Art for New Year's Eve

We promised you yesterday ... here it is: Ann Elizabeth Schlegel's "Cook's Champagne" ... in a time of economic crisis, frugal bubbles ...

I know someone that enjoys drinking Champagne. Now, I'm not talking about Dom or Perrier Jouet or even Korbel. This woman loves Cook's Champagne. She purchased a painting from me of a champagne cork and one of a corkscrew ... and then we toasted with some 'Cook's Brut'. I thought of her when I opened this bottle.

It was opened in celebration of another person who turned 50 years old and is a breast cancer survivor. I shared a glass with her daughter. I'll tell ya, for the $6.99 it's not bad. Not bad at all. Cheers!

The painting by the way, has long been sold.

A Painting Each Day Keeps the Blues Away!

Rummaging the Internet for a work of art to illustrate this year's New Year celebrations we were lucky enough to stumble upon the extensive collection of paintings created by Ann Elizabeth Schlegel, Bethlehem (PA).

A message at the top of the sidebar on her blog offers to send you a painting a day - upon your email request of course.

The collection of figurative paintings elevate a variety of every day items, from household clutter to kitchen and cooking utensils, to a carnival of colors and shapes.

The chosen illustration for New Year's Eve we'll keep under wraps till tomorrow, but as a consolation we include a post by Ann Elizabeth dating back to Thanksgiving 2007: a series of charming allegories, mostly female figures representing a variety of drinks, cocktails, grapes and some of the other festive things that brighten up the dark days of winter.

A Painting Each Day: "Adult Beverage Gift Items"

Friday morning I begin my quest to paint, exhibit and sell at Christkindlemarkt in Bethlehem, PA for forty straight days. I will be painting my Painting Each Day series and also exhibiting my Adult Beverage prints and cocktail aprons. The prints and aprons have been big sellers to those shoppers searching for the perfect 'cash and carry' item for the individual who enjoys the unique gifts.

I sign everything and the prints are also numbered in a limited edition series.

So .... if you're out of the area and are thinking 'Hmmm .... wouldn't 'so and so' really like this great print or cocktail apron, just drop me an email and I can get it to you in time for the Christmas season. (...) >>>

I Want a Hippopotamos for Christmas!

Great lyrics! Brillant rendition by Aaron!

"White Christmas", Bing Crosby & Marjorie Reynolds (1942)

"O Little Town of Bethlehem", by Kiri te Kanawa

The Embarrassing Realism of "Obscure" Emperors

Oops ... reality has a nasty habit of surfacing in the most appalling ways and on the awkwardest of moments!

Here's another golden embarrassment for Ummah revisionism ... what now with the meme that historically no one has any business in the Middle East but the Dar-al-Islam? Oh, wait ... it must be a Zionist plant!

CNN: "Israeli archaeologists find rare gold coins"

Some Israeli archaeologists are having a particularly happy Hanukkah, thanks in part to a British volunteer who took time off from her job to work on a dig.

The Israel Antiquities Authority reported a thrilling find Sunday -- the discovery of 264 ancient gold coins in Jerusalem National Park.

The coins were minted during the early 7th century. (...)

The 1,400-year-old coins were found in the Giv'ati car park in the City of David in the walls around Jerusalem National Park, a site that has yielded other finds, including a well-preserved gold earring with pearls and precious stones.

They were in a collapsed building that dates back to the 7th century, the end of the Byzantine period. The coins bear a likeness of Heraclius, who was the Byzantine emperor from 610 to 641. (...)

The authority said that while different coins had been minted during this emperor's reign, the coins found at the site represent "one well-known type."

In that style, the emperor is clad with military garb and is holding a cross in his right hand. On the other side is the sign of the cross.

Authorities said the excavation of the building where the hoard was discovered is in its early stages. They are attempting to learn about the building and its owner and the circumstances of its destruction. (...) >>>

Truly Unforgettable

Hat Tip: "Conservative Contessa"

Bushes Brushed (rather than bashed)

Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery: "President and Mrs. Bush’s Portraits"

During the winter holidays, visitors will have the first chance to view the portraits of President George W. Bush and first lady Laura Bush commissioned for the National Portrait Gallery.

The president and first lady will unveil the portraits in a private ceremony at the museum Friday, Dec. 19. The paintings will be on public view beginning Dec. 20. This is the first time that the Portrait Gallery will present the official likenesses of a sitting president and first lady.

“It is always a great moment for the National Portrait Gallery to unveil the portraits of presidents and first ladies” (...) >>>

Modelling the Archimedes Computer

New Scientist: "Archimedes and the 2000-year-old computer"

Marcellus and his men blockaded Syracuse, in Sicily, for two years. The Roman general expected to conquer the Greek city state easily, but the ingenious siege towers and catapults designed by Archimedes helped to keep his troops at bay.

Then, in 212 BC, the Syracusans neglected their defences during a festival to the goddess Artemis, and the Romans finally breached the city walls. Marcellus wanted Archimedes alive, but it wasn't to be. According to ancient historians, Archimedes was killed in the chaos; by one account a soldier ran him through with a sword as he was in the middle of a mathematical proof.

