Archive for July, 2006
"Violent Mob Want Peace"
Saturday, July 29th, 2006Best headline of the day, if not, month. Via Instapundit.
More Nutrition From Seminar
Saturday, July 29th, 2006Calcium is good for you. Best kinds: Calcium Lactate and Calcium Citrate Malate.
Teen girls need 1500 mg.
The rest of us need 1000 mg.
There ya go.
Back later for more on why.
Light Blogging Today
Saturday, July 29th, 2006Nutrition seminar, folks.
What I’ve learned so far:
Eat butter–cholesterol levels below 300 are fine, get off the stupid Statins
Eat more fermented stuff–will help you digest your food
Back later.
Killers Are Mentally Ill
Saturday, July 29th, 2006I said that about Andrea Yates, and it’s true about any killer. Mentally stable people don’t go on murderous rampages against innocents, do they? Don’t you have to be crazy to kill, unprovoked, unarmed people?
No they don’t. Hugh Hewitt talks about how the MSM excuses criminal behavior by labelling it crazy. And then, interestingly, the stories vanish. Poof! Gone into the fog of failed mass murder attempts by Islamic radicals that no progressive wants to admit exists.
Good News
Friday, July 28th, 2006After a day of bombings and bombs and killings and crazies, I wanted to end the day on a good note. Well, the good note is this: it is a blessing to have family who loves you. It is a blessing to love your family. Today was a day of family and sun and the pool. It was a happy day. Even though every other minute my family made fun of my blogging. Oh well….
Happy Weekend!
Mass Shooting at the Seattle Jewish Center
Friday, July 28th, 2006Instapundit has all the news.
It’s disturbing. More on the Seattle thing at Pajamas Media. More at Drudge.
The victims were women, one 17 weeks pregnant. The aggressor a Pakistani male with a criminal history, (this is alleged at this point) supposedly has no terror contacts–he’s just a disgruntled Muslim man.
You know what I’m sick of? All the murderous, marauding, mayhem causing Jews at the the center of these melees. If it weren’t for them……. Those poor, terrorized Muslims in Dearborn and everywhere else in the U.S. fearing, at any moment, the aggressive Jews will come and get ‘em.
Deb Frisch At It Again
Friday, July 28th, 2006Jeff Goldstein is down and putting together a legal case against Deb Frisch.
Background here, here and here.
There is a new strain of cyber crazy and it’s getting more virulent. More at Patterico‘s.
Michelle Malkin: "Abusing Kids For Art"
Friday, July 28th, 2006Michelle Malkin links to an LA photographer Jill Greenberg who induced crying in children, took their pictures and said their reactions reminded her of how she felt since the presidency of George Bush. Go look at the disturbing images yourself.
You know, I keep thinking that people can’t get any crazier and then something like this happens. I think: we’re not all that different, it’s just the media accentuating and polarizing the populace and then something like this happens.
That a mother would take candy away from children and that their parents would assent to this treatment is unbelievable to me.
As a side note, I do find this “art” revealing, but not for the reasons Ms. Greenberg intends: they demonstrate the Machiavellian lengths some will go to to justify their belief systems.
Update:
Perhaps the greatest irony of the work is Greenberg’s overlaying of a political message, one preaching compassion and intelligence at that, to a process that involved the willful manipulation of toddlers to break down their toddler-sized psyches and leave them in a pool of their own tears. I agree with the artist and many others in this country in her assessment of the current administration in Washington. But Greenberg’s own tactics are a mordant, grotesque “nursery-school version” of the most conspicuous of those same policies and practices. One anonymous commenter on Hawk’s blog attempted to reconstruct what happened in Greenberg’s studio, using only information she herself has made available regarding how she made “End Times” possible:
Forcibly making a child have an episode of tremendous anguish, as is indicated on their faces (these children are well beyond simply crying) is an act of abuse. She is abusing her power over them, as both an adult and what the child sees as a trusted friend to their parents. I doubt if she sat the children down and said “Ok here is what I am going to do. First, we will take off your clothes, then I will have you sit right over there. Next, my assistant here and I are going to do many things to get you to cry as hard as you have ever cried before. We will do that by having your parent leave the room, giving you some candy or a toy, and then grabbing it from you. We will do this over and over until you are crying good enough for me, and then these bright lights will flash over and over again, until I have a good enough picture. We will do this and there is nothing you can do to stop me. Thank you for your time and understanding, and participating in this historic event that is really a comment on my feelings towards the Bush administration. I am sorry we have to terrorize you like this, but you see, this is for the greater good. These pictures will make that bad man go away and stop hurting other children.”
