balkanization

 A US politician, not a contending mouth-piece fortunately but despicable all the same, made the hateful comment some months ago that the Palestinians were a made-up people and proposed to exclude them with prejudice from all future negotiations. While this was not the words of a gadfly and hopefully the statement’s reverberations went no further than a few pandering sound-bites, the conferring of the Nobel Peace Prize on the European Union, and a lunch-time quiz to name the twenty-seven member states of the EU, a tricky task sometimes with some distinctions lying in semantics and treaties and not just geography, made me wonder if the same arrogance and dismissiveness are not also at work in the halls of this organization. I want to say this carefully, and I hope that I am not so naïve as to gloss over real—though cryptic—bigotries or the rules and reforms contingent on ascension, but I was not fit for the challenge and could not name two members on the periphery of the glaring hole at the nexus of the Balkans.  The region that gives its name to allegorical device was created by the successive collapse of empires, first the Ottoman, then Austro-Hungarian and the Russian Imperia and the finally the Soviet Union, and the fast breaks with feudalism revived sectarian fighting, parallel to the wars and de-colonization of the European powers in Africa and Asia that redrew the lines in the sand, creating new national entities with borders that did not necessarily match historical and culture contexts.

The region has made a lot of progress since being defeoffed and may not be looking to reinstate being lorded over in any measure nor want to join, necessarily, at this juncture—quite a few of the current members I think are grumbling over their association and it is not as if all the current upstanding, founding membership was completely forthcoming and honest about their own conditions and by-laws in the first place. While I am sure there are good reasons for doing so, there is even one country there named, in English, anyway with the unspeakably sad moniker of the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (FYROM), and I could not guess what the endonym might be and it seems to make it seem more like a place where Europeans do not live.  The EU is not Europe and forced, coerced inclusion is never a good thing, but it is a distressing thought that accomplishment and self-determination would be belittled for the sake of making the disparager’s case look more secure.

household atomics

Although it is a matter for debate and speculation through the rather myopic lens of the Cold War and the policy of deterrence what the grounding motivations for the speech and the project were, US president Eisenhower’s 1953 address to the United Nations’ General Assembly on “Atoms for Peace” was a bold and defining departure.
This message, most likely worded to bring the antiseptic of daylight, more transparency and less secrecy that characterized how research and maintenance of stockpiles was conducted prior, to that “bucket of sunshine,” as Khrushchev called the bomb, aimed to promulgate nuclear power for peaceful purposes—energy, medical research, etc., and to assuage public fear that such destruction would not be visited on the Earth again, with the irreconcilable horrors of Japan still very raw and tensions escalating between the two superpowers. No longer state secrets because of this move for peaceful proliferation, the US knew better that state of players on the periphery and developing and nascent powers, with newly-acquired know-how under special tutelage, were able to develop generators, reactors and laboratories.
Until recently, this openness has helped mean that the founding members of the nuclear club have kept their munitions but very few have applied for membership, perhaps content with pursuing their own goals in regard to transitional power supplies and perhaps with the assurance that, in a pinch, they too could weaponize their stocks. Some argue that the underlying stratagem was to persuade NATO allies to shift their focus to developing and maintaining a nuclear arsenal, rather than more costly traditional armaments and standing armies and regard the policy of sharing technologies as having gravely backfired. I believe, rather, that this approach figuratively built in fail-safes and backdoors that was a greater instrument of restraint than mutually assured destruction. The genie cannot be put back in the bottle but well-crafted diplomacy and confidence seem much more enduring than dictates and fighting wars by proxy.

verðlaun, iad duais, the prize, o prémio, el premio, el premi, ar priz, le prix, de prijs, den präis, der prisen, premija, den prisen, i priset, palkinto, auhind, der preis, il premio, præmium, il premju, lu premiu, w nagroda, a díj, cena, çmimi, premiul, τα βραβεία, прэмія

It is a great honour to be awarded a Nobel Peace Prize, along with 502 million fellow Europeans, and I believe in the congratulatory and admonishing spirit of the committee’s unanimous decision. Individuals surely take on the burden and potential of promoting harmony, too, and there are worthy and magnanimous individuals out there working in the public and struggling in the shadows to those ends, but awards en masse, neither slights for the other nominees nor anodyne and over-cautious, are not without precedent, like when the prize was given to Doctors without Borders (Médecins sans Frontièrs, Ärzte ohne Grenzen) or Great Britain conferring the George Cross collectively to the people of Malta for gallantry during World War II.

