Lot 132: DAUM Important tubular vase with conical neck on pedestal.

Est: €18,000 – €20,000
€18,000 0 bids

OGER – BLANCHET
July 2, 2020, 2:30 PM CET
Paris, France

DAUM
Important tubular vase with conical neck on ringed pedestal. Made in purple and white marbled glass. Decorated with violets etched with acid and entirely enhanced with natural polychrome enamel. Lower part and pedestal decorated with engraved leaves and insects enhanced with gilding.
Signed in gold under the base.
High. : 70 cm

Similar to model presented by Daum Establishments at the Nancy International Exhibition in 1909.

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I get lots of auction notices by email.

I’d buy this one for my wife like a shot, except not for €18,000, alas!

In St. Louis, protesters knocked down a gate and invaded a private road in search of Mayor Lyda Kewson’s home. They wanted her resignation after she the released names and addresses of residents who suggested defunding the police department. The Mayor’s home was invaded and occupied, and presumably looted.

Meanwhile, Mark and Patricia McCloskey, two married local attorneys, succeeded in saving their own stately home nearby in the same historic district by standing outside with guns and standing off the mob. Liberals were outraged.

Biz Pac Review:

The radical left is evolving into the monster that can no longer be controlled, with the Democratic Party playing the role of Dr. Frankenstein.

At the same time, American citizens are gearing up for the challenge, as seen Sunday in St. Louis when an armed couple stood guard outside their historic home located on a private road, as Black Lives Matter protesters marched outside.

The dramatic scene was either inspirational or terrifying, depending on your views of private property and the God-given inherent right to defend yourself.

Organizers can be seen in the video moving the mob along, as the husband and wife hold a pistol and automatic rifle outside the upscale property.

With rioters burning and looting all across America these past weeks, destroying all that stands in its path, the couple cannot be blamed for wanting to protect the palace.

The words of an organizer of the protest, Ohun Ashe, as reported by KSDK, adds to that concern: “It’s meant to be disruptive. It’s meant to be disturbing.”

The home is reportedly on the National Historic Register, as Ian Miles Cheong, the managing editor of Human Events, tweeted.

Hundreds of protesters were marching to the home of Mayor Lyda Krewson, calling for the Democratic politician’s resignation for releasing the names and addresses of residents wanting to defund the police department, according to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. …

The couple seen above are neighbors of the mayor, and their home is on a private road, the newspaper reported.

As BLM protesters march down a public street, a faction can be seen breaking off to enter through a side gate to gain access to the property.

A sign posted outside the gate clearly reads: “Access Limited to Residents.”

The CBS affiliate KMOV noted in a photo description that protesters “broke down a gate in the neighborhood to march past their home.” …

At one point, the wife walked out onto the lawn and is seen pointing her handgun at protesters.

[T]he rage mob is offended that the property owners are willing to protect the mansion to the death, if necessary.

[T]he law in Missouri appears to be on their side.

RTWT

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More at Todd Starnes

The British Daily Mail is anti-rich and anti-self defense.

Caroline Randall Williams

The New York Times publishes the worst nonsense these days. Yesterday, for instance, they served up this spectacular exercise is self-pity from Affirmative Action poet Caroline Randall Williams.

I have rape-colored skin. My light-brown-blackness is a living testament to the rules, the practices, the causes of the Old South.

If there are those who want to remember the legacy of the Confederacy, if they want monuments, well, then, my body is a monument. My skin is a monument. …

I am a black, Southern woman, and of my immediate white male ancestors, all of them were rapists. My very existence is a relic of slavery and Jim Crow.

According to the rule of hypodescent (the social and legal practice of assigning a genetically mixed-race person to the race with less social power) I am the daughter of two black people, the granddaughter of four black people, the great-granddaughter of eight black people. Go back one more generation and it gets less straightforward, and more sinister. As far as family history has always told, and as modern DNA testing has allowed me to confirm, I am the descendant of black women who were domestic servants and white men who raped their help.

It is an extraordinary truth of my life that I am biologically more than half white, and yet I have no white people in my genealogy in living memory. No. Voluntary. Whiteness. I am more than half white, and none of it was consensual. White Southern men — my ancestors — took what they wanted from women they did not love, over whom they had extraordinary power, and then failed to claim their children.

