pick your battles or macro-offence

When I have callers in my narrow and cramped office, visitors are usually forced to assume a position over my shoulder, and while I feel no particular compunction to minimise windows or switch tabs to hide shopping or travel browsing, I am sometimes persuaded to mask the headlines of certain news outlets for fear as public-trust appointee that I might be violating the Hatch Act—a US statute that prohibits government workers from advocating for one political ideology over another, though I think it’s more narrowly defined than my abundance of caution—and for fear I might incite a micro-aggression.
Once I had thought that political-correctness as a surrogate for civility and general good manners might die the ignoble death it deserves instead of rising from the flames in a dread, self-censoring and tongue-watching phœnix, but I suppose that was a naïve thing to think. There have always been those artful souls skilled at taking offence and going on the defensive, but I’ve only known those demagogues that invite heaps of abuse, martyrs and matrons. I never thought that the faithful might till a patch of garden that’s securely hedged off from all opposition and descent, not deigning to entertain contrarian opinions. Cultivating such safety-zones, I think, ensures that they will always hate us—especially in the realms of higher-education where dialectic is defined along very stringent bounds and becomes something meaningless and only re-affirming. In my shyness, I hope that I can recognise my own bias since it’s not for the sake of shirking my job that I close off discussion but rather that I’d like to consider myself informed and not engage in a debate or find some common-ground. Maybe my desire to dispense with an ordeal in the work-place (propriety aside) enables the victims of micro-aggresions (innocent on-looker or policy-maker) to have their bustle in their hedgerow. What do you think?

6x6

don’t look at it marion: a candle in the likeness of the melting face Gestapo agent from Raiders of the Lost Ark

façade: opulent palace hidden behind an exterior that’s very drab in comparison

mainframe: women in the company of giant computers, vintage early 1960s

redoubt and ravelin: twenty imposing fortresses from around the world

lost in space: having mapped the entire Moon, surveyors have not yet found Luna 9, the first probe to land on another planetary body, missing for fifty years

why so serious: spiffy alternative terminology to what passes as resting bitch face

great glavin in a glass

A trio of committed Simpsons fans have created a fun search engine that delves deep into the core seasons of the series and fetches a screen-capture from associated quotes, saying and scenarios and allows one to caption the image. As an homage to Professor John Nerdelbaum Frink, Jr., this mainframe is called the Frinkiac. What’s your favourite quote from the show?

gaffer and key grip

When signalling the start of a footrace, a starter gun is used (as opposed to a chequered flag) because the auditory cue reaches the brain, gathered from a relative paucity of non-intuitive evidence that with more invasive investigations reveal how disjointed reality is mediated by our senses. Though it’s nothing that one could easily access and would probably terribly frightening to try, our perceptions are only glancing and we carry in our minds a composite map of our immediate surroundings that merely regularly monitored for updates.
Although visually we imagine a sweeping continuity of our environment, our eyes, like a stage-hand, are more akin to the panicked flagellations of insect antennae, constantly seeking out corrections and in the absent of new input, blinders are put in place. Up to seven minutes in each hour (routine hours, though, I suppose and not when one is visiting the Grand Bazaar for the first time and is overwhelmed with impressions) we are effectively blind as our eyes dart around in search of changes—sort of like the commercial breaks in television programmes. Our separate senses, the intent to pull the trigger, the report, the puff of smoke and the recoil from above, are shuttled to our brains at different speeds so while there’s as much as a half second’s lag-time among them, they all are received as coordinated and consequent. I wonder if this mental trick of synchronicity that we can’t easily step out of could explain the dissonance between the relatable Newtonian physics and the baffling quantum reality underlying it. Vision can be assailed to an extent but the other senses present a real quandary. I suppose one could appreciate the drift in the illusion of animation, but it always struck me as rather amazing that our eyes are filled with veins and capillaries that are in our field of vision but don’t see because they don’t affect our internal maps.

tanked

With oil prices sinking to near historic lows, it’s really remarkable how causality comes unhinged when reason dictates that a lot of the economy hangs on the price of fuel. Though household budgets are seeing some degree of respite at the petrol station, the positive repercussions seem to end there and the myopic outlook is compounded.
Some hold the whole situation has a conspiratorial character meant to knock Russia down a notch as retribution for Ukraine, and event if this plot were true, the effects could not be contained and would lead to even graver instability in other oil-exporting nations. Without pain at the pump, environmental conscious bows out and the motivation for cleaner technologies falls away—with only greenwashing on offer. Waning demand has ensured the continued depression of prices, and the profit gradient for country’s whose wealth is an especially narrow one.  In hock as much as they were just recently flush with cash because of their commodity, Russia, Nigeria, Argentina and the Middle East are faced with the reckoning of re-financing and lenders are closing their ranks for other clients and keeping prices to the consumer steady. It is sort of like personable occupants stuck in a broken elevator turning to cannibalism.The formerly safe-bets of petroleum and follow-on industries are becoming unpalatable, and investors scuttle to park their money elsewhere—in rather hollow and abstract instruments that court yet another bubble coaxed to bursting.

grace and favour or sweetheart deal

Not just in the UK (whose crown dependencies prove haven and safe-harbour for this sort of arrangements) but for the tax-paying public all over the world the apparent pittance in levies that large corporations have paid in compared to revenue is inciting outrage. Because of the byzantine complexity of the situation and the fine distinction between avoidance and evasion, it is hard to say what exactly has transpired although there’s more than a hint of civic injustice and it seems as if corporate taxes are somewhat of a voluntary contribution—and not even the suggested donation when the collection-plate is passed down.
Of course, other methods of circumvention could be cooked up and it is not so straightforward to say where a product or service fulfilled its raison d’être of generating a profit—and what the public at large are privy to is necessarily mediated—but perhaps the whole corporate tax scheme as it exists, essentially hard to enforce and interrupt and by design encourages evasive manœuvres, and like proposals for a flat-tax or a Value-Added Tax (VAT) charged on the wealthy that excises a fixed percentage and eliminates loop-holes so far as deductions go, perhaps the same system would work for big businesses. The problem remains, I think, of sourcing earnings and different tax jurisdictions would walk on each others throats to claim a piece of it, but perhaps as lowering the burden is good for share-holders, a simpler and manifest tax regime might prove better for all stake-holders, corporate giants investing more in their own ecosystems (employees, research and host communities) in order to divest themselves of some fiduciary obligations.