A picture taken on April 16, 2019 shows an interior view of the Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris in the aftermath of a fire that devastated the cathedral. – The Paris fire service announced that the last remnants of the blaze were extinguished on April 16, 15 hours after the fire broke out. Thousands of Parisians and tourists watched in horror from nearby streets on April 15 as flames engulfed the building and rescuers tried to save as much as they could of the cathedral’s treasures built up over centuries.
Many of the most important treasures of the Cathedral of Notre Dame were saved.
The facade and the two front bell towers survived as did the three Rose Windows over the main portals dating back to the 13th Century.
Apparently, the Great Organ was also saved.
Both what is purported to be the original Crown of Thorns worn by Christ during the Crucifixion and the tunic worn by St. Louis when he delivered the Crown to Paris in 1238 were also saved.
Apparently, Father Jean-Marc Fournier, chaplain of the Paris Fire Brigade, entered the burning cathedral and personally saved both the Blessed Sacrament and the Crown of Thorns, passing them out of danger via a human chain.
Bear in mind that the “real†— or near-original â€modern†state of — Notre Dame was significantly defaced during the iconoclastic spasm wrought by the French Revolution.
What we see today is largely the result of the highly controversial theories of architect-scholar-architectural restoration advocate E.-E. Violet-le-Duc — as executed by Ballu in the middle of the 19th century.
Today’s cathedral is as much symbol of these historical layers as it is an artifact.
I would even argue that the symbolic quality of this event already FAR surpasses the physical and *actual* damage — which appears to me to be a fire that started in the wooden substructure of the flèche [the tower that collapsed –jdz], a NON-original, 19th-century design put up to “improve†on the original. It was put in place when Lincoln was running for President.
But this “new†appendage carries with it all prior incarnations of the earlier variations of the flèche, as well as the Divine significance it carries as the tectonic marker of the crossing of the cruciform ground plan. It is a real thing, but it is as a carrier of meaning that gives it such power over our thoughts about the building and its place in the way our species has conceptualized our role in creation.
The symbolic aura is precisely what drives our visceral reaction: we respond to an image that is freighted with emotion.
In his Second Inaugural Address, Thomas Jefferson boasted that his Administration had accomplished:
“The suppression of unnecessary offices, of useless establishments and expenses. … These covering our land with officers, and opening our doors to their intrusions, had already begun that process of domiciliary vexation which, once entered, is scarcely to be restrained from reaching successively every article of produce and property.”
Kristin Tate argues that Donald Trump needs to be more actively devoted to following Jefferson’s example.
After eight years of reckless expansion of the federal workforce under Barack Obama, Donald Trump vowed to downsize the wildly growing bureaucracy of Washington. In 2016, he promised to “cut so much your head will spin. However, during the first two years of his presidency, there has been no significant effort to reduce the bloated federal payrolls. In fact, the federal government is the largest employer in the nation.
Walmart, which has a presence in communities of all shapes and sizes, is the largest private employer in the nation with 1.5 million workers. Yet the number of Americans who rely on the corporate giant for their livelihoods is dwarfed by the number who rely on the federal government for their paychecks. The federal government employs nearly 9.1 million workers, comprising nearly 6 percent of total employment in the United States. The figure includes nearly 2.1 million federal employees, 4.1 million contract employees, 1.2 million grant employees, 1.3 million active duty military personnel, and more than 500,000 postal service employees.
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Many of the individuals serving our nation are high quality workers who provide necessary and worthwhile services. However, there are valid economic reasons to be concerned by the sheer size of the public sector workforce. Government employment operates separately from market forces and causes a disconnect from the economy. During downturns, many businesses have to pull back on operations or payroll, but since Washington has the power of taxation and printing dollars, there is no incentive for tightening its belt beyond vapid election year promises.
As I outlined in an opinion column earlier this year, federal workers often enjoy pay and benefits that private sector workers can only dream of. For example, they receive pay that is 17 percent higher on average than private sector employees who perform comparable work, even though they work 12 percent fewer fewer hours on average. Meanwhile, federal workers face a 0.2 percent chance of getting fired in any given year. That is more than 45 times lower than their private sector counterparts.
While full time federal employee compensation and benefits are above market, at least these figures are relatively transparent and accountable. However, many taxpayers may not realize they are additionally subsidizing a ballooning shadow government of some 5.3 million contract and grant employees. While politicians often promise to cut the size of government, many fail to acknowledge the increasing number of contract workers.
The use of contract workers can be a dangerous means of hiding the true cost of the federal government workforce from the general public. Often contractors are used for practical reasons, like temporary projects not requiring full time employment. But in other cases, these contractors can actually come at a much steeper cost than full time federal workers.
