Shakespeare was right: Prospero teaching Caliban only makes Caliban bitter and resentful at what he was not and what he could not be.

Or, as Aldonza sings in Man of La Mancha: “You have shown me the sky/but what good is the sky/to a creature who never do better than crawl/of all the cruel bastards who badgered and battered me/you are the cruelest of all…..”

At the heart of the gallery’s new Rembrandt exhibition, half a dozen portraits of beautiful 17th-century ladies in black white-collar dresses confront a collection of everyday stainless steel teaspoons recently assembled by the Congolese-Canadian artist Moridja Kitenge Banza.

Rembrandt can’t touch this, ladies and gentlemen! The bidding starts at \$1 million!

Great piece.

“Perhaps in the near future, art museums will stop displaying paintings by white artists like Rembrandt—after such knowledge, what forgiveness?—and instead just display texts of excuse and abuse.”

The New Dark Ages.

Re the “WHAT COULD HAVE BEEN” section, I understand perfectly well that the thrust of all these efforts is to prevent white people from recognizing that whites are people too, with interests of their own and a right to consider those interests, and that if they find the experience of being Great Replaced to be something less than thrill it’s advertised as, to resist it.

That said, the questions asked in that passage are indeed the sort of questions a just society should be willing to ponder. I would much rather live in a society like that than in one which incessantly glorifies itself (the whole “we wuz kangz” routine). So it’s a great pity – a very great pity – that the generally sensitive white people who feel moved to ask such questions have their heads up their asses on the question of anti-white racism – indeed, who often make their own contemptible contributions to it.

few artworks were actually created by Black diasporic people during this time due to slavery and anti-Black racism

The problem with the above assertion is that, back in the day, paintings were realistic, and required an extremely patient sensibility. Portraits especially. Multiple sittings and sessions. To cite an extreme example, The Mona Lisa took four years. Today, of course, one could create a stylized work of modern-art on a rainy afternoon. Slaves might have lacked the required patient sensibility. In fairness: they lacked the time. The same “patient sensibility” argument can be made for literature and poetry. I once read a book about the poetry of Yeats, and I remember reading how he would sometimes spend a day perfecting a single line.

So Canada is coming for Rembrandt? Ha!!!

Canada is attempting to compare a guy who has been a legend for centuries to a youngish African-Canadian artist who recently “created” a collection of teaspoons? This is really a Babylon Bee article, isn’t it?

The fundamental problem facing art museums in the Age of George Floyd is that history’s designated bad guys—white men—produced vastly more of history’s best art than did the official good guys, such as blacks and New World Indians.

And the reason it’s a problem isn’t because it’s a problem for non-whites in general they don’t care that European history is full of Europeans. It’s a problem for non-whites in the West. You can ‘diversify’ the staff and patrons all you want, it’s very hard to diversify historical artifacts like paintings. It’s a new phenomena in historical times, to have an entire population substituted in the blink of an eye (Even the population replacement in urban Italy during Rome took much longer) and the conflict between having people with no ancestral connection to a nation’s history demanding to be treated as if they did and inevitably seeking to change or tear them all of it and have it remade in their image.

Going forward this is going to be a source of continual agitation. Things like historical museums in Europe detailing the ancient ancestors of the native peoples and how they arrived will have displays explaining the migration origins of the ‘New insert nationality here’s beside them. We saw something similar when the ancient genomes of WHGs shows alleles less associated with lighter skin and were immediately depicted as pitch black (Something that actual paper authors were cautious about), which whether true or not was somehow taken to mean the modern populations are not their descendants and modern dark-skinned people aren’t. Of course they were and of course they aren’t but emotionally, that is how it was pitched in the media. The ancient brown man even had a smirk on his face.

But there is also a SWPL audience for this too but surely not enough, more will be offended than pleased.

And Then They Came for Rembrandt …

the historical shortage of Old Master paintings by blacks

Well, at least both Rembrandt and Darkie are famous in the toothpaste world.

[MORE]

You’re confused/bullshitting. There was no “study”; the research was conducted by the British Natural History Museum and to my knowledge was never published.

https://www.nhm.ac.uk/our-science/our-work/origins-evolution-and-futures/human-adaptation-diet-disease/cheddar-man-faq.html

Cheddar Man really was black and modern English people are not descended from WHGs (and have perhaps 10% autosomal ancestry from them). Cheddar Man had almost no alleles causally associated with light skin specifically, and only a few variants that may indirectly and collectively lighten skin by as much as 5%. He would have looked like an average modern day African American, at lightest, and might not have even been blue eyed as commonly depicted (including as by NHM) as several of the ‘dark’ variants he had were also simultaneously associated with darker eye color.

comment in mods again, egads.

To the black guy making comments about the Chair, the people who made that society possible were white farmers. England’s rise as a commercial power was driven by its rise as an agricultural powerhouse.

As I mentioned earlier, it’s racist to presume that random individual whites are not responsible for the fate of the less-white everywhere.

Rembrandt could have propped up the entire slave trade, by himself, without even leaving his easy chair. It’s not like the Bantu could have resisted. It really could have been up to him and him alone.

Altai wrote:

And the reason it’s a problem isn’t because it’s a problem for non-whites in general they don’t care that European history is full of Europeans. It’s a problem for non-whites in the West.

No, not really.

I’ve known and been friends and colleagues with lots of non-Whites: Blacks and Hispanics and, of course, since I am in STEM, Asians. No, none of them much cared that Newton and Einstein and Beethoven and the Beatles were White.

This is an obsession mainly of Woke Whites, who are showing their superiority to the hoi polloi bu pretending to be ashamed of being White. It’s all pretense, of course: if they really believed it, they would give up their positions to some Black folks and become janitors (and thereby benefit humanity).

To be sure, a few Black folks have figured out how they can profit off the scam. But, still, how many Blacks are profs at Harvard, Stanford, et al.? Nope: the taxpayers’ money keeps flowing to the Woke Whites, who only pretend to care about People of Color.

All a sham.

Kinda like most organized religions, I am afraid: “When a coin in the coffer rings a soul from purgatory springs.” If and when the money spigots dry up, just watch how fast the Woke Whites change their stripes!

But it’s not blacks who are responsible for this. I’d understand a vengeful Caliban — I’d even sympathize with him, as I suppose many other men would. (Revenge is one of the greatest and most noble masculine virtues.) What we have here is something more perplexing…

It’s college-educated white people, performing a particularly holy self-debasement and humiliation ritual, for the benefit and approval of other college-educated white people.

They have a religion that celebrates victimhood and weakness. Unfortunately for us, it happens to be the dominant religion of the state and it satrapies. It is nothing more or less than the logical terminus of secular egalitarianism.

So there’s another parallel between us and the late Empire Romans.

“After such knowledge, what forgiveness?”

I’m trying to understand this line (from a poem by T. S. Eliot, an online search tells me), in general and in this context of “Perhaps in the near future, art museums will stop displaying paintings by white artists like Rembrandt—after such knowledge, what forgiveness?—and instead just display texts of excuse and abuse.”

Can someone please paraphrase this line and explain its point? What knowledge? Forgiveness by whom to whom for what?

So Rembrandt, the greatest painter who ever lived, is “controversial” because of some turtle I’ve never heard of …

Anyway, why obsess over this DWEM:

while we can enjoy something better ..

This is why people wear headphones around everywhere. It’s hard to enjoy anything anymore while you are being bombarded with bullshit. If it’s not the TV blaring out in the tire store or dentist’s waiting room, it’s this woke stuff “explaining” the old Master’s artworks.

I know, the headsets don’t help with signs, but one can now listen to all sorts of podcasts or recordings, say, an explanation of the paintings at a museum, while he is there. Sound can’t hide the signs, but it can help one ignore it, along with whatever does come over the speakers. It’s mentally painful, but to enjoy things, we must often try to keep our eyes and ears from getting attracted to the BS. That’s especially true on the internet.

That title was a nice one, Steve, and “Turtle Island all the way down” was funny too. Yeah, that writing about where the wood came from, and the oppression thereof, in the chair in the painting is just too stupid to pay attention to. These people will just not leave anyone alone though, which has always been a thing with proto-Communists everywhere and every time.

Hey, put me down for some of those spoons. They’ll hold up better than US currency. If they’re real silver, I’ll give the guy spot plus \$2, plus 5 dollars a spoon too.

Don’t want to sell? My next step may just be to call the law on this Moridja Kitenge Banza. I’ve got a feeling that silver is stolen goods to begin with, likely taken from the Canadian colonizers in the Congo.

Charles Laughton as Rembrandt’s three minute paean to his wife, Saskia, from back when Europeans still thought Europeanness was pretty good.

Note that even in 1936 “brown-skinned women” still get a look in to Rembrandt’s soliloquy, but in a natural, unremarkable and un-woke way.

All a sham. … If and when the money spigots dry up, just watch how fast the Woke Whites change their stripes!

I’m skeptical of the whole “it’s all about money/power/prestige/class/whatever” line. There are plenty of people, mostly but not exclusively white, who really do believe this stuff and do their yeoman’s work for wokeness for free. Some even do go so far as sacrificing their self interest in service of the cause.

Yes, there are professional grifters too, as there are with any sort of movement, but the mind virus wouldn’t be so pervasive or so deadly if weren’t for the legions of true believers plus the even larger multitudes of believe-it-enoughers who enable it. Belief matters. As a professional materialist, that may rankle, but take it from a man who achieved immense material success, Napoleon: “the moral is to the material as three is to one.”

For many blacks, it goes much deeper …

James Baldwin, perhaps the most influential black literary figure of the last century, confessed in Notes of a Native Son that blacks feel alienated and inferior no matter where they travel in the modern world. Each black person, he mourned, is but a “stranger in their village,” a global village shaped by others—especially by whites.

