Parmigiani Fleurier, watchmakers, undertake the restoration (restauration, as they put it) of a pistol automaton probably built circa 1815 by the Frères Rochat.
Matt Labash has compiled a list of Donald Trump’s most Trumpish moments.
If you’re the sort of person who’s been conditioned to accept reality-show excess as entertainment, which is to say the sort of person who lives in America, then what’s not to love? There’s the supermodel wife and the gold-covered “Trump”-embossed Boeing 757. There’s the garishly decorated three-story Trump Tower penthouse that had a New Statesman writer, after a tour, calling Trump “a man whose front room proved that it really was possible to spend a million dollars in Woolworth’s.” There’s that hair that looks like a mac-‘n’-cheese-colored nutria that was hit by an oil truck. There’s the permanent pucker, which at rest makes Trump look like a puzzled duck working out long-division problems in its head.
And who doesn’t admire his fiscal conservatism? (“The only kind of people I want counting my money are little short guys that wear yarmulkes.”) His impeccable manners? (To Larry King: “Do you mind if I sit back a little? Because your breath is very bad.”) His commitment to diversity? (“I have a great relationship with the blacks.”) Who couldn’t appreciate the executive know-how and tested mettle that come from telling La Toya Jackson “you’re fired” on Celebrity Apprentice?
And as if all that doesn’t qualify Trump to Make America Great Again®, he’s a man who knows his own mind, except when he changes it. (Trump has switched his party registration five times since 1987, once every 5.8 years.) He’s a man who tells it like it is, except when he’s lying. (“Sorry losers and haters, but my IQ is one of the highest and you all know it!”) He’s a man of rich contradictions. (“I’m actually very modest,” he once bragged.)
But to lovingly catalog all of Trump’s gaffes is a pointless exercise. Even calling them “gaffes” is a bit of a misnomer. Gaffes are what stop normal politicians. But a gaffe can’t actually be considered a gaffe if, say, you give a speech in the belly of the evangelical beast, Liberty University, and show your total ignorance of the Bible (an amazing holy book, right up there with The Art of the Deal) by calling Second Corinthians “Two Corinthians,” and yet you still sop up 42 percent of evangelical voters, as Trump did in a recent New York Times/CBS poll. Second-place Ted Cruz (or should I say “two place”) only managed 25 percent. Expecting a gaffe to stop Trump, at this late date, is like expecting a traffic cone to stop a runaway train. …
But with a sizable chunk of the electorate now poised to take the great leap forward with Trump, it may be worth hitting the pause button for some quiet reflection. Who is this man and what do we really know of him?
After combing my vast Trump archive, as well as contacting Trump sources, I present herewith nine of Trump’s Trumpiest moments — a Trump Moments collage, if you will — that distill the very essence of the man.
Rod Dreher notes that National Review may be substantively correct about Trump, but elite conservative writers, a lot like the liberals, are also thoroughly disconnected from the concerns and views of normal working class voters out there in the hinterlands. Trump, in openly and passionately taking on the Establishment, has tapped into a powerful reservoir of political support, and is rejecting the whole elite Establishment intelligentsia, on the Right as well as on the Left.
When I worked at National Review in 2002, I took pride at being part of the team of conservative standard-bearers, and believed that we were articulating what American conservatives felt. This continued after I left NR, but kept up my work as a conservative opinion journalist.
But a funny thing kept happening. When I would go back to south Louisiana to visit my family, I often got into (friendly) arguments with people about conservative principles and policies. I noticed that we were at loggerheads over many things. It frustrated me to no end that reason was useless; “ideologically unmoored cultural passions†weren’t just something, they were the only thing. This was a tribal conservatism, one that had very little to do with ideas, and everything to do with nationalism and a sense of us-versus-them. To be a conservative is to agree with Us; to disagree with us means you must be a liberal.
I remember getting into it with my dad once after I moved home. I was driving him to the VA clinic for a check-up. This was during the Obamacare debate, and he started complaining about welfare spongers who expected the government to pay for their medical care. I pointed out that he was an avid user of Medicare and of veterans’ medical benefits, and that if not for those government programs, he would have died a long time ago.