WT

Obviously, the author knows no such thing. history is complicated, far more complicated than imaginary ideal grievance narratives can possibly reflect.

When Henry Louis Gates, on the popular PBS television program Finding Your Roots, looked into the genealogies of African Americans, with massive funding and plenty of professional research assistance, he found one black family that had been free immemorially right back to the 17th century (Tonya Lewis Lee‘s paternal line — Season 4, Episode 6).

He found several black celebrities (including Lionel Richie) descended from ancestors who received state pensions for Confederate military service. He also found one person was descended from a white Confederate soldier who lived, in complete defiance of the mores of the time, with a black woman as man and wife.

Reducing, in the fevered left-wing imagination, all amorous relations between representatives of different races to rape simply travesties reality.

We know from countless depictions of Antebellum Life in the Southern States that African American house servants lived essentially as members of their owners’ extended family. White children were raised by black Mammies, and white and black children grew up as playmates and friends. So, with millions of people living in such intimate and affectionate contact, do you really think that mutual sexual attraction never occurred?

Obviously, it did, because, despite powerful social taboos, some white men really did simply defy Society and live with women of color.

Beyond that, of course, not all African Americans grew up to be pillars of the community and a credit to their race. There was obviously a black underclass way back when, just as there is today. Mixed racial descent could possibly result from the unintended consequences of the practice of the Oldest Profession. Rather than some cruel rapist master, Caroline Randall Williams’ white ancestor may simply have been a lonely chap who wandered off into the sinful part of town one Saturday evening while celebrating.

Of course, it is true as well that current African American hysterical complaints about what they imagine occurred more than a century and a half ago, in addition to lacking a serious factual foundation, are patently ridiculous simply due to the great distance and remoteness of the supposed events.

What happened to your fourth or fifth times great grandparent obviously has very small connection to you. Everybody, white or black or whatever, has some potential historical sob stories. A major portion of today’s US population (including myself) has no ancestors present during, or before, the War Between the States. If Simon Legree, with lascivious intent, chased Little Nell across those ice flows, I had nothing to do with it.

Actually, if we go back before 1850, the ancestors of a lot of white Americans were, if not actual serfs, still peasants with a labor obligation to a socially superior landlord and no meaningful rights.

Caroline Randall Williams, do us all a favor and grow up and get over yourself. Black America’s constant whining and complaining, its excessive chauvinism and racial animosities have a lot to do with the violence and crimes perpetrated by its lower class representatives. It’s long past time to stop all this.

HT: Vanderleun.

click on image for larger version.

Central image on breast star of the Order of St. Michael and St. George.

The Guardian finds the image of St. Michael defeating Satan to be racist and offensive.

Campaigners are calling for the redesign of one of Britain’s highest honours personally bestowed by the Queen because they say its badge resembles a depiction of a white angel standing on the neck of a chained black man.

The Order of St Michael and St George is traditionally awarded to ambassadors and diplomats and senior Foreign Office officials who have served abroad. It has three ranks, the highest of which is Knight Grand Cross (GCMG), followed by Knight Commander (KCMG) and Companion (CMG).

The imagery on the award’s badge portrays St Michael trampling on Satan, but campaigners say the image is reminiscent of the killing of George Floyd by white police officers in the US that led to worldwide protests.

A petition calling for the medal to be redesigned has attracted more than 2,000 signatures on change.org. The petition, started by Tracy Reeve, says: “This is a highly offensive image, it is also reminiscent of the recent murder of George Floyd by the white policeman in the same manner presented here in this medal. We the undersigned are calling for this medal to completely redesigned in a more appropriate way and for an official apology to be given for the offence it has given.”

Bumi Thomas, a Nigerian British singer, activist and specialist in visual communications, said the imagery on the badge was clear. “It is not a demon; it is a black man in chains with a white, blue-eyed figure standing on his neck. It is literally what happened to George Floyd and what has been happening to black people for centuries under the guise of diplomatic missions: active, subliminal messaging that reinforces the conquest, subjugation and dehumanisation of people of colour.

“It is a depiction on a supposed honour of the subjugation of the black and brown people of the world and the superiority of the white, a construct born in the 16th century. It is the definition of institutional racism that this image is not only permitted but celebrated on one of the country’s highest honours. Whilst statues are being pulled down and relocated, emblems and symbols of this nature also need to be redesigned to reflect a more progressive, holistic relationship between Britain and the Commonwealth nations.”

