Tiago Mata

What is left after satire corroded all possibilities? In the last few days I have become addicted to the song below. Its euphoric positiveness and the counterpoint of negativity. It parodies truthfully a certain way of being political and Portuguese.

Once you place enthusiasm against its inverted self, does enthusiasm survive? One could say it’s simply dialectics, one ravages the other. But I don’t see the next step in the progression.

I see a hollow, dark place, of silence, neither positive, nor negative, instead indifferent and laughing and displaced. Maybe it is nothing to do with the song, and everything to do with where I listen to it. I am no longer there, where this satire happens with conviction and without self-perspective, so I cannot be in it, and resolve it.

Recently, the Federal Reserve of the USA hired a lobbyist to advance its cause in Congress. The Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco contributes to the campaign to regain public trust by way of a web gamegr. The game invites one to be a Fed Chairman and set the Federal Funds Rate against a shock (permanent, or temporary, contraction or expansion), the player needs to adjust the hydraulics to keep the time series close to the target inflation rate, i.e. keeping employment at the “natural” rate.

(via Economix)

This summer I got stuck at the airport with a delayed KLM flight. The plane to fly on a Sunday afternoon, had to wait for a mechanical part coming from the Netherlands in the evening. So we could only fly on the next, Monday, morning. Because I was stranded in Lisbon, home town, I did not need the “complimentary” hotel or meal.

Enraged by the delay and missing a meeting on Monday morning, I checked the Customer Care Policies of KLM to see if I was entitled to any compensation. This is what I found:

passengers will be offered free of charge:
- meals/refreshments in a reasonable relation to the waiting
time
- hotel accommodation in cases where an (additional) overnight
stay becomes necessary (transport included)
- 2 telephone calls, fax messages or e-mails.

The item that merits comment is the 2 phone calls. I wonder what is the rationale to this. In cop movies, suspects have the right to make one phone when they are thrown into jail. KLM treats its costumers with only one more degree of generosity.

P.S. It turns out that if you don’t take the hotel, the (reasonable) meal or the 2 emails, you get nothing.

The new manifesto on the left: L’Insurrection qui vient has sparked great controversy more about the authorship than the content. Today I was surprised to find it published by semiotic Princeton University Press, with a blurb by Glenn Beck:

“I am not calling for a ban on this book. It’s important that you read this book. [...] And let me tell you something: Don’t dismiss these people. Don’t dismiss them.”

Violating copyright, the text is also pdfed online.