The Non Asian Minority Monster

Or AMM for short


As I've written in a recent post, I've been doing the internet tour of Human Bio-Diversity (HBD) websites. The world is mind-bogglingly interesting. There are HBD believers who blog about HBD daily, who leave comments on one another's blogs, who have cult followings, who are cult followers, and some who manage to present their unique and bizarre self in all its glory.

One such is FeministX (clever girl, clever moniker). She is what is known as an Asian Minority, as opposed to the Non-Asian Minority--all self-explanatory. But, it gets a little confusing, because she's not East Asian, which seems to be the real definition of AM, but she's South Asian (SAM?). Yet, she boasts of a high IQ, although she has never been tested, and bases this on her commentators' guesses and online tests she's taken.

For all her smarts, her blog is actually a boring stringing of words, meandering around what one commentator dismissively called "streams of consciousness." It is a lazy way of communicating. She makes fallacies, assumptions and not very interesting insights that simple common sense would enlighten better.

I guess her appeal to various well-read blogs, including 2blowhards, is that she is outrageous. Or, outrageously undefined. She admits that she lives a double life as an Indian woman looking for an Indian husband and as a Sex and the City kind of gal--read her "interests" here for a more complete profile. She holds a job for which she is clearly overqualified, which she openly admits to. She listlessly moves from one job to another, from one "relationship" to another, from one city to another, with nothing much to show for herself, although she tries hard to make it all sound exciting.

It’s not worth going into too much description of this pathetic personality, except for the fact that she is a monster.

This is what HBD wants? Asian Minority Monsters who keep asking "who AM(M) I!?"

Water, Water Everywhere

Georgian Bay on Lake Huron













St. Lawrence River









Ottawa River












Niagara Falls

The Human Bio-Diversityers

And their death wish on the West

Human Bio-diversity (HBD) is a concept relatively new to me; I've seen it before, but only these past couple of days did I study it more fully.

Why? Because blogger Dennis Mangan has a quoted me on his blog post about HBD.

Mangan writes

PS: A commentator at VFR, Kidist Paulos Asrat, wrote:

I find that most atheists are highly intelligent people, so in that capacity, they are valuable members of a civilization-saving movement. But, they have also successfully (through this intelligence) argued out the existence of God to themselves.

But, at the end of the day, people like Dennis Mangan, and now the Undiscovered Jew, don't quite come to the task in defense of this civilization. Look, for example, at how Mangan works out the Game phenomenon. And the Undiscovered Jew resorts to his HBD (and I assume Darwinism) to explain the world to himself.

Mangan continues:

All I can say is that, if I don't "come to the task in defense of this civilization", that leaves mighty few who do.

Now, I will return to this final comment by Mangan in a while. But, I will try to answer this question first:

Why did Mangan choose my words, from the many other comments posted at VFR?

I don't like speculation (it is a bit like gossip), but I will go for it here, anyway, since I've spent a bit of time this weekend reading about HBD and its implications in saving the West - something I still don't think people like Mangan come to the task of doing.

HBD, from my preliminary understanding, seems to say that one of the ways humanity will be saved is by the high IQers, which is mostly (70%) genetically determined. Now, according to the HBD crowd, they very politely say that whites and Asians can do this, but NAM (Non-Asian Minorities) do not quite "come to the task." In his subtle, but gentlemanly way, because Mangan is often cordial and polite, I think that Mangan was saying that as a NAM, I might be put under the same kind of scrutiny of ineptitude when it comes to saving the West as I've put him under - but for different reasons, of course.

Now, regarding my critique of him. I'm getting tired of clever, and sometimes intelligent, atheists, to which group most HBDers belong, put their spotlights on anyone that dares to reason outside of their atheist box - how ironic that clever and sometimes intelligent atheists cannot think outside of their box!

Of course, the biggest targets are Christians, who are way off the radar of HBDers/atheists, and who are supposed to suppress their religious views on humanity, life and civilization for the sake of "civil" argument. We Christians are supposed to accommodate HBDers, and never them us.

Where does all this cordiality and politeness, along with impeccably civil debating behavior that Mangan displays (until pressed into a corner), come from? Who taught him that? Or better yet: what culture taught him to behave so? Isn't it the effects of Western civilization?

He cannot deny, and I don't think he does, that this very same West depends a great deal on Christianity to produce the kind of culture where Mangan can write tendentious arguments on his blog and get mostly civil and moderate responses. Unlike the Muslim culture, whose members would be ready to chop off his head if he dare mention that Allah doesn't exist.

So, what happens when Christianity is gone - where will the West get its codes of behavior and civility from? How will the West survive without these codes that originated, and are maintained, by Christianity? Those atheists who profess an affinity to Christianity actually show no desire to let Christianity flourish and reign, and are wishing the death of the West, the same as those atheists who have no sympathy for Christianity. This truth eventually comes out. 

[Note that I've said the very same thing of another atheist - Mercer - who hasn't aligned herself with the HBD crowd. Atheism seems to be the common factor amongst those I condemn as anti-West].

Hydrangea

By the Sea


I found this postcard in one of my image boxes. It is one that I bought, which is a habit I have when I go to museums or galleries. I've never heard of the artist who painted the scene, and I am certain it wasn't his work I was viewing, even though I bought the card at the gift shop of whatever museum I was visiting.

