via regia

Via Hyperallergic, we are directed towards this comprehensive and highly detailed chart mapping out all the major and minor trading routes established and solidified during the High Middle Ages—a vast and sophisticated network that connected European, African, Asia and Far East merchants—with nodes not only along the Silk Road—and gives some perspective on the drive to advance markets and what sort of rates of exchange enable and underpin these linkages.

administratively embargoed

The newly-minted ambassador, officially credentialed and assuming the role just hours prior to Trump’s announcement to withdraw from the Iranian nuclear deal, to the US mission in Berlin sent out his first missive, suggesting that “German companies doing business in Iran should wind down operations immediately.”
It seems like everyone in that crooked cadre does not see words as a mode of communication to be exchanged, but rather as projectiles to fire out demands. Though Trump did not have the nerve (happily) to careen the world economy into chaos with a full-fledged trade war with his promised tariffs on steel exports but a trade war may yet materialise over this threat, given that America reserves the right to impose secondary sanctions on businesses that have dealings with Iran, in any capacity and any company sizable enough to do business with Iran would most likely have an American presence to subject to punishment. Though the US withdrawal from the deal, which was one of Trump’s campaign promises, was not surprising—the extent of punitive second- and third-degree repercussions is, determined to drive a wedge between the US and Europe that will result in greater consensus among those still party to the agreement (were it a treaty, Trump could not withdraw unilaterally): the EU, China and Russia.

manufactured crisis or the art of the repeal

Either out of boredom or malice, Trump again brings the world to the brink of disaster for no good reason, despite a vigourous round of entreaties from world leaders not to and vow for continued commitment to the cause, in breaking away from the robust and effective treaty with Iran that ensured that its rocketry and nuclear programmes were directed towards peaceful, civil aims and not weaponised.
Sowing discontent and mistrust geopolitically serves abjectly no purpose as Iran economically does little trade with the US and the pressure of further economic sanction would only manifest as hostile tensions, not to mention alienating and sidelining America’s allies and major trade partners. This sham of a world leader who is no negotiator, has been influenced by a few equally corrupt governments and advisors with an agenda and stand to profit off of this conflict—through oil and weapon sales. In response to Trump’s cache of adjectives deriding the deal, Iran’s president stated Trump was a “troublesome creature” and would attempt to continue to uphold its terms of the treaty with other parties but there was no guarantee that this move would not set off an arms race. This also signals to other countries, like North Korea that US commitment to peace and stability is rather disingenuous. President Obama, who helped broker the arrangement back in 2015 and who usually refrains from commenting on the bumbling of his predecessor, issued a statement shortly after the announcement that the US would not renew the treaty, “In a democracy, there will always be changes in policies and priorities from one administration to the next. But the consistent flouting of agreements that our country is party to risks eroding America’s credibility, and puts us at odds with the world’s major powers. Debates in our country should be informed by facts—especially debates that have proven to be divisive.”

თბილისი

A committed flâneur myself, I appreciated the invitation from Calvert Journal correspondent Daryl Mersom to take a wander through the different quarters of Tbilisi to marvel at the contrasting and complementary styles of the city’s cultural influences, with the conviction that architecture is not best experienced with an itinerary or by a windshield tour but rather by walking.
From the Old Georgian for a “warm place,” the city was founded in the fourth century BC around a sulphurous thermal spring, an area referred to as Abanotubani, and the settlement has since been at the crossroads of successive civilisations, often in competition over the territory due to its strategic location, and these waves of influence have let their marks and have informed a rather vibrant cosmopolitan capital.
The iconic Wedding Palace designed by Victor Djorbenadze in 1984, purpose built as a matrimonial venue but now a private residence that can be rented out for special events and the 1975 Ministry of Transportation (now the headquarters of the national bank) by Zurab Jalaghania and George Chakhava were not directly included on the meandering path but are alluded to as component parts of the city’s architectural character.  One encounters a rich mixture of Byzantine, Soviet Modern, Beaux-Arts and Neoclassical styles and there’s a certain allure to this panorama that we would like to see in person.

the worst view in the world

In collaboration with local artists, Banksy has introduced a line of keepsakes, we learn via Colossal, available at the gift-shop of his Bethlehem hotel (previously here and here) that are inversions of the normal tourist tchotchkes of famous landmarks with the West Bank barrier wall depicted in various stages of crumbling. The hotel has also recently released an album by several Palestinian and international performers and has hosted several other events that you can read more about at the links up top.

