disclaimer

During opening remarks to commemorate the fortieth anniversary of the Islamic Revolution that exiled a Western-supported monarchy and installed Ayatollah Ali Khamenei as Supreme Leader, the marja defended the continued use of his provocative catch-phrase, “Death to America,” saying that the sentiment only applies to Trump and his warmongering associates and not the American people as a whole. Khamenei adds that European leaders are not the most trustworthy lot either.

jahrgang xxmviii

As this year draws to a close, we again take time to reflect on a selection of things that took place in 2018. Thanks as always for visiting. We've made it through another wild year together.

january: Turkey enters the Syrian conflict in attempts to wrest control in the north from Kurdish rebels.  The US government experiences a partial shutdown over a lapse in funding due to a stand-off regarding the status of immigrants that were brought to the US as children by their parents.  We had to say goodbye to science-fiction and fantasy writer Ursula Le Guin.

february: There are further advances in private-sector rocketry that seem primed to usher in a new age of exploration.  Another school shooting in America fails to get the country to open up to a dialogue on gun-control. The US Federal Communications Commission repeals net neutrality consumer protections.

march: A former Russian double-agent and his daughter are poisoned in Salisbury, England.  In China, term limits for the office of president and general secretary of the Communist party are eliminated.  In the US, a nation-wide school walk-out occurs to protest gun-violence and weak gun-control laws.  Vladimir Putin is re-elected to a fourth consecutive term as president of Russia.  We bid farewell to scientist Stephen Hawking.

april: France, the UK, and the US launch airstrikes on Syria bases following a government sanctioned chemical weapons attack that killed over seventy civilians.

may: The European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation goes into effect in an attempt to wrest back some modicum of control over individuals’ digital dossiers. Donald Trump precipitates a trade war by imposing punitive steel tariff on exporters with other countries responding in kind.

june: At the G-7 summit in Toronto Donald Trump pushes for the reinstatement of Russia before embarking to meet with the leader of North Korea in Singapore for talks on denuclearisation. 

july: A series of climate-change driven heat-waves devastate North America and Europe, causing many deaths and torrents of forest fires.  A boys’ football team and their coach are rescued from a cave in Thailand after a harrow, seventeen-day ordeal.  Researchers confirm the existence of a subglacial lake of liquid water on Mars.  

august: The market value of Apple surpasses one trillion dollars.  The US reimposes sanctions on Iran over its nuclear programme (having announced its intention to withdraw from the deal in May) while maintaining support to Saudi Arabia in its retaliatory attack on the Yemen.

september: The National Museum of Brazil in Rio de Janeiro is engulfed in flames.  The Supreme Court of India decriminalises homosexuality.  Following a contentious hearing, a controversial justice is appointed to the US Supreme Court, altering its composition.

october: A dissident journalist is kidnapped, murdered and spirited away in pieces at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul. Canada legalises cannabis possession and use nation-wide.  Trump deploys soldiers to the Mexican border to fend off an approaching caravan of asylum-seekers. While visiting his native China, the chief of INTERPOL goes missing and presumed assassinated. The US signals its intent to leave the International Postal Union and shutters its diplomatic outreach offices for Palestine.

november: Democrats take control of the US House of Representative with Republicans retaining control of the Senate.  The InSight probe lands on Mars, beginning a mission to pierce the surface of the Red Planet. We had to bid farewell to SpongeBob SquarePants creator Stephen Hillenburg and social justice warrior Harry Leslie Smith.  US ex-president George Herbert Walker Bush passed away, rejoining Barbara Bush, his life partner of seventy-three years, who died in April.

december: The shambles of Brexit and the investigation into the Trump campaign and administration to Russia are ongoing.  US forces withdraw from Syria with plans to also do so for Afghanistan and the country’s defence secretary resigns in protest.  We had to bid farewell to actor and director Penny Marshall.   The US government enters another partial shutdown over Border Wall funding. 

