Garden in the Cloisters , New York
Discussed in: Garden Guide: New York City pp. 33-37
Cloisters Flowers
[Photo by KPA, August 2012]
I have started a new web project, which I've titled "Reclaiming Beauty."
In the "About" section, I've described it thus:
This is a site which aims to reclaim beauty. It is a group effort, with the vision that it becomes a movement.Please take a look, make a comment, pass on an idea. Join us.
I don’t think we should allow [John] Brennan to go forward for the CIA directorship, [Chuck] Hagel to be confirmed as secretary of defense, until the White House gives us an accounting. Did the president ever pick up the phone and call anyone in the Libyan government to help these folks? What did the president do?He continues:
I don’t know what the president did that evening. I don’t know if he ever called anyone. This was incredibly mismanaged. And what we know now — this seems to be a very disengaged president. What did he do that night?
This was incredibly mismanaged. What we know now seems to be a very disengaged president.And
This is complete system failure and I’m going to get to the bottom of it.
The president was just disengaged and the Department of Defense never launched one airplane to help these folks for seven-and-a-half hours. This is complete system failure, and I’m going to get to the bottom of it.
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I have reconfigured my website on beauty and called it "Reclaiming Beauty." Our current situation is more dire than appreciating beauty. We have to reclaim it from the nihilistic, anti-beauty climate that is percolating in our culture. Please support this initiative.
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I am raising funds to initiate my project "Reclaiming Beauty."
Please use the most convenient method to submit the funds:
- Contact me by email, and I can send you my mailing address
- Contact me by email, and I can send you information for direct deposit into my bank
- Use a secured Paypal deposit method by linking to the Donate button on the side
Thank you in advance for your interest.
I will send a gift, from my own "Trillium Series" designs, for the corresponding contributions:
$20 - Brooch/Button
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I am raising funds to initiate my project "Reclaiming Beauty."
Please use the most convenient method to submit the funds:
- Contact me by email, and I can send you my mailing address
- Contact me by email, and I can send you information for direct deposit into my bank
- Use a secured Paypal deposit method by linking to the Donate button on the side
Thank you in advance for your interest.
I will send a gift, from my own "Trillium Series" designs, for the corresponding contributions:
$20 - Brooch/Button
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Miserable Swedish skills at the universitiesInger Enkvist, the Spanish professor cited in the above article, neglects to connect the dots. It is not Swedish students who are lacking in...Swedish. As Enkvist herself says: "[T]here is also a problem in that one can be admitted to the university by studying 'Swedish as a secondary language' at high school. And even passing the mandatory language test to attend university is frequently not sufficient."
Artilce by Maria Calendar
Gloom and despair rule among the university lectures in Sweden. The language skills of the students are so bad that it is becoming hard, bordering on impossible, to conduct classes.
”Far too many of them simply do not understand what we are saying,” as nine historians of the universities of Uppsala and Linköping write in an opinion piece in the Swedish daily Uppsala Nya Tidning.
Sweden has dropped like a stone in all surveys of language skills conducted over the last 20 years. The alarms have been sounding for a long time, and the lecturers have requested effective reactions, but nothing has been done.
”The reason that we are going public with a verbal emergency call is that the students no longer have the required tool to even absorb humanist science: the language. The majority of the students coming to us from high school haves problems with the language,” the historians write.
Inger Enkvist, professor in Spanish at the University of Lund, knows the problem intimately. She has written several books and opinion pieces about it. In her latest book ”God och dålig utbildning – internationella exempel” (“Good and bad education – international examples”), as recently as last week, she again tries to make people aware of the issue.
"The problems are well-known to the lecturers, and all surveys point in the same direction. Among the skillful as well as among those having a harder time at school, Sweden stands out with declining reading skills, year after year," says Inger Enkvist to Dispatch International.
