luftangriff

This evening and into the next morning marks the seventy-fifth anniversary of the deadliest and most destructive bombing attack by the Allied forces on the town of Kassel.
The attack punctuated a series of strategic air raids that had been periodically targeting manufacturing facilities and defensive infrastructure killed an estimated ten thousand civilians and the resulting fire engulfed the city for seven days afterwards. Counted with Dresden, Hamburg, Pforzheim and Darmstadt, Kassel had among the highest number of casualties from aerial bombing.

gca68

On this day, fifty years ago President Lyndon Baines Johnson signed into law the Gun Control Act of 1968, which focused on regulating the firearms industry and owners by restricting interstate trade in guns and weapons to licensed dealers and exporters.
The assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy nearly five years earlier prompted the legislation, which still languished in Congress and the Senate, when it was discovered that the president was killed with a rifle purchased by mail-order from a magazine. The murders of Martin Luther King, Jr and Robert Kennedy earlier in 1968 renewed the effort to change the law, which additionally mandated that buyers have licenses for and register their weapons and prohibited categories of persons, including felons and the mentally incompetent, from owning guns.

leaf-peeping

I took a stroll through the fields to the forest’s edge above our village watch the slow transition of the leaves to their autumn colour palette.  The sunshine was not as forthcoming as yesterday that bathed everything with a blushing golden hue in the mid-afternoon but the woods still put on a spectacular show for this opening act that is to be followed by several encores. 

untitled (questions)

Composed first in 1990, conceptual artist and collagist Barbara Kruger’s massive, declarative mural in Futura Bold Oblique that begs important and resonant questions will be reinstalled on the south wall of Los Angeles’ MOCO Temporary Contemporary building.
An anonymous donor is paying to have the installation recreated ahead of US mid-term elections and will remain up until at least 2020. The nine questions posed are anything but rhetorical devices and are as follows:

Who is beyond the law? Who is bought and sold? Who is free to choose? Who does time? Who follows orders? Who salutes the longest? Who prays the loudest? Who dies first? Who laughs last?

Learn more at Fast Company at the link above.