It was certainly the hydrangea that attracted me. Also, the sea - but it isn't the Mediterranean. I’m pretty sure the painting is set by the English Channel, in a tourist town like Deauville or Dieppe - the postcard has not title. The sea isn't that turquoise blue of the southern Mediterranean, with plenty of warm yellow in it. It is more of a colder, harsher blue. Also, the scene is clearly in spring, but there is still the lingering feeling of winter, with the long dress the woman is wearing, despite her summer hat, and the rough waves on the water.

The artist, as I found on the back of the card, is Jean-Pierre Cassigneul. And almost all his paintings are overflowing with flowers, populated by women in these large hats. They remind me of Michelle Pfeiffer in Chéri, and her array of hats she had for every occasion. I wish we could wear hats like that these days. Summer, though, makes for a good excuse to wear such extravagantly large hats, using the pretext of sun coverage to avoid the bemused looks of our non-hat-wearing public. We don’t know what we’re missing.

Indians Will Be Indians

But, that is to be expected

Canadian "natural" supplements for joint
relief using the Lakota as the mystical, spiritual healer

David Yeagley, who calls himself a conservative American Indian, hosts Bad Eagle, a  website with an open invitation to the world. It hosts a myriad of forum topics ranging from art to music to a subject simply entitled "Death," which is actually an interesting topic once one gets over the squeamish parts.

I found David's endless interests to be a great asset to the site, and few internet communities have such a wide range of discussions. But, I kept forgetting during my time there, that it was actually an Indian site, with an Indian perspective.

Now, how can an Indian live an ethnocentric life while also living as a citizen of America (or Canada, for that matter)? Is there really an Indian who is at peace with America and willing to swallow the bitter pills of defeat? I thought so for a while at Bad Eagle, but I think I was asking for a superhuman feat.

I don't know how individuals acknowledge defeat, whether at work, play, love, and in the case of Indians, of their whole tribal ancestry. I think it requires a certain, perhaps saintly, humility, and a constant prayer for strength to accept what has happened.

David does this, to a certain extent. But, here starts the contradiction. Despite a professed love for America, I think David, naturally, loves Indians first – and best. So he has to find ways to incorporate the defeat of his people with their uncomfortable and humiliating lives in modern America. Hence, his strange, and constant, discussions of the subliminal effects of Indians on America, and even the world.

Now, I understand this. I think this David wants non-Indians to see Indians as some supernatural – and perhaps in a more mundane world more of a subliminal psychological – presence, guiding people with the wisdom they have acquired through their suffering. He wants to give an honorable role to Indians who have survived this historic defeat. But, unfortunately, I think he goes to far.

For example, his position is that America, through treaties of many guises, is obligated to support Indians, like infants still feeding on their mothers' milk, for eternity. Where is the strength in that? How can the reality of the Indian reservations’ dismal failures give Indians the licence to be the keepers of America? Where does a losing party suddenly become the winner?

I’m afraid that David, cleverly and sincerely, is using psychological tactics to give Indians the importance they don’t have. We have some magical properties, we can heal your ills, he says. Yet, he rarely talks about the dreadful ills his own people are going through; their weak and fallen positions. This is hard medicine to take, but it is better to face reality, then at least you can do something about it.

Unfortunately, David seems more interested in giving Indians a false sense of their position in the world based on feelings and emotions rather than provide recourse for actual achievements. He is acting like any other (leftist) Indian in this case, who professes magical, spiritual, qualities, which unfortunately have not been proven yet.

Wagner's Musicality

What makes Wagner "Wagner?"

Richard Wagner
Lithograph by Pierre-Auguste Renoir


Wagner’s "musicality" was in his tricks. His Tristan chord, his leitmotifs - which he just over-emphasized, his "total art-work' - which he borrowed from the Greeks. His only originality would have been in his Tristan chord - I can give him that credit. But then, that was more of a trick than a genuinely musical creation.

I have never read anyone discuss his shortcomings based on his musical structures. In fact the opposite is true. His Tristan chord is universally admired, eulogies are written about his over-indulgent leitmotifs, and his total-art work enterprise created the very popular Bayreuth where his aficionados still congregate. But, words like "repetitive" and "seductive" enter the vocabulary of these eulogists, which adds some negativity to their critiques.

Here's an analysis of his Tristan chord:

In Tristan und Isolde, musical phrases no longer resolve to the tonic until the end of the opera. Each resolution in a musical fabric is a process of tension and release...Resolution is delayed by the simple device of a discord followed by a discord, known as The Tristan Chord.

And another:

What makes the Tristan motif different in the eyes of many analysts is its duration; in the Beethoven example the Eb resolves to D in approximately a quarter of the time it takes the G# to "resolve" to the A in the Wagner.

And yet another:

And he leaves the chord in mid air...creating a half resolution.

And more:

The Tristan chord, gives us this extraordinary feeling of ambiguity, ambivalence, movement. Where is it going?

But Wagner knew where he is taking us.

I don't even think his influence, musically/structurally, is as important as Bach’s or Mozart’s. He was a one off. Schoenberg was certainly more than that, in the direction that Western music took after his contributions.

My point is that there is nothing really grand about Wagner at all. In fact, he overcompensates for his lack of greatness through his outrageously long operas, and his loud and insistent music. Of course, there are also his seduction techniques, his Tristan Chord being one of them. His genius is therefore questionable - over-worked some say.  

