madhatter’s coffee.

Everything is set. The speeches done, the transition smooth, the commentaries written. Still, there remains one question that’s repeated over and over again: can Obama live up to the expectations he’s raised?

Spiegelfechter focused on one specific problem, which is, the new President being more than just another president in the line of 43 preceding incumbents. People all over the world project their hopes on his promised policies, him being rendered by the Democratic marketing machine as the antipode of a president that polarised the political world in in a way that has hardly been seen since the iron curtain raised.

Allegedly the Obama administration seeks not to be measured to Franky Roosevelt’s 100 days in which he set up the legendary New Deal. However, the inauguration speech clearly drew a direct line to that of his famous predecessor. In switching the tone from a general level to an almost political agenda, addressing several of his plans during the oncoming presidency, he almost copied Roosvelt’s speech from 1933. And he did set many goals: reform of health care and educational system, shift from oil based to regenerative energies till 2010, renovation of the federal infrastructure. That’s not just huge, that’s a New Deal accompanied by an ideological shift towards almost green ideas.

But is it? It would be idle to dwell on interpreting the speech – in a few months we will have the answer. What really matters is the question if there just one interpretation. Or can we suggest that there may be another way, that the ideological shift is a nice-to-have rather than a obligatory element?

Ultimately Jens may still be right: the constellation Obama versus Bush may be no more than a medial projection on what could be just a slight shift in priorities without abandoning general U.S.-paradigms. Time will tell, anyways.

They’ve gone completely crazy, so they do. Who? The urban planers in my oh-so-beautiful hometown, of course. I thought Trump-Tower, Stuttgart 21 and the New Fair on the Killesberg were already enough. Big plans for a city having scarcely more than 500,000 inhabitants. Now they published the plans for another exorbitantly expensive architecturally… let’s say: problematic project:

The Da-Vinci-Project will be placed between the Old Market, the Karl’s Square and the buildings of the Breuninger Company. What will be razed though, is not the latter celebration of concrete – it’ll be the the Hotel Silber (Silver). Not that I would specifically argue to preserve a former coordination center of the Gestapo but it’s definitely not the first one to be deconstructed in this area.

Overall, There have been numerous arguments on those projects all boiling down to two quite simple opposing views: there are the people who want to develop the city and believe they alone know best what will work and what won’t. And are those who do believe the city is nice as it is and shouldn’t be changed an ounce.

Since urban planing hasn’t exactly worked out perfect for Stuttgart in the past the criticism of the latter group definitely has its justification. So has the idea of development, you say?

Well, it certainly has, but a third shopping mall being built next to an already existing mall? The second shopping mall in Stuttgart being built in five years? Furthermore, another shopping mall aimed for quite exclusive shops? And founded with tax payer’s money, since the local Ministry of Finance is going to rent 36,000 square metres?

36,000 sqm are more than 50 percent of the planned 55,000. If these are going to be reduced to 45,000 as the building authority demands, it would equal almost 80 percent. Renting is not building it, but that’s even worse: if they would build it, they would at least own it – thus they will have to pay extra: to make the investment financially valuable for the Breuninger GmbH and because they will want to support a local company.
And what’s going to happen to the New Castle, which currently lodges the roughly 1,000 public servants?

On what grounds does the local authority in Stuttgart claim it being reasonably to spend my precious money on this project? On a building that isn’t infrastructurally necessary, economically questionable or even going to be owned by them? Who outsourced his brain this time?

Further reading:
Facts and figures @ STZ
Pictures and dreams @ Stuttgart.de
Counterarguments and accusations @ SÖS.de
More polemic comments @ Stuttgart-blog.net

Who for heaven’s sake is responsible stairways for horses in Dunbar? I feel like an idiot walking on them. If you try to take one step at a time you’ll get a rather dwarf-like experience and if you go smart and take a couple simultaneously you’ll find yourself in the quite uncomfortable position of a ballerina. And I’m really not into doing the splits.
Christ! 17th century is over, thanks Goodness.

Freedom and the freedom to chose are two of the most basic elements of a modern democracy. Family on the other hand is one of the oldest but certainly also the invariable principle in human history.

The authors of the American Declaration of Independence chose the words ‘pursuit of happiness’ to describe what I would interpret as the right and the will to shape your own life after your own ideas and concepts. However, if people in Germany are given the opportunity to decide if they want to have a family or not, most people would say that apart from biological and social reasons there are constrictions that are far less pathetic and nonetheless force you to go into what Christians call a marriage.
After being reigned by more or less conservative governments for most of the past 60 years the German Federal Republic’s residents have no means to change into so called alternative live forms. Particularily after the ‘neo-conservative’ turnaround in the nineties, as the more radical leftist would call it, family, especially family in the way western european christianity puts it is on a new all-time high. You don’t have to read Eva Herman to perceive that. Five years ago studies already predicted a generation, my generation, that would not even be more practical, pragmatic and less political – we are also branded as being part of a conservative roll back after the wild seventies and early eighties. To put it in simple letters: we are family people. Marriage numbers have gone up since then.

