Last year, I blogged about some research that Michael Heaney and I were doing on the anti-Iraq War movement. I found that the antiwar movement quickly collapsed after Obama’s election. Smaller crowds, less attention. The big finding is that Democrats stopped showing up after Obama’s inauguration. Based on 5, 398 surveys of street demonstrators, here’s the paper’s key chart: (Click on link to see chart.)What this means in human language (not commie crap talking points)is that the anti-war movement is fake. It's a cover for communists to undermine freedom just like the climate change boondoggle. The hard-core commies in the unions and the Plantation/Slave Party, aka the Democrats, don't want to challenge Obama. That's why they haven't stirred up the Cindy Sheehan type Berkeley Birkenstock peaceniks who really are unemployed useful idiots. Where are the masked thugs of MoveOn when the Code Pink pansies need them to stir the shit?
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In other words, once a Democrat gained power, Democrats stopped showing up to antiwar protests. If you want the full write up, read the paper, which has now appeared in Mobilization.
Bottom line: Social movements and parties rely on each other. Movements benefit when partisans appear because they can bolster their numbers. Parties use movements as platform for partisan grievances. But there’s a drawback, electoral victories mean that the rank and file will stop showing up.
Why are there no anti-war demonstrations?
Democrats killed the antiwar movement:
Just say no to Newt #378
"I was happy to see that Newt Gingrich has staked out a position on the war, a position, or two, or maybe three. I don’t know. I think he has more war positions than he’s had wives. [...] There’s a big debate over there. Fox News can’t decide, what do they love more, bombing the Middle East or bashing the president? It’s like I was over there and there was an anchor going, they were pleading, can’t we do both? Can’t we bomb the Middle East and bash the president at the same time?" - Senator Rand Paul.
And just say yes to Rand Paul.
And just say yes to Rand Paul.
My idea of heaven on earth
A shit in the woods with running water and toilet paper. This is in Bali.
Gandhi - the "Great (fascist racist) Soul"
From a review of Joseph Lelyveld's new book, Great Soul:
The whole review is worth reading. Here are a few more snippets:
Of course I had to find out about Gandhi's German-Jewish architect and bodybuilder:
Here is a photo of Kallenbach:
And here he is with Gandhi and his secretary Sonia Schlesin (click to biggify):
The statue of Gandhi in Durban.
Joseph Lelyveld has written a generally admiring book about Mohandas Gandhi, the man credited with leading India to independence from Britain in 1947. Yet "Great Soul" also obligingly gives readers more than enough information to discern that he was a sexual weirdo, a political incompetent and a fanatical faddist—one who was often downright cruel to those around him. Gandhi was therefore the archetypal 20th-century progressive intellectual, professing his love for mankind as a concept while actually despising people as individuals.That about sums up exactly what I think about Gandhi too. He lived in South Africa for 21 years before returning to India and there are two ashrams and a farm near where I was born in Natal that were founded by and for his disciples. Gandhi's oldest son had a falling out with his father and, when the "Great Soul" returned to India, his son stayed behind in South Africa. I once met one of Gandhi's grandsons and knew two of his grandchildren through my Gujarati friends when I lived in a Hindu ashram in Durban for two years.
The whole review is worth reading. Here are a few more snippets:
Although Gandhi's nonviolence made him an icon to the American civil-rights movement, Mr. Lelyveld shows how implacably racist he was toward the blacks of South Africa. "We were then marched off to a prison intended for Kaffirs," Gandhi complained during one of his campaigns for the rights of Indians settled there. "We could understand not being classed with whites, but to be placed on the same level as the Natives seemed too much to put up with. Kaffirs are as a rule uncivilized—the convicts even more so. They are troublesome, very dirty and live like animals."Gandhi's devotees don't like to think that their Mahatma ("Great Soul") was a dirty old man who molested his young niece. And of course they are too embarrassed to ever mention just how queer he really was. In fact I'd never even heard of this take on Gandhi's relationship with Kallenbach before:
In an open letter to the legislature of South Africa's Natal province, Gandhi wrote of how "the Indian is being dragged down to the position of the raw Kaffir," someone, he later stated, "whose occupation is hunting and whose sole ambition is to collect a number of cattle to buy a wife, and then pass his life in indolence and nakedness." Of white Afrikaaners and Indians, he wrote: "We believe as much in the purity of races as we think they do." That was possibly why he refused to allow his son Manilal to marry Fatima Gool, a Muslim, despite publicly promoting Muslim-Hindu unity.
