Archive for June, 2019
30 Jun 2019


Washington with slaves picking cotton.
At the height of the New Deal, government contracts for “works of art” by Bohemian radicals to decorate public buldings were passed out like salted peanuts.
One prominent beneficiary of all this public largesse was the very left-wing Russian muralist Victor Arnautoff who got to paint an endless series of “socially conscious” works taking pokes at both American history and the contemporary American scene all over the San Francisco Bay area.
Arnautoff started off as a Tsarist officer and fought for the Whites before fleeing into exile in the United States, but once in the New World, he fell in with the Mexican communist painter Diego Rivera, became Rivera’s assistant, and converted to Communism himself. He was investigated by HUAC in the 1950s in connection with a caricature he drew of Richard Nixon. Arnautoff in retirement returned to Russia to live out the end of his life, happily, under Communism.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s WPA naturally chose Arnautoff to decorate San Francisco’s George Washington High School. Araunoff’s series of Washington murals came out precisely as everything the left-wing heart could desire. Bari Weiss describes it, in the New York Times:
[His] “Life of Washington,†does not show the clichéd image of our first president kneeling in prayer at Valley Forge. Instead, the 13-panel, 1,600-square-foot mural, which was painted in 1936 in the just-built George Washington High School, depicts his slaves picking cotton in the fields of Mount Vernon and a group of colonizers walking past the corpse of a Native American.
There is a happy ending though. The ultra-leftwing SF School Board is so stupid that they have voted to spend $600,000 of the tax-payer’s dollars, not to cover up, but actually to destroy the communist series of paintings. Not because they are pretty crappy paintings abusing the Father of Our Country and treasonously siding with Stone Age Savages against the pioneers, but because the left-wing dimbulbs out there feel threatened and offended by these dreadful images which they interpret (erroneously) as glorifying Colonialism.
Here we have a case of Life not resembling Art, but rather approximating with perfection a satire based on extreme exaggeration.
You go, SF School Board! Trash that obnoxious Communist Colonialist bunch of paintings!

Evil, ruthless white settlers (one equipped with a pick to violate the landscape) advance past the body of the noble Indian they killed.
28 Jun 2019