My other point is that the form/structure an artist uses usually describes his intent. Wagner's modus operandi was seduction in order to dominate. That is how Hitler got his following too. There is another side to this, of course. People have to be willing to be seduced (and dominated). And yes, there is a historical process which brings out the Wagnerites. I find that it is a certain type of slightly decadent person who finds him attractive.

Natasha Richardson's Leftist Family Background

And my question to them about Natasha's death


Natasha Richardson was English. She was the daughter of leftist and pro-Palestinian actress Vanessa Redgrave.  So, I wonder what her family, and specifically, her mother, would make of these avoidable errors (more like ingrained systemic problems) that most likely led to Natasha’s death? She would have probably fared the same if not worse in her native England, although as far as the internet says, she and her husband and children lived in the States.

This wasn't an innocent American who came to Canada and got caught up with the system. This is the daughter of an infamous English leftist who supports these kinds of universal systems. Maybe it is a wake-up call for them. But leftists never respond to wake-up calls.

Being the hypocritical socialist that Vanessa Redgrave is, she would most likely demand special intervention when it comes to the well-being of her own family, and the rest of the world just better be socialist or else. Unfortunately, at the crucial moment of her daughter's life, she wasn't there to make this personal intervention.

Redgrave, in her own way, is a talented actress. But, there is a funny relationship with talent and evil. The talent is diminished by evil. I cannot watch her films, because they are diminished by her belief system. I think it actually makes her a worse actress.

I remember recently watching A Month by the Lake, and all I could think of was what a pathetic specimen of a character Redgrave was playing. She has also starred in many episodes of that awful series Nip/Tuck. Personally, her PLO support and activism is such a turn-off, that it overshadows everything about her. It makes her into a terrible actress who chooses terrible roles.

I still put the question to her:

What does she and her family think of the circumstances of her daughter's death? What does she think of the system that is set up in her native England, which is very similar to the Canadian system?

I bet she thinks it's just a "one off," and that her daughter was just unlucky.

Background on Natasha Richardson's Brain Injury and Death

Canada's Health Care System at its worst (or best)


Actress Natasha Richardson, after her ski accident in Canada, was met with closed doors at crucial points in her chances of survival. Of course, this started with her refusal for treatment, which is common in brain injury patients who have no symptoms. But, when she arrived at the local ski-resort hospital, she was still conscious, and had a good chance for survival; if she had received the right treatment.

At the local hospital there were:

- No specialists to perform a preliminary drainage to increase her survival rate
- No CT to see the extent of the damage
- No helicopter to transport her quickly to Montreal

By the time she arrived in Montreal, she had to be moved to yet another hospital, again by land, before she got to the right one. By then, it was probably too late.

Compared to hospitals in a similar ski resort in the U.S. - say in Colorado - these would have been unacceptable delays. The problem in Canada was exacerbated by lack of specialized facilities and medical experts: transportation, medical teams, doctors, and brain scanning machines.

This is not a Third World problem. This is a First World problem caused by ideological compromise of its healthcare structure. What the Canadian system does is forfeit advanced, specialty-oriented health care for lower-level universal health care. And lots of "education" on prevention. You can get cured from a cold or even the flu without too much of a doctor's intervention. Or, you can teach yourself how to eat better so you don't get a heart attack. But, God forbid if you have a brain injury that requires precise, first-class equipment and trained specialists. Canadians are quite capable of acquiring wide-scale, specialty-oriented health care, but the system prevents the hospitals and doctors from achieving it.

Some Interesting Posts I Made At Bad Eagle

The German Nationality

The Giant German Ogre (Otto Von Bismarck)

I've been a contributor at the American Indian website called Bad Eagle for a while. I recently stopped participating since it looks like the site is going through some kind of overhaul. I think material is inadvertently getting lost over there. I spent some time researching many of the entries I made, all for the sake of defending my arguments, so, I am recuperating them, and I will post some of them on my blog from time to time.

Some of the more fascinating posts had to do with nationhood, national boundaries and national identity.

I was intrigued, due to a rather contentious German poster (the site was really an attempt to invite an international membership), at what made the German character. Besides referring to my own previous studies on German film (pre-WWII, from the early 1920s to the brilliant propaganda films by Leni Riefenstahl), I read several books on German history to figure it out. 

Here is my analysis of the German national identity (the German character). The post is slightly edited. 

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The passive-aggressive duality of the German character 

[The Holy Roman Empire Emperors] were selected by Germanic Principalities, but their ultimate confirmation was by Rome. The lack of a national cohesiveness by the Principalities also led them to select "German" rulers many of whom were not at all German, and who ruled from as far away as Spain. This further exacerbated the lack of national unity, since these Habsburgs, etc. didn't really care about the "country" as much as ruling it.

Until the forced cohesion of Bismarck, who set off a huge (the first ever, I think) welfare state to appease the Germans, and bring them up to par with each other, the region wasn't even given a proper name - it was an extension of the "glorious past" before the invading barbarian tribes: The Holy Roman Empire. But this very Roman connection had them in handcuffs, so to speak. Even their rulers weren't authenticated until Rome said so. England France, and even much smaller countries such as the "Lowlands" had formed clear, independent nations by then.

So how did these states really survive?

Germans lived in their small towns and provinces, building their safe, secure and stable communities, following authority and educating their young men. But, they were "reined in" by: authority, busyness (all those things they made in their regional and village workshops), and training and taming their young men to be proper leaders and not follow their ancestral barbarian inclinations. They were passive, and civilized, until they were unleashed (reclaiming their untamed past?). 

