and i would have gotten away with it too, if it weren’t for you meddling kids

Exactly one month after the addled accusation that the former US president was wire-tapping Dear Leader during the campaign, it is beginning to make sense—although it’s just another diversionary-tacit—how the baselessness was defended by characterising news as fake “but the leaks are real.”
When the intelligence service conduct surveillance on foreign agents—it being well established that America spies on friend and foe alike—sometimes, often American parties in on the conversation are intercepted in the process. In all cases the identities of the speakers of this collaterally collected conversation is duly redacted in the transcription and are anonymised. Requesting to reveal a name—with justification and truly on a need-to-know basis—is called unmasking. The then US national security director—and it’s impossible to find a reporting source that does not couch the interview with editorial—acknowledged the procedural jargon and protocols while denying any political motivation or leaking any of the intelligence over-reach to the press. This refutation seems perfectly plausible since Dear Leader’s paranoia and continuous fugue state had already confirmed everyone’s suspicions without the need for leaking anything.

confederation

To invoke Article V—not to be confused Article L, in the context of the US federal government is to trigger that process whereby the constitution is amended, designed purposefully to be hard to do and reflective of universal values and not subject to the caprices of demagoguery.
Chillingly, as Brendan O’Connor files for Fusion, last summer saw a gathering of legislators and billionaire lobbyists amid the forced atmosphere of Colonial Williamsburg, Virginia for a twisted sort of a model UN that yielded the debate and passage of three trial amendments. In this instance, the convention called for fiscal restraint (the balanced-budget amendment), federal term limits and the end of the estate (death) tax, but it was just an experiment with members attesting to a wide-ranging and ambitious agenda.  This convention was also illustrative of how deeply entrenched influence-peddlers have become and how fragile progressive democracies have become in the face of gerrymandering and ballot-stuffing.

digital foundry or prototype

In the context of debates on the privacy and over-reach of contemporary facial-recognition technologies, Tedium takes a look back to when teaching machines to read—that is recognise text that was also contoured for human eyes (as opposed to bar-codes)—was the hurdle to vaunt. Aptly, it was the offices of Reader’s Digest that first employed optical character recognition (OCR) in 1954—not for skimming the abridged versions for the busy reader—but rather to manager their subscribers’ data.
The prototype was invented two years earlier in the attic workshop of a tinkerer who called it “Gismo.” As the idea spread, a need for industry standards arose and type-face designers had to make a departure from the quiver of fonts that printers used, sourced from medieval scripts, and designed a character set that could be easily interpreted by all eyes and avoided ambiguity. As the visual acuity of machines has greatly increased (although there are still notable hang-ups) along with reading comprehension, we are not restricted to a certain font family and can be expressive with materials fit for consumption by electronic or biological minds, but for legacy hardware, such typefaces are kept around—for instance on the raised digits on a credit card. The inventor, David Hammond Shepard, also designed the latter numeric font called Farrington B and devised the automated telephone answering tree, interactive voice response technology.

science, not silence

Home to one of the largest concentration of experts in the world due to its proximity to the research facilities at CERN and other international institutions that support and promote the sciences, Geneva will be host to a protest rally on 22 April, Earth Day, with the scientific community marching against anti-science rhetoric and “alternative facts,” first gushed by Dear Leader’s majordomo in defence of views antithetical to reality.
With an inclusive message, the organisers are not calling the event a political one (despite the wanton disregard that some are broadcasting) but rather an opportunity for a course-correction in the spreading attitude that rejects science and objective authenticities and to leverage the reputation of learning—which is wholly non-partisan and a demonstration that we can all get behind.  The stakes are too high not to.

the rock or europa point

Residents of British territory of Gibraltar have doubtless seen more contentious times under the regime of Francisco Franco when the border was blockaded and trade suspended by a series of embargoes and transit was not normalised until 1985 and of course when it was captured as a naval base during the War of Spanish Succession in the early sixteenth century.
Having asserted their continued link to Great Britain on multiple occasions and no desire to rejoin Spain, the majority of Gibraltarians voted to remain part of the European Union. Though Madrid has given no indication of a change in policy or posture towards the exclave it claims as its own, the formal triggering of Article 50 is inspiring some rather baffling, hostile remarks from the metropolitan care-taker government, including the foreign minister arguing that Gibraltar is not for sale or subject to bargaining and comparisons to the conflict in the Falklands

how about a nice game of chess?

Whilst Dear Leader says he will handle the other Dear Leader with or without China’s assistance—awkwardly ahead of the visit by the Chinese president, North Korea, Gizmodo speculates, may have inadvertently revealed its ability to upgrade a fission reaction into a hydrogen bomb.
Having the technical prowess to miniaturise a nuclear device to the extent it could be mounted on a ballistic missile is another question but the reality remains that the distance from Seoul to the Demilitarised Zone is less than that between Washington, DC and Baltimore and North Korea already has the ability to seriously damage the capital to the south with conventional weapons. What do you think? After witnessing how other dictatorships have been selectively toppled with the help of American statecraft, North Korea would never abandon—nor fully disclose (an alternative narrative to be sure) its nuclear programme not just for the destructive, retaliatory potential but because it is a bargaining chip—at least in the regime’s eyes as the revolutions that were suffered and permitted involved no burgeoning nuclear powers.

docklands

Taking a stand against the gentrification of its old wharf and shipyard—which is already seeing developers transforming the area with posh hotels and restaurants—local caretaker Peter Ernst Coolen has designs on the massive ensemble of abandoned warehouses on the north side of the IJ that formed the Netherlands Dock and Shipbuilding Company with plans to create the world’s largest street art museum on the outskirts of Amsterdam. The venue is ideal and Coolen hopes to open the museum next summer—and although not as expansive, it reminds me of the old slaughterhouse behind the train station in Wiesbaden and few other local spots adorned with graffiti.