over a barrel

Arguably emboldened by Dear Leader’s strange and strained whistle-stop tour of the centres of faith of the Abrahamic religions that unanimously positioned US policy and patronage squarely behind regimes that he didn’t come to lecture—code for not wanting to address the hypocrisies of diplomacy based solely on business interest and drag down negotiations with more rarefied talk, Saudi Arabia led others in the region in suspending relations and closing borders with Qatar.
The top US diplomat and former swaggering oil-man himself, despite the fact Qatar is host to the largest US military installation in the Middle East, assesses that this action will have little to no impact on the global war on terror. Tensions already existed between the Saudis and the Qataris over their allegiance with rebellious elements and Iran, whose oil reserves are seen as a match for the kingdom’s, but the timing seems pretty suspect after Dear Leader stomped all over a sectarian hornets’ nest—praising those Sunni majority nations willing to be franchisees of his brand and condemning Shi’a countries, though most perpetrators of terror to include the Cosplay Caliphate have had Saudi associations and have been of the Sunni persuasion—and the simultaneous decision to sell stock to Western investors in the kingdom’s national oil-drilling operation for the first time. Though Dear Leader’s attempt to discredit the world’s commitment to not destroy itself is a fitting failure, one wonders if that too wasn’t decided in concert somehow—in his mind only, as conspirators are not dolts, with a bit of insider-knowledge, which has now been elevated to a crime against humanity.

executive function or appeal to emotion

The outstanding NPR podcast Invisibilia (previously here and here and here) is back for a third season and opens with a rather arrestingly provocative two part episode that has too much on offer to effectively summarise blow-by-blow but really delivers a wallop in the form of an alternate way to view the nature of human emotions. Rather than an unconditioned reaction to outside stimuli, feelings might be the product of one’s brain continually assessing the body’s internal functions to make sure everything is working as it should be.
Instead of some finely calibrated and detailed status report on our various systems, the brain only makes a few distinctions spread out over all the organs—hunger, satisfaction, arousal and repulsion. Anything more, on a conscious level at least, would prove overwhelming and might even be beyond our mental capacities. These internal senses and their input are called interoceptions. Consider how one’s sense of sight is compartmentalised and far different than the illusion of continuous perception that we’re presented or how our brain directs the body to adjust the blood-pressure with one’s intention to stand. There’s quite a bit of housekeeping going on behind the scenes. These internal, primitive emotions become—following the somatic theory of evolutionary psychology, which was en vogue in the nineteenth century but has fallen out of favour, dismissed as being not far removed from the idea of bodily humours ruling our moods only to enjoy a very recent resurgence—magnified and informed by our experience and upbringing. Surely it would be hard to divorce oneself from the notion that fear and anxiety—and by extension, the positive experiences too—are not something intrinsically connected to the encounter or experience (and the dread or excitement of anticipating it) but rather the product of strongly cultural and idiomatic enforcement. Of course too that mode of thinking manifests itself extrinsically by framing situations with their culturally endorsed, emotional window-dressing. Regardless of the completeness of explanation for one’s temperament, it is a comfort to keep in the back of one’s mind that one’s emotional response is provisional and very much subject to change.

fromageries occitanes

On this day, as our faithful chronicler Doctor Caligali informs, among other things in the year 1070 according to turophile lore (a highly specific date), Roquefort cheese was accidentally invented when a shepherd stashed his noontime repast in one of the Combalou caves in order to pursue a fair maiden—or what have you. Returning to retrieve his lunch after the appellation d'origine contrôlée standard number of months for maturation, the ewe’s cheese had transformed into Roquefort, which perhaps came in handy after such a dalliance as clinical trials have shown that the mould in the cheese can combat gangrene and venereal diseases.

curation

Not the output of a machine-learning algorithm (check those out here, here, here and here) alone but rather a collaborative effort between human artist and robot that demonstrates that the two types of intelligences together are better than at odds, artist Isabel Kim’s Infinite Artwork Simulator project generates such absurdity precisely because the descriptions—for all their airs—strike one as perfectly plausible and something one could find attached to any item in a gallery or modern museum collection. Check out more of these formulaic recipes whose ingredients generally call for a pinch of something from pop culture, a bit of art history, a bit of cultural appropriation, plus something edgy to yield a useful blurb at Hyperallergic at the link above

star-crossed

A century after it was first conceived, the very personal tale of a forbidden romance between a human and an elf which the author struggled to complete over the span of his entire literary career, has been stitched together and edited by JRR Tolkien’s son and collaborator, Christopher, and is available as a stand-alone book. Set during the first age of Middle Earth and whose ill-fated love are alluded to as legend in other works, the mortal man Beren and the immortal elvish maiden Lúthien are faced with difficult choices, unsupportive parents asking the impossible and werewolves and is an allegory for Tolkien own difficult courtship. Though the project defied completion in Tolkien’s life time, the author’s burial plot that he shares with his wife Edith also bears the inscription Lúthien and Beren.

an inconvenient alternative

Due to revelations that you may have heard tell of, Al Gore’s sequel to his sobering, Academy Award-winning environmental documentary An Inconvenient Truth will be treated to a quick recut.
While the feature is being updated ahead of its postponed, late summer box-office release date to reflect Dear Leader’s decision to withdraw from the Paris Agreement, audiences in select cities across the US will be treated to free screenings of the current version of An Inconvenient Sequel. The brutish wrongheadedness of his woefully unpopular stance is reflective of a hypocritical, insincere romancing of the Rust Belt and jobs that cannot and will not be brought back (advanced, clean technologies are surely offering better paying careers and would have been more sustainable for communities had Dear Leader not forfeited that opportunity), even if the regime were genuine in its concern over them.

dreamtime stories

No—that’s not an incident of pareidolia nor even an example of an acheiropoieton that you’re seeing but rather an apartment complex in Melbourne, completed in 2015, called the “Portrait.”
Architects designed the façade of balconies to form the image, when viewed at a distance, of Beruk (Anglicised as William Barak) son of Bebejan who was the last traditional tribal elder (ngurungæta) of the aboriginal inhabitants, the Wurundjeri clan, of the lands that host the present-day metropolis. Barak, who died in 1903, dedicated his life to fighting for aboriginal social justice causes and was an important informant of his people’s folklore and mythology. Of course such a tribute has no pretensions of amending the grievous suffering that the Aborigines experienced because of European settlement but perhaps the edifice is at least edifying enough to inspire curiosity and move people not to just examine these darker chapters but also the heritage and culture of the population the portrait represents.