Moving Forward!

Mengistu Haile Mariam with raised fist

"Mitt Romney Makes Fun of Obama Campaign Slogan During High-Dollar Fundraiser" says this headline, but Romney is not wrong, although a little naive. The article says:

Mitt Romney this evening, speaking to a group of high-dollar donors at the Ritz-Carlton hotel, poked fun at President Obama's newly unveiled campaign slogan, "Forward," remarking, "Forward, what, over the cliff?"

"Forward" is actually a communist/socialist slogan which this Washington Times article correctly identifies:

The Obama campaign apparently didn't look backwards into history when selecting its new campaign slogan, "Forward" — a word with a long and rich association with European Marxism.

African Marxist countries also used "forward" as a slogan. "Etiopia Tikdem," which loosely translated is "Ethiopia First" but actually means "Let Ethiopia Come First" or "Let Ethiopia Go Forward," was a well-known slogan during Marxist Ethiopia.

"Etiopia Tikdem" on a helmet

Even non-Marxists like us liked the sound of it for a while. Some still use it, a little nostalgically and ironically. Here is a blogger, whose name is Etiopia (it is common to give girls the name "Etiopia"), who uses it as her Facebook title. She's too young to have lived through the worst of the communist regime, but somehow the phrase has prevailed, and she associates with it positively.

How to Wear a $990 T-Shirt

A spiteful blogger at the Washington Post writes:

Ann Romney has been coming under fire for wearing a $990 Reed Krakoff t-shirt on the air recently. Never mind that Reed Krakoff sounds like a rejected Hunger Games character. This is a Serious National Issue.

My biggest objection to the shirt is that it looked like a disembodied fish-bird was squinting at you off Ann Romney’s right shoulder.

That is a nightmarish vision with which I would as soon not contend. That someone would pay this amount of money so that a disgruntled yellow creature could give TV audiences the stink-eye is the sort of thing that makes even the staunchest Reaganian rethink his stance on trickle-down economics.

Of course, this comment is directed at the "99%" who cannot afford $990 silk shirts. In the usual fascistic and dogmatic manner of liberals, everyone has to wear the $9 t-shirt that caters to the lowest common denominator. And all those who can afford to buy $990 t-shirts have to hand out their money to those who somehow got behind in buying designer shirts, and wear the $9 t-shirt uniform in solidarity. Never mind those 1% (i.e. the Romneys) who bought their shirts with their hard-earned money.

Never mind that the t-shirt (or silk shirt, as what it really is) has a print of John James Aududon's Gyrfalcon, which is an illustration of a large falcon native to North America.

Audubon's book of illustrations, Birds of America, was an ambitious project of,

435 hand-colored, life-size prints of 497 [North American] bird species, made from engraved copper plates...[which] contains just over 700 North American bird species.

The books also features the gyrfalcon.

So how "un-American" can Ann Romney be, with her instinctive ability to wear a shirt featuring an American illustrator's American bird, while accompanying her husband on a campaign interview at CBS This Morning a few days ago? Michelle Obama also likes to wear large prints, yet I have never found any of hers to have cultrual significance other than to promote "designers of color."

That said, Reed Krakoff, the designer who created Ann Romney's shirt, took the liberty of adding extra colors to the print on Ann Romeny's shirt, since Audubon's bird is mostly white, black and with touches of color, as are the colors of the actual bird. Krakoff's website says:

The bird painting was inspired by John James Audubon' s iconic painting of gyrfalcons, recolored and manipulated to a larger-than-life scale for a bold and modern effect.

Detail of Reed Krakoff's gyrfalcon

Still, good design is a reinterpretation of what is out there to fit the item on which it is displayed (a piece of clothing, a furniture), and I'm sure Audubon would have found it an honor to be part of American political history.


Gyrfalcon
By John James Audubon (1785-1851)
From: The Birds of America; from original
drawings by John James Audubon
Publication date 1827 - 1838

About the gyrfalcon:

The Gyrfalcon is dispersed throughout much of the Northern Hemisphere, with populations in Northern America, Greenland, and Northern Europe. Its plumage varies with location, with birds being coloured from all-white to dark brown.

