all the president’s sophists

Though eventual acquittal of Trump by the jury of the Senate was a foregone conclusion with a super-majority needed to remove him from office and not by the narrowest of margins by which the high house abrogated its ethical and constitution charge to conduct a fair, complete and impartial trial yet refused to hear any further witness testimony—meaning that Trump will feel vindicated and act with the imperial abandon after the outcome of the Mueller Report feel short of an indictment, which Trump took as a full exoneration and celebrated by asking the newly-elected Ukrainian president to dig up some dirt on his political opponent’s son if he wants to receive military aid—the anti-democratic over-reach that brought us to impeachment in the first place.
Arguments propped up by the cowardice of incumbents wanting to retain their seats at any cost, Trump’s counsel’s latest specious rebuttal amongst a tranche of prevarication, hypocrisy and double-standards has atrophied into essentially that any president believes his re-election is in the best interest of the American people (whether or not it’s the case is not for the office holder to decide but rather the constituency that he or she represents) and it is therefore permissible for the president to pursue his campaign. Perhaps, as some maintain, calling witnesses would only prolong the process and net no change in the end but I suspect that the Republican members’ intransigent loyalty will backfire as the trial exits the well of the Senate and once again returns (those parallel proceedings never stopped) to the court of public opinion where the legal process falls short and America relies on the precious precarity of voting and enfranchisement.

xtrmntr

Exactly twenty years ago on this day, the Scottish band Primal Scream released their titular album in the United Kingdom, as NPR reports, with lyrics and themes that seemed a bit overblown at the time but in hindsight seem eerily prescient to the inheritors of the dystopia that they raged against.
Though in those millennial salad days it would be hard to appreciate the trend despite similarly concordant portrayals across the arts and entertainment spectrum, their predictions of epidemics, endless wars, economic asymmetry, surveillance states and the preponderance of propaganda were ignored at our peril. Find more musical retrospectives with National Public Radio at the link above.

attention to detail

Via the ever keen-eyed Super Punch, we gain a renewed appreciation for the costume department with this very subtle tailoring addition to Captain Picard’s (see also) civilian suit.  The stripe of red thread sewn into the jacket signals his membership as a recipient of the French Legion of Honour (Légion d’Honneur).

The order of merit that recognises those who have made significant contributions to the state was established by Napoleon Bonaparte in 1802 and the institution was continued by successive governments—and would surely still exist under the Federation. The special thread is in lieu of the medals and sash that the knights, officers and commanders are bestowed for less formal occasions and is stitched in by an exclusive tailor near the Palais Royal in Paris. The honour is not limited to French citizens but Sir Patrick Stewart is not a holder of this particular order.

gmt+1

In accordance with the provisions of Article 50, after forty-seven years of membership and a contentious three-and-half years of vigorous and at times unseemly and embarrassing debate, the UK will leave the European Union at 11:00 pm local time. The UK quits the EU with a standing invitation to rejoin, as Commission President Ursula von der Leyen concluded her speech to assembled MEPs during the last plenary session before Brexit Day with a quote from British poet George Eliot: “‘Only in the agony of parting do we look into the depths of love.’ We will always love you and we will never be far. Long live Europe!”

the hungry earth or the gorn hegemony

Inspired by and named for a 1970 Doctor Who story-arc that originally aired from this day until 14 March on BBC1 in weekly installments wherein the Third Doctor tries to broker a peace settlement between the simians, sapiens and the reptilian Silurians who were the dominant intelligent species, the eponymous hypothesis is an interesting and self-critical (though sometimes coopted by fringe elements and regaled with the hallmarks of pseudo-science) thought experiment, a corollary to Fermi’s Paradox in a sense, to gauge those simian successors’ ability to detect evidence of prior (or parallel) advanced civilisations.
Formalised and fleshed out just in 2018 in a paper by astrophysicists Adam Frank and Gavin Schmidt, they pondered whether there would be any sort of trace of industry, given sufficient time and distance and divergence from our own manifestly self-destructive and unsustainable technology, a civilisation that produced less enduring waste and had a lower profile in terms of environmental impact would be harder to dig up but would probably be the more successful and longer-lived for it as well.  Any artefacts, direct or indirect, could prove elusive indeed, and we may be incapable of recognising them for what they are. Please be sure to visit Futility Closet at the link up top for an abstract and the full paper.

kryptos

Via the never cryptic and always interesting Nag on the Lake we are informed that a new clue has been tantalisingly dropped regarding the bronze sculpture that adorns the courtyard of the headquarters of the Central Intelligence Agency (previously) whose coded message has for nearly thirty years rebuffed obsessive efforts to fully decrypt it.
Professional and hobbyist code-breakers alike over the years have managed to solve three (the first two are Vigenère ciphers, a method using an interweaving of shifting and polyalphabetic substitution, the third is a transposition cipher with the fourth being a mystery) out of the four puzzles but the last remains a conundrum. The artist behind the work, Jim Sanborn—surprised that the mystery has taken this long to be decoded and perhaps out of a desire not to have it all unravelled posthumously—has issued a few hints first in 2010 with BERLIN, next in 2014 with CLOCK and most recently NORTHEAST with which letters of the cipher the solution corresponds with.

6x6

solar max: amazing high-resolution imagery of the surface of the Sun

holyrood: the Edinburgh parliament will continue to fly the EU flag post-Brexit (plus votes for a second referendum for independence)

birth tourism: a woman planning to visit US territory of Saipan forced to prove that she was not pregnant

commonly known as the pipewort family: the stunning paepalanthus flowering plants

part of the troop: robotic gorilla infiltrates a family in the wild

bmc: a large cache of art and artefacts, largely never before seen, from Black Mountain College (adjacently)—staffed by among others Anni and Joseph Albers after they fled Nazi Germany—is being put on-line