gordian knot or charge of the light brigade

The situation in the Crimea is escalating quickly, and I think outside intervention (or subvention) might prove unwise, if not unwelcome. The country is clearly divided among western and eastern region, including the strategically important peninsula on the Black Sea, separated by a narrow strait from Russia. The divide, however pronounced it may be, is not a think just the struggle over segments of the population seeking closer allegiance with the powers of Europe and the West and a nostalgic segment with closer ties to the old, united regime of the Soviet Union, convinced that Ukraine is and has always been a part of Russian proper, is not the only cogent factor, I'm afraid:
Ukraine as a whole is only second to the whole expanse of Russia in terms of industrial and agricultural output within the former Soviet footprint. Though economic independence could eventually be amended into a beneficial partnership, those traditional attitudes that reign in the Crimea (a cartographic flip-book of sovereignties since the Crimean War of 1853 that pit Russia against the Ottoman Empire, the UK and France over access to the Holy Lands—the most technologically advanced and reported—photographs included—conflict that the world had yet seen) are bundled, irretrievably with a logistical system that certainly makes Russian dominant influences loath to see the country become more Western orientated. Not only is the Black Sea fleet based there, the network of petroleum pipelines that deliver gas from Russia to Europe transit through all points of the nation—and not only at snarl-point that connect the Azov with the Black Seas. If this conduit were lost or supply interrupted, even for a short while, the knock-on effects would be devastating for the region and countries dependent on Russian oil. It is tragic to say, but I think conflicts are ignited over far less and diplomacy and freedom are the first casualties. The effectiveness of outside observers I fear might prove dismal at best—even though this is not an internal affair, and Ukraine may have to sacrifice its territorial integrity, ceding along political divides, lest the commemorations beginning this year take on an all too real charter.

sovereign wealth or statlig investerings

Always a good steward of her natural resources and forward-thinking, Norway's petroleum fund which reinvests proceeds from oil profits, and is edging towards a trillion dollars, translating into a tidy $165 000 (en million norsk kronen) pay-out for each of the land's five million inhabitants, seems to be having a bit of a crisis of conscience that I wish might plague other public pensions well.

Though every Norwegian man, woman and child is a stakeholder in this fund, these outrageous fortunes are a deferred windfall, as the country aims to provide the same level of social services to future generations and when the oil has ran out, recursively, the biggest return on investment, a safe bet, has been in returning to the petroleum industry itself. Despite being the fund's bread and butter, there is debate among the government, in a position of public trust, whether it is ethical, as something ultimately unsustainable, to deal in a dirty business rather than taking a luxuriously responsible stand and partner with initiatives that will ultimately make their work obsolete—putting it in an oil museum and shifting away from its seed account.

vernacular or pain-compliance

Not to glorify an overly weaponised culture, but did you know that like scuba-diving (a self-contained underwater breathing-apparatus) that a taser electroshock gun is a trade-marked abbreviation for Thomas A. Swift's Electric Rifle, the NASA researcher who developed the prototype in 1974 naming it in honour of his boyhood hero's daring adventures?

Tom Swift had adventures like Buck Rogers or Perry Rodan but this prolific inventor was usually more Earth-based, like a predecessor to the Tony Stark behind Iron Man. I thought it was some contraction for a tag-laser, since two little electrode darts are projected at the target, unlike a stun gun that requires direct proximity. In any case, once one is it, then one is subject to all sorts of debilitating pain, which is the point of less lethal defense and offense but sometimes the effects linger, especially within a regiment of abuse among trigger-happy authorities who think there's a way to deal with the criminal or unruly without consequence.

playbill or agnes dei

Recently, I had the chance to see the local community theatre produce an excellent performance of John Pielmeyer's play Agnes of God. I recall there was a 1985 cinematic adaptation of the piece starring Jane Fonda as court-appointed psychiatrist, Dr. Martha Livingston, and was rather controversial movie, the play itself a dramatization of an actual tragic case.

I did not realize how challenging the original stagecraft was, however, the character of the psychiatrist interacting with just two other players with an almost unhalting monologue and dialogue that lasts for the entire performance. As the fourth wall, I was a little discouraged that there were only three people in the audience to witness the spectacle, though the actors and crew did not stint the small house any of the effort. Dr. Livingston has many memorable reflections, but I think the one of the most profound and foreshadowing moments came with her opening soliloquy when she remembers returning to the cinema time and time again to see one of her favourite stars play out a doomed life, hoping against hope that during one showing she'd be sitting in the darkened rows and all of a sudden and without warning, the projectionist had discovered that long lost “alternate reel,” the one with the happy end. The psychiatrist, despite and because of what she was about to face at the nunnery, still believed in alternate reels.

quitsies, keepsies

The Local (the German daily in English) has an interesting profile of an engineer from Düsseldorf who proposes to revolutionize exploiting renewable and passive energy by installing giant spherical collectors mounted on brackets to focus heat generated by sunlight so power can be squeezed out of it.

Arguably, these Raw Lemon masts are more aesthetic and less intrusive and intensive than shingling one's entire roof with delicate and resource-demanding solar-panels or putting arrays of photovoltaic cells out to pasture, whose manufacture require several rare compounds to function and are prone to the caprice of the elements and cloudy days. Two or three of these simple massive marbles, that are nothing more than magnifying lenses, can heat a household and because of the shape of the Raw Lemon, the sun is never at the wrong angle. This pretty ingenious project has been exclusively crowd-funded and there are a surplus of enthusiastic investors.

the dandy warhols or the factory method

Before his discovery in the 1960s, Andy Warhol (with the help of the penmanship of his mother) designed book jackets, advertising pieces and album covers, like this gallery of art for jazz records curated by Dangerous Minds. Be sure to check out more of DM's daily onslaught of discoveries on film, literature, artwork and sundries.

telescreens have no off switch or the ballad of max headroom

In more underwhelming news, whose aggressions were probably always buried in some consent boilerplate, comes the revelation (read, natural consequence) that Her Majesty's spy agency Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) ran a program under the codename Optic Nerve that captured billions of snapshots from video chat sessions, indiscriminate and warrantless to be sure.

The article focuses on one particular messaging service but I am certain that others were also sampled. Material harvested was not intended to be a record of users' conversations and contacts—though I don't believe that that cache of intelligence was simply atomized, but was rather a platform to test the limits and filters of facial recognition software and sift out villains already posted in the police mugbook. The exercise is proving of dubious value, and in fact they've sequestered a sizable amount of lewd displays (described as undesirable amounts of flesh). The surveyors plead to be at a loss as to what the disposition ought to be for these false-positives, whether they're to be classified as other distinguishing features or put on deposit in a registry somewhere of posing indecents for future use.