stay bronze pony boy or the telescreens have no off switch

Originally the missions of consulates and embassies were distinct—the consuls not simply being an outpost of the chief ambassador, but while the embassy represented the foreign-relations interests of the sending and the host nations, consulates were established in order to champion the business and economic interest of their credentialing nation-state.
Arguably there’s been quite a bit of mission-creep and the institutions have taken on overlapping roles—and fighting for the interest of domestic businesses abroad might ought not to be held to the same standards which govern diplomacy. I’ve only chanced to be in depths of the compound in Frankfurt once and could well imagine what activities might be carried-out in those labyrinthine, subterranean corridors. According to the latest tranche of documents released by Wikileaks, the US Central Intelligence Agency used the facility as a base of operations for surveillance and subterfuge for all of Europe, the Middle East and Africa (DE/EN). It’s not as if we hadn’t been warned multiple times before, and these revelations about the spy-base plus the UK’s collusion were among the few concrete details (also demonstrating that Russian hackers didn’t have a monopoly on silly code-names with Brutal Kangaroo, malware hiding in digital images, or Weeping Angel, fake off buttons on snooping gadgets) in page after page of tools for prising vulnerabilities and making sure those wounds are kept open once on the open market and certainly would confer economic advantages.

repeal and replace or never bet against the house

Someone observed in the days leading up to the awe-inspiringly awful Republican party plan to eviscerate the Affordable Care Act and instead give the uninsured and the uninsurable public a plan that only exacerbates every single, line-by-line, complaint that the party levelled against its sponsors and awards the companies that run the insurance exchanges, that if it were just re-branded as Trump Care™ or Big Orange™ with no changes to the structure and protocols, all involved would walk away reasonably happy.
Having had six years to stew over the act’s passage despite every effort to destroy it and still failing to have a contingency at the ready when their chance came, the controlling cadre of law-makers were compelled to fast-track some bit of garbage legislation with no one to stop them. Indeed, who in fact knew health care could be this easy?  There is a year-long moratorium on reproductive care and support for new parents because—why not?  With many Americans left in a quite precarious state, bereft of a measure of security and peace-of-mind, substituting subsidising health-care and making insurers less prone to discriminate over less than optimal wagers with tax credits that are overwhelmingly in favour of the regressively better-off is not a tenable surrogate and only ensures that the poor will stay poor and those preventable ailments of poverty will remain with generational consequences.

brave little toaster

At a Geneva automotive showcase, Volkswagen unveiled its autonomous, self-driving concept vehicle that’s being called Sedric (an abbreviation of “SElf-DRIving Car”) whose boxy chassis is being characterised as looking like an angry toaster bearing down on traffic. I find its appearance to be pretty endearing but I don’t know if I could adjust to being chauffeured around on a comfy sofa, the cockpit stripped of all controls. If I wanted that experience, it’s readily available at little to no cost and it’s called the bus. In any case, I would imagine that the notion of car-ownership will undergo a pretty radical change not long after these first prototypes are rolled-out.

june bride oder baumbastik

Amusing Planet has a nice profile and appreciation of the Bridegroom’s Oak (die Bräutigamseiche) of the Dodauer Forest of Eutin—north of Lübeck, a tree with its own postal code (Postleitzahl) and recipient of human correspondence and secret-keeper.
While the tree’s origins might be conflated with myth and the message of missionaries, the tradition of letter-writing can be traced back to historical star-crossed lovers. A forester’s daughter and the son of a Leipziger chocolatier used the oak as a letter-drop cite for their liaisons—to their parents’ initial disapproval. Later the parents relented and the pair was wed under the trees boughs in June 1891. Their fame spread by word of mouth and people began writing to the tree in hopes of finding true love. Letters deposited in the tree’s trunk are open to public-inspection and several matches have been made over the years. The Bridegroom’s Oak was itself married to the Holy Ghost horse chestnut (die Himmelgeister Kastanie) in April of 2009—across Germany in the Ruhrgebiet near Düsseldorf. The two seem to be handling their long-distance relationship quite well.

backscattering

Apparently all those deputised to keep the US borders safe at boarding and departures ought to aspire to be as frisky and handsy as Dear Leader himself with the Transportation Security Administration implementing new, more invasive pat-down methods, as Boing Boing reports, that are so aggressively gratuitous that public-relations ombudsmen are already girding themselves for the coming raft of sexual assault cases.
The TSA also ought to be prepared for legal action on the part of the airlines whose experience was already made pretty awful and now even more so. There are far bigger battles to fight but at work we’re still contending with the knock-on effects of a sloppily worded civilian hiring freeze (plus a hierarchical farce that makes me see almost see why there might need to be such purges—though not carried out this way) and we find it the irony of ironies that among the few jobs that are automatically exempt are the Sexual Harassment/Assault Response and Prevention (SHARP) officers and unit victim advocates. I thought under Dear Leader’s at least that might be one annual, mandatory training we’d maybe get out of.

typeface, space-race

Previously, we’ve looked at the creative application of æsthetic principles to pull together a compre- hensive, “corporate” face for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration but we failed to realise that there was an entire movement throughout the 1970s behind it that marked the US federal government’s embrace of graphic design and style. One of Richard Nixon’s advisors, Leonard Garment, persuaded the president that support for the arts made for good politics and to establish a National Endowment for the Arts and the Humanities (the NEA and the NEH). The attention to presentation was championed by new cabinet appointee and chairperson Nancy Hawks, with the mandate that good design facilitated communication both between agencies and to the public that the government served. Good design also of course has an intrinsic value of its own and creates icons inseparable from the message and responsibilities of the office.

a modest proposal

The administration of Dear Leader, as Boing Boing informs, is apparently willing to separate children from their parents if apprehended trying to enter the US illegally as another arrow in his quiver to deter immigration.
According to leaked proceedings taken under advisement, children would be warehoused—either with relatives already residing in the country or with foster parents or failing that—as Dickensian street urchins, whilst their parents are locked up in detention centres, private prisons either contesting the grounds that they will be deported or await an asylum hearing. This could potentially mean separation from mothers and fathers for months or more likely years held in suspense. Child welfare services believe such trauma would have debilitating life-long effects, especially for very young children, even if those families willing to take in migrant children are the best parents in the world. Even the staunchest opponents to a liberal immigration policy must surely concede that conditions must be unimaginably wretched for families to risk everything to get into Dear Leader’s America and fifty thousand mothers and children have tried from election day up through the inauguration.

your mileage may vary

Via the forever fabulous Everlasting Blört comes this delightful promotional film from the American Petroleum Institute that illustrates the virtues of fuel-efficiency and ethical resource management through the conformist practises of the Martians in thrall to the great and powerful Ogg who pay the primitive Earthlings a visit, who despite their superior technology, don’t have infrastructure and public institutions worked out too well. This animated short by character designer Tom Oreb is from 1956 and for the time really highlights our ability to harness energy and develop new industries but it also demonstrates that we’ve all but stopped progressing, insofar as we’re still reliant on oil.