fáil whale or pot-of-gold

Ireland's incumbent government was brutally routed as retribution for gross dereliction when it came to the custody of the country's wealth. Mismanagement and buying into flimsy schemes excited the ousting of the outgoing Fianna Fáil coalition, and though, no doubt, the people should be held to account whose conduct has lead Ireland's betrothal to years of indebtedness, the elections seem one on hand symbolic and moot. Saddled with this financial crisis, the incoming government has very little latitude in determining any significant changes to welfare or austerity, since all future funding has already been allocated--spent--to pay off IMF loans with money tight and choices narrowed. Many other places facing similar situations fear population and talent drains as people move with the fleeing job opportunities and spiraling revenues. Huge swaths of land stood nearly deserted already on our visits, with little going expect for the holidaymakers, but what may not have been visible or appreciable to us was I am sure a lot of individuals getting creative and inventive. Governments may never be luminaries at stretching the household budget, and some ministers, fearing saturation and stagnation, can only hope to repackage, refinance, or hope that extra-terrestrials will infuse the market with fresh buying-power.

One nation in the same predicament as Ireland, having already dumped its lax leadership and dealing summarily with withering investment and hardships to come, is Iceland.

The bit of genius they are testing, albeit ambitious and grandiose, is a proposal to channel geothermal energy from volcanic fonts in Iceland via cable to Scotland or Ireland and onto Europe. Considering how Iceland's exposure only shifted from news of the country's financial melt-down to how Eyjafjallajökull (Kajagoogoo) grounded air travel, that is a good stroke that people may soon be associating the country with plentiful, clean and cheap energy. There's a bit of wildness in laying a two thousand kilometer power line under the Atlantic, but the project's scale and goal is little different from the Suez or Panama Canals.

e*moticons

Thought Catalog (via the always stunning Mind Hacks) has a short reflection on the Internet's rather unexamined capacity to alter existential states. Though there are tumbling stacks of articles on how social networking has besmirched manners, etiquette and attention spans, there seems to be less said about the emotions--anxieties, rather--that the Internet has authored. That's a strange manifestation of artificial intelligence or a new weighted-factor for the Turning test. One's venues, perches for expressing and maintaining one's image have increased considerably with the new electronic real estate, and there is a strange, unrelenting pressure to update and to be the first on the scene. One should perhaps trust in all the redundancies built into the system for a bit of solace. If exposure is missed one place, the same item will mostly be re-run, recycled or re-posted elsewhere a little behind the curve. Nothing, in fact, ever goes away, notwithstanding the gnawing obligation to treat something as actionably otherwise. The internet is not like television, telethons, or radio in this respect. Neither are emails--discounting their speedier derivatives--the same as a phone call: they are designed, whether intended or not, to be answered at one's pace and not instantaneously refreshed.

ad lib

The situation in North Africa and the Mid-East is still explosive, and despite progress won there is a distinct and present risk of recidivist tyrannies and back-sliding into chaos. Some protesters’ honeymoons have lost their sheen as police are doing their job of civil policing and concessions, sometimes meaningful, betimes empty, are being offered by leaders of a whole range of vested and divested authority.

People have been inspired towards revolution, though no oppression is exercised in quite the same way—Libya is a very different place than Egypt or Tunisia or Algeria or Jordan or Iran or Iraq or Yemen or Saudi Arabia—and though steady-state strife, disenfranchisement or even civil war is influenced by macroeconomic factors and policy-decisions that have left a younger population disaffected and without many opportunities for a commensurate career, aside from daily staples and small freedoms. Many observers seemed spooked by talk of civil war and the subsequent disruption to oil supplies and overall destabilization that would make it more difficult for carpetbagger corporations to operate there.

