i read the news today—oh boy—four thousand holes in blackburn-lancashire

Four days ahead of the General Election on this day in 1924, the conservatively-aligned tabloid, The Daily Mail (previously plus see also), published a letter, purportedly a directive from Grigory Zinoviev, revolutionary and head of the Cominterm, to the Communist Party of Great Britain urging revolution and subversion of parliamentary politics.
The reaction in the ballots prompted the collapse of the Liberty Party, significantly forstalled the development of the then fledgling Labour Party and precipitated a Tory landslide. Zinoviev vehemently denied having anything to do with the supposed correspondence and pointed out how the forger had not done his homework when constructing the letterhead and committees by naming them incorrectly and that the Communist International would not meddle in the elections of foreign states. Historians and current scholarship agree with this stance, not penning the fabrication of the missive to the newspaper directly (while blaming them for citing dodgy and incendiary sources, we’ve another name for it, in their page nine story) and rather source the idea of encouraging sedition abroad to the messenging of the White Russian (czarist) intelligence to try to discredit the Bolsheviks internationally.

do ut des

Continuing to charaterise the impeachment proceedings as a coup d’etát and in the wake of particularly compelling testimony by a seasoned career diplomat whose work was undercut by Trump’s backchannel, a group of thirty of Trump’s staunchest supporters stormed closed-door meeting being held in secure chambers to disrupt the testimony of another witness with Ukraine connections, the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defence.
By bringing cell phones into a classified environment, members—with a distinct lack of collegiality—compromised security and caused the witness’ accounting to be delayed for several hours. Grown weary of playing the apologist though too cowardly to cross him, Republicans refused to give anything but the thinnest, tacit support for Trump’s call to hold the next G7 summit at his tacky resort which prompted Trump more than the self-dealing Ukraine (or Kurdish concessions inter alia) and how that affair is unwinding to accuse his party of not fighting for him. Loyalist responded to this lament by barging in to the hearing room, again characterised as a star chamber despite how the scandal under investigation makes Nixon’s subversion of the democratic process seem rather adorable, and ordering pizza. After five hours, the witness was allowed to give her statement in private.

milkdromeda

Living ourselves in area designated as a stellar sanctuary (though often in the city with only a few planets and stars visible), we very much appreciated this nearer-term corollary to the premise that later generations and iterations might experience the Cosmos as some place empty and pre-ordained, the possibility of life elsewhere having receded far away from our perspective and oversight. Billions of years into the future but yet eons to go until that lonely end-state occurs, the Earth’s night sky will be ablaze as the Milky Way merges with its neighbouring galaxy Andromeda. Due to the vastness of interstellar space, there will be few if any collisions as this process unfolds.

7x7

trick-or-treat: communities in race to best each other with increasing draconian ordinances regulating Halloween

huzzah: the utopian ideals behind Renaissance Fairs

dog whistle/bull horn: critiquing Facebook for the low quality propaganda platform it is, via Marginal Revolution

starchitecture: pairing Zodiac houses with their representative designers

your trial period has expired: how free storage drove every thing out if the archives and mandated everything be always available, via Duck Soup

world unique promotional product identity & emotion: the strange world of Vater Abraham, author of the Smurfs’ theme song among a few others

noir: Bruce McCorkindale’s Art House Muppets for Inktober

ten of dowels

Via the always excellent Nag on the Lake, we are introduced to the handiwork of a creative called Hundred-Armed Sweater (that would be for the Hecatonkherires on your gift-list) through her IKEA-inspired tarot deck, recognising that the store and experience represents “a place of transition, a journey, a source of light and comfort but also strife.” The deck includes the major and four full suites of minor arcana.

weideabtrieb

H and I had the chance to observe an interesting agricultural event when the shepherds bring the sheep and goats down from hilltop pastures to the valley in a village not far away. It was quite well attended with human spectators perhaps outnumbering the livestock being herded and driven to their winter quarters. 

Though cattle were also present, the stars of the day were the distinctive Rhön sheep (Rhönschaf) whose single flock numbered over one thousand, the breed nearly having gone extinct in the 1960s and now their numbers, with the help of a nature conservancy and the green belt across Europe that marks the former border between NATO and the Warsaw Pact have safely returned, led through a rather narrow channel thronged by a human audience—not unlike the scene in Pamplona with the Running of the Bulls.

karambolage

From 1942 to 1990, Arnold Odermatt was employed as a forensics photographer for the Swiss canton of Nidwalden whose extensive portfolio documents encroaching modernity into this once isolated area, especially in traffic accidents, taking a second photograph for his own personal collection once the injured had been taken away.
Though his fascination is morbid and inscrutable as his motivation was never stated and the existence of the images were only disclosed by accident (his filmmaker son discovering the trove in a box in the attic one day and published them in a book that garnered attention in the late 1990s at the Frankfurter Buchmesse), there is, one might conjecture, a restorative property in seeing these husks of vehicles in an austere light, unmoving without drivers and passengers. Much more to explore at the link above including several galleries of Odermatt’s compositions, which includes many candid, happy scenes artfully captured as well.