shelter-in-place oder white-flight

While captialising on the fears of rich, white people is a legitimate business model and a fool and his money are soon—nay eventually, since there’s so much of it, the reports that luxurious doomsday bunkers are being outfitted somewhere in the hinterland of Germany for a select number of high-paying clients to ride out a nuclear holocaust seems a bit over the top. Fortunately, we have not had the occasion to test the effectiveness and security of such entombment under realistic conditions, but it seems no matter the material wealth at one’s command, surviving an event that brings the rest of the world to rack and ruin bivouacked with those who tipped off the downfall in the first place (and are now the self-appointed rebuilders of civilisation) is a very appealing notion. Such money is better spent on an ark in space before we get to the point of burying our heads in the sand.
The articles never say where this secret compound, built in the corridors already hollowed out by the state apparatus of the East German government at the height of the Cold War (which surely has keys to the rear-entrance) and I suppose that location cannot be maintained undisclosed, especially when the Apocalypse is nigh and the peasants come clawing at the door with the torches and pitchforks that ought have appeared much earlier, and while there are several candidate sites, my money’s on a place called Prenden (a part of the community of Wandlitz in the state of Brandenburg—the cavernous bunker here being sufficiently unassuming and isolated, expect that it’s conveniently close to the construction site of the much delayed Berlin-Brandenburg international airport (BBF).

es war einmal oder forms of transmission

H and I decided to revisit the town of Lohr am Main to take a moment to properly appreciate the castle’s denizens’ role for inspiring a fairy tale, which rather uniquely as far as we know stands out among the folk-stories collected and studied by the Brothers Grimm as some thing based in fact—that is, as far as we know. Before visiting what is known as das Schneewittchen Schloß (Snow White’s Castle), however, and wondering how the oral-tradition of story-telling from generation to generation embellished historical happenings, we first crossed a field that dealt with communication in a thoroughly modern fashion.
Along the way, just outside of the town of Hammelburg by a German army installation was a giant array of satellite dishes. This ground station (Erdfunkstelle) beams data and other telemetry to the constellation of orbiting satellites, space probes and the International Space Station, plus probably for other applications besides civilian. It is quite an impressive and unexpected site in rural Frankonia. Next, we strolled through the storybook cobble-stone streets of the old part of Lohr and made our Snow White’s Castle—the tale being loosely based on an actual personage and event (though license was given and taken) in this town once known for its manufacture of mirrors.
At the neck ditch (Halsgraben, a dry moat that does not go all the way around) of the castle, there was another surprise of contemporary grammar, which often becomes inseparable from one’s locus and trajectory, a geo-data reference point, fixed coordinates employed to calibrate positioning systems and correct for drift. The juxtaposition was pretty thought-provoking and we were given to wonder how course-correction and detours into the fairy tale archetypes are both guiding factors.

5x5

viewer-discretion advised: graphic and unsettling no-nukes animation from 1956

how can you have your pudding if you don’t eat your meat: 90% of food-crops in the USA are genetically modified

this just in: how the hammering in of the Golden Spike for America’s transcontinental railroad marked the beginning of breaking news

purl 2.0: artist incorporates chunky stitches for maximum comfort

figleaf: the cyber attack on US government workers is bigger than anyone is letting on, having targeted security clearance questionnaires