The bird's common name comes from French gerfaucon; in medieval Latin it is gyrofalco. The first part of the word may come from Old High German gîr (cf. modern German Geier) for "vulture", referring to its size compared to other falcons; or from the Latin gȳrus for "circle" or "curved path"—from the species' circling as it searches for prey, distinct from the hunting of other falcons in its range. The male Gyrfalcon is called a gyrkin in falconry. The scientific name is composed of the Latin term for a falcon, Falco, and for a countryside-dweller, rusticolus. (More here

Hitler's Death

Hitler committed suicide 67 years ago on April 30th, 1945.

Here is a post I wrote on April 30th which I titled "Hitler's Manhood." It was a review of his picture on various Time Magazine covers, as well as his Man of the Year title he received from Time for 1938.

Of course my blog title was ironic. Here is a "man" who opted to kill, while real men would sacrifice themselves to save lives.

Hitler died, as many weak (unmanly) men die, by suicide.

I wrote my blog post on the anniversary of Hitler's death. I didn't know this. In fact, I didn't know much about Hitler other than the circulating stories about him.

I also ominously write in this Hitler post about another Götterdämmerung, which might really be the last one, and I attribute it to Muslims.

Saris at the White House

What would Camera Lucida be without a fashion post on Michelle Obama? I was trying to find what she wore to the gala for the Japanese Premier, who was at the White House recently, but the gown she wore to the White House Correspondents' Dinner on April 28 (I wrote on the event here, commenting on Barack Obama's jovial, but typically "leftists" remarks) triggered my periodic critique of the First Lady's Fashion Sense.

Below is my attempt to "re-style" the First Lady. Unfortunately, I cannot do anything about those shoulders. And she clearly doesn't listen to advice (what stylist will not bring them to her attention) about covering them up (note the gauche "tan lines" above her collar bone).

--------------------Michelle Obama---------------------

Left: In a Naeem Khan gown at the White House
Correspondents' Dinner
Right: Photoshopped [KPA] with re-styled hair and
button earrings replacing the dangly loops

Vintage Italian Venetian
Murano Glass earrings
(Possible replacement for
Michelle's loops

Michelle Obama wore a gown by "Indian-born, American " fashion designer Naeem Khan to the dinner. The gown was similar to the bulbous "African" gown she wore for the Premier of Japan's visit last year. As I wrote here, Michelle seems to be singling out and promoting "designers of color," which is a code phrase for non-white designers. So far, I haven't seen her wear anything by black designers, probably because of the dearth of state dinners-worthy gowns, although she did wear the "African" atrocity, designed by the erratic but talented (late) Alexander McQueen.

Well, Michelle is showing off her ample, hard-earned (apparently she works out quite a bit) muscles, in this shoulder-less dress, about which this fashion blogger comments:

Mrs. Obama chose a printed silk gown from one of her favorite designers, NY-based Indian-born Naeem Khan. It's from his Spring 2012 Collection and on the runway (as you can see above), it was shown with a one-shoulder drape. As we all know, the First Lady has some AMAZING shoulders and intelligently knows that they should be showcased. Therefore the one shoulder over-drape was removed for Mrs. Obama. I think she looks great. I love the "ethnic" feel of the mixed print and it is very ON TREND with what is happening in prints.

It looks like Khan, who has other variations of this bulbous gown, designed this dress especially for Michelle, a First Lady who "has some AMAZING shoulders and intelligently knows that they should be showcased."

Many of Khan's designs, especially his evening gowns, are striking, but do not quite reach the beauty he seems to be aspiring for (perhaps that is why the Vampiric Pop Star, Lady Gaga, wears his gowns - see below). He is certainly channeling the lovely Indian saris, with their ethereal silk and colorful designs, many encrusted in gold and silver threads. He doesn't reach their level, though, in delicacy and beauty. But he seems good enough for Michelle.

