Ramblings, From Trauma to Poor's

It's quite late but I am still very much up, and since my usual time-wasting experiences are temporarily out of reach, I was doing a little research for the story instead. As long as the reading about gunshot wounds was strictly theoretical and verbal, it was fine; even looking at the photos was fine. Then I looked at photos of other types of wounds, stitches, etc., and was for once subtly rocked to the verge of seasickness, as it were. So I decided to postpone the rest to a different day, and here is my blog post instead.

This evening my sister T. had an interview, and instead of having to go off to a complicated location, the interviewer came over to us! The rest of us were tucked away in our respective rooms and didn't traipse in to disrupt the proceedings. Anyway, it was a lovely change of pace.

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The weather has been mixed, with a couple impressive gusts which bent back the branches on the oaks and even stirred the top of the trunk; in Dahlem a gust of over 19 m/s was recorded, which is not unusual but at any rate an 8 on the Beaufort scale and gale-force. The temperature fell and rose between 14 and 19 degrees Celsius; the humidity was generally I think between 60 and 70%. I like looking at the circum-British marine weather on the Met Office's website, too, and finding strong winds and learning the names of the different quadrants of sea. It's fairly useless for knowing the weather in Berlin except if conditions in the "German Bight" are similar.

At any rate the night sky is covered in clouds for the first time in several days, which I know because I have been watching for Perseid shooting stars before the moon becomes full. I can only point out the Big Dipper and the moon and sometimes Orion, but do recognize Cassiopeia because it is simply a sideways W, and so by luck I think I figured out where Perseus's constellation lies (i.e. mostly behind a neighbouring apartment building).

Though too impatient to watch stars well, I did take the time to sit in the open window of Ge.'s and J.'s room and watch the aperture of sky for a long while, and noticed that it is a slow process for the eye to accustom itself to the darkness and to glimpse more stars. Then of course there was the ambient city light, and even someone turning on the light in a room dimmed the stars further. I haven't seen the obvious blips of shooting stars which I saw (I think those were the Leonid showers, so in November) gliding over the sky in Canada once; but I saw one goldenish fizzle, which was strange and possibly something else, and I have never seen so many imaginary streaks of light in my life.

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I have been following the riots in London with intense interest. On the whole, though I made a conscious decision not to read the coverage in the Telegraph much, I find the response of public opinion reasonable. The calls for police brutality and prompt military invasion are of course shortsighted and profoundly unintelligent on the whole, but as a verbal reaction at least they are to be expected and natural. What interested me is (for example) that there was so much of a focus on David Cameron handling the matter, rather than Boris Johnson; though admittedly Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson (I read the whole name somewhere today and thought it was worth repeating) does not exude the air of the stern, noble arbiter of the socioeconomically afflicted.

Generally what I think is that living in downtown London is, depending on income level and the nature of one's immediate neighbours, in fact quite brutal and very monotonous; so without considering all of the looters as victims, and with considering setting fire to buildings as well as beatings of people as acts whose abhorrent nature should not need to be pointed out, I have a lot of sympathy for the rioters and looters. As for the theft, of course I am not comfortable with it; in pragmatic terms, it is clear firstly that destroying the work and savings of someone who has had to struggle for them (like the owners of the small businesses which have also been attacked) is unjustified, and secondly that the wealthy management of a multinational retailer are very likely to ensure that the brunt of financial losses falls on persons other than themselves. Thirdly I think it's true that the looting doesn't do much for the besieged economy; fourthly I don't understand why technology gadgets seem so essential to these people. As for the man who was shot and killed in Croydon, the phrasing of the incident is so ambiguous that I wonder whether he was shot by the police, and if the death was in fact related to the riots or not — doubts all the more justified, I think, by the improbity of public statements regarding Jean Charles de Menezes, Ian Tomlinson, and more recently Mark Duggan.

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As for the stock market crashes, I think that they are fairly stupid, and have been as inclined to mutter about Moody's and Standard & Poor's (also of course in connection with Greece, Portugal, and Italy) as many other people, though I need to read more business articles to know what precisely is going on. Becoming the agency that hammers the nail into the coffin of a national economy must not be very rewarding, and as Paul Krugman has pointed out, for instance, S&P entirely failed to identify the subprime mortgage problem before it burst onto the scene and so is something less than omni in its science. On the other hand if something finally gets Berlusconi out of the prime ministerial office and into the round of judicial proceedings which have been breathing down his neck, I don't mind if it is this period of economic malaise.