Gandhi's pejorative reference to nakedness is ironic considering that, as Mr. Lelyveld details, when he was in his 70s and close to leading India to independence, he encouraged his 17-year-old great-niece, Manu, to be naked during her "nightly cuddles" with him. After sacking several long-standing and loyal members of his 100-strong personal entourage who might disapprove of this part of his spiritual quest, Gandhi began sleeping naked with Manu and other young women. He told a woman on one occasion: "Despite my best efforts, the organ remained aroused. It was an altogether strange and shameful experience."
Yet as Mr. Lelyveld makes abundantly clear, Gandhi's organ probably only rarely became aroused with his naked young ladies, because the love of his life was a German-Jewish architect and bodybuilder, Hermann Kallenbach, for whom Gandhi left his wife in 1908. "Your portrait (the only one) stands on my mantelpiece in my bedroom," he wrote to Kallenbach. "The mantelpiece is opposite to the bed." For some reason, cotton wool and Vaseline were "a constant reminder" of Kallenbach, which Mr. Lelyveld believes might relate to the enemas Gandhi gave himself, although there could be other, less generous, explanations.But his blatant racism really takes the cake:
Gandhi wrote to Kallenbach about "how completely you have taken possession of my body. This is slavery with a vengeance." Gandhi nicknamed himself "Upper House" and Kallenbach "Lower House," and he made Lower House promise not to "look lustfully upon any woman." The two then pledged "more love, and yet more love . . . such love as they hope the world has not yet seen."
Gandhi was willing to stand up for the Untouchables, just not at the crucial moment when they were demanding the right to pray in temples in 1924-25. He was worried about alienating high-caste Hindus. "Would you teach the Gospel to a cow?" he asked a visiting missionary in 1936. "Well, some of the Untouchables are worse than cows in their understanding."Most Indians are very caste, class and color conscious. When I first moved into that Hindu ashram in Durban, I used to invite all my friends. After a few visits by some of my Zulu friends, I was told by the leader of the cult not to invite anymore blacks because it made the Indian devotees uncomfortable to be so close to "such dirty people."
Gandhi's first Great Fast—undertaken despite his belief that hunger strikes were "the worst form of coercion, which militates against the fundamental principles of non-violence"—was launched in 1932 to prevent Untouchables from having their own reserved seats in any future Indian parliament. Because he said that it was "a religious, not a political question," he accepted no debate on the matter. He elsewhere stated that "the abolition of Untouchability would not entail caste Hindus having to dine with former Untouchables." At his monster rallies against Untouchability in the 1930s, which tens of thousands of people attended, the Untouchables themselves were kept in holding pens well away from the caste Hindus.
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Gandhi and Mussolini got on well when they met in December 1931, with the Great Soul praising the Duce's "service to the poor, his opposition to super-urbanization, his efforts to bring about a coordination between Capital and Labour, his passionate love for his people."
Of course I had to find out about Gandhi's German-Jewish architect and bodybuilder:
Hermann Kallenbach (1871–1945) was a South African architect who is best known for being a very close friend of Mahatma Gandhi, starting from the latter's early days in South Africa. Together with another Jew, H.S.L. Polak, Kallenbach was associated with Gandhi throughout the Satyagraha (non-violent resistance) struggle which lasted in South Africa until 1914.Of course, Hermann and Mahandas may not have been actual butt-buddies but I know all about the "homo-erotic" aspects of Hindu monastic life. I had a very intensely emotional and sensuous (but not sexual) relationship with one of the male disciples who used to come to my ashram for devotions. There's a fine line between the intimacy of sharing with another "brother" in the experience of ecstatic love for "God" (that is generated by constant meditation) and plain old human emotional and physical love and affection.
Hermann was born in 1871 in East Prussia to a German Jewish family. He went to study architecture in Stuttgart and Munich. In 1896 he went to South Africa, where he practiced as an architect and became a South African citizen.
