In Paris Review, Danielle Oteri described how, despite the efforts of curators, scholars, and even an obsessed high school teacher turned museum guard, our understanding of the complex symbolism in the tapestries has retreated rather than advanced over decades. She notes: “the Met’s most eminent scholars have debated the finer points of the tapestries, each time removing more and more from the guidebooks and wall labels. Today at the Cloisters, the wall label for each of these tapestries, the most famous works in the museum, among the most famous works in the world, is only about one sentence long.”

Nobody knows who made the Unicorn Tapestries, a set of seven weavings that depict a unicorn hunt that has been described as “the greatest inheritance of the Middle Ages.”

Without evidence, the La Rochefoucauld family in France asserted that the tapestries originate with the marriage of a family ancestor in the fifteenth century. The tapestries did belong to the La Rochefoucauld in 1793, before they were stolen by rioters who set fire to their château at Verteuil. The family regained possession sixty years later, when the tapestries were recovered in a barn. The precious weavings of wool, silk, gold, and silver were in tatters at their edges and punched full of holes. They had been used to wrap barren fruit trees during the winter.

In late 1922, the Unicorn Tapestries disappeared again. They were sent to New York for an exhibition, which never opened. A rich American had bought them and transferred them to his bank vault before anyone else could see them. In February 1923, John D. Rockefeller Jr. confirmed from his vacation home in Florida that he was the American who had acquired the tapestries for the price of $1.1 million. The tapestries were transferred to Rockefeller’s private residence in Midtown Manhattan.

Fourteen years later, Rockefeller donated the tapestries to the Cloisters, a new medieval art museum he had funded as a branch of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The mysterious works were to be on regular public display for the first time in their five-hundred-year history.

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In Greek tragedy, they fall from great heights. In noir, they fall from the curb.

— Dennis Lehane

From PG via Karen L. Myers.

Sotheby’s Old Master Sculpture and Works of Art
November 24, 2020 — London

Italian, late 17th/ early 18th century
Estimate: 4,000 – 6,000 GBP — $5,315.24 – $7,970.36

America’s Most Trusted News Source:

U.S.—An American firearms manufacturer is making waves after unveiling a brand new AR-15 that glows blue whenever libs are nearby. Constructed with ancient elven technology from the forgotten land of Gondolin, this semi-automatic rifle will pulse with an ethereal blue light whenever it detects a democrat within a 100-yard radius.

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I get press release emails from Mother Yale pretty much every day.

This morning in came a triumphant notice boasting that Yale, this year for the first time, earned a gold rating via STARS, The Sustainability Tracking, Assessment & Rating System, “a transparent, self-reporting framework for colleges and universities to measure their sustainability performance”.

Now “Sustainability” is one of those major shibboleths constituting obsessions and the foci of ersatz-religious devotion for the contemporary elite community of fashion.

Not to put too fine a point on it, Sustainability is a superstition, based essentially on the fallacious theory of Malthusianism, which contended that an ever-expanding human population would inevitable out-grow the food supply and other essential resources.

We have all lived through decades of constant media propaganda about the imminent apocalyptic crisis produced by excess population, peak oil, exhaustion of availability of this or that, despite Norman Borlaug, Fracking, and (most hilariously) the Simon-Erlich Wager. No evidence, no factual refutation will ever suffice to dispel this nonsense.

As Oil Company Executive Don Huberts observed in 1999: “The Stone Age did not end because the world ran out of stones.”

The ability of human ingenuity to innovate and create new solutions and to multiply existing resources is consistently and reliably wildly underestimated by our Grand Establishment Pseudo-Intelligentsia.

I think their real underlying motivation is a religious one. The elite community of fashion has long since abandoned Judeo-Christianity, but its members still are afflicted by guilt and a profound sense of their own unworthiness of the privilege and prosperity they enjoy. They subconsciously feel a need to propitiate some higher power. They yearn to find some way to sacrifice and flagellate themselves and hanker to perform some kind, any kind of penitential acts.

Thus, Gaia has replaced the Puritan Jehovah. So the Yale Administration, for instance, confirms its own membership among the Elect by gravely immolating large sums of cash and by public testimony.

It’s all really the recrudescence of the ancient Manichaean heresy: there is this wonderful, good, natural stuff over here, and there is this awful, naughty, intrisically violative stuff over there. The former is the natural world, and the latter is anything man-made, anything and everything connected to human economic activity.

