Although I still declare that anyone truly shocked by learning that the world is the prying, groping place is a measure naรฏve or even complacent or complicit, public attention and outrage ought not be placated by life intimato Ars, the words of prophets of doom, or by practicality, commonality—offensive aspirations.
There is a little guesthouse, called the Schwendenschanze—the name itself, meaning a Swedish Wall, sort of a catch all folk etymology for defensive barriers and trenches constructed not just by that country's conquest of much of Germany (more in keeping with living memory) but also for much older fortifications built by the Celts and the Romans, like the mysterious Schrazelloch (goblin holes) to be found everywhere—that is set at the summit of the high road through the Rhรถn mountains.
I always like reaching this place because then I know I am almost home but I have not really paid much attention to the building itself, except for a bit of scowling at the out-of-proportion house number it bears—something oversized, green and white that makes the place look like a truck stop along the Autobahn and by this point, I've had my fill of trucks, as I creep behind them up the steep climb. I just realised, however, that it is not just some plaque but rather the UNESCO stele for the world heritage biosphere site of this region. It occurred to me upon seeing the marker at another site. Now I recall seeing them elsewhere too, although camouflaged. This design is practical, I'm sure, but to call it a stele, a cartouche (the belief that if a name was written somewhere, the owner could never disappear) I was expecting something a bit more classic and for the ages, although it is fitting as the United Nations awards this honour but sometimes also takes it away when not enough is done to preserve it. The English daily, the local, features a nice series of World Heritage Sites all around Germany.
I always thought those friendly games of poker that became quite a regular tableau for the senior crew of Star Trek: The Next Generation illustrated a sort of refined irony, sort of like those velvet paintings of dogs playing poker or fishing with no expectation of catching anything—since, after all the human players were at a clear disadvantage, facing the analytical skills of an android, a psychic and a Klingon who might rips ones arms out of their sockets if he didn't win. Though I think after wards there will be little danger of the of the accords not being agreed to in their present form, there is an important debate happening in the Bundestag and other parliaments of Europe concerning the US-EU free trade agreement.
How could any nation reach true compromise with the other bargaining unit knows exactly what the other wants to hear and what concessions to promise and how the future regulatory landscape will change? The thrust of intelligence gathering and snooping was certainly not limited to juicy gossip and blackmail-material but also extended into business-spying, and for production and labour standards worlds apart, very different cultural tolerances for employment protections, genetic dabbling with food, internet architecture, ecological stewardship, rigour of testing for pharmaceuticals and respecting privacy and proprietary information itself, it is hard to see a happy medium reached without someone taking the upper-hand. Go fish. Let the Wookie win.
There is an unhealthy public sentiment, I think, fueled by a few firebrands that is resulting in a wholesale rejection of experimentation and ambition. In Germany in 1932 there was a wild proposal for a peaceful, broader union for a disjointed continent reeling from the horrors of the Great War that captivated the public in ways that no national party or platform could, unfortunately humanist and engineer Herman Sรถrgel's grandiose plans were overcome by other events. Perhaps public distrust of demagogues would have served the world better in some instances.
Sรถrgel's movement was based on the prescient warning that governments must keep pace with technological developments or else risk becoming merely an instrument or a nuisance for innovators. The most significant change that the native of Regensburg on the Danube had experienced personally was that the sluices and dams along German waterways had successfully harnessed the rivers for commercial use and looking toward the example of the nautical empire of Venice and other port cities, Sรถrgel proposed no less than damming the Mediterranean at the Strait of Gibraltar to the Dardanelles in the Black Sea in order to reclaim fertile and productive lands (Neuland) from the Mediterranean basin and selectively flood the Sahara Desert, making the African continent more self-supporting, in his view, and undoing geology and reuniting the land-masses as Atlantropa plus getting a surplus of hydro-electric power in the bargain. I am not sure if this project was feasible, but he went as far as deploying a security detail to Gibraltar to stave off attempts of sabotage by jealous Anglo-Saxons should the building ever get underway. Projects like the Aswan High Dam and enormous wind parks or even the monumental engineering effort to save Venice itself from flooding were perhaps less lofty but probably also neither assailable without Sรถrgel's vision. The project failed and the regime that came into power prevented his further work, although the engineer contributed a great deal to the electrification of Germany and expanding the network of river traffic. There is an institute dedicated to his study and publications in Bad Homburg, not so far away, that I plan to visit.
Although there is no political agenda behind the Pope's visit to the immigration processing centre on the remote Italian island of Lampedusa, the Pope's decision to make his first excursion outside of the City of Rome is nonetheless an important reminder that there are countless less visible refugees and asylum-seekers no longer being covered by the news. Refusing to allow any politicians tag along, the Pope will go to the tiny island, the one of the closest European Union territories to northern Africa, to weep for those who lost their lives in the dangerous sea-crossing, to greet new arrivals and show gratitude to the local population that have done much to help the immigrants with their passage, treating their guests with dignity, considerations that were not always continued by the migration authorities here and elsewhere. Since the height of the revolutions that punctuated the Arabic Spring, the pace has slowed somewhat, but given recent events, is expected to increase soon.
