Fun and/or Interesting

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Quick Bites: Rethinking Slavery… Reconsidering Virginia Woolf… Child Abuse and the Catholic Church… Joe Rogan’s Secret… Another Insurrection Thwarted

  1. The long history of slavery. For most of my life, I thought of slavery as something that began in America, with white people enslaving people of color. It wasn’t until I started reading about slavery in my 40s that I discovered I knew nothing about its history. In this short clip, Candice Owens provides a brief introduction.
  2. Dazzled. Bewitched. Enchanted. I’ve never read more than a smattering of Virginia Woolf’s fiction because I decided, in college, that her writing was too “experimental” for me. Yesterday morning, however, I came across this in Letters of Note from Vita Sackville-West, Woolf’s lover, that persuaded me to reconsider.
  3. Stephen Fry on child abuse and the Catholic Church. Click here.
  4. What’s Joe Rogan’s secret? My theory: His authentic curiosity about such a wide range of topics. The curiosity helps him ask good questions. And the range of his interests is staggering. The combination is what made him the highest paid and most successful interviewer of all time. Here’s an example.
  5. Another insurrection?Hundreds of people rushed into the US Capital complex Oct. 18 and remained there, chanting and ranting. For a moment, Capital Police thought it could be Jan. 6 all over again. But when they realized the crowd was there to support the Palestinian terrorists, they reclassified the event as a protest and relaxed. Click here.
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Friday, October 20, 2023, Los Angeles, California


Notes From My Journal

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Scary: Palm Tree Experts Visit Paradise Palms

I spent most of last Saturday at the botanical gardens, hosting a group from the Palm Beach County chapter of the International Palm Tree Society.

For the first time since we started the project ten years ago, the park was fully developed, or at least it looked fully developed. It looked fantastic! I was happy about that. But I was anxious about what our guests would think of it. These weren’t casual visitors out for a bucolic weekend stroll. They were palm tree aficionados. One mislabeled palm tree could provoke who knows how much scoffing!

Paul Craft, a world-renowned expert on palm trees and the man chiefly responsible for making our garden what it is, led the tour for half of the group, about 25 people that I imagined were the hard-core botanists. (I tagged along with them.) And Keith Buttry, who will be Paul’s replacement as Chief Design and Development Director when he retires, led the tour for the other half.

Paul with Eric Katz, one of the palm enthusiasts on his part of the tour 

The complete tour of the grounds, which our usual visitors typically complete in 60 to 90 minutes, took more than three hours with these people. It felt like they wanted to stop at every single one of our 550+ species. And they had lots of questions and comments, half of them too technical for me to even understand.

Afterwards, everyone assembled in the picnic and game area for lunch. The mood was upbeat, the conversation convivial, and I was soon surrounded by guests that had figured out I was the person whose project this was.

First-timers to the gardens were flabbergasted to discover that such a beautiful and substantial palm tree garden was in the middle of West Delray Beach. Others, who had been here before, congratulated me on the progress we’d made since the last time they had visited.

I decided to spend the night in the cottage on the grounds so I could take a walk the next morning to see the gardens in the early light. It was sort of amazing.

For more information about the gardens or to schedule a private tour or event, email giovanna@palimi.net.

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News & Views

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Where Do You Stand on America’s Involvement in the Israeli/Hamas War?

Republican lawmakers are largely united on aiding Israel, but divided over whether to help Ukraine, while Democrats largely agree on assisting Ukraine but are torn on supporting Israel. In this WSJ report, White House reporter Sabrina Siddiqui reviews the range of opinions on both sides of the aisle, as well as reports on results of polls asking the opinion of US voters. Click here.

More food for thought…

Here are several good essays from The Free Press that shed light on the moral and tactical complications of our involvement.

Here’s a think piece I found on Dan Gardner’s blog that cautions us against the urge to label those whose opinions on Hamas are starkly different from ours.

And here’s yet another view from one of my favorite independently minded Communists, Freddie deBoer.

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Worth Considering

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Bill Bonner on War and the “Hypocrisy of the Elites” 

“But for our purposes, we are focused neither on the wolves nor the lambs, but on the shepherds. In a civilized world… leaders of countries such as the US, France, and Germany would be trying to protect the sheep. They would urge restraint. Calm. Negotiation. Deliberation. Most importantly, they would at least make it clear that they could not in good conscience provide aid – guns and ammunition – to be used to slaughter innocent civilians.

“This would be deeply hypocritical on their part. But hypocrisy is the proper role of the elites – to preach virtue in public, while enjoying whatever vices they choose at home. Almost all nations at one time or another slip into Old Testament kind of warfare, where they authorize, promote, or overlook the ‘collateral damage’ they cause. But while major nations may not be able to avoid it in themselves, they have the power to curtail it in others.

“What is so alarmingly on display in the Levant is the abject failure of The West’s leaders. Even at hypocrisy, they are a flop. Instead of calming people down, they incite them to even more outrageous acts of violence.” – Bill Bonner, Bonner Private Research, 10/16/23

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Arts & Letters

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Too Tacky! What Is the Fine Art World Coming To?