There is also an imaginary past or current state constituting the only perfect and legitimate set of conditions. Any change or modification of this alleged ideal represents a disaster, a crime, and a tragedy. If some obscure mugwort, insect, or rodent happens to go extinct, mankind is to blame, and no possible expense or inconvenience can be spared to preserve every single species and subspecies, and they’ve got the taxonomists ready to promote any subspecies to species status.

Yale, of course, is fully committed to the good fight. Yale has even built its own shrine to Gaia, Kroon Hall, a $33.5 million dollar Rube Goldberg exercise in spending several thousand dollars to save a nickel, in deploying top-level expertise and engineering to find dazzlingly innovative work arounds for trivial items available at any Ace Hardware Store.

——————————

Sustainability, Mr. Salovey? How’s this for your Sustainability?

Yale College
2020–2021 Tuition and Fees

Total: $77,498

When I arrived at Yale in September of 1966, the total cost was $3000 a year.

Why does the cost of attending Yale rise so much more rapidly than the rate of inflation? It probably has a great deal to do with the proliferation of special imaginary problem/bad idea offices filled with administrators burning incense in front of false idols.

Yale “Sustainability” Office has no less than eight left-wing academic bureaucrats disseminating nonsense, perpetually grasping at unwarranted powers (“Ask me about” World Governance”), and wallowing in undeserved prestige. And this ridiculous and nonsensical office has been operating, and wasting pots full of money, for fifteen years!

Just imagine how many similar Offices of Empty Superstition and/or Terrible Ideas are cluttering up the landscape all over Yale’s campus.

There is undoubtedly a well-staffed Office of Diversity and Inclusion at Yale, devoted to pandering to Snowflakes of Color’s amour propre and enforcing political correctness.

James B. Meigs, in City Journal, describes the way Progressive generosity tends to penalize good conduct and playing by the rules. Relaxation of standards and selective release from conventional obligations of democrat constituencies that complain, he predicts, inevitably infuriates salt of the earth ordinary Americans who earned everything they have and who accept the world as it is without claiming victim status.

Last January, a small but telling exchange took place at an Elizabeth Warren campaign event in Grimes, Iowa. At the time, Warren was attracting support from the Democratic Party’s left flank, with her bulging portfolio of progressive proposals. “Warren Has a Plan for That” read her campaign T-shirts. The biggest buzz surrounded her $1.25 trillion plan to pay off student-loan debt for most Americans.

A man approached Warren with a question. “My daughter is getting out of school. I’ve saved all my money [so that] she doesn’t have any student loans. Am I going to get my money back?”

“Of course not,” Warren replied.

“So you’re going to pay for people who didn’t save any money, and those of us who did the right thing get screwed?”

A video of the exchange went viral. It summed up the frustration many feel over the way progressive policies so often benefit select groups, while subtly undermining others. Saving money to send your children to college used to be considered a hallmark of middle-class responsibility. By subsidizing people who run up large debts, Warren’s policy would penalize those who took that responsibility seriously. “You’re laughing at me,” the man said, when Warren seemed to wave off his concerns. “That’s exactly what you’re doing. We did the right thing and we get screwed.”

That father was expressing an emotion growing more common these days: he felt like a chump. Feeling like a chump doesn’t just mean being upset that your taxes are rising or annoyed that you’re missing out on some windfall. It’s more visceral than that. People feel like chumps when they believe that they’ve played a game by the rules, only to discover that the game is rigged. Not only are they losing, they realize, but their good sportsmanship is being exploited. The players flouting the rules are the ones who get the trophy. Like that Iowa dad, the chumps of modern America feel that the life choices they’re most proud of—working hard, taking care of their families, being good citizens—aren’t just undervalued, but scorned.

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some things that are more like fascism than book-burning:

––travel bans on racial and religious minorities;
––concentration camps which split migrant families;
––fascism;
––the phrase "the transgender craze that's seducing our daughters";
––terfism.

— Grace Lavery 🐬 (@graceelavery) November 14, 2020

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actually what we could do is find copies of Abigail Shrier’s book IRREVERSIBLE DAMAGE in our local libraries, rip out the interiors without consent, and install the texts of our own propaganda before sewing the jacket back up. stop this rubbish from reproducing itself https://t.co/dGYidLbUBd

— Grace Lavery 🐬 (@graceelavery) November 13, 2020

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The above chilling tweets, advocating book burning and other other forms of forcible suppression of opinion have recently gone viral.

Heine long ago observed: “Dort, wo man Bücher verbrennt, verbrennt man am Ende auch Menschen.” (Those who burn books, they will also in the end burn people.)

