We understand that one major social media outlet has launched a new campaign to combat catchpenny clickbait by monitoring misleading and salacious headlines engineered to lure people outside of their own walled-garden.
This pledge strikes us as pretty ironic since that same web-presence is responsible for and substantively little more than listicles, rehashing and the same sort of attention-cloying preying on the insecurities of visitors snatched from their ecologies and histories. What do you think? Indeed, maybe the same algorithm that keeps their advertising environment robust might be used to retool those touts and cut back on rhetoric without estranging readers from quality writing and meaningful content.
Thursday 11 August 2016
petard hoist much?
islands and bridges
For a quarter of a century, a Canadian couple have been constructing their floating home, a most unusual and self-sufficient estate called Freedom Cove and presently moored off of Vancouver Island. The massive and mobile island was built by hand and includes gardens, greenhouses, a beacon and a dancehall aside from the couple’s quarters. Please visit the link above for more details on this dream realised.
hadj-podge
Add this being an election year to the series of crises that have fraught and jeopardised Europe’s attempts to shelter the displaced and the threatened (not to mention the spectre and reality of rising nationalism, preachers of hate and preachers of appeasement), it is little surprise that some German politicians are drafting a raft of proposals that would markedly change the country’s policy on immigration.
Though attested as measures to promote integration and public-safety, the reforms include, most provocatively, the banning of burqas and hijabs in public, following France’s rules. While other elements might be less sensational, the former seems the least worrisome considering that there is talk of relaxing doctor-patient confidentiality by introducing a duty to report even when the threat is not imminent, the expulsion of notorious characters for their potential to incite violence, or even removing refugees to massive encampments outside of European Union borders to wait it out until their respective conflicts at home end. What do you think? Whosoever champions one side or another seem unable in any venue to start a conversation that can be heard above the din of the repelling of opposites and the compacting of reasoned arguments down to their dread conclusions. One has to wonder if those policymakers are above that miasma of the democracy of the moment, in the thick of it, or are foolish enough to try to wield it.
yestersol, solmorrow
myrmidons or pyric victory
We are living through the biggest war in the history of the natural world, as Kottke informs, had have been for a few of our generations and countless of the belligerents’ and we’d probably pay more attention to epic and global struggle happening underfoot and regard it as more than a nuisance if we did have our own battles to contend with.
The last years of 1800s a solitary stow-away from the marshlands of Argentina arrived in the port New Orleans, and this introduction of an invasive species resulted in the creation of a super-colony that has since spread all over the world, competing with native ants for territory and resources. As the battlefield has expanded and fronts and lines have grown together, the invading Linepithema humile have encountered their own diaspora, and strangely still recognises and treats them as kindred even when they have been separated by continents for over a century. These peaceful reunions, however, may end once the armies have vanquished all other competition.
Wednesday 10 August 2016
lying down with lions
รons after the dispatching of the woolly mammoths, sabre-toothed tigers and Neanderthals but too far removed from mankind’s driving the whales and buffalos to the point of extinction (and sadly too late for the passenger-pigeon), a new paradigm emerged for man’s relationship to Nature, captured by some enterprising toy-makers and some US presidential myth-making. Most are familiar with the lore behind Teddy’s bear, how in 1902 whilst on a domestic safari US president and avid hunter Theodore Roosevelt nobly pardoned a frightened bear—whereas behind the myth, sanitised like the received versions of fairy-tales, the account is not so cuddly.
A guide had captured a rather mangy sow and tied her to a tree to give Roosevelt the honour of shooting her. Roosevelt did decline, believing shooting such a poor prize to be beneath him, and instead ordered that the poor creature be put out of her misery. The guide disembowelled the bear and later the hunting party dined on bear steak. Gruesome as it was, marketers saw an opportunity after the cartoon depicting the moment of Roosevelt’s clemency was widely circulated and produced the teddy bear, marking the first time a formerly ferocious and parallel creature (menacing and sufficient unto themselves like lions, yetis or wolves) was tamed in plush-form. With self-assured supremacy, the careers of these separate and competing members atop of their respective food-chains were now at the pleasure and pardon of the great white hunter. Not realising the endurance of their idea, manufacturers feared that the craze would disappear with Roosevelt and tried to capitalise on the ascendency of William Howard Taft and oddly again with an animal that ended up being eaten. After the election, Taft was treated to a congratulatory banquet in Atlanta, Georgia where he was served an enormous opossum the size of today’s turkeys. Re-enforced on his victory-lap, Taft was presented numerous taxidermy and plush “Billy Possums,” the industry tried to launch a new craze to supplant the teddy bear that represented the old-guard of the Republican Party.