In 1904 he met Mohandas Gandhi, who was then working in South Africa. He was highly influenced by Gandhi's ideas of Satyagraha and equality among human beings and became his intimate friend and a dedicated devotee. In 1910 Kallenbach, who was a rich man, donated to Gandhi a thousand acre (4 km²) farm belonging to him near Johannesburg. The farm was used to run Gandhi's famous "Tolstoy Farm" that housed the families of satyagrahis. Abandoning the life of a wealthy, sport-loving bachelor, he adopted a simple lifestyle, vegetarian diet and equality politics of Gandhi on this farm. In Gandhi's words, they became "soulmates" and, for a time, shared Kallenbach's home.
Here is a photo of Kallenbach:
And here he is with Gandhi and his secretary Sonia Schlesin (click to biggify):
The statue of Gandhi in Durban.
Just say no to Newt
I'm voting for Newt. I know that, if I wait long enough on any issue, he'll eventually take the position I agree with.
Unless of course you like a pandering opportunist who completely over-estimates his own intelligence. He should have been neutered like the runt of the litter a long time ago.
Unless of course you like a pandering opportunist who completely over-estimates his own intelligence. He should have been neutered like the runt of the litter a long time ago.
Soros' war in Libya
Cameron and Obama are telling the same lies about Libya as Bush and Blair told about Iraq: it's a "humanitarian intervention." What BS. It's about oil. I'm not against war for oil but let's tell the truth.
We all know that George Soros is Obama's puppet-master so I did some checking.
From Good Sense:
We all know that George Soros is Obama's puppet-master so I did some checking.
From Good Sense:
Update: Obama departed to Brazil where he personally strengthens Soros' oil interests there.There are more smoking guns.
Out with Western oil, in with Russian and Chinese oil. Is it just coincidence that George Soros sold his Western oil stock and bought stock in Russia and Chinese oil companies, about three months ago?
Starting in 2009, George Soros invested heavily in Western oil companies in Libya. His investments brought enormous returns, and then at the end of 2010 he mysteriously sold them, and bought stock in Russian and Venezuelan oil.
Each Western company saw stock prices skyrocket over the last six months: Suncore Energy up 46%, Petroleo Brasileiro SA Petrobras up 15%, Occidental Petroleum up 36%, Marathon Oil Corp. up 61%, Conoco Phillips up 42%, Halliburton up 67%, Hess Corp up 57%.
Soros somehow knew to reduce Suncore stocks on New Years eve. Soros dumped almost all his holdings. Likewise, Soros dumped almost all of Halliburton on New Years eve. Same for Hess. Soros dumped almost all of Occidental at the end of September, along with most of Conoco Phillips. He dumped much of Marathon in June. Soros actually increased PBR but that might have more to do with its huge oil bock buy in Africa. Each company began to tumble over these last few days because of the bloody revolution in Libya.
Soros switched much of that over to Russia and Venezuela oil giant Harvest National Resources, which skyrocketed right after his initial September 2010 buy.
Last March, Soros invested in airport screeners. How did he know to do that? Insider info! But how did he know what would go down across the Middle East?
Soros was behind the Egyptian uprising. But it is crucial for him that Gaddafi must stay in power! Otherwise his Russian investments might lose out. That explains why Obama dittered on something as simple as a no-fly zone for 31 days!
The emergency bicycle pedal pump solves two problems
My buddy Chas says he wants one of these:
Not the Japanese policeman, but the emergency bicycle pedal pump he's using to manually pump gas from an underground tank.Posted by Chas @ Chas' Compilation.
Such a practical and sensible device could also be used, I think, to manually pump water out of my well if our power were out for a long length of time.
I did a Google search for "tmc pump pedal", and I found the device here:
Emergency Pump “KP Series”
But alas, you can't buy it from the website, and I can't find an American distributor that carries it.
A search for equivalent devices didn't turn up much: you can buy plans to build your own, or student projects, and various other farm-quality devices, that don't seem to be commercially available.
Why are such devices not available in the USA? They could be so useful in so many ways.
Maybe we need an incentive to start making them. Such devices can also be used to generate electricity. So here is an idea.
In the 1930's, they had all those "pick and shovel" programs to make work for people. Obama can't do that now, because heavy machinery have replaced most those pick-and shovel jobs. But we could have a new kind of "job" instead.
Create tons of bicycle pump generators, and then let all the overweight people who sit around collecting welfare, pump water or generate electricity for several hours per day. They could even watch TV while they are doing it. There would be many benefits:
1.) In our nation of obese people, it would be a way to get thinner and stay healthier.
