chancel, chancellery

The predominant theme of German news and discussion panels has been refugees and immigration for weeks now and is demanding an increased sense of urgency due to its unrelenting stream of asylum-seekers and families fleeing war and institutional poverty and the change in weather that assuredly guaranteeing no happy-campers, sheltered in to a large part in tent-cities or cavernous warehouses. The rational that buoys compassion is that Germany’s ageing population needs an injection of young, able-bodied adults to supplement their workforce (and retirement scheme) in order to maintain the competitive economic edge that they’ve enjoyed for the past couple of generations.
Germany’s young breeders apparently are not working hard enough to replenish the labour-pool. Employment-models suggest that the influx of refugees (many of who purportedly will not stay in Germany but be resettled elsewhere in Europe) has not yet reached that threshold of sustainment and whatever money and resources spent are a good investment, but I wonder if that welcoming reception might change once the requirement is met—or when the demographers realise that their constructions and projections are not valid gauges of future job-markets, what with robots threatening to take-over vast parts of certain jobs-sectors. Aside from worries over the effect on housing-market (and the question of adequate, affordable accommodations), there are significant challenges ahead with integration and assimilation that are only just now being broached—although wholly unaddressed by one particular group, those migrants—not necessarily from those same regions but grouped together as such I’m sure. I wonder what this silence means—whether or not the more established immigrant population is reaching out to newcomers and being forthcoming with assistance and sponsorship, or whether there’s a widen rift, agonising whether these late arrivals might upset whatever social-acceptance that they’ve gained, feeling their benefits under-threat. Maybe that’s an aspect just not being reported but I don’t know. This image, first discovered by the fabulous Nag on the Lake some time ago, is a public-service announcement from the Scarfolk Council, which is unfortunately caught in a Doctor Who-style time-loop and forever condemned to relive the decade of the 1970s and importantly makes us confront our own selective humanity.

fliegerhorst wasserkuppe

Over the weekend, H and I took a little stroll on the leveled summit of the highest peak of Hessen—the Wasserkuppe outside of Gersfeld and just in the Rhön mountain range over the state border.

We’ve spend quite a few afternoons watching the gliders towed aloft by small aeroplanes crisscross the horizons and come in gentle on the grass runway, and though a lot of others had the same idea as us on this bright October, everything looked somewhat transfixed under that day’s sun and it turned out to be a pleasant little walk around—through a lot more urchins were climbing over the Fliegerdenkmal than five years ago. I knew that there was some provision to getting a pilot’s license for a glider, which could be accomplished at a younger age than the usual minimum age to obtain a driver’s license, that ended up making the end process of the later license to drive somewhat easier, which drove some adolescents’ interest, but the idea—though possibly a little bit scary, is enervating besides. There are quite a few flying-clubs of this sort in our area. The Wasserkuppe, aside from its ideal locale, has a long and innovative history, going back to the first decade of the twentieth century with university students experimenting with kites and short flights.
The first sustained, hang-gliding sessions happened here, about two decades after the first mechanical fixed-wing flight—as the properties of aerodynamics were not very well understood until this feat. Interest in the air-sail grew considerably with the end of World War I, whose conditions of surrender forbade German research or use into powered flight, and competitions in glider design were launched centred around the Wasserkuppe and in a few years, test-flights of all sorts of flying-machines, including the Messerschmitt and early rocket-jets, were conducted there. After the war, elements of the American and the French air forces occupied the summit, especially prized for its commanding view into the Iron Curtain, and the radom in the background is a remnant of those days. The recreational use of the mountain, however, was not restricted for too many years.

5x5

miss cellany: eccentric, vintage beauty titles

cross-over: bizarro universe celebrity guest stars

high-tension: creative engineers turn Iceland’s pylons into colossal works of art

letterbox format: French museum displays tiny, detailed recreations of movie sets

blue-light special: retail sound-track circa 1989-1993 preserved for posterity

fun fact

Though in its original meaning, the trivia signified the foundational triad of the liberal arts—that being grammar, rhetoric and logic, needed to be mastered before graduating to the more stimulating disciplines of music, geometry, arithmetic and astronomy, its Latin adjectival form (triviālis, a word which has surely been claimed by some pharmaceutical or disputed game-show outcome arbitrage service by now) already denoted something akin to the English form trivial—trifling and fit for the street corner, being where three paths met. One ought to be proud of one’s accumulated knowledge and share it magnanimously and without stint, but this etymology and association makes me think of some pusher standing at an intersection bellowing to passers-by, “The mad professor intoning ‘Science!’ in She Blinded me with Science is show-master Magnus Pyke, cousin of Geoffrey Pyke eccentric, well-meaning boffin who proposed building aircraft carriers out of ice and saw-dust during World War II. The first one’s free! Spermology is the study of trivia!” This literal deconstruction makes me also think of how pornography means, innocently, the writing of prostitutes: “Dear Diary, What a day – but it’s better than waitressing…”

