flavor-fla

At the beginning of the month, voters in Bavaria moved to reject (I believe) the state's remaining vestiges of smokers' protections.  The act, Raucherschutz, was criticized in part because the measure had a misleading name--were voters endorsing protection for smokers' and smokers' rights or protection from smokers and the rights of nonsmokers.  The confusion in wording smacked of the criticism levied against the 2008 US state of California's ballot Proposition 8.  Proposition 8 sought to formally define the institution of marriage to exclude same-sex partnerships, so an affirmative vote for Proposition 8 was delivering a resounding no to marriage equality.  In both cases, lobbyists took advantage of this fact.  The Raucherschutz also passed, some believe because enough people misunderstood the message.  Mostly the new law dealt with schemes that bypassed fairly comprehensive EU smoking bans, like hookah bars or beer tents or beer tents inside of nominally non-smoking establishments.  The debate is still on, and a second vote may be pending, whether "members' only" clubs and renting a restaurant for completely private function are exempt.

alpengeist or keys to the kingdom

The town of Garmisch-Partenkirchen at the foot of the Zugspitze has been nominated once again to host the Winter Olympic Games. It did so once before in 1936. The planning and prom committees are of course excited and perhaps a little over enthusiastic, as the schematics were set forth, however, without first consulting local landowners, who are not eager to sacrifice their heritage for an Olympic media center. A lot of installations are already there in Garmisch, like the stadium, so I wonder what all needs to be built.

Now there is talk of re-appropriating some of the property the US military forces leases from the government of Bavaria as a ski resort for soldiers, like the golf course, for new Olympic facilities. Though positioned with pristine views of the mountains that rise up like surface of the moon, I have stayed at the "Edelweiss" and I don't think anyone should bemoan the loss of this government-run resort that is overpriced and preys on the uninitiated travellers' idea of fancy and does not nearly compare to the hospitality that locals offer.

In unrelated news, like the plot of some role-playing adventure quest, inventor of the Interwebs Al Gore, has vetted seven people across the Earth with electronic keys to restart the World Wide Web, I guess at a safe-point in case of catastrophic failure. It sounds as if these proponents were chosen for their propensity and life-force when it comes to the Legend of Zelda--pieces of the Triforce were scattered across the Land of Hyrule.

jailbreak

A US federal judge and the Librarian of Congress, in two separate rulings, have in the former decided that it is permissible to disable, fold, spindle, or mutilate DRM (digital rights [restrictions] management) protocols to enhance functionality, so long as it's not with the intent of infringing copyrights, and in the latter that one can tinker with one's own smart phone in order to liberate the hardware and open it up to the service provider of one's choice.  This is fraptuous news, and I am sure after the browser choice injunction, the EU will welcome these precedents.  German-American legal relations on these sort of matters can be strange.  I have learned about an early, founding case, along with becoming more educated on Richard Wagner's opus of works.  There's a flood of publicity concerning the Festspiel in Bayreuth, who annually host productions of Wagner's works.  It's nearly impossible to secure tickets, and there's a ten year waiting list--if I tried for good seats, it would probably mean that I would have to choose between Wagner or Oberammungau, whose next Passion Play is the next decade.

 I did not realize that Wagner's operas debuted there under Wagner's direction and have a founding connection with that particular, storied opera house.  The early legal wranglings between America and Germany, with a collolary to copyrights, telephone and utility and bookface monopolies, regarded performances of Parsifal.  Staging rights belonged exclusively to Bayreuth and the opera was never shown outside of Germany, until US courts ruled that Germany had no jurisdiction over a group of Wagner enthusiasts in New York City and could not stop the show from being put on.  Wagner had hoped to secure a perpetual allowance for his wife and surviving family by granting Bayreuth exclusive rights, but this was in jeopardy by relinquishing control.  Quite a few singers from Germany repaired to the States for the first performance outside of Bavaria.  Wagner's widow, however, got her reckoning by making sure that none of these players ever worked in the German theater again.

quagmire

To confound any legal attempts to block publication, Wikileaks triangulated its trove of a press-release with Der Spiegel and the New York Times, which has framed the break in the dyke quite nicely.   Some criticize the media for trumping up the nature of the documents, saying that there are no real surprises, no shock-and-awe, which I think is a strange critique, coming from the venerable third estate: it is journalism's job to limn a situation, an environment and interpret and reveal through its objective lens.  Comparison to the Pentagon Papers are apt, but these are unprocessed bits of evidence, and it is the newspapers which tie together a proper daisy-chain accounting.  Nonetheless, if there had been a transparent horde of documentation from the beginning, the US and NATO would not have engaged in the war in the manner in which it did.  It is disheartening to have confirmation on the cheapness of Afghan lives, duplicity of the US Pakistani partners and the general glossing-over of way the war is being prosecuted.  Rather than playing the enemy of mine enemies against one another, like the Americans did to the Soviets in the region, it seems the coalition forces are enacting their own counter-finance.  Perhaps the biggest outrage and surprise ought to be the US focus on plugging the leak and visiting vengence on the free press, rather than addressing the problems exposed.