swiss cheese

Quietly—and hopefully not prematurely, last month Switzerland disarmed around three thousand defensive features hidden in and around transportation infrastructure—bridges, tunnels and roadways, that had been primed for decades to self-destruct in case of invasion and literally close all the borders of this landlocked Alpine nation, whose population would flee to shelter in the mountains, which are apparently hollowed out with secret bunkers like Swiss cheese.

/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.

Of course most splotches of colour are not typically violent and many just want greater recognition, but surveying the land and finding large areas that don’t contain some sort of break-away politics makes one wonder if the people there are all completely agreeable, just naïve or too cowed to complain. Looking at this situation presented on this map, I am not sure what to think about it. While I am sure that motivations are genuine and not frivolous and people have the right to proportional representation—historic borders being far from infallible too, I suppose that this sort of fractocracy and devolution does fiddle a bit with not only the spirit of integration but also of equal-rights and minority-protection—and we’re all happily minorities in one way or another, and rather than making an honest-effort to try to get along with one’s neighbours (oppressors, by some estimates) simply compartmentise them with a new sovereignty.

harmonic trap

Researchers in Switzerland and Belgium are developing a novel new approach in the search for extraterrestrial life in a very sensitive motion detector, which could identify the sympathetic vibrations that the chemical powerhouses of life produce, whether microscopic or closer to our scale. Complementing current methods of investigation with another sense could certainly boost chances of discover and I think strips away an element of bias that has maybe tainted prior efforts.

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.

In 2007, they started broadcasting from a local radio studio their own hit-parades, the record library being comprised from their own collections, with the call-sign Angel Radio: Music and Memories. The timeless selection from the 1920s to the 1960s was a resounding success—for young and old alike, and hearing these classic songs perked up quite a few shut-ins, who were feeling marginalised and not much use to anyone, and resulted some becoming engaged again and more than one listener even got their own regular shows, disc-jockeying. Angel Radio is now on the internet—still run by the same founding group, whose biggest intimidation to overcome was using the computer, but have since excelled.

touchstones oder sonderweg

The years from 1806 to 1815 marked some of the darkest times for the kingdom and more peculiar holdings of the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation, as armies of Napoleon ravaged the lands, spanning from the surrender of most of the nobility, the summoning of the secular and ecclesiastical powers of the realm to pledge allegiance to the conquering French in Vienna, until Waterloo, and called into question the survival of Germany as a coherent culture. Retreating to the ancestral city of Königsburg (the modern-day Russian exclave of Kaliningrad) on the Baltic, the royal house of Prussia, the only major kingdom that did not capitulate to the French—and for that saw their lands redistributed and further reparations that exacted too much, the duke instituted many measures to build solidarity, patriotic privation and sacrifice and gave his subjects a waft of equality and egalitarianism which sustained the people through victory and the rebuild and the reorganisation that seemed to be deferred for nearly a generation.
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 über 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 Köln 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.

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.