The story of America’s other non-contiguous state is also a fascinating one and how it came to be is impacted not just by time and tide (and volcanic eruptions) or even just simple avarice (as I assumed). Neither was Manifest Destiny a universally accepted doctrine of the expanding Republic. It is true that the Kingdom of Hawai’i was ultimately annexed by the United States due in part by agitators who owned plantations and backed supporters in the overthrow of the royal family. The seated US government, however, under the leadership of anti-imperialists, was exonerated of any interference, both in unseating the monarchy or encouraging the new democracy (a very short-lived republic) to make the transition to accession as an American territory. The timing of events during the late 1800s and culminating in 1903 were the ripples broadcast of a larger stratagem for America to assert its strength as a world power. The interest and acquisition of the Pacific island group began with the Spanish-American War, a forgotten and long-distant conflict itself but responsible for many of these geological artefacts and discontinuities. Prior to the US Civil War, successive regimes in the US were interested in obtaining Cuba, a colony of Spain, for its farmlands and to enslave its native population—rather than importing slaves from Africa. Spain refused to sell to America at any price and America’s own intervening civil war put a halt to ambitions of empire for several years.
Wednesday 9 April 2014
spanish armada or tonkin ghosts
catagories: ๐บ๐ธ, ๐, ๐, foreign policy
Tuesday 8 April 2014
flik-flak oder carte blanche
Apparently tinkerers at the Swiss Swatch factory rebuffed the overtures of US security personnel recently, when they refused to allow investigators access to their workshop.
The officials wanted to ensure that no explosives could be smuggled in the watch casings or that they could not be weaponised as an instrument for assassination, delivering poison. Undoubtedly the company had nothing to hide but innocence certainly does not oblige one to cave to the whims of bullies. The factory director flatly refused, raising some ire and a threatening gesture, the anti-terror expert commenting that it might become more difficult to export this product to America.
boob-tube or tl;dr
Literacy, practical and functional, comes in all forms and is an adherent to all things considered skills and human maneuvers; however, it is something hewn and honed and not some hard-wired instinct. Just as the human body needs to temper its appetites against the abundant temptations of the modern diet and lifestyle, with greater or lesser degrees of success, because survival and perpetuation is neither subject to the etiquette of restraint nor aestheticism that goes against the grain, the ability to quickly skim and assess information without mediation seems certainly much more useful than the ability to comprehend the corpus of great literature.
frรผhschoppen
Generally there is more resistance and popular momentum to do away with the seasonal time changes in the Autumn—whereas the tilt-shift towards longer days in the Spring is usually welcomed with relief, but the deputy minister president of Bavaria, Ilse Aigner, pledges to start a campaign to keep universal time year-around.
The impetus came in part due to her superior, Horst Seehofer, missing the regular Sunday morning conference call with the Chancellor—having overslept and not adjusted his alarm clock. I suspect the later story is a promotion for championing doing away with the relic of switching time, and I also suspect that there won’t be a terrible lot of traction, since the change would probably have to pass muster in Brussels first. This administrative embargo is unlikely to be overcome by the feeble arguments of the counter-clockwise, equipped mostly with ninnyish but true observations like saying that we’ll have less to look forward to next March or contrarily, how on earth will we remember to check smoke-detectors and fire-extinguishers without a bi-annual cue. One maladjusted day aside, it hardly seems the time to be looking towards the Equinox, but what do you think?
catagories: ๐ฉ๐ช, ๐ , ๐ง , Bavaria, environment, holidays and observances, labour
Sunday 6 April 2014
salient factor
A little while ago, we had the chance to visit the spa town with ancient roots known as Bad Salzungen on the Werra river and not far from Wartburg. The settlement, which was founded originally over two millennia hence by Celtic tribes grew around a salty marsh, which contained the prized substance in high enough concentrations to yield commercial amounts through simple evaporation in shallow pools, salterns and saltpans, which at the time of its discover were mostly relegated to far off lands, like the coastal estuaries of Bordeaux or the northern reaches of Germany, die Salzmannstraรe was a trade route from here to Erfurt and Halle (named not for a hall but rather the Latin term for salt) and on a wider scale connected Frankfurt am Main with Leipzig and beyond.
Throughout medieval times, this proved a huge boon to local royalty and led to the building of many structures and offices (also halophiles) who sought to tax the exchange, but there was not quite a bust once salt became a less valuable commodity and more of a condiment to be given away freely. In the modern era, the place quickly reinvented itself as a wellness destination with a lavish resort and galleries of graduation lanes (degrees of salinity in the air, Gradierwerke, where one can stroll and breath it in) whose inland theatres look like they're based on locales on the sea.
catagories: ๐ฉ๐ช, Thรผringen, travel