instinct and individuation

It could be said that pioneering Swiss psychotherapist and collaborator of Sigmund Freud, Karl Gustav Jung, was patently his own first patient—but that can be said of most professions. Freud and Jung had an intense and productive relationship but differences in interpretation and emphasis became magnified and this strife over the nature of the psyche and best bedside-manner grew to an irreconcilable rift over a lecture tour that Jung undertook in the United States on behalf of their shared ideas.
Though Jung had his own divergent ideas about what was formative for the character and personality (de-emphasizing the role of libido and repression, Jung thought that one’s private being was a shared and public one with the collective-unconsciousness and spirituality was important component as well) he was accused of misrepresenting Freud’s theories while speaking at Fordham University (auf Deutsch to boot) but may have chosen to censor-out the sexiest bits, considering his possibly prudish audience. After the schism that formed separate schools of thought, Jung distanced himself from Freud’s thinking and shamefully denounced that favour of psychoanalysis as the Jewish science—ironically, Freud had found a great spokesman and advocate in the younger Jung initially because he came from outside that circle in Vienna and lent that the practise not be stereotyped as such: Nazism, beyond persecution, baptised many causes and individuals as undesirable even when the affiliation was in name only. Following this judgment, which understandably cast a pall over his body of work, Jung turned towards inter-disciplinary studies, in sociology, alchemy and astronomy, and embarked for years of extensive travel—trying ostensibly to get a better grasp of those shared archetypes and common-fates in mythology and creation accounts that he posited from different perspectives (modern practitioners re-branded them as the objective psyche), but to Jung’s credit, his sojourn had more humane motives, I believe, and set out to prove what was wrong with the familiar and secure Western world during the decades of the 1920’s and 30’s.

5x5

babel: elegant diagram of the world’s most spoken languages

anachronistic: is this a lap top being presented on this ancient funerary frieze?

eye of the beholder: via Dangerous Minds, computer picks out the most creative works of art of all time

sandbox: old school playground reimagined for the age of helicopter parenting

medieval woman: a look housewifery in the Middle Ages, via the Everlasting Blort
 

gadfly or liberté toujours

Recently, I made the cast-off observation that Erasmus’ nice-making between the Catholics and the Lutherans was unwelcome on both fronts due in part to Erasmus’ reintroduction of free-will. I sort of swallowed that comment and later realised that that subject deserved a bit more attention. Most people would want to believe that they do have free-agency, free-will in at least some form, since the alternative—or at least the only one we can imagine is fate destiny, determinism or a mixture thereof—and leaves nothing praiseworthy, blameworthy, no reason to be thankful or ungracious. If one’s fate was predetermined before one was born—either by God or gods bounded by Necessity (the Fates, Μοῖραι) or in Sir Isaac Newton’s clockwork universe, bound by natural laws with all actions dependent on some antecedent action going all the way back to the beginning of time (which would apply to our own neuro-chemistry as well), it hardly seems right to consign some to eternal damnation and suffering and too to reward others in they had no choice in the matter. In more mundane terms, there is a tendency to not hold people culpable for their wrongdoings or negligence if there is found to be some pre-existing factor, like insanity or trauma or bad parenting, that absolves them of responsibility for their actions.

As best as I understand it, Luther favoured predeterminism not in order to toss out the idea of morality and personal responsibility but rather to promote the idea (called justification in religious contexts) that salvation and forgiveness of sins was a part of the grand, undeviating plan—and that nothing else was needed except for faith even in the most recalcitrant cases. Supposedly when threatened with excommunication, Luther refused to back down, saying “Here I stand and how could I be anyway else.” Justification frees parishioners from the corruptions of the Church itself by allowing institution no further say in the matter. That does sound like a good idea, except that it doesn’t address the choice of having faith or being agnostic or not having the benefit of being born and raised in a Lutheran country—or at least being pestered by missionaries, but mostly, we’re all winners. Hallelujah! Except that free-will and choice, albeit bound to other conventions, lead to the same conclusion and redemption. Prior to doing anything, we feel we have all the choice in the world (and indeed we have moral figments) but often times after the deed is done, we recognise that it really couldn’t have been any other way and yet there’s a lot of notions on ethics, gratitude and accountability that don’t seem just illusory or artificial. It’s a popular idea but surely one even less understood that Luther’s pro-determinism argument that the uncertainties and bald probabilities of quantum-mechanics may suggest that the cosmos isn’t at all governed by a fixed destiny. If, however, microscopic randomness projects fully up to the macroscopic world, that doesn’t allow us our choice either, since we’re just at the mercy of chaos. I don’t know and probably our underlying assumptions are wrong—but I do expect that there’s something in between that won’t emerge as wholly unsatisfying. What do you think? Is it possible to know one way or the other?

senescence

A truly inconceivable debt of gratitude is owed to young woman by the name of Henrietta Lacks and to the team of physicians and technicians who tried to care for her at Johns-Hopkins. After a difficult pregnancy brought to term in late 1950, Lacks was tragically found to have a form of cervical cancer. Though afforded the best treatment of the day at the university research hospital (the illustrious Johns Hopkins being the only medical facility in segregated Maryland that would accept African-American patients), she eventually succumbed to the malady. A biopsy was performed on the tumour, unbeknownst to Lacks and her family—though it was not custom to provide consent for medical release at the time, and samples were retained for study.