I don't think it was the German people per se who expanded, or wished to expand, their territories, but rather their ambitious rulers. Many of their rulers were imports, ruling from a distance (usually another land), so it was in the nature of these rulers to expand these, and any, territories. Of course, it was the German people who were at the forefront of wars and battles their distant leaders concocted. 

The German people just passively obliged. For example, the power struggle between the Catholic south and the Protestant north, although religious, was also fiercely territorial. Some 30% of the German population was decimated, and the Germanic territory considerably reduced, while other nations - France, Holland, Sweden, etc... - made much big gains as a direct result of this war. It is surprising that the Germans obliged to fight in these interminable wars, but history shows that their character was a duality of passive, stable "countrymen", and followers of ruthless rulers, even out to war. A passive and aggressive trait - the aggression part easily manipulated. 

Think of Hitler. He was using this German passive-aggressive duality, this German temperament coupled with a strict adherence to authority (as seen from the Popes, to the Rome-elected foreign Kings, to Bismarck's paternalism) to get them to do what he wanted. In a way, that is how they've always been treated, and how they've always behaved.

Germans were in their land without "owning" it, so any impostor like Hitler, any ruler, Pope and other patriarch could come and have his say. Like I said, Germans didn't yet "know" who they were as a nation, and this gap was filled a little more with Hitler, who came along only a few short 50 years after the 1871 formation of the nation. This seems to be the story of Germany, even from as far back as the formation of European nations, to the pre-War years, and later the two World Wars.

From Gables to Torsos

And the decline of cities

Gable wall hanging

This is the very first silk screen I made, under very primitive conditions (I didn't have the correct light, for one, so  it was a bit of a trial and error to get the exposure). I was trying to reproduce the lovely gables of Victorian houses, with their lace-like carvings, and to make them into some kind of pattern. It was a time when I was studying juxtapositions of colors. I also tried to use the idea of musical notes to partly arrange the colors. It is harder than one thinks. Later on, this became quite a little enterprise with cards, tablecloths and runners.

More gable prints

------------------------------------

I was looking through a book on Toronto recently, which was simply a listing of buildings in the city worth recording, with photographs if available. I cannot remember the name of the book offhand. Anyway, I was struck at the time by the number of buildings that were demolished between 1960 and 1970, some without any reason. Most were destroyed to give way to things like wider roads or more modern buildings (usually high rises). It is incredible the number of buildings that were demolished.

Then I found this 2001 interview of Jane Jacobs, the American urbanist who came to Toronto in the 1960s and stayed. Here is what she had to say about the Victorian buildings that were had been destroyed:

Remember how people despised Victorian buildings earlier in this century? They were just ruthless with them. They were just thought to be automatically ugly and disgusting. Many wonderful, wonderful buildings were destroyed. Well, that was a big rejection of Victorianism. Not just the buildings. There was the feeling that it was stuffy, it was repressive.

She got it exactly right. By demolishing the buildings, people thought you could also get rid of the ideas, the traditions, the history. One terrible way to destroy the history of a place (or to warp it) is to destroy its buildings.

My neighborhood has some of the most beautiful Victorian buildings I have ever seen. Parts of it are considered a Heritage Conservation District by the city of Toronto, and not to be tampered with. I wish they had done this forty years earlier. Who knows what they could have saved.

I've always maintained that buildings show us the outward manifestations of a city's psyche. Modern buildings are very hard to like. These days, we are being thrust with horrors like the ROM extension, an angular, dangerous-looking building.

The new Royal Ontario Museum exterior
called the Michael Lee-Chin Crystal

Then there is the famous Turning Torso in Sweden's Malmö harbor. Another structure teetering on its building blocks. And look at what's now happening in Malmö. It's a hotbed for aggressive Muslim youth, intent on destroying the West. Malmö's Turning Torso was surely an omen, which no one listened to.

The Turning Torso in Sweden's Malmö harbor.
An omen?

The Oprah Drama...

Continues


Laura Wood, at The Thinking Housewife, has a very funny take on a recent Oprah episode she watched.

Still, Oprah is a force to contend with, and I am preparing a post on how she manages to deceive her audience, all the while holding quite radical views about the world, including accepting (and agreeing with) the "career" choices of prostitutes.

Was the Marquise de Maintenon the Very First Feminist?

The short answer is: no

Isabelle Huppert as the Marquise de Maintenon with her pupils

I recently watched the incomparable Isabelle Huppert playing the Marquise de Maintenon (also known as Madame de Maintenon), second wife of Louis XIV, in the film St. Cyr. The film was a well-shot period piece, about the school for impoverished young aristocratic girls that Madame de Maintenon founded.

Isabelle Huppert's character starts of as the generous benefactress of this school and the young girls, but eventually degenerates into some kind of fascistic, wilful woman who changes her mind about the school without any consideration for the young girls she was trying to help. But the reality is quite different.

Madame de Maintenon's story is long, including an impoverished childhood, marriage to a much older man who dies leaving her without the means to support herself, and eventually employment as a nanny to Louis XIV's children, where she catches the attention of the King himself and becomes his wife through a morganatic marriage.

