marching orders

This is not the timeliest reporting, but after being in effect for eighteen years, it is nice to actually see the repeal (DE) in print and on official stationary. Of course, what comes after all the talk, debate and vitriol is important and mending, but this final formality seemed already in place and triumphant for quite a while. The memo was just now disseminated to our level, and though that's a rather typical internal pace, news does find other avenues and outlets.

up periscope or objects in the rear-view mirror may appear closer than they are

Generally, I am never in so much of a hurry that I would chance passing trucks bumbling down the county roads, although the line of cars behind me sometimes don't appreciate the leisurely pace (the time to rush is before one leaves home and not on the road). I do get stuck, quite often, idling and studying the rear of a cargo transporter and I was thinking, as the line of cars behind my lead grew more and more impatient, that having a view-screen to see around the truck and the next bend in the road, would be a neat thing--although I am sure there would be worries about liability issues. I am sure marketers, like those who plaster buses and trams in advertising like race cars, would install the monitors and cameras for the chance at having another mobile billboard that might also make over-taking traffic a slightly safer maneuver.

casting stones or papst blue-ribbon

The staff at Der Spiegel is presenting a preview of the Pope's potentially difficult visit to his homeland, which H and I will be attending this weekend--beginning with biographies of the prominent-players Benedikt will encounter on his State visit, replete with skeletons in the closet. Berlin's lord mayor has said that the Pontiff is welcome in his city, but so are the protesters. Through the lens of Catholicism, Germany's statesmen are revealed as a quite a lot of reprobates.

"Luckily for the pope, he won't have any problems with two other prominent people he will meet in Berlin. Chancellor Angela Merkel (remarried) and German Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle (gay) are both Protestants."

I suppose, by the rules, we all do. There are serious social schisms that need to be healed and some shadowy deportments that have gone too long without saying. Once, in seminar in college, I proclaimed--rather obtusely, that Jesus says: "The rules are for bad people." While I don't believe that's necessarily rubric or Church doctrine, there is ample latitude for tolerance and learning from one another and loving one another, despite any differences in upbringing and inculcation.

basta and geldpolitik

I am not sure what to make of this Fire Sale that the United States has announced with its apparent intent to offer unlimited US dollar-denominated loans to try to hold interest rates down for European countries coming against their debt thresholds. This emergency relief seems like a mechanism to undo the gossipy damage done by downgrades from the credit rating agencies, since credit-worthiness determines the upward usury on loans--in other words, to allow everyone to keep playing. Though ostensibly Germany's Federal Ministry for Food, Agriculture and Consumer Protection (Bundes-ministerium für Ernährung, Landwirtschaft und Verbraucher-schutz) may be an exception, it seems like most of the work of governments, bullied by supranational finance institutions, is devoted to protecting the lender organizations and promoting good PR for their schemes and trustworthiness, with little regard or recourse for the debtors. Holding players to another round, without rigid or fair rules to play by, instead of allowing a pass or fold yields diminishing returns and impoverishes everyone, no matter what the window-dressing. These insubstantial lifelines tossed to the EU allows the dollar to dodder a bit longer at favourable lows and generates nominal revenue off of phantom loans, and a fixed margin of appreciation (how much the dollar-euro exchange rate varies) keeps the borrowers from speculating over-much against the lenders. If the euro value tumbles, the dollars become the functional currency, but if the euro gains in value against the dollar (as it should do because the European market are inherently stronger and more stable), such debt becomes cheap to pay off. The euro is not in distress and it does not need this kind of American chivalry and chauvinism (and maybe the munificence of others too), and it looks as if the creditors' champions have succeeded in expanding (diluting) their money supply without immediately and clearly sacrificing the security of their players for their very next round.

ahoy, hoy or pirates' progress

Yarrggg, mateys! The Pirate Party (die Piratenpartei) secured a significant number of seats in Berlin's general state-election, and they are able to aptly celebrate their victory with International Talk like a Pirate Day (EN/DE). That's really something. I wonder if excitement over the opportunity to use this patois helped to rally the voters and to mutually raise awareness about electronic privacy and public-domain issues.

Another fabulist tradition of adventures and incredible yarns has just recently been re-kindled: after publishing its collected stories and taking a two year hiatus, Damn Interesting appears to be returning with more bizarre and engrossing vignettes that are certainly more enduring in terms of scholarship, research and interest than the daily buzz, but it is also a treat to have fresh dispatches from the weird and wonderful.

mowgli or babelsberg

We may well all have been had, but this sort of story, tragic and mysterious, is engrossing and seems a little too quiet to be a hoax--the English daily the local reports on a teenage boy who emerged from the forests outside Berlin in early September, healthy but apparently oblivious of his origins and identity after having lived in the woods for five years with his father. He only speaks English and demonstrates only rudimentary understanding of German. I am reminded about another supposed wild youth of Germany, Kaspar Hauser of Ansbach, who may have, as a rightful heir to the throne, been cast into the wilderness and hidden away by a pretender or usurper. The story, just told in brief, seems quite sad and I am sure that the German Sprachraum is sensitive to such dramatic appearances, especially considering the continuing revelations of kept basement-women and cases of decades of mistreatment and isolation. In fact, this sort of thing seems to be a particularly German leit-motif, with Rapunzel, the Bamberg Boy who was raised by cows, Peter of Hamelin (same town where the villagers lost their children because they failed to pay the piper) who was adopted by the British monarchy. There is also the film Hanna (a German-American venture from Babelsberg studios), about a prodigious and deadly little girl, raised alone by her father in arctic wastelands and intensely tutored in what to do in case of an emergency, like the youth found outside of Berlin was instructed to go north. It is a mystery--and I wonder what kind of escapism it is to feel estrangement, savage otherness, that such things happen to anybody but at the same time hope it's not a prank.