The Pentagon found that hiring contractors was more expensive for most positions than simply using civilian employees. Contract workers are especially costly and often used during times of conflict. From 1999 to 2010, the number of contractors hired by the federal government more than doubled. When you factor in state and local governments, which together employ 7.4 million workers, the entire government workforce as a share of total employment in the nation sits at more than 18 percent.
We cannot sustain ourselves without a public sector workforce. But an increasingly bloated class of government employees in powerful unions and corporations seeking contracts is a recipe for disaster. Government needs to be nimble rather than creating perverse incentives for higher compensation for work that could be done in more productive sectors of the economy. With our $22 trillion debt, programs like the Green New Deal will balloon the federal workforce further and could cost taxpayers more than $90 trillion. We cannot pay for what we have now, even before the promise of the plan to give money to those who are “unwilling to work.â€
Vanderleun has some elegies to the American small town so many of us grew up in.
RAY: I was born in the late fifties into the same small Kansas town where my mother and father grew up.
My grandparents all lived in that same town. Everyone was basically German, with a smattering of other northern European ethnicities thrown into the mix. The Main Street had everything anyone could possibly need to buy, from groceries to hardware. There were several Protestant churches that were always packed on Sundays, and one Catholic church on the edge of town, as well. There was no crime to speak of… we had one policeman, who spent most of his time bringing groceries to shut-ins. (He was a friend of my father’s, and my dad would joke about it.) We kids (and there were tons of us!) were outside from sun up to sun down, playing and fishing and riding bikes and building things. Every family had a garden out back, and sometimes a small orchard, and some folks raised a steer for winter beef, or kept chickens. That was in town! Every holiday was an opportunity for everyone in the family to get together and have some fun and good food. It was a warm, safe, sunny, idyllic way to grow up.
That all began to change in the seventies. People became much more materialistic, thanks in part to Mom taking a job outside the home and having all that extra cash. The new color television encouraged people to buy buy buy. Parents began divorcing and all my friends’ families disintegrated. People began staying inside from sun up to sun down. Where were all the kids? Inside, playing those new video games! The gardens went to weeds.The first black family moved into town. Hey, where’s my bike?
After college, I moved to another state for a job. When I returned home for a funeral last summer, I didn’t recognize the place. It was like that scene from “It’s a Wonderful Life,†when George Bailey gets to see what his small town was like without him in it. The streets had all been widened, there were cars everywhere, and the town had become mile after mile of shopping and fast food joints. Main Street was dead and boarded up. There was a new GIGANTIC shopping Mall, though. It had been built on top of the land where my grandparents’ farm had been.
I sat at a table outside of one of the Mall’s restaurants, sipping a coffee and watching the people as they came and went. Most were fat, poorly dressed, and had a generally unhealthy appearance. They all looked so sad and stressed.
I thought of that YouTube video “Never Forget,†showing archival footage of daily life in a small town in South Dakota in 1938. A town filled with happy, healthy, well-dressed people. My home town used to be that way, too.
But now it is gone. The modern way of life is a curse, for sure.
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DETER NATURALIST: We grew up in the same town, or nearby.
Your reference to Pottersville (It’s a Wonderful Life without George Bailey) is razor-sharp. My “home town†grew 800% since the mid-1960s and now looks like it’s the back-lot where every single TV commercial is now filmed. In my old neighborhood literally every eighth 1950’s vintage house has been torn down, replaced by a “mansion†whose walls extend to the utility easements.
I remember climbing a fire escape on a downtown building with Jr. HS classmates and watching a parade from the roof. Imagine trying that now.
I remember buying rocket engines and cannon fuse with cash at the downtown hobby store (rode there on my bike) at 11 or 12 years of age. Imagine trying that now. We launched rockets at an open field near a grade school and a college. No one bothered us. When I tried to launch rockets at a county-owned field with my kids 15 years ago we got hounded by a deputy sheriff.
When I was a kid my home town had TWO stoplights. When I moved out 30 years ago it took literally 45 minutes of stop-and-go to drive from a house on the south edge of town to the north edge of town on a Saturday morning. How many “new Americans†have joined us since then?
An ice age cometh.
And he links the more hard-line Alt Right perspective of Chateau Heartiste.
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I find it amazing sitting here, aged 70, looking back, and realizing that the whole entire active, complicated, functioning-in-a-lot-of-ways-better-than-today’s-America small town world I knew as a boy is as dead as Nineveh and Tyre. Who could have imagined this would happen?
When I was young, my small town was already a provincial relic, home to an industry in its final death stages. The coal was below the water table and post-WWII environmental regs stopped them from pumping out the water anymore.