2.) Taxpayer's would actually be getting SOMETHING in return for their money.
3.) It's GREEN energy. Hooray! Placate fanatics AND get people to work!
4.) In an emergency, "pumpers" could be deployed to pump gas, water, and generate electricity to charge batteries as needed.
Isn't that what they call a win/win situation? Or does it just make too much sense? Or is it just Sunday, and I haven't drank enough coffee yet?
Safe nuclear - thorium
China launching a rival technology to build a safer, cleaner, and ultimately cheaper network of reactors based on thorium:
China’s Academy of Sciences said it had chosen a “thorium-based molten salt reactor system”. The liquid fuel idea was pioneered by US physicists at Oak Ridge National Lab in the 1960s, but the US has long since dropped the ball.
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Chinese scientists claim that hazardous waste will be a thousand times less than with uranium. The system is inherently less prone to disaster.
“The reactor has an amazing safety feature,” said Kirk Sorensen, a former NASA engineer at Teledyne Brown and a thorium expert.
“If it begins to overheat, a little plug melts and the salts drain into a pan. There is no need for computers, or the sort of electrical pumps that were crippled by the tsunami. The reactor saves itself,” he said.
“They operate at atmospheric pressure so you don’t have the sort of hydrogen explosions we’ve seen in Japan. One of these reactors would have come through the tsunami just fine. There would have been no radiation release.”
Thorium is a silvery metal named after the Norse god of thunder. The metal has its own “issues” but no thorium reactor could easily spin out of control in the manner of Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, or now Fukushima.
Professor Robert Cywinksi from Huddersfield University said thorium must be bombarded with neutrons to drive the fission process. “There is no chain reaction. Fission dies the moment you switch off the photon beam. There are not enough neutrons for it continue of its own accord,” he said.
Dr Cywinski, who anchors a UK-wide thorium team, said the residual heat left behind in a crisis would be “orders of magnitude less” than in a uranium reactor.
The earth’s crust holds 80 years of uranium at expected usage rates, he said. Thorium is as common as lead. America has buried tons as a by-product of rare earth metals mining. Norway has so much that Oslo is planning a post-oil era where thorium might drive the country’s next great phase of wealth. Even Britain has seams in Wales and in the granite cliffs of Cornwall. Almost all the mineral is usable as fuel, compared to 0.7pc of uranium. There is enough to power civilization for thousands of years.
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We cannot avoid the fact that two to three billion extra people now expect – and will obtain – a western lifestyle. China alone plans to produce 100m cars and buses every year by 2020.
The International Atomic Energy Agency said the world currently has 442 nuclear reactors. They generate 372 gigawatts of power, providing 14pc of global electricity. Nuclear output must double over twenty years just to keep pace with the rise of the China and India.
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US physicists in the late 1940s explored thorium fuel for power. It has a higher neutron yield than uranium, a better fission rating, longer fuel cycles, and does not require the extra cost of isotope separation.
The plans were shelved because thorium does not produce plutonium for bombs. As a happy bonus, it can burn up plutonium and toxic waste from old reactors, reducing radio-toxicity and acting as an eco-cleaner.
Marilyn Monroe the literature lover
From a review by Larry McMurtry of 3 new books about MM :
If you're an MM fan, the rest of the review is worth reading.
MM's favorite photo of herself by Cecil Beaton:
MM with Edith Sitwell:
Of the three books under review, easily the most accessible is MM—Personal. Marilyn Monroe, particularly during the decades of the 1940s and 1950s, was arguably the most famous woman on earth. In Korea during the Korean War—of which she was the dominant pin-up—she drew ten thousand soldiers at her appearances. She wrote and received many letters. Here’s a response to one she wrote Somerset Maugham:I've never heard of the TV version of "Rain". In 1953 Rita Hayworth did a remake of the 1932 cult classic movie with Joan Crawford (which I have ordered from Netflix).Dear Miss Monroe,...
Thank you for your charming telegram of good wishes on my birthday. It was extremely kind of you to think of me; I was touched and much pleased.
I am so glad to hear that you are going to play Sadie in the T.V. production of “Rain.” I am sure you will be splendid. I wish you the best of luck.
