money laundering

The US Drug Enforcement Administration has recently raised alarm over the safety of its agents and intermediaries due to the potential for currency seized during drug raids to be covered with deadly chemicals and has been soliciting for contracts to decontaminate fiat tender.  Despite the lack of scientific backing for the dangers, the DEA is vigorously pursuing this initiative and has even expressed an unwillingness to risk counting the cash before sending it off to the cleaners.

cantril’s ladder

Princeton psychology professor Hadley Cantril (*1906 - †1969) made significant contributions to the field, looking into the applications in polling and propaganda and was in a way responsible for making political allegiance a contemporary defining trait—or at least a topic of discussion and amplification.
Studying in Münchin and Berlin in the 1930s and examining the panic that the 1938 Orson Welles’ broadcast of War of the Worlds as a radio drama caused, Cantril devoted his work into public opinion research, building on the work of George Gallop. Working through the seemingly paradoxical results he was discovering—particularly among the American polis—Cantril developed a gauge for self-anchoring, a cognitive bias (previously) that affect decision-making by relying too heavily on initial information at the cost of ignoring subsequent results, which is perniciously difficult to avoid.

a notable non-human ape

Having imparted a life time of lessons that demonstrates that many of the hallmarks of humanity are far from unique to humans and helped us to understand and appreciate that we are not outside of Nature and the natural world is not ours to exploit, the world pines for one of its most influential and effective ambassadors in Koko the Gorilla, who passed away earlier this week in her sleep at the age of forty-six.
Reading her obituary reduced me to tears, and I hope that we are able to take those aforementioned lessons to heart.  Just shy of her next birthday, she was named Hanabiko (花火子, Fireworks Child) by her care-takers at the San Francisco Zoo because she was born on the Fourth of July—American Independence Day. Koko herself famously had a pet kitten whom she named All Ball and mourned its accidental death, signing “bad, sad, bad—frown, cry, frown, sad.”

hammajang or synonymous

Via Slashdot, we learn that the Oxford English Dictionary has broadened its search for regional linguistic delicacies from around the globe. The title is a Hawaiian term for shambolic, and the Words Where You Are appeal has already netted agley, catawampous, antigodlin and ahoo as ways to describe a pictured that’s hung crookedly. The OED since its first edition, however, has been keen on the inclusion of regionalisms submitted by the public, examples being ginnel for a back alley, clarty for really muddy and far-welted to describe a sheep lying on its back.

kein mensch ist illegal

While images of families being torn apart at the US-Mexico border are dominating the discussion of immigration and respect and value for human life, on this World Refugee Day, we are also audience to some quieter, nefarious dealings which includes a task force (via Miss Cellania) that is being assembled to strip citizenship from naturalised Americans (and by extension all Americans) found to have obtained citizenship under false pretences.
At the same time, Orbán’s Hungary has passed legislation framed as “STOP SOROS” that would make it a crime to provide aid or asylum in any form to “aliens.” Not to be outdone, factions of the Italian government are calling for the expulsion of thousands of Roma from the country, pledging that “Italians and their security comes first.” The European Union strongly condemns these measures.