But still: one of the most radical thoughts that the flower-power generation brought up was the idea of a real democracy. Not a fake one to be put against evil communism – no, a actual people’s republic. Respecting women and men as individuals and tolerating differences is still part of this ragged utopia.
Since you need room for differences this leads to the beginning of this thought: room to pursuit your happiness, the freedom to chose. And you can’t chose something that ain’t there. As the stereotypical supermarket in the former USSR gave you the right though not the option to choose. You could chose between three different loafs of the very same bread. Nice, huh?
In Germany, one of the so called free states, you can chose between all possible constellations of family. Father goes to work and mother stays at home, mother works and father does the housework, both work and buy a cleaning whatever to keep the mess sorted – but what you can’t do, is simply having: no official family, two working persons in that relationship and a child that can go to nursery.

There are no nurseries.

And there comes the first conservative telling me, that the right to chose is not the same as the option.

What kinda name’s that? Man, it not unlikely that I would kill people for participating in social networks but I surely kill them him if they participate in a network named AKA AKI. I mean, well, the idea of bringing social networks to cells is already a bit orwellesque but why name it after… an ELK?

The concept of a network that enables people to know what I’m listening to on my iPod, despite my anticipatory use of noise-reducing earphones, may appeal to social degenerated control-freaks with the idea that you have to know what someone thinks to talk with him. I mean I’m paranoid, yes, and if I’m not I will become so if people start using such networks – especially people I happen to know.

with a normal data rate you can send something about 500 aka-aki messages to the price of one SMS. Which is, we suppose, funny.

Ah. Well. I suppose it ain’t funny. Not at all. Especially if the people using it are approximately two meters tall and tend to cut their hair frantically short. Nope. That ain’t funny. And their ‘jokes’ about elks ain’t funny, too. Elks are bigger as cows. Ha ha. Elks don’t use social networks – at least those who have antlers.

And of course all those quotes about the possibilities such networks can open are quite elaborate. There may even lie some truth in it. But I’m still not sure if I want those possibilities. And I’m not just conservative. And I’m certainly not getting old.
Certainly those possibilities ARE gorgeous. Think of a demonstration, the cops getting kinda hard and you’re able to control and communicate with a whole network of activists – and all this just with with some clicks on your cell’s keys. Or about new forms of getting organized: social and psychological barriers are lowered and participation would get easier. You’d have access to loads of potential sympathizers which you could spam with information.
If you hear the obligatory but coming… well, here it is:

It doesn’t matter. For Social networks reproduce the society they are based on. And if it’s a fairly unpolitical one the network will be, too. The ’student’s movement’ against tuition fees WAS fairly political – students are the perfect soil for a political movement: they are usually pretty well educated, at least supposed to learn how to access sophisticated ideas and despite many contrary pretenses they have enough spare time to engage in political or social movements.
But they didn’t – even though a new study revealed that nearly two thirds are against tuition fees. Even though paying money and having less is the most usual reason for people to take the streets. As a matter of fact, ‘StudiVZ’ – in this respect the most promising social network with over 500.000 users (about quarter of all students enrolled ind the FDR) – didn’t activate them. And there were multiple attempts, vast ‘groups’ with people against tuition fees – but ideas and organizations for even a virtual demo never passed the state of a plan.

Social networks change nothing in this worlds social or political reality – in dictatorships they can be an additional way to spread information – in democracies they are just a way to find new friends or someone who at least could be called so.

Plus: social networks not only can be controlled – they are always controlled. By money, economic interest, or political aims. Rupert Murdoch bought Myspace for the same reasons which caused him to establish the Fox news channel – which were not not merely for economic aims.

On the other end of a network there’s always someone who pulls the strings. And the more sophisticated and the easier the access to that networks becomes the more powerful it will prove as a weapon not of censorship – but of unnoticed control.

via Elektrischer Reporter

Yeah. After hours of reading newspapers, listening to radio news and surfing through flickr photo-streams I have to admit – I gotta say something. I gotta say three things.

First. What in God’s holy name did this idiots think of? Radicals are no pussy cats. Yeah, they throw stones and they do it out of conviction. The problem is that half of the media, some of the so called police specialists and obviously none of the attac organisators has the faintest idea of what radicals think like. It doesn’t matter that the organizatory committee took the pink spectacles and the police chose the black ones. No what matters is that most of the journalists never did any research on left and counter youth culture.
Even if they once were part of a Maoist separatist group. They never realized that you have to update your experience. Well. So far for that.
The results are obvious. It was a scarce comfort that the tageszeitung at the third day offered of the official protest a small chapter on autonomous radical movements in Germany. Nobody reckoned that there would be what the police called an unprovoked outburst of violence.
Ridiculously. Police and State Security spent the last two months on preventive strikes against the radicals in Germany, a vital center of autonomous organization in Denmark was cleared, criminalize the protest before-handedly. Who thinks radicals can’t read takes his heading straight towards ignorance. They even communicate.
Interesting.

