transparez

No place has a monopoly on greed, corruption and bribery, and Corporate Europe Observatory (CEO) has been doing important work to expose the lobbyists in Brussels and how business motives translate to political agendas within the European Union. The organization has compiled an extensive list of the ties that bind, available for downloading on their site, in addition to all the other reporting they do on influence-peddling. Such work is vital, I think, because there is a gentrification and formalization in the culture of corruption and the EU, which further shields those courtiers from the press and public backlash.

wallet inspector or nickel-and-dimed

Rarely I think new policies are introduced without calculated unpopularity, and I think that this is the case with the announcement of one of the biggest banks of America (recursively named) that it will begin charging its customers a nominal monthly convenience fee for using their point of sale debit cards.

All the outrage and resentment that have been generated over this relatively harmless move might be the final straw that causes the public to move their money and quit enabling these too-big-to-fail. If such a mildly unsettling PR failure can bring about revolution, then I am happy for it, but I think the message was instead designed to make the public at large forget about all their past transgressions and focus on this new tangible and across the board policy: never mind all the billions in tax-payer bailout assistance, predatory loans, aggressive and faulty repossessions, casually firing tens of thousands from its own workforce, being generally unrepentant about abetting the whole global financial , and now they have the nerve to nickel-and-dime people for the privilege of using their own money (merchants already pay a premium for renting debt-card machines), which the banks profit from by holding it. I think it will backfire.  One would do better to always use cash: all those electronic trillions in sovereign debt and corporate assets the world around could not fit physically fit into all the bank vaults of the world, if this trend snowballs and that’s quite something for cash-on-hand.

a dinosaur victrola listening to buck owens

I can distinctly recall being informed that all Creedence Clearwater Revival songs were references to the Vietnam War, years and years while listening to Looking Out My Back Door on the radio while visiting some friends in Reardon, Virginia. This already sounds like a bit of dialogue from The Big Lebowski or someone trying to pass an urban legend off as his own. I do not know if that association is the absolute truth but I remember it being quite a revelation to start to peer through the lyrics and suddenly understand that a lot of music is about drugs, protest, Nixon and Watergate-gate. Folk and protest music has sometimes, I think, gone underground, and I never really thought about it beforehand, but I suppose that the rap genre is the legal successor in some ways to the anti-war movement and all the artists who used their talent to weave an allegory that was more subtle. Rap is excused, of course, and can be more direct.

In between-time, there was Don Henley’s (the Eagles--there’s Big Lebowski) All She Wants To Do Is Dance that was apparently in protest to America’s 1984 counter-revolutionary support and occupation of Nicaragua about the hedonists CIA spooks stationed there who could not see the bigger political picture. Maybe that level of allegory and deference was too subtle, too polite, but good music always surpasses its immediate context.

long march or sky palace of first heaven

The Chinese space administration has initiated a very major technical and also visionary project--first as a sandbox to develop docking and maneuvering capabilities and on to grander things, of placing the first component of an unmanned space-station in orbit. I think some innovators really started to lose their edge for substance and symbol after the Space Race of the Cold War, and what with a lot of large scale science programmes being mothballed or decommissioned, this I think is a positive advancement. The people who realized Skylab had some back-handed congratulations for China, saying that China was making strides but they had accomplished the same thing back in the 1970s. China, the European Space Agency and others, however, are not just playing catch-up--by no means were the possibilities and avenues of exploration exhausted by the pioneering players. A lot of exciting things still are going in the cosmos and discoveries are being made, but it is important, I think, to be able to captivate people's imaginations with such a permanent presence and flagship enterprise--and not just with brute computing and tele-commuting.

tusken raiders

Seeing an endless succession of horror stories about metal-thievery--primarily through a distant lens to the States but there have been a few incidents in Germany and they are nothing new and novel, I am just left sad and anxious about the infrastructure and institutions destroyed, only to be replaced at a higher cost, and more for the artwork, public and private, at risk. Looking just down the street, I fear that our neighbourhood statuary would not last a minute before it was stripped down if transplanted elsewhere, desperate and listless. People must be pretty frightened if uprooting railroad tracks or melting-down sculptures seem like a productive occupation, and I hope that this sentiment does not spread.