Cumulatively, the people of Europe and not just their ombudsmen and institutions have realized peace, progress and understanding while preserving and even sharpening individual culture and heritage in just scant decades from a landscape of conflict and autocracy. Conspicuous heroism is sometimes hard to see in the glare of everyday daylight. This is a feat that should not go unrecognized and the prize is not diluted by bureaucracy as an instrument of reconciliation and cooperation that goes by an institutional name, but rather, I believe, serves as an important nudge that everyone, regulators and citizens and those associates and cadets branches and those waiting in the wings alike, should try to live up to what’s been bestowed on and inherited and be not distracted from the course by threats that divide and diminish.

logograph or measuring box and hollyhocks

I don’t pretend to know anything about the subject, the distinct traditions of the Japanese ideas of heraldry and vexology are quite something to survey. Here is a collection of family crests, akin to coats-of-arms, which fall into geometric categories, like variations on hawks’ feathers, oaks, measuring boxes, plums, peonies, cranes, etc. Mouse over the image for a description. One can see that a few of these arms have found their way into the blazoning of the Western corporate world, used as logos by a certain banking enterprise, political party brands and monograms, a hardware manufacturer, and a few other as yet undiscovered ones. I like to think that the necessarily large and diverse marketing department that spearheaded these advertizing campaigns had some insight into their inspirations and there’s some allegory and symbolism behind the decisions. I’d like to think so anyway, although I often run up against a curiosity barrier when the matter of things gets too dense.

One ought to at least try to learn the provenance of one’s emblems. It really gets me, nonetheless, how unabashedly the new logo of our office copier samples from the flag of Kyrgyzstan. Admittedly, their old design was not very inspired and the one before that seemed to suggest fading and copy-degradation, but the banner of the former Soviet Republic seems to have little to do with xerography.

t9 or sui generis

Although not quite in contention as laureate material for its sometimes frustrating poetry, the chain of developments—from Pennsylvania 6-5000 to telephony for the hearing impaired to text-messaging—that led to predictive text, T9 technology, I think, deserves acknowledgement.
At first, I didn’t care to have my lines stepped on or my sentences completed when tapping out a little telegram, plus the fact that nimbleness of digits come with practice on any keyboard, but once I got more accustomed to the interface and being able to switch languages, I started to enjoy it, even appreciate it. Another interesting aspect is the strange word puzzles, poems by substitution that come out of the sequence of numbers, at first as broad suggestions and then narrowed down, like from gone, hone, home, hoof, goof, hood, to good. This transforming vocabulary do not quite make anagrams (Anagramme) but have a similar feel and I think the hidden relationships of neighbouring words that pop up are surprising and probably reveals something about the spacing and arrangement of the alphabet and the dimensions of language, as both disambiguations adapt.

powerhouse or conundrum

There is political and business consensus that the Energie-Wende, Germany’s planned transition away from nuclear dependency and towards more ecologically sustainable energy sources, will demand sacrifice and see a dearer cost placed on utilities, probably a truer reflection of the impact our accustomed lifestyles have on the environment. The recently passed bundle of regulations championing renewables, das Erneuerbare Energie Gesetz (EEG), is expected to propagate an increase in electricity costs of up to two fold in the coming year, which will of course having ripples through out the marketplace, and not ending with the average 50 € annual increase per household. That does not seem like too great of a price to pay but it may continue to climb by the same percent or higher in the following years, and does not take into account other fuels and knock-on prices.

Consumers are not bearing all the costs associated with the greening of the of the energy sector, but a significant contributing factor to the rate hikes households will see is the subsidizing of energy intensive industrial activities with reduced rates and tax exemptions. In some cases, the breaks have probably overreached their intent, places like golf courses beneficiaries of the same savings as factories, but however one feels about this reserved advantage to manufacturing, the lower rates help keep jobs and production in Germany and keep costs for finished goods competitive. Discounts for businesses means that the public have to pay higher rates to keep on track with targets, but should these cuts go away, there will be a certain threshold beyond which it is more economically sensible to relocate production and/or have domestic consumption and exports suffer by higher end-costs. Perhaps a two-tiered, public and corporate standard for carbon-swaps and emissions controls is not far behind, to ensure reforms are not damaging to important businesses.  Germany’s stewardship and aims are admirable, though in this economic environment, such behaviours do not seem to be courting many imitators, and while consumers aren’t exactly footing the entire bill for corporate influentials, but I do feel that a better equilibrium should be struck between commerce and ecology to keep all sides viable and not dishonour those ambitions by merely propping an artificial and hollow sense of affordability, competitiveness and real, overall progress on protecting the environment.