Sir Simon Woolley, the director and one of the founders of Operation Black Vote, which campaigns for greater representation of ethnic minorities in politics and public life, said he was appalled by the badge.

“The original image may have been of St Michael slaying Satan, but the figure has no horns or tail and is clearly a black man. It is a shocking depiction, and it is even more shocking that that image could be presented to ambassadors representing this country abroad,” he said.

“This is the past that informs the present, and that’s why it symbolises everything that Black Lives Matter are campaigning for. It provides a challenge and an opportunity. The challenge is to acknowledge it and own it, but the opportunity is to put it right. It is easy to get rid of an image, but I would like root-and-branch restructuring, because most of the institutions created by the empire are still there.

“For most black and brown people, there is nothing good about the empire. Most people will see this as an image of George Floyd on a global scale and a symbol of white supremacy.”

RTWT

Is this the Loch Ness Monster? pic.twitter.com/Blpnr8GgIH

— Z-104.5 The Edge (@edgetulsa) June 24, 2020

It’s been a long time since we’ve seen a new one of these.

Victor Davis Hanson contends that we country mice are about to have the last laugh on our urban cousins.

Then came the COVID-19 epidemic. Suddenly, green mass-transit rail, high-density, elevator-reliant town houses, and subways were petri dishes, in a way Wyoming, upstate New York, and the Sierra Nevada foothills were not. Translated, what was the upside of going to Greenwich, Conn., poetry readings of the latest hipster poet or buying the prints of the future Andy Warhol on Manhattan’s Upper West Side if you were either infected or locked in your cramped apartment dependent entirely on a host of previously taken-for-granted Others who brought you water, food, and power, and took out your garbage and sewage — or sometimes didn’t?

Michael Bloomberg’s slur of dumb farmers dropping seeds by rote into the ground to produce corn on autopilot suddenly seemed even dumber when boutique bread was not to be so easily had at the corner La Boulangerie.

The contagion and the lockdown led to economic catastrophe. If the cities might have fared better than the countryside in the abstract calculus of finance and stocks, the recession also gave us another, rawer glimpse of Armageddon to come. Urban services and necessities may break down, but at least in the countryside, the proverbial basics of existential survival — food, water, power, guns, and fuel — are not so tenuous.

In small towns, outlying suburbs, and farmhouses, you can grow food, have a well, pump out your own septic tank, take target practice at home, and have a gasoline tank or a generator in reserve. You can be worth $2 billion on the Magnificent Mile, but if your Gulfstream is locked down at the airport, your driver socially distanced at home, your elevator on the blink, and your food courier a day late, then you are poorer than a peasant in Nowhere, Okla. The poor in high-rises in Queens are far more vulnerable than those in rickety farmhouses in rural Ohio.

After the Trump election, the virus, the lockdown, and the recession, then came the looting, street violence, and arson of the protests that spiraled out of control after the initial demonstrations over the horrific death of George Floyd while in police custody. America saw that in extremis blue-city mayors and police chiefs would virtue-signal away the public’s own safety, to veneer either their own bias, fright, or impotence.

The country’s major cities — New York, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, Washington, Philadelphia, and others — experienced not just mass fire and theft but state-sanctioned or de facto allowances of both. Police departments either could not — or would not — stop the stealing and burning. And officers on the beat often blamed their mayors and governors, who characteristically contextualized the violence, either because they felt they could do nothing about it or they wanted to do nothing about it, or they saw that excusing it was the more persuasive political narrative, at least in the short term. A family in the country may be two hours away from the rural constable, but when armed, it has some recourse against the nocturnal intruder, in a way that someone locked down in an apartment in gun- and ammunition-controlled Queens, with a politically beleaguered police force, does not.

On the national level, blue-state congressional representatives and senators treated chaos in city streets in the same way they had earlier packaged the epidemic, lockdown, and recession: more mayhem that could be blamed on Donald Trump and that would thus accomplish in November 2020 what Robert Mueller, Ukraine, and impeachment did not. Suddenly millions without masks reminded us that shouting about endemic and systematic racism exempted one from the quarantine — though Donald Trump’s flag-waving crowds did not enjoy the same privilege. The urbane who quoted “science” chapter and verse manufactured all sorts of pseudoscientific exegeses about how storming into restaurants to shout down patrons and strolling through burning and smoke-filled Walmarts to loot for hours were permissible indoor social congregations, while going to a peaceful indoor Trump rally was Typhoid Mary recklessness.

