painting the roses red or mezzoamerica

Though not necessarily enjoying the moral high-ground due to their own speculative surveillance practices, China and Russia have little reason to dignify threats from the US over harbouring a fugitive from Justice.
Ecuador's bold and unflinching withdrawal, however, from a export regime, instituted to curb cocaine production, with America in response to sabre-rattling over its willingness to grant Snowden asylum is an act of standing up to bullies and the system deserving of one of those slow claps that gallop to a round of applause. The US Senate's Foreign Relations Committee has moved to deny the South American country preferential treatment in trade—something like a Most-Favoured status which is accorded to some 130 nations. The defiance is more than symbolic, since though they will find other willing buyers for their oil and other natural resources, the vegetable and cut-flower industies will take a hit. Ecuador even does its tormentors one better—not only rejecting this framework to end the blackmail but offering to repatriate or render the equivalent millions of dollars it has realised in benefits to the US to fund institutions and programmes in support of transparency, civil liberties and protecting the right to privacy.

brusselsprout oder marco... polo

Some euro-skeptics have maintained from its conception that the union was a means for Germans to enjoy a Mediterranean holiday with minimal fuss. I do not share that opinion and believe that there are far nobler causes and potentials behind this experiment of a united and inclusive continent.

Reading the litany  of disadvantages, usurious baiting—money that's already spent, and generally bleak outlook, however, I have to pause and wonder whether membership has its positive mutually positive aspects. I do hope that this rather sombre assessment is wrong, but presented the way it is, it seems like manufacturers in Germany stand to realise a dramatic, albeit short-lived, windfall by way of new markets. A new sizable demographic has opened up to those companies with the removal of Croatia's tariff regime, no longer an outsider. A discount to further entice consumers, however, bodes only ill for an already struggling financial household (that looks already like a disqualifying factor), threatening to steamroll remaining locally owned enterprise with competition and shove the economy more towards the service and tourism sectors. Of course, other outcomes are just as likely but reciprocation does not seem entirely forthcoming and jubilation is scarce.

for more information, please re-read

Professionally, I often find myself frustrated with the regulations and law for not anticipating my highly specific question and scenarios. I find it slightly chilling, however, when Computer is able to put words into my mouth and correctly guess my obscure and poorly lettered quieries. The New Yorker has an entertaining FAQ on FAQs, demonstrating that by the dint of definition address what is frequently asked.

ravelin or navi knows best

Although I really appreciate GPS (a navigational system) for never saying, “Why do you want to go there?” though turning really bossy and panicky if one strays from the direct route and sometimes betraying a twisted sense of humour, maybe sometimes the question should be asked. On the way back from one of the few errands that I need to drive to accomplish, I decided to find out what Fort Biehler exactly was. I had spied this turret from the Autobahn every time I passed that way but it turned out it was not part of the fort at all, but a much older watchtower (Warte) of the village of Erbenheim, the landmark built in 1497. It difficult to find the right angle and distance to take a picture of the tower, which had little contrast against the overcast skies but some thoughtful person put a miniature model in his garden, though the actual tower was facing just beyond.
The fort, I found out after a long walk through the neighbourhood and the forest was an inaccessible ruin, cordoned off behind a security fence in a training groud used by the German and America military for exercises and there was not much to see of the foundations itself.
Completed in the last decades of the 1800s, Fort Biehler was part of a massive ensemble of defensive constructs known as Fortress Mainz, this area being where the Palatinate's possessions slipped south of the Rhein and into Hessian holdings, named in honour of the chief of the Prussian corps of engineers and architect, General Hans Alexis von Biehler, who designed many such structures, including the citadel at Spandau and was nearly as prolific as his French rival, Marquis de Vauban, whom we've chased around during our travels as well.
In accordance with the Treaty of Versailles that ended World War I, Fortress Mainz was defanged and the fort was used to garrison French forces before eventually being cannibalised for building material in the 1930s. With sweeping views of Wiesbaden and Mainz from this area, it was easy to imagine the vantage such a fortification had and I'm glad that GPS devices are not overly opinionated or timid about exploring.

of mice and men or hoodoo economics

Though it is hard to say how well the experiment's participants were shielded from the fact that they were subject to research, since knowing that one is taking part in a psychological or behavioural study makes people act in strange ways, trying to prove their cleverness or uniqueness—the observer-expectancy effect, sort of like a clinical Stockholm Syndrome, the Frankfurter Rundschau (via the English daily the local) features the work of a sociological battery of test conducted in Bamberg, raising the stakes, to illustrate how a competitive environment can quickly undermine our convictions and values.

It's really horrible to contemplate that human participants were willing to speculate and bargain, a race to the bottom, with the certain death of lab rats (though I am sure no animals were harmed in the name of that particular study and maybe as the opportunists were thinking too), but selling out one's morals, rather than being abetted by an embarrassment of choices and conscientious alternatives, goes unaided and even further compromised by the prospect of a bargain, since even with an extreme example (reductio ad Hitlerum, seriously) we are failing to recognise that our consumer decisions are easily overturned and the consequences of those choices become marginalised, buying known or strongly suspected goods produced under objectionable conditions or taking the more expedient route when we ought to know better. What do you think? The unbraided market and government policies are strong influences but not moral imperatives. Is the chance to make a deal indicative of sellers' remorse and moral bankruptcy?