These were sold last year for $1650 each.
Forbes tells us all about Star Citizen, a video game that attracted $300 million in Crowd-Funding, but still may never be completed.
It’s October 2018 and 2,000 video game fanatics are jammed into Austin’s Long Center for the Performing Arts to get a glimpse of Star Citizen, the sprawling online multiplayer game being made by legendary designer Chris Roberts. Most of the people here helped to pay for the game’s development—on average, $200 each, although some backers have given thousands. An epic sci-fi fantasy, Star Citizen was supposed to be finished in 2014. But after seven years of work, no one—least of all Roberts—has a clue as to when it will be done. But despite the disappointments and delays, this crowd is cheering for Roberts. They roar as the 50-year-old Englishman jumps onto the stage and a big screen lights up with the latest test version of Star Citizen.
The demo starts small: Seeing through the eyes of the in-game character, the player wakes up in his living quarters, gets up and brews a cup of coffee. Applause quickly turns to laughter when the game promptly crashes. While his underlings scramble to get the demo running again, a practiced Roberts smoothly fills minutes of dead air by screening a commercial for the Kraken, a massive war machine spaceship. Eventually the Kraken, like all the starships that Roberts sells, will be playable in Star Citizen. At least that’s the hope. But for $1,650 it could be yours, right away.
“Some days, I wish I could be like . . . ‘You’re not going to see anything until it’s beautiful,’ †Roberts later says at his Los Angeles studio. “A lot of times we’ll show stuff and literally say, ‘Now, this is rough.’ â€
What’s really rough is the current state of Star Citizen. The company Roberts cofounded, Cloud Imperium Games, has raised $288 million to bring the PC game to life along with its companion, an offline single-player action game called Squadron 42. Of this haul, $242 million has been contributed by about 1.1 million fans, who have either bought digital toys like the Kraken or given cash online. Excluding cryptocurrencies, that makes Star Citizen far and away the biggest crowdfunded project ever.
Rough playable modes—alphas, not betas—are used to raise hopes and illustrate work being done. And Roberts has enticed gamers with a steady stream of hype, including promising a vast, playable universe with “100 star systems.†But most of the money is gone, and the game is still far from finished. At the end of 2017, for example, Roberts was down to just $14 million in the bank. He has since raised more money. Those 100 star systems? He has not completed a single one. So far he has two mostly finished planets, nine moons and an asteroid.
This is not fraud—Roberts really is working on a game—but it is incompetence and mismanagement on a galactic scale. The heedless waste is fueled by easy money raised through crowdfunding, a Wild West territory nearly free of regulators and rules. Creatives are in charge here, not profit-driven bean counters or deadline-enforcing suits. Federal bureaucrats and state lawyers have intervened only in a few egregious situations where there was little effort to make good and a lot of the money was pocketed by the promoters. Many high-profile crowdfunded projects, like the Pebble smartwatch ($43.4 million raised) and the Ouya video game console ($8.6 million), have failed miserably.
If you don’t play video games, you probably have never heard of Roberts. But in the world of consoles and controllers, he is Keith Richards: an aging rock star who can still get fans to reach into their pockets. Roberts first gained fame with his early 1990s hit Wing Commander, a space combat series that grossed over $400 million and featured Hollywood stars like Mark Hamill and Malcolm McDowell. He followed that success by starting his own studio, Digital Anvil, with Microsoft as an investor. There, he spent years working on Freelancer, a spiritual successor to Wing Commander, which was eventually released years behind schedule and was far from a blockbuster. Roberts also dabbled in Hollywood, spending tens of millions on a movie version of Wing Commander that he directed himself and that was a critical and commercial flop.
Forbes spoke to 20 people who used to work for Cloud Imperium, many of whom depict Roberts as a micromanager and poor steward of resources. They describe the work environment as chaotic.
“As the money rolled in, what I consider to be some of [Roberts’] old bad habits popped up—not being super-focused,†says Mark Day, a producer on Wing Commander IV who runs a company that was contracted to do work on Star Citizen in 2013 and 2014. “It had got out of hand, in my opinion. The promises being made—call it feature creep, call it whatever it is—now we can do this, now we can do that. I was shocked.â€
“There is a plan. Don’t worry—it’s not complete madness,†Roberts insists.
But what Roberts has stirred up does seem crazy. Star Citizen seems destined to be the most expensive video game ever made—and it might never be finished. To keep funding it and the 537 employees Cloud Imperium has working in five offices around the world, Roberts constantly needs to raise more money because he is constantly burning through cash.
This is not fraud—Roberts really is working on a game—but it is incompetence and mismanagement on a galactic scale. …
“There’s no two ways about it, man. Star Citizen is nuts,†says Jesse Schell, a prominent game developer and professor at Carnegie Mellon University. “This thing is unusual in about five dimensions. . . . It is very rare to be doing game development for seven years—that’s not how it works. That’s not normal at all.â€
RTWT
Boy! That this story take me back to the old days at SPI back in the late 1970s. I can tell you that high intelligence and self-discipline do not necessarily go together, and that long hours and complete obsession can lead to dissociation from reality. We certainly never spent millions on any game, let alone $500 million, but there were definitely some games where development went on, and on, and on, like Achilles and the tortoise, never quite arriving at completion.
28 Jun 2019


