hinn best land sem solinn skinner uppa

In 1868, swelling with pride over expansionist’s ambitions and the recent procurement of Alaska from an imperial Russia fraught with the sorry prospects of a fire-sale and the acquisition of a few Caribbean properties from the equally distressed Danes, the spree did not end there and not only tried to annex Greenland (an offer repeated during the Cold War) but also Iceland, as Neatorama reminds. The case for annexation was based mostly on the decades’ old accounts of travelogues, which was probably the source for the idea that the two were ironically named to dissuade prospectors, and though the soon to be independent island would have surely been a jewel in imperial America’s crown, the Icelanders weren’t having it. Fortunately, after such outlays on dubious returns, the US Congress was not buying this proposal either and the purchase was not pursued further.

system of a down

Far worse than the potential dictatorial stance of the likes of the Free World under the yoke of a Trump regime or the sprawling tin-pot nation of Fāçbükıstan, our friends in Turkey are facing the insufferable under the endless presidency (it seems like few politicians can go gracefully into retirement, and it is convenient to swap the offices of president and prime minister) of Erdoğan.
The latest dillusory stunt is Ankara’s recall of its ambassadorial mission to Berlin (restored, apparently after pulling out recently over a satirical song by a German comedian) is over the German parliament’s resolution to designate the Ottoman Empire’s killing and persecution of Armenians (and other minorities) during World War I as genocide (Völkermord). Turkey is rebuffing criticisms both internal and external and accuses Germany of being provocative—but pledges that in no way will this grave and unfortunate decision affect the deal with the EU to siphon refugees first through its borders, discouraging the dangerous overseas crossing.  If Turkey is truly earning a place within the European Union community with such gestures, one would think it would play this leverage with more strategy.  With this resolution, Germany is joining a chorus of voices, including the Pope, but there was some tremolo-heroics behind the symbolic vote (which was just as likely to have not occurred), with some top government officials conspicuously absenting themselves from the assembly.

agrabah

Via Quartz Magazine, we learn about the Chinese government’s ambition to create a Muslim theme park of sorts in order to court wealthy tourists and bridge Sino-Arab relations and highlight (or perhaps dampen or whitewash) Islam’s identity in the broader Chinese cultural heritage, prising out the folklore that Aladdin of One Thousand and One Arabian Nights hailed from eastern China.
The reporting from Quartz—to my mind, selectively draws from the most cynical and suspect elements of World Muslim City, the trappings and the stagecraft meant to mask China’s internal struggle with its Islamic population, the lack of visitors, the rather insensitive way women are invited to wear veils to see how it feels. All these faults and more are in the source article of course, however cushioned, and perhaps this project is like the 1:1 recreation of Hallstatt, or zombie planned-communities that never came to fruition. Those are epic failures a lot of people take with some schaden Freude—like Chinese wine-enthusiasts paying a mint for counterfeit cheap, supermarket red wine. Executed with the same soft diplomacy, I’d venture it’s far more foreboding that China’s public-relations apparatus is hoping to limn a fairy-tale version of Islam that’s palatable to the government’s world-view, removing potentially destabilising characteristics. I’d applaud the effort for simply not propagating the stereotype of the violent terrorist, but it’s not respecting of the interplay between religion and governance determining social norms and is fraught with the same trappings that forms the impasses of the One China Policy and the evisceration of Tibet (the pronouncement that the next incarnation of the Dalai Lama will be ethnic Chinese and the current avatar fearing he might be the last) and other undesirables that don’t tow the party line. What do you think? Would you visit World Muslim City?

