|
| Click any image to enlarge |
With our 250th Anniversary of the Declaration of Independence nearly upon us, I thought I would feature an American artist. Winslow Homer (1836-1910) is arguably America's finest painter. Although he spent some time in Paris and England, he was primarily based out of New England. He started as a magazine illustrator but moved on to oils and watercolors. He grew increasingly more reclusive as he aged.
|
| Winslow Homer |
 |
| An anarchist |
All of these people — back to Marx himself — spend far more time naming who deserves to be on the receiving end of theft and violence than working out how their ideal society would actually function, let alone building it.
This is the difference between a genuine grievance and a pathological one. Ressentiment only subtracts. It locates the entire source of its suffering outside itself and proposes to remove that source from the face of the earth. Take off the billionaires’ heads. Liquidate the favored men. Cut down the one who said the wrong pronoun. None of these are doctrines aimed at stability or coherence. They are justifications for resentment.
That is why these movements hate the language of self-improvement — why the manifesto sneers at lifting weights, at becoming confident, at building something. It is why all the blame falls on the health insurance CEO and none on the millions living with lifestyle-induced chronic disease. It is why billionaires’ heads become the cause of all your problems. To improve yourself is to admit you have agency over your own life, and agency is surrendered long before ressentiment swallows the soul. That is what the sane are truly up against. Not a single ideology, but the spirit that spawns them all.
Above is an excerpt from a post at Pergelator's blog. He swiped it entirely from My Daily Kona who swiped it from Liam Out Loud. It is a succinct, and I think very accurate, discussion of one of the currents underlying a lot of today's political violence. It is well worth reading it in full.
This video discusses meals in ancient Rome. The food they ate is also explained. Also, most Romans didn't have a means for cooking food at home, so they used street vendors to get their meals. Herculaneum and Pompeii were both buried in volcanic ash, so we have well preserved examples of the infrastructure to support their daily dining.
|
| Click any image to enlarge |
Judge magazine was an American satirical magazine published from 1881 to 1947. It was founded by people who left Puck. It was aligned with the Republicans and published a lot of overtly political content. Many of its early covers are in the style of that era's political cartoons.
I liked the cover immediately below. My grandparents came over on one of those European Garbage Ships where they got dumped on Ellis Island. Eastern Europeans were the riffraff of the day. Riffraff or not, they were legal and sought to acclimate. However, the last image is rather more immigrant friendly, showing Uncle Sam's face as a melting pot of ethnicities.
Lightning strikes travel too fast to see. So, do they move from cloud to ground or vice versa? This video has some slow-motion video that shows the evolution of a lightning strike. It turns out to be far more complex.
As thunderstorms form air current rapidly life water upwards. As the water vapor quickly moves up, electrons are knocked loose resulting in a positively charge anvil and a negatively charge cloud base. The negatively charge cloud bases causes a positive charge to build in the ground. Tendrils of current begin to form, in both the cloud and the ground, and when they connect, we have the lightning bolt.
The NOAA website has a more detailed explanation of lightning.
|
| Click any image to enlarge |
The Menologion of Basil II is an 11th century Byzantian manuscript. It was a liturgical book that showed the lives of the Saints as well as martial feats by Emporer Bail II against the Bulgarians. Its style is of the Macedonian Renaissance which was a return to a more naturalistic look. The images were accompanied by text stressing important points about the Saints. After passing through several hands, it is now in the Vatican Library.
Earlier I've posted about The Codex Laud which is an Aztec religious text. I mentioned that, because of its religious topic, it came across as being rather bloodthirsty. The same applies to the Menologion. Without trying to draw an equivalence between the two religions, when the topic is the tribulations of mankind there will be ghastly scenes portrayed.
A forklift places a Dodge Caravan into a car crusher, and it gets crushed. Then another car gets loaded in and it get crushed. Then another and another and another until we have a stack of crushed cars. In the video below we have a car shredder. Drop a car into the bin and it gets randomly disassembled.
I suppose to a motorhead, thinking of when these cars were new and sparkly on a dealer's lot, this is all a bit of a tragedy. To the rest of us it is oddly fascinating.
|
| Click any image to enlarge |
Dominic Serres (1722–1793) was born in France. After studying at a seminary, he moved to Spain where he became a merchant sailor. Eventually, in the Caribbean, he was captured by the British and imprisoned. While in prison he took up painting. Upon release he moved to England and began his career as a painter of maritime subjects, most generally warships of the time.
|
| Dominic Serres |
Bukit Bintang is an upscale shopping district located in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Compared to many of the areas we've walked through in this series, it is very nice looking. The place is lively, with a lot of shops, restaurants, cafes, and food stalls.