warmongering or operation desert stormy

Though we are just four months into 2018 and we don’t have comparable figures for comparison from the UK and France, as opposed to the fifteen-thousand Syrian migrants fleeing their war-torn country that the US helped resettle in 2016, this year the US has only welcomed eleven.
It strikes me as beyond cruel insult in this proxy war that millions are caught in the middle of to condemn the killing of civilians and respond by raining down death and destruction yet offer those trying to escape the violence little to no support or recourse—not to mention arming opposing regional factions and increasing sectarian strife. Targeting sites linked to the Assad regime’s chemical weapons programme, military facilities were avoided to prevent the possibility of collateral damage to Russian assets. Twice the amount of missiles were used in this mission compared to last April’s response to a chemical weapons attack. Some two thousand American troops are stationed in opposition Kurdish-controlled northern Syria—for good measure. This stunt also happens to coincide with the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s former boss who was fired by Trump publishing a rather damning bombshell account of his dealings with Trump and under the direction of the independent counsel, the FBI has raided the offices of one of Trump’s lawyers, possibly securing irreconvertibly incriminating evidence of wrong-doing behind the campaign and the election.

a separate peace

While Russia may have donned the public-facing mantle for meddling and media manipulation, one is puts out of mind the Trump regime’s other cosy relationships at one’s peril.
While debate rages on about the extent that Russia undermined the US presidential election or whether democratic institutions can be under siege from multiple fronts or not—some seem to have adopted the contrarian narrative that it can’t be both Russia and sophistry—other political strongmen in the Middle East have leveraged Trump’s compromising business-ties to achieve desired, measurable outcomes at the expense of alienating other regional partners and players for the appeasement and enrichment of the few whose tensions will pull the world into a fresh conflagration—not that the embers from before are not still glowing.

food court

Though the history and geopolitical situation that frames Iran’s relationship to the US and the broader Western-world (and its neighbours in the region) if rather fraught and complex and believe that the profusion of convenience food is a real blight on society and the environment, we rather enjoyed this summary presentation through the lens of bootleg fast food franchises from Atlas Obscura that neither shied away from the uncomfortable truths nor trivialised the state of affairs.
Kentucky House, Mash Donald’s, Pizza Hot and others occupy an entrepreneurial and experiential space that’s otherwise absent in daily life. We also gained an appreciation for the nuance of the Persian pejorative gharbzadeghi (غرب‌زدگی) for being besotted (struck) with Western models and standards in education, business, arts and culture but also critically as it launches a discourse on imitation and authenticity and how one as a nation is can be played proxy as consumers of the products or the politics that the West is selling. Do give the whole article a read at the link up top and discover more with the help of their team of intrepid adventurers.

the great belzoni

On this day two centuries ago, and with the express permission of the Pasha of Egypt, adventurer and pioneering archaeologist Giovanni Battista Belzoni became the first person since Antiquity to penetrate and explore the Pyramid of Chephren, the second largest structure of the complex at Giza—though looters from nearly a millennium before had already partially plundered the burial chambers. How the Great Belzoni, as he styled himself, came to be there is a pretty intriguing tale in itself—born one of thirteen siblings to a father who was a barber in Padua—he went to Rome as an apprentice plumber with the intent on taking monastic orders but his career path was suddenly diverted by the occupation of the city by the forces of the Napoleonic armies and abduction of the Pope.
After a stint as a barber in the Netherlands, Belzoni moved to London and found his wife and joined a travelling circus (as you do), incorporating magic lanterns into his acts. After nearly a decade of performing with the circus, they allowed him on the international circuit, touring with shows on the Iberian peninsula and Malta—where he happened to meet an emissary of Ottoman Egypt. Informing Belzoni of the pasha’s public works scheme which included large-scale irrigation and land-reclamation, the sideshow actor offered his expertise in in hydraulics and presented the ambassador with a proposal. Ultimately, Belzoni’s damming project was not undertaken but it was enough to get him to Cairo and a relationship with the governor of the county. After a demonstration of engineering prowess and appreciation for the conservation of artefacts with the successful removal (again with the pasha’s permission), transportation and installation of a monumental bust of Rameses II (at the British Museum) and his exploration was partially underwritten by the British consulate. Belzoni embarked on several excavations, making several discoveries. Contracting dysentery, he died en route to explore a dig underway in Timbuktu.

mmxvii

january: Millions march across the globe in protest to the inauguration of Dear Leader, followed immediately by a federal hiring-freeze and a controversial travel ban. Artificial intelligence surpasses humans at the ancient game of Go. Sadly, we had to say goodbye to Mary Tyler Moore.  