ttip or ta-ta for now

It ought to come as no surprise that the successive rounds of shady, secreted negotiations over the American-EU trade accords was rife with compromise that would spurn the light of day and favoured business over health, welfare (human and animal) and the environment, but thanks to Greenpeace Netherland’s leaking a trove of documents, the public gets a glimpse of just how much their government holds them in disdain.
Europe is not conceding wholesale to American demands for open market access and the creation of corporate tribunals that will sit in judgement, presiding over the regulatory bodies of accenting nations to ensure that their policies aren’t at cross-purposes with profits, but the fact that talks have dragged on this long over differences and outlooks that are flatly irreconcilable, one wonders how persuasive and inuring the endless negotiations can become and how parties might not be so resilient to this constant onslaught. What’s a bigger disappointment that the contents of the dirty deals is the revelation—by its absence in the transcripts—of the dissenting voices that went on public-record, echoing wider concerns, but those objections are not mentioned in the minutes, begging the question whom is on our sides.

foia, foil

Writing for Gizmodo, reporter Matt Novak delved into the jauntier halcyon salad-days of White House entertaining by filing a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request with the George Bush Presidential Library to learn more about the exclusive screening of The Hunt for Red October, which was a strange mingling a fantasy and reality, where politicians met celebrities that played to their wildest dreams and idealisation of how they imagined they should be as swashing-buckling, crusading statesmen.
Much of the material from the gala fete in February of 1990 was delivered heavily redacted and the guest-list is still incomplete, but the presence of certain attendees (or their implied presence) for this sneak-preview makes one wonder how much creative-input America’s intelligence apparatchik had in the film-making. Although The Hunt for Red October—adapted from the 1984 novel—saw its premiere to general theatre audiences after the Berlin Wall fell and the Great Soviet was beginning to dissolve, production took place at a time firmly ensconced in Cold War noir—and notably the last in a long tradition that need not be nostalgic. I wonder if the apparent loss of a counter-balance—an enemy to fight, came as too much of a shock and put viewers all around (especially the influential and influenced individuals at this reception in the White House) in the mood to gear up for a new target. Not to worry as Desert Storm was on six months away, although it was fully another five years until the CIA owned up to having its own casting-couch in Hollywood.

exterminate! exterminate!

Appearing like a cross between a Darlek and a matryoshka doll, the debut of China’s first crowd-control/anti-terrorism robot is garnering a lot of perhaps deserved ridicule on the internet.
I wonder, however, if the autonomous AnBot as it’s called might be deceptively non- threatening and dumpy looking to lull the mobs into a false sense of security, and once deployed a trio of cyborg ninjas tumble out of its hatch. The pepper-shakers from Doctor Who look harmless enough too but are a formidable foe, but if AnBot can be thwarted with uneven pavement or a dishevelled rug, then perhaps it should stick to vacuuming or join its American counterparts in issuing orders on the battlefield, as the Pentagon is pushing to enhance strategic planning with artificial-intelligence nudging human instinct.

big brother and the holding company

The always interesting TYWKIWDBI directs our attention and sadly abject resignation to this non-descript office building in Wilmington, Delaware that dwarfs other company registers—like Ugland House, as the source article from the Guardian reports, of Georgetown in the Cayman Islands.
Though only hosting a fraction of letterbox businesses, Ugland House was incredulously called “either the world’s largest building or the biggest tax-scam on record”—but as the official address of some three-hundred thousand companies, ranging from the portfolios of politicians (making for some strange mingling of assets) to the world’s richest and most powerful corporate entities, this little yellow building is a clear and unequivocal answer as to why no Americans were tripped up in the Panama Papers.  After all, why risk engaging an offshore tax-haven when there’s something far closer to home? More than a million firms (including the media outlet cited), foreign and domestic, have been lured by the state of Delaware’s business-friendly posture, opacity and low-tax burden, whose structure openly encourages companies to shift earnings from other jurisdictions, costing other states and countries untold billions in tax-revenues.  Obviously such loopholes like this inspire rage and indignation, but given its prevalence and the duplicity of custodians, is it any wonder that this sort of thing is happening and no one is willing to do a thing to stop it?

