flotsam and mackintoshes

The gradual warming trend here is melting the accumulated snow and the cold, cold ground and rivers cannot accommodate much more of the water. It is strange to think that the chief weapon against flooding the world-around is the humble sandbag and neighbours helping neighbours, and not something novel, unwieldy and dangerous like Ice-9, especially considering the weather-weirding factors that are most likely contributing to the extremes.
European communities along major rivers, particularly where the waters have been straightened and manicured for shipping and are more prone to flooding because of these alterations, are equipped, however, with impressive retractable retaining walls, steel panels that rise out of the harbour automatically and as articulated as the sluices of the canals that they guard. It is potentially tragic and certainly nerve-wracking but always handled with poise and steadfastness, and not the same breed of stubborn prospectors on eroding beach-front property.  Venice and Amsterdam have endured below sea level for centuries, recognizing that the constructs and artifices encroaching on the environment bring the floods regularly, and even harnessing the power of the waters wanting to be untamed.

atchison, topeka and the santa fe

My mother gave H and I a fantastic Atchison Fox print, for which we’ve found the perfect spot on the wall though we have not hung it yet because of the Sunday proscriptions against work here—or at least polluting the neighbours’ conscience and that accounts a little for the wonky snap-shot. This scene was always famous to me growing up with it in the house, and while one can easily find information on illustrators and graphic artists who were contemporaries of Fox, like Maxfield Parrish, Audrey Beardsley and Alphons Mucha, there’s very little to be found on the internet for him—at least not what’s fast-tracked and in the forefront.

A picture like this, of course, can be appreciated without knowing its context, and should be enjoyed regardless, but I am wondering what is relegated to oblivion, never to be rediscovered, when it cannot be easily researched and sought out.   UPDATE: I suppose getting the name right would facilitate matters, and R. Atkinson Fox’s Dawn is a bit better known than the undiscovered Atchison.

you can pop a lot of trouble on the pop-o-matic bubble

The other night, I listened to an infomercial to its conclusion, or at least its unabashed sales push, regarding the precarious situation that the US and world economy is still in. The report was not terribly original and a bit pandering, underestimating the devious and willful intent of the rich and the allure of joining the rich.

Market fundamentals are being undermined by the burden of debt, governments leveraged in excess of the aggregate total income of their citizens, and new debt creation is being enabled by America's unique and unilateral ability and penchant to print more money, quantitative easing, when debts outstrip income. Other countries and monetary unions have the prerogative to do so as well, although the EU charter and other conventions in other cases confounds the process, and do not fold to temptation. Finances on all scales are still in shambles, and though other countries, like the UK and Yugoslavia, in recent times, have taken this course with devastating effect, the US has been thus far allowed to continue this hucksters' game of three-card Monte for so long because of the dollar's equally privileged position as the world's reserve currency. Though Russia, China, India and others are gaining independence from this hegemony, historically anyone not American became indentured to a middle man for international transactions. Ounces of gold, barrels of oil, fortnights and furlongs are all denominated in dollars, and a merchant from anywhere else in the world, buying a foreign commodity has to pay up a fee for the medium of exchange, and then to render it back to his or her home currency. Only Americans do not lose out in the translation, since not only does their endless money supply keep the international marketplaces lubricated, cheapening the dollar has also allowed Americans to acquire without offering anything more than fiat in exchange for quite some time. The economic collapse, I agree with the infomercial, will come quickly once more countries abandon the dollar as exchange-media and no one is willing to buy or hold more money itself in arrears and obligations go unmet. You sank my Battleship!

bird of prey

After a succession of rather mysterious occurrences of birds dropping dead out of the sky in the south eastern United States, it seems that such plagues have unleashed the hounds of augury and conspiracy. Poor birds, and now fish--but no one would question such disturbing behaviour from lemmings. Speculation is ranging from the residuum of the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, to the intense cold--which would exact a high toll on sea life, more accustomed to a regulated span of temperature--to New Year's fireworks, emerging disease, escaped vaccines, the bird-rapture, and to secret government testing programs, weather control, acoustic weapons, ionospheric modification to mitigate disruptions from solar flares. Maybe the US military is developing Klingon-style cloaking technology and the unfortunate flocks of birds are slamming against an invisible jet--or the schools of fish (ghotl) the propeller of an invisible submarine. Earthquakes and other natural disasters have likewise garnered these usual suspects, even at the expense of facing the more mundane and equally sinister culprits.

Being in a speculative mood, like the mounting legal footraces big banks are running to minimize damage, from snatching up domain names that could be potential outlet for disgruntled and outraged customers, what could the next big shocker be? From bypassing real estate registrars, instituted centuries ago to prevent kings from easily seizing the lands of his subjects, gambling with the money of others, squandering public treasure, and bald thievery, what could possibly be the gasping news that might make these great houses blush? Months ago, a major credit card company, was shown to practice discriminatory rate hikes based on customers' shopping habits: if a card-holder frequented an establishment that demographically suggested poor credit-worthiness, like discount stores, the card-holder might see his or her interest rates rise. Maybe the banks are doing the same, but taking it a step further and selling one's shopping lists to marketing departments, captured through ubiquitous bank cards. What other depravity and betrayal could be put on full display?

and i would fall out into the night, can't live a minute without your love

The Norwegian press, just as Germany is poised to begin its two year term on the United Nations' security council, has revealed that the country's aerospace administration has been working secretly with the US to develop a network of ultra hi-resolution spy satellites, which can also perform the nifty trick of night time surveillance with infra-red cameras and transmit data faster. Due to protests from neighbouring countries and partners, including France, US and German authorities decided to front the collaboration as a civilian environmental study. That Germany would engage in such a project seems strange, especially considering public sentiment for privacy and an abiding attitude that nebulous threats should not undermine the liberties or tolerances of a democracy country. This news also serves to remind viewers that less than 1% of the cable-dump has yet been processed and published.

emphasis added

Alternet hosts a excellent article from the younger son of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, where he faces surely a lifelong demon in the Espionage Act of 1917, a blatant beast that has mostly been a "dormant Sword of Damocles" but could also prove very plastic and serviceable, thanks to an array of wounded egos laid bare and selective reading. What an awful burden for anyone to be yoked with--that one's parents were executed as traitors, especially considering that Americans do not believe such things happen in America. With so much constitutional steerage and political fundamentalism, recourse to original sources seems often frustrated and arbitrary, though in its argument that the Espionage Act violates the principles of America's founders, the article highlights the Constitution's own reckoning of what could be traitorous:

"'Treason against the United States shall consist only in levying war against them, or in adhering to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort' (Article III, section 3). The framers felt this narrow definition was necessary to prevent treason from becoming what some called 'the weapon of a political faction.' Furthermore, in their discussions at the Constitutional Convention they agreed that spoken opposition was protected by the First Amendment and could never be considered treason."

History is littered with countless examples of despotic regimes wielding high treason, unilaterally defined and investigated, as an effective political tool to remove inconvenient people and inopportune laws, and the people who drafted the founding documents did not want their republic to devolve in that manner. Let us hope that America never again goes down this path, and if already committed to that course, can at least be turned. Apparently, the incoming US Congress, led by those same fundamentalists and literalists, wants to open their session with an unprecedented reading of the US Constitution in chambers. I wonder how much of more choice parts will be mumbled over, or what amendments, including the Bill of Rights, will be skipped to reinforce the myth that their constitution is eternal, sacred and infallible, especially if construed to one's own ends.