He wrote:

For this village, even were it incomparably more remote and incredibly more primitive, is the West, the West onto which I have been so strangely grafted. These people cannot be, from the point of view of power, strangers anywhere in the world; they have made the modern world, in effect, even if they do not know it. The most illiterate among them is related, in a way that I am not, to Dante, Shakespeare, Michelangelo, Aeschylus, da Vinci, Rembrandt, and Racine; the cathedral at Chartres says something to them which it cannot say to me, as indeed would New York’s Empire State Building, should anyone here ever see it. Out of their hymns and dances come Beethoven and Bach. Go back a few centuries and they are in their full glory—but I am in Africa, watching the conquerors arrive. (Notes of a Native Son, p. 164)

Too many people ignore the fact that a fair percentage of these wokesters are mentally ill. The white lunatic who’s spent the last year and a half standing on the corner of of Main St. holding a BLM sign for a few hours every afternoon in the center of my SWPL town is a perfect example.

https://eu.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2020/07/30/harrison-arkansas-man-holds-black-lives-matter-sign-viral-video/5550585002/

A man held a Black Lives Matter sign in Harrison, Arkansas. He posted the racist responses to YouTube.

………………………
A lone man rolled down his window while driving by Bliss and said, “About 10 minutes I’m going to be back. You better be (expletive) gone.” Bliss said he feared the man was going to get a gun.

Bliss, no stranger to viral video fame with videos like “10 Hours of Walking in NYC as a Woman,” said videos like his help the conversation around the Black Lives Matter movement.

Yep, Mod. that’s hot stuff – let the UN take care of it. Pronto! – For a starter, they could try a bombardment of the art gallery. – That should scare the hell out of the Coloniasts and Imperialists and Racists in black disguise like Moridja Kitenge Banza! – Enough is enough of that awfully racist pseudo-art stuff!

Howgh!

For me it’s pounding chick anthems when I am just trying to find some #8 nuts at the hardware store. As for the dentist office, take a TV-B-Gon and you can remotely shut off the TV. Usually the receptionist will indignantly restore the volume. How workers can stand that all noise day long is a mystery. When it comes time for the nursing home, I will prefer the cyanide pie.

I once read a book about the poetry of Yeats, and I remember reading how he would sometimes spend a day perfecting a single line.

Every decent writer spends a day perfecting a single line when it’s time for the final edit (and it was usually accepted as good form to pretend this doesn’t happen). It’s just that the last generation that did this is like in their 80s. Today’s wankers spend an hour on a page at best and it shows.

The last divide is perhaps best illustrated between Kingsley Amis and his son Martin Amis. The last proper writer vs a postmodern star. Every sentence by Kingsley Amis in for example Difficulties With Girls, or Stanley and the Women, or Girl, 20, is terrific. His Martin Amis uses gimmicks instead.

And in today’s world it is now Martin Amis who is a towering figure of amazing skill compared to the new ones.

Amsterdam, transatlantic slave trade – yet, no mention of individuals or institutions who financed the trade. Without financiers, there would have been no transatlantic slave trade.

When are these individuals and institutions going to be held accountable and their descendants, forced to make restitution?

What might have been if chattel slavery had not taken place? How many “master” artists were lost during those centuries?

Wow, sounds like a great opportunity to do a black-washed version of It’s a Wonderful Life.

He would have looked like an average modern day African American, at lightest

Dark skin does not mean African. There are plenty of people in the world with skin nearly as dark as Africans – South Asians, especially – who otherwise look nothing like Africans. If you take a white man and make his skin black and give him black hair he still looks nothing at all like an African.

Cheddar Man really was black and modern English people are not descended from WHGs (and have perhaps 10% autosomal ancestry from them

So in other words….modern English people ARE descended, in part, from WHGs. Would you say that I am not descended from my great-grandmother since only about 12.5% of my DNA comes from her?

That art is really forked up

The sad thing is they didn’t design the teaspoons, either.

I hope there is a God, there is nothing wrong with these wokist brats that some righteous smitings wouldn’t cure. God should make an example of ten of them, then the rest will straighten up and fly right.

Oh Canada…a former colony now known for the mistreatment of Indigenous children who were forcefully taken from their parents and placed in residential schools in an attempt to “Anglicize” them. And to make amends some Canadians have set fire to many Catholic churches across Canada. So dear land of the maple leaf I propose you take every work of European art in your vast country and burn it. And what does that accomplish? Nothing. No more than pretending that some slave was denied the opportunity to be Rembrant or Da Vinci. Search your museum and find all the stored African art stored in crates and collecting dust on shelves and put them on display for your citizens and somehow this will make amends. On the other hand, your Ballet is breathtaking.

Cheddar Man really was black and modern English people are not descended from WHGs.

Chedder man was not black – that was just until the archaeologists brushed all the dirt off of him. He should have looked high yellow, in reality. Pretty sharp dude for his time, though, apparently …

Don’t forget Swiss man, who was white as can be and was determined to have been some sort of Holy man of the Paleolithic Era. There was Muenster Man, also white, albeit with a bit of orange tinge around his edges, errr, fingertips (absolutely NOT from The Weed, as his people were hunter/gatherers, not farmer/stoners).

I think you are thinking of 20,000 year-old Camembert man, who was indeed black, with a little bit of dark green seen more easily once the archaeologists took off the maggots.

Congolese-Canadian artist Moridja Kitenge Banza =
Admitting Congolese-Canadian art is a brazen joke

a collection of everyday stainless steel teaspoons recently assembled by the Congolese-Canadian artist Moridja Kitenge Banza

Isn’t Mr/Ms Banza appropriating spoons from western culture?

Even getting the materials to make a painting, building a frame, stretching canvas across it, making a paint brush, getting the paint, was all a process in itself, it wasn’t as simple as going to Michaels on a Saturday afternoon. You also had to either come from money, have a wealthy benefactor, or be ok with being poor for the sake of having time to create art. Van Gogh didn’t start selling paintings until after he died, I think his brother bought one or two from him while he was alive, most likely out of charity.

The Dutch Republic of Rembrandt’s time had a very clear connection with the history of Turtle Island via contact between Indigenous peoples and Dutch settlers and through the legacy of the transatlantic slave trade.

Baruch Spinoza was a contemporary of Rembrandt who also came from the Netherlands. For some reason, his philosophy is not subjected to the same CRT critique as Rembrandt’s painting. I wonder what that reason might be?

OTUK
FIRST
oh my god you guys we need to close businesses, wear masks, and socially distance; if you resist then you are a criminal
THEN
ha ha ha what a great party, this was a great idea, maybe it’s the messy toussle of blonde hair blocking my eyes but I can literally see no potential downside to this awesome crowded party, woo hoo
BUT ALSO
media: [zombie noises mp’s make during pm’s questions. but made by media]
SUDDENLY

“I expect my leaders to shoulder the responsibility for the actions they take. Yesterday he did the opposite of that. So I will remind him of a quotation which may be familiar to his ear, Leopold Amery to Neville Chamberlain: ‘You have sat too long here for any good you have been doing. In the name of God, go.’”

AND ONE DAY
… uh … so … just kidding about the whole mask thing …
BUT
Boris, most popular prime minister ever! Re-elected to thrupteen more years! Who could have foreseen that all the people wanted was an end to the dishonest and medically illegitimate mandates? They’re not even mad about the party, they don’t remember it!

What might have been if chattel slavery had not taken place? How many “master” artists were lost during those centuries?

Just think of all the \$100,000,000 Basquiats we might have had, were it not for slavery and heroin!

How long until there are calls for burning the paintings? I mean, why stop at statues?

We are talking about a religion, after all. If thy right eye offend thee…………………

“What might have been if chattel slavery had not taken place? How many “master” artists were lost during those centuries?” That’s easy – outside of a few childish finger painters, ZERO.

The only painting I’ve seen in black Africa from before the 20th century are from Ethiopia.

Not exactly Rembrandt or Velazquez but it’s something.

The only sub-Saharan art that made any impression on me are the Benin bronzes.

Every once in a while I google fake Rembrandt. I have a vague recollection of a story that even got onto the main television network news segment of the Metropolitan Museum in NY having the centerpiece Rembrandt in one of their main galleries re-evaluated as being a fake.

This is an example but there are always dozens of interesting stories if you like Rembrandt:

https://www.cnn.com/style/article/rembrandt-oxford-painting-analysis-scli-gbr-intl/index.html

Also that jerk face Simon Schama’s book is still in print. How? Why?

Literally the picture which comes with the frame.

Ah, collecting is going to become the new art skill? Having good taste is indeed a talent, but even there, whites outdo blacks. Blacks are too stupid to recognize, jealous of, and vindictive towards talent to honor it. Look how blacks treat the one smart black kid in the classroom.

What might have been if chattel slavery had not taken place? How many “master” artists were lost during those centuries?

I think the spoon collection gives a pretty good answer to that question.

a collection of everyday stainless steel teaspoons

I am always amazed by the ignorance and disconnection from the material world exhibited by (often young and female) news reporters.

Looking at the photograph, it is quite obvious that these are not stainless steel teaspoons. They are silver and tarnished, which is what silver does. Most likely they are silver plate, which was the common middle class form of eating utensils before stainless steel flatware was perfected in ancient times (i.e the 1960s). Solid sterling silver was too expensive for most folks but for silver plate a thin layer of silver was plated onto a cheaper base metal ( brass or nickel) thus giving the appearance of silver (at least when new) at a reasonable cost. After a while the silver plate would inevitably wear off in certain places, revealing the base metal.

I still have my wife’s grandmother’s silver plate moldering down in my basement somewhere. Maybe I could sell it to a museum if I could find a Person of Color to suitably bless it first with her touch.

Is the reporter really so clueless as to believe that an arrangement of silverware is equivalent to a Rembrandt portrait or is she just trying to rub our noses in the humiliation of white men? How many fingers am I holding up, Winston?

The shame of our gatekeepers is that the history of the indigenous people of the Americas and west Africa is not particularly meaningful in the sense of accomplishments that influence our world today. So they have to invent an alternate reality in which cultures that were a couple millennia behind their eventual colonizers were an untapped reservoir of human potential that would have produced impactful science and art if only given the chance.