Recycling for the most part has been institutionalized and adjudged its own reward, however, there are still creative avenues for mining mineral wealth: a few months ago, we watched a documentary about a waste-management concern in Germany that is treasure-hunting in vintage land-fills and extracting Wertstoff from old appliances, electronics, household trash, etc. that were thrown away decades ago before recycling was mandatory. I bet they are finding other artifacts more or less intact too. I can imagine that future archeologists might bemoan losing the chance to explore these junkyards and strata but sacrificing that sort of cultural archive is certainly better than losing the monuments and mementos, bronzes and plaques where one lives.

stempeluhr or casey jones

Much more frightening than facial recognition capabilities arising in social media networks that could tag one's likeness in that parallel, virtual universe, or even that it could project how one might look aged in the real world, or even cross over tagging in the very real world of omnipresent surveillance cameras--even scarier than the gimmicky, pervy scanners used at US airports and sporting arenas, offered as an alternative to an invasive pat-down (though a really sorry trade-off)--scariest yet are the biometric punch clocks that factories, fast-food restaurants and distribution centers are installing in the States to further terrorize and torment low-wage workers.  The above listed insults are bad enough in themselves, and probably have gone far to inure the public's attitude towards pervasive biometric systems.  Comfortable when they've managed to deflect affronts by their societal-outlets or the airports waive them through security, the average person does not think about having his or her minutes and productive clocked, having indelibly announced their arrival, departure and breaks (not to mention everything in between) by having their face photographed or fingerprint taken.  Of course, those workers do not get much of an opportunity to complain about this psychologically toxic control over their schedules, making tardiness inexcusable and any other excuse moot.  With labour unions defanged, hopefully there are still advocates for the working poor who would have businesses explore the ethical and human-impact of adopting such technology beforehand--pause to compare the costs of such a system (though like the x-ray scanners and electronic voting machines they are probably not very effectual) versus being a decent and motivating supervisor, since with high and enduring unemployment, each worker is expendable and there are thousands eager to advance from the ranks of the unemployed into his or her spot, whether or not they suffer such humilation, until or unless the workers revolt or are replaced by machines.

negative reinforcement or forever blowing bubbles

The reigning coalition in Germany has been compelled to make some difficult decisions and try to apply some sophistical cheer to an approach to the debt crisis that's been shown to be a costly failure. The public needs convincing that their tax monies are not being squandered and that this rescue package is not just a furtherance (kicking the can) of the same game, same irresponsibility and same greed that's bigger than the public's interests or hopes or aspirations. Such dishonesty and futility is being broached, I'd venture, mostly because of the berating and scolding that the European Union as a whole received from a very paternal and ironic United States: blamed for the global financial crisis and blamed for perpetuating fear and manufacturing and hiring timidity through its inaction. A lot of unsolicited advice has been traded since the public became aware of this Great Game but never in the form of an official rebuke and lecture. I hope the EU does not fold to this sort of pressure, since its only in the interest of the States and the Elite Them to stoke a virtual euro bubble. It's all hearsay.

Speaking of economic bubbles, Magic Eight Ball is indicating that the next boom and bust cycle may lie in the agricultural business--in food and drink. Cows and cars are already competing over fodder, leading to shortages and price inflation all around. I'm afraid that there will be a land-grab of the limited suitable fields and pastures, just like the exuberance that accelerated property prices during the Housing Crisis only to fall and to dash greed as well as livelihoods. There will probably also be action to turn more small farms into franchisees of agribusiness conglomerates, like the unstinting corporations that have put genetically modified crops, biofuels and corn-syrup into the food-chain. There are more of us to feed and only so much space left to grow what we need, without further decimating the environment. Hitching up home prices to a dangerous and unsustainable height was bad enough--it's scary to try to imagine how the situation might look with more immediate and needful provisions.

fortune cookie

Recently, when faced with the disclosure that monitoring of its users did not cease after they logged out, a popular social networking utility demurred to give an honest answer. To some degree, the computing public has only just been reintroduced to the concept of a cookie--a prion that is a token of one's visit history and whereabouts that helps the internet function more smoothly.

What some services do is indeed dastardly and one ought to be able to expect some way of turning off their status updates and autobiography of things they're keen on. It was scant months ago that a popular cellular telephone manufacturer (EN/DE) attributed its persistent spying (even when disabled) to an overzealous programmer and said it was not intentional. Given adequate resources and interests, anyone could monitor anyone else's activity online, regardless of membership, of course, but no one wanted their outside interests mingled with the persona that he or she shows to the world.

Social networking sites, however, have made the potential for monitoring less a question of committing resources and more of an untapped given. Untangled, facial recognition software routines even transpose internet and real-world tracking abilities. What, I believe, is the most interesting aspect to this outrage, which--if not apathy disguised--sort of flags when one really faces the prospect of boycotting the service or simply disconnecting, is that members would be convinced otherwise. Skepticism and self-censorship are healthy approaches, because users are not customers. The services are "free" and users volunteer marketing and marketable information that enriches these sites. They may promise cohesion and accountability, but what's exacted for free seems quite the opposite sometimes.