——————————–

Grace E. Lavery is a post-doc Associate Professor at Berkeley.

GEL is a transexual, who is “married” to “Daniel M. Lavery“, a transexual who was born Mallory Ortberg.

So we have a boy who think’s he has become a girl married to a girl who thinks she has become a boy. One cannot help thinking that they didn’t really have to go to all that trouble: they could just have gotten together and married the way they were.

I remembered Mallory Ortberg. Over the years, I came across a number of witty little postings of hers and linked them here.

Obviously, both GEL and MO/DML are highly intelligent (though seriously screwed up), talented, witty, and erudite people who’d be a great asset at any cocktail party.

I’m basically tolerant. I don’t care what they do in private, and I agree that they are, privately, entitled to characterize their identities and relationship in any terms they like. If I knew them as friends, I expect I would politely refrain from expressing my own private opinion of their world-view and fantasies and would go some distance in humoring them.

Where I draw the line, though, is in allowing people this far removed from normal reality to define the culture and public policy. They may be talented and well-educated, but they are also obviously afflicted with grave psychological problems and they not only subscribe, but are fundamentally invested in, they have centered their lives and their identities around, a futile and essentially pathological fantasy. People with this grave a level of removal from normalcy and reality ought not to be allowed to occupy any positions of trust, responsibility, and public influence.

Roger Kimball suggests Auric Goldfinger would find the 2020 Presidential Election end count highly suspicious.

It’s partly a matter of what I think of as the Goldfinger principle, after the avid gold smelter and nuclear weapons amateur Auric Goldfinger.

Goldfinger was a sensitive man. He didn’t like it when people began looking into to his business ventures with too much curiosity, largely, no doubt, because many were ostentatiously illegal and, in some cases, evidence of grandiose homicidal insanity.

Nevertheless, his response to the repeated unscheduled appearance of James Bond in his life prompted him to make the eminently rational observation that “Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. The third time it’s enemy action.”

It might have been mere coincidence that Joe Biden ran behind Hillary Clinton everywhere except a handful of critical cities in the battleground states of Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, Arizona, and Georgia.

That is odd, to be sure, especially when one notes that around midnight on Nov. 3, Donald Trump was running substantially ahead in those states. Then the voting stopped. Everyone yawned and dozed off. When they woke up, what do you know, Joe Biden had the lead everywhere!

Odd. Possible, certainly, but also odd.

It was also odd that the turnout was so large: pushing 90 percent in Milwaukee, for instance, much higher than it was for Hillary, and substantially higher than it was even for Barack Obama.

It was odd, too, that all of what have been described as computer “glitches” benefitted Democrats. They seem to have come to light by accident and, once uncovered, in some cases shifted county elections from the blue column to the red column.

Makes you think, as does the ratio of votes for Biden in those late-arriving ballot dumps.

There are so many occasions for thought in this election. There was the apparent violation of Benford’s Law, for example, a statistical tool widely used to uncover fraud, as well as the tranches of votes that were filled out, every one of them, for Joe Biden, not to mention the tens thousands of ballots that were filled out for Biden-Harris but for no one down ballot, as if someone were hurrying to stuff—I mean cast—his ballot.

None of this is dispositive, of course.

Nevertheless, I feel sure that it would have made old Auric Goldfinger ornery.

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The BBC reports on at least 40 incidents of killer whales attacking boats off the coasts of Spain and Portugal.

[There have been] at least 40 similar incidents in the area. During the summer of 2020, the strangest of summers for so many of us, a group of killer whales off the coast of Spain and Portugal began to act very strangely indeed.

Accounts of the incidents suggested that the animals were deliberately targeting sailing boats. As David puts it: “They came to us, not the other way around.”

The first reported incident was back in July, the most recent at the end of October.

Behind international headlines about “rogue killer whales”, “orchestrated” orca attacks and the videos shared thousands of times on social media, there is a forensic marine science investigation that is still trying to work out what is driving these complex, intelligent and highly social marine mammals to behave in this way. …

In July, a sailing vessel had to be towed back to shore after a group of orcas repeatedly hit and damaged its rudder.

In August, a French-flagged vessel radioed the coastguard to say it was “under attack” from killer whales.

Later that same day, a Spanish naval yacht, Mirfak, lost part of its rudder after an encounter with orcas. A video of that incident showed the crew trying to outrun the animals, which appeared to pursue the boat.