The purpose of St. Cyr was to provide an alternative to convents, where impoverished girls of noble backgrounds often ended up. According to the Jesuit La Chaise, the King’s confessor, St. Cyr’s aim was:

[N]ot to multiply convents, which increase rapidly enough of their own accord, but to give the State well-educated women; there are plenty of good nuns, and not a sufficient number of good mothers of families. The young ladies will be educated more suitably by persons living in the world.

Drama was one of the ways that the girls would learn poise, and Racine himself had his play Esther debuted by the young pupils. But, it was this very play, and Racine’s presence, that would change the direction of the school. The attention the girls who acted in the play received from the male courtiers was deemed inappropriate, as were several of the school's courses given to the girls. In the end, Madame de Maintenon, herself a deeply religious woman, transformed the school into a more liberalized form of a convent. And not all the girls became nuns. About two thirds of the girls who went through the school system remained "in the world."

So why was Patricia Mazuy, the director of the film, so vicious towards Madame de Maintenon, portraying her as a vacillating fascist who wanted to change St. Cyr into some form of theocracy? I think the answer lies in the later reformations that Madam de Maintenon made. She shied away from what appeared to be feminist ideas to those more concerned with the moral well being of the girls under her charge. But in fact, she was no feminist. She had merely wanted a place where girls could expand on their intellectual abilities, all within the context of their femininity, and their future roles as wives and mothers.

In her feminist rage, and feelings of betrayal, Mazuy even got Madame de Maintenon's original intention wrong. So, she portrayed her as a villainous character in the history of feminism, who abandons the movement for her religious fanaticism.

All wrong, of course.

O Magazine As Oprah's Mirror

“I could be wrong. I could be hopelessly and irretrievably wrong.”


The Thinking Housewife, at her beautifully designed blog, has commented on my post on Oprah, which she titles, "Queen of Vanity." Here is the link, with further comments by me. Her use of the word vanity to describe Oprah (and her seductive pose on the magazine cover) is fitting.

NATO's 60th Anniversary Non-Logo

From solid compass to flimsy spiral - all in sixty years

NATO's sixty-year anniversary spiral logo 

The Brussels Journal recently had an article on NATO titled, "As goes the West, so does NATO", and put a logo beside the article. I was struck by the flimsy spiral on the right, and wondered whether BJ got it wrong. I scoured the internet for this, and the only place I could find this spiral was on NATO's 60th anniversary website (different from its official website), where this spiral is placed to the right of the original NATO emblem, as in the BJ article.

The original emblem, adopted in 1953, was described by the then NATO Secretary General Lord Ismay as:

[A] four-pointed star representing the compass that keeps us on the right road, the path of peace, and a circle representing the unity that binds together the 14 countries of NATO. 

NATO's official logo

Now, what does a flimsy spiral represent? In fact, the 60th anniversary logo looks like some kind of wiring had sprung loose from the insides of a machine. Are the NATO designers envisioning the uncoiling of this spiral into a distant, happy, warless future? Close. 

I often see this kind of whimsy, sloppy spiral in feminist goddess artwork. Gaia followers describe the spiral as:

[A]n ancient symbol of the goddess, the womb, fertility, feminine serpent forces, continual change, and the evolution of the universe. 

Slipshod Gaia spiral jewellery 

The spiral is actually of ancient mathematical interest. The Archimedean spiral, which these floppy pagan female symbols resemble, is formed with precision to produce a spiral with equal distance between the turns.

The precise Archimedean spiral
is described by the equation: r = a + bθ     

So, what does the NATO 60th anniversary spiral resemble most, the Archimedean or the Gaian spiral? A floppy Gaia imitation, I’m afraid. Now, why does the military safe keeper of peace in Europe opt to celebrate its 60th anniversary with such a mediocre, and what appears to be ill-thought-out, design? But I think the design was quite deliberate.

The solid compass of the original design, with its precise purpose, is no longer valid. War is out, peace is in. Let’s be universal peacemakers, like the goddesses of yonder years, and engulf the earth with our good intentions. Let this spiral uncurl to reach the depths of the world and impart the message of peace, and not war.

This is the new mantra of the once militarily conceived NATO, now celebrating its 60th anniversary with its spiral goddesses.

Oprah Power

Full force?

Oprah gracing the covers of September's O Magazine
(as she does every single issue), with the caption,
"You're stronger than you know. How to tap into
your true power and really make it work for you."

One of my interests is to understand and deconstruct images - whether they be artistically composed (paintings, illustrations, textile designs, etc.), or images that are photographic or film shots, which are often not as meticulously composed from scratch, like paintings and illustrations, but which the lens tries to capture from the world around us.  

Sometimes, these "documentary" images are more interesting than the carefully planned paintings, since they reveal inadvertent movements and expressions, and show us a deeper "picture" than what the photographer (or the subject) expects us to see.

Here is one such of Oprah (see above image). Now, this is a planned, staged photo shoot. But the photographer, Birgitte Lacombe, writes in the September issue of O Magazine which features this photo on its cover:

Oprah is powerful, yet she wears her power lightly. That's what I was out to capture. She looks in control, but not in an aggressive way. It's a more introspective kind of power.

Lacombe was going for power, "but not in an aggressive way." Either she's a very bad reader of human expression, or her idea of a power look is the insecure, hesitant and certainly non-powerful expression that Oprah has in the photo. Given her own explanation of power, I would say the latter comes closer to Lacombe's intentions. 
 
Here's what Oprah herself has to say:

When your life is on course with its purpose, you are your most powerful.

