another brick in the wall or please don't feed the tigers

Columnist Laurie Penny of the New Statesman sends a dispatch from the latest round of student protests in England against tuition rate hikes. This anger follows demonstrations in Germany and many other European countries where budgetary shortfalls, real or imagined, and austerity measures, imposed or voluntary, have undermined the ideal and priority of the equitable promotion of a literate society.  This is something worth fighting for and the students' efforts from Dublin to London to Paris to Bamberg and all points beyond and in between are valiant and should not go unnoticed or unheeded.

For those outside of the European education system, and not counting only those laureates and their families who have been direct benefits because the whole society benefits, the nominal tuitions and selective admissions process might seem unfamiliar: it amazes me that the approach to education in the States compared to the rest of the world could have diverged so greatly, on the one side, merit-based and underwritten by the state and on the other prohibitively expensive and undiscerning where even public universities are run for-profit through the Ponzi scheme of student loans and financial aid, which seems likely to be the next bubble to burst, and not to mention overcrowded, unrealistic and generally unremarkable in all disciplines. Perhaps thinking such targets of budget cuts would be forgivably (or forgettable) unpopular, politicians have been unprepared for the backlash, especially in England and Ireland, where rescue-loans from the EU and the IMF came with too many strings attached, and putting university fees on the line was one way to portend fiscal balance. This sort of sacrifice, however, is unwelcome and ill-advised, like the tragedy that will be facing Iceland--again over finances--when the next generation is forced to leave over lack of opportunity. Tripling tuition will have the same effect, leaving one's native landscape diminished and becoming more like the university system of America in price and quality, and that kind of collateral is on terms that no one can afford, regardless of their credit-worthiness.

cornucopia

What sort of daily sentiments, gems of wisdom, especially shop-talk or the poetic haikus of sociopathic rage that the boss of my boss has scribbled on all too ephemeral note pads, would you like to turn into keepsakes? Crochet it on a pillow? Steotch, the New England needle-artists, has produced a vast selection of such samplers, adding a touch of kitsch and permanency to tag-lines and memes, internet doctrines and covenants not necessarily captured in tee-shirt form, from Transportation Security Administration awkwardness to LOLCats (give us this day our daily cheezburger) to Peanut Butter Jelly Time to O RLY owl to Double Rainbow.  A happy and humourous Thanksgiving to everyone... Om Nom Nom.

allons-y, alonso

A bloggeur on Tumblr has a sizable and tasteful collection of animated GIFs from great films, the bulk from modern classics by Stanley Kubrick, David Lynch, Jean Luc Godard and Tarantino under the blog If we don't, Remember Me.  Unfortuneately, I can only share a static image from the compliation, but I really admire the scences, just a few frames each, that the author choose for their subtle expressions and nice quotes.  Animated GIFs remind me of those Cracker-Jack prizes, little postage stamp sized things with varigated surfaces, that when turned askewed revealed a new picture and the illusion of movement and change.  To get that right in the limited framework of available technology, like within the parameters of a graphic file, is much more impressive than embedding flashier presentations.

beyond thunderdome

Der Spiegel, via thelocal, reports on a tip from a would-be defector that warns of a Mumbai-style terror attack on the German Reichstag to be carried out in the Spring. Since when is kicking it Bombay style a way to talk about stratagems, as if it were comparable to à la russe or Stockholm Syndrome, because as dreadfully effective and tragic as it was for the city of Mumbai, storming Parliament and running amok is on a different level. It is just tacky shorthand.

Given the calm and collected reactions of the Ministry of the Interior, taking these developments in stride, I feel confident that with this warning and insight, the public will be kept safe—though Germany’s quitting Afghanistan altogether would probably be a cheaper and more expedient way to curb terror threats. One other item about this tip that seems suspect, however, is the speed with which authorities leaked this to the press and how quickly the news filters to the public forum. Transparency and disclosure are very important and ought to be expected, but maybe this threat, source and intelligence was too quickly put up for speculation and argument, even without all the details. That the luggage bomb couriered from Windhoek to Germany turned out to be a security test, a dummy, which no one is taking credit for planting, would also make me a little wary of tipsters and possible self-fulfilling prophets of gloom. When the news broke, before it was discovered that the suitcase was a tester model, I tried to fill in the blanks, remembering that Namibia is a former German colony, but now the country is a bit upset over the bad, and misdirected, publicity. Much of the war against Iraq and the regime of Saddam Hussein was prosecuted on the testimony of exiles, some of whom were later shown to have more complicated agendas and motives, but despite purity of evidence, it was taken as such because that was what the defenders wanted to hear. The exiles were very obliging.

flying dutchman or space ghost coast-to-coast

As the BBC reports, astronomers from the Max Planck Institute in Heidelberg have discovered the first exo-planet that seems to have originated outside of the Milky Way galaxy. Researchers believed that this planet, found in orbit around an ancient star in a stellar stream, formed before its host dwarf galaxy was absorbed by our own. These wispy bands of red giants are the remnants of once independent galactic bodies. Nothing yet, as with all distant planets, can be determined about is composition, nor is there reason to believe that it would betray any kind of departure from the imagined and the expected, as if anything could be safely assumed about alien worlds--rather, it is more evidence of the abundance of stars hosting planets. It also reminds me of the Martian meteor found in the 1980s in Antarctica. Without even addressing questions of extra-planetary biogenesis and whether the imprints on the rocks surface are fossils, just the fact that material could be ejected or otherwise shrugged off of Mars and travel through space and be captured by Earth's gravity to be found later by rock-hounds at the bottom of the world, just seems amazing and almost lyrical, purposeful and mysterious all at once.