gaslight or don't step on the mollraths

Quite by accident, I stumbled across an affair that seems fit for treatment as a thriller by Alfred Hitchcock: some seven years ago, an employee of one of Germany’s beleaguered big bad banks was remanded to the custody of a high-security psychiatric hospital after being diagnosed as having chronic paranoid personality disorder. I missed any coverage of this story in the local media but the UK Guardian featured a pretty frightening and unflattering article.

Herr Gustl Mollrath was consigned to incarceration because he insisted that his former employers and co-workers (including his then-wife) were involved in money laundering operations, including smuggling of enormous amounts of euro to Switzerland. Mollrath’s case was cinched once his spouse alleged he was becoming violent towards her, gaslighted, as he grew more and more obsessed with his “conspiracy theories.” Maybe Mollrath’s only crime was being too visionary, realizing not all was above board in the financial sector some three years before everything started imploding and before one had reason to question the integrity of these institutions. While there seems to be holes in the story on both sides, I think it is amazingly chilling that a bank could disappear an inconvenient person or whistle-blower in a dungeon and hold him there for years. Mollrath has been released but probably won’t be vindicated, because the institution is likely to dig in against any admission of wrong-doing, despite mounting evidence to the contrary, and the implication of governors who have since taken up some high position in the German government. What a nightmare to be discredited and have one’s sanity question for daring to question the conduct of banksters. I am sure that this gentleman is not searching for continuing intrigues and further adventures, but I would like to see how this plays out and who else might be tossed in an oubliette.

tl;dr or loving spoonful

I have seen quite a lot of weird and wonderful through-the-looking-glass homages of art imitating digital life, but something about the tribal makeup of this woman, inspired to pose as Grumpy Internet Meme Cat really just struck me as the be-all, end-all, sort of like a Faberge Egg, Busby Berkley choreography, or some amazingly executed Rube Goldberg bucket-brigade of customer service teamwork to make a wish come true. Now with that spoonful of sugar, there is, however, much too much cowardly incivility and trolling, bullying on the internet.

There have been far worse tragedies that ended with consequences more dire and as undoable as the meanness and careless comments and mobbing that have been indelibly commented to the narrative, but one recent and unrelenting attack on a German politician who entered regional service with a seat on the Pirate Party for merely speaking really is a disheartening reminder of how cruel and childish and uncensored people can be. It was not the content of her words but tenor of her speech, as someone who is hearing-impaired, that brought on a barrage of cold and ugly commentary, channeled through one social networking forum, that stirred feelings of self-consciousness and insecurity about how she talked that maybe she had long ago over come or did not know to be anything other than confident about before. This woman was propelled to celebrity and politics for her ability to read lips and shared the unheard conversations between coaches and players and provided some interesting insights during the soccer championships with her play-by-play feed, but she is now thinking of resigning over this harsh and unreasonable treatment. Celebrity and public-service invites criticism, of course, and an audience of any size draws spite and nastiness—if for nothing else, out of the mirage of anonymity and distance. I hope @pontifex will not have to deal with this kind of abuse or disrespect, but such forums deflate inhibitions and encourage something other than courage, making it sometimes hard to forgive what is never truly forgot. Words are as shattering as sticks and stones, and I hope that people could move forward with a little compassion and empathy so the really terrible and permanent things don’t happen again. There ought to be a penance for those who don’t have the restraint to resist nasty, unhelpful comments, like posting enough funny cat memes or inspirational quotes (and say it like they mean it, though no amount really equals sorry) to smooth the situation over.

picture-picture or ei-dee-o-lo, o-lo, o-lo

A few observant photographers captured some good chance occurrences of pareidolia and it made me wonder whether computer could see such thing, even were something designed for those ends, like a facial-recognition programme. Would Curiosity have picked out the Face on Mars—and either way, what does that say about us? The more I thought about the mind’s ability and need to bridge the gaps and summon up patterns or semblance, unmotivated, bidden or otherwise, I realize that there is a lot more than cuteness happening here when this and similar but unexpected configurations would impart the same exact thing to everybody.
The more I thought about it, I also realized that my digital camera does in fact sometimes alert me as having detected closed eyes when taking a picture of a statue or of a painting or the robot Johnny 5 from Short Circuit who saw a butterfly in a coffee spill, however, those are not examples of the mind’s eye, apophenia, I think. It is very remarkable for something to have a subjective meaningfulness, and not just seeing a shape in the clouds but also in coincidence, clustering, shadows, synchronicity, a lucky-streak, that is still something that can be communicated and perpetuated, no matter how delicate or specious the connections.

trim, trace and cross-quarter

I discovered this nice Christmas spread decking the altar of country church in mid-January earlier this year.
Ignoring for a moment the big take-away that this is a woefully inaccurate representation of the event, what with the pious farm animals, most churches, including the Vatican, keeps out its Christmas decorations through Epiphany (Dreikönigstag) and the ordinary time (ordinary in the sense of ordinal, counting the weeks until the next big season) before Lent and Passiontide until the feast of Candlemas (Darstellung des Herrn, presenting Baby Jesus at Temple) at the beginning of February. It’s OK if one does not get to taking down the lights and tree right away, and it is a nice thing to let the celebration linger. The Pope is not calling for a tightening up on symbols and idols and Catholics should not fear for the loss of these trappings—besides (it really bothered me that some body understood all the Pope’s scholarship for some amounted to livestock and time of the year), the latest papal blunderbus about tagging staff and domestics in the city state to monitor their movements, like Texas public school students or married Saudi Arabian women (but for quite different reasons), seems to have become the next big take-away.

concession: friendship is magic

I do not really understand what this is all about, but some are too clever to ignore.