I Shut down my website, claudlylesartworks.com for a couple of reasons.
I dropped Instagram. Privacy and waste of time concerns :)
I hope you enjoy the updates to my art and life as presented in this blog. IF you don't like the political stuff and don't want to receive future blogs just say so, no hard feelings. So far, only two have taken me up on the offer. With that in mind, remember:
I hope you enjoy the updates to my art and life as presented in this blog. IF you don't like the political stuff and don't want to receive future blogs just say so, no hard feelings. So far, only two have taken me up on the offer. With that in mind, remember:
Below the Fold below is where lies controversial stuff, if you don't want to go there, stay above.
And now, Ladies and Gentlemen, I present:
New Art:
Meanwhile, 4 x 6" on Masonite board.
Fun Art: Not all are studio photos, more than visual artists, some interesting sidebars...For example, I did not know that Daniel Chester French was an eminent sculptor who is most famously known for creating the seated figure of Abraham Lincoln in the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, DC. I was surprised at the self-portrait by Charles Demuth, so unlike the pieces for which he is known.
The link below will take you there:
125 Artists and Their Historic Studios
An artist in the studio is a powerful thing. Feast your eyes on this incredible collection of artists in their studios sponsored by Historic Artists’ Homes and Studios, a Program of the National Trust for Historic Preservation.Imagine visiting the most intimate interiors of 125 artists – from famed Georgia O’Keeffe in her New Mexico compound to Andrew Wyeth to Winslow Homer in his coastal Maine studio to artists you’ve yet to discover from all four corners of the world! Enjoy this eclectic and truly global mix of artists and their studios, organized geographically starting with the artist of North America, and take note of how you can visit for yourself all these extraordinary studios and workplaces where artists lived and created!
MIZ-ZOU:
From my MIZZOU wall calendar for February - photo by Nate Brown
Snow-Covered Trees At Jessie Hall
Jeremy Maclin (photo by Chris Lee, Post-Dispatch)
Watching:
Listening to:
One of my favorite Shawn Colvin (Carbondale, IL) songs, good guitar accompaniment.
I'm riding shotgun down the avalanche,
Tumbling and falling down the avalanche,
So be quiet tonight
The stars shine bright
On this mountain of new fallen snow
But I will raise my voice into the void
You have left me nowhere to go ... and so on.
I think this link from Austin City Limits will work if you want to listen. Bonus, accompanied by Champaign's Allison Krauss. Click on the refresh icon in the lower left.
Reading:
In honor of Ronald Reagan's February birthday, we remember "The Speech" — his 1964 address that vaulted him to national prominence: "The Founding Fathers knew a government can't control the economy without controlling people. And they knew when a government sets out to do that, it must use force and coercion to achieve its purpose. So we have come to a time for choosing. ... You and I are told we must choose between a left or right, but I suggest there is no such thing as a left or right, there is only an up or down. Up to man's age-old dream — the maximum of individual freedom consistent with order — or down to the ant heap of totalitarianism."
"It's time we asked ourselves if we still know the freedoms intended for us by the Founding Fathers. James Madison said, 'We base all our experiments on the capacity of mankind for self government.' This idea — that government was beholden to the people, that it had no other source of power — is still the newest, most unique idea in all the long history of man's relation to man. This is the issue of this election: Whether we believe in our capacity for self-government or whether we abandon the American Revolution and confess that a little intellectual elite in a far-distant capital can plan our lives for us better than we can plan them ourselves."
He concluded, "You and I have a rendezvous with destiny."
*******************
I have referenced Walter Williams before, a Black economist at George Mason U. This was an interesting response to The NY Times article on 1619 Project: The Beginning of US Slavery
Slavery: What They Didn't Teach In My High School
A man I have known since grade school changed his name, years ago, to an Arabic one. He told me he rejected Christianity as "the white man's religion that justified slavery." He argued Africans taken out of that continent were owed reparations. "From whom?" I asked.
Arab slavers took more Africans out of Africa and transported them to the Middle East and to South America than European slavers took out of Africa and brought to North America. Arab slavers began taking slaves out of Africa beginning in the ninth century — centuries before the European slave trade — and continued well after.