acculturation and ascendency

Just recently I learnt that there is a yet unfolding what to frame the inquiry as to why—given that the Chinese invented the most uncontestably useful and revolutionary innovations in world history, the compass, the stirrup, weirs and dams and locks to allow for inland navigation, porcelain, the spinning wheel, the printed word and gunpowder—China did not continue on the same trajectory in scientific and technological achievement and was overtaken culturally and demographically (by most estimates) by Western Europe with their Age of Exploration, Enlightenment and Industrial Revolution, fueled in large part by the introduction of such ancient Chinese secrets to the West. The so called “Needham Question” was posed first in the early 1950s by biochemist and China-scholar Noel Joseph Terence Montgomery Needham and sought answers to this conundrum at a time when many Westerners believed the above modern hallmarks were Western inventions, and whose extensive research into the question is yet being unpacked. Given that I was under the impression that China was only interested in gunpowder for dazzling pyrotechnic displays and religious ceremonies (something facetious to believe really, like saying after inventing democracy, philosophy and the fine arts, the Greeks decided to call it a day) and it was Europeans who weaponised it, I suppose it would be wise to explore how such misconceptions come about and perhaps why such advances were not entirely seismic—at least seen through the lens of the occident and the focal point of centuries on.

Though not entirely a monolithic geopolitical landscape at any point in its history, China was a highly bureaucratic meritocracy that spanned a land-mass the size of Europe, which was then a fractious space filled with hundreds of petty kingdoms that would like nothing better than to blow one another to smithereens. Paper and the printing-press were certainly drastic and sweeping when introduced to Europeans, but in China an entire book-culture had already been cultivated for nearly a thousand years (by the time it had reached Europe) and every household had at least a small library. Not that reading was just a sedate pastime but cultural alignment under the Emperor with regimented social order and the lack of subversive elements (depending of course on one’s perspective) printing pamphlets and broadsides shone the presses in a quite different light. It remains very much an open question, ripe for thought, with some arguing that the state fostered a climate in which conscientious bureaucrats were rewarded above all else—discouraging scientific and engineering ambitions beyond what maintained hierarchical cohesion. Others believe that the nature of Chinese religion, which was non-exclusive whereas Christendom was violently so, was not conducive of competition nor of scientific inquiry over metaphysical thought—though holding those precepts hardly sound true for Taoism or Buddhism. Yet others believe—which may be tending in the right direction but makes China out to be a frail place, that the forced-opening of markets, prizing into a self-sufficient economy, and colonisation threw the Empire into social chaos, for which it could not adapt native resourcefulness. Maybe, however, we view China and Asia as a whole like all “faded glory” vis-à-vis its present presentiments—a threatening dynamo that’s subsumed all the things we’ve declared ourselves inefficient for, another level of faded glory—which seems a dangerous standard to grade things by. What do you think? It is not as if China is no longer inventing things and ought to make the Western world wonder about its privileged position.  Did China not have its enlightenment because it neglected to harness the power of steam, which incidentally was another Greek discovery (the æolipile), some two thousand years old?

5x5

tiki-chic: fascinating story of Harry’s Habour Bazaar of Hamburg, floating curio-cabinet packed full with idols, voodoo dolls, fetishes and shrunken-heads

post-script: gallery documenting America’s disappearing rural post-offices

last starfighter: awkward, kind of lame platform from UK government to identify and train cyber-security savants

thrones and dominions: John Paul II nominated Saint Isidore, a seventh century monk who tried to capture the whole of human knowledge, as the patron of the internet—with an invocation against trolls

china syndrome: incredible photographic essay of Fukushima almost five years after the disaster and its local and global legacy, via Messy Nessy Chic 

pronoun, dative-singular

“What new entertainment have you, Jester?” “Beholde o Lord! ‘Tis mine inventio, what that I clepe the Selfum-Sticke.” The king is unimpressed.

tail-pipe oder abgazskandale

I think that the manufactured mock rage over one iconic German auto maker has lost its traction but is failing to be brought out of the public-eye. During the past weeks, a normally interesting and academic program block of documentaries has sunk to sensationalism, with titles like “Krank dank VW” (Sick thanks to VW, about smog and urban pollution) and it seems that members of the American House of Representatives are calling for these “unsafe” vehicles to removed immediately from the road.

There is of course no safety or performance issues from a consumer standpoint, environmental damage aside and the lost tax-liability for carbon-producers—and though it is hardly an excuse for bad-behaviour, all car companies fib a little (or a lot) on their emissions-standards and less hue and cry has been expended over models with fatal flaws and those whose electronic brains can be easily commandeered. One might think that this episode was a final argument in favour of TTP, showing that American quality-controls can keep the world secure—except that the in-house guidelines broken were much more stringent than the common-denominator that passing such a treaty threatens to impose on all of us. What do you think? Lady is affected and we do wish our adventures had left a smaller-footprint, but the company will remedy this situation, and hopefully soon.