hey nineteen—no we can’t talk at all

The rule invoked to silence Senator Elizabeth Warren’s dissenting view on Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III’s appointment to the office of US Attorney General has been rarely used and was codified into law a century after Thomas Jefferson first anticipated the need for mechanism to maintain order when a heated debate escalated to physical violence.
The parliamentary proceedings that the Founding Father drafted was meant to curtail deliberations on the subject of abolition and following the fist-fight (over the subject of lynching) that spurred formal adoption in 1902 states, “No Senator in debate shall, directly or indirectly, by any form firm of words impute to another Senator or to other Senators any conduct or motive unworthy or unbecoming a Senator… No Senator in debate shall refer offensively to any State of the Union…” Of course, this atmosphere of congeniality precludes debate on the floor and so has been sparingly called on. Warren’s rebuke could only be muffled by this legal fiction because the nominee happened to be an incumbent senator, who also happened to be denied a federal judgeship for being racially insensitive and his civil rights record and potential menace to social justice. The excerpts from a petition from civil rights icon Coretta Scott King from three decades hence that Senator Warren (whom Dear Leader still calls Pocahontas) tried to cite only recently came to light as the receipt of Ms King’s letter failed to enter it formerly into the congressional record. Now that Sessions is no longer a fellow senator, Warren is free to say anything she pleases about him. If we are to adhere to the rule book this closely, note well Rule XIX also provides, “Former Presidents of the United States shall be entitled to address the Senate upon appropriate notice to the Presiding Officer who shall thereupon make the necessary arrangements.”

flashback friday

Keen-eyed followers have noticed that former official White House photographer, drawing on his extensive archive of presidential and diplomatic moments, seems to time his posts in juxtaposition to what the current court jester is steam-rolling or ranting about.

Scharfsichtige Anhänger haben bemerkt, dass der ehemalige offizielle Weiße Haus-Fotograf, der auf seinem umfangreichen Archiv aus Präsidenten- und Diplomatischen Momenten aufbaut, seine Beiträge in der Gegenüberstellung zu dem, was der jetzige Hofnarrer zerstört oder beklagt, zeitweilig zu sehen scheint.

sheep’s clothing

I suppose I never fully worked out what the meaning behind “corporate raider” entailed until listening to this interview regarding the degeneration of an American factory town whose story runs counter to the conventional narratives and incriminations. Like the bankrupt casinos that line the shores of New Jersey, ghost malls and abandoned resorts that sprout up like mushroom but yield diminishing returns until their profitability has waned too far, a corporate raider would swoop in to extort a windfall for himself or on behalf of others that was unsustainable for the target business and/or the surrounding community.
In this case, much like the Vikings with their Danegeld (read ransom), an individual bought up a controlling share of the manufacturing operation that was an anchor for the town and made himself a nuisance to corporate governance. After undermining the company’s executive functions and being generally disruptive to business for a sufficient amount of time to cow the board of directors, the corporate raider graciously offered to be bought out—at a profit to himself that meant the company had to sell off some assets to be able to afford to end this coercion. All tragic downfalls are a collusion of several vectors and no two scenarios are alike, but once the company betrayed weakness in being willing to negotiate with an extortionist, others instantly perked up at the signal and homed in on a new victim. What do you think? This sort of capitalism is very different from the notion that greatness was somehow stolen from America by the Chinese rather than by our own rapine.

nobody puts baby in a corner

A German network aired Wag the Dog the other day and I think that the film has enjoyed a better reception here than it did in the States because there was a greater separation to digest life imitating art than there was for domestic audiences.
The satire about spin and fake news premiered a month before the Clinton-Lewinski scandal and the subsequent conflict in Kosovo was too close for comfort and suffered for its vision and honest assessment of what propaganda that the media might be capable of. Of course the elect of Hollywood could not be persuaded to be the mouth-pieces for this regime who is instead heir to poorly produced adaptations of Ayn Rand novels—subversively the book that Johnny Castle tells Frances Houseman to stop reading in Dirty Dancing was The Fountainhead—or the weird series of documentaries from the Chief of Public Enlightenment, whose latest work Torchbearer is an odd romping march of clashes of cultures through the millennia that squarely assigns all misfortune and the collapse of civilizations on societies growing wayward from the norm.

unit of account

Having recently been informed that the Inca reckoned the passage of time against the duration it took to cook a potato made me reshuffle my own ponderings on how we measure time. Of course, the size of a potato should be taken into consideration as well as the time it would take to boil would vary a lot between the Amazon basin or at the mountain citadel of Machu Picchu—which is a much different form of time-dilation than what Albert Einstein worked with. Since I began wearing this little snitch on my wrist, I’ve noticed that I am becoming quite obsessed with the different metrics that track my rest and wakefulness and hardly ever look at the watch face any more, though always have been an avid walker and flaneur. It’s as if I can tell what time it is by the pedometer count and whether I’m a-pace, ahead or lagging behind the typical day. Are you driven to get your steps in? I am motivated by the little feeling of accomplishment and conditioned message of praise. Living so much of our lives virtually, augmented and in a sense either accelerated or outside of time altogether, it’s strange that we can still find routine and patterns in unmediated data, cues that’s processed and collated echelons above in ways we don’t understand.

6x6

dilithium: four-dimensional “time” crystals are a reality

arboreal: a vertical residential forest tower to be cultivated in China, like this one in Milan

wir sind die roboter: grand tour of the automaton exhibit at the London Science Museum

one-armed bandit: this bit of moral-panic and malfeasance that the casinos can’t counter is an apt metaphor, via Super Punch

utopía: a profile of a rather congested island paradise

worth-1000: Merriam-Webster dictionaries goes animated with a Giphy presence, via the Daily Dot  

possible, probably and preferable

The always engaging BLDGBlog introduces us to rogue librarian Megan Prelinger—co-founder of the eponymous independent media archive—and author of book that explores how the space race was narrated and to an extent sold by the vintage advertising and promotional materials of ærospace contractors and computer companies to the same degree our aspirations and trepidations were captured by science-fiction. What do you think? Industrial futurists would naturally offer a vision where they were equipped to meet demand but I think it also speaks volumes about contemporary scientific literacy and curiosity.
The steampunk airship depicted in this 1960s back-cover magazine ad by Erik Nitsche is an homage to how the company got its start in a New Jersey shipyard as an electric boat corporation, purveyors of submarines and torpedoes, infamous already at the beginning of the twentieth century for selling armaments to opposing navies at war. Be sure to explore Geoff Manaugh’s blog at the link up top for more architectural conjecture, urban speculation and landscapes of the future.

the new colossus

In 1940, the Council Against Intolerance in America commissioned artist Emma Bourne to produce a map (with no state boundaries) to illustrate how the US was a nation of migrants. The red banners show broadly where various groups of people settled and mark their religious and ethnic backgrounds and there’s a call-out box crediting immigrants in the arts and industry (though telling of attitudes towards Asia and Africa and very euro-centric).
The impetus to publish the map back then was the isolationist stance that the US was taking to the escalating situation in Europe and scapegoating of refugees. The title refers to the poem that Emma Lazarus penned to raise funds to construct the pediment for the Statue of Liberty that was otherwise a gift from France that of course concludes with the stanza:

“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”