asia-minor or turkish delight

The middle of next month (16 May 2016) marks the centenary of the signing secret pact known as the Sykes-Picot Agreement that carved up the Middle East in an arbitrary fashion, drawing the modern borders of Iran, Iraq, Syria and Palestine. Covert negotiations went on for the previous five months, in anticipation of the defeat of the Ottoman Empire by the Triple Entente, Britain, France and the assenting third party, Imperial Russia, but pivotal battles of the Great War were yet to be fought.
The outcome on the fields of Amiens, Ancre, Marne and Megiddo did not negatively diminish the apportioned claims of the UK for Jordan, Palestine and strategic points along the Mediterranean and for France, the Levant, represented by the eponymous ambassadors—however, Imperial Russia, who had been promised Constantinople, the straits of the Bosporus and Armenia (but consulted in matters as much as the Arabs or the Persians were) lost their territory due to the intervening destabilising of the Bolshevik Revolution that transpired in November of the following year. This forfeiture allowed the other powers to proceed with a second wave of colonialism and though the resulting architecture has fuelled overwhelming sectarian strife but did also engender a framework of protections, tolerance for minorities in the region. This imperfect and shaky geopolitical architecture endured as a legacy for nearly a century and though the formal lines in the sand still exist, what precious little about the Agreement that was sheltering and steadying was dismantled with violence and prejudice by the Cosplay Caliphate. The Agreement only came to light thanks to a leak from the Bolshevik brokers to the newspaper Pravda, in retaliation for having their claim denied, and later picked up by the Manchester Guardian. The revelation led to massive uprisings in the Middle East as World War I itself drew to a close, which was countered with damage-control measures that were not more flattering than the secret partitioning , the buzzards circling, to begin with.

lèse-majesté

The leader of the Berlin faction of the Pirate Party was detained by law enforcement for conducting a literary analysis of the infamous poem about the Turkish president on the street in front of that country’s embassy (the Turkish mission to German in der Tiergartenstraße, Berlin, mind you, and not in Ankara) over the weekend.
This development comes just after the Chancellor expressed second-thoughts on her initial condemnation of the comedian’s satire though still feeling that the case of the prosecution should go forward. The last time paragraph 103 from the German book of criminal code (Strafegesetzbuch—essentially a left-over from the days of European monarchy, criminalising the insult to the dignity of a foreign head of state, lèse-majesté) was invoked was by the Shah of Iran in an attempt to muzzle the critiques among the Iranian diaspora settled in Germany, and perhaps the Chancellor, announcing the intent to sunset the antiquated law within two years, was quietly hoping that it would similarly backfire. Norway, Denmark and the Netherlands, who have comparable laws in their penal codes (and constitutional monarchies all), announced that they would be repealing them post-haste.

voice and accountability indices

Broadcast on BBC Radio 4, professor and gadfly Timothy Garton Ash recently presented a series of sobering and important essays on the state of free speech, which distills the ideas and necessary dialogue found his comprehensive and engaging internet presence.
Positing that no subject should be taboo in the pursuit of knowledge, we see liberty of expression under assault not only—and paradoxically—by the synapses that an intimately connected world but also in those corridors of learning and ivory towers of educational institutions—also being the last place one would expect to find the aura of censorship and sophistry, Professor Garton Ash elucidates interlocutors with a treacherous trio of veto-powers that elegantly present the threat: the heckler’s veto—wherein in all dissent is lost in the noise and chaos, the assassin’s veto—the threat of violence or litigation, and the veto of the offended—the intimidating prospect of violating the safe-space of another group. What do you make of these mute-buttons and has the internet facilitated the creation of this sort of timorous bully-pulpit?

calling doctor bombay, emergency! come right away

Though Czech is the adjectival form and perhaps the additional republic makes the country sound as if it has to legitimise its standing somehow, the proposal of the Czech Republic (Česká republika) to change its English and hence international handle to Czechia smacks to me like a page from Gregor Samsa’s metamorphosis, in waking up to find oneself transformed in order to keep up with the times—those times being rather fickle and unperturbable.
Since the divorce from Slovakia, the country has been known as Tschechien in the German Sprachraum, which to my ears sounded too close to Tschetsschenien (Chechnya) and I feel that this forced change is confusing as well—though not exactly without some historical precedence, going back to latinate-loving Englanders observing the Holy Roman Empire’s tenant states. One has to wonder about exonymy and endonymy and the success rate of rebranding.

allthing or all that’s fit to print

Boing Boing’s Iceland correspondent reports on a wonderful and antithetical response to the scourge of off-shoring and out-sourcing (and indeed even proxy-wars) in the plan, having already secured parliamentary endorsement, to make the country a designated safe haven for the freedoms of expression and information.

