The Mask Seller By Cesare Mariani

circus circus detail – it looks like this structure, which dates the opening of its hotel in 1972, houses its main power generators. this whole complex, opened in 1968 as an extraordinary bacchanal of a casino, has come to seem like more and more of a las vegas modernist masterpiece as everything around it is replaced by generic 21st century chintz. las vegas, nev. february 2024

© tag christof

"As one reads history, not in the expurgated editions written for school-boys and passmen, but in the original authorities of each time, one is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed, but by the punishments that the good have inflicted; and a community is infinitely more brutalised by the habitual employment of punishment, than it is by the occurrence of crime. It obviously follows that the more punishment is inflicted the more crime is produced, and most modern legislation has clearly recognised this, and has made it its task to diminish punishment as far as it thinks it can. Wherever it has really diminished it, the results have always been extremely good. The less punishment, the less crime. When there is no punishment at all, crime will either cease to exist, or, if it occurs, will be treated by physicians as a very distressing form of dementia, to be cured by care and kindness. For what are called criminals nowadays are not criminals at all. Starvation, and not sin, is the parent of modern crime."

~ Oscar Wilde, The Soul of Man Under Socialism, 1891. Just a few short years before his own imprisonment, which ultimately lead to his death.

Close up of Pluto from the New Horizons space probe.

Will be adding several more photos to this same post

the trolley problem vs. systemic oppression: a comic.