The sad thing about this is that a better approach would be to say to them that in the here and now they are the inheritors of a mighty civilization, and they should follow its traditions to maximize their potential. Instead the constant implied message is that they are history’s biggest losers and always will be unless they dispossess evil whites.

White people, their top down “leaders” have lost any kind of back-bone. Exemplars: collectibles as Boris Johnson, Macron, the Dutchies’ Marc Rutte, just to mention some in the infinite minority on the wrong side of the Atlantic. Go and pick your own, in your preferred environments.

These(examples) are signature “art” of a sick society. Sick goal-setting. It is what burbles up from the bottom, through the middle classes, channeled through education, propaganda channels of internet, arena sports, intelligentsia into a rotten head.

Why isn’t Jackson Pollack’s artwork not considered to be shit?

For anyone interested in Rembrandt, I thoroughly enjoyed ‘My Rembrandt’:

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt11744472/

The ‘Old Woman Reading‘ portion was most enlightening for me with regard to Rembrandt’s talent. As the Duke who owns the painting said: “How does he do it?”.

Slate demanded in 2020 that we “fullname” the greats to cover this up:

“When we do return to the concert halls, let’s return to concerts that play Ludwig Beethoven [sic] alongside Florence Price, and Edmond Dédé alongside Johannes Brahms.”

Good. Then people can finally know Little Richard’s real name.

If they’re real silver, I’ll give the guy spot plus \$2, plus 5 dollars a spoon too.

The photo caption says that that are ” everyday stainless steel spoons.”

So, no, just scrap steel.

You don’t think a “Canadian-Congolese” artist is going to use actual silver spoons in his art, do you?

That might be what artists do in wealthy Nigerian-Canada, up north, but not in poorer southern Congo-Canada. Detroit, in the USA, lies somewhere in between.

If white Americans can prove that they looked at x amount of artworks by black Americans, does that not mean that they have paid reparations to the descendants of black African slaves? A discount at least? As an autist I felt compelled read at least 90% of the words on that picture, it was a chore to be sure but I now feel innocent of apartheid.

Chedder man was not black

“Chedder man”?

I thought he was Cheeto man.

I see him all the time in TV ads. Orange fingers, lips. Yup.

Cheetos are impervious to decay, so some are pretty old. They mine those up in Denmark don’t they?

The spoon artwork immediately made me assume the piece is about heroin addiction. Real inspiring. Good article in Takimag!

Hey, I just emptied the dishwasher earlier and organized the silverware in the drawer. Who knew I’ve been a great artist this whole time?!

I am no stranger to rewriting things, but at a certain point you’re only doing it for yourself. Yates could have spent his time far more productively. Then again, I live in a glass house when it comes to productivity.

Just as the same people were insisting there was zero chance of Neanderthal ancestry in modern humans because they likely had a different number of chromosomes. These were respected authorities and institutions that knew out of Africa was likely wrong to some degree but didn’t want to admit it. Same thing here. We really don’t know what Cheddar Man looked like, whether he was representative or what. They will lie about anything.

Bullshit squared.

“Woke whites” are indeed a bigger problem than anti-white “non-whites,” but the latter group forms a massive and powerful bloc in our culture. And the former group, with obvious exceptions like Bezos, is NOT motivated by money. What is your motivation for saying so?

That homeless idiot is irrelevant. The problem stems from his fellow travellers in positions of power and prestige who don’t have ten minutes a day to spend holding a sign on the corner.

We need an “irony-challenged” button so I can push it for the guy who called you a troll.

So there’s the three comment per hour limit, plus some additional factor which causes perfectly relevant and clean comments with legitimate verifiable mainstream information (such as the definition of “the Muslim world” or the handing of pets) to be moderated for days, the money paid and the unspecified additional money to be paid. But is there sniping? Are there customers who request little delays for other customers?

In his 1975 book The Painted Word, Tom Wolfe lampooned the postwar dominance of critical verbiage over artistic talent in the New York art world by foreseeing a future in which the painters’ creations are reduced to the size of “wildlife stamps” to make room for the critics’ texts:

The intellectual deconstruction of all history and reality is contemporary art. It is also contemporary “science.” Were it not for these walls of criticism and the impulse to produce them, there would be neither any modern-day role for Rembrandt nor any current, culture-wide symbolic activity of the sort that art fulfills. And for one who surveys the history of Western art as a whole, it is undeniable that this deconstruction of the old forms is something in the same vein and spirit as the old forms themselves. The swan song is in the same key as the overature. Rembrandt’s enigmatic brush strokes and his mysterious use of “studio brown” contain the seeds of what would eventually become impressionism. And impressionism is simply deconstruction with paint. The fact that today’s “artists” dispense with the need for paint and proceed directly to the pure intellectual evisceration of text means only that the essential activity has freed itself from all material constraints.

It is sad to say it; it will shock the conscience and wound the hearts of anyone who still loves the old arts; but the people who, today, write graduate-level theses on the gender binary or what have you, are the same people who, 150 years ago, would have occupied themselves with chamber music or landscape painting. The only difference is that, back then, the impulse to eviscerate (which is tellingly and quite inappropriately referred to as “creativity”)—which is born of certain secret egotism of a purely animal sort—had a great cultural tradition to subsume itself into. The artist could let himself run free because he was corralled in certain well-circumscribed quarters. Today, that same freedom to create/destroy exists only in the academic field. The critic of today is an artist of a much greater sort than anyone still doggedly working away at the tired old task of oil painting, which is now simply a craft-art of no more symbolic weight than interior decorating.

A great iconoclasm is coming, but it will not be brought about by the Woke. It will be brought about by the un-Woke who finally decide that there cannot be anything of eternal value in a culture capable of going so far off the rails. Any sort of pious regard for Western culture is a millstone around the neck of the good people, which they must eventually throw off if they want to accomplish anything.

The genius of this guy had to be contextualised in terms of someone else not being a genius…How many budding Rembrandts were lost to transatlantic slavery? Zero. Absolutely zero. Rembrandt died in the 1660s. Oil Painting was a Dutch invention tracing back to Jan Van Eyck. There were maybe 100 decent painters in Holland around that time and 4 you’d call genius. Even in Rembrandt’s time the medium was novel but known about like CGI in the 1990s. It’s like saying that mega factory workers in China, or farm hands in the Central Valley are being deprived of their own genius by a Fortnite game designer.

Harry, and yet, Basquiat is considered an artist worthy of a semi biographical movie. This is not even refrigerator quality work. However, maybe on black velvet and he reaches a whole other level of acceptance.

Jack, in the 60s those Sterling forks were turned into bracelets and necklaces. Used to see them at the street art shows all the time. Real sterling currently bringing decent “melt” money. And this artist’s ancestors eating utensils would consist of a wall covered in severed digits. Stay safe.

Rembrandt could have propped up the entire slave trade, by himself,

…..congratulations, I don’t think tiny duck ever said anything that stupid.

I’ve got a feeling that silver is stolen goods to begin with, likely taken from the Canadian colonizers in the Congo.

Or the Clinton White House. At least the spoons are fit for general audiences, unlike most Congoloid art.

https://discoverafricanart.com/

Moridja isn’t wearing socks. Isn’t he cold? Montreal isn’t Kinshasa.

He’s also not wearing a mask. Doesn’t he know about the homocron variant? This would be a good one, and can double as a lady’s fascinator at the next royal wedding, to which he and his teaspoons will no doubt be invited:

What are teaspoons in metric, anyway? Aren’t they imperialistic? But so are milliliters, so there.

I remember seeing a classified ad in Shotgun News decades back for perhaps the most usual silverware: melted together spoons salvaged from the wreckage of The Hindenburg zeppelin for less than \$20.

I’ve got a feeling that silver is stolen goods to begin with, likely taken from the Canadian colonizers in the Congo.

Asians LOVED imported silver coinage.

The Spanish and, from 1824, the Mexican silver dollar had an intrinsic face value based on its consistent purity and weight, and this appealed greatly to Chinese merchants. It rapidly became the de facto approved currency for trade in Southeast Asia and the most widely used coinage in history.

“In parts of China and Southeast Asia, the Spanish and later Mexican dollars were so widespread that they formed the most significant part of the local money supply, [much the same as the US dollar in modern South America],” Cribb says.

The purity and size of the silver British dollar was designed to mimic its Mexican counterpart, but despite a heavy marketing campaign, the Chinese trading community shunned it. They remained loyal to the Mexican dollar, which had been established and trusted since the 1570s in Manila. In April 1868, the mint was closed and the machinery was later sold to Japan. The British dollar was reintroduced in 1895, but was minted in Bombay and London.

Other nations also attempted to dislodge the Mexican dollar with their own version, and there were nine types of silver dollar in circulation by 1900.

The American trade dollar was specifically minted for trade in Southeast Asia and was widely used in Hong Kong, Singapore and Malaysia. The Japanese silver yen was minted with the equipment acquired from Hong Kong. There were three types of Chinese dollars minted locally: the Formosan and Fukien dollars (issued in 1838), the Dragon, and the Republican.

https://www.scmp.com/lifestyle/article/2132260/how-china-and-hong-kongs-currencies-were-shaped-spanish-mexican-silver

I visited the Contemporary Art Museum in Toronto about 7 years ago. They had a collection of African quilt hangings. The designs were not impressive and the craftsmanship was appalling.

I visited the Seattle Art Museum maybe 10 years ago and there was a display of gifts from the Coast Salish Weavers from Northwest Canada. The spinning of the wool for weaving was coarse and uneven. Ends were sticking out. They would have made good dog blankets.

I would be embarrassed to have my name associated with any of these craft pieces; whereas, I have been to Amsterdam and viewed Rembrandt and many of the other artworks there. Great art. The National Gallery of Art in DC also has a fine collection of Dutch art work.

Off-topic aside from the Takimag connection, but David Cole’s recent articles seem to be leaning in the latter direction between the two categories of hit and miss.