february: North Korea invites international censure for testing a ballistic missile over the Sea of Japan and for the very public assassination of the country’s leader’s half-brother. Astronomers discover a solar system comprised of seven Earth-sized exoplanets in our Goldilocks zone.

march: Millions face the prospect of starvation in northern Africa. Elon Musk successfully recovers and reuses the booster stage of an orbital class rocket.  The United Kingdom invokes Article Fifty of the European Union Treaty, triggering its exit from the bloc.

april: US retaliatory action in Syria significantly damages the country’s relationship with Russia, then America drops the largest conventional bomb in Afghanistan. Coral bleaching threatens the world’s reefs. A passenger was violently removed from a commercial airliner prior to take-off, setting off a trend of customer abuse.  We had to bid farewell to comedian Don Rickles and actor Jonathan Demme.

may: A terrorist bombing at a concert in Manchester tragically killed twenty-two people and injured hundreds. A ransomware virus holds computer systems around the world hostage. French presidential elections put a stay on the spread of conservatism. Sadly, actor Roger Moore, musician Greg Allman and statesman Zbigniew Brzezinski passed away.

june: Amid resounding international criticism and pledges by others to redouble their commitment, the US withdraws from the Paris Climate Agreement. A dread inferno engulfed an apartment block in West London, killing seven-one and displacing hundreds.  Terror attacks perpetrated by the Cosplay Caliphate ravage Tehran. Former West- and reunified German chancellor Helmut Kohl passed away, as did actor Adam West.

july: North Korea continues to test more and more sophisticated, longer-range missiles. The Syrian city of Mosul is taken back from ISIL. Huge ice bergs break away from the Antarctic ice shelf. Researchers believe early human migrated out of Africa seventy thousand years sooner than previously thought. We bid farewell to actors Sam Shepard and Jeanne Moreau.

august: The detection of gravitational waves is becoming a common occurrence. North America experienced a total solar eclipse. Hurricane Harvey struck the Gulf Coast. The Burmese military carry out ethnic cleansing against the Rohingya people. The Eagles’ Glen Campbell passed away as did Dick Gregory and Jerry Lewis.

september: Russia expels hundreds of American diplomats over new sanctions. Hurricane Irma devastates the Caribbean and Puerto Rico, followed closely by Hurricane Maria. An earthquake strikes Mexico City. Actor Harry Dean Stanton, Monty Hall and playboy Hugh Hefner pass away.

october: A gunman opens fire on an audience gathered for a concert in Las Vegas, Nevada from high atop a casino resort hotel and killed fifty-eight and injured hundreds, surpassing last year’s deadliest shooting at an Orlando, Florida nightclub, failing again to make Americans more willing to discuss gun-control. The US withdraws in protest from UNESCO, with Israel following immediately after. Austria elects a far-right coalition.  Our Solar System gets an interstellar visitor.  German researchers discover that there has been a seventy-five percent drop in insect biomass over the past twenty-five years. Catalonia declares independence from Spain. Tom Petty dies.

november: A German newspaper publishes a tranche of documents leaked by an offshore law firm as an encore to the Panama Papers. A work attributed to Da Vinci fetches the highest price ever paid at an auction for a piece of fine art. Many brave women come forward and confront their sexual harassers.  Parliament will be given a final vote on the divorce deal before the UK leaves the EU. Actors David Cassidy and Jim Nabors pass away.

december: More wildfires ravage California. The Trump regime provocatively recognises Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and moves to eviscerate net neutrality and other consumer protections. Russia is barred from the Olympics due to its sanctioned, systemic doping practises.  Narrowly, Alabama elects a senator from Democratic party rather than a sexual predator, though there is still one in the White House. Entertainer Rose Marie and French rockstar Johnny Halliday pass away.

jumping jehoshaphat

As if it weren’t inflammatory enough for the United States to unilaterally declare Jerusalem to be the capital of Israel and symbolically transform its consulate into an embassy, the controversial recognition is being aired by the United Nations’ General Assembly, who’ve resolved to put the decision to a vote—mostly likely of condemnation, that’s only baiting the UN into the hands of thugs and bullies.
Trump’s fawning ombudsman, and not for the first time, has pledged to take careful note of how each member votes and suggests that not only will the United States begrudge those who cross it foreign aid (which of course is not a charitable contribution but something that the US does to further its own interests, which includes regional stability) but that sovereign states might consider showing their solidarity by moving their respective diplomatic missions to Jerusalem as well. While I am confident that this effort to strong-arm the international community to legitimise Trump’s ill-conceived statecraft, it’s painfully awkward that his narcissism has brought us here and some administrations (either opportunistic or stymied) may have excised their option to voice dissent.

