Saturday 9 February 2013
hey mister talleyrand or church and state
A parallel clerical hierarchy was its own second state wielding a different influence but also with their own wealth and land-holdings. On-going political pressure from the government of France, culminating in revolution and conquering marches, for unity and orderliness—plus a princeling’s ransom that saved some toy kingdoms from being annexed, resulted in alliances forming in Prussia and land-grabs on the part of defeated and diminished states that prompted them towards mediatisation, secularization of church property.
Bavaria alone acquired some 14 000 square kilometers of land (after having loss some 10 000 sq km in the wars), plus the attending population and revenues from bishoprics, monasteries, abbeys, and convents (in addition to a few autonomous enclaves, principalities and locales with imperial immediacy). The decision to absorb church lands was one of the last of the Empire, but the Vatican brokered a deal with Bavaria in 1817 provides that the government maintains former church property, which is still in effect.
The some eleven million euro annually that Bayern spends is quite a bargain, though some tax-payers might object, for all the gains, and the renewal of agreement did not change this year in kind—only pooling funds for distribution, so that the leaders of individual diocese are not on state payroll. While churches and institutions are cared for (other Europe countries have also negotiated their own care-taker agreements with the Holy See with differing provisions), still it makes for some awkward and immemorial bureaucracy where holy sites fall under the sometimes (yet) competing jurisdictions of government, religion and the league of historical and cultural preservation.
catagories: ๐ฉ๐ช, ๐ซ๐ท, ✝️, ๐, foreign policy
Wednesday 6 February 2013
the latrix or virtual reality
Suspending disbelief for a moment, these barriers suggest a self-contained experiment with fixed parameters, elusive but not beyond the eventual acuity of the persistent and morbidly curious. Perhaps this is a clue, peeking behind the curtain, but (and I am sure popular speculation goes far beyond the claims and competency of the research) but it also may be a phenomena programmed into our scientific methods and props. Not too long ago, I can recall, sort of an enthusiastic worry that eventually the advancing capacity of digital imagery with exponential mega-pixels could eventual out-map the real world, pictures containing more “information” than their subjects. I wonder how this will play out.
grand coalition or what say you, alcibiades?
catagories: ๐ฉ๐ช, ๐ช๐บ, ๐ฌ๐ท, economic policy, labour
Tuesday 5 February 2013
orange
Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands recently announced that she would be abdicating this Spring, in favour of her son and successor.
Unfortunately, there are no such plans for Prince Charles of the United Kingdom. I do really admire Elizabeth II and certainly would not be eager to see her relinquish the throne, I do also sympathize with the prince, who’s got one of the most awkward posts in the world, as heir-apparent, since a promotion is only possible should someone pass away, as Charles himself has conceded many times. The celebratory mood in the Netherlands did not fail to permeate into Wiesbaden, which has an intimate connection with the royal family that I failed to register until this occasion. The line of Nassau hails from here, specifically with the palace in Biebrich as their primary residence. Vestiges of these connections abound, great and small, in endowments, architecture and institutions throughout the city (especially in the way they differentiate their portion of the national public banking system), with storied histories that defy the overlooking and wonder, but still sometimes it takes an out-of-the-ordinary event (and special guests) to excite heritage and legacy.
bridey murphy or mesmerize
Accidentally, I discovered a pamphlet—a book, really, but there was such a paucity of substance as to make modern de-sophisticates a little dismissive, on the subject of self-hypnosis from the early 1960s.
At times the tone of the discipline took on this familiar, yet unheard for these disciplines for me, which seemed to have been something akin to a huge craze, apologetic, open and self-effacing tone of gimmicky schemes, modern touts for exercise equipment and miracle diets. Still curious, I read on, knowing that such disdain was exactly what the bulk of the argument warned about: people are simply more accustomed to failure than success and suggestible to a fault, and stressed the safety of auto-hypnosis, dispelling apparently equally stern warnings against enthusiastic self-treatment. Like all forms of meditation, and prayer even, these techniques seem far from the pseudo-science of quack tonics or sรฉance sessions, and at worse a placebo, and though discipline and patience is never an appealing delivery system, and likely a sort of psychic flexibility that can work in surprising ways—unexpected too since one’s own faulty beliefs are trying to remedy themselves.
Personally, I am not a stranger to the passing yet memorable thrill that’s called self-help and though I can’t always keep up some mantras, no matter how good and sensible the advice, I was convinced when despite my concentration on apparent vanities, even with unrealistic expectations but allowable since they were daily companions for quite some time, bigger and more defining anxieties instead surfaced and allowed themselves, I felt, to be redressed. That was pretty keen. In the end, I suppose, I wonder why such a fad was a fad and then was forgot and what sort of turf battle occurred to end this study’s popularity.
Sunday 3 February 2013
manager of mirth or as you like it
Saturday 2 February 2013
1993 or janet reno, meter-maid
The question posed asked what people were doing twenty years ago on that particular day, and though that date registered nothing particularly memorable, like the days the Kennedys were shot, the moon-landing or 9/11, I do have a few resources, like diaries than reach back nearly that far and watching the daily addendum to the Tagesschau (the nightly national news report) that broadcasts (sometimes with extensive warning labels) the installment from two decades ago. In the early part of 1993, William Jefferson Clinton was inaugurated as president of the United States, poet and statesman Vรกclav Havel became the president of the young Czech Republic, it was the dread beginning of nostalgic adaptations first with the Beverly Hillbillies and The Fugitive, there was the first World Trade Center bombings occurred, the cable channel Comedy Central premiered (I really, really wish-a I’d never heard of Amy Fisher—Mohammed Salameh, Mohammed salaam, I was only the driver, I didn’t build that bomb) , and the now redundant bureau of the US ATF (alcohol, tobacco and firearms) began a fifty-one day stand-off at the Branch-Davidian compound in Waco, Texas, Iraqi authorities refuse NATO weapons-inspectors access, fractures began to appear in Yugoslavia, the Red Army Faction was still active in a united Germany, the trials of the Rodney King beatings began, and Stephen Hawking published A Brief History of Time.
Later in the year, there was a lot more. I couldn’t say definitively how a certain day reverberated for me personally, but the notion of taking time to review one’s life from the perspective of two decades or just two years on (everyone probably has their modern history well-documented though all time is full) is something powerful and perhaps an archive that should be sought out.