habemus papem

Benedikt XVI has announced his retirement, a transition to a post in a local monastery of quiet mediation and prayer, fearing that the infirmities of old age are making him an ineffective leader. The office of Pope is an odd one for precedence, with all possible permutations discoverable—bad popes, short-lived papacies and even a lady pope, supposedly. It has been more than seven hundred years since the last Pope removed himself. Like Britain’s reigning queen, however, experience and living-memory are prevailing and formative factors, never mind that most of England’s heads-of-state were male and most occupants of the throne of Saint Peter were Italian. Familiarity, I think, does not out-strip all institutions.

There are some guardedly mysterious whispers about health and higher-level intrigues, whose speculation probably plague all such decision, but I do wonder if the seemingly responsible decision ought to be besmirched with conspiracy. Nearly eight years of services were ringing with speculation that the Pope was a place-holder, a concession to crown later a Latin pope again. If that were the case, I think Benedikt surprised detractors by hanging around this long and not just on balance being a bridge, and if anything, this controlled though unexpected stepping-down engages the Church all the more and makes people scrutinize the candidates in such a way as to make any larger agenda untenable.

gale force

Der Spiegel’s English mirror presents an interesting compilation of interviews and analysis regarding just what exactly is stealing the wind of the sails of the renewable energy revolution, die Energiewende: namely subsidies (Subventionen).

Governmental support programmes (in Germany and elsewhere) for alternative power are being curtailed due to budget priorities, sometimes as a sort of inside-out Trojan Horse promising consumers that the policy redirection will help stifle rising home utilities prices. Such changes are enough to make investors, who would champion the building of new infrastructure and fund research skittish—though a really winning idea would succeed with or without government imposed controls, and probably in spite of bureaucratic support. The handicapping for wind turbines, however, is compounded by government subsidies geared in the opposite direction, meant to help wind-down the conventional powerhouses: support for coal and nuclear energy. The emergent and experimental technologies cannot compete and the markets react unkindly to these cross-currents.

fauxcabulary

The always entertaining Bob Canada’s Blog World presents another instalment of pharmaceutical barrel-scrapings for names from word-like formations not yet claimed by others in the trade, which sound deceptively like sophisticated vocabulary terms. The marketing departments for the drug companies seem to be reaching but I guess the possibilities are bottomless. My favourites, all names of real medicine, clinically tested and surely introduced to focus-groups to see how they liked the name, used in a sentence is:
Intuniv (Adjective.) Someone who easily grasps situations. “Joan was very intuniv and immediately sensed that her blind date was a repellent troll.”

load-bearing month

Fixed and statutory holidays aside, I was wondering if the advance and regression of the Moon inevitably yoked Fasching, Carnival, Marti Gras with the Lunar New Year, but then I realised that this upcoming week, beginning with the ringing in of the Year of the Snake, is really chocked full of celebrations, with the feast day of Cædmon, the earliest Anglo-Saxon poet known by name, following on Monday, with the birthday of statesman Abraham Lincoln and the commemoration of Freedom to Marry, when San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsome back in 2004 directed staff to issue marriage licenses in a non-discriminatory manner, then on 12 February.

Wednesday (the 13th) marks the Roman feasts of Lupercalia (spring-cleaning and to encourage fertility, for which two billy-goats and a dog were sacrificed, and were call februa, and celebrants wore their skins) and Parentalia to honour one’s ancestors. Next is naturally St. Valentine’s Day, an international and thoroughly modern institution. 15 February marks Susan B. Anthony Day, American suffragette, and scads of other national observances. Friday marks Kim Jong-il’s birthday and the martyrdom of Elias and his Companions who sought to free and comfort Christians condemned to lives of slave labour in Roman mines during the persecution of Emperor Maximinus II. Saturday sees also the Roman holiday of Flamen Quirinalis (the first three months of the old Roman calendar did not really count, thus November for nine and December for ten, and all these holidays carried on for quite a while) who was considered the deification of statecraft, spear-wielder, and perhaps prototypical cousin to the image of Cupid. That’s quite a bit to pack into one week—not to be overshadowed by any one in particular and there seems to be a common thread running through them all.

fractuous

Some factions of the government in Germany want to selectively open up some regions to the controversial method of extracting natural gas and disinterring other useful resources from the ground, known as fracking—hydraulic fracturing, much to the dismay of members of the public and environmentalists, who fear that they are trying to rush through the policy-reprieve, untested and under-studied ahead of national elections in the Fall of this year. It sounds, unfortunately, like some pandering and ill-conceived rallying-cry, akin to “drill, baby, drill!” and not at all keeping with the move towards the greening of the dirty business of cleaner energy.

While critics of the procedure across the Atlantic where it is in wide use often cite real but possibly dramatized and diversionary effects, like giant, marauding sink-holes and increased seismic activity, German opponents point to fundamental concerns, like the potential for contaminating ecology and ground water, and well as the extraction being retrograde, releasing huge stores of carbon already successfully sequestered by Nature while engineers and scientists are struggling to find ways of keeping the current spillage in check and entombed. I wonder, too, whose backyard these operations will be in.

shoal

Ichthyologists have recently determined that social fish “smell” distinctly different to members of their own species according to maturity and size. Researchers believe that this mechanism developed in order that schools of fish could more quickly gather and sort themselves for protection, assuming a uniform front against predators, since from a fish-perspective, I imagine that it would be hard to judge size by sight. Schooling also helps with foraging for food and facilitates finding a suitable fish-mate.