In Prisons & Slavery, John Dewar Gleissner writes: "The Arabs' treatment of black Africans can aptly be termed an African Holocaust. Arabs killed more Africans in transit, especially when crossing the Sahara Desert, than Europeans and Americans, and over more centuries, both before and after the years of the Atlantic slave trade. Arab Muslims began extracting millions of black African slaves centuries before Christian nations did. Arab slave traders removed slaves from Africa for about 13 centuries, compared to three centuries of the Atlantic slave trade. African slaves transported by Arabs across the Sahara Desert died more often than slaves making the Middle Passage to the New World by ship. Slaves invariably died within five years if they worked in the Ottoman Empire's Sahara salt mines."
My name-changing friend did not know that slavery occurred on every continent except Antarctica. Europeans enslaved other Europeans. Asians enslaved Asians. Africans enslaved other Africans. Arabs enslaved other Arabs. Native Americans even enslaved other Native Americans.
He accused me of "relying on white historians" who, he insisted, had a "vested interest to lie."
What about Thomas Sowell, the brilliant economist/historian/philosopher who happens to be black? Sowell writes: "Of all the tragic facts about the history of slavery, the most astonishing to an American today is that, although slavery was a worldwide institution for thousands of years, nowhere in the world was slavery a controversial issue prior to the 18th century.
"People of every race and color were enslaved — and enslaved others. White people were still being bought and sold as slaves in the Ottoman Empire, decades after American blacks were freed."
Sowell also wrote: "The region of West Africa ... was one of the great slave-trading regions of the continent — before, during, and after the white man arrived. It was the Africans who enslaved their fellow Africans, selling some of these slaves to Europeans or to Arabs and keeping others for themselves. Even at the peak of the Atlantic slave trade, Africans retained more slaves for themselves than they sent to the Western Hemisphere. ... Arabs were the leading slave raiders in East Africa, ranging over an area larger than all of Europe."
I asked my friend if his anger over slavery extended to countries like Brazil. "Brazil?" he said.
Harvard's Department of African and African American Studies professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. — who also happens to be black — wrote: "Between 1525 and 1866, in the entire history of the slave trade to the New World, according to the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, 12.5 million Africans were shipped to the New World. 10.7 million survived the dreaded Middle Passage, disembarking in North America, the Caribbean and South America. And how many of these 10.7 million Africans were shipped directly to North America? Only about 388,000.That's right: a tiny percentage. In fact, the overwhelming percentage of the African slaves were shipped directly to the Caribbean and South America; Brazil received 4.86 million Africans alone!"
African tribes who captured other tribes soldthem into slavery. For this reason, in 2006, Ghana offered an official apology. Emmanuel Hagan, director of research and statistics at Ghana's Ministry of Tourism and Diaspora Relations, explains: "The reason why we wanted to do some formal thing is that we want — even if it's just for the surface of it, for the cosmetic of it — to be seen to be saying 'sorry' to those who feel very strongly and who we believe have distorted history, because they get the impression that it was people here who just took them and sold them. It's something we have to look straight in the face and try to address, because it exists. So we will want to say something went wrong. People made mistakes, but we are sorry for whatever happened."
Over 600,000 Americans, in a country with less than 10% of today's population, died in the Civil War that ended slavery. "While slavery was common to all civilizations," writes Sowell, "... only one civilization developed a moral revulsion against it, very late in its history — Western civilization. ... Not even the leading moralists in other civilizations rejected slavery at all."
And, no, after all this, my friend did not reconsider his name change.
So, I say: let's continue to progress in how we treat our fellow citizens while we also deal in honesty about the past.
Humor:
Bumper Sticker can be reversed depending on who is President! You can save money with this reversible vinyl.
I commented on my experience on his 5th point in my last blog.
https://issuesinsights.com/2019/09/22/resist-being-brainwashed-on-climate-change/
Do you understand that:
https://issuesinsights.com/2019/08/20/the-truth-about-solar-power-good-for-virtue-signaling-and-not-much-else/
So, “Despite huge investments in wind, solar and biofuel energy production capacity, Germany has not reduced CO2 emissions over the last 10 years. However, during the same period, its electricity prices have risen dramatically, significantly impacting factories, employment and poor families.”
I am not saying that we should look the other way, not try to improve our earth, but lets be honest and let's consider both sides of the argument.