opsec

Wanting a bit of a respite from his War on Christmas that not only has forcibly separated some fourteen thousand young children from their parents who’ve yet to be reunited, a partial government shutdown whose consequences portend untold collateral damage—especially for those living precariously and counting on that one reliable paycheck for the holidays plus some unwelcome disabusing that’s really tarnishing and not in keeping with the spirit of the season, the Grifter-in-Chief decided to take a swing at those who criticised him for failing to visit a combat zone and staged a surprise three hour publicity stunt at a US airbase outside of Baghdad.
Such photo-ops are usually harmless and might otherwise be a nice morale boost, even if we are still reeling from the announcement to withdraw from Syria and the subsequent resignation of the defence secretary—except the detachment that Trump’s handlers chose for him to greet is a group of special operations forces, likely on some covert operation in the region, and revealing their identities seriously compromises their mission if not putting the troops’ own lives at greater risk.  If the social media exposure was not bad enough on its own, Trump further jeopardised the deployed soldiers and the hospitality of their host nation in refusing to meet with Iraqi government officials during his trip but also gave a campaign speech defending his recent military decisions and suggesting that they use Iraqi bases as a staging-ground for the Syrian nation-building that he had pledged to quit. 

rocky horus

Via Messy Nessy Chic, we are treated to the 1981 production from Egyptian director Mohammed Shebl, who had several horror credits to his name, called Fangs (al’Anyab, الأنياب)—an homage to the Rocky Horror Picture Show. The plot, with ample musical interludes, is faithful to the original up through the first act (plenty of glam vampires but nothing too transgressive to sneak past the censors) and certainly demonstrates a degree of craft and talent that separates it from other knock-offs, like the nearly unwatchable “Turkish Star Wars.”

vacancy announcement

Learning that the social media accounts of the newly elected Iraqi prime minister were absolutely inundated with over thirty thousand applications by those who wanted to join the government after taking to the medium to solicit for appointees, we were reminded of the concept of sortation—rule by lottery—we explored last week. Wanting to disburden himself from a fraught political past of sectarian tensions, corruption and nepotism, Adil Abd al-Mahdi was overwhelmed and heartened by the depth and range of independent applicants interested in cabinet positions, willing to work to rebuild the country.

inter alia

While only briefly a signatory to the Treaty of Rome during the final years of the Clinton administration, Bush II withdrawing America along with Israel and the Sudan with the US being only an observer state during the Obama years under contingent provisions that US soldiers were immune from its verdicts or prosecutions, it is still far out of bounds for the US to excoriate the International Criminal Court (ICC) as irrelevant and capricious.
Beyond the gesture of refusal to cooperate (previously here and here), the US government is threatening dire consequences against the ICC should it move forward in investigating allegations against the US for war crimes perpetrated in Afghanistan to include sanctions and criminal charges against the members of the court and any parties cooperating with their case. A parallel inquiry into human rights violations and practising a policy of apartheid on the people of Palestine resulted in the US closing off all diplomatic outlets for the Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO)—evicting the group from its offices in Washington, DC—a move also characterised as an assault on sovereignty and a country’s right to self-defence undermined.

calving

According to Slashdot, Dubai is exploring the possibility of towing an Antarctic iceberg to the rapidly expanding desert megacity to supply its populace with fresh water. What do you think about that?
I don’t know what the environmental consequences are to nibbling at the margins of the last apolitical refuges of the Earth but it doesn’t strike as a particularly good, far-sighted idea. An engineering firm is in the process of selecting an appropriate candidate—somewhere in the vicinity of a hundred million tonnes—and is working out the logistics, though it’s unclear about the finer points of storage or sale to the government.

