shelter-in-place oder white-flight

While captialising on the fears of rich, white people is a legitimate business model and a fool and his money are soon—nay eventually, since there’s so much of it, the reports that luxurious doomsday bunkers are being outfitted somewhere in the hinterland of Germany for a select number of high-paying clients to ride out a nuclear holocaust seems a bit over the top. Fortunately, we have not had the occasion to test the effectiveness and security of such entombment under realistic conditions, but it seems no matter the material wealth at one’s command, surviving an event that brings the rest of the world to rack and ruin bivouacked with those who tipped off the downfall in the first place (and are now the self-appointed rebuilders of civilisation) is a very appealing notion. Such money is better spent on an ark in space before we get to the point of burying our heads in the sand.
The articles never say where this secret compound, built in the corridors already hollowed out by the state apparatus of the East German government at the height of the Cold War (which surely has keys to the rear-entrance) and I suppose that location cannot be maintained undisclosed, especially when the Apocalypse is nigh and the peasants come clawing at the door with the torches and pitchforks that ought have appeared much earlier, and while there are several candidate sites, my money’s on a place called Prenden (a part of the community of Wandlitz in the state of Brandenburg—the cavernous bunker here being sufficiently unassuming and isolated, expect that it’s conveniently close to the construction site of the much delayed Berlin-Brandenburg international airport (BBF).

es war einmal oder forms of transmission

H and I decided to revisit the town of Lohr am Main to take a moment to properly appreciate the castle’s denizens’ role for inspiring a fairy tale, which rather uniquely as far as we know stands out among the folk-stories collected and studied by the Brothers Grimm as some thing based in fact—that is, as far as we know. Before visiting what is known as das Schneewittchen Schloß (Snow White’s Castle), however, and wondering how the oral-tradition of story-telling from generation to generation embellished historical happenings, we first crossed a field that dealt with communication in a thoroughly modern fashion.
Along the way, just outside of the town of Hammelburg by a German army installation was a giant array of satellite dishes. This ground station (Erdfunkstelle) beams data and other telemetry to the constellation of orbiting satellites, space probes and the International Space Station, plus probably for other applications besides civilian. It is quite an impressive and unexpected site in rural Frankonia. Next, we strolled through the storybook cobble-stone streets of the old part of Lohr and made our Snow White’s Castle—the tale being loosely based on an actual personage and event (though license was given and taken) in this town once known for its manufacture of mirrors.
At the neck ditch (Halsgraben, a dry moat that does not go all the way around) of the castle, there was another surprise of contemporary grammar, which often becomes inseparable from one’s locus and trajectory, a geo-data reference point, fixed coordinates employed to calibrate positioning systems and correct for drift. The juxtaposition was pretty thought-provoking and we were given to wonder how course-correction and detours into the fairy tale archetypes are both guiding factors.

5x5

viewer-discretion advised: graphic and unsettling no-nukes animation from 1956

how can you have your pudding if you don’t eat your meat: 90% of food-crops in the USA are genetically modified

this just in: how the hammering in of the Golden Spike for America’s transcontinental railroad marked the beginning of breaking news

purl 2.0: artist incorporates chunky stitches for maximum comfort

figleaf: the cyber attack on US government workers is bigger than anyone is letting on, having targeted security clearance questionnaires

instinct and individuation

It could be said that pioneering Swiss psychotherapist and collaborator of Sigmund Freud, Karl Gustav Jung, was patently his own first patient—but that can be said of most professions. Freud and Jung had an intense and productive relationship but differences in interpretation and emphasis became magnified and this strife over the nature of the psyche and best bedside-manner grew to an irreconcilable rift over a lecture tour that Jung undertook in the United States on behalf of their shared ideas.
Though Jung had his own divergent ideas about what was formative for the character and personality (de-emphasizing the role of libido and repression, Jung thought that one’s private being was a shared and public one with the collective-unconsciousness and spirituality was important component as well) he was accused of misrepresenting Freud’s theories while speaking at Fordham University (auf Deutsch to boot) but may have chosen to censor-out the sexiest bits, considering his possibly prudish audience. After the schism that formed separate schools of thought, Jung distanced himself from Freud’s thinking and shamefully denounced that favour of psychoanalysis as the Jewish science—ironically, Freud had found a great spokesman and advocate in the younger Jung initially because he came from outside that circle in Vienna and lent that the practise not be stereotyped as such: Nazism, beyond persecution, baptised many causes and individuals as undesirable even when the affiliation was in name only. Following this judgment, which understandably cast a pall over his body of work, Jung turned towards inter-disciplinary studies, in sociology, alchemy and astronomy, and embarked for years of extensive travel—trying ostensibly to get a better grasp of those shared archetypes and common-fates in mythology and creation accounts that he posited from different perspectives (modern practitioners re-branded them as the objective psyche), but to Jung’s credit, his sojourn had more humane motives, I believe, and set out to prove what was wrong with the familiar and secure Western world during the decades of the 1920’s and 30’s.