Just a small detail. Michelle is wearing large, dangly, round earrings, which I find inappropriate for formal evening wear (I know, I already said that her dress wasn't up to par for the occasion so the jewelry goes with the outfit). But here is an interview with Khan on the Wall Street Journal, on why (and how) he added that incongruent "touch":

WSJ: The First Lady looked so confident and comfortable. Can you talk about how the dress was made?

Khan: What she did with her hair and I love the idea of all those bangles, because it’s very traditional Indian. You know, Indian women do not live without their bangles. When you get married, you get your bangles, and you have to wear them till the day you die.

I would have given her a less "Indian" look, and with button-style earrings, with her hair styled up. But why would someone described as an "Indian-born American" designer bother with the traditions of America? Like all non-western, ethnic chauvinists, Khan is primarily interested in his own cultural background. But he still has to sell his clothes in America, and to other "ethnics" including blacks and whites. So his designs become a hybrid, but skewed heavily toward the Indian side.

Vampiric Pop Star Lady Gaga wearing a Khan gown

Below are a collection of authentic Indian saris from two sari weaving towns in India, Maheshwari and Chanderi:

Back to Earth

Above are the incredible shots of the Space Shuttle Enterprise flying over New York City last Friday April 27. It was mounted on NASA's Shuttle Carrier Aircraft at Dulles International Airport for its final flight, landing at New York's John F. Kennedy International Airport at around 11:20 am.

But on the way, [the shuttle] thrilled thousands of spectators by flying at low-attitude above some of Manhattan's most iconic landmarks, including the Statue of Liberty, the Empire State Building and One World Trade Center, as it followed the Hudson River to the Tappan Zee Bridge and back.

The above quote is from the Daily Mail, which has more photographs of the spectacular event.

The dramatic clouds over New York fit the grandeur of the shuttle. And one great lady raises her arm in greeting to a great American enterprise, which is paying its respects to a great American city.

On a sour note, President Obama's funding cuts for NASA:

leaves NASA funded at its lowest level in four years, forcing the space agency to juggle priorities and "devastating planetary science," said Bill Nye, CEO of space exploration group The Planetary Society.[From Foxnews.com]

Where Have All the Good Jokes Gone

Jumping marines don't ask or tell. They just demonstrate.

I watched the recent White House Correspondents' Dinner speeches, and I thought there were reasonably funny and light-hearted moments, although there were a couple of mean-spirited jabs, especially when comedian Jimmy Kimmel sniped:

The President was very candid in an interview with the Atlantic a couple of weeks ago when he called Kanye West a jackass. No offense sir, but I think you got the wrong West. I think you meant Allen.

Allen West was in the audience, and took the "joke" with stride.

I thought Obama was generally funny. But he was also dead serious at some moments. His took a mean-spirited jab at Sarah Palin with: "What’s the difference between a hockey mom and a pit bull? A pit bull is delicious." Of course, this is in reference to his dog-eating childhood in Indonesia, but at the same time, he managed to slyly and cleverly denigrate Sarah Palin, who used this famous line in her Vice-Presidential campaign:

"I love those hockey moms. You know, they say the difference between a hockey mom and a pit bull? Lipstick"

Mitt Romney's wife, Ann Romney, proudly says that she raised fours sons as a stay-at-home mom, after news commentator Hilary Rosen quipped that Ann Romney "never worked a day in her life." I think ordinary women are beginning to realize the importance of child rearing as a sole activity and not intertwined with some career oriented job. But the true pit bulls are still out there, who have an underlying hatred of motherhood permeating through their blood, and who see no independent value in the role.

Obama's "joke" on homosexuals in the military was also dead serious:

In my first term as president, I repealed Don't Ask, Don't Tell. In my second term, I will replace that with 'It's Raining Men.'

