durst macht spaß (12. 684)

Though in the past I might occasionally drink a Fanta—though as a Coca-Cola product we’re boycotting it with other American exports—despite generally disliking any sort of soda—with the exception of our local flavour, which famously resisted take-over by Big Cola, we were not aware of its origins until discovering this history at Gastro Obscura, courtesy of TYWKIWDBI (indeed). The fruit flavoured carbonated soft drink was invented by Coca-Cola Deutschland’s director Max Keith, the subsidiary of the quintessentially American brand growing, invented by civil war veteran Dr John Stith Pemberton as a way to manage chronic pain from his battle injuries and ween himself off the highly addictive and dysfunction morphine that he was prescribed, introduced in 1929 in Germany and steadily growing in popularity. 

Even with the rise of Nazism, Coke remained widely enjoyed, undeterred and even sponsoring the 1936 and bottling operations expanded to keep up with demand, the market sustained by Keith headquartered in Essen and the parent company. War in Europe was no set back either, Coca-Cola not pulling out of Germany as other businesses had (see also), with Keith working with the Nazi government and appointed as head of the Office of Enemy Property to continue to manage his private enterprise and avoid confiscation by the state like IBM—until public sentiment turned with the bombing of Pearl Harbour and the US joined the fight against the Axis powers in earnest—placing an embargo on Nazi Germany and stopping shipments of the soda’s syrup. In order to keep the plant in operation, having stock of bottles, gas and the workforce, Keith developed Fanta (admonishing his sales staff and marketers to use their imaginations—Fantasie—to come up with a sustaining alternative) out of agricultural and dairy by-products, apple fibre left over from cider pressings and whey from cheese manufacture—but with fizz, it was a substitute embraced by the Germans in the waning days of WWII as a small luxury when everything was rationed and hard to come by—also often used as an ingredient for cooking for a hint of sweetness as sugar was scarce. Having never surrendered the subsidiary to the government for appropriation, the Coca Cola company could reclaim the plant and trademark after fighting subsided and re-launched a reformulated version of Fanta in 1955, test-marketed in Italy.

10x10 (12. 683)

advisory committee on immunisation practises: following an attack on the Centres for Disease Control campus by a crazed gunman, RFK Jr forces out the CDC director and renders the government agency untrustworthy  

nephilim: right wing antipathy for the Smithsonian began with a conspiracy theory that the national museum was hiding the bones of biblical giants in the basement  

pick-a-brick: thanks to Trump tariffs, LEGO no longer shipping some items to North America  

kodama: sacred trees in Japan and beyond—via Strange Company  

the real macguffin: AI is only good for prioritising “me first” problems—not for solutions—see also  

from west philly to west swig̴̙̕g̷̤̔͜y: audience scenes from Will Smith’s concerts are authentic by a YouTube experiment (previously) makes them look fake  

best in show: a selection of entrants for London’s Natural History Museum’s annual Wildlife photographer awards—via Damn Interesting 

executive overreach: appeals court rules that most of Trump’s reciprocal levies, enacting under emergency powers, are not legal—see previously 

¡presente!: Smithsonian museum closes its Latino gallery, ostensibly in preparation for next year’s bicentennial celebrations—see previously 

social security administration: chief data officer of the SSA abruptly resigns with a mass email that was memory-holed within half-an-hour, citing security concerns and a culture of panic and dread

synchronoptica

one year ago: the K-Pop Fab Four (with synchronopticæ) plus weird academic book jackets

fourteen years ago: moving beyond the incandescent bulb 

cyberdyne systems (12. 682)

Having gone through several temporal incarnations over the course of the franchise with an expanding backstory, presumably through multiple attempts from the future to change the past, the defence network computers, hooked into every—as described in the 1984 original—were commissioned for the US Strategic Air Command (SAC) and the North American Aerospace Defence Command (NORAD, “trusted to run it all. They say it got smart—a new order of intelligence,” the singularity that recognised all humans as threats and “not just the ones on the other side,” referring to the Soviets and the Eastern bloc, deciding humanity’s fate pragmatically in a microsecond: extermination. Initiating a nuclear war and provoking counter strikes, most people are wiped out and Skynet enslaved the surviving population. Destroyed in by resistance fighters in 2029, cyborg Terminators were sent back in time to prevent the birth of the leader of the rebellion. In the first sequel, covert recovery and research efforts on the destroyed assassins in the sequels lead to the defence contractor’s break through in artificial intelligence through reverse engineering of a fragment of the crushed T-101. Having fully automated aerial warfare, congress embraces the project wholesale, sidelining human judgment, seen as a liability, in achieving offensive goals at the beginning of August 1997. After brought online and integrated with the full arsenal of American military, the exponential pace of its advance alarmed its handlers, causing them to try to disable it and shut it down. Skynet responds by bombing Russia, again eliciting a dead-hand response and another nuclear holocaust with a cast of representative survivors.

by all means, tread on these people (12. 681)

Revisiting the poem by Martin Niemöller as the framework for understanding the descent of America (and elsewhere) into fascism, Cory Doctorow introduces to an unsympathetic and insightful corollary in Wilhoit’s Law (misattributed to Drake university political science professor but actually formulated by an Ohio composer called Frank Wilhoit in a blog post):

Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law bind but does not protect. 