This week, the article is about how the right needs to have a laser-like focus — on what, he doesn’t say. Tucker wasted everyone’s time ranting about how cabins are preferable to skyscrapers, and we need to focus! …AND high-rise condos are obviously better.

Focus! Lucidity! And understanding that, by God, Beverly Hills is more Republican than their reputation suggests!

In fairness, not one of his better works.

I get a furniture catalog from an outfit called Design Within Reach — expensive Cape Canaveral/Saarinen type stuff absolutely by white people for white people. You almost never see a human being in these catalogs, as it would ruin the vibe of icy perfection. But sure enough the new issue includes a feature on a young designer “drawing on his African-Caribbean background”

Caliban is an excellent illustration of the main point of resentment.

“After such knowledge, what forgiveness?”

I keep going back to an exchange from David Mamet’s 1998 neo-noir film The Spanish Prisoner, staring Steve Martin of all people.

JIMMY DELL: I think you’ll find that if what you’ve done for them is as valuable as you say it is, if they are indebted to you morally but not legally, my experience is they will give you nothing, and they will begin to act cruelly toward you.

JOE ROSS: Why?

JIMMY DELL: To suppress their guilt.

WHG – white hunter gatherers?

The Bee Or Not The Bee, That Is The Question.

If we’re being charitable, he’s technically not wrong…
I thought I was laying it on a little too thick. Maybe I’ll accumulate more for my trophy case in the future.

P.S. The main purpose of silver flatware is the antimicrobial properties. I think only brass is similar, and brass has a flavour. For these purposes, a plating is all that’s necessary.

They’ve always got that pansy who pays Chinese to paint six-fingered 0bama emerging from the hedge Homer Simpson-style.

LOL. “Obama In the Mist.” I’d forgotten about that one.

You could probably make a case that it’s the technically and aesthetically worst painting of a public figure ever. I remember the unveiling and ol’ Barack looked flabbergasted. Should have hired a white portrait artist, bro.

‘…What might have been if chattel slavery had not taken place? How many “master” artists were lost during those centuries?’

The question seems awfully easy to answer. What am I missing?

‘Moridja isn’t wearing socks. Isn’t he cold? Montreal isn’t Kinshasa.’

Hush. It’s one of the ways we can tell actual African Africans from our own African Americans.

Do not suggest to them that they should start wearing socks.

‘It’s not like the Bantu could have resisted. It really could have been up to him and him alone.’

Why would the Bantu have ‘resisted’? They slaved enthusiastically themselves; Mungo Park estimated that three out of every four blacks in West Africa was a slave.

The notion that they should have ‘resisted’ is absurd. If you pass through my town, and stop off to buy some groceries, will the storekeeper ‘resist’ selling you the groceries?

I doubt it.

“Descent” implies parental ancestry. But even a few Britons carrying WHG haplogroups (which truthfully come from Early European Farmers, who often had WHG haplogroups) does not imply “descent from WHGs”.

WHGs were extinct 6000 years ago. The genetic structure of modern Europe didn’t even exist until thousands of years after WHGs went extinct. To say we “descend from WHGs” is erroneous. We merely have a little fragmented WHG admixture, which mostly came from a population of European Farmers.

There’s really no such thing as autosomal “descent”. It’s just admixture. The autosomal admixture also stems from admixed Early European Farmers, not direct WHG ancestors.

Rembrandt was obviously not a “Man of UNZ™®”! The screenwriter appears to have been Carl Zuckmayer, so a hat tip and a bow to him. Thanks for posting this. The whole movie is worth watching.

Dark skin does not mean African. There are plenty of people in the world with skin nearly as dark as Africans – South Asians, especially – who otherwise look nothing like Africans. If you take a white man and make his skin black and give him black hair he still looks nothing at all like an African.

There are three racial groupings, Caucasoid, Mongoloid and Negroid. The differences are easily distinguishable by anthropologists and pathologists when examining skulls from each. Skin color plays no part.

“This is really a Babylon Bee article, isn’t it?”

It’s a Steve article. Steve, who should really consider giving the Babylon Bee some competition: a website dedicated to sarcasm and making fun of everyone. Especially babies.

Technically it’s fine. But it excels in creepiness. CIA product Obama and what he represents doesn’t get enough credit for its creepiness.

The picture is an example of a particular type of silliness that Obama was steeped in throughout his life. Why would anyone want his defining image to be so ridiculous?

I doubt that it was originally done for anti-microbial properties. Silver flatware and tableware dates back to the Romans (and has changed relatively little) . These are from the 1st century BC and might have graced the table of Pontius Pilate:

This was approximately 2,000 years before germ theory. (The table fork OTOH doesn’t become fashionable in Europe for another 1,000 years).

Silver is soft and easily worked and it was a noble metal that is non-toxic and does not rust or add an unpleasant flavor to food. (It tarnishes in the presence of sulphur but this is just a surface discoloration and is easily removed). The one disadvantage (other than tarnish) was that it was not cheap, so various methods of plating thin layers of silver onto less expensive base metals were developed.

The picture is an example of a particular type of silliness that Obama was steeped in throughout his life. Why would anyone want his defining image to be so ridiculous?

I think the big deal about this portrait is that it was conceived by a POC (Painter of Color), and as such it couldn’t simply be an updated version of a crusty old white guy in front of a book shelf. It had to be ostentatious, loud, and poorly executed so that you know what’s being rejected in this choice of composition.

Sometimes it is impossible to distinguish between Rembrandt and “School of Rembrandt” (while the difference in value is vast) so it really pays to have friends in the snooty circles of art “experts” that determine which is which. In many cases, if you listen to their reasons for saying that a painting is one or the other, they amount to a bunch of hand waving and personal prejudice.

Although Black subjects exist in European art from this period, few artworks were actually created by Black diasporic people during this time due to slavery and anti-Black racism. What might have been if chattel slavery had not taken place? How many “master” artists were lost during those centuries?

I dunno. I guess if you give a room full of chimpanzees a palette and brush they’ll eventually paint a Rembrandt. Though to be fair they can also paint with their feet.

Ethiopia is really part of the Greater Mediterranean, and its art history in the early medieval years is not that different from parts of Europe that were somewhat in the boonies compared to Greece and Rome (say, Saxony or Visigothic Spain).

Medieval Ethiopian Christian Art is recognizably related to Byzantine art etc. There is a lot of good information on it at the Met. Museum.

https://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/acet/hd_acet.htm
https://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ethi/hd_ethi.htm

On the other hand, Greg Cochran posted this when Tyler Cowen asked if Ethiopia will be the next China:

https://www.jstor.org/stable/41965919?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents

From the Taki article quoted scholar,

The chair is made of timbers shipped from the colonies, via routes which also shipped enslaved people. Could the chair also stand-in for all those unnamed black and brown people enabling the society that supports his vigorous creativity?

Sometimes a chair is just a chair.

“I still have my wife’s grandmother’s silver plate moldering down in my basement somewhere.”

Did you pose her so that she’s holding it?

Wiley has a studio in Beijing where skilled Chinese artists actually paint the pictures that he conceives of.

https://nymag.com/arts/art/rules/kehinde-wiley-2012-4/

One of the greatest tragedies of the 18th century was American slavers forcing African blacks to forfeit their hand-ground pigment linseed oil paints, Kolinsky sable brushes and linen canvases as they were herded aboard the boats.

Vincent’s brother, Theo, also bankrolled Vincent. Theo worked in a gallery in France, where he talked management into displaying a few of Vincent’s paintings. The two brothers had a voluminous correspondence, virtually all of which included Vincent’s asking for money with which to pay the rent and to buy more canvases and tubes of paint. Van Gogh’s impasto style ate up paint. Vincent’s paintings more properly should be attributed to his brother as well, inasmuch as they were a joint venture. Without Theo’s moral and financial support and deep brotherly love, there would have been no Vincent Van Gogh as we know him.

Does this mean Rembrandts will have to be sold at fire sale prices? Can I get on a waiting list?

Why do you need to understand “germ theory” to see that mold will not grow on silver tableware?

It is not just Rembrandt, and not only white guilt tripping policy, and lunatic suicidal West.

The point is, apart from politics: modern music & visual arts simply- suck. Most of this is nothing more than crap.

Any human endeavor that can be done by a Joe Sixpack is not a big deal. And I am not talking about transcendent geniuses like Rembrandt.

Take any important painter, not necessarily among the “greatest ever”. For instance Watteau, Constable or Vlaminck. Joe Sixpack couldn’t do what they did. But- he could do what Pollock or Rothko did, and I think even most of the later Matisse & much of Picasso.

In music, Joe couldn’t, even if he knew something about composition, do anything even close to Byrd or Boccherini. But- he could do many Stockhausen’s or Cage’s works.

Literature is in a better position, because Joe couldn’t write anything comparable to minor masters’ works, say, Sherwood Anderson or Coover.

As far as accomplishments in other areas go, it is evident that Joe couldn’t, even in his wildest dreams, do anything comparable to what Pavel Urysohn, Auguste Laurent, John Bernal, George McClellan, John Carpenter or Harry Hopkins had done.

The point is that any creation which can be done by anyone is not of much worth.

I don’t question the sincerity of many “modern artists”, but whatever they felt & intended to do, but didn’t succeed to communicate to others- remains their private affair of no interest to others.

It’s not even bad.

If you take a white man and make his skin black and give him black hair he still looks nothing at all like an African.

The Stoner President.

The lighting on the face doesn’t match anything else in the picture. His butt isn’t on the chair seat. The knob on the left front leg (as we see it) is in front of his pants yet his leg is clearly projecting towards us beyond the leg of the chair. These are the kind of mistakes found in composite pictures, pictures put together from a multitude of separate images.

The two brothers had a voluminous correspondence, virtually all of which included Vincent’s asking for money with which to pay the rent and to buy more canvases and tubes of paint.

No, no- this is a much deeper stuff.

‘…Yes, there are professional grifters too, as there are with any sort of movement, but the mind virus wouldn’t be so pervasive or so deadly if weren’t for the legions of true believers…’

Indeed. I can predict, accommodate, and even pay off the corrupt. ‘Okay: see how this works for you? We’re happy now? Great.’