Advocates, who hope to create a Switzerland of bits, hope that this stance will compel other governments to be more transparent and forth-coming about legislation and its enforcement. Cobbling together some of the best whistle-blower protection and anti-censorship laws from different jurisdictions—for instance, the attorney-client privilege that any conversation with a journalist enjoys in Belgium or the public registry of all government documents (even classified ones) in Estonia, is creating a forum where witness to corruption can come forward without fear of reprisal. As if meaningful reform and mindful democracy weren’t occasion enough, perhaps this new media landscape might be able to attract internet start-ups to recover some of the jobs-prospects lost to Iceland’s former dignities where laws are not biased towards copy-holders and a select few with political heft—besides, surely the land of fire and ice is probably an ideal place to operate with a smart labour pool and totally green geothermal energy to power it all.

whiter than white

This artefact circa 1976 from the doomed town of Scarfolk—which has still not managed to advance beyond 1979, in the form of an advertisement for the popular if not pricey laundry detergent, Panama Automatic, is a brilliantly savaging critique and allegory of the entire erupting scandal, which has become sadly all too common-place. Be sure to visit the council notes for the account of the rather devious wash-day practises that surrounded this brand.

providenciales

Since 1917, Canada has sought to incorporate the Crown suzerainty of the Turks and the Caicos Islands in the Caribbean as its southerly province in order that the expansive nation be able to offer its residents the full-spectrum of tourism-opportunities without leaving the country, as TYWKIWDBI informs. When devolution has occurred in the past, it is not without precedent, like Australia or New Zealand administering even farther removed UK possessions in the Pacific, that such associations can be arranged. Previous polling as shown enthusiasm on both sides, and although the long, unusual quest has been going on for almost a century, the matter is on the docket for discussion for this weekend’s plenary party talks of Canada’s new government. I wonder if we will have anything new to report on this front soon.

muzzled oder totem und taboo

In a chilling development, a German comedian could face hefty fines and a prison sentence for a encore act directed at the president of Turkey—who has gone on record (as some other choice demagogues) saying while he welcomes criticism, those critics will be sued. Adding to the list of not just taboo subjects of conversation in Turkey, like defaming Ataturk’s memory zum Beispiel, or questioning the official party line on the Soviets’ allegiances in World War II, but illegal ones, Germany’s diplomatic corp was called to the carpet—well, rug—for this satire, causing the Chancellor to intervene, perhaps out of fear that her tenuous deal for a refugee-exchange with Turkey might be jeopardised over this spat.
Germany, along with a few other European nations, has a law on the books regarding the slander of foreign heads of state, which is rarely but selectively enforced and carries with it a possible jail-term, if relations are not smoothed over. What do you think? This is horrible, but I suppose that libeling a dictator in this instance carries a punishment less than that for sacrilege.

petard hoist much?

