Today is Inauguration Day. I have been having improper thoughts lately (I should go to confession), one of which is that such grand delusions as coronations are necessary. People need to imagine they elect their leaders. Why we were given a clown like Donald Trump, why we were forced to choose between him and an even less qualified person, is inside baseball stuff. I don’t know that answer.
It’s About Time To Sexualize The Next Generation
Flipping through my car radio I’ve been hearing the same song over and over again the last few weeks. It is called “Side to Side” by Ariana Grande featuring Nicki Minaj. It’s currently the #9 song on the Billboard Hot 100 and here is the video with 700 million views.
I must admit the song is catchy and Ariana Grande is a very beautiful girl from the neck up. HOWEVER, and this is a big however, despite being 23 she has the body of a young teen. A pre-pubescent looking girl singing a song this sexual is not a coincidence. Ariana Grande has been well chosen for the role.
Continue reading “It’s About Time To Sexualize The Next Generation”
Something completely different …
This is off the beaten path, just something nice for us to enjoy.
A few years back my wife and I had a chance to see the Colorado Symphony perform Beethoven’s Ninth Choral Symphony, Ode to Joy. My wife has long loved classical music and in our twenty-one years together she has watched me move closer and closer to it, to her delight. That performance that day was so rich, so well performed, that when it was over the house exploded, genuine cheers and shouts of appreciation as I have never experienced before. No rock concert can come close.
We are going back to see it performed again in a couple of weeks. I am pumped. In the meantime I ran across the video that follows beneath the fold, “10000 singing Beethoven – Ode an die Freude_Ode to Joy.” I know nothing about it, but with over 8 million views, no doubt readers here are familiar and can fill me in.
Enjoy, and if you are short of time, cheat and jump ahead to minute six leading up to that part of the movement where the conductor jumps out of his suit. The same thing happened with the Colorado Symphony.
Trees are fake
The theory that all trees are fake, an optical illusion put there by bears to hide their dens, is gaining wide traction these days on the Internet. Bears are actually very clever manipulators who run the planet from underground, with elaborate lighting and shadowing devices that create the illusion of trees within a thirty yard radius around us as we walk outdoors.
My morning on Facebook
My kingdom for a good book to read in the morning. Any suggestions? Instead, I skimmed Facebook … it appears now to be the primary vehicle for spreading propaganda, once the role of TV news and tabloids, but I repeat myself. It is coming down fast and furious these days.
This morning’s lessons:
Meryl Streep is a blueblood descendant of British royalty, and was chosen to be famous for that reason. She’s not smart, not even a good actress. Her opinions don’t matter.
The 2002 Venezuelan manufactured coup d’état
The 2002 failed coup d’état in Venezuela spawned a 35-page Wikipedia entry, and Hugo Chavez another 52 pages. As I came to understand that Fidel Castro was an American Intelligence agent, I began to realize there is a pattern here. Hugo Chavez, like Castro, is/was an Intelligence agent.
Chavez led a plot against the government of President Carlos Andrés Perez in 1992. It was an illegal coup, and could have easily led to his permanent imprisonment, execution or banishment. Instead he went on to become the President of Venezuela by popular election. That tells us all we need to know.
Continue reading “The 2002 Venezuelan manufactured coup d’état”
The Manufactured 2002 Venezuelan coup d’état
The 2002 failed coup d’état in Venezuela spawned a 35-page Wikipedia entry, and Hugo Chavez another 52 pages. As I came to understand that Fidel Castro was an American Intelligence agent, I began to realize there is a pattern here. Hugo Chavez, like Castro, is/was an Intelligence agent.
Chavez led a plot against the government of President Carlos Andrés Perez in 1992. It was an illegal coup, and could have easily led to his permanent imprisonment, execution or banishment. Instead he went on to become the President of Venezuela by popular election. That tells us all we need to know.
Continue reading “The Manufactured 2002 Venezuelan coup d’état”
Welcome to the calm zone
I have been busy researching an event from 2002, the failed coup d’état in Venezuela. Then-president Hugo Chavez was taken hostage for a couple of days and then restored to power. The upshot is that Chavez was controlled opposition and that the event was manufactured for the benefit of the Venezuelan people. It instilled confidence in Chavez, its whole purpose. (Wikipedia clues us in in the first sentence with the number “47.” That is a spook marker telling us the event was fake. We are not supposed to know that.) [A better word than “fake” is “manufactured,” as thousands of honest people were sucked into it by agents provocateur.]
Vermeer the Forger, Part Six
Vermeer’s Forgers
One of the most notorious art forgers in history was the miscreant, Han Van Meegeren (1889-1947). He is sited as much as he is because he had the juevos to engineer a swindle of the degenerate, Hermann Goering, head of the Luftwaffe and Hitler’s number two. This event made Van Meegeren a popular figure in Holland after the war but it was also the reason he was caught. Had he not pulled a fast one on Iron Hermann, his Vermeer forgeries might still be part of the official canon.
His story is told several times, the best English language versions being “Van Meegeren, Master Forger” by an Irish Lord, Kilbracken, with the aid of Van Meegeren’s son; “The Forger’s Spell” by Edward Dolnick, and the superior “The Man Who Made Vermeers” by Jonathan Lopez. If you only have time for one, get the Lopez book.
Also of interest is the filmmaker Errol Morris’ multi-part essay about these events and books at the New York Times website.
(Christ at Emmaus, Han Van Meegeren’s most successful Vermeer forgery)
Vermeer the Forger- Part Five
Vermeer’s Demise
Two events occurred between 1672 and 1674 that essentially broke Vermeer and hastened a quick and brutal end to his life at the age of forty three. The first disaster was the invasion of Holland by the French who were attempting to wrestle ports in the Netherlands away from Spain, the Catholic super power holding sway over the Protestant region. The immediate fallout was that the Dutch economy collapsed, leaving Delft in particular with holes in its pockets, prompting a mass exodus of tradesmen for Amsterdam, then the richest city in Europe.
Vermeer stayed put, having several children to feed, and he by default became one of the guild leaders as he was one of the few master grade painters left in town. This didn’t do him much good as the market for paintings vanished. It is at this point in time, if the eponymous claim of this series has any validity, that Vermeer may have, with the facilitation and cash flow of Pieter Van Ruijven, executed outright forgeries.
Piece of Mindful 