“That’s different,†he said.
“How?†I asked.
He just got mad, and changed the subject.
This kind of thing happened more than a few times. Moving back to Louisiana to live really did reveal to me the gap between the conservative punditocracy and those for whom they — for whom we — presume to speak. Ideas and reason matter far less to most people than they do to people like us (this is true of the left as well), not because most people are stupid, but because their mode of experiencing life is not nearly as abstract as ours. …
[C]onservative theoreticians (like me) get so caught up in our ideas that we fail to see some important things, even as many of us tell ourselves, as we have for a generation now, that we are the spokesmen for “real†America.
It’s a narrative that is irresistible to intellectuals. The Left, of course, always loves to think of itself on the side of the People, never mind what actual people think. Trouble is, the Right is the same way.
I’d say that we’d better beat Trump in the primaries, because Populist Nationalism is never going to lead to conservative results or good government. What Trump in power and unbridled would turn into is another Juan Peron, another Huey Long, cozying up to the masses with Nativism, Protectionism, and an inevitable package of socialist goodies, with a large helping of crony capitalism and corruption on the side.
This video made by a 16-year-old Bibi Wilhaim tells German elites that they have destroyed Germany with their policy of admitting Third World primitives. She calls on the men of Germany to protect their women and children from Muslim attacks. Facebook is apparently censoring her video as “hate speech.”
The Guardian reports that new research methods have disclosed the ancient roots of classic European fairy tales.
Fairy stories such as Beauty and the Beast and Rumpelstiltskin can be traced back thousands of years to prehistoric times, with one tale originating from the bronze age, academics have revealed.
Using techniques normally employed by biologists, they studied common links between 275 Indo-European fairy tales from around the world and found some have roots that are far older than previously known, and “long before the emergence of the literary recordâ€.
While stories such as Beauty and the Beast and Rumplestiltskin were first written down in the 17th and 18th century, the researchers found they originated “significantly earlierâ€. “Both tales can be securely traced back to the emergence of the major western Indo-European subfamilies as distinct lineages between 2,500 and 6,000 years ago,†they write.
Durham University anthropologist Dr Jamie Tehrani, who worked with folklorist Sara Graça da Silva, from New University of Lisbon, believed the research – published in the Royal Society Open Science journal – has answered a question about our cultural heritage. …
Some of these stories go back much further than the earliest literary record and indeed further back than classical mythology – some versions of these stories appear in Latin and Greek texts – but our findings suggest they are much older than that.â€
Analysis showed Jack and the Beanstalk was rooted in a group of stories classified as The Boy Who Stole Ogre’s Treasure, and could be traced back to when eastern and western Indo-European languages split – more than 5,000 years ago. Beauty and the Beast and Rumpelstiltskin to be about 4,000 years old. A folk tale called The Smith and the Devil was estimated to date back 6,000 years to the bronze age.
The story, which involves a blacksmith selling his soul in a pact with the devil in order to gain supernatural ability, then tricking the evil power, is not so well known today, but its theme of a Faustian pact is familiar to many.
The study employed phylogenetic analysis, which was developed to investigate evolutionary relationships between species, and used a tree of Indo-European languages to trace the descent of shared tales on it, to see how far they could be demonstrated to go back in time.
Tehrani said: “We find it pretty remarkable these stories have survived without being written. They have been told since before even English, French and Italian existed. They were probably told in an extinct Indo-European language.â€
Da Silva believes the stories endure thanks to “the power of storytelling and magic from time immemorialâ€.
Justin Smith, 26, of McAdoo is what doctors are calling a medical miracle.
He was found nearly frozen to death on the side of the road about one year ago.
On Monday, he got the opportunity to thank everyone who helped him survive after spending nearly 12 hours out in the cold.
“I got done with work that day and we were going to the fire hall to hang out, having a couple drinks with some people, and I wanted to go home around 10 o’clock,†said Smith.
