crony capitalism

As the nihilism of the vapid economic policy and empty pandering of the Trump regime has teetered like a petulant toddler to alienate US allies and is eliciting belligerent responses in kind (the palaver that’s usually reserved—paternally or otherwise—for those suffering under a tyrant whose not to be understood as a metonym for the country or the people under his rule), it’s worth noting that while punishing tariffs are to be immediately imposed on Mexican, Canadian and EU steel and aluminium exports (in order to punish China for depressing steel prices, though the US imports little from them) there are significant concessions and accommodations being made for the world’s second biggest aluminium exporter, a company called Rusal under the control of a Russian oligarch for whom sanctions are pending.
Though unwilling to fully abdicate their duty, the Senate went against Trump’s wishes by imposing new sanctions on several influential business magnates and their enterprises in April 2018, the legislature betrayed a weakness by compromising and offering a transitional period of six months in order for the oligarch to divest himself of his stakes in the aluminium producer and reorganise his businesses, giving American clients more time to get in compliance with the terms of the embargo. Meanwhile, the Trump syndicate is still grifting at the expense of the tax-payers, refusing to recognise a conflict-of-interest for being willing to swap the Republic and world order for his personal gain and there’s been little room for mediation on matters that the US has rubbished unilaterally—like the Iran deal. This trade war will escalate into a full-fledged one if we are not careful and continue to allow both ends to play against the middle.

input/output

We found it to be a pretty joyous viewing experience to see a group of spectators for a kinetic art display transform into exhausted (and a bit dirty) but inspired guides for a travelling expedition by Polish creator Karina Smigla-Bobinski.
Namesake of pioneering computer scientist Ada Lovelace (previously), the artist likens her freely floating helium balloon studded with charcoal spikes that leaves a tracing of its interactions on the walls, floors and ceilings (plus the audience) of its singular gallery to the way Lovelace and other computer engineers, like Vannevar Bush, came to understand algorithms and networks. There is a record of interaction and the membrane and its behaviour is bound by the rules of physics and the way the participants try to influence it but there’s a significant chasm in intention, result and record that’s worth reflecting on. Learn more at the link up top.

alwato

Via one of the usual suspects, we find ourselves acquainted with the life’s work of nineteenth century American abolitionist and futurist Stephen Pearl Andrews, an early advocate for a living-wage who proposed that workers receive man-hour credits in exchange for their labour—based on difficulty or repugnance of their job—rather than a salary based on how much the employer thought he could exploit the employee—with his outline and synopsis of Universology and Alwato (1871).
Similar to the idea of consilience popularised by biologist and educator E. O. Wilson, Universology’s aim was the revelation of the unity of all scientific disciplines and how everything knowable emanating from an unbroken chain of events, traceable back to the beginning of time. In as much as Andrews was a champion for workers’ rights, he was also an anarchist and rejected the interference of the church and state in human affair and established a short-lived utopian colony in New York City called the Unity Home, regulated by the idea of the Pantarchy—as opposed to the patriarchy, being one the first Americans exposed to the writings of Karl Marx whilst regrouping in England having been chased out of Texas for his anti-slavery sympathies. Though Andrews’ fundamental ideas many have been repackaged and resold with new distribution rights in various different context, it seems no one appreciated much the philosophic language Andrews found necessary to construct to disburden words the weight of past associations and etymology, called Alwato, Universal Speech—not that Interlingua, Esperanto and others didn’t have the formation of an ideal society as their raison d’être, it’s just who ever heard of such a language. Learn more by visiting the links up top.

7x7

true blue: synthetic, petroleum-based dyes go into a billion pairs of jeans a year but one company is committing to natural, indigo denim, via Things Magazine

scyphozoa: Ernst Haeckel’s (previously) exquisite jelly fish

through a different lens: a collection of the photography of Stanley Kubrick

electronic engineers’ master volume ii: vintage 1985 tech company logos and resources from Marchin Wichary, who also sets them to a screen-saver—via Coudal Partners’ Fresh Signals

notability, fame, notoriety: watch Time magazine create its cover for the Age of the Drones edition

hela: the immortal Henrietta Lacks (previously here and here) is honoured in the US National Portrait Gallery

bell-bottom blues: voice-over artist Ken Nordine narrates some trippy Levi’s advertisements from the 1970s