Not an accurate debate list, but does it really matter? Who can possibly keep track of all of them?
Dave Barry doesn’t actually summarize the two-night democrat candidates debate.
Miami faces many daunting challenges. We have hurricanes, rising sea levels, overdevelopment, hellish traffic, lunatic drivers and air so humid it’s like breathing whale snot. We have bionic mosquitoes, hallucinogenic toads, termites that can chew through concrete, cockroaches the size of adolescent gerbils and snakes the length of municipal buses. We have alligators lurking on our lawns, lizards lounging on our ceilings and peacocks pooping on our cars. We’ve had bales of marijuana wash up on our beaches and bags of cocaine fall from the sky. We once had a live shark on the Metromover. For a while we even had O.J. Simpson.
So we Miamians have dealt with a lot. But never have we faced a challenge like the one we are facing this week: The largest mass of presidential contenders ever to descend upon an American city.
Nobody is certain exactly how many of them there are, but the estimates range into the dozens, and they are putting serious pressure on our fragile ecosystem. As a local meteorologist explained: “Every single one of these people is constantly emitting policy positions. When you concentrate this many presidential contenders in one place, you have a massive quantity of policies being expelled into the atmosphere in the form of carbon dioxide. It’s not a coincidence that since these people arrived, Miami has been hotter than Satan’s jockstrap.â€
The reason all these candidates are here, of course, is the big Democratic Debate at the Arsht (Gesundheit!) Center. It’s actually two debates, taking place over two nights. Even then, there is room for only 20 candidates, so they had to qualify to participate based on their performance in polls, fundraising, the egg toss and the swimsuit competition.
his means some declared candidates did not make the cut. These include Steve Bullock, the governor of Montana; Seth Moulton, a congressman from Massachusetts, Wayne Messam, the mayor of Miramar; and Harvey Heckman, which is a name I just now made up, but because I am mentioning him in this column he will probably soon be polling at least as well as Steve, Seth and Wayne.
These debates are the first big Democratic event of the 2020 presidential election, in which Florida will play a crucial role, because we are a “swing state,†defined as “a state that is totally incompetent at holding elections.†If states were “Godfather†characters, Florida would definitely be Fredo. We have NO idea how to count votes. Anybody can win here. In 2016 at least two Florida counties, as far as we can tell, went for Vladimir Putin.
So the stakes are high, which is why this week the political eyeballs of the nation are turned toward Miami. The next Democratic presidential nominee will be one of the people participating in these debates, unless my man Harvey starts to gain traction. That is why these debates are so important, and that is why all of us, as concerned citizens, should consider it our civic duty to watch all four hours of these debates unless something more entertaining is on, for example “Bob’s Burgers†(the Toon Channel).
RTWT
HT: Bill Laffer.
27 Jun 2019


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PA Home Page:
A possible alligator is captured near Altoona.
Blair County crews were busy trying to capture the elusive reptile. Crews tried to snag the scaly creature for about an hour before finally wrangling it.
They’re not sure yet if the three-foot reptile is an alligator or caiman. It was taken to a Wildlife Care Facility while they work to determine who let it go in the wild.
Officials suspect the animal was dropped near the river by an owner.
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Centre Daily Times:
Adding to the recent string of alligator sightings throughout Pennsylvania, Blair County law enforcement captured a 3-foot-long baby alligator in a creek near Tipton Township Monday night. The reptile was transported to Centre Wildlife Care in Port Matilda, where it will stay until it can be transferred elsewhere.
Centre Wildlife founder and Executive Director Robyn Graboski said law enforcement called late Monday night and asked if they could bring the gator to the wildlife rehab center.
“We will work with law enforcement to find an appropriate placement for it,†Graboski said. “We don’t know yet whether or not there will be charges filed.†…
Graboski said the alligator cannot remain at Centre Wildlife because its facility is not equipped with the housing needed in order to sustain a proper habitat during the winter. She added that just because it is legal to keep an alligator as a pet in Pennsylvania does not mean everyone should.
Reflecting on the series of sightings — including three in the Pittsburgh area in a month — Graboski said alligators are not just showing up on their own.
“They’d never survive our winters,†she said.
Instead, people are buying them as pets and releasing them when they become too big to care for.
26 Jun 2019


Richard J. Evans, in The Guardian, really unloaded on the conservative historian Norman Stone in an obituary.
was character assassination. As a judge of the Fraenkel prize in contemporary history some years ago, he told the astonished members of the jury that they should not award the prize to a historian of Germany whose politics he disliked because she was an East German agent – an allegation that was enough to rule her out of contention even though it was absolutely baseless and undoubtedly defamatory.
Shortly after the death in 1982 of his patron and mentor in Cambridge, EH Carr, the author of a multivolume History of Soviet Russia and influential works on historiography and international relations, Stone published a lengthy assault on his reputation, which included lurid details of his three marriages. When a colleague criticised this “outrageous†diatribe to his face, telling him that Carr “always said you were amoralâ€, Stone responded: “And he always said you were a bore†(probably an invention, though one cannot know for sure).
At a time when malice and rudeness were highly prized by some rightwing Cambridge dons, Stone outdid them all in the abuse he hurled at anyone he disapproved of, including feminists (“rancidâ€), Oxford dons (“a dreadful collection of deadbeats, dead wood and has-beensâ€), students (“smelly and inattentiveâ€), David Cameron and John Major (“transitional nobodiesâ€), Edward Heath (“a flabby-faced cowardâ€) and many more.
Stone was undoubtedly clever. He could write entertainingly and could summarise complex historical circumstances in a few pregnant sentences, gifts which brought him a flourishing career as a journalist and commentator. He was a talented linguist who read and spoke more than half a dozen languages, including Hungarian. Yet his career was also dogged by character flaws that prevented him from fulfilling his early promise as a historian. …
Read the rest of this entry »
26 Jun 2019


