There were several stories in circulation this week, echoing from many corners of the world and many times without deference to this being the fifth anniversary of the collapse of the too-big-to-fail financial house whose downfall placed economics internationally in chaos, that proclaimed real and shadow markets to be fully recovered and no longer in danger of relapse.
Sunday 15 September 2013
laissez-faire is everywhere
catagories: ๐ช๐บ, America, economic policy, labour
Saturday 14 September 2013
suffrage
The citizens of Bavaria will go and cast their votes for state elections on this Sunday, and I discovered, after appreciating the collusion of events, like the anticipation of the beginning of Oktoberfest, which celebrates into October starting on next Saturday, that state governments do have some discretion in setting the dates for election day—no sooner than 59 weeks before and no later than 62 weeks after the last cycle of four years hence.
And though there was license to place balloting the morning after the bacchanalia, officials put it strategically a week prior to federal elections. There is not the same kind of flexibility in campaigning in the United States, whose moment of decision, by law, falls on the day after the first Monday in November—due to the agrarian nature of the early US and notwithstanding the provisos of early- and absentee-voting. That German federal elections (and neighbouring Hessen's state elections also) come maybe while nursing a hang-over is quite another matter and maybe too by design. Coincidences of the calendar are certainly not always politically advantageous but does make one wonder when it came to the legal convention—like US presidential elections being always (except in the rare case of a year equally divisible by 400) on leap-years or during years of a summer Olympiad—locust plagues, perhaps, in addition to whatever sideshows can be introduced. I wonder if such precedents were considered.
catagories: ⚖️, ๐ฉ๐ช, ๐บ๐ธ, holidays and observances
Friday 13 September 2013
austausch, b-gosh
Long had European Union Commissioner for Internal Affairs Malmstrรถm held her tongue over the on-going revelations of the breadth and depth of indiscriminate intelligence gathering on the part of the US—not, I think, out of a lack of concern or zeal but rather to not bait controversy prematurely, but digesting the reported reach of the spying, suggested that the lack of transparency could lead to the EU's withdrawal from the SWIFTBanking Treaty with the United States.
catagories: ๐ช๐บ, ๐ฅธ, America, economic policy
apiculture or re-colonisation
I fear that worldwide, bees—domestic and wild—are far from being completely out of the woods when it comes to any number of natural and artificial ravages, it seemed like the bees returned this summer in Germany, at least, with a vengeance.
Any number of factors could have been decimating their numbers, which drive worker-bees from their hives and thus the support system collapses—ranging from cellular phone masts, parasites, pesticides, genetically modified crops to mono-culturing, and I wonder what factors shifted here to very nearly make sitting outside intolerable. Or maybe those are just all the prodigal bees that disappeared from their home-hives on the return. Of course, I'll suffer a curious bee droning too close and investigating my food and drink but at times it was enough to move the table-setting indoors. It was worse and more immediate than ants marching on a picnic, and I wonder if the stabilisation of the population will once again make bees the object of irreverence, instead of dire concern, like with the portrayals of killer bees in B-movies and angsty media.
catagories: ⚕️, ๐ฉ๐ช, ๐ฑ, ๐, environment, food and drink
Thursday 12 September 2013
subject-verb agreement or pluralia tantum
Mental Floss has a provoking list to puzzle of nouns that exist in the English language only in their plural form, like scissors, eye-glasses, amenities, britches, riches and remains. There is a complimentary phenomenon called singulare tantum, which are called the uncountable nouns, like information or comparing the last two previous examples—wealth and dust.
Wednesday 11 September 2013
castellan or look that up in your funk & wagnall's
It was a bit of a challenge to find, obscured by terraced homes and not on the high-ground but in a valley, and I had to inquire. “Excuse me but is there a castle-ruin nearby?” The eponymous community is also known as the place where Konrad Duden retired. Duden was an influential lexicographer of the German language, authoritative and the industry-standard like the Oxford English Dictionary or Noah Webster.
Monday 9 September 2013
pro se or soi-disant
Shaking my head with a touch of disbelief over the way a German political party portrayed itself, I was totally unprepared for the stultifying display of ignorance and insensitivity that a senior delegation of legislators made, while on a fairy-tale princess reception in Cairo, as the New York Times reports.
catagories: ๐บ๐ธ, ๐, economic policy, foreign policy, revolution