On that cold night last February, Justin Smith walked out of the Treskow fire hall, but never made it home.
His father Don found him the next day on the side of Treskow Road.
“I looked over and there was Justin laying there and he was laying face up there like this,†said Don Smith. ” He was blue. His face he was lifeless. I checked for a pulse. I checked for a heartbeat. There was nothing.â€
“The coroner was on scene. The state police were on scene. They were doing essentially a death investigation,†said Dr. Gerald Coleman.
But Dr. Coleman, an emergency department physician at Lehigh Valley Hospital in Hazleton, refused to pronounce Justin dead when his body was that cold.
“Our mind is supposed to run the show, not our hearts because if your heart runs the show, you can run into some problems. I just kind of threw that to the wind and said, ‘No, not today,’†said Dr. Coleman.
A team in Hazleton performed CPR on Justin for two hours.
He was then transferred to Lehigh Valley Hospital Cedar Crest near Allentown where doctors used what’s called an ECMO machine to warm up Justin’s blood.
Doctors say flying Justin to Lehigh Valley’s Hospital near Allentown was a miracle in itself. They had to beat a snowstorm and do compressions on him the entire way.
“We knew we needed a big, big miracle,†Justin’s mom Sissy Smith said.
“When you have very low temperature, it can preserve the brain and other organ functions,†said Dr. James Wu of the Lehigh Valley Health Network.
Doctors said as Justin warmed up, his heart started beating.
Weeks went by before he actually woke up and realized where he was.
“It’s like I woke up from a dream, but it wasn’t a dream,†Justin said.
“When you look at the science of what happened to Justin, it was really hard to imagine that anyone on Earth could survive this,†said Dr. John Castaldo of the Lehigh Valley Health Network.
Now he’s back to his family he loves, golf, and school.
Justin lost his pinkies and all of his toes, but doctors call him a medical miracle.
Susan Wright is not very happy with Sarah Palin’s recent behavior.
Today we saw someone who was once a rising star in the conservative world explode in an inglorious display of crass opportunism.
Sarah Palin, that darling of a failed John McCain presidential bid, has resurfaced to throw her voice and her support behind the gilded toad of the GOP, Donald Trump. Where she was once a strong Tea Party leader, promoting free market ideas, limited government, and power back in the hands of the people, today she forsook it all, in favor of a big government, foul mouthed, Wall Street liberal with atrocious hair. …
If it’s true that we reap what we sow, the next couple of months will see Palin and her brood fade into obscurity, once and for all. Those talking heads (I’m looking squarely at you, Sean Hannity) who are obviously in the Donald’s soiled pocket need to see their ratings plummet, as a fitting response to their willingness to turn a blind eye to this fraud in our midst and build him up, even as he tears the name of conservatism down.
Am I angry? Yes, I angry.
I’d kind of like to think that Donald paid her an enormous amount of money, but I have a suspicion that she really just became completely carried away by Trump’s populist, anti-Washington shtick.
Raphael Richard Haar, on Facebook, argues that Israel requires the “west bank” territories in order to have defensible borders. His 3D map seems pretty persuasive to me.
A one dimensional picture is worth a thousand words. How many words is a three dimensional picture worth?
Notice the green flat coastal plain, 70 percent of Israels population resides in this region. 80 percent of Israels industrial base is also in this region.
Notice the beige mountain range of Judea Samaria. This is a natural protective barrier against ground invasion. Land can not be invaded and occupied by air power, only boots on the ground controls territory. The vast majority of Israel fresh water supply is captured within the aquifers located under and within this region historically known as Judea Samarian (The Biblical Heartland)
Conclusion; The Jewish Communities, towns villages and cities on top and in Judea Samaria are not an “obstacle to peace†they prevent war. If Israel where to come down from these mountains she would be a tasty little morsel that would invite invasion from the global Islamic supremacist movement that surrounds battle ship Israel, who is floating in a Sea of Arab tyranny. The Biblical heartland, where Israel maintains her existence.