The New York Times has begun a major initiative, the “1619 Project,” to observe the 400th anniversary of the beginning of American slavery. It aims to reframe American history so that slavery and the contributions of black Americans explain who we are as a nation. Nikole Hannah-Jones, staff writer for The New York Times Magazine wrote the lead article, “America Wasn’t a Democracy, Until Black Americans Made It One.” She writes, “Without the idealistic, strenuous and patriotic efforts of black Americans, our democracy today would most likely look very different — it might not be a democracy at all.”
There are several challenges one can make about Hannah-Jones’ article, but I’m going to focus on the article’s most serious error, namely that the nation’s founders intended for us to be a democracy. That error is shared by too many Americans. The word democracy appears nowhere in the two most fundamental founding documents of our nation — the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution. Instead of a democracy, the Constitution’s Article IV, Section 4, declares, “The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government.” Think about it and ask yourself whether our Pledge of Allegiance says to “the democracy for which it stands” or to “the republic for which it stands.” Is Julia Ward Howe’s popular Civil War song titled “The Battle Hymn of the Democracy” or “The Battle Hymn of the Republic”?
The founders had utter contempt for democracy. James Madison, the acknowledged father of the Constitution, wrote in Federalist Paper No. 10, that in a pure democracy “there is nothing to check the inducement to sacrifice the weaker party or the obnoxious individual.” At the 1787 Constitutional Convention, delegate Edmund Randolph said, “that in tracing these evils to their origin every man had found it in the turbulence and follies of democracy.” John Adams said: “Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There was never a democracy yet that did not commit suicide.” U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Marshall observed, “Between a balanced republic and a democracy, the difference is like that between order and chaos.”
The U.S. Constitution is replete with anti-majority rule, undemocratic provisions. One provision, heavily criticized, is the Electoral College. In their wisdom, the framers gave us the Electoral College so that in presidential elections, heavily populated states could not run roughshod over sparsely populated states. In order to amend the Constitution, it requires a two-thirds vote of both Houses, or two-thirds of state legislatures, to propose an amendment, and requires three-fourths of state legislatures for ratification. Part of the reason for having a bicameral Congress is that it places another obstacle to majority rule. Fifty-one senators can block the wishes of 435 representatives and 49 senators. The president, with a veto, can thwart the will of all 535 members of Congress. It takes a two-thirds vote, not just a majority, of both houses of Congress to override a presidential veto.
In addition to not understanding our Constitution, Hannah-Jones’ article, like in most discussions of black history, fails to acknowledge that black Americans have made the greatest gains, over some of the highest hurdles in the shortest span of time than any other racial group in mankind’s history. The evidence: If black Americans were thought of as a nation with our own gross domestic product, we’d rank among the 20 wealthiest nations. It was a black American, Gen. Colin Powell, who headed the world’s mightiest military. A few black Americans are among the world’s wealthiest. Black Americans are among the world’s most famous personalities.
The significance of this is that in 1865, neither a slave nor a slave owner would have believed that such progress would be possible in less than a century and a half, if ever. As such, it speaks to the intestinal fortitude of a people. Just as importantly, it speaks to the greatness of a nation within which such progress was possible, progress that would have been impossible anywhere else. The challenge before us is how those gains can be extended to a large percentage of black people for whom they appear elusive.
***********************
I would add that in 1619 there was, unfortunately, slavery all over the world - in Africa, in Europe, in the Middle East, and in Asia. Slavery was the norm, our attempt to create a country were all (ideally) were considered created equal was the exception. This is covered in an essay by Larry Elder. He is a Black, U of Michigan Law School graduate who attended the liberal Brown University. Slavery: What They Didn't Teach In My High School
By Larry Elder
A man I have known since grade school changed his name, years ago, to an Arabic one. He told me he rejected Christianity as "the white man's religion that justified slavery." He argued Africans taken out of that continent were owed reparations. "From whom?" I asked.
Arab slavers took more Africans out of Africa and transported them to the Middle East and to South America than European slavers took out of Africa and brought to North America. Arab slavers began taking slaves out of Africa beginning in the ninth century — centuries before the European slave trade — and continued well after.
In Prisons & Slavery, John Dewar Gleissner writes: "The Arabs' treatment of black Africans can aptly be termed an African Holocaust. Arabs killed more Africans in transit, especially when crossing the Sahara Desert, than Europeans and Americans, and over more centuries, both before and after the years of the Atlantic slave trade. Arab Muslims began extracting millions of black African slaves centuries before Christian nations did. Arab slave traders removed slaves from Africa for about 13 centuries, compared to three centuries of the Atlantic slave trade. African slaves transported by Arabs across the Sahara Desert died more often than slaves making the Middle Passage to the New World by ship. Slaves invariably died within five years if they worked in the Ottoman Empire's Sahara salt mines."