No, “End Times” is not Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay, or even your average episode of 24. But I don’t think anyone who has alluded to contemporary torture meant to imply an equivalence so much as a cleaner metaphorical link than the one Greenberg attempted to foist on her own work. Stripped of its purported conceptual framework, “End Times” is, above all else, a detached experiment in bullying, period. This fact makes it almost embarrassing to critique Greenberg’s work on a deeper level, because it necessarily involves thinking things through more thoroughly than the “artist” herself seems inclined to do, prefering instead to assume that her instinctual response will hold up without further investigation and elaboration, grimly following her idea to its logical conclusion without recognizing how well she is mimicking her supposed enemy in her expression of concern for children. 1984, this one’s for you. [emphasis added, ed.]
That’s from Jeremiah McNichol’s blog Thinking In Pictures. He gives the most cogent evaluation of Jill Greenberg’s “work”. He approaches the notion of even giving this “art” an audience as reinforcing the moral depravity of the “artist”. He says:
I believe that the moral dimension of “End Times” cannot be ignored, and that an artist need not profit from societal objections to their work if those objections are sound and widely shared. I further believe that Jill Greenberg’s work should not be viewed through the art-historical lens of edgy, contemporary art, but is instead a cultural hiccup that should be shelved with divisive cultural artifacts like black minstrelry, art involving the physical abuse of animals, and other works that reflect a sensibility so alien that it is better approached not as art, but as the fractured product of a diseased mind or a necrotic culture.
I think the best response to any travesty of this nature is careful critique supplanted by outright mockery. Someone out there may prove otherwise, but I think that Child Welfare Services has no applicable standard for judging what Greenberg has done, that Paul Kopeikin really believes that hate mail means he has truly arrived, and that any pain Jill Greenberg suffers from your calls and letters could easily be “expressed” in an equally repugnant new series of work. My personal and untested opinion is that the only way to stop this kind of practice is to laugh it off the public stage. The art itself will die without too much help from us.
Let’s hope this art will die, but why am I quite sure she’ll get rich from her depraved work? Surely George Soros could use a “Greenberg” or two in his mighty gallery. Cindy Sheehan and her vile misuse of her own son, surely will have no problem with another woman violating her child’s trust for the sake of art and the “greater good.” In fact, Greenberg’s art illustrates perfectly the progressive movement’s house of horrors. Maybe the art will signify the times more than even she can fathom. The more I think about it, the more I believe it does.
Muslim Botox Lovers
Friday, July 28th, 2006Fatwa issued against the cosmetic use of Botox. A couple thoughts:
- You’re under a Burqa who gives a flip if you’re wrinkly or not?
- Islam is so freeing: no need to make yourself look young and beautiful. Free to be ugly.
It also brings me around to my favorite Muslim woman–Al Zark’s mom. She is still blogging away–now from Rehab. Hey, she’s a celebrity!
Woodlands Residents: West Nile Here
Friday, July 28th, 2006By the way, friendly neighbors. A friend of ours had mosquitos tested in her yard and they carry the West Nile virus.
My advice? Keep your immune system strong: Vitamin C, Adjustments, happiness, blah, blah, blah. And, bug spray. Getting bit by one nasty fella is bad. Getting bit by 15 of them would be worse.
Count on me for the obvious.