"It's raining men" is a popular song, and the phrase is used as a code identified with homosexuality. With his "it's raining men" promise, Obama simply means that he will not give up on allowing homosexuals to enter the United States Army, and that he will do so with renewed vigor and force for his new Presidential term. He is making a campaign promise right there.

Hitler's Manhood

Time Magazine's issue of Hitler as Man of the Year

[Large image here, Click on linked image to magnify further]

The caption reads:

Man of 1938
From the Unholy Organist, a hymn of Hate

The illustration shows:

Organist Adolf Hitler playing his hymn of hate in a desecrated cathedral while victims dangle on a St. Catherine's wheel and the Nazi hierarchy looks on, was drawn by Baron Rudolph Charles von Ripper (see p. 20), a Catholic who found Germany intolerable.

The illustration is by Baron Rudolph Charles von Ripper [text of linked article is small, but the biography is the most complete I can find online]

Hitler on the cover of Time:
Top - Left: 1931, Right: 1933
Bottom - Left: 1936, Right: 1941

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

A couple of days ago, the T.V. game show Jeopardy asked who was the Time Magazine Man of the Year for 1938 as its final question. Guess, if you don't know.

Unbelievably it was Hitler.

By 1938, there was enough information coming out of Germany to paint a viscous picture of Hitler's ambitions and rise to power, including his invasions of Czechoslovakia and Poland.

Below is a review of Hitler as he attains the leadership of the Nazi Party to his death by suicide in 1945.

On November 8th, 1923, Hitler, the leader of the National Socialist German Workers' Party, or the Nazi Party for short, marched with 2,000 Nazis to disrupt a meeting at the Munich Beer Hall (known as the Beer Hall Putsch) to spark a "revolution." This failed. The following morning, Hitler and about 3,000 Nazis marched in Munich to take over the entire city. This was averted by the police. Hitler was arrested two days later at his hiding place in the attic of friends. He served only one of his five-year term. He wrote most of his Mein Kampf treatise while in prison. The book was published in two volumes in 1925 and 1926. There was no doubt what he thought about, and intended for, the "Jewish Question." In 1933, he was elected Chancellor of Germany by popular vote. In 1936, his government hosted the summer Olympic Games in Berlin, a prestigious recognition of his country by the world at large.

Hiter's aggressive leadership, his clear-cut anti-Semitism, his nationalistic politics to bring Germany to the forefront of Europe through Nazism, and his expansionary goals, were ignored or undermined by world leaders, despite enough (I could say ample) evidence.

The January 2 1939 edition of Time Magazine named him Man of the Year for 1938, as a world figure who "for better or for worse, ...has done the most to influence the events of the year." This ambiguous honor gave some legitimacy to Hitler's leadership by the world at large.

Here is more from the 1939 article in the magazine, describing Hitler:

[T]he figure of Adolf Hitler strode over a cringing Europe with all the swagger of a conqueror. Not the mere fact that the Führer brought 10,500,000 more people (7,000,000 Austrians, 3,500,000 Sudetens) under his absolute rule made him the Man of 1938...More significant was the fact Hitler became in 1938 the greatest threatening force that the democratic, freedom-loving world faces today.

In March 1938, Hitler invaded Czechoslovakia. On September 1, 1939, Hitler invaded Poland. On September 3, 1939, Britain and France declared war on Germany, but with no military action against Germany. Hitler then invaded Norway and Denmark, and launched his blitzkrieg on Holland, Belgium and France by 1940. Churchill, who became Prime Minister of Britain in 1940, led the British to war against Germany with his June 1940 "Finest Hour" speech, and his famous line:

"I expect that the Battle of Britain is about to begin."

The Americans joined soon after, in December 1941

Hitler stayed in power from 1933 until the defeat of the Nazis in 1945. He had managed to convince the German people to elect him as their leader despite his aggressive and destructive coup on the German government more than ten years earlier. His stint in prison was forgotten. His book, Mein Kampf, failed to alert the public of his true intentions. His invasions were initially downplayed by foreign nations. News, reports, and perhaps more importantly anecdotes by Jewish dissidents to America on this treatment of Jews in Germany, including stories of Jews being rounded up for labor/concentration camps, were ignored or downplayed.

