You are currently browsing the monthly archive for July 2013.
My most recent fine art discoveries: Jewish painters!
Green
http://www.tuttartpitturasculturapoesiamusica.com/2010/12/maya-green.html
Loved some of the musician paintings – you can feel the music flowing from the instruments and the players… beautiful
And the painting with the couple walking between the two throngs of trees, the thick strokes providing texture, the so very romantic feel of it all…
Gottlieb
And… saved the best for last: Samuel Hirszenberg
This guy is da man! Absolutely loved his sense of composition, among others:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Hirszenberg
http://boverijuancarlospintores.blogspot.fr/2013/02/samuel-hirszenberg.html
I especially liked A Sabbath afternoon, Portrait of a young man, The last prayer, The wandering Jew (so powerfully disturbing), and, my very favorite: Excommunicated Spinoza
Ah!
(been too busy to blog…)
Gay Couple Sues Colo. Bakery for Refusing Wedding Cake
I simply do not understand how these cases can be framed as discrimination from a legal standpoint. The baker is refusing to provide service because it would be serving a destructive political and social agenda.
See, if two heterosexual men ordered a wedding cake from the bakery, because they were getting married – mind you that nothing today prevents them from getting married where SSM is legal – and the bakery refused, could they sue the bakery for sexual orientation discrimination? What sexual orientation would that be?
That’s the crux of the matter. There is no such thing as equating “sexual orientation” to race (or any in-born physical characteristic), thus legislation that equates it to racial discrimination is empty of meaning. It is a fraudulent concept at its very root.
One more case that evidences that every piece of legislation regarding discrimination based on sexual orientation is a joke and must be scrapped.
Updated Aug 23, 2013
Lastly, and the most important point in all of this, is that once you establish a “protected class” for whom different laws apply, you’ve clearly done away with equal protection before the law.
Just a quick note to say that from the very first moment this Snowden-NSA scandal broke, I was wide-eyed, thinking to myself how unbelievably huge this scandal is, the fact that it has barely gotten underway and it’s already exploding in so many fronts. To top things off, I had the surreal experience of talking to a variety of morons who had barely heard of it, barely taken interest in it, barely realized just how enormous it is – and this, only considering what’s happened up to now – even without considering what’s to come – which is anybody’s guess. But if the revelations up to now are any indication, we are witnessing, day by day, hour by hour, with all the adrenaline rushes given by the immediacy that high-tech news dissemination means can provide us, perhaps the greatest political scandal that I will ever witness in my life time. It’s like an avalanche that first begins in slow motion. In an avalanche, the first slabs of snow and ice start to dislodge and shift imperceptibly. It’s this beginning that deceptively appears to be moving slowly in time – it seems nothing is really happening that could take down a whole mountain. In reality, however, the rumbling only lasts a few seconds before the thing picks up so much speed and volume, now thundering and just exploding down the mountain, engulfing everything in its path. Here of course it’s parallel avalanches on parallel mountains, all interconnected, moving at different speeds – but started by one man.
It is unbelievable.
There are too many implications for me to write about. I’ve been reading mostly. But here is something that has struck me that no one will connect the dots with:
WASHINGTON — In an initiative aimed at rooting out future leakers and other security violators, President Barack Obama has ordered federal employees to report suspicious actions of their colleagues based on behavioral profiling techniques that are not scientifically proven to work, according to experts and government documents.
The techniques are a key pillar of the Insider Threat Program, an unprecedented government-wide crackdown under which millions of federal bureaucrats and contractors must watch out for “high-risk persons or behaviors” among co-workers. Those who fail to report them could face penalties, including criminal charges.
……………
Without going into the topic the article directly discusses: Stasi-like societies – which the US is increasingly and rather rapidly morphing into* – with fully uninformed, partially informed, or fully informed consent of its populace and elites – a topic which definitely merits a discussion, I wanted to remark that all these measures could be useful in detecting profiles related to sexual abuse or harassment. In fact, what else can we do in terms of prevention? Unless you work to detect, you will be neglecting all red flags that imperil children and adults that will be or are being targeted for exploitation, harassment, and abuse. You cannot do prevention without detection.
And yet, large swaths of the public will argue for the very opposite, for society to tune out to signs of potential sexually perverted and harmful profiles, by adopting the mantra that “sexuality is nobody’s business.” Everyone must be accepted with any sexual perversion because everyone is “born the way they are.” Everyone is “normal” and every sexual perversity is OK. So say our sexually perverted elites (and the large part of the populace who is the same). And they will hypocritically add that every sexual perversion is OK “as long as its consensual” – pretending that every time that consent fails it is not already too late for prevention – and pretending that it’s not the same people who they were empowering as being sexually perverted “as long as it was consensual” that usually violate consent down the road. But society supported the perverted mind of the individual all the way until the abuse or harassment happened.
Society waits until abuse happens to then exclaim that abuse is bad – but where is the detection that will allow its prevention? Then all we see in society are cowards.
Furthermore, while sexuality bourgeoisies go on proclaiming that being sexually perverted is OK “if it is consensual,” they are fully indifferent to the fact that most of what is not consensual is never brought to justice anyways, a fact that obviously does not bother them and for which there is no civil rights movement, we must note.
The US, like many modern societies, uses a great deal of their security apparatus and related knowledge to cover up crimes, instead of detecting and investigating them, failing to provide both safety and justice for millions of people.
