kauderwelsch

Since 1994 linguists from the Association for the German Language along with journalists and authors have gathered to nominate an Unwort (Un-word) of the Year, picking a neologism that's made its way into common-parlance but butchers the language. The nature and construction of the German language, compounding modifier and substantive in long and novel chains not just for the nonce but also for public-consumption, celebrates invention as well, but Unwörte general fill a need that’s not there, sort of like the English equivalent of "irregardless" or "misunderestimate" or "refudiate," and many past candidates do originate with American buzzwords.

The jury announced that the winner for 2011 was "Döner-Morde," which is a little dark but importantly draws attention to the type of soft, dismissive and maybe apathetic racism and prejudice that has disturbingly become much too prevalent and tolerated. It is shorthand that marks the spree of coordinated extremists murders that targeted minorities all over Germany that went nearly unnoticed for a decade. The term is meant to be demeaning and reflects the ignorance of authorities and politicians who might be as prone to reduce someone to a stereotype based on assumption. People with Turkish ancestry living in Germany are often associated with running Döner Imbißen (stands, lunch-counters) and such labeling may have prevented police from seeing the scope of the murder series and terrible ideas that have taken root. Grammarians are not usually social activists and perhaps it would have been more in keeping with the light mood of the contest to use some fashionable term from finance or Merkozy or the whole trend, out of some weird hurricane-envy, of naming all the storm fronts (Orkan) that pass through, but they are right in that the timbre of communication does reflect the times.

barnard’s star or space oddity

The BBC has an item on a newly expanded public science project, called Planet Hunters, which invites volunteers to scour time-lapse images of some 150,000 stellar groups captured during the Kepler mapping mission. It is incredible and inspiring to think in the span of less than a decade, astronomy has gone virtually from uncertainty whether any planet was outside of our own Solar System to over seven-hundred confirmed extra-solar planets. Scientists posit that all stars host a planetary system of some kind, so there's a lot to be discovered yet. Computers have identified many potential candidates but computers are very good at spotting patterns in the universes that they create, and I am sure human recruits with wonder and imagination will be able to point out many more.  The Zodiac and its underlying mythology is a very human invention, a means to cope with mysteries and the the unknown, but the calendars and charts that were shook out of that approach have not been surplanted or bested. Being a part of such a project, I think, would be a much more constructive use of my well-honed skills for match games and mah jongg and I am very excited to contribute.

blackout warden

Although the White House and the US congressional contingency sponsoring SOPA has flinched, abandoning language that provides for a government firewall that blocks out whole swathes of the internet, nodding to some expert testimony and perhaps in hope of appeasing protestors who demonstrated how DNS blacklisting could invite more security problems and damage the architecture of the internet, the remaining provisions of SOPA are still devious and misguided and give Hollywood too many choke-points (any link), to stifle creativity and reporting. On Wednesday (18. January), many diverse websites are going dark in protest to this bill’s impending passage, to illustrate how broke down the internet could become if America enacts this law. People world-wide ought to join in, because the internet knows no borders, and no one suffered the privations or propaganda that tried to quell past and more recent uprisings. America fortunately does not control the internet, though maybe pressure is mounting for the US to act as if it does, and ought to receive a strong signal that such meddling in media and in politics and in the economy is unwelcome, especially through such cowardly, backdoor channels.

streitkräfte

Following the America's Secretary of Defense's (Verteigdingungsministers) announcement—rather, confirmation, that part of US redesign of a leaner and cost-effective military would involve reduction of the army's presence in Europe, the German press made some pointed observations, probably pin-pointing areas for closure, which has been the subject of desperate and heated speculation to a select niche of German communities. Planned reductions in the size of the Bundeswehr, following the end of universal conscription, has already delivered bad news to some towns and villages that came to rely on money that soldiers and Soldaten spent locally.

I am sure that the guess-work will continue, and the US army as a familiar of the US government certainly cannot be relied on to commit to the most logical course of action. I believe Germany will see some transformation but will continue to host its American partners. Regional threats have changed as has the purpose of America's far-flung garrisons, but I think the United States would imperil itself further by wholly quitting its European presence, hollowing out its military, for the sake of savings that surely won't materialise. Despite strains and disagreements, America's NATO partners have assisted in their belligerent adventures because of this presence. Working-exchanges between guest- and host-armies are especially strong in Germany, and there are a lot of joint-training exercises. Without this partnership and immediate closeness, what waning support and cooperation, especially after decommissioning their ability to sustain battles on multiple fronts, will go away altogether.

kurzfrist

The news of a rash of downgrades in credit-worthiness, both for the short-term and the long-haul, was generally taken with a healthy wince and a shrug by the governments of Europe.  After all, people who live in glass houses ought not throw stones: despite what prognosis rating agencies in the United States threaten, which only speak to a skittish cabal, a massive underclass of underwriters enabling a more elite class of cooler heads to continue exercising grander manipulations, that does not discount the fact that a group of seventeen and twenty-seven nations, with different cultures, languages and priorities are still willing to engage one another peacefully and fairly in order to work things out.

