amicus curiæ

Quoting Nixon’s national security adviser Henry Kissinger, the nominee to the US Supreme Court’s 1988 Columbia University yearbook entry was, “The illegal we do immediately. The unconstitutional takes a little longer.”
Though the seriousness of this tag-line is up for speculation and probably understood to be satirical by legal-eagles of the time, no one is yet bothering to scour the earnestness of the claim that the justice in the wings is calling Dear Leader’s disdain for the judiciary demoralising. I wonder, if like the vice-president’s attestation that Russia was behind the hacking attack or that climate change was a reality or that sorry-not-sorry chiding given for turning the office of the president into the Home-Shopping Network, this is an insincere lunge for independent and critical though that’s merely meant to make these abnormal times seem more palatable.

6x6

montezuma’s revenge: salmonella bacteria could be weaponised as a therapy to attack cancer

ralf und florian: unaired pilot for a Kraftwerk sitcom

creative commons: the Metropolitan Museum of Art released its online catalogue into the public domain

vinegar valentines: vintage cards for trolling those unworthy of your affections

cultural appropriation: unhinged preacher wants to reclaim the rainbow as a reminder that the final judgment will be by fire

gallery 1988: 80s pop culture icons presented as postage stamps

hey nineteen—no we can’t talk at all

The rule invoked to silence Senator Elizabeth Warren’s dissenting view on Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III’s appointment to the office of US Attorney General has been rarely used and was codified into law a century after Thomas Jefferson first anticipated the need for mechanism to maintain order when a heated debate escalated to physical violence.
The parliamentary proceedings that the Founding Father drafted was meant to curtail deliberations on the subject of abolition and following the fist-fight (over the subject of lynching) that spurred formal adoption in 1902 states, “No Senator in debate shall, directly or indirectly, by any form firm of words impute to another Senator or to other Senators any conduct or motive unworthy or unbecoming a Senator… No Senator in debate shall refer offensively to any State of the Union…” Of course, this atmosphere of congeniality precludes debate on the floor and so has been sparingly called on. Warren’s rebuke could only be muffled by this legal fiction because the nominee happened to be an incumbent senator, who also happened to be denied a federal judgeship for being racially insensitive and his civil rights record and potential menace to social justice. The excerpts from a petition from civil rights icon Coretta Scott King from three decades hence that Senator Warren (whom Dear Leader still calls Pocahontas) tried to cite only recently came to light as the receipt of Ms King’s letter failed to enter it formerly into the congressional record. Now that Sessions is no longer a fellow senator, Warren is free to say anything she pleases about him. If we are to adhere to the rule book this closely, note well Rule XIX also provides, “Former Presidents of the United States shall be entitled to address the Senate upon appropriate notice to the Presiding Officer who shall thereupon make the necessary arrangements.”

flashback friday

Keen-eyed followers have noticed that former official White House photographer, drawing on his extensive archive of presidential and diplomatic moments, seems to time his posts in juxtaposition to what the current court jester is steam-rolling or ranting about.

Scharfsichtige Anhänger haben bemerkt, dass der ehemalige offizielle Weiße Haus-Fotograf, der auf seinem umfangreichen Archiv aus Präsidenten- und Diplomatischen Momenten aufbaut, seine Beiträge in der Gegenüberstellung zu dem, was der jetzige Hofnarrer zerstört oder beklagt, zeitweilig zu sehen scheint.

sheep’s clothing

I suppose I never fully worked out what the meaning behind “corporate raider” entailed until listening to this interview regarding the degeneration of an American factory town whose story runs counter to the conventional narratives and incriminations. Like the bankrupt casinos that line the shores of New Jersey, ghost malls and abandoned resorts that sprout up like mushroom but yield diminishing returns until their profitability has waned too far, a corporate raider would swoop in to extort a windfall for himself or on behalf of others that was unsustainable for the target business and/or the surrounding community.
In this case, much like the Vikings with their Danegeld (read ransom), an individual bought up a controlling share of the manufacturing operation that was an anchor for the town and made himself a nuisance to corporate governance. After undermining the company’s executive functions and being generally disruptive to business for a sufficient amount of time to cow the board of directors, the corporate raider graciously offered to be bought out—at a profit to himself that meant the company had to sell off some assets to be able to afford to end this coercion. All tragic downfalls are a collusion of several vectors and no two scenarios are alike, but once the company betrayed weakness in being willing to negotiate with an extortionist, others instantly perked up at the signal and homed in on a new victim. What do you think? This sort of capitalism is very different from the notion that greatness was somehow stolen from America by the Chinese rather than by our own rapine.

nobody puts baby in a corner

A German network aired Wag the Dog the other day and I think that the film has enjoyed a better reception here than it did in the States because there was a greater separation to digest life imitating art than there was for domestic audiences.
The satire about spin and fake news premiered a month before the Clinton-Lewinski scandal and the subsequent conflict in Kosovo was too close for comfort and suffered for its vision and honest assessment of what propaganda that the media might be capable of. Of course the elect of Hollywood could not be persuaded to be the mouth-pieces for this regime who is instead heir to poorly produced adaptations of Ayn Rand novels—subversively the book that Johnny Castle tells Frances Houseman to stop reading in Dirty Dancing was The Fountainhead—or the weird series of documentaries from the Chief of Public Enlightenment, whose latest work Torchbearer is an odd romping march of clashes of cultures through the millennia that squarely assigns all misfortune and the collapse of civilizations on societies growing wayward from the norm.