extra, extra

Teaming up with a pair of correspondents from the network’s finance desk, Janelle Shane (previously)—considering that one Chinese news agency looks posed to replace its anchors altogether with artificial intelligences (I wonder how the human anchor this tireless clone feels about making himself possibly redundant)—fed her neural network thousands of CNN headlines to see how it might reinterpret them and highlight trends that were otherwise invisible against all the noise.
The output was somewhat bleakly nihilistic and highlighted businesses behaving corruptly. Some of our favourites were:

Its iPhone Look it
Million do Regret
The US China Trade War is so Middle Class
The Best Way to Avoid Your Money

See the whole list and learn more about the methodology behind this and other experiments—with a lot more weirdness to discover—at the links above.

drawing board

We had encountered the proposal to put a triumphal ziggurat in Trafalgar Square beforehand but until now—thanks to Things magazine, we had not appreciated the whole scope and scale of London’s alternative monuments and transport plans. Visualised and superimposed over the modern city, the gallery contains rejected and rather fantastic architectural ideas like an elevated runway for a Westminster airport pitched in 1934 or the 1967 plans for monorail servicing central London. Check out the whole collection at the links above and discover more on the theme of unbuilt cities.

novemberpogrome

Acting on the pretext of the assassination of a Nazi Germany diplomat in Paris by a teenaged refugee of Polish-Jewish descent, and with mobs already worked into a furore over the commemoration of the failed putsch of 1923, on this night in 1938—five years after the Nazis overthrew the Weimar Republic (founded on the same date in 1918)—riots broke out across Germany and Austria with stormtroopers as well as German civilians engaged in plunder and violence against Jewish owned businesses, places of worship and homes.
Laws were already in place that excluded the Jewish population from engaging in social and political life, but Kristallnacht (so called after the shards of broken glass) became a turning point with the neighbours and the global community attending more closely to the horrors that people were capable of and how we can stand by and allow such things to happen. At least ninety-one people were killed overnight and over thirty-thousand individuals arrested and sent to concentration camps the next day in what Reichsminster of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda Joseph Goebbels characterised to the world press as “spontaneous manifestations of indignation over the murder of Herr vom Rath”—the Paris-based diplomat by Herschel Grynszpan, whom were rumoured to have been lovers. The power of shame and insecurity are not to be underestimated either and usually result in foisting otherness on others.  This dread incitement precipitated in something far worse but also showed the world that stances of containment and appeasement were no longer tenable. 

nasty, brutish and short

Building off of a long tradition of social contracts and utilitarianism, philosopher John Rawls developed his original position hypothesis as a thought experiment in order to temper our thinking towards discourse and a way from a savage state of nature as the impetus for the polis and social conventions, introducing the heuristic tool of a “veil of ignorance” in order to gauge the morality and empathy of policy decisions.
Perhaps we do slide into anarchy but order and concord are not the consequence of chaos necessarily. Politicians and decision-makers, donning this veil, become blind to their place in the hierarchy and don’t know if they will fall into the category of haves or have-nots, until the veil is lifted, and would in theory make equitable decisions that maximises welfare for all, regardless of where they fall on the spectrum. One can immediately appreciate the urgency of justice and equanimity should one be weighing decisions with the insight of ignorance that disfavours or privileges the rights of the enslaved over slave-owners and vice versa.

throw-away society

Via Boing Boing, we learn that Collins Dictionary—edging out other runners-up including the complimentary plogging—has selected single-use as their word of the year (“WotY”), noting a four-fold increase in the frequency of the term applied to consumable, disposable products, usually plastic, whose unchecked proliferation are wrecking ecosystems and working their way up the food-chain since 2013. Hopefully that increase in print correlates with an increased public understanding and acknowledgement of how we’re rubbishing the planet. Stay tuned for more lexical superlatives as they are announced.

turizam

Rummaging through the archives—which is an always advisable activity—Things Magazine directs our attention to the Haludovo Palace hotel, an abandoned resort on the island of Krk. This swank, swinging Penthouse Adriatic Club casino was built in 1971 with the investment of the adult magazine founder Bob Guccione and maintained by a Yugoslav holding-company due to restrictions on foreign-ownership in the country. The magnate saw an opportunity to create a new, untrammelled playground for the jet-set but attendance was precipitously lower than expected and the venture went bankrupt the next year.
During the ethnic conflicts and wars for independence with the dissolution of the state, the hotel became a refugee camp and subsequently went through many owners until being fully left to wrack and ruin in 2001. Just last month, there was an announcement that a private investor would restore and revitalise the resort (samo na hrvatskom jeziku) which has a whole fresh set of comparison pictures from then and now.