Yours very sincerely, W. Somerset Maugham
Two years before she died, Frank Sinatra gave Marilyn a Maltese terrier that she named Maf. Andrew O’Hagan knows a great deal about Marilyn Monroe, and he has chosen to write about her from the point of view of her canine companion Maf the dog—certainly a daring, even a cheeky thing to do. He has made Maf into a very well-read dog. On each of the 277 pages we are likely to find a number of literary references.
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To say that the dog Maf has come up with a truly dizzying number of literary references would be to understate. O’Hagan has combed world literature for references to writers and their dogs, and picked up scores. Here, for example, is Vita Sackville-West, who “once spoke of her admiration for a certain French tapestry showing Ulysses being met on the doorstep by his dog, Argos.”
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Curiously, MM—Personal includes a charming series of letters Marilyn wrote to Arthur Miller’s children from the point of view of their basset hound:Some terrible insects by the name of ticks have been getting on me lately and Janie it’s just terrible but I am managing the problem pretty well because when I get one on me I just run to Daddy or Marilyn and they get them off me in a hurry....
Marilyn’s favorite photograph of herself was made by the British photographer Cecil Beaton in New York on February 22, 1956. She liked it so much that Josh Logan, who had just directed Bus Stop, had it framed for her, between two notes from Beaton. Marilyn had dozens of prints of it made. What struck Beaton was her ability to endlessly transform herself—without inhibition but with a real uncertainty and vulnerability:She had rocketed from obscurity to become our post-war sex symbol, the pin-up girl of an age. And whatever press agentry or manufactured illusion may have lit the fuse, it is her own weird genius that has sustained her flight. Transfigured by the garish marvel of Technicolor cinemascope, she walks like an undulating basilisk, scorching everything in her path…. Perhaps she was born just the post-war day we had need of her. Certainly she had no knowledge of the past. Like Giraudoux’s Ondine, she is only fifteen years old, and she will never die.The photograph—like many of her photographs—is stunning, but she doesn’t look fifteen and, six years later, she did die, after saying this to a reporter:It might be kind of a relief to be finished. It’s sort of like you don’t know what kind of a yard dash you’re running, but then you’re at the finish line and you sort of sigh—you’ve made it! But you never have—you have to start all over again.
If you're an MM fan, the rest of the review is worth reading.
MM's favorite photo of herself by Cecil Beaton:
MM with Edith Sitwell:
Boris Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago
Pasternak began writing Doctor Zhivago in 1946:
[H]e didn’t complete it until 1955, by which time he’d already published ten of the poems contained in the novel’s final chapter. Hoping to see the book appear in the Soviet Union under the terms of the Khrushchevite cultural “thaw,” he submitted the manuscript to the liberal journal Novy Mir in 1956 and asked the state publishing firm Gosizdat to consider bringing it out. He was rebuffed by both because of the subjective nature of the novel and its rebellion against Marxist orthodoxy. Instead, Pasternak agreed to hand it off to an Italian Communist journalist who had visited him that same year at the poet’s home in the Moscow suburb of Peredelkino, announcing grandly but not entirely without reason, “You are hereby invited to watch me face the firing squad.”
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The repercussions, however, were dire for Pasternak’s kin. After his death in 1960, his mistress Olga Ivinskaya—the woman upon whom part of the novel’s heroine Larissa Fyodorovna, or Lara, is based—was arrested along with her daughter, Lyudmila. Their crime was the “illegal” receipt of foreign royalties for Doctor Zhivago. Ivinskaya was sentenced to eight years of hard labor in Siberia, more or less following the fate of her fictional counterpart, while her daughter was sentenced to three.
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When Stalin’s wife N. S. Alliluyeva committed suicide in 1932, an obsequious letter of condolence, signed by thirty-three prominent Soviet writers—all of them subsequently executed in the Great Terror—was sent to the Kremlin. Pasternak was offered an opportunity to add his signature but declined, instead choosing to append a postscript to the letter saying:I had been thinking, the evening before, deeply and persistently of Stalin; for the first time from the point of view of the artist. In the morning I read the news. I was as shaken as if I had been present, as if I had lived it and seen it....
