The Syria Bombing Unpacked, Only Ugly Gov. Buildings Allowed, the $6M "Art" Video, The First Town Started by a Freed Slave (The Five for 03/02/21)
Hey,
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“I hated The Bachelor story.” Everyone who told me this didn’t read it, which is totally cool. I don’t enjoy covering The Bachelor, and almost certainly never will again. But what’s happening right now with that stupid show is a bellwether for the rapid evolution of cancel culture. This is why I decided I couldn’t avoid covering it. If you missed that story, you can read it here.
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I’m amazed that a year into this thing, I haven’t had anyone unsubscribe in the last 10 months. I did have one reader upset over a single story I covered, but we hashed it out over (several thousand words of several) emails, and (to my delight) the person who offered the feedback still reads The Five.
One final note…if there’s one element of The Five I hang my hat on, it’s that the readership spans both sides of the political aisle, and after 65+ issues there still haven’t been any complaints of partisanship, which reinforces the two main reasons I write The Five.
Those reasons are:
In a world gone mad, there’s a need for reasonable (and dare I say, intellectual) news coverage.
My current day job is great, but highly technical. I need something to pour the creative side of my brain into…which is why I need to write this newsletter more than you need to read it.
And on that note, let’s get into the news
[one]
I said in the last issue that I wasn’t going to contribute to the hot-takes around the Biden Administration’s first military action, the bombing of an Iranian-backed militia base in Syria.
The Pentagon said Monday that a U.S. airstrike last week in eastern Syria killed one fighter in an Iranian-backed militia and wounded two others.
"What I can tell you is that we believe right now there was likely one militia member killed, and two militia members wounded," Pentagon press secretary John Kirby told reporters.
The Biden administration had earlier said it was unclear what the casualty toll was from the bombing raid, which was carried out in retaliation for a deadly rocket attack on a U.S.-led coalition base in northern Iraq as well as two other rocket attacks.
Two U.S. F-15 fighter jets dropped seven precision-guided bombs last Thursday on what the Pentagon said was a logistics hub for the Iranian-backed militias near Syria's border with Iraq. The Pentagon blamed the militias for the recent rocket attacks.
A human rights nonprofit claims the strike actually killed 22 fighters. I’m not sure who to believe on that one.
Iran’s responded to the bombing by claiming a power vacuum now exists for ISIS to move into that part of Syria, according to the New York Post:
America’s recent action strengthens and expands the activities of the terrorist Daesh (Islamic State) in the region,” said Ali Shamkhani, the Secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, during a visit with Iraqi Foreign Minister Fuad Hussein.
Tehran denied any involvement in the cross-border rocket attacks. Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif called some of the incidents in Iraq “suspect,” and said they could be designed to disrupt Iran-Iraq relations and Iraq’s security and stability, Iran’s state media reported.
“The attack on anti-terrorist resistance forces is the beginning of a new round of organized terrorism,” Hussein said, Reuters reported.
Observations:
A. I’m not an expert on the Middle East. Keeping up with the shifting power dynamics there would literally be a full time job.
B. However, I can tell you that Iran, Saudia Arabia and Turkey are all competing for power in the region, and all blatant violate of human rights. How the chess board has been re-arranged from this strike, I can’t tell you. There’s are no “good guys” to back in the three way race to dominate the Middle East (four way race, if you count ISIS).
C. One reason the Abraham Accords came into existence is that the United Arab Emirites and Bahrain, smaller countries in the Middle East, were happy to normalize relations with Israel as an ally as a check on Iranian aggression in the region.
D. Meanwhile, President Bashaar al-Asaad might still be “prosecuted” by the U.N. for using chemical weapons against his own citizens. I’m pretty sure if he cared about the rule of law, he wouldn’t be murdering his own citizens in the first place. This seems to be the international equivalent of telling another kid he can’t come to your birthday party, when said kid had no wish to attend anyway.
E. Finally, “tens of thousands” of Syrians are still being held in more than 100 detention facilities, without due process, for protesting against the Asaad regime.
Here are the before and after shots of the facility. If only one fighter died in that, I guess the rest of the militia was out shopping for groceries. Or bombs. Or whatever it is paramilitary groups run to the store for.
[two]
The Biden Administration has reversed a Trump executive order do do away with “Brutalism” architecture in government buildings for classical style.