The problem has several roots, she thinks. One is the public perception of the teaching profession, which has declined so much that it no longer attracts inspired and ambitious teachers. Another is the laissez faire mentality of the 1960s and the 1970s, which provided evidence that no proficiency requirements are demanded of the pupils in primary school or in high school.
"If you merely show up, the demands are fulfilled. It is useless to discuss the quality of university education when the level of primary schools and high schools have been permitted to fall so drastically. It is not unusual that 8th grade pupils have entry-level reading skills. No single teacher can fix that at the university," says Inger Enkvist.
The attitudes of the students also leave a lot to be desired. Many exhibit what Inger Enkvist calls a “primary school mentality”, even at the university. They lie on the benches with their caps drawn down, they are insolent to the teachers, and they come and go as they please.
"It is all about rights, rights, not about the work they themselves need to do.
Effort and responsibilities. They are missing the basic insight that one cannot acquire knowledge without effort. Many students have an entirely flawed perspective."
Many students of immigrant background, young women in particular, are very ambitious and outshine their ethnic Swedish classmates in Swedish skills. But there is also a problem in that one can be admitted to the university by studying “Swedish as a secondary language” at high school. And even passing the mandatory language test to attend university is frequently not sufficient.
"The test is far below what is considered normal high school level. And the Swedish skills of the students are frequently too superficial, the language too simple, to work at university level," says Inger Enkvist.
The future looks gloomy, if one doesn’t urgently improve the Swedish primary and high schools, she thinks. Strengthen the position of the teacher and improve the image of studying, reintroduce discipline work habits and begin to making demands — these are all required actions.
Dispatch International has asked for comments from Minster for Education Jan Björklund, Liberal People’s Party, but his press secretary Eva-Marie Byberg declined the request.
In 2007 the Museum Gustavianum celebrated its 10th anniversary. The Gustavianum building is much older. Some sections are from the Middle Ages. It is Uppsala University's oldest preserved building erected in large parts during the 1620s.
The name comes from Gustav II Adolf who donated funds and land for a new university building. Previously, the University was run in a house from
the Middle Ages south west of the Cathedral.
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STANDARD LYING POLITICIAN--------------------------------------------------------
Here is Obama engaging in a standard gesture of dishonest politicians: posing for a photograph of himself hunting or shooting at targets, so as to create an image of himself as pro-gun (not to mention as being a regular guy), when in fact he seeks to dismantle gun rights where they really matter: self-defense and resistance to tyranny.
Critics of this PR photo are quoted at length in the New York Post.
- end of initial entry -
February 4
James N. writes:Anyone who has ever fired a shotgun knows that photo is a fake.LA replies:You’ve got to be more specific, monsieur.James N. replies:By the time hot gasses are leaving the muzzle of a gun, the equal and opposite reaction (recoil) is at maximum. No one can stand erect, with the comb of a shotgun too high on the shoulder, and not react to the huge force being exerted by the recoil.LA replies:And therefore? He was firing a blank?James N. replies:Could be a blank (I didn’t think of that), or Photoshop.John writes:Those of us who have fired shotguns know that Obama’s pose is an incorrect stand for shooting skeet. If Obama has just fired, why isn’t he showing recoil, such as the cheek wrinkled? The stock pressed into his shoulder? What is the puff of smoke to the right of the muzzle? In an article at American Thinker, an analyst who knows guns lists all the things wrong with the picture of someone who says he likes to go skeet shooting. The author concludes, “All in all, this was staged like everything else in President Obama’s life.”Kidist Paulos Asrat writes:
More than 200 commented on the article. Many are experienced shooters quite critical of the picture and believe the picture was photoshopped.
On the other hand, Sarah Palin, a real woman, shows good form while teaching skeet shooting to her daughter Bristol. Mr. Obama shoots, like, well, Bristol Palin.I think you are being generous towards Obama. The more I try to understand him, the more I realize that he is insidiously evil. He wants destruction, and destruction of the white West, in order to give us his utopia.LA replies:
I think in this regard he is even worse than African black dictators, to whom he has been compared. You could say that black dictators were fighting their rivals, the whites, the best they know how. I don’t think they aimed to destroy their countries. And in some sense, in some historical sense, one could argue that the physical land was theirs.