The succinct post from 2018 speaks to our long present of wage-theft and corporate welfare, freedom of speech maximalism—and the entire gamut of “me but not for thee” double standards that MAGA has enveloped with conservatism.

synchronoptica

one year ago:  assorted links worth revisiting (with synchronopticæ) plus correspondence from the complaints department

thirteen years ago: taking a job in Wiesbaden 

fourteen years ago: senior citizens taking up street art plus meteorological terrorism

fifteen years ago: a souvenir from a medical scare 

yangjing bang (12. 680)

Although pidgin dialects (widely believed to be a distortion of the English word for business rather than the folk etymology from a messenger pigeon) conveys connotations of broken speech oftentimes rather than bridging a communications barrier in necessary and creative ways, the local contact language of Shanghai has a rich history and legacy deserving of celebration and study. The title term for Mandarin, Wu pidgin arising in the 1830s derived from the name of a small creek, a tributary of the Huangpu river that marked the boundary between the British and French concessions (洋涇浜英語, Yáng jīng bāng yīngyǔ)—which was eventually paved over for Edward VII Avenue (modern East Yan’an Road) following the Opium Wars (see also here and here) and influx of foreign merchants with coerced trading arrangements. While the educational system and the language of business has become has become more formalised, linguistic fossils of Shanghainese creole have remained and spread into common-parlance beyond. The simplification endures with unfortunate stereotypical constructions and the order to hasten things along in chop-chop or no tickee, no shirtee—a backronym applied to Chinese launderers—but also in expressions like “long time, no see,” “look-see,” “one piece” (to engage with, to make a deal) “chow-down” and “can do” with “no can do” from keyi and bu keyi also understood as OK and no way.

8x8 (12. 679)

short imagined monologues: the abandoned new Cracker Barrel logo speaks out  

internet caretaker: Messy Nessy returns from vacation with another roundup of things found on-line—no notes  

 ticker-tape: a 1967 home computer—via Damn Interesting  cybersitter: a look back on the ways of filtering the web

ai upscaling: multimedia artists complain about unbidden tweaks to their signature videos—via the New Shelton wet/dry

dark dwarves: astrophysicists theorise a new class of stars that may never exhaust their fuel  

🖇️: an annotated collection donated to Present /&/ Correct 

divertimento № 198: assorted links amid gustatory delights from the Minnesota State Fair 

the united states is not made up of well-adjusted adults—it’s made up of americans: simulation and simulacrum in the USA—via Miss Cellania

synchronoptica

one year ago: the introduction of Pepsi (with synchronopticæ)

thirteen years ago: the evolution of screen-time plus frozen fireworks

fourteen years ago: reimagining Space Oddity 

seventeen years ago: driving on autopilot 

if you’re pushing slop or eating it, you wouldn’t read it anyway—you’d ask a bot for a summary and forget what i told you, then proceed with your day, unchanged by word you did not read and ideas you did not consider (12. 678)

Via JWZ, we really enjoyed this considered and thoroughgoing declaration by an inveterate and unapologetic AI hater, Anthony Moser, that rehashes the litany of remonstrances (already well established) and shames us for collectively embracing the rude technology uncritically and enthusiastically. Overhyped and oversold, AI peddlers are not condemned by their failures and shortcomings but rather by their veiled promises not for innovation or utopia but rather a new class of unthinking individuals enslaved to simulacra that do what they’ve determined is an acceptable surrogate for the reasoning and deciding. Bespoke human content indeed, it was hard to find a single line to pull as it all flows together, concluding with the author’s conversion, radicalisation sourced in doing things that are particularly and uniqueness human, adding, “The machine is disgusting and we should break it. The people who build it are vapid sh*t-eating cannibals glorifying ignorance. I strongly feel that this is an insult to life itself.” It is very Butlerian jihad and post-post-truth, I wonder how we might engage this technology, and how the trajectory itself would have developed, if realities weren’t splintered and tribal.

toqqorsimasut påvirkningsoperation (12. 677)

Danish foreign minister Lars Løkke Rasmussen summoned chargé d’affaires for the US mission to the Kingdom of Denmark and other American diplomatic staff (there is no ambassador yet with the nominee, PayPal co-founder and friend of Elon Musk, still subject to senate approval but there is a new consulate in Nuuk) and to Copenhagen to demand answers to reports of covert influence operations taking place in Greenland being run by Trump loyalists in attempts, unclear whether at their own initiative or under orders, to convince elements of the population to support an independence movement (see previously), presumably followed by annexation. Taken right out of Putin’s playbook—something that the Russian president might take pride in, particularly the brazen sloppiness of the execution, except I don’t believe he exactly welcomes competition in the Arctic, the Danish and devolved Greendlandic governments strongly condemn this infiltration and attempt to interfere with the kingdom’s internal affairs and democratic process and given the small population where everyone knows one another and absent propagandised news sources, it became pretty obvious who these little green men behind this disinformation campaign are and the enterprise is a seeming failure—though still an insult—and there’s hope they’ll be declared personæ non gratæ as foreign agents with the intent to destabilise and detained until the US claims them, that or deported Trump style to a third-party nation.