Isn't this sad? Who thinks stuff like this up? At first, I laughingly thought this image could serve to illustrate the "manufactured" 9-11 truth community as we have known it. What would Carl Jung say was the shadow here? Angelology, or ponerology? But we're moving so rapidly now this symbol already feels passe. I wonder what imagery will come up next?
A few days ago I bought this sconce at auction, and I definitely feel it has a connection with Bruegel's imaginary world. Late 19th-century English brass, it obviously stylistically devolves from the classical dolphin motif revived in the regency period in tribute to Nelson and Poseidon. But it has become something quite different, more akin to a Transylvania bat than a flying fish with fingernails. Then again, I also see a pineapple design at center, which makes for a, perhaps inadvertent, international symbol of welcome. Oh well, the price of empire I say!
One other thing---even though it's only a single, two-armed wall light, which wishes it were one of a pair---in my experience, being able to acquire it for only $120, is such an absurdly cheap bargain that even in a declining market I can truly know, we must be in last days and not in end times. Why couldn't this have happened back when shopping was fun and had a future?In any event, when it arrives, I'm going to hang it over my bed and burn white candles in it and see what happens. Jay Rockefeller wants to shut down the internet and that deserves some scrutiny:
...along with a full transcript.
"...tomorrow, a full committee hearing on cyber security, and um, this comes within our purview on this committee, and it, I mean not trying to be dramatic about it, but when we, when the internet was invented, everybody fell flat on their face, they were so thrilled. And the world began to do business in a different way.It is patently obvious that Senator Rockefeller isn't talking about the technical or mechanical aspects of computer security---either on the level of securing my bank account, or of securing America's nuclear activation codes. What the "any kid in Latvia" can only do, is harass, or test, and compete against and tighten the tier of necessary security, which becomes increasing high the more you want to keep something a secret, and in that way a young Latvian would provide a service and not a threat.
"Now both the, President Bush's Director of national Intelligence, Mike McConnell, who I greatly respect, and President Obama's Director of National Intelligence, Admiral Blair, who I greatly respect, have labeled cyber security, perpetrated through the internet, as the number one national hazard, of attack, on the homeland in West Virginia, on, ah, West Virginia and America---or anywhere else.
"So, I mean, it really, it really, almost makes you ask the question, would it have been better if we hadn't invented the internet, and had to use paper and pencil or whatever---and that's a stupid thing to say, but it's, it has genuine consequence, because it's on the internet that these acts of shutting down...you know, they have the television saying, that ah, ads every day saying that the, the Department of Defense is, is, um, attacked three million times a day, and it's true. Um, that everybody is attacked, anybody can do it---people say, well, it's China and Russia, but there could be, you know, some kid in Latvia, ah, doing the same thing. I mean, it's an individual act---it doesn't require a sleeper cell, it doesn't require any, aah, you know, ammonia, or explosives, it's just an act. And, um, it's an act which can shut this country down, shut down it's electricity system, it's banking system, shut down really anything that we have to offer.
"It is an awesome problem. On the intelligence committee, we were taken for a full day, to discuss, to a, to a...an undisclosed place in Virginia to discuss this. Um, it is a fearsome, awesome problem...[edit]... to speak, I mean, obviously it's broader than that too.
"I wonder where this stands with you where your thoughts are, and what you think we ought to be doing about it.
"Senator, ah, cyber security is obviously of utmost importance..."
I think what Rockefeller is talking about here is the movement toward failure of a long-established system used to manage and control transmissible words and ideas---the news and reports of individual truth and perception traveling from the mind of one person to another.
They should have seen this coming---so maybe they were blinded by profit. The artist Robert Wilson acquired an abandoned Westinghouse factory building in Water Mill, New York years ago, and transformed it into an artist's workhouse and showplace. The father of an acquaintance of mine who worked for Westinghouse and held a high-level security clearance there, tells a story about how the advent of fax machines was withheld for a decade after their practical perfection by agents of the C.I.A. who worried they transmitted information too quickly and widely---remember too, we are talking about machines requiring you mount one page at a time onto a cylinder, which then took a stylus four minutes to send.
Such is called transformation. Like from Pieter Bruegel the Elder to Jonathan Meese perhaps.
Or back again.
Well, the sconce arrived safely from down south and it is not a dolphin at all.
It is a little Aztec, art deco warrior bird
Quite powerful indeed. Who do you serve little warrior bird?
Tis better to light two candles than to curse Howard Lutnick.Ah! This better not turn out like my blogging about my William Etty painting only to have it heisted by shadow cons.
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