From Art Today: “Kim Kardashian and Tom Brady competed over an original George Condo drawing at a charity art auction in Atlantic City. The reality star kicked off the bidding for “Standing Female Figure” (2023) at $500,000. The former NFL star ended up outbidding Kardashian with an offer of $2 million. However, the American artist agreed to make a matching $2 million work for the loser.”

What’s wrong with this? Two things.

Celebrity art auctions are tacky. I can count the number of celebrities that know anything about museum-quality art on one hand. And Kim Kardashian and Tom Brady aren’t two of them. They attend these events for PR purposes. Their publicity agents tell them it will make them look sophisticated. Instead, it makes them look foolish.

In this case, they are bidding on what to me is a very sketchy (pun intended) George Condo piece that might be worth $50,000 to $80,000. On a good George Condo day. But they bid the work up to $2 million, which distorts the market and has all the serious art buyers in the room shaking their heads.

So, who are the celebrities today that have props as serious collections?

At the top of my list is Elton John, who has focused on photography and has a collection that includes Cindy Sherman, Nan Goldin, Robert Mapplethorpe, Minor White, Irving Penn, Man Ray, and George Platt Lynes.

Next, I would nominate Cheech Marin, who almost certainly has the finest private collection of contemporary Chicano art in the world.

Madonna is next on my list, for no other reason than she was an early collector of Frida Kahlo. Also in her collection are works by Frida’s husband, the great Diego Rivera, as well as Picasso, Fernand Leger, and Man Ray

Barbra Streisand. Over the years, she has smartly restricted most of her buying to 18th and 19th century American furniture and folk art, of which she has, I’ve read, a very impressive collection.

Honorable Mentions 

Steve Martin, who has an esoteric collection of relatively unknown but respected artists. He gets on the list for having been a trustee of LACMA from 1984 to 2002, for giving $1 million to the Huntington Library to benefit its American art collection, and for writing Picasso at the Lapin Agile, about a meeting between Picasso and Einstein in a bar.

Ellen DeGeneres and Portia de Rossi for their collection of works by Giacometti, Mark Grotjahn, Ed Ruscha, and Andy Warhol.

Oprah Winfrey. I don’t know anything about her collection except that she has significant pieces by Gaston Lachaise and a Harry Rosalind. But she has proved herself as an art dealer, having made a $62 million profit when, in 2016, she sold a full-length Gustav Klimt portrait for $150 million.

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Health & Wellness

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More Studies Show that COVID Vaccines Can Infect and Affect DNA

Artist’s depiction of a virus particle covered with spike proteins 

If you’ve done any reading about COVID-19 and the vaccines created to combat it, you’ve heard about “spike proteins,” which the body uses to fight the virus.

The CDC has taken the position that the spike proteins from the vaccines (which are synthetic) do not enter our DNA and are eliminated from the body soon after they produce an immune response. (This is what happens to the spike proteins that are created naturally, from the virus itself.) But new studies have found spike proteins in vaccinated individuals as long as three to even six months after vaccination.

Click here.

 

Bad Medicine: Prescribing Drugs That Don’t Work

GM wrote to remind me/us that approving Big Pharma drugs that don’t work is not a new phenomenon. He provides two examples. Click here and here.

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Fun and/or Interesting

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Quick Bites: New border scam… “Ebony Alerts” in California… Netflix pop-ups… A sort of sensible trans debate… Test yourself on the history of water sports

  1. This is not nice. As you know, I think Biden’s open border policy is a very bad idea in every imaginable respect. But I do feel sorry for some of the poor people that invest all their money and risk their lives because they’ve been conned into thinking they could illegally sneak into Europe or the US. Click here.
  1. This is not a joke.Last week, Governor Newsom signed into law the “Ebony Alert,” a special Amber Alert system designed just for missing Blacks. California already has “Feather Alert” for missing Indians. (Again, not a joke). Click here.
  1. Trying something new. After having some success with testing 40 pop-up “fan experiences” in 20 cities worldwide, Netflix is planning to launch a new concept called “Netflix House” – a combination of retail, dining, and live experiences. Click here.
  1. I can’t get enough of… the completely loony but hugely popular worldwide debate on transgenderism. Usually, my attraction is on par with my interest in watching video clips of “Karens Gone Wild.” But occasionally I find a conversation that – were it not for the subject itself – I think of as interesting and even informative. Click here for one between a gay woman and a gay man.
  1. Pop Quiz: Water Sports. I would have said I know absolutely nothing about water sports – but I aced it! Click here.
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Readers Write

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From AS re the piece about Ayn Rand in the Oct. 17 issue: 

“I have always loved Ayn Rand. I’ve read her novels and some of her short stories. While reading her books, I always stop and think, ‘She came here from Russia when she was 19 and is writing these books in her second language.’ Amazing!”

My Response: Yes. I have had the same thought about her. A Russian émigré who is even more amazing perhaps because he is such a great stylist of the language is the great Vladimir Nabokov. And there’s a novelist writing today with the same credentials: Gary Shteyngart.

You may have read one of his books. I especially liked Absurdistan, Lake Success, and Super Sad True Love Story.

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Postscript

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Golf? Why? 

Thinking about my recent week in Myrtle Beach, where I joined old friends for a week of golfing (but didn’t golf because I stopped enjoying golf two years ago), here’s a bit by Robin Williams that echoes my sentiments.

Click here.

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