with all the frills upon it

Not to attribute any redeeming qualities to the regime’s First Trumpet, but it turns out that while serving as assistant US trade representative for media and public affairs under the administration of Bush II, he volunteered as assistant to the Easter Bunny multiple times. This fact, I think, makes it all the more incredulous that no one thought to make any arrangements for the annual White House Easter Egg Roll until the last minute—which makes me a little sad that some kids will get to miss out on the experience but also a little gleeful that Dear Leader and his repulsive family don’t get another platform, especially on the back of a holiday.

moab or mopping-up

Whilst it is unclear whether the very un-surgical and indiscriminately destructive bombing raid on Cosplay Caliphate caves on the Pakistan-Afghanistan border that Dear Leader authorised was just another costly (that initial figure of three hundred fourteen million dollars was not the price of the single operation but rather the entire arsenal of Massive Ordnance Air Blasts and the Massive Ordnance Penetrator, the untested bunker-busting bombs that have three times the explosives on what was dropped on Thursday) but hollow publicity-stunt, it would do us all some good to stop to reflect on the past four decades of history in the land that’s been called on multiple occasions the graveyard of empires. Fearing the growth of Soviet influence in that country, the US Central Intelligence Agency (under the codename Operation Cyclone) financed and supported the Jihadi resistance to communist ideology and gave rise to the mujahideen directly and its cadet-branches indirectly. Many argue that it was the expense of carrying out the fight to retain a toe-hold in Afghanistan that bankrupted the Soviet Union and precipitated its dissolution. After the success of their proxy-war, the US quickly shifted its interests elsewhere and this sudden abandonment allowed more radical jihadi elements to take control—creating al Qaeda, the Taliban and successor groups.

sickbay

A self-funded team in Philadelphia won the international X Prize Tricorder consumer medical competition, under the leadership of an innovator and emergency-room doctor whose only prior invention was a cotton candy machine that he made with his siblings during grade school. Like on the franchise, the hand-held scanner can diagnose and interpret multiple health conditions and monitor vital signs. The prototype could revolutionise home health care and bring treatment and prevention to places under-served by medical professionals. I still think there’s ample need for an Emergency Medical Hologram, however.

autocad

Via Laughing Squid, we learn that there’s another tool in Google’s sandbox (an advance on this previous version) that’s like an autocomplete, spell-check feature for crude sketches. Whether or not one has any talent for drawering it can be arduous and awkward to try to trace something on screen, but this experimental, predictive algorithm (which gets smarter the more its used) delivers really polished illustrations and icons.

be sure to wear flowers in your hair

This summer, as the always interesting Collectors’ Weekly informs, will be fiftieth anniversary of the Summer of Love, orchestrated by an ad-hoc council of advocates and artistic entrepreneurs, in San Francisco. In order to appreciate how much that event transformed the city, they reach back a decade more to view the various districts and neighbourhoods through the insiders’ travel guide by columnist Herb Caen, who pierced through the general mid-century squareness to find the emergent and incubating haunts of counter-culture.

the overview effect

An advocate for independent space exploration launched a weather balloon into the upper reaches of the stratosphere to send Dear Leader a missive and hopefully some perspective—though sadly the message is over the heads of him and his supporters who’ve been steadfast no matter what outrage is unleashed.
Though seemingly discourteous at first or a squandered opportunity “Look at that, you son of a bitch” is actually a rather poignant quote from astronaut Edgar Mitchell, expressed when he first went in orbit and experienced the overview effect, a shift in awareness when one hangs naked in the void of space and sees how tiny and fragile the Earth is. Mitchell, after his moment of awaking said that he wanted to grab a politician by the scruff of the neck and drag him a quarter of a million miles out and say, “Look at that, you son of a bitch!”