On November 9, 1938, his SA stormtroopers conducted two days of destruction and pogrom on Jewish neighborhoods using as a pretext the shooting of a German Embassy staff in Paris by Herschel Grynszpan, a young Jewish student. Grynszpan was retaliating against the deportation of his parents from Germany to Poland. Although the international community condemned this Germany-wide pogrom, or Kristallnacht as it is known, some by cutting off diplomatic relation with Germany, Hitler suffered no serious consequences. The world didn't take his clearly displayed Jewish animosity as a precursor to his impending aggressions.

Hitler himself said in a public speech in January 1939:

"If international-finance Jewry inside and outside Europe should succeed once more in plunging the nations into yet another world war, the consequences will not be the Bolshevization of the earth and thereby the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation (vernichtung) of the Jewish race in Europe."

His speech was included in

the 1940 Nazi propaganda movie The Eternal Jew (Der ewige Jude), whose purpose was to provide a rationale and blueprint for eliminating the Jews from Europe. [Source: Wikipedia]

It would take Britain and France another eight months after Time's honor of Hitler before they would declare war on Germany, and another nine months before Winston Churchill would lead the fight.

I don't think there is a Hitler analogy in our era, and I sincerely hope there never will be. Yet, I keep coming back to the Muslim presence in the West. We may never have a Muslim leader in a Western country like Canada or the US since Muslim culture is just too different from Western culture. But we have enough multicultural propagandists and liberal equality mongers who work around the clock to convince the public that Muslims in our countries are part of that wonderful, peaceable smorgasbord of peoples, and that letting more of them into our liberated, free and equal lands should be part of our mission. Soon, Muslim will have built up a mass that will work in tandem to wreak real havoc on our societies, and not with just the occasional bombs that blow apart buildings and people.

Sam Solomon, a former Sharia expert and converted Christian, seems to have similar ideas to mine. I discuss here his book Modern Day Trojan Horse: Al-Hijra, The Islamic Doctrine of Immigration, Accepting Freedom or Imposing Islam? on Islamization and the Umma. Below is an excerpt from his book:

The beginning phase of Islamization usually includes activities pivotal to building a physical presence. It consists of public calls to prayer; founding of schools, libraries and research centers; and the teaching of Arabic -- actions that appear to be reasonable and respectable infrastructure requirements necessary to support the presence of a faith. At this point in the Hijra ["immigration designed to subvert and subdue non-Muslim societies and pave the way for eventual, total Islamization"], it is permissible for Muslims to engage in haram, or forbidden actions, out of necessity to establish and empower the umma or Muslim community. Koranic rules such as the prohibition against friendships with infidels are suspended while the objectives of future Islamization are systematically put into place. In its initial phase, the Hijra passes scrutiny by the West whose citizens erroneously view the migration as mainly economic -- a pilgrimage for a better life.

Just as the Nazis prepared the German people over the years about the evilness of the Jews, and concurrently built up their war machine, Muslims are building their societies in our Western shores by giving us a false image of their peaceful and integrationist intentions, while strengthening their powers. And Jews are also their great nemesis. Jews are like the canary in the coal mine, showing the approaching dangers. It is up to us to pay attention to this virulent anti-Semitism that is in the fabric of Islam, and which is surfacing in other, non-Islamic bodies and groups. Sam Solomon understands this link between anti-Semitism and Islam, and discusses it in his second book Eternal Islamic Enmity and the Jews, which I briefly review here.


Photo above:

A group of Jews, including a small boy, is escorted from the Warsaw Ghetto by German soldiers in this April 19, 1943 photo. The picture formed part of a report from SS Gen. Stroop to his Commanding Officer, and was introduced as evidence to the War Crimes trials in Nuremberg in 1945. (AP Photo) [Source: The Atlantic. Oct 16, 2011]