True believers are a different matter. They’re a real threat. The local Mafia don is one thing; Osama bin Laden is another.

War, well because Pollack’s “Convergence” is the centerpiece of the modern art collection at Buffalo’s Albright-Knox art gallery and our only claim to fame besides the Bills and snow. So give us a break, ok? Oh, and Buffalo wings.

I do hope that lists are being made of the Wokels who write these pieces.
Come the reckoning it will be a shame to miss one or two.

Meanwhile, over in the YUK, we discover that the Corona virus is such a wily operator that it knows to vanish if a politician looks like losing office.

https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/england-ends-all-covid-passports-mask-mandates-work-restrictions

England Ends All COVID Passports, Mask Mandates, Work Restrictions

Any betting that the version extant in these Untied States becomes just as smart between now and say, November?

It is.

Magic, Years ago we were erecting a large steel sculpture in front on Marine Midland tower in Buffalo. The red construction sort of resembled the number four. The very wealthy Knox family, of bank fame, were “patrons” of the arts and owners of the skyscraper where the scupture was sited. The artist was present as we assembled the piece. Our apprentice, a rather large goofy kid, approached the artist. “Did you make this?” “Yes, I am the artist.” “Did the Knoxes pay you for this?” “Yes. I received a sizeable commission.” Long pause….”Well, I don’t think you know shit about art, but you are one fuck of a good salesman.” You make it, they buy it, it is then art.

Eliot’s work was filled with ambiguity, but I took the use of that line in this context to mean, “Now that we have fully acknowledged the inherent evil of whiteness, how can we ever forgive white people?”

Off topic. Shawn Laval Smith was just arrested in Pasadena. Sitting on a bus bench. That’s a big homeless thing . Living in bus benches. Probably outside a 7/ 11 where he buys his lottery tickets and 4 28 ounce cans of malt liquor twice a day. He was caught because he used his welfare card at a convenience store soon after he murdered Brianna Kupfer. I wonder if he killed Sandra Shell too. Union Station is a big transit center. Trains subway and buses to and fro Los Angeles and Pasadena.

Aaaaand ER2 issued a tribute to Martin Luther King . Wasn’t that sweet of the descendant of unknown sperm donor who fathered Queen Victoria instead of her mother’s husband Prince Edward son of George 3? Something for the victims of Walter Scott disease to ponder.

Rembrandt when I was a kid every history book, art exhibit every European thing from 630AD on was full of this. The evil crusaders were being mean to the Muslims. Muslim invasion of Europe good. Muslims defending Europe from Muslim invaders bad.

The phrase “Born with a silver spoon in his mouth” was a not accidental reference to silvers antimicrobial qualities.

The rich were far more likely to make it through childhood.

Brother Theo sent Vincent a monthly check and also paid for care takers to check up on Vincent.

Another great article, Mr. Sailer. Thanks.

Oops. That’s really great. Thanks.

Was the chair mahogany or teak? Otherwise it would be some indigenous European wood oak walnut black or red chestnut elm cherry. I should look at the wood and see what it is.

Mold won’t grow on any kind of clean metal. Silver actually has an anti-microbial (bacteria killing) effect (as does copper).

Skin color does play a part in race. The idea that race is all bones in retarded. Soft features are no less genetic than bones, and the different race groups (and even ethnic groups) all have unique pigmentation SNPs, which is just as evolutionarily significant as a nasal bone or dental morphology. Cheddar Man had almost all African SNPs. Show me a single source that says Cheddar Man was Caucasoid. He is clearly not.

Steve uses it a lot. I don’t know why.

These pathetic, sad people. They’ve created nothing* so they have to attach themselves to great European art like barnacles.

*apart from some nice folk art. Even Waugh thought that Negro art was vibrant.

This is why people wear headphones around everywhere. It’s hard to enjoy anything anymore while you are being bombarded with bullshit.

Normal people. The morons are listening to their cell phones the way us Boomers listened to transistor radios back in the day. But we had an excuse: no headphones. Their excuse is that they are overgrown children. Morons.

And more freely associating on reputation & status. Frequently, it’s just a confluence of circumstances.

Among the greatest genius ever & the highest IQ lists, one almost invariably finds Leonardo da Vinci and Goethe at the top.

Leonardo is there for Reasons of: Renaissance, the most famous painting in the world. Archetype of uomo universale, free spirit & modern mind curious about everything, with a few visionary ideas on flying, submarines, bicycle, botany and other fresh ideas that came to nothing.
He didn’t even leave for others to build upon, and was wrong in most of his approaches to the natural, mechanical, ideatic & mathematical areas, as well as proto-physical and proto-anthropological works.

His extremely high status is, so: the time (The Renaissance) plus the most famous painting in the world (plus many other drawings & paintings)

Goethe is overrated as the German national sage, the author of “Faust” & his charismatic & impressive personality; Werther as introduction into modern Romantic age, as crackpot Goethean science & the Protean sage, last among the great dabblers.

Francis Galton, who was not your highly lauded universal genius, did much more than these guys.
Just, he lived in the Victorian era, which is not anything comparable to the magnificent Renaissance and he did not create One Big Thing.

So, although Galton is much more worthy of the title “universal genius”- just see what he did or truly initiated:

statistics (regression and correlation)
criminology (fingerprints)
mechanism of heredity
weather map
Isochrone map
Anticyclone
IQ
eugenics
composite photography
lexical hypothesis> big 5
the median & standard deviation
differential psychology

But since he doesn’t have One Big Thing & had lived in a time of sex repression & hypocrisy, Galton will never have achieved the stature of Leonardo and Goethe.

Arthur Danto:”Oh yeah…Men sticking their fists up other men’s rectums is great art…Maplethorpe….pure genius…..more photographed fisting please….”

The late Arthur Danto…America’s “greatest” living(was) art critic…

Dear Russia…please nuke and blacktop America….

Somewhere in the Congo, somebody’s good spoons are missing.

I thought it’s a great line and serves well. I thought it fairly jumped out at me. Perhaps there’s a convoluted German word that expresses angst, longing, envy, subdued anger and bitterness at the accomplishments of others but I don’t know it.

From T.S. Eliot-
“After such knowledge, what forgiveness? Think now
History has many cunning passages, contrived corridors
And issues, deceives with whispering ambitions,
Guides us by vanities…”

Or to repeat a part of what Baron Kaldian quoted from James Baldwin earlier in this thread-

For this village, even were it incomparably more remote and incredibly more primitive, is the West, the West onto which I have been so strangely grafted. These people cannot be, from the point of view of power, strangers anywhere in the world; they have made the modern world, in effect, even if they do not know it. The most illiterate among them is related, in a way that I am not, to Dante, Shakespeare, Michelangelo, Aeschylus, da Vinci, Rembrandt, and Racine; the cathedral at Chartres says something to them which it cannot say to me,

So it was the Ethiopians who invented the Blaxploitation genre!

In another 20 thousand years, they will discover Orange Man, and come to understand that he was baaaaad.

When I served on an urban arts commission to pick out new public art, a goodly contingent of fellow committee members seemed determined to shell out \$25,000 (probably twice that now) for a “sculpture” which resembled a pile of fallen girders. In fact, we had several of these modern works to choose from! Anyone can call up examples in any mid-size American city, usually in front of the library or on the campus of the state school. To the modern mind, they are impressive because they are enormous, plus they have the added advantage of being completely meaningless, and thus unlikely to offend. Another popular choice for public art is the enormous giant symbolic vulva, always created by a woman artist. There are several in our city. You can make a good living making this stuff, no joke.

I remember talking to a friend from the Middle East about the backwardness of the Islamic world. At one point he said “I understand now how black intellectuals feel. On the one hand, you are sick of hearing about how your group is inferior, on the other hand, you don’t have a lot of evidence to suggest otherwise.”

Kehinde Wiley, the gay black painter who is credited with the Obama portrait, doesn’t even bother to paint his own pictures anymore: he makes a sketch and takes some resource photos, and the actual painting gets farmed out to a factory studio in China. Wiley has been doing this for a long time, as do some other wildly successful modern artists. Of course, a lot of successful Renaissance artists also had large studios and apprentices who finished up paintings for the master, but Rembrandt was too poor to have teams of apprentices.

JIMMY DELL: I think you’ll find that if what you’ve done for them is as valuable as you say it is, if they are indebted to you morally but not legally, my experience is they will give you nothing, and they will begin to act cruelly toward you.

Yep!

After all, to constantly offer help to someone, or some group, is to instruct them that they can’t help themselves. It’s a form a denigration. So of course they will begin to act cruelly toward their benefactors. But it’s not because they feel guilt. But because they feel less than their benefactors, and are convinced – not without reason – that this must mean their benefactors feel more than them.

The full quote in the Art Newspaper (not exacted Der Shturmer), said:

Tate’s caption points out that “the chair is made from timbers shipped from the colonies, via routes which also shipped enslaved people”, arguably a rather tenuous link between Hogarth and slavery.

If your own friends are calling your stuff weak sauce, its REALLY weak sauce. British understatement means that “a rather tenuous link” means “it’s got f*ck all to do with it.”

I don’t think Obama himself is poorly executed. It’s the peculiar setting that makes it unappealing. The portrait of Mooch really was paint-by-numbers quality.

You could forgive your enemies for being wrong. People are human and humans make mistakes. But you can never forgive your enemies for being right.

CIA product Obama

He’s a CIA product in your imagination only.

It’s not poorly executed. It just has a peculiar background, selected arbitrarily. The one aspect that might be deemed poorly executed is the greenery, which appears to grow both as a shrub and as groundcover. I would assume there is no plant species depicted, just something he imagined.

In the poem Gerontion, it refers to an asymmetry between time and knowledge.

