Archive for September, 2014
30 Sep 2014

Tantric Painting

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HinduPainting

17th century Tantric painting from Rajastan: a meditation on “the endless dance of energy.”

Siglio Press book page

From Frank André Jamme’s Tantra Song: Tantric Painting from Rajasthan

Stephen Heyman, in the New York Times: 17th Century Modernism?

Hat tip to Virtual Artifacts.

30 Sep 2014

Camille Paglia: Leftist Ideology Endangers Women

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CampusSexEducation

Camille Paglia thinks the Left’s date-rape witch-hunting blinds women to the dangers of genuine sexual assault.

American campuses are obscuring the true danger to young women, too often distracted by cellphones or iPods in public places: the ancient sex crime of abduction and murder. Despite hysterical propaganda about our “rape culture,” the majority of campus incidents being carelessly described as sexual assault are not felonious rape (involving force or drugs) but oafish hookup melodramas, arising from mixed signals and imprudence on both sides. …

The basic Leftist premise, descending from Marxism, is that all problems in human life stem from an unjust society and that corrections and fine-tunings of that social mechanism will eventually bring utopia. Progressives have unquestioned faith in the perfectibility of mankind.

The horrors and atrocities of history have been edited out of primary and secondary education except where they can be blamed on racism, sexism, and imperialism — toxins embedded in oppressive outside structures that must be smashed and remade. But the real problem resides in human nature, which religion as well as great art sees as eternally torn by a war between the forces of darkness and light. …

The gender ideology dominating academe denies that sex differences are rooted in biology and sees them instead as malleable fictions that can be revised at will. The assumption is that complaints and protests, enforced by sympathetic campus bureaucrats and government regulators, can and will fundamentally alter all men.

But extreme sex crimes like rape-murder emanate from a primitive level that even practical psychology no longer has a language for. Psychopathology, as in Richard von Krafft-Ebing’s grisly Psychopathia Sexualis (1886), was a central field in early psychoanalysis. But today’s therapy has morphed into happy talk, attitude adjustments, and pharmaceutical shortcuts.

There is a ritualistic symbolism at work in sex crime that most women do not grasp and therefore cannot arm themselves against. It is well-established that the visual faculties play a bigger role in male sexuality, which accounts for the greater male interest in pornography. The sexual stalker, who is often an alienated loser consumed with his own failures, is motivated by an atavistic hunting reflex. He is called a predator precisely because he turns his victims into prey.

Sex crime springs from fantasy, hallucination, delusion, and obsession. A random young woman becomes the scapegoat for a regressive rage against female sexual power: “You made me do this.” Academic clichés about the “commodification” of women under capitalism make little sense here: It is women’s superior biological status as magical life-creator that is profaned and annihilated by the barbarism of sex crime.

Misled by the naive optimism and “You go, girl!” boosterism of their upbringing, young women do not see the animal eyes glowing at them in the dark. They assume that bared flesh and sexy clothes are just a fashion statement containing no messages that might be misread and twisted by a psychotic. They do not understand the fragility of civilization and the constant nearness of savage nature.

30 Sep 2014

Letter From Matisse

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MatisseLetter

Via Ratak Monodosico.

30 Sep 2014

“Such a Good Russian Bear at Kolyma”

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Russian worker has trained the bear to give him his paw. That bear will do anything for another cookie.

29 Sep 2014

Which One Could It Be?

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ObamaLying

Daily Beast:

On “60 Minutes,” the president faulted his spies for failing to predict the rise of ISIS. There’s one problem with that statement: The intelligence analysts did warn about the group.

Nearly eight months ago, some of President Obama’s senior intelligence officials were already warning that ISIS was on the move. In the beginning of 2014, ISIS fighters had defeated Iraqi forces in Fallujah, leading much of the U.S. intelligence community to assess they would try to take more of Iraq.

But in an interview that aired Sunday evening, the president told 60 Minutes that the rise of the group now proclaiming itself a caliphate in territory between Syria and Iraq caught the U.S. intelligence community off guard. Obama specifically blamed James Clapper, the current director of national intelligence: “Our head of the intelligence community, Jim Clapper, has acknowledged that, I think, they underestimated what had been taking place in Syria,” he said.

Reached by The Daily Beast after Obama’s interview aired, one former senior Pentagon official who worked closely on the threat posed by Sunni jihadists in Syria and Iraq was flabbergasted. “Either the president doesn’t read the intelligence he’s getting or he’s bullshitting,” the former official said.

29 Sep 2014

Kevin Williamson Thinks Lena Dunham Shouldn’t Vote

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LenaDunhamObama

And he makes a good argument:

Miss Dunham, reflecting celebrity culture at large, makes a fetish of voting, and it is easy to see why: Voting is the most shallow gesture of citizenship there is, the issuance of a demand — a statement that “this is how the world should be,” as Miss Dunham puts it — imposing nothing in the way of reciprocal responsibility. Power without responsibility — Stanley Baldwin would not have been surprised that Miss Dunham and likeminded celebrities think of voting in terms of their sex lives. Miss Dunham, in an earlier endorsement of Barack Obama, compared voting in the presidential election to losing one’s virginity — you want it to be someone special. Understood that way, voting is nothing other than a reiteration of the original infantile demand: “I Want!”