Second. Who for heaven’s sake thought there would be a positive output of protests and summit? Kueppersbusch put it in a pretty straightforward line: would you expect a general meeting mafia bosses to discuss the problems of the third world? Exactly.
And all those commentators and self imposed specialists who debate on the outcome of the meeting or the protest or both – they just want to earn money. Too.
The protest will have no effect because, if it would, it would make no sense that the summit would take place anyways. It’s the aim of the protest to make the summit redundant. And if the summit would not take place there would of course be more reason to protest against what’s going on. But there would be no place.
Both, summit as well as protest camp, are part of a ritual stating that no one will give up. The real solutions or processes aren’t part of an one-week meeting. And sitting around a nice bonfire lamenting over third world’s poverty never did anything against it. The ritual is one for the media, in a wider sense for the public and throwing stones is and putting fences up, too. It’s necessary to gain the attention of those who read about Knut and his relatives during the rest of week. And on weekend about the stone-throwers. Interesting species, ain’t it?

Third. Who on earth thought that the locals would love radicals that ain’t no pussy cats? No one. But why then telling them so. Radicals and even critics of globalization are neither domesticated nor tolerant. They are in the dead end of this society. And they stay there because they want to. And most of the petit bourgois want them to. And even if they don’t get up and start trashing your newly bought convertable as a statement against poverty, they still wear long hear and hear strange music.
No one in North-Eastern Germany who as a halfway decent sense of what his educated should look like will let them play with their children. Which is why it never was the aim to produce something as tolerance between those two groups. More something like a ceasefire period. For a few days.

Well that’s that. Maybe I start with a few more thesis after consuming some few more news and getting angry again. Now I’m thirsty.

What still leaves me back suprised: the high class prostitutes at Oranienburger Street. Right between middle aged and classed couples, hip new economy yuppies, indie folks and the modest upper class. The only feature that lifts them above an ordinary sexed up chic are those unbelievably long stilettos. What makes me mad: the ignorance of the people around. Official new speech: tolerance.

Since the whole republic started arguing about the question if consuming alcohol at a so called “flat-rate” the question tormented even my tired out thoughts.

While I am writing I’m actually sitting inside an overheated train with four specimen of sort sitting in front of me, with them their inevitable bottle of them. Talking and quarreling and posing of quite as much as the bunch of chicks on the opposing side of the waggon. One is even doing some movement that apparently are meant to look like table-dancing. But what they really miss is some thrill. Some exhilarating border-line experience. Like you get it on a trip. Right on LSD, or smoking nice little pipe of dope. Having dreams. Taking some hash. But drugs are illegal.

Society not only prohibited the use of drugs it also consented on drugs, hard drugs, being evil. And don’t never be evil. Since drugs can destroy a man’s existence they are the only real threat to our society that ain’t a product of society itself. If you think about it is the utmost ban a democratic society could spell. A ban that includes nearly the whole society.

Unfortunately it leaves out the group took drugs as the last chance to reach a little freedom and get rid of such bans. To provoke a small amount of anarchy. Just to have the option to return and accept that rules also grant facilities.

In ancient times those guys that left the train one minute ago went waltzing Matilda.Or they went into war. Sought the Holy Grail. Fought Saxons and freed Jerusalem. They took the eternal quest to fight the evil and do some good. Or meant to do. Which they can’t anymore because the grail is lost forever, wars seldom threaten this part of the world and the Foreign Legion nowadays isn’t very popular.

Drugs on the other hand were a marvelous alternative to the art of throwing stones at policemen. Or building a street guerilla. They were quite an easy peasy way  to oppose the bad machine a little bit and feel good at the same time. Plus you could buy them. Learning to throw stones is much harder. You still can’t buy courage.

Now drugs aren’t only illegal. They are immoral. Alcohol on the other hand is quite normal. And it’s even less expensive. Got it?

I’m really keen too get behind the question why the BVG heats the trains at 25°C outside temperature. Large capacity saunas.

… is not allowed iat StudiVZ anymore. This is at least the opinion of Udo at law blog. I suppose I got to get out of this shit as fast as possible. The only problem is: it is awfully useful. Of course youcould stay in contact with your friends in ways as versatile as a chameleon. Mail, SMS, Phone, E-Mail… the world is full ofcommunication devices.

The wonderful feature of StudiVZ, Facebook or similar components is the social force of a community that, once you paricipate, starts controling your communication. Everyone is inside, so you gotta be there, too. And don’t try to stay away more than two days. You can’t come back. It’s like the peer group I never had. Someone cares about you.