current state of affairs

Status quo is a shortened version of the original phrase in statu quo res errant ante bellum meaning to maintain the way things were before the war and broadly refers to upholding accepted social and political norms. There is also a qualified sense of the term, the Status quo of the Holy Land Sites, which is an understanding and compact amongst the religious communities of Jerusalem and Bethlehem for their simultanea, that is places that are sacred to multiple faiths, that are not under a single recognised religious authority.
Originating from a eighteenth century decree from the sultan of the Ottoman Empire, the arrangement has stood in essentially its original form until the present day and provides that the keys to the Christianity’s holiest sites have been kept in the same local, Arab clan for generations and that no common property may be altered in any way (especially to the impediment of pilgrims and holy rites), sometimes to the detriment of ancient structures needing upkeep, and is embodied by cedar wood ladder under a window of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre that has been on-site since 1757 when a mason was engaged to do some restoration work on the ledge. This bureaucratic impasse, known as the Immovable Ladder (literally in Hebrew, “The Status Quo Ladder”), is symbolic of the internecine conflict and irresolution of the six Christian religious orders that share the space, but also reminds visitors that consensus and cooperation are also sacrosanct and inviolable, as well as something surpassing tolerance for one’s neighbours.

alternativity

BBC 2 will air a collaboration between street artist Banksy and director Danny Boyle on Third Advent billed as a “festive spectacular” held at the venue of the artist’s own self-described worst hotel in the world at the foot of the wall dividing Bethlehem.

7x7

yōkainoshima: Charles Fréger photographs the monsters of Japanese folklore (more yōkai here, here and here)

arm + bend = elbow: more clever word sums from Futility Closet

oктя́брьская револю́ция: to mark the centenary since the start of the Russian revolution curators at

the Hermitage ceremoniously re-started the clocks stopped the moment Bolsheviks stormed the Winter Palace

tessellation: gorgeous drawing game inspired by Islamic art and architectural forms, via Waxy

zeroth law: Saudi Arabia confers citizenship on an android plus plans to build a robot pleasure megacity

moment factory: Montreal’s basilica transformed into an immersive multi-media experience in hopes to renew appreciation for the landmark

monsterpiece theatre: a nice appreciation of Cookie Monster, the academic muppet

and many pleasant facts about the square of the hypotenuse

Via TYWKIWDBI, we discover that a century of study and conjecture mathematicians have teased the secrets from a thirty-seven-hundred-year old Babylonian clay tablet and revealed that not only were the fundamental principles of the Pythagorean theorem known and applied earlier than expected, that indispensable ratio among the sides of a right-triangle providing that c²=a²+b², but moreover the artefact represents not only the world’s first trigonometric table and also the only completely accurate one—owning to the way the Babylonians counted in base-sixty instead of base-ten number-systems, which we retain in the way we reckon time and the degrees and minutes of longitude and latitude. This anonymous tablet predates the work of Hipparchus of Nicaea by more than a millennium, whom history has called the father of the branch of mathematics and credits with the invention of such preternaturally useful navigation and surveying tools like the astrolabe and the first star charts. The discovery is not just a revelatory in that it shows that these underlining principles were known to architects and astronomers far earlier than we believed, but there’s also the insight that these triads, the values of the sides of triangles, were derived ratiometrically—that is without inscribing a right-triangle in a circle.

alif, alef or mater lectionis

An Israel typeface designer and professor created a new script that combines elements of the writing systems for the country’s two official language, Hebrew and Arabic, into a mutual intelligible characters.
Her motivations for creating this hybrid abjad were not exclusive political (coming just weeks after the Knesset proposed removing Arabic’s status) the but also social and personal, describing how in bi-lingual or tri-lingual signage, she saw the Arab calligraphy as decorative and not something to be heeded on the same level as Hebrew or English. I am sure that is a common enough experience and many other audiences, for want of literacy, would see something written in Arabic as vaguely terrorising itself. In Aravrit, however, both languages are fused, inviting the reader to see them as co-equals and perhaps to comprehend something about their commonality. Visit Hyperallergic at the link above to learn more and for a demonstration of how the characters were split and reconfigured.

showbread

Our thanks to Super Punch for investigating past the headlines into the US Department of Justice suit against an American craft and hobby outlet’s founder for the illicit importation of ancient Middle Eastern artefacts.