Pasternak again chanced fate when he lobbied to free the poet Osip Mandelstam, who was arrested in 1934 for writing a satiric epigram about the “Kremlin mountaineer” with “cockroach whiskers.” Stalin rang Pasternak on the phone at 2 o’clock in the morning, asking why the Soviet writers’ organizations hadn’t appealed to him directly on Mandelstam’s behalf, clearly wanting to scandalize the poets who wouldn’t stick up for their friend. Pasternak explained that it was no longer the custom of these organizations to interfere in such matters. There followed this exchange:STALIN: But is he [Mandelstam] or is he not a master?...
PASTERNAK: That is not the issue!
STALIN: What is the issue then?
PASTERNAK: I would like to meet with you . . . and for us to talk.
STALIN: About what?
PASTERNAK: About life and death . . .
(Stalin then hung up.)
No other Soviet writer had the same breadth of vision, the same hopefulness, in the midst of so many human catastrophes. If Pasternak endures beyond the century that didn’t deserve him then it is because, as Robert Conquest noted in 1961, he “saw the human experience more sub specie aeternitatis than is possible to most of us.”
The father of the free-market - Adam Smith
Adam Smith was born in 1723 in Kirkcaldy, Scotland.
Unlike his French counterparts and even his bosom friend David Hume, he led a retired life, much of it in the small Scottish town where he was born, and he lived with his mother until she died at a very advanced age. He was shy, destroyed most of his letters, and did not seem to relish giving brilliant performances, either in print or in conversation. He never fell afoul of civil or religious authority, had no mistresses, and engaged in no public quarrels.In other words Smith was a sane and circumspect pragmatist not a lala-land libertarian.
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Adam Smith has become, along with Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek, one of the deities in the libertarian-conservative pantheon. I suspect Smith would have firmly declined this honor, even before his more zealous devotees, the proponents of the “efficient markets” hypothesis, nearly succeeded in wrecking the economies of the United States, Britain, and their unfortunate imitators.
The Wealth of Nations appeared in the eventful year 1776. The title page described the author as “formerly professor of Moral Philosophy in the University of Glasgow.” His principal influence, Francois Quesnay, chief of the Physiocrats, was a distinguished physician. They were both amateurs, generalists, and reformers—political economists, far removed in outlook and purpose from today’s “specialists without spirit.” The celebrated sarcasms and exhortations in Wealth of Nations—“All for ourselves, and nothing for other people, seems, in every age of the world, to have been the vile maxim of the masters of mankind,” for example, or “People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices”—are not incidental but central. The book might equally well have been titled The Welfare of Nations.
Everyone knows, of course, what Adam Smith stood for: free trade, the division of labor, the minimal state, the invisible hand, the illimitable growth of wants and needs. “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.” “Every individual … intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention.” “Little else is requisite to carry a state to the highest degree of opulence from the lowest barbarism, but peace, easy taxes, and a tolerable administration of justice; all the rest being brought about by the natural course of things.” Case closed.
What everyone knows is seldom altogether wrong; but often it is not altogether right, either. As Emma Rothschild notes at the outset of Economic Sentiments, her superb study of Smith and Condorcet, “They think and write about self-interest and competition, about institutions and corporations, about the ‘market’ and the ‘state.’ But the words mean different things to them, and their connotation is of a different, and sometimes of an opposite, politics.” It is far from obvious that Smith would have entertained cordial feelings toward Alan Greenspan or Margaret Thatcher.
For one thing, Smith roundly mistrusted businessmen. In addition to the sallies already quoted, he insisted that businessmen, for all they may talk of freedom and fairness, “generally have an interest to deceive and even oppress the public.” One example out of many from The Wealth of Nations:Our merchants and master-manufacturers complain much of the bad effects of high wages in raising the price, and thereby lessening the sale of their goods both at home and abroad. They say nothing concerning the bad effects of high profits. They are silent with regard to the pernicious effects of their own gains. They complain only of those of other people.
The difference between tsunamis and okinamis - distance from the shore
Hokusai's The Great Wave off Kanagawa:
(神奈川沖浪裏 Kanagawa Oki Nami Ura, lit. "Under a Wave off Kanagawa"), also known as The Great Wave or simply The Wave, is a woodblock print by the Japanese artist Hokusai. An example of ukiyo-e art, it was published sometime between 1830 and 1833 (during the Edo Period) as the first in Hokusai's series Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji (Fugaku sanjūrokkei (富嶽三十六景)), and is his most famous work.This pic is huge. Click to biggify and see details. It's stunning.
