workers of the world

Today marks the fusion of the International Labour Organisation’s Workers’ Memorial Day with the United Nation’s observance to promote health and safety in the workplace.

Taking the occasion to mourn for those lives lost due to hazardous conditions and people maimed and made chronically unwell by comforts that could be easily and reasonably accommodated began with the Canadian passage of a comprehensive on-the-job injury compensation act a century ago, on the eve of Labour Day.  The UN’s piggy-backing on the holiday highlights ergonomics and focuses on fostering safer working environments.  Despite America’s efforts to thwart May Day celebrations—repackaging the day first as “Americanization Day” after the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia and then as “Loyalty Day” during the McCarthy-era in the 1950s before finally moving it to September to distance it from what was considered Communists' leanings—though the May Day roots are in fact American in origin, both holidays are still internationally respected and kept, at least by those they honour.

hyponym or litotes

The American Scholar presents its list—with no special or commemorative reason or fan-fanfare, of its come-by-honestly best sentences in English literature.
It, the list, seems thoroughly modern and familiar yet the choices are far from pedestrian and quite resounding and evocative. The selection certainly has reciprocated a lot of good feedback and other nominees to explore. What would you include? Do you find the choices to be heavily orientated towards bulwer-litany, purple-prose? There is a lot to be said for pithiness, as well as the edifying and complete. However—I am happy to be reminded that there are people yet as passionate and cuckolded by words.

logos, pathos, ethos

Through a revue of several studies on the subject, Brain Pickings' weekly digest presents an engrossing and thorough introduction to the Eastern concept of wu wei (无为 and literally English for non-doing).
In a social framework where performance, exception- alism, and perfection are the measures of success, this notion of adaptive effort- lessness—not detachment or doing by rote but rather acquired reflexes and instincts—is something akin to the idea of flow, only recently given a name in the modern West. Perhaps this reluctance, generally accorded to savants and the like, is due to the learned incompatibility, as one author suggests, among intuitive thoughts and cognition—sort of like the proscriptions on mingling faith and science. Governance may well be achieved by the evolution of regulation and institution for subjects to obey but a real sense of community, epitomized by the construction wu wei wu (effortless doing), is cultivated with a set of values, respect, rights and freedoms that are felt independently of the rules that chase after them.

peerage or content mill

The US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) just made itself redundant by yielding to the whims of a few powerful industry-lobbyists and no longer being a good and conscientious steward of the frequencies, airwaves, ripples and what’s fit to print and abandoning key provisions in the concept of so-called Net Neutrality, which they were championing not so long ago (the reversal happening almost within the same breath of praise for relinquishing its control over the domain naming system).
Essentially FCC will grant license for service providers and major content providers—those with means and influence, like film-on-demand brokers and major labels in the entertainment business (plus, I imagine, clearinghouses holding the copyrights of popular or coveted images—leading to a lot of ugly watermark mark-ups), to negotiate arrangements to deliver their services with special priority.  This two-speed internet is a way of discriminating against the little to unknown, ensuring that it remains so, as there would be no chance to profit from its promotion.  This badgering of search results (I am feeling unlucky, auf gut Glück) prejudices what users and creators can find and learn, even if it is limited to specific partnerships whose affiliation are reviewed by the commission, and has the potential to render the internet as one big billboard, like some NASCAR vehicle.

