petard hoist much?

We understand that one major social media outlet has launched a new campaign to combat catchpenny clickbait by monitoring misleading and salacious headlines engineered to lure people outside of their own walled-garden.
This pledge strikes us as pretty ironic since that same web-presence is responsible for and substantively little more than listicles, rehashing and the same sort of attention-cloying preying on the insecurities of visitors snatched from their ecologies and histories. What do you think? Indeed, maybe the same algorithm that keeps their advertising environment robust might be used to retool those touts and cut back on rhetoric without estranging readers from quality writing and meaningful content.

islands and bridges

For a quarter of a century, a Canadian couple have been constructing their floating home, a most unusual and self-sufficient estate called Freedom Cove and presently moored off of Vancouver Island. The massive and mobile island was built by hand and includes gardens, greenhouses, a beacon and a dancehall aside from the couple’s quarters. Please visit the link above for more details on this dream realised.

hadj-podge

Add this being an election year to the series of crises that have fraught and jeopardised Europe’s attempts to shelter the displaced and the threatened (not to mention the spectre and reality of rising nationalism, preachers of hate and preachers of appeasement), it is little surprise that some German politicians are drafting a raft of proposals that would markedly change the country’s policy on immigration.
Though attested as measures to promote integration and public-safety, the reforms include, most provocatively, the banning of burqas and hijabs in public, following France’s rules. While other elements might be less sensational, the former seems the least worrisome considering that there is talk of relaxing doctor-patient confidentiality by introducing a duty to report even when the threat is not imminent, the expulsion of notorious characters for their potential to incite violence, or even removing refugees to massive encampments outside of European Union borders to wait it out until their respective conflicts at home end. What do you think? Whosoever champions one side or another seem unable in any venue to start a conversation that can be heard above the din of the repelling of opposites and the compacting of reasoned arguments down to their dread conclusions. One has to wonder if those policymakers are above that miasma of the democracy of the moment, in the thick of it, or are foolish enough to try to wield it.

yestersol, solmorrow

My Modern Met expertly curates a gallery out of the cache of a thousand just recently transmitted from the Mars Recon- naissance Orbiter that really highlights the diversity of the terrain. This dunescape, incidentally, is provisionally called Tleilax, after the fictional planet from the Dune Universe where rogue Mentats were trained in forbidden, machine-like thinking. This alien geometry of the Red Planet is surpassingly beautiful without even considering the unknown forces behind it. Be sure to check out the link to discover more images or explore the entire HiRise catalog.