This particular woodblock is one of the most recognized works of Japanese art in the world. It depicts an enormous wave threatening boats near the Japanese prefecture of Kanagawa. While sometimes assumed to be a tsunami, ["harbor wave"] the wave is, as the picture's title notes, more likely to be a large okinami [lit. "wave of the open sea."]
As in all the prints in the series, it depicts the area around Mount Fuji under particular conditions, and the mountain itself appears in the background.
Today's naked redneck chick post
A study has found that chickens are capable of empathy.
Chickens have feelings too:
Chickens have feelings too:
The writer E.B. White, patron saint of us dwellers in darkness who have come late to the barnyard, wrote about the mystery and menace of country life from his saltwater farm in Maine. He wrote about weak lambs who die in the night, heifers who refuse to breed, colts who go lame for no discernible reason. The theme that runs through all his farm accounts is the extremely tenuous thread that links livestock to life, a thread he turned into the world’s most famous web when he wrote Charlotte’s Web.
The story White never wrote was one that I reckon he deemed too hard for young readers to take, the story of a tame hen who willfully tore a chick to pieces and then, crazed with remorse, went into the cellar and committed suicide by eating moth balls.
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The story this week that chickens are capable of feeling empathy might have surprised some folk but it sure didn’t surprise me. I’ve known chickens who were capable of love, jealousy, selfishness and lust. I’ve observed the politics of the chicken yard and found them to be as complicated and heartbreaking as any parish council in the land.
New footage of September 11 attacks
Captured from a New York Police Department (NYPD) helicopter, the 17-minute video shows the aircraft hovering just 300ft above the Twin Towers as thick black smoke spewing out from the roof of the building.It's here.
After the 1727ft North Tower imploded, the police pilot can be heard on camera commenting: "Holy ----, that’s it, biggest disaster in the world, right there".
The footage was used at the official inquiry into the collapse of the World Trade Centre buildings. It was obtained from New York City authorities under the Freedom of Information Act by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) but was not released publicly.
However, the video was passed onto whistleblowing website Cryptome who leaked it onto the internet.
Sorry guys, size DOES matter...
...at least when it comes to fertility:
When it comes to male fertility, it turns out that size does matter. But not the measurement that most men worry about.I'll show you my AGD if you show me yours.
The dimension in question is a measurement known as anogenital distance, or AGD.
The shorter the AGD, the more likely a man was to have a low sperm count, a U.S. study has shown.
Men whose AGD is shorter than the median length - around two inches - have seven times the chance of being sub-fertile as those with a longer AGD, according to the study published on Friday in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives.
That distance, measured from the anus to the underside of the scrotum, is linked to male fertility, including semen volume and sperm count, the study found.
The last "White Rajah"
Anthony Brooke, who died on March 2 aged 98, was heir to the throne of Sarawak and briefly ruled the romantic jungle kingdom on Borneo:
Brooke's English family had been the absolute rulers of Sarawak for three generations. Popularly known as the White Rajahs, they had their own money, stamps, flag and constabulary, and the power of life and death over their various subjects – Malays, Chinese and Dyak tribesmen, a few of whom still indulged in the grisly custom of headhunting.The Brooke family ruled Sarawak (which is the size of England) from 1841 until 1946 when they were forced to cede it to the British Empire. It was finally given independence in 1963 when it joined the new Federation of Malaysia. Read the whole thing if you can stomach the British jingoism but I did enjoy how Anthony Brooke ended up after ceding Sarawak:
[He] embarked on a second career as a self-styled "travelling salesman" for world peace. In the late 1950s, he led a campaign to put morality back into British politics, and in the 1960s he toured the world on a "peace pilgrimage", meeting Nehru, Zhou En-lai and U Nu of Burma, and walking across the Punjab with the Indian saint Vinoba Bhave. He lived with the New Age commune at Findhorn, in the northeast of Scotland, adopting their belief that flying saucers would bring "peace on earth and the brotherhood of man".I think I'd take the lunacy of the British Empire over flying saucers anyday.
"Obama’s deep thinking is ultimately bogus"
Any sane person knows that Obama is a phony but it takes a fag to really see how totally insincere he is about "gay marriage". Bruce Bawer:
HT GayandRight.