One of Archimedes's creations was saved, though. (...) >>>

Unadulterated Sentimentalism ...

... but boy, what a Voice!



Here's Mark Steyn with a rather astute comment to the lyrics, which have indeed an extraordinarily high "world peace" octane ...

I Won't Dance

We, the Peoples of Europe, Got Roots!

Two and a half years ago I set out on a mission to find out what's wrong with the West today. One of the first ports of call on this mission was a wonderful little tome - "Without Roots" - a dialogue between Marcello Pera, President of the Italian Senate and Professor of Philosophy at the University of Pisa - and Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, as Pope Benedict XVI was known before his accession.

It acquainted me with the terms we have come to know so well by now: relativism, Postmodernism, false equivalence, subjectivism and reverse morality.

The book became an instant sensation in Italy. Pomo and self-declared boomer, EU Commissioner Margot Wallstrom, whose highest ethic consists in the truthiness "Make Love, Not War", lost no time dropping a sneer. The director of the European Monitoring Center on Racism and Xenophobia, Beate Winkler went as far as going on the record with the declaration that "people have boots, not roots!" - all, of course, in an effort to bend reality to the new Utopia of a borderless, multicultural empire as plugged by the Union.

Very revealing all, precisely what the Postmodernists wish us all to believe: that we are a people without a past (watch this Day by Day cartoon: Chris Muir gets it too), that we have no cultural or historical roots prior to the onset of the 1968 counter culture that abandoned all essentially modern values for anti-modern ones. George Orwell would have been proud.

It is for the same reason that history education has been reformed out of existence and children have no insight into culture-historical events, other than the revisionism that Nazism and Fascism are a form of Capitalism and that Leftism is the only proper form of Socialism.

We do not propose advancing either form of Socialism - Leftist or Rightist - but on the contrary, advocate fighting both its precursors. Because that is precisely where political and social thought leads once the primacies of individualism and equality are abandoned.

For the purpose of preserving the values of modernism and the Enlightenment, and for promoting the call that Americans have already answered when their Founding Fathers claimed the American politeia and put "We, the people ..." to paper in their Constitution, we are today launching a European grassroots movement, Roots! We, the Peoples of Europe ...

Our temporary home is a Ning social netroots platform that supports personal pages, blogs, videos, groups, a forum, photo albums and a slideshow for your personal favourites, an events calender, and soon also chat. So sign up, get your own badge, transfer your most cherished stuff to Roots! and let's use all those great features to debate the battle plan.

I am looking forward to see you on Roots! Let's get this continent on the road for the people, the European citizens, let's take this to street level ... Can't wait to meet you all!


View my page on Roots!

Hatikva

This Shabbat, "Hatikva" by Itzhak Perlman and John Wiliams - Hat Tip: Atlas Shrugs



In memory of all victims of the Mumbai massacre

Embraceable Vintage, by Gershwin

Family Ties: the Stone-Age Roots of the Nuclear Family

A recurring theme in Politeia and the old "Lighthouse" (before it became exclusively 'arty') are the so-called dialectics. Read all about it in the dossier - an explanatory introduction is at the bottom.

What we mean, are the Hegelian dialectic, which grew out of the Kantian dialectic, which led to the Marxist dialectic, and now morphed into the Postmodern dialectic.

Don't be fooled by nonsense about women's lib, gay rights and same sex marriage: these are all ruses to take out one of the main pillars of 'the power structure', romantic love and marriage.

Remember that upsurge in Swedish films and books around the sixties, portraying marriage and family life as sheer and sure hell ...? That was no coincidence! (Here's a Dutch book of some notoriety, but every Western country probably has its own version. Sartre's existentialism did away with all human company in general: "hell, are the others.")

Romantic love - according to Ayn Rand - is a bourgeois, selfish, social construct that becomes fashionable in societies with a strong middle class. That being the case, all the more reason to shatter that important pillar.

Among the nobility and the peasantry marriage has always been an institution for the formalization of family ties and the regulation of inheritances. It was of course sanctioned by a church ceremony, preferably held before the bride's bun was showing - just for good measure so as to ensure the groom's party wouldn't be left holding a barren bag... eh, hag.

But here's news: A Stone Age burial in central Germany has yielded the earliest evidence of people living together as a family within a tribal social structure ...

MSNBC: "The Flintsteins? Germans find Stone Age family - 4,600-year-old grave yields genetic evidence of family life (and death)" (includes video material)

(...) The 4,600-year-old grave contained the remains of a man, woman and two youngsters, and DNA analysis shows they were a mother, father and their children. (...)

"By establishing the genetic links between the two adults and two children buried together in one grave, we have established the presence of the classic nuclear family in a prehistoric context in Central Europe — to our knowledge the oldest authentic molecular genetic evidence so far," lead author Wolfgang Haak of the University of Adelaide, Australia, said in a statement.