NPR reports:
When Trump first proposed his executive order, it was clearly an out-with-the-new, in-with-the-old approach to architecture. He called modern federal buildings constructed over the last five decades (think boxy, concrete-heavy Brutalism) "undistinguished," "uninspiring" and "just plain ugly."
While the specifics are not yet clear, Biden's executive order instructs the director of the Office of Management and Budget and any related departments and agencies to "promptly consider taking steps to rescind any orders, rules, regulations, guidelines, or policies, or portions thereof" that would've implemented Trump's actions. Biden also calls for the abolishment of any "personnel positions, committees, task forces, or other entities established" to fulfill Trump's actions, "as appropriate and consistent with applicable law." This will likely eliminate Trump's Council on Improving Federal Civic Architecture, which was established in his executive order.
Biden's executive order may put his administration at odds with the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts, an independent federal agency established in 1910 that advises lawmakers "on matters of design and aesthetics." In 2018, Trump appointed one of modern architecture's biggest critics to the CFA: Justin Shubow, president of the National Civic Art Society. The organization was the driving force behind Trump's executive order. It also led a six-year campaign against Frank Gehry's Eisenhower memorial, which forced the architect to make some changes to his original design.
It’s standard operating procedure for a new administration to clear house and cancel a lot of programs implemented when the rival party was in power, but this is a weird flex just to “own the Cons.”
For a deeper dive on this, I highly recommend this episode of The Aureus Press podcast on YouTube featuring Amy Masterine (who’s a contributor to Evie Magazine, which I’ve used as a source here at the Five):
“[Modern architecture] is hostile to the past of a people. It’s a way to encourage people to displace themselves.”
[three]
This is super interesting, and hard to get your head around. If you haven’t heard the term NFT (non-fungible token), now is the time to catch up.
Reuters reports:
In October 2020, Miami-based art collector Pablo Rodriguez-Fraile spent almost $67,000 on a 10-second video artwork that he could have watched for free online. Last week, he sold it for $6.6 million.
The video by digital artist Beeple, whose real name is Mike Winkelmann, was authenticated by blockchain, which serves as a digital signature to certify who owns it and that it is the original work.
It’s a new type of digital asset - known as a non-fungible token (NFT) - that has exploded in popularity during the pandemic as enthusiasts and investors scramble to spend enormous sums of money on items that only exist online.
Blockchain technology allows the items to be publicly authenticated as one-of-a-kind, unlike traditional online objects which can be endlessly reproduced.
“You can go in the Louvre and take a picture of the Mona Lisa and you can have it there, but it doesn’t have any value because it doesn’t have the provenance or the history of the work,” said Rodriguez-Fraile, who said he first bought Beeple’s piece because of his knowledge of the U.S.-based artist’s work.
“The reality here is that this is very, very valuable because of who is behind it.”
“Non-fungible” refers to items that cannot be exchanged on a like-for-like basis, as each one is unique - in contrast to “fungible” assets like dollars, stocks or bars of gold.
Examples of NFTs range from digital artworks and sports cards to pieces of land in virtual environments or exclusive use of a cryptocurrency wallet name, akin to the scramble for domain names in the early days of the internet.
I first heard of this back in September 2020, when prolific investor Anthony Pompalino covered digital art as the next big bet:
Similar to how Bitcoin is superior to gold in almost every way, digital art is superior to traditional art in almost every way also. A traditional piece of art is static and sits on a wall. There is no motion. The art does not change unless someone takes the art off the wall and hangs a different piece. Physical art is hard to move around the world, it can be easily damaged, and there is difficulty in proving what is authentic and what is not.
Digital art is the next evolution of art. Each piece can incorporate complex movement and motion into the art. A single screen on a wall can periodically cycle through different pieces of art at the predetermined direction of the homeowner or art collector. The digital art can be sent to anyone in the world with a few clicks of a button, it is immune from damage, and authenticity and provenance is transparently available for anyone to verify. Quite literally, digital art has significant advantages over traditional art in the same way that digital news has advantages over physical newspapers.
I’m fascinated by this topic, but currently not read up enough to offer analysis…so we’ll just call this topic “to be continued.”
Screenshot below. See the full 10 second video here if you like.
[four]
The Chicago Tribune recently featured a story on Free Frank McWorter, one of the most significant settlers of my native Pike County, IL. I’ve been looking for a reason to tell Frank’s story in The Five.
