Edward Hopper Sailing 1911 It’s a development that has long been evident in continental Europe, and that has now arrived on the shores of the US and UK. It is the somewhat slow but very certain dissolution of long-existing political parties, organizations and groups. That’s what I was seeing during the Robert Mueller clown horror show on Wednesday. Mueller was not just the Democratic Party’s last hope, he was their identity. He was the anti-Trump. Well, he no longer
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Gustave Moreau Helen on the Walls of Troy 1885 First of all, I dearly wish I never had to read or write about Jeffrey Epstein again. But I can’t. And going over the reports about him, and watching the videos below (I’m sure there’s a thousand more), I started thinking I don’t see how he can have much longer to live. (Note as always that if you receive this through email, the videos may not show properly. If someone
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Salvador Dali Mme. Reese 1931 The circus will be coming to town a week later, but not to worry, the show will go on longer and there will be many added attractions, including a full troop of 800-pound gorillas and an entire herd of 8000-pound elephants in the room. And once the balancing acts, the clowns and the ferocious beasts pack up and move on, America might find itself without a Democratic Party, or at least one it would
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Gustave Moreau Orpheus at the Tomb of Eurydice 1891 “Don’t Take The Bait”, said 4 young congresswomen yesterday in a press conference in Washington DC. They were referring to comments Donald Trump had made about them earlier. However, just the simple act of calling the press conference meant they were … taking the bait. Yes, Trump was out of line, way out of left field territory out of line. But he did that on purpose, and Ilhan Omar of
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Johannes Vermeer The astronomer c1668 Alex Acosta is gone. That would appear to be good thing, because even if he claims he did the best he could in the 2008 Jeffrey Epstein plea deal, given the number of accusations and the seriousness of the alleged crimes, that deal seems to have had anything but the best interests of the victims in mind. That he agreed as part of the deal to not notify the victims was not only
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Johannes Vermeer The geographer 1668-69 July 7 2019, just another tequila Sunday. There are elections here in Greece, and the right wing will take over. Bad idea, because it will bring out the left wing resistance that have remained subdued while Syriza reneged on all their promises, but they were left wing, and how does left protesting left work exactly? They didn’t know. Better lay low. No more. From now on in, it’s women and children first. And there
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Jack Delano A welder in the roundhouse of the Chicago and North Western Railroad’s Proviso yard 1942 It’s rare that I reach back into the past of the Automatic Earth, but it’s not entirely unique either. The reason I do it today is not only the relevance of the article -in my view-, or the fact it was published so long ago, but it’s that the ‘world’ has changed so much since January 1 2014, the date I wrote
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Odilon Redon The Birth of Venus II c.1910 How do you define terror? Perhaps, because of the way the term has evolved in the English language, one wouldn’t call the west ‘terrorists’ per se, but ‘we’ are certainly spreading terror and terrorizing very large groups of people. Yeah, bring on the tanks and parade them around town. Add a marching band that plays some war tunes. The ‘official’ storyline : at the request of the US, Gibraltar police and
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Salvador Dali Remorse, or Sphinx Embedded In Sand 1931 Any image of a dead child is always harrowing, for everyone but the most deranged psychopaths among us. If the child has drowned while seeking a better life it is possibly worse. The public reaction of politicians to such images, which varies from doing very little, or nothing, to solve the issues that have led to a child drowning, to trying to make cheap political gains from the image, must
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Caravaggio Conversion on the way to Damascus 1600-01 Something’s been nagging me for the past few days, and I’m not sure I’ve figured out why yet. It started when Donald Trump first called off the alleged planned strikes on targets in Iran because they would have cost 150 lives, and then the next day said the US would do sanctions instead. As they did on Monday, even directly targeting Trump’s equal, the “Supreme Leader Khameini”. When Trump announced the
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