Not to be confused with the Emminger Reforms, an arguably kindred precedent that essentially did away with trial-by-jury for the German justice system, the Emminger Letter (PDF from the investigative memory of the Official Monetary and Financial Institutions Forum) covertly drafted by the then president of the German Bundesbank, Otmar Emminger, to Helmut Schmidt, Chancellor of West Germany, in 1978.
Tuesday 2 April 2013
lend-lease oder prime-directive
catagories: ๐ฉ๐ช, ๐ช๐บ, economic policy
odd bird or let’s fake a deal
The peripatetic seekers at the Big Think share an engrossing essay suggesting that demographically American subjects were the worst choices for the whole quiver of standard psychological experiments, and many of the techniques developed and conclusions drawn from this battery of tests are highly idiosyncratic and do not translate well into other cultures.
Monday 1 April 2013
ice-nine
Patterned off of Norwegian ventures, a German research partnership is embarking on a sea voyage in Asia to seek out a substance called methane clathrate (DE), a natural gas hydrate buried, frozen by extreme pressure, under the ocean floors, cleft to the cliffs of continental shelves. Moving away from nuclear energy resources and dependence on traditional petroleum sources, interest is growing in these newly discovered reservoirs, once thought to only exist on comets, the Moon and such, but spectacularly complicated efforts to staunch the leak during the Deep Water Horizon catastrophe. These deposits, however, represent a huge carbon-sink, exceeding the storage capacity of forests and coral reefs, and perhaps we do not have the skill to neatly exploit these sequestered reserves without causing more run-away effects.
local coverage or droste effect
I watch re-broadcasts of the various state news programmes in the mornings as I get ready for work, and sometimes regret that I missed some local happening from the day before so I’ll have to work on that—finding out when these shows first air. There’s a revue of reporting from each region, distinguished by a state map, generally, and I think I might be getting a little better at recognizing the Saarland or Baden-Wรผrttemberg in a line up and outside of the context of a map of all of Germany. I noticed the other day, that although the correspondence is not exact, most Lรคnder do mirror the larger country in a miniature sense—especially Bavaria and Brandenburg-Berlin. It cannot be intentional, like neighbourhoods streets grouped by trees, composers and sister-cities, and maybe it’s just an illusion of wanting to categorize these chunks of land. It would be an interesting bit of planning, however, if sub-units did reflect the structure of their larger constituency, a quarter, district cut as a smaller, nested map of its greater surroundings.
iconostasis
The inside of the church, which is duplicated on an upper and lower storey, symbolic of Heaven and Hell, has an impressive array of icons covering the back wall (an iconostasis) and donated fixtures, including one faithful reproduction of the Hodegetria (the iconic canting of “she [the Virgin Mary] showing the way”) of the Mother of God of Smolensk, that tradition holds was painted by Saint Luke and made its way from Constantinople to Russia via a very circuitous route.
According to different sources, the revered icon was destroyed either during the Russian Revolution that followed just a few years later or during the German occupation in 1941. The relic, however, could have been hidden for safe-keeping as its own copy, like some of the other treasures originally plundered from Byzantium.
gentrification or trade-fair, fair-trade
I had the opportunity to pour over, in depth a few city blocks in Leipzig. I would not exactly call it a photo-essay since I didn’t
attempt any interviews to try to further limn the character of the area but I did notice a few fellow casual documentarians also snapping pictures, but the exploration was book-ended between two examples of a sort of decay and renewal with a lot of graffiti in between, and I felt that I did not have the chance beforehand to properly capture some of the beauty I found around me in this place.
I wondered to an abandoned factory yard, expansive along the banks of the river whose influence was far from a typical brownfield, historic and dignified with decoration and as likely to abut a block of well-kept dwellings and parks as another spot of neglect.
These modern ruins are important reminders, I think, of transformation—and not the same as the Schadenfreude, the leering and the ogling that places, truly abandoned communities like Detroit, are subject to.
Leipzig is yet a centre of trade and industry but with some important changes, which repurposing and reinvention that is sometimes too revealing. It is sort of like an urban Dream-Time.
My wanderings eventually took me to another former industrial site, a textile mill, ein Spinnerei, restored faithfully to the original shell but as luxury apartments.
Many other similar venues have been created in the past few years, and I just hope that people are not convinced that wreck and ruin is only held at bay by inviting in the so-called angel investors and at the expense of character and expression.
I wonder how a neighbourhood, told that it is blighted, responds to such accusations and perhaps unwelcome assistance.