For many liberal urban dwellers, all the violence, filth, dependency, plague, incompetence, and sermonizing were no longer worth the salaries earned from globalized high-tech and finances. Even the city’s retro, gentrified neighborhoods, its internationalism and sophistication in food, drink, and entertainment, its cultural diversity, and its easy accessibility to millions of similarly enlightened liberals with superior tastes and tolerance began to wear. When stores go up in flames, or the 58th floor comes down with the coronavirus, or Mayor de Blasio plays “Imagine” to illustrate why there are no police on the streets, then who cares about the intellectual stimulation that supposedly comes by osmosis from the nation’s tony universities anchored in cities or their nearby suburbs?

Increasingly over the past four months, millions of city folk have discovered that the police are as essential as water, food, sewage, and gasoline. Without them, life reverts not to a summer of love but more often to the Lord of the Flies and Deadwood. The urban hipster and marketing executive discovered that a spark somewhere 2,000 miles away can ignite their own neighborhood, and all the kneeling, foot-washing, and social-media virtue-signaling won’t bring safety or food.

For the boutique owner, whose store was looted, defaced, and burned, the existential crisis was not just that capital and income were lost, and a lifetime investment wiped out, after the earlier one-two-three punch of plague/quarantine/depression.

Instead, the rub was that the urban store owner and his customer grasped that all that mayhem could easily happen again and on a moment’s notice — and the ensuing losses would once again be written off as the regrettable collateral damage that is sometimes necessary to “effect social change.” When the mayor and police look the other way as the mob carries off Louis Vuitton bags, and CNN reporters assure us of peaceful protests while flames engulf our television screens, why rebuild or restore what the authorities and the influential deem expendable? Why live in Detroit in 1970 when a constant 1967 repeat was supposed to be a tolerable cost of doing business there?

A Mayor de Blasio or Durkan and a Governor Inslee or Newsom were more or less indifferent when “brick-and-mortar” livelihoods were wiped out. Observably, they expressed very little outrage. Preventing the recurrence of anarchy might alienate the looters and burners, and especially their appeasers and contextualizers.

Add it all up, and as the country mouse of old learned, the giddiness and opulence of the city are increasingly not worth the danger, noise, and mess of the city, at least after February 2020. There are simply too many claws and too many sharp teeth to justify the rich crumbs from the opulent table.

RTWT

Jelani Cobb.

Fat cat Columbia Journalism School prof, New Yorker writer, endless beneficiary of racial favoritism and diversity hiring, Jelani Cobb who makes a terrific living typing out fantastical complaints and brazen expressions of ethnic chauvinism dashed off a little piece in Slate, commenting bitterly in support of the recent rebellion of Woke minority hires at the New York Times.

As protesters take to the streets to demand a reckoning with police brutality and systemic racism, the journalists tasked with covering those protests have taken to social media to demand a reckoning of their own. Journalists of color, most of them Black, have shared their experiences with pay inequity, discrimination, and hostile management at media companies like Refinery29, the New York Times, Complex, and Bon Appétit—leading to decades-late mea culpas and high-level departures across the industry. At the heart of the conversations playing out in newsrooms across the country is the double bind that Black journalists find ourselves in: We’re expected to do our jobs along with the additional, unpaid, and invisible work of making our workplaces more equitable. We’re labeled as “affirmative action hires,” solicited as sensitivity readers for others’ work, and enlisted as diversity consultants for our newsrooms, all while we cover the deaths of people who look more like us than our colleagues do.

How much extra do you suppose the establishment organs that performed all sorts of intellectual acrobatics to justify awarding special platforms and positions to pseudo-educated tokens and paying them professional salaries to produce this kind of tripe need to add to make up for all that “additional, unpaid, and invisible work of making [the] workplaces more equitable”?

This runner fell at the wire, his jockey never touched the ground, the horse slid across the finish line, his jock surfed him across the wire for the win. Incredible!!