Of course, Obama isn’t just your run-of-the-mill opponent of gay marriage. No, he wants to have that one both ways, too. So it is that every time he reiterates his hostility to gay marriage, he insists on adding that he’s “grappling” or “wrestling” with the issue.Couldn't have said it better myself. I'd have just said he is simply a typical pseudo-intellectual airhead snob.
...
Obama’s distinguishing characteristic throughout his adult years has been a species of intellectual vanity that seems to overwhelm his every other personal attribute, good or bad. So pronounced is this intellectual vanity — and the self-seriousness that goes with it — that it stood out even at Harvard Law, where he studied, and the law school at the University of Chicago, where he taught. He has, in short, even by the formidable standards of the Ivy League, the law profession, and high-stakes politics, an exceedingly lofty opinion of his own mind and wants us to share that opinion. Nothing else, it would seem, matters to him nearly as much.
So thoroughly does this trait dominate Obama’s character, indeed, that it utterly dwarfs other traits that one might consider important in a president — or, for that matter, an alderman, school superintendent, night manager at a deli, or anybody else in a position of responsibility. Time and again, when the impressive thing would be to make a strong and timely decision — and to make a clear case for it — Obama hesitates, vacillates, equivocates, and ends up, as in the matter of gay marriage, making a muddle of things and riling up pretty much everybody; and instead of recognizing this habit as a weakness, Obama himself shows every sign of considering it a virtue, a mark of excellence, that distinguishes him from lesser — which is to say less cognitively inclined — beings.
...
Obama’s deep thinking is ultimately bogus. It’s as if he’s posing for Rodin, elbow on knee, chin on fist — all the while staring in a mirror, pleased by what he sees.
HT GayandRight.
The odds of an American soldier being killed in various wars
From Nicholas Hobbes' Essential Militaria:
• War of Independence: 2 percent (1 in 50)Our Civil War was the deadliest but the figure is more than double the others because both sides were counted as American soldiers.
• War of 1812: 0.8 percent (1 in 127)
• Indian Wars: 0.9 percent (1 in 106)
• Mexican War: 2.2 percent (1 in 45)
• Civil War: 6.7 percent (1 in 15)
• Spanish-American War: 0.1 percent (1 in 798 )
• World War I: 1.1 percent (1 in 89)
• World War II: 1.8 percent (1 in 56)
• Korean War: 0.6 percent (1 in 171)
• Vietnam War: 0.5 percent (1 in 185)
• Persian Gulf War: 0.03 percent (1 in 3,162)
Lies, damned lies and statistics: American kids are the dumbest on earth
In general, kids from wealthy families perform well in school - better, in fact, than almost anywhere else in the world - but poor students rarely succeed.
In less politically correct words: kids from decent middle-class American families outperform kids everywhere in the world. It's the under-achieving black and white trash on welfare who drag our statistics down.
It's the same with the murder rate. Ghetto blacks killing ghetto blacks makes our murder rate high. Ditto with all the other statistics. Middle-class Americans are the most civilized people in the world. And anyone can become middle-class in America unlike anywhere else in the world.
As the Silky Pony says: there are two Americas. There are the Americans who work hard and pay taxes and then there are the bums who pay no taxes and suck off the government tit.
Socialism/welfarism has not solved any problems but it has created a huge one. We're stuck with a bunch of bums who would have died of starvation generations ago in a world without "from each according to his ability; to each according to his need" Marxist bullshit.
I'm an unapologetic Spencerian. Good old-fashioned Christian charity would have helped those who were willing to help themselves.
In less politically correct words: kids from decent middle-class American families outperform kids everywhere in the world. It's the under-achieving black and white trash on welfare who drag our statistics down.
It's the same with the murder rate. Ghetto blacks killing ghetto blacks makes our murder rate high. Ditto with all the other statistics. Middle-class Americans are the most civilized people in the world. And anyone can become middle-class in America unlike anywhere else in the world.
As the Silky Pony says: there are two Americas. There are the Americans who work hard and pay taxes and then there are the bums who pay no taxes and suck off the government tit.
Socialism/welfarism has not solved any problems but it has created a huge one. We're stuck with a bunch of bums who would have died of starvation generations ago in a world without "from each according to his ability; to each according to his need" Marxist bullshit.
I'm an unapologetic Spencerian. Good old-fashioned Christian charity would have helped those who were willing to help themselves.
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