The researchers studied four multiple burials at Eulau, Saxony-Anhalt, all dated to the same time and containing adults and children carefully buried facing each other. (...) >>>

Perhaps tribal people 4,600 years ago, knew what we have been taught to forget for political reasons: that single mum families are the surest road to poverty and dependence - dependence on the state, all for our own good, of course. No wonder it was sold in Europe, first as morally acceptable, then as a value and even a right.

- Filed on Articles in "The Dialectics" -

The Anonymous Muse

Something pretty sensational here: a veritable Muse of Jazz, buried within the deepest crevices of YouTube.

The video, doing homage to a number of other, unforgettable Queens of Jazz, she remains invisible to the present audience - but we can hear her: the sound of a bodiless angel ... every note impeccably in place, in perfect syncopation ...

This is Ladynea's YouTube Channel. You can take out a subscription to new material ...

Private Treasure from Greece and the Levant

Sotheby's: "Greece and the Levant: A Private Library"
First edition, by Guillaume Abel Blouet:

3 volumes bound in 4 (volume 3 bound in two parts), large folio (600 x 420mm.), 3 half-titles, 3 engraved additional titles, and 262 plates, 5 coloured by hand, 6 double-page or folding, many showing two or more subjects, contemporary half calf gilt.

In Viewer (may require registering at Sotheby's)

Auctioned in London on 13 November 2008
15,000—20,000 GBP
Lot Sold. Hammer Price with Buyer's Premium: 39,650 GBP

Armistice and Veteran's Day 2008

For Armistice Day we have attempted to collect a few edifying morsels of interest.

This is a lot less easy than it sounds. Most of what is available are isolated video snippets; or there's a choice of the pacifist anti-war stuff, of either the hefty Gothic, or of the sentimental tear-jerk variety.

However, given the current upsurge of interest - primarily in the US - we've unearthed some intriguing, if highly emotionally charged footage on the Weimar Republic, and the German Revolution that followed the chaos of World War I. It's got some rare historical material, as well as background information on whatever fateful constellation of events led to such a profound and total collapse of morality. (For more reading here's the Wiki on Christopher Isherwood.)

The music would certainly not have been our initial choice; we felt however as its message grew, that it serves the purpose of conveying some of the nihilism and the obsession with surreal horror that is so typical for the period, and that led to its inevitable outcome in World War II.

In this respect we can also refer you to earlier postings on the subject of the German interbellum: "Resist Commie Prop, Support Indy", "The Postmodern Anti-War Hero, the Red Baron", "The German Revolution".



From the cultural angle, we proudly present a collection of World War I propaganda posters from all countries involved in the Great War. The entire site is rather a gem and worthy of further exploration. For example, Prose and Poetry reads ...

"More than any other conflict, the Great War inspired writers of all generations and classes, most notably among combatants. (...) This section profiles the more renowned authors and contains samples of their work. Also available in this section are extended features, including a profile of Robert Graves - and, more unusually but nevertheless intriguing, a piece on literary ambulance drivers... There are also two articles written about the author of the war's most famous poem: In Flanders Fields. The 1917 collection of wartime poetry The Muse in Arms has also been republished here in its entirety. (...) >>>

An index of authors - including Sir Winston Churchill - is attached.

Next there's World War I American Legacy, a DVD documentary directed by Mark Bussler.

Wall Street Journal has a reality check for the US. "Soldiers of the Great War" lays an provocative link with the present: "(...) the victors failed to prevent the rise of the totalitarian regimes in Russia and Germany, the fascists in Italy and the militarists in Japan (...) the U.S. withdrew from its global responsibilities. (...) Now we are at a similar pass in Iraq, where the U.S. has effectively defeated Sunni and Shiite insurgents on the battlefield. But whether this costly achievement will hold depends largely on our willingness to support the Iraqi government and steel it against its own fascistic challengers, particularly Iran. If there's one lesson to be learned on this Armistice Day, it's of the price that's paid when we allow victory to slip from our grasp. >>>

One of the blessings of living part of one's life in cyberspace is the human connection one gets with people you will never know on a personal level. Following document was made by someone who remains anonymous, in commemoration of his great grandfather Aaron Kennett who fought in the Great War. He flourished from 1887 to 19187. May God bless them both, and all who fought and continue to fight for freedom, against barbarism and oppression.

The music accompanying the touching family document is the hymn "I Vow to Thee my Country", created in 1921 when a poem by Cecil Spring-Rice was set to music by Gustav Holst. It expresses the unconditional love, loyalty and self-sacrifice that was once unquestioningly devoted to one's country. It is a victory of the Postmodern One Worlders that these words - while warm and patriotic only a few years back when played at my father's funeral - now sound strangely surreal.

But make no mistake: whereas giving one's life for a state in Europe today seems unthinkable and alien, a renewed fight for individual freedom against neotot pocket potentates is certainly not. The same forces taunting national colours and hymns also whisper of collectives and the redundancy of democracy, suggesting that the value of 'enlightened dictators' is somewhat underrated. Ignore them at your peril ...





- Filed on Articles in "History Compiled" -