twitterati

Diplomatic relations between Canada and Saudi Arabia are in complete disarray after the kingdom’s asymmetrical response to what it characterises as meddling in internal affairs after the Canadian foreign minister and other diplomats expressed concern over the arrest of human rights activist, Samar Badawi who had recently spurred reform that confers more independence for women in allowing them to drive and to conduct some business without a chaperone—prompting a youth organisation to respond rather threatening for its trading and educational partner to mind its own business.
The medium is the message, as Marshall McLuhan says.  Official government measures from the kingdom included the suspension of all trade and investment (part of this feud may be sourced back to a weapons deal arranged by the previous Canadian administration which the Trudeau government rescinded out of concerns of backing oppressive, authoritarian regimes), recalling its ambassadors, expelling the Canadian mission, ordering Saudi citizens being treated in Canadian hospitals to request discharges and transfers to facilities in another nation and for sixteen thousand students sponsored by scholarships studying at Canadian schools relocate at the risk of losing financial assistance. Other countries in the region joined Saudi Arabia in denouncing Canada for politicising human rights, which seems to me one of the chief if not the primary purposes of government. The US refused to weigh in on this affair, urging Canada and Saudi Arabia to work it together.

trade wars are good, and easy to win

Last invoked in 1996 and causing the US to withdraw its threat of imposing secondary sanctions on Cuba, the European Union has adopted a blocking statue that provides a measure of protection to member state corporations that continue doing business with Iran and license to ignore the hectoring bluster emanating from the White House.
Though continued trade could be frustrated in practise, EU companies that are negatively impacted by the US unilateral departure from the terms of the deal with Iran and restoration of punitive tariffs can seek recovery through the courts and refuse to recognise jurisdictions that enforce the sanctions, which are backed only by the US (making good on a pandering promise made to mobilised, useful idiots) and few regional powers that stand benefit from a weaker Iran.

assignment baghdad

Geoff Manaugh, author of the always intriguing and philosophically indulgent BLDGBlog, contributes a rather cloak and dagger tale to the Daily Beast about a graduate class of aspiring architects who may have unwittingly enabled the precision and sustained bombing campaign during Operation Desert Storm (the Persian Gulf War)—rather than preserving Iraqi buildings that might fall victim to the imminent invasion.
The students gathered blue-prints and layouts of every structure in the city, granting military planners the details to put a missile down a chimney or fire a rocket through a window. One wonders how often intelligence and academic research might intersect—especially counter to the sentiments and the motivations of the researchers. Manaugh also offers in the accompanying blog post an interesting exploration of the history of keeping building plans out of enemy hands and the lengths one would go to in order to keep them secret. What do you think? One would always trust an architect with one’s potential vulnerabilities without arousing suspicion.

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.

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.

the great game or rules of engagement

Just for those who might have harboured a kernel of doubt about Russia’s meddling in Western elections, Jason Kottke directs our attention to a 1997 publication by Duma-advisor and noted fascist and eschatologist Aleksandr Gelyevich Dugin, which is essentially an Orwellian play-by-play script for the destabilisation and subterfuge that we are experiencing presently.
The geopolitical book sets forth that the struggle for world dominance for Russia did not end with the dissolution of the Soviet Union and that the country remains the venue for the new anti-American revolution, with a Eurasian Empire united against a common enemy. Across different theatres of influence, sophisticated instructions are given to ensure absolute and enduring Russian victory—including the suggestion that Germany should be the dominant power over western and central Europe, the United Kingdom ought to be cut off from the continent, Ukraine should be annexed. For the Middle East, Dugin advocates supports that the Iranians, Kurds and the Armenians ought to be supported—especially insofar as they could create chaos in Turkey. China poses a serious threat to Russia and should be dismantled and encouraged to focus it’s only expansion towards Indonesia, the Philippines and Australia. Moreover, Russia should cede the disputed Kuril Islands to Japan to as a way to weaken their allegiance with the Americans. For the USA, Dugin prescribes that special forces be used to provoke instability with racial and social strife, blackmail and undermine internal political processes. With Brexit, Dear Leader, proxy wars, Crimea and fake news, it’s chilling how many chapters have already become headlines and scary to speculate how much further this manual might be carried out.