Regardless how the US refrains from using assassination (targeted killings) in the same way it refuses to “negotiate” with terrorists, the drone-wars have exhausted—unintentionally but with the lulling effect of new technologies and the easier path—whatever intelligence capital and standing that America had in the world. Not only does the incomplete picture obtained by intercepting communications (SIGINT) yield grave inaccuracies including a lot of collateral deaths (though they’re never referred to as by-standers), these tenuous links can no longer be explored or exploited once the person of interest has been obliterated.
Saturday 17 October 2015
up periscope or dead men tell no tales
giraffe, erdmรคnnchen & co.
Parallel to the much celebrated and intensely competitive Wildlife Photograph of the Year run through the auspices of the BBC and the London Natural History museum, nature-photographer Paul Joynson-Hicks had the idea to capture the more candid side of the business with his “Comedy Wildlife Photography Awards.” Spiegel features a funny slide-show of some of the best entries, and the contenders are sure to ratchet it up for next year’s competition.
catagories: ๐ท, ๐ฆ, environment
Friday 16 October 2015
hinweisgeber
catagories: ๐ฉ๐ช, ๐ฌ๐ง, ๐ฑ, ๐ฅธ, foreign policy
5x5
twilight of the gods: Nina Hagen, Grace Jones and others feature in a Biblical Rock Opera, Gutterdรคmmerung, who strive to return the Earth to a state of vice
marylebone: BLDGBlog ponders the supposed funerary teleportation grid of Greater-London
scrumptious: venerable art foundation raises funds for galleries and museums with edible masterpieces, via the splendid Nag on the Lake
babel: a few odd, nuanced (but expeditious) terms found in EU English
catagories: ๐ฌ๐ง, ๐, ๐ถ, ๐, ๐ญ, food and drink, language, transportation
Thursday 15 October 2015
long-distance
catagories: ๐ง , lifestyle, networking and blogging
chancel, chancellery
The predominant theme of German news and discussion panels has been refugees and immigration for weeks now and is demanding an increased sense of urgency due to its unrelenting stream of asylum-seekers and families fleeing war and institutional poverty and the change in weather that assuredly guaranteeing no happy-campers, sheltered in to a large part in tent-cities or cavernous warehouses. The rational that buoys compassion is that Germany’s ageing population needs an injection of young, able-bodied adults to supplement their workforce (and retirement scheme) in order to maintain the competitive economic edge that they’ve enjoyed for the past couple of generations.
Germany’s young breeders apparently are not working hard enough to replenish the labour-pool. Employment-models suggest that the influx of refugees (many of who purportedly will not stay in Germany but be resettled elsewhere in Europe) has not yet reached that threshold of sustainment and whatever money and resources spent are a good investment, but I wonder if that welcoming reception might change once the requirement is met—or when the demographers realise that their constructions and projections are not valid gauges of future job-markets, what with robots threatening to take-over vast parts of certain jobs-sectors. Aside from worries over the effect on housing-market (and the question of adequate, affordable accommodations), there are significant challenges ahead with integration and assimilation that are only just now being broached—although wholly unaddressed by one particular group, those migrants—not necessarily from those same regions but grouped together as such I’m sure. I wonder what this silence means—whether or not the more established immigrant population is reaching out to newcomers and being forthcoming with assistance and sponsorship, or whether there’s a widen rift, agonising whether these late arrivals might upset whatever social-acceptance that they’ve gained, feeling their benefits under-threat. Maybe that’s an aspect just not being reported but I don’t know. This image, first discovered by the fabulous Nag on the Lake some time ago, is a public-service announcement from the Scarfolk Council, which is unfortunately caught in a Doctor Who-style time-loop and forever condemned to relive the decade of the 1970s and importantly makes us confront our own selective humanity.
catagories: ๐ฉ๐ช, ๐, ๐, foreign policy, labour
Wednesday 14 October 2015
fliegerhorst wasserkuppe
Over the weekend, H and I took a little stroll on the leveled summit of the highest peak of Hessen—the Wasserkuppe outside of Gersfeld and just in the Rhรถn mountain range over the state border.
The first sustained, hang-gliding sessions happened here, about two decades after the first mechanical fixed-wing flight—as the properties of aerodynamics were not very well understood until this feat. Interest in the air-sail grew considerably with the end of World War I, whose conditions of surrender forbade German research or use into powered flight, and competitions in glider design were launched centred around the Wasserkuppe and in a few years, test-flights of all sorts of flying-machines, including the Messerschmitt and early rocket-jets, were conducted there. After the war, elements of the American and the French air forces occupied the summit, especially prized for its commanding view into the Iron Curtain, and the radom in the background is a remnant of those days. The recreational use of the mountain, however, was not restricted for too many years.
5x5
miss cellany: eccentric, vintage beauty titles
high-tension: creative engineers turn Iceland’s pylons into colossal works of art
letterbox format: French museum displays tiny, detailed recreations of movie sets
blue-light special: retail sound-track circa 1989-1993 preserved for posterity