From our series “I live in a barbarian society that calls itself modern.”
* One could argue that American society has always been Stasi-like, the NSA et al is just its latest incarnation, that it’s just the form of persecution and surveillance that takes on different colors, like a chameleon which changes shades but is always the same animal, for example, the Red Scares and un-American activities period, etc.
Another disgusting news article – because the topic is so disgusting:
SANTIAGO, Chile (AP) — Chile’s president is praising an 11-year-old girl for her “depth and maturity” after she said in a recent TV interview that she wants to give birth to the baby who was conceived when she was raped by her mother’s partner.
Now 14 weeks pregnant, she was repeatedly raped over the course of two years by her mother’s partner. He has been arrested.
……………………………….
Why should such a man live? Just hang him.
And inquiring minds want to know what kind of a woman is this mother. Because it’s quite likely that she deserves at least a long prison sentence herself, if not to be hanged for collusive sexual abuse of her daughter, as many women are in such cases.
Frendamine (woman) telling me about her latest woes in socializing and trying to meet a guy. Here’s the run down on the last three: two of them were married, looking for an affair – unabashedly and clearly. These two men spend a lot of their time traveling, and specifically traveling away from their wives, and seek out other women as if this were perfectly normal.
One is like an idiotic clown that cruises through life systematically avoiding dealing with any serious topic, because his comfortable status allows him to do so. The second one does the same, but for completely different reasons – he has serious unresolved issues, which can easily veer into the direction of causing depression in him, and instead of trying to deal with it all, as in therapy, he has been running away all his life, from himself, first and foremost, and then, consequently, from the world. Any serious topic is too much to deal with because it is so depressing in his mind. And he doesn’t have a clue that the problem is, first and foremost, inside himself. So this guy works for some time to make some money, and then he runs desperately away, usually abroad, including away from his wife (and what kind of character would she be?) and looks for women elsewhere and takes these long aimless vacations.
Wow. See? Liberals.
On top of that, this friend of mine met these two men at a small gathering and the only other woman who initially seemed that could provide a bit of female-to-female support regarding the men turned out to be a bisexual pig who then tried to come onto my friend.
Liberal society is a sewer with an endless number and infinite variety of garbage of adults.
Lastly, she then met another man – at least this one was divorced and had raised his kids. What kind of a man? Democrat and liberal – so obviously, he thinks he is a good person. So he says: my two kids are all grown up. And you know what I miss? I miss having them in my life as when they were kids, because I loved doing stuff for them, buying the things they wanted, you know, like providing and pampering them.
So my friend says: there are so many kids in need, have you thought about doing some volunteering or…
That’s when guy’s expression completely changed and became thoroughly insensitive, and he interrupted her brusquely, “No, I have no interest; I’ve done enough volunteering…”
And she then said to me, later: “Enough” volunteering! What’s that? Millions of kids suffering who could so use a little bit of kindness and it sometimes makes such a difference. But no, the selfishness is too grand, too absorbing.
It’s all about him and his kids — only. Ask him to do anything that is not within the me, me, me realm – and it’s too much to ask, even clearly distasteful. How long is this guy still going to live? 30 years? Will do nothing for anyone who is not within his strictly egotistical little bubble – for three decades. And this is someone, as far as my friend was able to surmise, who has resources. And this was just one of the “highlights” of the conversation. There were many more problematic instances forming such a lack of awareness.
“Enough” volunteering… certainly he has not been selfish enough, has he? It’s the volunteering that he has done “enough” of.
Why is this considered normal? Why are we all so profoundly conditioned to think only about our selves and to be so thoroughly blind and insensitive to suffering in the world? This must be one of the most poisoned aspects of our culture. The cult of selfishness to the extreme and the obligatory insensitivity to the suffering of others that selfishness warrants at all times. Everyone is conditioned to walk by and keep walking without thinking about everyone else who suffers. Modern life largely consists of keeping the blinders in place, as tightly as possible.
As Mandela was in the news again recently, being treated in a hospital, it is a good opportunity to copy the truth here:
By DAVID JOHNSTON, Special to The New York Times
Published: June 10, 1990
The Central Intelligence Agency played an important role in the arrest in 1962 of Nelson Mandela, the African National Congress leader who was jailed for nearly 28 years before his release four months ago, a news report says.
The intelligence service, using an agent inside the African National Congress, provided South African security officials with precise information about Mr. Mandela’s activities that enabled the police to arrest him, said the account by the Cox News Service.
The report, scheduled for publication on Sunday, quoted an unidentified retired official who said that a senior C.I.A. officer told him shortly after Mr. Mandela’s arrest: ”We have turned Mandela over to the South African Security branch. We gave them every detail, what he would be wearing, the time of day, just where he would be.”
…
The news-service report said that at the time of Mr. Mandela’s arrest in August 1962, the C.I.A. devoted more resources to penetrating the activities of nationalist groups like the African National Congress than did South Africa’s then-fledgling security service.
The account said the American intelligence agency was willing to assist in the apprehension of Mr. Mandela because it was concerned that a successful nationalist movement threatened a friendly South African Govenment. Expansion of such movements outside South Africa’s borders, the agency feared, would jeopardize the stability of other African states, the account said.
Reflections, Reflections by Alessandra 