History lavishes upon us many gifts and opportunities, and also many primrose paths full of false promises. When we reach the twilight of life and begin to make a tally of all our missed chances and mistakes, something dawns on us which is deeper and more dreadful than the typical “I wish that I knew what I know now when I was younger.” We realize that not only did we not make the proper use of our time, but that we couldn’t have. The requisite knowledge, examples, and temperament simply were not attainable for us. Additionally, now that Gerontion is old, his passions have grown cold. He does not lament it because, while his passions are the only things that might have provided the necessary fuel to propel him closer to God, they also, due to their own corrupted nature, invariably led him further away from God.

Gerontion is in a real dilemma. He sees the complete insufficiency of his condition; he is damned if does and damned if he doesn’t, and there’s nothing he can do about it. There can be no forgiveness after this realization, because there is nothing either in the world or in the self to refer back to as the “greater good” for whose sake all this individual failure became necessary (shades of the Grand Inquisitor here). Gerontion cannot forgive himself and he cannot forgive history. Both, all, have failed him.

This degree of utter contempt of self is required before grace can enter the soul. “If any man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple.” The poem leaves the problem of Gerontion’s subsequent conversion an open question. We do not know if he found the salvation he sought, but we know that he has been brought to the very brink of it, to the end of his self-sufficiency.

(That is how T.S. Eliot uses the phrase. Steve uses it simply to mean that the historical fact of white cultural superiority is unacceptable to the Woke.)

That’s a good answer to a pertinent question.

Some consider it as such.

Bzzt, wrong. No white males, not even Jews are exempt from CRT:

http://www.scielo.org.co/scielo.php?script=sci_abstract&pid=S1794-58872018000100225&lng=en&nrm=iso

In a letter of July 20, 1664 Spinoza tells his friend Peter Balling a dream with “a certain black and leprous Brazilian”. Maybe that’s the one and only mention into Spinoza’s work that refers to the New World -where Holland had colonies. From that dream, the present text inquiries about the coexistence of the modern philosophies of freedom with the real slavery of thousands of human beings in America, and in particular about the silence of Spinoza regarding the slave trade in the American colonies.

According to the Current Year Rules, which apply retroactively for all time, anyone who is not an anti-racist is a racist. That includes the cracker Spinoza. As far as blacks are concerned, Jews are just another kind of cracker and must have owned all the slave ships too. Just because some Jews imagine themselves to be “allies” and put BLM signs in their yard don’t mean sheeet. Spinoza’s failure to denounce slavery brands him as a racist.

The lighting on the face doesn’t match anything else in the picture. His butt isn’t on the chair seat. The knob on the left front leg (as we see it) is in front of his pants yet his leg is clearly projecting towards us beyond the leg of the chair. These are the kind of mistakes found in composite pictures, pictures put together from a multitude of separate

images

Is this not a portrait, implying that it was painted ?

Silly me if not.

Now I’m getting confused. Are we talking about that chair that Obama is sitting on in his official portrait? Is that the one that could stand-in for all those unnamed black and brown people enabling the society that supports his vigorous grift?

” that Rembrandt was really, really good)”

One contemporary critic observing a Rembrandt portrait commented that the paint was troweled on so thickly that the viewer could reach out and twist the subject’s nose.

Rembrandt’s style is very difficult to copy because it is very difficult to paint the way he did. First, he built up a sculptural layer of white or tinted white paint. This was applied so as to follow the grain of the object under consideration. In other words, if clothes, then the heavy impasto followed the flow of the folds of the garment. From close examination, it can be seen that the paint used to do this had a “stringy” consistency–which in itself is not an easy thing to duplicate.

Over this underlying sculptural layer, Rembrandt laid glazes that were tinted to achieve the final tones. The darks were generally, as in all traditional oil paintings, laid in much more thinly. An umber glaze is used to fill in the lines of the folds of all the clothes and skin, uniting the entire picture and giving a very realistic appearance to skin, which, after all, is dimpled with pores and not nearly as smooth as the skin depicted by the French Neo-Classicist Bouguereau or late 20th century pop artists.

This technique of tinted glazes laid over a heavy underpainting is one way to distinguish Rembrandt’s work from that of students of his “school”. The students just could not match the technical mastery of the Master.

Bob Ross went from a USAF boot camp drill instructor to a soft spoken hippie Art Instructor on PBS….Bob said he got tired of screaming at teenagers every morning for twenty years….

Meaning, the public unveiling was the first time Obama ever saw it? Serves him rightl

The ancestors were not stupid, despite what your teachers said.

Why didn’t they use gold instead? It would have been even more rich. Answer: because they were quite aware of silver’s purifying properties.

According to the Current Year Rules, which apply retroactively for all time, anyone who is not an anti-racist is a racist.

Would it be too much to ask that these rules be published and updated by a government entity on a regular basis, hopefully daily? To avoid the perils of shunning, it is vital that our citizens are instantly informed of any rule changes. Without this information, we are all adrift.

In fact, an Amber Alert system might be helpful as well.

It’s a hot mess. The artist can’t even paint a chair in three dimensions. The torso is compressed because the artist can’t figure out how to depict his subject leaning forward from a sitting positionwith his elbows on his knees. The hands are disproportionate, and the left hand has a sixth phalange to overpaint an early mistake. The feet and ankles are overpainted with the foliage because the artist doesn’t know how to render them. The artist has zero ability to depict perspective (e.g., that off-kilter chair), hence the one-dimensional “wallpaper” background.

Aesthetically, it makes no sense at all as a portrait of a head of the US state. What’s the meaning of the freaking cat? What’s the generic, meaningless background, other than auto-fill?

Pure third world booga-booga shit.

Basically it’s cope. Silver is still the best metal for spoons, but we have to pretend moderns are superior to non-moderns in everything, because our egos are so very fragile.

Fun fact: silver destroys viruses (like corona) but stainless steel preserves them better than things like wood.

(Exception: don’t use silver spoons on high-sulphur foods, especially egg yolk.)

Prophetess Anna (which is an old woman rading) IMO is Rembrandt’s greatest work

https://www.rijksmuseum.nl/en/collection/SK-A-3066

AndrewR wrote to me:

Bullshit squared.

“Woke whites” are indeed a bigger problem than anti-white “non-whites…

Hmmm…

Sounds to me as if you basically agree with me.

I know of course that there are various thugs and grifters who are non-Whites. My point is simply, as you say, that “‘Woke whites’ are indeed a bigger problem than anti-white “non-whites…” Non-White thugs can be (and used to be) dealt with if only the Woke Whites were not in charge.

AR also wrote:

And the former group, [Woke Whites] with obvious exceptions like Bezos, is NOT motivated by money. What is your motivation for saying so?

There is a lot of money to be made in the diversity racket, the green consulting racket, etc. I have known a number of people who are getting very affluent, if not filthy rich, out of such things.

For example, there is a member of my extended family who was charging hundreds per hour as a green consultant.

Beyond that, to get a job teaching at a university nowadays you have to play the diversity game in your application. Convince them you are “Woke” or forget about getting the job.

I’ve said before that I think one of the major motivators is insecurity and anxiety: people who have real jobs involving real productive work that involves real skills — farmers, airline pilots, engineers, etc. — tend not to be members of the Woke Left.

People who justifiably loathe themselves are indeed attracted to the Woke Left.

But there is indeed also gold in being (or pretending to be) Woke.

You need to get to know some of these grifters: they do very well indeed by pretending to do good.

It’s mostly auto-CAD I think. Paint-by-numbers.

To his credit, Obama would probably have preferred a classic depiction of himself in a brown-toned suit gazing thoughtfully at one of those old globes turned to about 20 degrees east with a well-stocked bookshelf in the foreground and an open window with a ship at full sail in the background.

I had a similar conversation with a Middle Eastern friend, but he took a different view: “Assyrians, Persians, Egyptians, Greeks, Romans, Ottomans, and Europeans have all conquered or passed through here. We have everything, every religion, every god, every culture!”

Now admittedly, he was from the Levant and trilingual, so this view might not work for someone from, say, the Peninsular outback.

Isn’t Mr/Ms Banza appropriating spoons from western culture?

Also shower curtains it would seem. Mr. ,I believe.

In other words, it was very difficult to do what Rembrandt did in his time. This is typical of European, White accomplishments that go little noticed in our time. Context (like proportion, as I have previously explained) is everything.

Hey, give the artist some credit. He’d be pretty good if he lived in the 1300s.

A kniggbo who has a bunch of silverware that he didn’t steal?–That IS a remarkable feat.

Skin color does play a part in race. The idea that race is all bones in retarded. Soft features are no less genetic than bones, and the different race groups (and even ethnic groups) all have unique pigmentation SNPs, which is just as evolutionarily significant as a nasal bone or dental morphology. Cheddar Man had almost all African SNPs. Show me a single source that says Cheddar Man was Caucasoid. He is clearly not.

Not insofar as it is (or was prior to the Great Awokening) defined by anthropologists for over 200 years. Ethnic groups are a subgroups within each of the three racial categories. Within those subgroups, skin color can vary substantially.

You may disagree with the idea, but it is, or at least was, considered to be a mainstream scientific conclusion.

So nobody noticed that food from silver tableware was massively massively safer than food from wood tableware, for thousands and thousands of years, through times when eating the wrong food killed plenty of people. Okay.
How many Jack D comments boil down to EVERYONE IS STUPID?

… because it fits?

Almost Missouri wrote to me:

I’m skeptical of the whole “it’s all about money/power/prestige/class/whatever” line. There are plenty of people, mostly but not exclusively white, who really do believe this stuff…

You really think so?

The Woke Left is claiming that if a man puts on a dress he becomes a woman.

You think any of them actually believes this??

I like quoting Kilgore Trout from Vonnegut’s Breakfast of Champions:

And here, according to Trout, was the reason human beings could not reject ideas because they were bad: “Ideas on Earth were badges of friendship or enmity. Their content did not matter. Friends agreed with friends, in order to express friendliness. Enemies disagreed with enemies, in order to express enmity.

“The ideas Earthlings held didn’t matter for hundreds of thousands of years, since they couldn’t do much about them anyway. Ideas might as well be badges as anything.