This new-agey type of thinking comes from Oprah's now famous association with the spiritual movement "The Secret," whose founder/discoverer Rhonda Byrne, says:

What we do is we attract into our lives the things we want, and that is based on what we're thinking and feeling.

Oprah recently announced that she had become depressed, and was unable to control her weight. Her medical doctor attributed it to a thyroid problem, but her problem seems bigger, and deeper, than that. If pictures say anything, I would interpret her expression in the photo above as someone doesn't attract into her life the things she wants, which is certainly not a powerful condition.

There's a lot to speculate on this "weakness" of Oprah. One thing I'll say is that the world that Oprah says she's so in tune with, the life which is "on course with its purpose," isn't happening. She has taken a false path somewhere. 

Why Doesn't Michelle Malkin Write A Book On Conservatism?

I try to answer that further down

A conservative debating a liberal. Who comes
off as looking normal? Malkin was recently on
The View promoting her new book, and had
some altercations with the ultra-liberal Joy Behar.

Michelle Malkin is promoting her new book on Obama, titled, Culture of Corruption: Obama and His Team of Tax Cheats, Crooks, and Cronies. She's doing the TV rounds, both on conservative and liberal shows. It is striking how maniacal she looks. I understand that debating liberals can be difficult, and being the true believers that they are, like Muslims, there is no way to penetrate their system.

But, Malkin made the initial mistake. Why stoke the flames with a book on Obama? I suspect the blogs, and even now the MSM, are beginning to out all those things she's talking about in her book.

During an interview with a blogger at 2blowhards, Jim Kalb, when asked about the unappealing nature of conservative in the media says:

They're not thoughtful...so they can't explain why they reject the liberal program in favor of something else. The result is that their conservatism takes on an aggressive and arbitrary quality, at least in style.

My suggestion to her, and to other angry conservatives, is to keep calm when around liberals, but carve out your conservative movement, instead of spending all your time and angry energy castigating liberals.

Why not write a book on Palin? I'm afraid I know the answer to that already. How can she write about a marginal conservative, bordering on liberal, like Palin, and call it a book by and of a conservative? It is far easier to bash a liberal, than to define (re-define) and regroup your own movement.

Since Malkin seems to be at such a loss, I recommend that she read Jim Kalb's sane, reasoned, even-tempered and finally highly illuminating book: The Tyranny of Liberalism Understanding and Overcoming Administered Freedom, Inquisitorial Tolerance, and Equality by Command.

It is even available here in Canada. Well, I had to order it through Chapters/Indigo, and the guy who took the order kept asking me if this was the book I really wanted. I guess I don't look the type that reads such books.

Confessions of a Shopaholic: Even Feminists Cannot Alter the Moral of Screwball Comedies

The original screwball comedies of the 1930s introduced a momentary reversal of romantic roles, in which the lead female comedienne devises madcap routines in order to snag the leading man. We realize as these movies progress, that the screwball veteran, which includes Katherine Hepburn, Jean Arthur and Barbara Stanwyck, may be nutty but she certainly is not the fool or the sociopath that she makes herself out to be. Even in the tail end years of the original comedies, Marilyn Monroe, tottering in her high heels and batting her eyelashes, and looking much more daft than the earlier cast, is a good deal more savvy than she lets on. Through their unabashed zany acts which drive their leading men berserk, the leading ladies’ ultimate goal is to get these artless and unsuspecting men to declare love and marriage, although the women never declare anything themselves. Karyn Kay, a feminist film critic, wryly observes that screwball really is, “A reiteration of this man-above-woman world order ”[1], making these 1930s films one of the most conservative film genres to come out of Hollywood.

Not surprisingly, this type of film has garnered few fans from the feminists, who should have every reason to like a high-spirited woman that gets what she’s after. In his book Screwball Comedy, Wes D. Gehring observes, “Feminists…have ambivalent feelings toward the heroine. They generally tend to like her madcap means but have difficulty accepting the end: all this for a man” [2].

Filmmakers continue to revive screwball comedies, although they are few and far between. Our second category of heroines, the good students of feminism, focuses its frenzied energy not on the leading man, but on some other (preferably inanimate) item. This is usually a career, made more meaningful tied to a good cause. The 2001 and 2003 Legally Blonde series captures this exceptionally well. Reese Witherspoon, playing the ditzy but smart Elle Woods (she went to Harvard, after all), finds her true screwball comedic moments as a lawyer exposing a corrupt cosmetics firm in her pink suites and retro pillbox hats. Melanie Griffith is another working girl, this time a secretary who furtively takes over her absent boss’ projects in 1988’s aptly titled Working Girl. She is more interested in maneuvering her company through business deals, with the help of women’s magazines, than in getting the leading man. Both films still manage screwball comedy’s compulsory ending of a happy couple, but with the men clearly working hard to get their career-focused, but finally complaisant, leading ladies.

Confessions of a Shopaholic is the third installment to screwball comedy, but with a brand new twist – the self-absorbed, addictive personality. Rebecca Bloomwood, played by the talented Australian newcomer Isla Fisher, has some $16,000 in credit card debt from her out-of-control shopping sprees for designer clothes. “When I shop the world gets better, the world is better; and then it's not anymore and I have to do it again,” she confesses.