My name-changing friend did not know that slavery occurred on every continent except Antarctica. Europeans enslaved other Europeans. Asians enslaved Asians. Africans enslaved other Africans. Arabs enslaved other Arabs. Native Americans even enslaved other Native Americans.
He accused me of "relying on white historians" who, he insisted, had a "vested interest to lie."
What about Thomas Sowell, the brilliant economist/historian/philosopher who happens to be black? Sowell writes: "Of all the tragic facts about the history of slavery, the most astonishing to an American today is that, although slavery was a worldwide institution for thousands of years, nowhere in the world was slavery a controversial issue prior to the 18th century.
"People of every race and color were enslaved — and enslaved others. White people were still being bought and sold as slaves in the Ottoman Empire, decades after American blacks were freed."
Sowell also wrote: "The region of West Africa ... was one of the great slave-trading regions of the continent — before, during, and after the white man arrived. It was the Africans who enslaved their fellow Africans, selling some of these slaves to Europeans or to Arabs and keeping others for themselves. Even at the peak of the Atlantic slave trade, Africans retained more slaves for themselves than they sent to the Western Hemisphere. ... Arabs were the leading slave raiders in East Africa, ranging over an area larger than all of Europe."
I asked my friend if his anger over slavery extended to countries like Brazil. "Brazil?" he said.
Harvard's Department of African and African American Studies professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. — who also happens to be black — wrote: "Between 1525 and 1866, in the entire history of the slave trade to the New World, according to the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, 12.5 million Africans were shipped to the New World. 10.7 million survived the dreaded Middle Passage, disembarking in North America, the Caribbean and South America. And how many of these 10.7 million Africans were shipped directly to North America? Only about 388,000.That's right: a tiny percentage. In fact, the overwhelming percentage of the African slaves were shipped directly to the Caribbean and South America; Brazil received 4.86 million Africans alone!"
African tribes who captured other tribes soldthem into slavery. For this reason, in 2006, Ghana offered an official apology. Emmanuel Hagan, director of research and statistics at Ghana's Ministry of Tourism and Diaspora Relations, explains: "The reason why we wanted to do some formal thing is that we want — even if it's just for the surface of it, for the cosmetic of it — to be seen to be saying 'sorry' to those who feel very strongly and who we believe have distorted history, because they get the impression that it was people here who just took them and sold them. It's something we have to look straight in the face and try to address, because it exists. So we will want to say something went wrong. People made mistakes, but we are sorry for whatever happened."
Over 600,000 Americans, in a country with less than 10% of today's population, died in the Civil War that ended slavery. "While slavery was common to all civilizations," writes Sowell, "... only one civilization developed a moral revulsion against it, very late in its history — Western civilization. ... Not even the leading moralists in other civilizations rejected slavery at all."
And, no, after all this, my friend did not reconsider his name change.
Humor:
Bumper Sticker can be reversed depending on who is President! You can save money with this reversible vinyl.
Below The Fold---------------------------------------
Enter at your own risk:
A few years ago, a friend accused me of being a climate change denier. I view myself as someone who questions views, comments, and beliefs (which are not facts or the interpretation thereof). Why would I (or you) not question what is presented on this topic, especially if it just doesn't sound right?
Here are three articles that I considered worthy of consideration. You can click on the link and go to the source document.
I commented on my experience on his 5th point in my last blog.
Do you understand that:
- Solar conversion to electricity is already more than 75% toward the maximum possible efficiency, according to the laws of physics. There are no possible breakthroughs that will reduce significantly the sheer numbers of solar panels needed to increase the overall power derived from the sun.
https://issuesinsights.com/2019/08/20/the-truth-about-solar-power-good-for-virtue-signaling-and-not-much-else/
So, “Despite huge investments in wind, solar and biofuel energy production capacity, Germany has not reduced CO2 emissions over the last 10 years. However, during the same period, its electricity prices have risen dramatically, significantly impacting factories, employment and poor families.”
I am not saying that we should look the other way, not try to improve our earth, but lets be honest and let's consider both sides of the argument.
**********
I just can't help myself:
Remember this scare tactic? Well, he got it wrong😉
