Another Gathering

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I just watched Leni Riefenstahl's "Triumph of the Will" on YouTube. The whole thing. There are many interesting aspects apart from the amazing cinematography. This is 1934 and none of the soldiers have guns. I did not know that the German Army was limited at that time to 100,000 soldiers. Military exercises for Hitler are horses and relatively antique armored cars.

Aesthetics aside, what is truly amazing about this film is how insidiously evil it is. But, of course, we look at this in hindsight. However, caveat civis.

The philosophy behind it, the invocation of "God" and "Germany" in the same phrase, makes me very afraid of Glenn Beck. I thought he was a clown. Many thought Hitler was a clown.

Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin

I just don't understand these people. Either they are absolutely looney, which certainly has crossed my mind, or they are the most cynically craven politbots around.

Restore Honor? Who destroyed it in the first place? They have jumped off from a set of assumptions about America that are totally unwarranted.

I'm reading "The Jokers" by Albert Cossery. I was thinking of becoming a Cynic. (not to be confused with the garage band, the Cynics) But, I just realized that true "Cynics" are the opposite of what they have been portrayed.

(Friday) Crab Blogging

I think that this is my all time favorite.


Note the worry lines. Crabs should worry.

Not a bad representation, though I don't wear my pants around my knees. On the other hand, I think I've been left out in the cold.

The Saga of the Mighty Wurlitzer

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I used to think, erroneously as it turns out, that political change happens insidiously. In a way, this is true. It happens person by person. But where I was in error is that the cause of this change is subtle. It is not. It is battered into people day after day until, one day, that person wakes up and actually believes something that the day before they did not. In spite of Goodwin, and with no mention of Mr. H., this must have been what happened to the German people in the 1930's and, ironically, the Israeli people in the last 60 years. If you have it beaten into your head, over and over again, that some people (Jews, Palestinians) or some person (Obama) are not what you thought them to be (ordinary people), eventually, to retain your sanity (not hold two opposing thoughts at one time), you will be led to believe the awful awful.

The American people have had hammered into their heads day after day that Obama is not "one of us," that he was born "elsewhere," that he is in some way "evil." So that now:

Poll: Growing number incorrectly call Obama Muslim

Why Muslim? Well, of course, to tie him in a salacious way with the opposition to the building of a mosque near Ground Zero (I am old enough to think of Ground Zero as the site of the first Atomic Bomb Test in New Mexico.)

(I have a picture that I took of this but I copped this one from the Internet)

This is going to have disastrous results on the American polity. The reasons for it are very simple. No better example is Sarah Palin abandoning her position of Governor of Alaska for the lucrative role of player of the Wurlitzer.

The suffering of Jews in Europe in the 1930's-'40's is well know. The dehumanization of Palestinians is ongoing. The killing of Afghan and Pakistani civilians (and consequent dehumanization) has led directly to the poor response to the Pakistani flood.

Propaganda is a powerful tool.

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Friday Crab Blogging

Composition, Composition. It can be everything.



I am not sure why the fish is on the sand.

Sunday Crab BackBlogging

I have been remiss in posting crabs in spite of a backlog of critters. But first, we must give kudos to an outstanding artist, Emma Dibben, whose portraiture of certain denizens of the South Coast is exquisite (as is much else that she draws):

FELIX?

Now to some other entries:

Mac is waxing poetic as in here:

Here with a little Bread beneath the Bough,
A Flask of Wine, a Book of Verse—and Thou
Beside me singing in the Wilderness—
Oh, Wilderness were Paradise enow!