As a procedure for sorting out complex policy issues, voting is of distinctly limited value: If you wanted to know whether the compressive strength of a particular material were sufficient to support a bridge over Interstate 20, you would not go about solving that problem by bundling that question with 10,000 other equally precise and complex but largely unrelated questions, presenting the bundle of questions to the least-informed few million people you could identify, and then proceeding with whatever solution 50 percent +1 of them preferred. That would be a bad way to build a bridge — a homicidal way, in fact — and though it is a necessary instrument of accountability in a democratic republic, voting properly plays a very limited role. For instance, we have a Bill of Rights, which could with equal accuracy be called the List of Stuff You Idiots Can’t Be Trusted To Vote On. A majority of Americans don’t like free speech? Too bad, Harry Reid.

But for Miss Dunham et al., this isn’t a question of citizenship — it’s a therapeutic matter. Voting, she promises, will offer “a sense of accomplishment,” knowledge that one has done the right thing, even “joy.” But checking a box is the most trivial accomplishment imaginable; having done so is no guarantee that one has done the right thing, inasmuch as voters routinely make bad decisions for evil reasons; and one suspects that Miss Dunham means something different and less by “joy” than did, say, Beethoven or Walt Whitman. “I wore fishnets and a little black dress to vote,” she writes, “then walked around with a spring in my slinky step. It lasted for days. I can summon it when I’m blue. It’s more effective than exercise or ecstasy or cheesecake.” And that of course is the highest purpose of our ancient constitutional order: to provide adult children with pleasures exceeding those of cheesecake or empathogenic phenethylamines.

Hat tip to Darleen Click via Karen L. Myers.

29 Sep 2014

Detention Notice

28 Sep 2014

Generation Wuss

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Millenials1

When a male member of Generation X who has a boyfriend thinks your generation is weak, over-sensitive and generally lame, things are pretty bad.

I am looking at Millenials from the POV of a member of one of the most pessimistic and ironic generations that has ever roamed the earth—Generation X—so when I hear Millenials being so damaged by “cyber-bullying” that it becomes a gateway to suicide—it’s difficult for me to process. And even my boyfriend agrees that Generation Wuss is overly sensitive, especially when dealing with criticism. When Generation Wuss creates something they have so many outlets to display it that it often goes out into the world unfettered, unedited, posted everywhere, and because of this freedom a lot of the content displayed is rushed and kind of shitty and that’s OK—it’s just the nature of the world now—but when Millennials are criticized for this content they seem to collapse into a shame spiral and the person criticizing them is automatically labeled a hater, a contrarian, a troll. And then you have to look at the generation that raised them, that coddled them in praise—gold medals for everyone, four stars for just showing up—and tried to shield them from the dark side of life, and in turn created a generation that appears to be super confident and positive about things but when the least bit of darkness enters into their realm they become paralyzed and unable to process it.

Read the whole thing.

28 Sep 2014

New iPhone!

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Newphone1
Newphone2

Hat tip to Ratak Monodosico.

28 Sep 2014

Who Left That Camera There?

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Watch more video from the Staff Picks channel on Frequency

Hat tip to Karen L. Myers and Walter Olson [Facebook].

27 Sep 2014

Liberal Whales

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27 Sep 2014

‘Invisible Art’ Story Only Satire

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NewstromBosh
“Art enthusiasts admire Newstrom’s paintings and sculptures at the Schulberg Gallery in New York.”

The wags at CBC.Canada photoshopped a stock image and wrote up an amusing news story satirizing modern art.

27-year-old artist Lana Newstrom says she is the first artist in the world to create invisible “art.” In this documentary we traveled to her empty studio to learn more about Lana and her unusual artistic process.

“Art is about imagination and that is what my work demands of the people interacting with it. You have to imagine a painting or sculpture is in front of you,” says Newstrom.

Paul Rooney, Lana’s agent, believes she might be the greatest artist alive working today: “When she describes what you can’t see, you begin to realize why one of her invisible works can fetch upwards of a million dollars.” said Rooney.

Listen to learn more about Lana Newstrom and her invisible art.

6:53 audio

The story was just a little too good to be true, and I made a point of searching for the “Schulberg Gallery” and other confirmatory material before swallowing this one whole.

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They did fool a number of bloggers though.

Moonbattery: “Lana Newstrom’s Invisible Art”

Tea Party News Network: “The Sheer Stupidity of Useful Idiots on Full Display; Looks Like the ‘Intellectuals’ Aren’t So Smart”

Barstool Sports: “NYC Artist Selling ‘Invisible Art’ For Millions”

Even Richard Fernandez (who is a very smart guy) bit: “The Unseen”

Unfortunately, the spoof story was only too plausible in today’s cultural climate.

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the Archives of Never Yet Melted for September 2014.











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