Meanwhile, the US (which also does not enjoy a rating par excellence) has a legislative body that has not been able to agree on a budget for a more monolithic and formerly agile union for over three years now and has been operating on temporary measures while its sovereign debt has continued to swell. The EU is keenly aware of this sort of stalemate, political and economic, and the irony of the speed of its own deliberations. Reaction to opinions--especially considering the source, those same fashion-mavens that so enthusiastically commended the sub-prime mortgage market and encouraged exposure and contagion to a whole series of booms and busts, may drive markets but not real economies.

tabloid and broadsheet

The US Heimatschutz (Department of Homeland Security) disclosed that since at least June 2010 it has been operating a Social Networking and Media Capability charged with monitoring popular websites for trends and intelligence. I would be very surprised if such surveillance was not happening all along--after all, in those infernal anti-terrorism/operational security (OPSEC) that we’ve through annually for years now, we’re battered with examples of evil-doers gleaning valuable data from the same sources, seemingly innocuous until pieced together. The admission, I am sure, is not complete and does not reveal the entire scope of the operation, but it strikes me as a little pathetic that the approach of America's security and intelligence apparatus is merely a reflection of our own gossipy idleness and that the triangulation and predictive abilities are no more sophisticated than what any of us can access and do on a regular basis.

Most of these sites are sounding boards and aggregators that drive what people may read and research further but contain little original reporting nor opinion. I guess I am a little disappointed that there is nothing as clandestine and imaginative as the agency that Robert Redford worked for at the beginning of Sidney Pollock’s adaptation of "Six Days of the Condor," where bookworms scoured all sorts of publications, including pulp-fiction, for new ideas, plots and plans. Ruminating what's there for public consumption is the modus operandi of spammers and censors and trolls, and not the work of discreet professionals. It is probably the least invasive tact taken in the name of protecting the US people (ostensibly from themselves) but still very disconcerting for the US DHS to own up to reading over one's shoulder.

sustenance or food goes viral

From the science desk at Boing Boing, initial experiments conducted at the University of Nanking seem to indicate that eating, and the choices that go with it, not only are we consuming energy, nutrients, industrial dander or just empty calories but also bits of instruction, code with every bite. Small pieces of ribonucleic acid (RNA) survive digestion, splintered but essentially intact and identifiable--rice was the subject of the Chinese experiment, and can go on to interact with the consumer on a cellular level, influencing the way proteins are expressed.

I would guess the mainstay of eating throughout the animal kingdom is primarily derived from food’s fuel and nourishment, and is not in this residual coding but I don't know. The thrust of the research seems to present a strong warning against the introduction of genetically-modified or engineered crops into the food-chain, since digestion and nutrition and the mechanics of DNA and saying grace just got a lot more subtle and a lot more complex, but the accompanying write-up also raises other implications, like the relationship between predator and prey and how attuned, shocked or inured can we be in terms of diet choices. Do carnivores or herbivores seek out their specific quarry because their stomach have evolved to digest their meals wholly or imperfectly, by design, and benefit (or suffer) from symbiosis that goes deeper than our basic understanding of the hunt? Should such claims does prove true, it also makes me wonder about what it means to eat processed and artificial foods, whose information (as well as nutrition) is stripped away, and what truths and sense are in the latest fads like the Caveman Diet or the advice to cook and eat like what one's grandparents (or great-grandparents) ate. People cannot be forced to avoid junk and convenience foods and eat healthy, but learning about other ways that diet determines well-being can make the arguments for taking care of oneself more compelling and forces politics and the naïveté of greed (both on the parts of the fast-food industry and GMO agribusiness) out of the kitchen.

truth in advertising

At the other end of the spectrum (in several respects) from the efforts in the US legislature to bring SOPA and PIPA in force, the EU Commissar and national consumer advocacy ministries are teaming up to combat predatory lending practices through offers of on-line credit that are usually too good to be true. In contrast to the industry lobby in the States, this mission actually aims to protect the consumer and has the teeth to close down websites, possibly engaged in shady, dishonest business, if they fail to come into compliance--not steamrolled or blacklisted but not suffered purely for the sake of commerce either. Though I think the Banking Offices of Mister Goodluck Smith-Jones of National Bank Ltd GmbH of Nairobi, who has some incredible news for you, are safe, the commission has looked at hundreds of websites and scoured thousands of offers that purport to compare competitive interest rates for moving ones savings or find the best terms for a loan and found that more than two-thirds of these sites, with an air of legitimacy since they rate real financial institutions that people have heard of, the conditions did not pan out as favourably as promised. Caveat emptor is a sound doctrine to follow and a little homework is always to one's advantage, while the sieve of government cannot and would not attempt to filter and field all such spam, this kind of initiative is a proportional way to balance out the glossy inducements that people sometimes seek out.