BORDC is proud to present Jayel Aheram with the May 2013 Patriot Award. Jayel’s work also employs many media, combining his ability to capture a visual experience with journalistic expertise, a broad range of experiences and activism and organizing work across several social movements. In addition to its inspiring breadth, Jayel’s work also reminds us that creative expression can dramatically strengthen political activism by making the issues more accessible, and the concerns more powerful, to public audiences.
High heels point back to an unlikely source: men. For centuries, high heels were worn as a form of riding footwear, according to Elizabeth Semmelhack of
the Bata Shoe Museum in Toronto. The heel helped a rider secure his
stance in the stirrups so he could shoot arrows more effectively; this
was useful particularly in Persia (modern-day Iran), where the fighting
style relied a great deal on good horsemanship.
[...]
"In the 1630s you had women cutting their hair, adding
epaulettes to their outfits. They would smoke pipes, they would wear
hats that were very masculine. And this is why women adopted the heel -
it was in an effort to masculinise their outfits."
Eventually, though, the unisex heel branched into a low, stacked heel
for men and a slender heel for women, and when the Enlightenment rolled
around, men’s dress became more sensible and understated. The
distinction between classes was vanishing, and women—seen as silly,
vapid, and overly sentimental—became the curators of the high heel and
other pretentious, impractical fashions. By 1740, men stopped wearing
high heels entirely.
Once functioning as sensible footwear for horseback riding, high
heels evolved into stilettos and pumps, impractical but irresistible
signifiers of femininity and wealth.
Mark Twain, who thought that "Wagner's music is better than it sounds," humbly proposed to improve the master's operas by performing them in the manner of pantomime plays.
The entire overture, long as it was, was played to a dark house with the
curtain down. It was exquisite; it was delicious. But straightway
thereafter, or course, came the singing, and it does seem to me that
nothing can make a Wagner opera absolutely perfect and satisfactory to
the untutored but to leave out the vocal parts. I wish I could see a
Wagner opera done in pantomime once. Then one would have the lovely
orchestration unvexed to listen to and bathe his spirit in, and the
bewildering beautiful scenery to intoxicate his eyes with, and the
[silent] acting couldn’t mar these pleasures, because there isn’t often
anything in the Wagner opera that one would call by such a violent name
as acting; as a rule all you would see would be a couple of silent
people, one of them standing still, the other catching flies. Of course I
do not really mean that he would be catching flies; I only mean that
the usual operatic gestures which consist in reaching first one hand out
into the air and then the other might suggest the sport I speak of if
the operator attended strictly to business and uttered no sound.
Woody Allen: “Every time I listen to Wagner, I get the urge to invade Poland.”
I am not sure the below arrangements are likely to change my attitude much.
21 hours of Wagner music in a little over 4 minutes, this is what the below performance offers all those who have not been able to get tickets for the famous Bayreuth festival dedicated to Wagner.
OK, I have to admit that I'm an Adam Kokesh fan for lots of reasons, not the least of which is that we can't have a revolution without revolutionaries.
I realize that sometimes he does outrageous things that drive people away from the liberty movement, like this moment, right before he was forcefully removed from the 2008 Republican Convention:
And sometimes he organizes events that seem silly, like the Dance-In at the Jefferson Memorial:
But sometimes, his methods give us a glimpse of what we're up against and reveal what the government really thinks of us. This weekend is one of those times.
Adam was speaking at a marijauna legalization rally. While I think that drug laws should belong to the states, to be honest this isn't one of my issues and that's partly because it isn't a freedom that the traditional GOP voter is ready to embrace (yet).
But Adam wasn't smoking pot, he wasn't carrying pot, and he didn't organize the event. However,the police moved in on him when he was speaking, and he was arrested.
The Kokesh wing of the movement has been aflutter all weekend about it, and if you want to know more specifics, I suggest you visit his Facebook page or click ont of the links at the bottom of this entry because I want to focus on one small event that will likely go unnoticed, and it's in this video.
This officer is answering phones that are apparently ringing quite a bit as people call to check on the status of a quasi-celebrity. You won't need to listen long, I promise:
Who is the provacatuer again?
This is why I like and admire Adam. He never loses his cool, and his ability to do so exposes small bits of the arrogant power structures we're facing.
And in case you doubt the authenticity of the video, this is Part II, where the kid who recorded the call shows evidence in his favor:
Saturday Night is still on, even though they stopped being funny about the time John Belushi died. Apparently they're settling for being political hacks:
Actually, Amy, the courts have held that you can't be pulled over just for having a license plate or bumper sticker that arouses suspicion. But thanks for reminding us that the Democrats aren't really about civil liberties as much as they are brute force.
"That was a just P.R. plan to send out somebody who didn't know anything about what had happened," Schieffer said. "Why did you do that? Why didn't the secretary of state come and tell us what they knew. And if you knew nothing, say, 'We don't know yet.' Why didn't the White House chief of staff come out?"
Candy Crowley began the program with polling numbers that said by a margin of 50 percent to 44 percent, people did not think that the Obama administration misled the public on the Benghazi attack. Similarly, on the question of whether White House officials ordered the IRS to target conservative political groups, the sample answered “no”, by a margin of 55 percent to 37 percent.
Crowley then asked Paul if he agreed with the majority on either of those questions.
Paul said it didn’t matter what he believed, or even what the poll numbers show, but that whoever is responsible in either case is held accountable. What was more problematic, he said, was that someone made the decision to put an embassy and a consulate in a war-torn country with inadequate security, and called it a tragic error.