“They even had a saying about the futility of ideas: ‘If wishes were horses, beggars would ride.’

“And then Earthlings discovered tools. Suddenly agreeing with friends could be a form of suicide or worse. But agreements went on, not for the sake of common sense or decency or self-preservation, but for friendliness.

“Earthlings went on being friendly, when they should have been thinking instead. And even when they built computers to do some thinking for them, they designed them not so much for wisdom as for friendliness. So they were doomed. Homicidal beggars could ride.”

The nonsense the Woke Left spews out is a badge of group identity.

Why do they bother?

Yes, for lots of them it is (well-deserved!) psychological and emotional anxiety and insecurity and a need to belong.

But quite a few of them do manage to make money out of it.. or at least avoid losing their opportunity to make a living if they refuse to spout the lies.

All my life I have wondered why so many people claim to believe in a virgin birth or transubstantiation. Surely the motives that cause people to believe in the lies of the Woke Left are much the same.

Money and power alone? No, certainly not.

Money and power for lots of them?

Certainly so.

This is yet another reason to oppose immigration. It is one thing to decide that your economic prospects will brighten if you work a few years (or decades) in another people’s country, and then go home. It is quite another to make your children, born and yet to be born alike, strangers in a strange land.

Blacks had it done to them, and no one is happy with the results. Perhaps Hispanics are in a similar situation. They are a “triracial isolate” writ large. They may always be forever between worlds even if they stay home.

But Asians? They are heirs to proud, long-standing civilizations. Worse for Asians, they are smart enough to realize where their malaise originates. The more they integrate, the more they feel their race is “erased,” their white friends treat them like a white with slitty eyes, erasing thousands of years of pride and heritage. When a white makes noodles or dumplings, they see cultural appropriation. Surely they are intelligent and self-aware enough to realize that their entire “American” identity is cultural appropriation. Many of them cannot even speak in an authentic language of their own. Their every thought is appropriated.

I remember arguing with a couple Koreans in high school who were complaining that whites made some sort of noodle dish. This was terrible cultural appropriation. They did not seem to understand that they were complaining about cultural appropriation in a language they culturally appropriated. I haven’t googled it, but I’ll bet that the concept of cultural appropriation was created by whites, likely Jews. They are even culturally appropriating the concept of cultural appropriation.

My view? If they can make a hamburger, we can make a noodle dish. When you immigrate, your culture goes into the grab bag of American culture. It’s a shame that you don’t have more to contribute that a noodle dish. But it’s nice you had something. Blacks contributed nothing.

Darkie toothpaste was still on sale in Hong Kong in the early 1980s. And they did not change it to Darlie because anyone in Hong Kong cared…

Once Tejas turns azul, more mestizos in Texas are pointless. But put them in Nebraska, and boom!

This is the idea behind gerrymandering. You want your districts to be 60% yours, the other party’s to be 90% theirs. That way, you get more districts.

It’s also why you saw a lot more cheating in Milwaukee than in much dirtier Chicago. It made a difference there.

Is the reporter really so clueless as to believe that an arrangement of silverware is equivalent to a Rembrandt portrait or is she just trying to rub our noses in the humiliation of white men?

Rembrandt thought he was the Man but he wasnt nothin ’til Basquiat landed and shown what real paintin and shit is, you know what Im sayin? An you wanna see real art, not this white supreme-assist shit, take a shot of the Basquiat, I mean, basket weaving from Benin! You ofays lost it when you went Outta Africa, you know

Slate demanded in 2020 that we “fullname” the greats to cover this up

Isn’t fullnaming also deadnaming?

Of course, his full name isn’t “Ludwig Beethoven,” it is “Ludwig van Beethoven.”

But saying “Ludwig van” makes you come across like the sinister Alex…

The surname van Beethoven is Flemish. Germans drop their von (e.g. talking about “Humboldt” rather than “von Humboldt), but the Flemish and Dutch keep their van in all uses, except in telephone directories.

Ludwig Mies van der Rohe used van because he was legally barred from using von.

But the critical constructs of Greenberg, Rosenberg, and Steinberg were…

…only the tip of the ‘berg.

…. Amsterdam, transatlantic slave trade – yet, no mention of individuals or institutions who financed the trade. Without financiers, there would have been no transatlantic slave trade.

When are these individuals and institutions going to be held accountable and their descendants, forced to make restitution……

Yes – a thousand times yes.

I do hope that lists are being made of the Wokels who write these pieces.
Come the reckoning it will be a shame to miss one or two.

Second that. They ought wallow in their shame.

But will it end? The most ludicrous assertions in the piece are made by PoCs who are not going away yet are without anything else besides unappeasable rancor to offer.

From the wonderful England Their England, written by a Scot, Archibald Gordon MacDonnell in the early 1930s.

https://gutenberg.ca/ebooks/macdonellag-englandtheirengland/macdonellag-englandtheirengland-00-h.html

Lady Ormerode, M.P., was not the one to entertain narrow prejudices. She gave a thousand guineas to a fund to buy yet another Titian for a National Gallery that has already plenty of Titians, and, in the same week, financed a one-man exhibition of sculpture at the Leicester Galleries by a Kaffir from the Belgian Mandated Territory of Ruanda-Urundi, in which the now-famous group of three interlocked triangles of varnished ferro-concrete, representing Wordsworth’s Conception of Ideal Love, was seen for the first time in London. The masterpiece of the exhibition was a vast cylinder of Congolese basalt which was called, and rightly called, “The Spirit of Bernhardt,” and which was dedicated to the President of the French Republic, and which, furthermore, was formally unveiled by the French Ambassador in the presence of eleven London correspondents of provincial papers, a man from the Press Association, the editor of the Quarterly Sculptor, and the Liberian Chargé d’Affaires. And no one could say that it was Lady Ormerode’s fault that this work of art was described in the catalogue as “The Spirit of Bernhardi,” thus causing dismay and despondency upon the Latin bank of the Rhine and jubilation upon the Teuton, where the name of General Bernhardi occupies an honourable place among the experts whose prophecies, theories, and preachings about the art of war have long been completely discredited.

Nor did the French, usually so gallant, come well out of the subsequent controversy, for the only counter which they could find to the Teuton argument that the spirits of Bernhardi, of Hindenburg, of the Vaterland itself, are all like solid cylinders of basalt, was that Madame Bernhardt, in her later years, was just as solid a cylinder as any dirty little Prussian general.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedrich_von_Bernhardi

A militarist, he is perhaps best known for his bellicose book Deutschland und der Nächste Krieg (Germany and the Next War), printed in 1911. Describing war as a “divine business”, he proposed that Germany should pursue an aggressive stance and ignore treaties. In Germany and the Next War, Bernhardi stated that war “is a biological necessity,” and that it was in accordance with “the natural law, upon which all the laws of Nature rest, the law of the struggle for existence.

To be fair to Bernhardi, he seems to have been a pretty successful general in WWI.

I do not understand this at all. Rembrandt lived from 1606-1669. Without slavery, what blacks would have been in Europe at that time? Even with slavery, how many blacks were in Europe at that time? Were there even a thousand?

Unless we include in this counterfactual the story of the movement of many thousands of blacks from Subsaharan Africa north to the Mediterranean and across it into Europe, the Canadian museum’s scenario does not work.

I’d tell anybody that I wish white people had left the blacks in Africa alone and that we were completely wrong to get involved with slavery. But I sure am not going to feel guilty that blacks who weren’t in Europe then didn’t have the chance to have their own Rembrandts to rival the real Rembrandt in the mid-1600s.

We go from absurdity to absurdity when we try to rewrite history.

Art as politics: so dreary. It sucks.

Art should capture the natural world, or the mechanical world. More art in one motocross motorcycle than all the representations in the above videos.

We merely have a little fragmented WHG admixture, which mostly came from a population of European Farmers.

Admixture – which is to say…ancestry.

> Cheddar Man really was black and modern English people are not descended from WHGs (and have perhaps 10% autosomal ancestry from them).

Anon[962], focus on this sentence of yours. The world is complex, but sometimes simple ideas are correct. They aren’t necessarily wrong because they are straightforward.

Try this: “Modern English people are not entirely descended from WHGs (as they have perhaps 10% autosomal ancestry from them).”

You may already have come to appreciate this point, after reading Wilkey’s explanations in this thread. In which case, “Never mind.”

” To say we “descend from WHGs” is erroneous. We merely have a little fragmented WHG admixture, which mostly came from a population of European Farmers.”

It makes you wonder how the WHG fragments came to be in European farmers. Were there more advanced methods of producing “admixture” in those days than the one we all know and love, and which produces babies?

Did the much revered White Man really create so much great art? I find much European art to be rather lacking aesthetically.

No, dingbat, read my reply to him. Descent is uniparental. There’s no such thing as autosomal “descent”. WHG admixture in Europeans doesn’t come from WHGs but from admixed European farmers. WHGs were extinct 6000 years ago — long before modern European genetic structure existed.

No, not ancestry. Vast majority of modern Europeans have no WHG uniparentals. They cannot trace their WHG-like introgression to a WHG ancestor.

You might as well say you’re descended from Neanderthals. You’re not; you’re a modern human who has

Neanderthal admixture. Nobody has a Neanderthal haplogroup. You’re no more related to a Neanderthal than any random bum off the street, and your Neanderthal admixture comes from hybrid populations — not actual Neanderthals.

Also, East Asians are more closely related to WHGs like Cheddar Man than modern Europeans are. Truth hurts, you’re not related to that ancient colored person you’re strangely obsessed with.

It appears to me that Moridja is trying to mimic the official portrait of President Obama. Ironically of course.

They meant that there were untold numbers of potential black “masters” who might have created masterpieces but for the fact that they were traded away as slaves. They ignore that Africa is precisely where such “art” would have stayed and mouldered. They also conveniently ignor who took the African-sourced slaves into bondage and traded them to the European slave traders.

I come from a line that includes a couple Dutch slave traders. They did nothing illegal in their day; it is not even clear that in that context that whatthey did was immoral. It was just legal business.