gleeman oder allons-y

I had the chance to visit the nearby Nibelungenstadt of Alzey in the Rheinland.  Along with Speyer and Passau and many other towns and villages on the banks of Germany’s great rivers, this location is mentioned in the catalogue of places referenced by the saga of the Nibelungen.  Although in the case of Alzey, an ancient settlement going back to the times of the Celts and Romans, its association to the epic is only in the family roots of an itinerant minstrel, a gleeman, of the royal court of the Burgundians at their palace in Worms, who later fought with the other knights against the Hun tribes, called Volker von Alzey—the gleek.  I searched for clues for the Rheingold, nonetheless.
The town is really regaled with this connection—appearing in the town’s crest and in a dozen street and shop names.  There is an imaginative watering-hole installation in the Horse Market (Rossmarkt) of the old town for, I suppose, Volker’s steed.  Another very nice bronze sculpture there was this monument to stewardship and conserving ones architectural heritage, although I missed Alzey’s landmark (Wahrzeichen)—which is a high medieval observation tower on the outskirts of the city I suppose I can try to find next time through.
The castle in Alzey has a long history, dating back to 1120 and stands as testament to the idea behind the sculpture of the man raising the roof beam in its present form, reconstructed after the Nine Years’ War over the line of succession to the Palatinate throne, rather than being completely razed or kept in ruins as many were, the victorious wanting to leave their own legacy or reminders of destruction.

unfairhandelbar

Though fears over diluted environmental, finance, labour and consumer safety standards are in the forefront of the highly unsymmetrical and covert bargaining going on the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), which aims to promote business by removing certain bothersome obstacles, there are subtler concerns that are not being addressed in any public forum, I believe:  many bad things for Europe, without the possibility for reciprocation by making US regulations more stringent according to a continental model, are coming down the sluice and I suspect that the floodgates will be thrown open for the American entertainment cartel with ruinous consequences for local culture.
Neither the airwaves nor the cinema certainly are closed to American productions presently and there are quotas in place to ensure that domestic pieces are given air-time.  There is a different attitude towards film and literature in America, however, as opposed to Europe, where such institutions are enshrined and supported by governments and not treated like any other commodity.  The landscape for publishing houses (though Verlag are not altruistic over here either, exactly), labels and other stakeholders is something smooth-shod, flattened out by sure sales and reflective of the top-twenty and blockbusters and big chain stores—that all sell the same thing—and could also infiltrate the educational system with over-priced pulp-non-fiction.  Opponents have already cried foul that TTIP was a backhanded route to the provisions of ACTA, ultimately rejected by the European Union, and although the same propriety language is not present in the newest incarnation, TTIP is looking like an even more sinister and sneaky delivery system to put culture and colloquy in the hands of a few industry giants and sadly a more effective way to destroy competition and alternatives, since the stress on potential profits might play a bigger role in what gets imagined. 

hegemon

Adolf Hitler might have had the laurels of greatest politician ever, a uniter and not a divider, had he ceased with the notion of collecting willingly German lands—Austria, the Memel, the Elsaß, Danzig and the Sudetenland.

Time magazine, after all, awarded him with the honour of Man of the Year—when that distinction meant more. Although the dread rhetoric of subversion and extermination were already presenting in terrible and prescient forms by the time of the campaign, the calling-in, it bears little difference to the re-balance of powers that America and Russia promulgated in Asia and South America, chasing down their kissing-kin, unrelenting and with dire consequences which are not to be over-looked or regulated to the times. What do you think?  Contemporary times can also be deceptive and the victors become the authoritative historians.  How much chest-pounding is too much?

in the groove or playing life in hard mode

Hungarian psychology professor Csíkszentmihályi Mihály is a renowned teacher and researcher in the field of positive psychology, having to do with the creative drives and happiness as well as the stamina behind those motivations that are enduring and genuine.
Csíks- zentmihályi, holding that the only true rewards can be found in self-imposed discipline—rather than repression, whether indoctrinated or at the whip of slave-drivers', was the chief landscaper behind the concept of flow, the equilibrium of high levels of both skill and challenge that are ultimately most sustaining and intrinsic awards. Entertainers, it seems, most often are presented such demands but I suspect that we are all taken to task in one way or another, when concentration is most intense and distractions are not admitted. At the opposite corner of this flow-chart, one is met with apathy, understood as a demand that is not engaging or easily unseated. Here is a blank template for this graphic—in case you want to understand in ones own terms and might want to name specific states of mind. I would never suggest that certain practised assignments ever become the stuff of apathy, but it would do one good to question and assess what's truly in the flow.