Rebecca’s earlier model is Renée Zellweger’s Brigitte Jones, from the 2001 Brigitte Jones’s Diary, who is an overweight career girl that cannot get her food addiction under control. Brigitte crosses the thin line from the career girl with a cause, embodied by Legally Blonde’s Elle, to a career girl beset by addictions and self-absorption. Rebecca and Brigitte are women who spend their energy not in acquiring respectability and stability through marriage (although Brigitte is obsessed by romance), or in emulating their predecessor feminist screwballs by trying to do some good with their money and career. No, they are caught up in some kind of self-indulgent, often materialistic, preoccupation that consumes their time and energy. The screwball heroine has transformed herself into the self-centered Oprah feminist of the twenty first century, where everything is about gratifying “me”.

We first encounter Rebecca as she confronts a glitch in her shopping life when she gets laid off. She desperately accepts a new job at a financial firm to maintain her shopping addiction, much to the ridicule of her best friend Suze. “Don't you think it is ironic that Rebecca Bloomwood is advising people on money? ” asks Suze. “I have a plan,” replies Rebecca, true to the spirit of a screwball heroine. Her plan is to work her way up the ladder to land at a more appropriate fashion company. Of course, all this is a by-product of her obsession with clothes. She starts to shine at her new job due her sympathetic boss, Luke Branford, and a quirky financial advice column she writes, and she finally does get offered a position at the fashion company. But a new job and a successful column notwithstanding, Rebecca’s biggest nightmare is a debt-collector who “stalks” her to exact what she owes.

As she hops, skips, jumps and lies to keep acquiring new clothes on her over-charged credit card, and to avoid the debt collector who’s circling in on her, Rebecca finally gets serious about a “shopaholics anonymous” group. On her committed visit she introduces herself as, “I'm Rebecca Bloomwood and I'm a shopaholic!...I have a plan.” This time, Rebecca’s plan is to sell her designer clothes at an auction to pay off her gargantuan debt. As expected, she succeeds. And we would like to believe that she is cured of her affliction, and her nuttiness.

The film signs off with the signatory happy ending of screwball comedies. Rebecca gets the guy (Luke, her boss). Or more like the guy gets Rebecca, a continued twist in the screwball romance where a bemused male is the cautious pursuer of the distracted female.

Nevertheless, Rebecca has charm, and is an endearing character, although certainly giddy. Even her fashion sense is led by some inner voice which tells her to wear pink with orange, thanks to director Paul Hogan, a fellow Australian, who makes this movie a pleasure to watch by dressing Rebecca in flamboyant clothes and showering us with kaleidoscopic colors. Rebecca’s gaffes are soon forgotten by her friends, whom she had hurt numerous times, and she inadvertently (it definitely wasn’t part of the plan) gets the leading man in the end. We’re not sure, though, if this entails a marriage proposal – this is Screwball 3.0, after all.

Try as it might, feminism could not influence screwball comedy with its woman-above-man world order, even in its heyday of Reese Witherspoon’s daffy lawyer (or is it lawyeress?). To have a happy ending, one needs a happy couple. Usually that means what the original screwball comediennes knew very well: there’s no messing around (permanently, at least) with the world order. Even Rebecca seems to have acknowledged that.

1. Kay, Karyn. Part-time work of a domestic slave. Alexander Kluge. Film Quaterly. October 1975, Vol. 29, No. 1. Page 56.

2. Gehring, Wes D. Screwball Comedy A Genre of Madcap Romance. Westport, Conn : Greenwood Press, 1986. Page 155.

Apologies to Mr. Rubenstein

I must have had "Arthur" on my mind :-)

I've quoted Edwin Rubenstein's article from Vdare in my previous post,"How to ruin a discipline." I kept referring to him as "Rubinstein." My apologies. There is an Arthur Rubinstein though, so I've kept him in good company!

Botanical Art

Saturated Flowers

Iris, by Leslie Staple, botanical artist from Toronto

How To Ruin A Discipline

How immigrant designer Chung-Im Kim is influencing, and ruining, design

Edwin Rubenstein President of ESR Research: Economic Consultants, who writes for Vdare and has developed the very useful "VDARE.com American Worker Displacement Index", has a recent article up called: "Did Immigrant Economists Sink the U.S. Economy?"

This article is an eye-opener on how a particular type of foreigner can make lasting changes in a particular discipline. In this case, how Asian students, with their low-level English language skills caused the removal of history and psychology courses in economics and had them replaced for mathematically-oriented, abstracted, ones. Rubenstein writes:

Gone was the economic history course that exposed students to market failures and the importance of psychological factors—what Keynes dubbed "animal spirits"—to a prosperous economy.

I don't want to reproduce Rubenstein's whole article here. It is worth reading. But his point is that one of these mathematically-oriented economists, a Chinese man educated in Canada, came up with an equation that:

"proved" that the risk of an investment grade mortgage defaulting could be estimated with precision, independently of the risk that other—say, sub-prime mortgages—would default.

Rubenstein continues:

Apologists point out that the traders, not Li and his fellow quants, are the ones who lost billions for Wall Street firms last year. That may be technically true. But when traders sit in front of their computer screens and click the mouse, they are responding to the prompts derived from some complex equation.

Now, for my part of the story!

An influential Toronto textile designer, and associate professor of design at the Ontario College of Art and Design (OCAD), is a Korean immigrant named Chung-Im Kim.

