hellau

There are a lot of old traditions and customs associated with Fasching (Carnival), like fancy-dress, grand balls, parades and a little reckless abandon to celebrate this fifth season. These past few years, however, might point to a new convention, politicians giving up politics for Lent, marked with ungraceful resignations. Germany's president (DE/EN) just gave up his office over ongoing scandalous revelations of abuse of position, power and prestige unbecoming of the post for gifts and preferential treatment. Just a year prior, Germany's defense minister also resigned in disgrace right before Fastnacht (although not on the same exact date, as the Carnival season is determined by the moveable feast of Easter) over findings he had plagiarized a large portion of his doctorial thesis. These last minute dishonours, I heard, have got the krewe making floats for the grand Faschings parade in Köln scrambling to properly lampoon their political figures, and I wonder if there isn't something in the timing: are party caucuses and election cycles synchronized to some extent with the liturgical calendar, or is this Lenten penance just a good way to save oneself from further embarrassment? Fasching is apolitical but democratic and with no shortage of potential targets for ridicule and fun.

deus ex machina or exit, stage-left

Greece is growing more and more incensed by the harsh disregard that financial-colonialists are offering, serving up quite openly while the country's social institutions and remaining commercial infrastructure collapse into receivership. For all the tea (or opium) in China, these carpet-baggers are no different than the Dutch East-India Company or the pine-apple companies and banana-republicans with their Bayonet Constitution for the Kingdom of Hawaii, with no more sophistication or subtlety than their colonial predecessors. Though there is probably profits to be realized too from the downfall (for opportunists and also ultimately for the good of the people), the only ones to suffer from the revaluation, by hook or by crook, of the present economy would be the colonial powers and their local collaborators, politicians and businesses that facilitated the credit supersaturation. The current climate is not sustainable, and it escapes me why anyone would accept and propagate the ugly characterizations cast towards the Greeks, the Spaniards, the Portuguese of greed, laziness, dishonesty and naivety other than blatant deflection and attempts to detract from the colonial powers' own simplicity and avarice. What is tantalizing and easy is also smug and untenable.

komplott or ockham’s razor

For the past several weeks, I have been voraciously reading a Vatican thriller by academic, theologian, Cold War espionage artist, exorcist and polyglot Father Malachi Martin, and although the author, as a papal-insider, claimed to be channeling reality rather than divining fiction, it is really frightening how the language and intrigues bear an almost word-to-word correspondence between the current political mood of the present German papacy (DE/EN) and the past crises of the Slavic Pope of Windswept House. In both the novel and the newspaper, there is the same conspiratorial atmosphere, more palpable now that daily conclaves and missteps are not so well shielded from the headlines any longer, and the same swell of disunity and splintering leadership is currying discord on both sides of the looking-glass.

Perhaps there's a balance to be found between the two accounts, and one certainly better adheres to the principles of Ockham's Razor, that the laws of parsimony and simplicity rather than elaborate plots and multiple, complex factors are generally right and sufficient.  Maybe bald job-security might be enough to sew discontent with some princes of the Church, but I hope not all motives are pure politics.  In one version, globalist factions are moving to establish a novus ordo seclorum through the organs of the emergent European Union, the new-fangled internet and a defanged and secularized Church Universal, and the besieged Pope works for an eminent and orderly collapse of the Soviet Empire within the framework of the Fátima Correspondence (DE/EN). In the other version, the Church has not satisfactorily addressed dissention among the ranks and its endemic cultural failings and whose stance and creed is under attack, as in the former, by climate-change apologists who would rather see populations curbed and save critical raw materials for their own gain, as identified in another series of leaks. One Pope faces a test in a sphinx-like China who has given no indication impending change, but I think that few without the caliber of the intelligence network of the Vatican could foresee the events of 1989 and 1990 and 1991. Not a political animal and not interested in allowing the Church to be an influence on statecraft, the Pope's vicarage leave some apparently wanting and ambitious. Let us hope that life does not imitate art in every detail.

the hunting of the snark or the barrister’s dream and the banker’s fate

Perhaps the embattled EU and currency alliance needs the rare and elusive Eurocorn for a mascot, a symbolic protagonist to rally against the kingmaker creditors and the formless monsters of debt and want.

pedigree pelecanus

There was a happy and romantic friend waiting to abush me in the shower for Valentine's Day when I got home. 

versöhnen u. abkindern

According to the Passauer Neue Presse (DE), there is a small faction in the CSU (the Christian Socialist Union) proposing to shore up the financial landscape of health- and nursing care insurance, facing an aging and dwindling population in Germany, by levying a special income tax against the childless (Kinderlose).

The group's speaker and chief advocate suggests that adults over the age of twenty-five should be made to contribute 1% of their income to support this fund, reduced to a half for the first child and to zero for every child thereafter. I am not sure what to make of this plan, which would need to overcome the hurdles of a Bundestag vote, legal scrutiny and public opinion. I don't know if it is equitable to exact a nominal, punitive sum from individuals who are not backfilling, putting someone in the wings, to continue paying into the pool of funds that make up pensions and insurance programmes, and apparently, aside from Kindergeld, there is already a fractional surcharge built into nursing-care policies for the childless--and such a plan would have to ultimately face the hurdles of the past as well. Incentive initiatives, like the Marriage Credit (Darlehen) (DE/EN) of the 1930s and 1940s and continued under the DDR for the promotion of families and a strong populace, of the past approached social engineering from the opposite direction. Newly-weds were extended lines of credits, loans, which were progressively forgiven as the couple had children. This scheme of debt jubilee--pardoning, discharging--was referred to as abkindern. I suppose that eventually no plan of action is off limits when it comes to reconciling (versöhnen) disparities between generations and the flow of support between children and parents.

it’s only a paper moon

Some months ago, I heard some discussion about a crowd-sourced, independent science-fiction feature with the premise that during the final days of World War II in Europe, remnants of the government of Nazi Germany retreat to the dark side of the Moon, and from that lunar base, study world developments and regroup to found a Fourth Reich. The Moon and exploration, cinematically, has been taking a beating lately, what with the Transformers' Movie and the cover-up depiction of the missions, general lunar skepticism, and now this.  Iron Sky, nonetheless, sounds fantastic, and I was not following at first but the movie has premiered at the Berlinale film festival, with audiences and critics indulging in the guilty pleasures of this trashy fun. Irreverent, the movie reminds me of Mel Brooke's The Producers, and shows that (maybe trampling on good taste and the realities of war) this era continues to be inexhaustible. There are several theatrical trailers out there, but I really like this one, featured on Boing Boing, because it pokes fun at itself and the ridiculousness of the idea, and I agree that an invasion of space Nazis from the Moon would be a natural consequence of electing Sarah Palin as president of the United States.