone in these preparations— in company with America, who has been quietly protecting similar domestic fall-out should there be a economic collapse, and just last year, Switzerland carried out a larger scale, more public and political exercise, called Stabilo Due, to practice girding itself for potential waves of financial refugees should the surrounding monetary union of the euro become untenable. Meanwhile in Poland, former prime minister and architect of the Solidarity Movement, Lech Wałęsa suggests that Germany and Poland should unite, forgetting their pasts and an overture beyond his former calls for an Eastern Europe more oriented towards the West, musing that technological advances have made national less relevant and shuttle people, identities and activities far beyond their home countries.

it could happen here

Dum, dum, dum—Slate Magazine introduces what promises to be a brilliant series of lampoons describing American politics in terms and with the tutting tone traditionally employed by journalists for limning the situation in distant lands, unfortunately inexhaustible as well.
The first vignette is of course on the curious case of the government shut-down, which probably seems to the rest of the world as it unfolds as some arcane, secretarial matter to be resolved directly. This spot of bother, which is in fact a manufactured crisis, does seem anomalous and dressed in peculiarities of national laws, sort of like day-light savings time being out of sync, non-residential taxation, or resistance to the metric-system, until the founding factors and very real repercussions are considered. A hand was forced, and not on principle alone, but to not make security for the least protected more of a slippery-slope—an inch for a mile, and the delayed, bemusement of the subjects' of America's customary critique speaks volumes.

speakeasy or yes, minister

For some time there has been a continual soap-opera cycling in the hallowed halls of the US government, yet it is hardly the stuff of dramaturgy without great license and a keen imagination, being that the dialogue outside of what the public is subjected to and the secretive pow-wows whose proceedings are all to easy to envision, is the sum total of the exchange. The two parties do not engage one another off-line, as big as the growing disconnect between civilian and military leaders. That is not to say that backroom, unregulated deals are preferable—enough of those end up codified without the watch-dog of checks and balances or the consent of the public that the elected legislature is supposed to represent, but at least, without too much theatre or romanticism, there was in the past the water-cooler, the break-room or social-dues that saw senators and congressmen, regardless of political ilk, spending time together at private haunts, after hours.
This club culture is undone by hasty retreats to their constituencies whenever recess is called, which no matter how short can find repre- sentatives home and back again in no time and the conscience decision not to filter one's public and private lives. Thinking of two congressmen casually finding commonalities by forgetting differences and spending a spare moment together seems unfortunately like a laughable prospect nowadays, for fear one might question their party loyalties. I couldn't say whether any great compromised was ever reached in Congress by a dining-out but it's a fact that only keeping company that's like-minded is quite sufficient for justifying one's own views—or rather the unshakable views that one is expected to have.

stockholm syndrome

The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in Sweden just released a comprehensive report on global-warming that is unfortunately is being down-played as more alarmist palaver, but is nothing to scoff at or ignore.
Even though the multidisciplinary study that took several years to comply and analyze has few new startling revelations (trashing ecology is startling and shameful enough) and merely is another bleak assessment in the same traditional, it does serve to confirm our worst fears. In that there is nothing new in it, however—too, the skeptics and the procrastinators remain inured and unconvinced, though their contention with this fact-finding mission defies unity and leaves little open for objection. There is no one country or political persuasion that presents a the ultimate roadblock or challenge to policy but rather commitment to halting and healing the climate is a matter of individual priorities and choice, though national fronts and dogmatists can certainly be a source of opportunities and threats. Disparagingly, platforms—whether critical or regaled with the best of intentions, tend, I think the mutilate urgency, and rather than considering that the house is on fire, and still pits one group, bundled with all sorts of tangential priorities against another, rather than accepting a cold and disquieting fact.

hunting of the snark

From antiquity through the Renaissance, most productions and publications were content to rely on the intellect of the audiences to discern satire and irony, but with the decentralisation of governments and the displacement of the Lingua franca of the Renaissance, which saw the rise, through printing of native languages, many authors feared that their sense might be lost, especially in translation. Hence, many thinkers attempted to independently espouse a new series of punctuation marks over the years to denote something meant to be ironic or tongue-in-cheek. Sometimes variations on the exclamation mark were employed or an opening and closing quote with a glyph like the the Greek letter psy (Ψ), maybe in deference to the eirôn, a stock character of Ancient Greek comedies who through understatement and sometimes self-depreciation, usually triumphed over the braggarts in the end. Such flags were thought to be important, especially in dicey diplomatic situations, were it became important to maer distinctions between what was spoken ex cathedra and what was the modest proposals of uncredentialed journalists and opiners.
The perennial failure of this sort of mark-up language—though maybe its time have come with shouts and murmurs and snarky comments regularly framed by inventive interjections, sort of reminds me of the struggle to introduce the metric system to the hold-outs, which always seems to fail as well but for interesting reasons and in spectacular ways, is just one of several typographical adventures explored in the new work, Shady Characters: the Secret Life of Punctuation, Symbols and other Typographical Marks, by Keith Houston, showing that the stories behind those oddities that never managed to catch on are as fascinating and perhaps as influential as those that did endure—or linger in ways much changed from their original purpose.