Rather infamous already for refusing to comply with provisions of the Affordable Care Act and withheld compensation for the covered medical expense of contraception for its employees on religious objections, the family that owns the chain of stores massed a purloined collection of some five thousand scrolls, tablets (not pictured) and other relics smuggled out of the region by dealers under the guise of business samples. Plunder doesn’t necessarily need a further explanation but it turns out the motivation lie in a DIY project that the family was backing in Washington, DC: the Museum of the Bible is slated to open in November of this year, just off the National Mall and across the street from the US Department of Education. The privately-funded museum will display Biblical antiquities, showcasing the family’s sizable and questionable collection, and feature a research centre and an immersive augmented reality experience. Such passions and eccentricities are fine provided that no one’s hurt in the process, but given that the Cosplay Caliphate is receives its financial support through the sales of looted artefacts from Iraq and Syria, we’re too late for that already. The acquisition of the heritage and treasure of another culture by museums is always a subject fraught with controversy and begs questions of repatriation and cultural appropriation but touring galleries that reflects recent practices in pilfering and contributes to slaughter and strife and the undermining of regional stability seems perverse and wholly inappropriate.

6x6

underground sundae: recreating the lost psychedelic commercial that Andy Warhol made in 1968 for a Manhattan family restaurant franchise

lad culture: Sir David Attenborough narrates a typical British night out

dumpster honey: revisiting a disturbing requiem for Nature in the Anthropocene epoch—and yes, it was the insecticides all along

chiaroscuro: stunning night time photographs of Japanese playground equipment

cubismo: Spanish street artist Belin produces hyper-realistic graffiti portraits that evoke Pablo Picasso’s elements of cubism and the surreal

alive, son of awake: a look at the tradition of fantasy and speculative fiction of the Muslin world that precedes European Romanticism by centuries

big tent politics

Published by the German newspaper Welt am Sonntag (auf Englisch, as Boing Boing reports), veteran investigative journalist Seymour Hirsh—responsible for exposing the massacre at My Lai and equal-opportunity critic of US capers—shares a series of conversations between an American soldier (AS) and a security advisor (SA) that was leaked to him regarding April’s retaliatory missile strike on a Syrian airbase, heavily redacted for security reasons.

AS: This is bad… Things are spooling up.

SA: You may not have seen trumps press conference yesterday. He’s bought into the media story without asking to see the Intel. We are likely to get our asses kicked by the Russians. Fucking dangerous. Where are the godamn adults? The failure of the chain of command to tell the President the truth, whether he wants to hear it or not, will go down in history as one of our worst moments.

AS: I don't know. None of this makes any sense. We KNOW that there was no chemical attack. The Syrians struck a weapons cache (a legitimate military target) and there was collateral damage. That's it. They did not conduct any sort of a chemical attack.

SA: There has been a hidden agenda all along. This is about trying to ultimately go after Iran. What the people around Trump do not understand is that the Russians are not a paper tiger and that they have more robust military capability than we do.

This dangerous, deadly incompetent leadership style is about to be put to the test again, as Dear Leader predictably is planning on staging a distraction to side-line public scrutiny as the Senate moves to vote on the future form of healthcare in the United States. The fact that he’d resort to taking lives, putting others at risk and squandering millions on a pretence and as a side-show (not to mention exacerbating already strained international relations) in order to push through a tax-break for the wealthy swaddled in medical insurance reform is beyond despicable. Anyone colluding with his wanton cannibalism is deserving of the same harsh criticism.

luftwaffenstützpunkt

Having been repeatedly denied access to visit service members stationed at the NATO airbase in İncirlik, German Foreign Minister Sigmar Gabriel said that his country has been left with no choice other than withdraw troops and materiel and re-station them elsewhere.
Turkish authorities have blocked visits by government officials since last summer’s questionable coup d’etat and Germany’s refusal to extradite political asylum-seekers caught up in the swift and subsequent purge. Relations further degraded thereafter. Defence Minister von der Leyen offered that the some two-hundred fifty personnel and Tornado fighter jets now at the base in southern Turkey (where the US also has a presence of around five-thousand soldiers and airmen with their families and fifty or so nuclear warheads) could be re-deployed to an installation in Jordan but the transition would be costly and hamper joint efforts in the fight against the Cosplay Caliphate.