It’s not about blame, he said, but about making sure it doesn’t happen again. Crowley pressed that Paul’s remarks lately seemed to make the issues more political, because he spoke in Iowa and New Hampshire, but Paul responded that he made the same remarks everywhere he spoke.
Turning the discussion to the IRS targeting political groups, Crowley insisted that the she did not think the targeting was done in a political manner, and asked Paul if he thought it was.
“Well, we keep hearing the reports and we have several specifically worded items saying who was being targeted. In fact, one of the bullet points says those who are critical of the president,” Paul said. “So I don’t know if that comes from a policy, but that’s what’s being reported in the press and reported orally. I haven’t seen a policy statement, but I think we need to see that.”
Candy Crowley seems to think that public opinion polling results are equal to the truth. Umm, no. Public opinion is the *opinion* of members of the public, many of whom are very low information respondents.
"This is a business where you have to tell the truth, and that did not happen here," Woodward said.
On CNBC on Friday, however, Woodward seemed more comfortable using the word "Watergate."
"If you read through all these emails, you see that everyone in the government is saying, 'Oh, let's not tell the public that terrorists were involved, people connected to al Qaida. Let's not tell the public that there were warnings,'" Woodward said on "Morning Joe."
"And I have to go back 40 years to Watergate when Nixon put out his edited transcripts to the conversations, and he personally went through them and said, 'Oh, let's not tell this, let's not show this.' I would not dismiss Benghazi. It's a very serious issue."
And while I can't find anything that definitively links him to the Democrat party, the treasurer, Nick Nuckelt, has a Facebook page which is now private. But a little while ago, it wasn't, and his small list favorites included Occupy Wall Street, NBC, and Huffington Post. Ugh.
He also scrubbed his LinkedIn and Pinterest accounts, although they didn't appear to be anything except dull. (Thanks Google cache)
My guess is that this independent-expenditure PAC is trying to cash in on Rand Paul's name, divert cash away from the official organizations, and then spend it running ads against him if he runs in the general.
If you want to support the real Rand Paul, then donate $5,000 here first: http://www.randpac.com .
In the meantime, the FEC regulations clearly state that, "In the case of any political committee which is not an authorized committee, such political committee shall not include the name of any candidate in its name."
Which is why PACs like RAND PAC and SARAH PAC are actually acronyms.
I suspect there will be a complaint filed with the FEC shortly.
“Please explain how all of your activities, including the prayer meetings held outside of Planned Parenthood, are considered educational as defined under 501(c)(3).”
For some (technically unfathomable) reason I am getting lots of (mostly favourable) comments on a post I entered in a long defunct blog of my own that I had had a go at before joining RedStateEclectic.
Funny to read a post that is five years old. My writing may have been a wee bit more laddish then; also, I may have a lesser urge to be reproachful toward the unenlightened (really?). At any rate, in large measure I remain in agreement with my former self.
As of writing these lines, Germany's most frequented DE>EN - EN>DE
on-line-dictionary reveals uncertainty as to the meaning of the term
"doublethink".
Is
this a case of the confused finding it difficult to sort out their
confusion? I suspect so. I harbour the presumption that muddled thinking
is essential to upholding what a vast number of people in Germany
consider their dearest believes. The ever-present intimidation of
"political correctness" both expresses and enforces "intellectual"
commitments concocted from inconsistency, cowardice and opportunism.
Let me give you an example of how doublethink serves to fend off the moral overload people are constantly exposed to these days:
Recently,
a senior civil servant told me that he had applied for a new job. He
regarded himself the best candidate for the position but was almost
certain he would not be considered because the second best applicant
would likely be favoured on the grounds of being a woman. He thought
this unjust. When I challenged him to protest the probable decision, he
switched to a different position, underwriting the need for positive
discrimination (affirmative action) on behalf of women.
The
implications of the underlying theory which he espoused startled me: The
first assumption was that there is a uniform view as to the station
women deserve in our time. The second assumption was that this standard
of where women should have arrived at in our days has been anticipated
by all men in human history, only to be studiously violated by them
until very recently. The third assumption was that the male conspiracy
behind the suppression of women established a guilt among contemporary
men and an obligation for them to make good in terms of positive
discrimination favouring women.
In the course of our discussion,
he remained trapped in doublethink, firmly believing both that it was
not right to pass the best candidate over and that such injustice
assumed the quality of just behaviour when it came to restoring women's
rightful station in contemporary life.
Eventually tired of the
debate, he told me that the issue was of little import as the promotion
would involve only a negligible pay rise and that his present position
required only one or two days effective work per week and thus left much
leeway for other activities to satisfy his needs.
Incidentally, the man's job is to define what our pupils are to be taught.
A
hallmark of our time, assiduously promoted in the educational system
and asserted by a haggling variant of democracy, is the replacement of
consistent principles of justice by a calculus of popularity ("but that
is what everyone thinks") and expediency ("why, I can/can't get away
with it"). The idea that justice rests on consistent principles gives
way to a notion of justice based on the enforcement of organized
interests.
Once special interests are fortified by a majority,
the totalitarian concept of democracy (i.e. the belief in the
unconstrained power of a majority) guarantees that these special
interests define justice - arbitrarily, of course.
Democracy as
we know it, i.e. the philosophy holding that political power defines
justice, overrides consistency and, thus, creates moral overload and the
need for doublethink.
Main Entry: dou·ble·think Pronunciation: 'd&-b&l-"thi[ng]k Function: noun : a simultaneous belief in two contradictory ideas
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