A lot of people had already left to find work in the modern, economically thriving America of cities and suburbs, but a lot of people, too, clung to home and church and family, and their small town middle class status. Moving to the city involved an instant demotion to the bottom rung on the social and economic ladder. Moving to the city also involved the loss of ready access to the out-of-doors, and hunting and fishing were like religion to people like us. Families were close. Everyone showed up for weddings and funerals, and you were in touch with grandparents and aunts and uncles all the time. People who moved away lost all that.
But alternatives to moving away ended with my parents’ generation. I and my contemporaries grew up feeling confined by the narrow intellectual horizons and thoroughly conscious of the lack of opportunities of small town life. We were eager to get out and take on the great big outside world. Only losers and criminals stayed behind.
A lot of this had to do with the vast 20th Century growth in personal and social mobility. I had an uncle, born in 1910, who was an all-around able and intelligent man, with natural dignity and a sense of style. He had to leave school after third grade and go to work. He was stuck as a coal miner all his life. If he’d been born 40 years later, he’d have taken standardized tests and scored well, and elite colleges would have been recruiting him.
In the old days, a small town was full of able and talented people. After WWII, social mobility dispersed all the competent younger people to the four winds, leaving behind the hapless and unlucky.
Nobody today, not even the hapless and unlucky, is willing to work hard to make a small living. The malls killed Main Street, and now Amazon is killing the malls. Costs and regulations have piled up, and starting a small business is much, much harder today. When I was a kid, there were barrooms and mom-and-pop little convenience stores on every block. The latter opened at 7 in the morning and closed at 10 or 11 every night. The kind of people living in today’s small town cannot be bothered to do all that. They’d rather take relief. Personal character has dramatically decayed and our society is sclerotic with regulations and red-tape.
We’ve gained a lot with mobility and economic growth, but we have also lost so very, very much.
The Guardian reports on the discovery of a bibliophilic treasure house.
[A] huge volume containing thousands of summaries of books from 500 years ago, many of which no longer exist… has been found in Copenhagen, where it has lain untouched for more than 350 years.
The Libro de los EpÃtomes manuscript, which is more than a foot thick, contains more than 2,000 pages and summaries from the library of Hernando Colón, the illegitimate son of Christopher Columbus who made it his life’s work to create the biggest library the world had ever known in the early part of the 16th century. Running to around 15,000 volumes, the library was put together during Colón’s extensive travels. Today, only around a quarter of the books in the collection survive and have been housed in Seville Cathedral since 1552.
The discovery in the Arnamagnæan Collection in Copenhagen is “extraordinaryâ€, and a window into a “lost world of 16th-century booksâ€, said Cambridge academic Dr Edward Wilson-Lee, author of the recent biography of Colón, The Catalogue of Shipwrecked Books.
“It’s a discovery of immense importance, not only because it contains so much information about how people read 500 years ago, but also, because it contains summaries of books that no longer exist, lost in every other form than these summaries,†said Wilson-Lee. “The idea that this object which was so central to this extraordinary early 16th-century project and which one always thought of with this great sense of loss, of what could have been if this had been preserved, for it then to just show up in Copenhagen perfectly preserved, at least 350 years after its last mention in Spain …â€
The manuscript was found in the collection of Ãrni Magnússon, an Icelandic scholar born in 1663, who donated his books to the University of Copenhagen on his death in 1730. The majority of the some 3,000 items are in Icelandic or Scandinavian languages, with only around 20 Spanish manuscripts, which is probably why the Libro de los EpÃtomes went unnoticed for hundreds of years…
After amassing his collection, Colón employed a team of writers to read every book in the library and distill each into a little summary in Libro de los EpÃtomes, ranging from a couple of lines long for very short texts to about 30 pages for the complete works of Plato…
Because Colón collected everything he could lay his hands on, the catalogue is a real record of what people were reading 500 years ago, rather than just the classics. “The important part of Hernando’s library is it’s not just Plato and Cortez, he’s summarising everything from almanacs to news pamphlets. This is really giving us a window into the entirety of early print, much of which has gone missing, and how people read it – a world that is largely lost to us,†said Wilson-Lee.
Adam Schembri, a professor at the University of Birmingham, makes the case for the weirdness of English.
English probably sounds a little “weird†to many speakers of other languages. According to the WALS, the average number of distinctive speech sounds in the world’s languages is about 25-30 – known as “phonemesâ€. …
English has more phonemes than many languages, with around 44, depending on which variety of English you speak. It has an unusually large set of vowel sounds – there are around 11.
According to WALS, most spoken languages only have between five to six vowel sounds. This is part of the reason that English spelling is fiendishly complicated, because it has inherited five letters for vowels from the Roman alphabet and speakers have to make them work for more than twice that number of sounds.
