unternehmen walküre

On this day in 1944, Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg orchestrated a plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler and remove the Nazi party from power. The culmination of several co-conspirators representing a coalition of resistance groups from across Germany, the coup d’état (Putsch) was to dislodge the party loyals and the Gestapo and make peace with the Western Allies as soon as possible.
The attempt to detonate an explosive planted in the conference room in the Wolfsschanze failed to achieve their objective and precipitated in the arrest and execution of hundreds of co-conspirators and a purge of military personnel—the army using the event as a pretence to settle old scores and a way to settle grudges even if there was only a very tenuous connection to the opposition. Had the plot succeeded, members had been designated ahead of time to assume government and cabinet positions and leave no room for others to claim power in the ensuing chaos, including Stauffenberg as the Minister of State to the War Department and staunch detractor of the Nazi regime Carl Friedrich Goerdeler as chancellor—though the latter was a source of incriminating evidence and was apparently willing to implicate others, consigning all to the same fate as martyrs. Despite the fact that the Führer’s reign of terror continued for almost another year afterwards with more death and destruction, the bravery of the plotters showed to the world that Germany was not monolithic in their thinking and outlook.

chryse planitia

Touching down on this day in 1976, the seventh anniversary of the Apollo 11 Moon landing, Viking 1 became the second probe to successfully reach Mars after the Soviet Union’s Марс-3 five years earlier—beginning what would turn out to be a rather incredible six-year monitoring mission (sadly, the previous effort failed after seconds) with a battery of biological experiments to search for evidence of life.

Scientists were also able to use this distant beacon that’s sometimes occulted by the Sun to confirm the phenomenon of gravitational time dilation as predicted by the theory of General Relativity, the Sun’s gravity causing delays in transmission times. The Viking sent back this incredible panoramic vista (landing site in the title) shortly after its arrival.

konkrete kunst

Here is a tondo (a circular enframed work of art, from the Italian rotondo, “round”) from Swiss artist Fritz Glarner (born on this day in 1899, †1972). Heavily influenced by painters of De Stijl movement, particularly the geometrical studies of Dutch artist Piet Mondrian, Glarner’s style focused on “relational” schema as revealed through architectural patterns. Studying in Paris, Glarner spent most of his professional career in New York’s Long Island artist colony, before retiring to Locarno in 1966.

jennyanydots

I think we are all this film review of the upcoming “live,” demented deep-dreaming nightmare adaptation of the musical Cats. So many questions that dare not seek answers.
The 1981 piece is based on a collection of epistolary poetry that T. S. Eliot (previously) composed to entertain his godchildren in the 1930s—presenting a sociological tract on a tribe of felines and their nomination of one of their members to ascend into a paradisaical afterlife and be reincarnated, and the new production, starring an ensemble cast of screen and stage luminaries projected onto cat-sized avatars, is seemingly riding the coattails of attempting to revive old properties with live-actors aided by digital graphics, dispensing the need for imagination and suspension of disbelief, illustrative of what happens when creative outlets are not constrained by a budget and no one has the courage of conviction to say when a project is going in the wrong direction.

meine tochter nimmer mehr

Featured in Amadeus, a favourite of the endearingly incompetent Florence Foster Jenkins and dispatched to the Cosmos on the Golden Records of the Voyager emissaries, we’re all familiar with the challenging coloratura passage, the trilled run spanning two octaves, of Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte but I failed to appreciate the piece’s message and that it’s classified as a rage aria (which sounds quite fancy—Yas Queen, the Italian terms being aria agitate or aria infuriate).
Entitled “Hell’s Vengeance Boils in my Heart” (Der Hölle Rache kocht in meinem Herzen), the Queen of the Night delivers a knife to her daughter Pamina and on pain of disownment, assassinate her arch-rival, the high priest Sarastro, whom had recruited her daughter and would be rescuer Prince Tamino and sidekick Papageno to his school of thought. Familiar with her vocal talents, Mozart wrote the part for his sister-in-law Josepha Hofer who first played the role, with words by librettist Emanuel Schikaneder—whom himself played the part of bird-catcher Papageno in the opera’s premiere.

bonjour farewell

In a private meeting between French and US presidents during the Ottawa G7 Summit of the summer of 1981, François Mitterand disclosed to Ronald Reagan of the existence of a Soviet defector, Colonel Vladimir Vetrov, a French intelligence asset codenamed Farewell with the notion that if apprehended the KGB would assume he was working for the Americans, and turned over an extensive collection of documents, referred to as the Farewell Dossier, demonstrating that the Soviets had been routinely surveilling and incorporating US and NATO partners’ research and technology.
The files also identified the espionage network that had taken years and considerable expense to build and thus precipitated the expulsion of hundreds of spies from countries in the alliance, but prior to taking action, the US Central Intelligence Agency instigated a counter-campaign of disinformation and disseminated faulty designs in the hopes that the Soviets would try to steal these sabotaged plans as well. Though the correlation is disputed and quite possibly just reflects the angst expressed by the Reagan administration that British and West German support for a trans-Siberian natural gas export pipeline would compromise their allies and make them reliant on Russia for energy, according to some accounts, the CIA delivered a Trojan Horse to pressure control relays that caused a massive explosion in the winter of 1983. The US was already imposing sanctions on the Soviets and restricting the sale of supplies needed for the monumental engineering project, which became operational despite these setbacks.

it’s the assault on freedom of the press. but it’s not just the assault on freedom of the press.

This essay, via Miss Cellania, from David Rothkopf at first glance reminded me of a punchline from Michelle Wolf, part of her monologue which ultimately led to the rubbishing of a time-honoured journalistic and comedic tradition for the White House Press Corps: “Trump is so broke he had to borrow money from the Russians and now he’s compromised and susceptible to blackmail and possibly responsible for the collapse of the Republic. Yay, it’s a fun game!”
It goes to demonstrate, however, how far we’ve lost ground and how present the threat of normalising, despite forewarnings, has become. Droning on in the best spirit and practise of demagogues, “It’s the dead in Puerto Rico and the at the border. But it’s not just the dead in Puerto Rico and at the border. It’s turning the US government into a criminal conspiracy to empower and enrich the president and his supporters. But it’s not just the turning the US government into a criminal conspiracy to empower and enrich the president and his supporters. It’s weaponisation of politics in America to attack the weak. But it’s not just the weaponisation of American politics to attack the weak.” Rejecting this point-of-view keeps it marginalised and keeps us focused and reminds us that this is not normal.