Free Frank was an enterprising enslaved Kentucky man who purchased freedom for his pregnant wife, Lucy, then his own, by manufacturing and selling a component of gunpowder and fertilizer. He moved his family to Illinois, a free state, in 1831. He bought 80 acres for $100 and in 1836 founded New Philadelphia, a promising city of brotherly love, in Pike County, 20 miles from the slave state of Missouri. Collectively, his family acquired 600 acres of farmland.
Free Frank sold lots to Black and European Americans to secure the eventual freedom for 16 more family members.
In New Philadelphia, Black farmers worked next to white farmers; Black children were schooled with white children; Black families attended church with white families. Only the cemeteries remained separate.
The city and farming community grew to become home to 160 people by 1865. It also was a refuge for freedom seekers. Black people from Missouri would swim across the Mississippi River to get to New Philadelphia.
In recent years, in addition to being acknowledged as a stop on the Underground Railroad, the community was deemed a National Historic Landmark. Last year, U.S. Rep. Darin LaHood of Peoria introduced a bill to make the site part of the National Park Service.
I believe I grew up in the shadow of this legacy (literally and figuratively, since the site for New Philadelphia was only 20 minutes from my family’s farm). I’ve often shared that, growing up in a bi-racial (and refugee) extended family, it took a move from rural Illinois to Chicago to see racism in action.
You can purchase the book on New Philadelphia or make a donation to help preserve the site here.
[five]
As a follow up to the architecture story above, I wanted to ignore a lot of the stupid news that’s happening right now (Dr. Suess, Mr. Potato Head, Mitt Romney falling down and bumping his head) to feature a story of some more substance.
As outlined in #2, the buildings we live around effect our quality of life. One city in Germany is proving that the green space in the form of a wild forest around us do the same, and can drive significant tourism dollars as well.
The Yellow Point Ecological Society reports:
There is a forest in Germany that people are talking about. While most of Germany’s forests are in a sorry state, losing their magic, losing nature and lacking older trees, this forest is gaining magic and supporting nature while providing its foresters with a steady income.
The forest belongs to the city of Lübeck, a beautiful Hanseatic port north-east of Hamburg, close to Denmark, whose tourist officers have labelled it ‘The Venice of the North’ because of its many canals, just as ours have labelled the Cowichan Valley ‘The New Provence’. Its community forest, some 5,000 hectares in size, is mostly beech and oak, mixed with ash, maple, hornbeam, elm, birch and alder, with some coniferous spruce, pine, larch and Douglas fir.
The land has been covered by forest for more than two hundred and fifty years, but in 1994 Lübeck’s chief forester proposed a change in the way it was managed. Instead of the conventional method of logging with heavy machinery followed by replanting he wanted to try a new approach called ‘close to nature’, or ‘near-natural forest use’, which was developed in cooperation with scientists and nature conservationists. The city approved the change to “use wood and preserve the forest”, the citizens endorsed the change by referendum, and the forest has been managed this way ever since.
The city manages its forest with four objectives in mind. First, to be a natural forest for the people of Lübeck to enjoy, where nature can teach the residents of Lübeck and visitors about the natural functions of a forest and how a healthy forest can help sustain life on the planet. Second, to meet the commercial needs of the forest industry through sustainable management, with a focus on felling large trees on a needs basis, with buyers going into the forest to select the trees they want. Third, to contribute to the conservation of nature, enhancing biodiversity through the preservation of natural habitats. And fourth, to be a store of carbon, contributing to efforts to slow the climate crisis.
Trees are harvested by using horses rather than large machinery, as not to disturb the ecosystem. I can’t imagine this is a model that could be replicated to scale to supply the world’s paper needs, but it’s a fascinating idea to attract tourists and permanent residents alike.
One thing I don’t see the news covering as much as the story warrants is the mass migration that’s happening right now in the U.S. People are fleeing large cities (NYC, Chicago, LA) due to losing the amenities that make those places special as a result of COVID lockdowns. And residents of high tax states are relocating to lower cost, more livable areas (Tennessee, Texas and Florida) are gaining new people left and right.
I’d love to see a city in the U.S. try out this forest idea as a way of revitalizing the area.
[epilogue]
Amazon tweaked it’s app recently after complaints the design looked like Hitler.
It actually did look a little like Hitler.
Until the next one,
-sth