a separate peace

While Russia may have donned the public-facing mantle for meddling and media manipulation, one is puts out of mind the Trump regime’s other cosy relationships at one’s peril.
While debate rages on about the extent that Russia undermined the US presidential election or whether democratic institutions can be under siege from multiple fronts or not—some seem to have adopted the contrarian narrative that it can’t be both Russia and sophistry—other political strongmen in the Middle East have leveraged Trump’s compromising business-ties to achieve desired, measurable outcomes at the expense of alienating other regional partners and players for the appeasement and enrichment of the few whose tensions will pull the world into a fresh conflagration—not that the embers from before are not still glowing.

six-foot, seven-foot, eight-foot bunch!

A group of post-graduate students in Iceland have conferred a banana a passport so they can study not only the scope and complexity of the process and infrastructure that brought the single piece of fruit from its place of origin in Ecuador but also the reductive nature of food labelling and how no product or produce is from just one place, passing seamlessly from palette to plate.
Following the fortnight-long journey of a banana of nearly nine thousand kilometres whose handled by thirty-three individuals on each day of the travel—without deference to the growers or consumers, really, illustrates the impact of upholding global trade networks, bearing in mind that more finished- rather than harvested-goods can encircle the planet several, on ocean-going vessels (the fact that the seas are brought into this petty land-lubbing ordeal is also overlooked) times before reaching the purchaser. The same group has also examined the travels of Iceland’s chief exports—cod and aluminium

on all the things

In the same distracting, side-lining class of other properties in the pantheon of therapeutic diversion, we’re introduced to gallery of particularly resonant animations of a particular genre called Tokugifs—also at Tumblr, should one prefer but that blog seems not updated recently—whose name is short for the term Tokusatsu (特撮 or special-effects) that refers to the combination of live-action with computer-generated or hand-animated segments.
Featured quite often on PfRC without realizing there was a special name reserved for them, tokusatsu examples are kaiju classics, superhero cartoons and the giant robot trope—among others. One of the genre’s chief hallmarks and probably constituting a whole sub-culture of its own is found in suitmation (スーツメーション) technology. Check out the links up top and treat yourself to a cavalcade of delights that it will be hard to escape from.

schwedische haus-gynastik

In an era before animation or interactive video, we found this German physical education manual’s use of double-exposure to capture motion and the steps of an exercise routine to be quite clever.
Looking a bit like an incarnation of Shiva, author Theodore Bergquist demonstrates various exercises through multiple super-positions based on a discipline developed by Pehr Henrik Ling, a medical doctor from Småland, who recognising the role that physical activity and preventative measures played in overall health, Ling conceived of a studio equipped with parallel bars, wall beams and the vaulting horse for daily practise. Bergquist above was also the director (Hofrat) of the spa retreat at Bad Wörishofen, also known for popularising hydrotherapy and the Kneippbad was developed here. As innovative as the pioneering Ling was, his association with the invention of Swedish massage is somewhat of a misattribution, with the term only existing in a limited Sprachraum and going by classical massage everywhere else, the standardised practise (to include tapotement—the word used for when they vigourous beat you) first described by Johann Erst Mezger, though Ling was the first to incorporate elements of Asian massage (awakening the subtle body or the nervous system) techniques and importantly lent the ideas of massage and exercise scientific credence.

anyone? anyone?

In what’s shaping up to be a timely history lesson, NPR’s Planet Money presents an extensive study of the factors leading to the passage, the immediate consequences and legacy of the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930 made into a pop-culture reference by the droning line of inquiry of Ben Stein playing a high school economics teacher in the movie Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (previously). Economists, who to a man believed the schedule of tariffs to be a disastrous idea, concede that its enactment did not cause the Great Depression as those wheels were already in motion, but agree that it exacerbated an already bad situation and prolonged it, turning a trade war of retaliatory tariffs on imports and exports into an unqualified war.
With the gradual introduction of electricity and the automobile throughout the 1920s, globally but particularly in the United States, farmers suddenly found a significant portion of land freed up that was formerly reserved for growing feed for horses and other beasts of burden, which led to over-production and caused the government to intervene to subsidise prices lest the price of commodities becomes too depressed and there’s less incentive for domestic production. Once the government signalled its willingness to protect a batch of staple goods of strategic importance to the US, things escalated rather quickly with no one wanting to miss out on this opportunity and some twenty thousand goods securing an embargo that held foreign competition at bay. Though international response was immediate, punishing and predictable with countries raising duties on American exports astronomically, not buying US products and turning towards self-sufficiency, the practise carried on for two years until congress reversed the tariffs and conceding that it such an unnecessary economic blunder, they abdicated their role in negotiating trade deals and put that power solely in the prerogative of the executive branch.

neap tide

Though perhaps only a cold comfort and little consolation to imagine how the same cadre that benefit for the present from these regulatory changes are also the ones who are behind the policies that contribute to global warming and sea-level rise and their ocean-front properties will be soon conquered by the waters, the state of Florida has enacted legislation that could potentially severely curtail public access to state-controlled beaches.
A seemingly innocuous change in wording that extends the property-rights boundary out a bit caught only by the fact that the bill contained a rider prohibiting municipalities from passing legislation to countermand state law will give hoteliers and other land owners greater power to control who trods over private holdings to reach what the wealthy cannot yet own outright. Despite the governor’s exuberance and confidence that the landed-gentry won’t abuse this gift and deny people egress, many mayors have protested that such a move will destroy the state’s tourism industry, tossing favour to only a few establishments catering to a particular clientele.