VICE magazine has an interesting dialogue about the broader political ramifications of the Panama Papers, whose depths are barely plumbed but the biggest travesty so far to me appears to be that much of what will be uncovered is (barely) legal and within that exculpable framework of protection that skirting the law has crafted.
The immunity of the elite to the tax-regimes of their own creation, fashioned as a cushion in some instances to buoy what’s too big to fail in this whole global Ponzi scheme, adds insult to the injury of pervasive economic injustice. The early analysis is pretty captivating, mooting its impact, whatever the revelations, on the US elections, as antithetical to America’s zealous persecution of Swiss and European banks and the expatriate population, that country is a tax-haven itself, with many splintered jurisdictions. Despite what bombshells might drop, sadly probably no more heads will roll and we’ll be made to suffer less transparency and distracting debate of gilded escapades that draw attention away from bigger social problems—still I am hoping that this preliminary assessment is wrong and there will be some gore and shame to watch.

oration or the sound and vision

Thanks to a sharp eye perusing a 1984 edition of some teen Tiger Beat magazine, the response to an inquiring reader’s question about the rumoured role of the Great Emancipator to be portrayed by none other than David Bowie, we learn about an unperformed but still immense spectacle that was to be played at one of the Olympic venues of the Los Angeles games that summer.
Far outstripping those cross-over, special guest-star sitcom episodes that kept my rapt attention (like when Fred and Ethel Mertz appeared as Darinn Stevens’—the second Darrin—parents or when the Harlem Globe-Trotters were shipwrecked on Gilligan’s Island or the angry ghost of Valerie Bertinelli haunted the Love Boat), an experimental, day-long bit of musical theatre was being orchestrated, called CIVIL warS, it was to feature the musical stylings of Mister David Byrne with libretto that included Mister Bowie as Abraham Lincoln, delivering the Gettysburg Address in Japanese. Corporate sponsors were a little anxious, and with the boycott of the American games by the polarised Communist world, the project was shelved. Read more about this amazing opera that would have perhaps been too grand and overwhelming for this Universe at Dangerous Minds. The closing ceremonies did include a UFO landing to the fanfare of Thus Spake Zarathustra and a giant grey alien that saluted humanity’s peaceful coming together.

hacktivist or equities and securities

The US Federal Bureau of Investigations dropped its suit against one global technological giant, served a backhanded measure of victory to the company for having the integrity not to relent in the face of the governments dragnet policies of surveillance, once the agency realised that there was a back-door way, a security flaw to exploit, to access a user’s data, telemetry, call logs and contacts despite (or perhaps in spite of) the company’s refusal to cooperate.
This one subpoena was arguably a matter of national security and public safety but there would be no way of putting this genie back in the bottle once even one exception was made. The company begged-off, in fact, that they were unable to engineer a work-around to the device’s security protocols, but now the FBI has contracted its work out to another company that could apparently bypass the safety measures, but no one is quite sure how. I find it a little incredulous that purely technical means were applied, but it’s hard to say—especially not that the FBI is magnanimously offering its newly-acquired expertise to help local law-enforcement to shoehorn their way into the phones and gadgets of relatively small-fry criminals (or suspected criminals) to keep tabs on their entire networks and supposed syndicates. There’s a legal provision that could be invoked called “equities review” that could force the former plaintiff to disclose what recourse they found that led to them dropping the case, arguing that it’s better for companies to be made aware of an exploitable flaw so they can patch it instead of affording a few then a lot of parties entry, but I suspect it will be hard to compel the FBI to reveal its sources and stooges.

We wholeheartedly agree with Belgium’s reaction to this assault, as this further attempt at destructive social-engineering—baiting the innocent and peaceful with yet more aspersions as it’s exactly what the Cosplay Caliphate is hoping to engender. Sewing distrust and fear only promotes their cause by backing those who fled that way of life and outlook into a corner, and those who recruited a handful of listless losers to do their bidding did so that we as hosts could no longer discriminate and assault those migrants living among us and block the escape-routes of those who have no share in this and are themselves terrorised. Our thoughts and prayers are with the suffering, but this, as the corridors of power of the European Union, is an affront to us all. “French-fries” are of course Belgian cuisine become a contribution to the entire world.

super nintendo chalmers

Though Ralph Wiggum may have had professional aspirations to be either a caterpillar or a principal when he grows up, some—nay, all—of the prodigy’s one-liners make are suitable and believable stump-speeches for a higher office. Dangerous Minds graces us with the collected quotations from one cartoon character put into the mouth of another.