English has some comparatively unusual consonant sounds as well. Two sounds, those represented by the “th†in “bath†and “bathe†respectively, are found in fewer than 10% of the languages surveyed in WALS. In fact, these two sounds are generally among the last sounds acquired by children, with some adult varieties of English not using them at all.
English grammar is also “weirdâ€. English uses varying word orders to distinguish between questions and statements – meaning that the subject of the sentence precedes the verb in statements. Take the phrase “life is a box of chocolates†for example. Here, the order is subject (“lifeâ€) followed by the verb (“isâ€). In the question, “is life a box of chocolates?â€, the order of these elements is reversed.
In a WALS survey of 955 languages, fewer than 2% of languages in the sample used English-like differences in sentence structure for questions.
The London Metropolitan Police entered Ecuador’s diplomatic base in West London on Thursday morning and took Assange into custody after 9 a.m. local time.
Robinson, Assange’s lawyer, said Ecuador’s ambassador to the UK told Assange just before the arrest that his asylum had been revoked.
Assange “barged past” police officers who tried to detain Assange at the embassy, and yelled “this is unlawful” while other officers were required to handcuff him, BuzzFeed reported, citing an unnamed US government lawyer.
Video footage later showed a heavily bearded Assange being forcibly removed from the embassy and placed into a police van.
The International Monetary Fund on Monday approved a $4.2-billion, three-year loan for Ecuador, part of a broader aid package to help support the government’s economic reform program.
The Washington-based lender agreed to the terms of the financing late last month, and the final approval of the IMF board on Monday releases the first installment of $652-million.
IMF Managing Director Christine Lagarde said the aid will support the government’s efforts to shore up its finances, including a wage “realignment,” gradual lowering of fuel subsidies, and reduction of public debt.
“The savings generated by these measures will allow for an increase in social assistance spending over the course of the program,” Lagarde said in a statement, stressing that “Protecting the poor and most vulnerable segments in society is a key objective” of the program.
Quito is expected to receive another $6-billion from the Development Bank of Latin America, the Inter-American Development Bank, the World Bank and the Latin American Reserve Fund.
The 7mm Belgian pinfire revolver that might have shot van Gogh.
Hyperallergic reports on an intriguing opportunity to buy a junk gun that just
might
have an important historical connection. On the other hand, some drunken clochard might simply have lost it sleeping in the field.
Any shmoe with a spare $25-$100 million dollars can land themselves an original Vincent Van Gogh painting, but this June, only one lucky bidder can go home with a singular piece of art history: the gun that was allegedly used by the eccentric painter to kill himself. As reported by the Associated Press, a 7mm pocket revolver found in a field in the northern French village of Auvers-sur-Oise — where Van Gogh is believed to have shot himself in the chest on July 27, 1890 — will go up for auction in Paris at the Drouot auction center, on June 19.
“The gun offered in this sale was found in this field by a farmer around 1960 and was handed to the current owner’s mother,†said the auction website. “Writer Alain Rohan investigated this case and wrote the book Did we find the suicide weapon? in 2012. Several pieces of evidence show it must be Van Gogh’s suicide gun: it was discovered where Van Gogh shot it; its caliber (7 mm) is the same as the bullet retrieved from the artist’s body as described by the doctor at the time; scientific studies demonstrate that the gun had stayed in the ground since the 1890s and finally, it is a low power gun so it could explain why Van Gogh didn’t instantly die after shooting it.â€
The painter died two days later of his apparently self-inflicted injuries — although another recent theory is that Van Gogh did not inflict this wound himself.
“Another theory about Van Gogh’s death appeared in 2011,†says the Drouot website, referencing a controversial biography, Van Gogh: The Life, by authors Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith, which makes several dramatic revisionist claims, based on 10 years of study with more than 20 translators and researchers. “According to [two] American researchers, the artist didn’t kill himself. He would have been the victim of an accident. [Two] young boys were playing with a gun next to him when one of them pressed the trigger by mistake and wounded him. However, even if this assumption is right, the weapon could still be the one that killed Van Gogh. The gun would have been left in the field.â€
Either way, the gun was included in a 2016 exhibition at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, On the Verge of Insanity: Van Gogh and his Illness, which deals with multiple aspects of the painter’s notoriously troubled mental health, and is expected to fetch €40,000–60,000 (~$45,000–67,000) at auction. It certainly represents a unique offering for obsessive Van Gogh fans, gun collectors, and historical true crime enthusiasts.
Perigold has very nice, and quite expensive lamps, and it also sells books for entirely decorative purposes, grouped by color and style of binding.
Above we see 50 book (five linear feet of them) in green. You can get red and blue and beige and even colorful dust jacketed books! Perfect for morons who do not read.
