link roundup: five-by-five

tiny bubbles: that fizzy sensation is actually the flavour of carbon-dioxide

does not stay in vegas: charter flights for employees of area 51

convoi-exceptionel: polish trucking companies blanch at new german minimum wage laws

hils and tanketorsk plus eight other nifty danish words

new york, new york: gotham perennially threatens to secede from the rest of the state

agit-prop

The Local, the German daily in English, is reporting that the Duma is ruminating on whether to draw a parallel between the annexation of East Germany by West Germany, and declare the reunification an illegal act, as unlike in the Crimea, there was no plebiscite put to the people of the East before the 1990 appropriation and thus had no say in the matter, and Russia’s own behaviour. Mikhail Gorbachev, who has been meanwhile issuing some dire warnings to the West about not escalating matters and courting more polarization, dismissed the proposition—yet to gain any official backing and just under consideration—as preposterous. What do think of this sort of propaganda? Is it merely detached or is it purposely divisive?

paso del norte oder flüchlingslager

In a 2008 publication, historian David Dorado Romo explored a very dark and tragically formative and inspiring episode of in the history of cross-border relations between the US and Mexico and attitudes towards immigration.
These uncomfortable measures taken—ostensibly to ensure public health during the Spanish Influenza pandemic (brought back by returning soldiers from the Great War) that was decimating the population, included screenings to keep out homosexuals, the handicapped and other undesirables, fumigation and disinfection, and were lauded as systematic and scientific—though only in practise only carried out in a targeted, selective manner at checkpoints in El Paso and Juárez and only for Hispanic peoples. While the cruelty and outcome—death and maiming from the disinfectants that included DDT, petrol and Zyklon-B, has gone mostly undocumented and even forgotten—even after the debut of Romo’s book, the influence that America’s model had on the Nazis is recorded explicitly, whom instituted those already horrible and dehumanising methods by dread exponents.

R-IL (D-SC)

According to Four-and-Six, a web-site documenting forensics and doctoring photographs that spans the history of the technology, that iconic image of the Statesman Abraham Lincoln is actually a pastiche of Lincoln’s head and the posing figure of Senator and former Vice-President John Caldwell Calhoun. This choice of composition is a great irony as the Democrat’s views, fearful of a tyranny of majority-rule and defense of the institution of slavery, and general rabble-rousing was one of the contributing factors that encouraged the Southern Secessionists and started the US Civil War. There are quite a few more interesting examples to be found on the website of creative cropping and air-brushing before the advent of photo-shop.