USA Today:
Brave grandma kills 4.5-foot-long cobra with shovel to protect neighborhood kids.
Animal control said the snake that grandma Kathy Kehoe killed was an Asian cobra, and was about 4.5 feet long.
Animal control said the snake that grandma Kathy Kehoe killed was an Asian cobra, and was about 4.5 feet long. (Photo: Getty Images)
First she snapped photos.
Then the 73-year-old Pennsylvania grandma smashed the snake dead with a shovel. Animal control says she slayed a 4.5 foot Asian cobra.
Kathy Kehoe said she knew instantly it was a cobra when she first spotted it on her patio. Birds were screeching outside at about 2 p.m. Monday when she stepped outside see why. “Oh, it’s a snake,” Kehoe told ABC 6.
“When I opened the screen door to see what kind of snake it was, the birds flew away and I saw the spot on its back, and I kind of nudged its tail and it came up and spread its hood and I said ‘that’s a cobra,'” she said.
The snake slithered away, but Kehoe chased after it.
“He went this way. I stalked him and when he got over to here, I tapped his tail. He went up and that’s when I did the deed and held him there,” she said.
The grandma said she wasn’t about to let the cobra get away because of children in the neighborhood of Falls Township, Bucks County, 25 miles from Philadelphia.
“I was like ‘this animal can’t be here, it’s a poisonous reptile,'” she said.
In March, officials removed 20 venomous snakes from a neighboring apartment, including 12 cobras.
RTWT
25 Jun 2019


Nancy Mohr, of Sevynmor Press, is generously sharing her publication company’s first book, Nancy Nicholas’s Tales of an Inn, memories of Fox Hunting and Equestrian Life in post-WWII Chester County, Pennsylvania, on-line.
Sevynmor Press popped up in 1989, by happenstance, with its first book Tales of An Inn. Twenty-six years later, it’s time to share the little book again – without any cost to the reader. Some of the characters emerge in The Lady Blows A Horn and Delicious Memories. Look at the end of this page, click the link. Start reading!
Several generations were blessed by Nancy Nicholas’s enthusiasm for Unionville, and her love of horses and foxhunting. Weekends found her deserting her New York office and hopping on the train with brother, Harry. In the mid-1980s, Nancy developed rheumatoid arthritis, no longer able to ride. Eventually she had to leave her beloved “fox-hunting lodge†on the Upland corner. She moved with Timmy, her little white dog, to Waverly on the Main Line. This wasn’t quite the life she loved, but the book helped.
John and I suggested that all those hunting stories needed preservation, and volunteered as editors. Nancy Nicholas moved her energy to the desk, notes and letters, memories … kept Unionville a little closer. A full year saw a completed manuscript, with designer Virginia Sloss and Ann Armstrong’s beguiling sketches — and the birth of Sevynmor Press and Tales of An Inn, published in 1989 with 700 copies. Nancy had a marvelous time signing books. She died in 1995 at 80.
The author.

25 Jun 2019

Gros-Delettrez, Ethnographic & Indigenous Artifacts, June 28, 2019, 2:00 PM CET, Paris, France
Lot 57: Une exceptionnelle collection de 47 ceintures Berbères, Afrique du Nord — An unique collection of 47 antique Berber belts, North Africa, Moroccan Sahara
S’il est rare de rencontrer une de ces ceintures, en voir 47 réunies en une collection, cela nous semble unique. Certaines possèdent des fils métalliques dorés, d’autres, des fils métalliques argentés, d’autres sont toutes en laine, enfin d’autres possèdent des parties en coton. Usures mineures.
Milieu du XXe siècle
3 x 92 cm ou 3.5 x 97 cm de moyenne
It is unusual to find even one of these belts, but to see 47 united in one collection, seems unique. Some have gold wire, some silver wire, some are all wool, others have cotton parts. Minor wear.
Mid 20th century
1.2 x 36 inches or 1.4 x 38 inches on the average.
Starting bid €8,000 ($9115.60)
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Interesting visually, but just a bit expensive.
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