Chung-Im Kim, textile
"designer" and associate
professor at OCAD

I was a student in several of her classes. We tried, in her classes, to draw out her extensive knowledge on: silk painting; gouache techniques for reproducing designs; insights and examples of textile prints and designs.

Eventually, we had to give up on a lot of these. Her ambition, I later understood, was to destroy the textile design section of the program and to revert it to simply "textile art", an amorphous discipline which was all about self-expression, relying not on history, past accomplishments and skills, but on what you can "create" yourself.

Kim is part of a faculty that includes other textile “experts” so the blame on the declining discipline cannot land fully on her. But, she dominated the field when I was there around 2000-2003, with an exhibition there and a commission here, and with an array of skills. She was the dynamic faculty in her program, and could have had full leverage on its direction.

I remember one of her excuses was lack of English. Yet, when it came to paid and personal projects, she was able to secure whatever she needed.

At that time, I was going part-time, and paying for my studies (and expensive material costs) while working full-time. This was probably a God-send, since my classmates were stuck with her all day, every day.

I got the basic gouache painting technique with repeated cajoling on my part for her to teach me independently. I learned as much as I could, leaving her full-time students baffled at how I acquired my skills. I knew more in my part-time studies than they did, some of them having been there four years by then.

I got so interested in the field, that I did my own historical and cultural study of the field. Thank God for libraries. I discarded the “self-expression” part of her teaching method, and studied textile designs from the ancient world up to the mid-twentieth century.

So, what has happened to Kim? Well, she is still in the faculty there, which has an impressive selection of courses ranging from “Fibre Design, Constructed Form” to “3-D Structures in Design – Wearable Form.” One course description says: “[Students] will be encouraged to discover their personal voice in this expressive medium.”

Here are two courses that she teaches:

Fibre: Surface Design/Print:
This course introduces students to surface design as it applies to fabric and other materials. Emphasis is on understanding and developing design concepts, repeat pattern structure and silkscreen printing techniques on yardage scale.

And

Fibre: Surface Design/Pattern:
Directed at fibre students, the course would also be of interest to students who are interested in the graphic application of repeat imagery such as wallpaper or carpet design.

Here is the dismal outcome of what I presume is a student's work influenced (taught) by Kim during these two courses. These pieces were selected for the Material Arts and Design gallery for the class of 2007:

Selected works for OCAD graduating class of 2007 gallery 

This kind of presentation is not unusual. I went to a graduating class presentation in 2004, a year after I left, to see what the work was like. One of my classmates had one of the most depressing senior theses I have ever seen. She set up a whole room as a living room, and covered everything, the walls and floor included, in white. The furniture was covered in white sheets. Her statement clearly was that she didn’t learn anything, which was more honest than the student who presented those doodled flowers as part of her repeat design.

So, if textile design is Kim’s way of earning her income as an associate professor at OCAD, what exactly interests her?

Abstract or abstracted “artistic” works. This has always been her method. One of the first pieces of hers which I saw at an exhibition looked like a crescent moon growing into a full moon. But it wasn’t. There was no full moon, and the crescent was more of a flattened oval shape. When I asked her, rather bluntly I admit, what happened to the moon, it set the stage for her mistrust of me for the rest of our interaction.

Here is another piece. But what is it? Leaves? Maple leaves? It looks like that’s what she’s trying for, just like her “moon”, but can’t quite get there.

Leavs? Maple leaves?
Textile "art" by Kim
 
I‘ve had a theory on this for a long time. I think she is unable to connect to nature, to the landscape, to a concrete reality, because of her extreme discomfort at her presence here in Canada. She cannot accept Canada as a real, concrete place, so anything she designs will be an abstracted, geometric rendition. She is the ultimate immigrant.

Rather than use design, and textile design, as a way with which to connect with a place, she has reverted to the hollow center of self-expression. And all that comes out are strange abstractions or distortions of reality.

Here is her latest – a glorified doodle parading as textile art - which she calls "Dawn." Notice the distorted sun and horizon lines, once again revealing her dislike of nature. To give the work a little credit, though, it resembles the op art pieces of the 1960s. But, those years were not the most artistic, although people enjoyed the inventiveness and abstracted geometry that the artists played around with.

 

Which brings us right back to the beginning of this post. If immigrants can only produce for us abstracted and distorted thoughts, equations and designs, without any context or content, as Rubenstein writes, why should we let them run and consequently dismantle our important institutions? 

Obama's Perennially Slipping Mask

Images are worth a thousand words


Thomas Lifson from American Thinker has posted the above image with this preface : "This picture truly is worth at least a thousand words."

It seems more and more pundits and writers are looking at Obama's body language and facial expressions. Thomas Sowell wrote an article recently on how Obama's mask slipped during the Gates interlude, and how we should never forget it.

I could say that I was the original detector of slipping masks, which I described here. I say this a little tongue-in-cheek, but I actually haven't seen anyone make these observations until recently. 

I think there have been constant reminders of Obama's slipping mask, right from that very first observation I recorded. Most people found this obvious detection of the falsity of Obama too disconcerting. Look at this instance of Obama clearly bowing to the King of Saudi Arabia. Some writers couldn’t accept this at the beginning, half-jokingly giving it other interpretations.

I do have to add, though, that we cannot rely wholly on pictures. The art of discerning someone’s true intentions depends on many things. And even then, after putting all the information together, we may get our assessment wrong.

But, in Obama’s case, that one slip was good enough to make my judgment.