I hope that outsiders are not just wishing this away, support tepid at best, to keep cheap oil pumping and promote continued expansion opportunities to export Western luxuries and fast food franchises and to ensure that the standard of living stays low and not too much of the treasure and resources are retained and used in these places. Just like it is billed as a rarity to witness a revolt that was not under the ægis of the forces that spread freedom and democracy in the world, it is likewise billed as unusual to see a civil war starting, as most assume such regional conflicts have always been, some warring tribes in lands with borders jimmied out arbitrarily when the colonial powers moved on to pure mercantilism—and what of that blood and treasure in a decade not so well invested in Iraq as protests begin in Baghdad. Years of war and occupation have left the people with precious little left to loose, and makes the chance ripe to regain and reclaim what was once theirs without meddling, direct or tangential.

end-user error

I will readily admit that I can be very lazy when it comes to electronics and tend not to pay attention, constantly surprised by the extra features the camera or the DVD player is capable of, for example, and I am reluctant to ever touch the settings on the central heating. The controls, however not excusing me from my want just to bang on buttons until the desired result is achieved or not familiarizing myself duly with the protocol, do not seem to me simple, intuitive or logical. This one slightly overwhelming dial on the hot water tank makes me think of the instructions forward-thinking scientists designed for the Voyager spacecraft so that an alien intelligence could receive the messages from Earth, the star Sirius (*), the lunar phase (•), the base of the natural logarithm (℮) as it approaches the mass to energy equivalence (E)… What does it all mean?

berlin, du bist wunderschön

Bundestag

On the occasion of the travel industry trend merchants announcing that Germany has surpassed France as the preferred European tourist destination, I thought it was a good reason to hold a photo roundup from our vacation last week to the capital. 

Brandenburger Tor

While we were waiting to buy tickets to the observation deck of the fantastically retro-futuristic Fernsehturm at Alexanderplatz, there was a graphic display on how the TV tower compared to other tall structures with a view from around the world. 

Weltzeituhr, Alexanderplatz

All the listed sites from the Empire State Building to the Tokyo Sky Tree were charter members of some International Society for Tall Towers, which I though was some strange, bureaucratic and self-referential device (like the Institute for Wine Drinkery for one particular grocery store chain, which of course only recommends the store brands the chain sells and rates no outside vintages),

Fernsehturm with Neptunbrunnen

and that is what I think of these tourist rating bureaus. 

I am very glad that more people are appreciating Germany,

Siegessäule

though it is admittedly skewed a bit this year for Bavaria with the once a decade pilgrimmage to Oberammergau for the Passion Play this past Spring, but Berlin is not Paris or London and Paris and London is not Berlin, especially considering the affordable accessibility one has to all these fine things.

Gendarmenmarkt with Konzerthaus and Französische Dom

Berliner Olympic Stadium

Ishtar Gate on Museum Island

general zod

There is a certain cachet to arch-villains that the cadre of contemporary but quaking megalomaniacal leaders have failed to capture. I don't know if there is an annual gathering of the truly rotten and demonized heads of state, Leader and Guide of the Revolution, Dear Leader, Baby Doc, Protector of the People, Fidei Defensor, to coordinate and plan outright--or if such a summit falls under the guise of another. These bad guys are readily identifiable, like any well-drawn nemesis, and certainly have the tragic flaw of hubris. This much they are capitalizing on, not that the struggles and triumphs all around the world are some comic book adventure, but they, for one, do not admit to an equally matched opponent--which makes the revolution all the more impressive with the accumulated efforts of the people a more sturdy support than any super hero--and because or despite of this imbalance, these stubborn dictators are not the ultimate fonts of evil either.

Greed and rank hypocrisy of course punctuated their long reigns, but the source and inspiration and allowance surely lay elsewhere, just as the people draw their line in the sand, came to their tipping-point, not solely when this steady-state oppression became suddenly intolerable but also when outside pressures and influences made day-to-day existence even more of a struggle, exposure--the sieves of information, financial inversion that brought too much down on the markets, souks and bazaars. No outstanding credit is due, however.