The culture of cells, however, exhibited a surprising resiliency, and given the right environmental conditions will propagate without end—a property that not even the most cancerous or healthy cells demonstrate outside the human body—which led researchers to declare the unique line to be immortal. Prior to this discovery, medical studies on human cell cultures was very labourous as lines did not survive more than a couple of divisions (generations) and were not conducive of any longer term research into the impact of chemical compounds and potential toxic-affects. Lacks’ line (known as HeLa from her initials) was radically different and was almost immediately recognised by the scientific and medical community for its hitherto unimagined potential. The cultivation of HeLa cell lines coincided with the work of virologist Jonas Salk and enabled him to develop a safe vaccine that’s all but eradicated the plague of polio. By 1955, these cells became the first to be cloned and have been propagated to laboratories worldwide for countless applications. Over six decades later, the same deathless cells (which has prompted some to suggest that the mutation is actually an emerging speciation—the chromosomes of these cells don’t shed telomeres when they replicate, unlike normal cells, and biologists believe that this degradation causes ageing and dotage) are still pioneering research into gerontology, cancer AIDS and countless other infectious diseases as well as environmental pollutants and contaminants. Without Lacks’ contribution, the sequencing and mapping of the human genome—and associated insights, probably would still be a work in progress. Lacks’ family had no idea of Henrietta’s legacy until the 1970s, and after her contribution received due recognition, two members of the family were invited to sit on an ethics panel that has oversight on the use of the line’s DNA—not to hinder important medical research, but rather to help guide and monitor experimentation on HeLa itself.

300 or hoplites and helots

Sparta-worship is nothing new and has gone through numerous and at times—maybe mostly, dangerous revivals. Revolutionaries as varied as those who fought for independence under the British Mandate of Palestine or under colonial Britain in North America based their extolling, exhortation and sometimes lament in failing to live up to that example on a long chain of praise that extended all the way back to times contemporaneous with the Spartan civilisation. This romancing of the austere and disciplined lifestyle practised goes by the name laconophilia (from Laconia where they lived and hence laconic or blunt) and while the course of history may have was neither steered solely by either admirers or detractors (who importantly saw the Spartans’ faults and warned that theirs was not a society to emulate) their battle-cry is heard sometimes in unexpected places. That Nazism was steeped in Nordic traditions and mythology (including fabricated volk-etymologies purely to forward their agenda) is patently well-known but I never knew that the Nazis had cast their maniacal nets further south as well and believed that the Spartans (as part of the larger “race” of Dorians) also embodied their ideal. 
Of course it was not their deportment as rational stoics or temperate individuals that held the appeal (then and now, and die neue Dorier did not go unheard) but rather the reputation of these hoplites (citizen-soldiers) on the battlefield, whose glory came at a high price—with most willing to dismiss this fascination as sophomoric, the Spartans excelling only at war through a regiment that left trainees little better than broken and brainwashed, a strict caste-system, peace untenable and dependent on a subjugated population of feudal farmers called the Helots (considered to be natural slaves).  The ability to achieve and sustain this proto-fascist state through eugenics (though without the nobles lies of The Republic) was aligned with what Nazi Germany hoped to emulate, but I am not sure what brought about that political syncretism that mingled the Norse gods with Mediterranean traditions, but perhaps it was how just a few decades prior, a German entrepreneur and amateur archaeologist was able to dynamite his way to Priam’s Treasure and significantly prove to the world that there was at least a kernel of historical fact behind the legends. Feats of renown are especially prone to misappropriation.