In September, a man sailing his boat home to Scotland from Spain suddenly had the wheel spun out of his hands. A killer whale broke the surface at the side of the boat and he says that for 45 minutes, the animals bashed and chewed at the rudder, spinning the boat around.

“It’s getting worse and worse,” says Dr Renaud de Stephanis, another biologist involved in the investigation.

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HT: Bird Dog.

Shiro Kasamatsu, Sakunami Hot Springs, 1954.

Employees of @JonesDay & @PorterWright, do you believe your law firms should be attempting to overturn the will of the American people?https://t.co/Q3NR5xM4tjhttps://t.co/65DOcAUHYb

— The Lincoln Project (@ProjectLincoln) November 10, 2020

Lefties were gloating when the NYT trumpeted the news that Porter Wright was withdrawing from representing the Trump Campaign in efforts to overturn voting fraud in Pennsylvania.

John Hinderaker, at Power-Line, explains how and why that happened.

Porter Wright is a mid-sized law firm with offices in eight cities across the country. But apparently it lacked the courage to stand up against the Twitter mob. The “Lincoln Project” doxxed the two Porter Wright lawyers who signed the Pennsylvania complaint, tweeting their pictures, addresses and telephone numbers, and encouraging leftists to harass them. Reportedly there also were employees at the law firm who objected to representing President Trump. Porter Wright’s abandonment of its client is shameful conduct for which I suspect it will receive little but praise.

Not many years ago, every terrorist in Guantanamo Bay was represented by one of a group of America’s top law firms. For free. No one batted an eye. Now, the President of the United States is having trouble getting lawyers to represent him in asserting perfectly legitimate claims. Some dictator.

This is the latest instance of the most troubling trend in American culture, leftist bullying. Rare is the company (or, as in this case, the law firm) with the courage to stand up against it. It is a serious threat to the liberty of all Americans.

Ian Birrell*‘s Spectator review of Ed Caesar’s new book, The Moth and the Mountain (to be released November 17) placed it immediately on my own must-read list.

It recounts WWI veteran Maurice Wilson’s doomed 1933 attempt to solo climb Everest by crash landing a de Havilland Moth biplane on the mountain’s upper slopes and then ascending on foot to the top.

Reinhold Messner, the first person to climb all 14 of the planet’s peaks higher than 8,000 meters, is probably the finest high-altitude mountaineer in history. His list of astonishing achievements on dangerous ice-clad crags includes the first solo ascent of Mount Everest without use of oxygen. Yet as he sat exhausted at 26,000 feet with two days still to go on that pioneering ascent, he thought of an eccentric Englishman ‘tougher than I am’ who had set out before him with one crippled arm and no crampons, let alone knowledge of some basic climbing techniques. ‘Do I understand this madman so well because I am mad myself?’ he wondered.

[T]he writer Ed Caesar, similarly captivated by the crazed early assault on Everest by the Yorkshireman Maurice Wilson, has told the extraordinary story of this intrepid ‘madman’ in an engrossing biography. It is a tale well known in the mountaineering community, not least since his frozen corpse has emerged five times from its glacial tomb on the slopes where he died; yet it remains clouded in as much mystery as those mists that cling to the great peaks. Was he a naive climbing legend, a mystical sage, a disturbed war veteran or even someone running from his gender fluidity, so unacceptable at the time? Or possibly all four of these things? …

The backdrop, as with so many things in the 1930s, was the legacy of savage trench warfare that tore apart a continent. Wilson fought with distinction, winning a Military Cross, but lost the use of an arm and saw one of his three brothers turned into a shambling wreck. His own efforts to win compensation were repeatedly rebuffed, leaving him with a loathing of officialdom.

It seems his traumas led him to trek the world aimlessly, dumping women and jobs in his wake. So was his bid to climb Everest an attempt to find glory or inner peace? …

Wilson began to read widely about Everest in 1932, hatching his plan despite the cruel details of terrible deaths in avalanches and blizzards. He was not deterred by the failure of four British expeditions, comprising the best climbers in the country aided by teams of porters carrying huge supplies. He began training his mind and body through fasting and prayer. He flirted with the idea of parachuting onto the lower slopes. Then he decided to fly there, so took lessons and bought a Tiger Moth; yet he was such an inexperienced pilot that when he left (looking ‘like a man going to a fancy dress party as an aviator’) he nearly crashed by taking off in the wrong direction with the wind.

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Maurice Wilson’s Wikipedia entry.

* Outline frequently lists the wrong author’s name for articles decrypted from behind paywalls.