Only with the benefit of hindsight can I say that it was misguided, stupid, and perhaps immoral, but for the fruits it ultimately delivered and not for the reasons most would like to hear. I personally feel no guilt, because I did not commit the offending acts.

Re: The Stoner President

It’s painted from photograph(s). A real painter can always tell. 🙂

Last week, that guy Amy missed the final Jeopardy about Van Gogh and his brother, as did the other contestants, but I got it.

Interesting. Modern Britannias are probably my favorite silver coin. Besides having a number of anti-faking features (and a beautiful design), British and Canadian metal is consistently brilliant in a way that American eagles miss.

Each s-s-spoon’s a symbolic reflector,
To the in-the-know Banza collector,
Of a slavemaster’s fetter.
Being a fraud’s “so-o-o much better
Than being a hotel inspector!“.

I don’t remember the cat face being there when it was unveiled. Was it added later to make the portrait a little bit interesting?

Yes. People from the Islamic world at least have some real civilization to talk about. Even when sub-Saharans became Muslim, the best they could do was…Timbuktu! I mean, compare this…

https://www.google.com/url?sa=i&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.worldatlas.com%2Farticles%2Ftimbuktu-mali.html&psig=AOvVaw250HQDbpTKvYjpik87JsFg&ust=1642774769406000&source=images&cd=vfe&ved=0CAsQjRxqFwoTCKjAuInDwPUCFQAAAAAdAAAAABAD

…to this:

https://www.google.com/url?sa=i&url=https%3A%2F%2Fasiasociety.org%2Feducation%2Firans-safavid-dynasty&psig=AOvVaw1qsiH3ENAfv825PUwQo-VV&ust=1642774836094000&source=images&cd=vfe&ved=0CAsQjRxqFwoTCPCq-6rDwPUCFQAAAAAdAAAAABAI

Not homeless. An older ponytailed trustafundian who lives in an \$800K condo above the shops on Main. He’s found his calling.

When I served on an urban arts commission to pick out new public art, a goodly contingent of fellow committee members seemed determined to shell out \$25,000 (probably twice that now) for a “sculpture” which resembled a pile of fallen girders.

Cupid’s Garden in Arlington VA. I drove by it years ago with 3 year old Amanda in the back seat. She pointed at it and said, “Look, Dad! Broken!”

Sorry, Jack, you can’t claim Spinoza. The rabbis threw his as out of the temple.

Absolutely not. Part of what gives the Rules their power is that they are unwritten and known only to the Consigneti , so that rubes like you get tripped up by them.

2nd, having the rules be unwritten means that they can be revised in each situation as needed in order to trap anyone who is deserving of being trapped, but meanwhile the worthy can benefit from exceptions that also can be discovered on the fly. The Founders prohibited Ex Post Facto laws because they are unfair but the Woke LOVE them for that exact reason.

There is a reason these people are called “social justice warriors” and not “justice warriors”. Any time you add adjectives to justice, you are talking about something that is not really justice but generally its opposite.

There’s no real reason or evidence behind any of this, just a blind adherence to the ruling ideology of our time taken to an extreme ( It must be true, to be consistent with it, therefore it is ).

Steve has mentioned the persistence of African modes of thinking such as the concept of bad juju. If someone has put the hex on you, you can have action at a distance. The white man put the hex on the Black man and the exact details of how this caused the museums to be bereft of the 17th century Black masterpieces that they would otherwise be filled with are unimportant. The wood for the picture frames sailed upon the same sea as the slave ships – that’s close enough.

The important thing to understand is that absent racism Blacks would have had not only equal but greater prominence in every sphere. The art world, the world of science and literature, etc. – they are all like baseball before Jackie Robinson.

Steve has mentioned the persistence of African modes of thinking such as the concept of bad juju. If someone has put the hex on you, you can have action at a distance. The white man put the hex on the Black man

I’m sure the chaps who deliver here for UPS and Amazon and the lady postal worker downstairs fancy their ancestors were hexed by Vasco da Gama. The chatty LPN at the assisted living center housing the older generation in our household, ditto.

I was at the Toledo Museum of Art recently to see their Medieval Armor exhibit, which was very interesting. The museum also has paintings by Van Gogh, a few Rembrandts, Monet, Renoir, and many other classical artists, along with religious paintings from the 1500-1700s, carvings, metal workings, and inlaid cabinets from that era as well. The craftmanship is incredible, especially when you consider the tools & materials they had to work with at the time. The paintings are beautiful, and true works of art.

They also have an exhibit of Black Artists from the American South, which consists of works from modern artists, that consists of some quilts, a couple sculptures made from scrap metal, and some drawings made by a schizophrenic that look like something an angry 3rd grader would draw. It is quite a jarring contrast compared to what the rest of the museum has to offer.

No, some ideas are so stupid that only an intellectual could believe them.

But, if you were to question your Amazon delivery man closely, you might find that he had beliefs and a lifestyle that would be surprising to you and which are consistent with African modes of thought and behavior. For example, did he grow up in an intact family and is he married to the mother of his children? Now if you had asked these same questions in 1960, the answer might be different but one way of looking at these changes is that blacks are reverting to their own cultural practices because whitey has stopped pressuring them to conform to white norms.

What about Garbage Plates, or is that more of a Rochester thing?

Now if you had asked these same questions in 1960, the answer might be different but one way of looking at these changes is that blacks are reverting to their own cultural practices because whitey has stopped pressuring them to conform to white norms.

IIRC, the Kerner Commission in 1968 opined that perhaps 30% black illegitimacy was not such a great idea and was met with outrage. So whites stopped talking about it and black illegitimacy is now at 70% and white at 30%.

And, perhaps, because Africa is “coming to America”!!!!

Must be all that “white supremacy,” sweeter than honey, sugar, and high fructose corn syrup combined!!!!

NEW: Roughly 4.6 million, or one-in-ten Black people in the U.S., were born in a different country as of 2019, up from 3% in 1980. https://t.co/wCMxWT4JX2 pic.twitter.com/RyZxZ9pDUb

— Pew Research Race and Ethnicity (@pewidentity) January 20, 2022

Just get this guy to copy them but sign his own name, problem solved.

https://www.seattletimes.com/nation-world/new-york-painter-created-forgeries-that-sold-for-millions-us-says/

The white man put the hex on the Black man

A hell of a lot of white men, and even more white women, are acting like the black man put a hex on them. And it’s working!

that was my point.

An extreme example of this occurred at a school nearby. 20 yr old twins with autism (low-functioning) started fighting in the lunch line because they read the menu, which said chicken, but instead pizza was being served. The lunch lady got slugged in the eye when she tried to break up this fight between grown men.

It’s awfully harsh to mention that in some cases learning to read causes more problems than it solves – so I usually don’t mention it.

Absolutely not. Part of what gives the Rules their power is that they are unwritten and known only to the Consigneti , so that rubes like you get tripped up by them.

Excellent insight.

Woke War I isn’t about fairness, it’s about justice for everyone but me. I’ll just keep my head down and continue clapping.

Oh well ….

My view? If they can make a hamburger, we can make a noodle dish.

You may think it is impossible to screw up a hamburger. If you ever go into a hamburger joint and it’s Chinese behind the counter turn around.

(McDonald’s does not count as a hamburger joint. Don’t go there either.)

One of the demands of the Plebeians in ancient Rome was simply to know the laws of the state. Before this the law was a secret thing known only to lawyers (i.e. Patricians.)

This is really a Babylon Bee article, isn’t it?

Unfortunately, no.
The former 98% “White” country of the 1960s, formerly known as Canada, is now a leading candidate to become the newest 3rd world shit hole by celebrating the wonderful contribution of spoons to the treasure chest our national art.

Can you explain how Inuit, living almost exclusively above the Arctic Circle, and eating virtually no vegetation, have darker skin than Caucasians or than most of the Plains Indians who had some vegetation in their diet?

who were forcefully taken from their parents and placed in residential schools in an attempt to “Anglicize” them

Well you got the part about Anglicizing correct, the rest is complete bullshit.
https://fcpp.org/2018/08/22/myth-versus-evidence-your-choice/

No, I wouldn’t find that, Jack, because it’s your stupid imagination talking to you, not the Amazon delivery guy.

Neither is he reverting to any ancient cultural practices, any more than was my sister when she popped two bastard children.

Has anyone noticed that this picture isn’t exactly the official one? Something about those leaves. The cat’s new, too.

Keep in mind that the total # of slaves imported from Africa to the US was something like 388,000 out of 10.7 million Africans were shipped to the Americas (the slaves sent to the Latin tropics tended to die so they kept on having to send more while slaves owned by humane American masters multiplied like rabbits). All of our tens of millions of ADOS blacks are descended from these less than 400K slaves about which we hear endless kvetching. Meanwhile America is such an awful place for blacks that 10x more than the original group have voluntarily come just in the last 40 years.

They are not coming only for Rembrandt.

pic.twitter.com/uyhuKARvCx

— I,Hypocrite (@lporiginalg) January 20, 2022

The current thinking is not that lighter skin itself permits survival in the sunless north (American blacks don’t seem to be in any danger of dying off from lack of Vitamin D) but rather that lighter skin is a sexual selection measure which can take place in the absence of strong sun. All things being equal, blacks in Africa also prefer lighter skinned mates (see Barack Obama, Sr.) but if you chose one and your kids fried to a crisp your genes would disappear. Whereas the children of Olaf’s blonde bride survived in the pale northern sun and got paler and paler (sexual selection often carries things to an extreme, such as in peacocks, because there is a sort of arms race).

The other current thinking is that this is a very slow process so that the American Indians haven’t been here long enough for this process to operate.

Is it possible that widespread black illegitimacy (and the desire of white liberals not to stigmatize blacks for their pathological behavior) made it more acceptable in society for your sister to do what she did? Would she have done the same in 1960 and did the changes in our society since then have anything to do with blacks?

I’m actually pretty impressed by that Tinbuktu mosque. Antoni Gaudi, call your office.