Obama carries his blackness like some kind of yoke. But he is still an American. Even a black American ought to have some love and respect for his history and the people he lives alongside. The people who created the country in which he lives, and has prospered. Obama is set to destroy his rivals, cleverly and systematically. This means he is out to destroy whites, cleverly and systematically.
Why is he shooting that rifle? Why does he have to show us that image? I think he is running scared. I think he thinks that whites are beginning to see through him, and he has to appease them somewhat. But, it is probably too late for appeasement, and I personally think it is too late.
By the way, I know people like Obama. Black, non-white people who have an evil hate for whites, and who go out of their way to find any possible way to destroy them and their works. It is easier to get away with this in Canada because of the multicultural laws, and the Human Rights Commissions, which are another way of destroying whites. I always say to these people: “Just go back to where you came from.You don’t belong here. You don’t love the country, you don’t wish it well. It would fare better without you.”I did not mean the description “standard lying politician” to be an exhaustive critique of Obama. I was merely speaking of this photograph. I agree with what you say about him.Joe R. writes:Kidist Paulos Asrat wrote:
“I always say to these people: ‘Just go back to where you came from. You don’t belong here. You don’t love the country, you don’t wish it well. It would fare better without you."
Oh dear. If she said that in the UK they would clap her in jail alongside Emma West.
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Perhaps her real persona is the aggressive militaristic, black power one, where she is following her smart husband's intentions, which he is reticent to disclose to us.In an email exchange with Jeanette Victoria, this is what I said about the Obamas:
I can actually see her turning ugly. Is that why Obama is so nice to here - kissing her in public, and all those intimate dances during their parties? And he also needs her irrational (black power) anger, since he's not going there in the same way. He's smartly sticking to "politics."And in an email to Laura Wood of The Thinking Housewife I wrote:
By the way, Jeanette's Star Wars analogy with Michelle's entrance sparked my follow up post on Michelle. And there is much there besides a pictorial one (e.g. Obama's underlying aggression, and Michelle as his female Captain).The email conversation with Jeanette turned to evil characters in current films (I had done a blog post on a film referencing Little Red Riding Hood and which turned into some kind of were-wolf rapist story.
Check out Lost Girl it's a Canadian show.I replied:
I missed that! Actually, I don't have the cable channel Showcase.Laura has this image up in a post which she titles The Revolution Lives.
So this is one of those girly, super-heroine, "mysterious" beings, who just wants "The Truth." And Good for the world! I wonder when the wolf (the bad white male) will show up. Of course if he shows up as a black male, she would forgive him, and even hook up with him, as Larry Auster keeps showing us.
They [the Republicans] are constantly stuck down in the weeds arguing details, details about which Obama cares not at all. Obama is a visionary, he has his eyes on the prize (the destruction of America), and for him all the twists and turn of the political process are simply means to an end.James N. is being sarcastic when he calls Obama "a visionary." But I think Obama takes his role of changing America, and he surely calls himself "A Revolutionary."
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I’ve detected a typo in your heading [Michelle Obama: Militant and Girlish]. I’m sure you meant to type,Well, above is Michelle with the great company of Darth Vader and Neo.
“Michelle Obama: Militant and Goulish.”
She looks like Keanu Reeves in the Matrix, only more masculine.
MORPHEUS: Have you ever had a dream, Neo, that you were so sure was real? What if you were unable to wake from that dream, Neo? How would you know the difference between the dream world and the real world?[Source]We could ask the First Lady the same question, who could pass it on to the President.
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You know she looks like something from Star Wars.To which I replied:
Very Funny!She sends in later:
LOL I also read "jack boots by designer Reed Krakoff" as Boris Karloff LOL [She] does look like some futurist scarey nightmare.We would never have imagined Jill Biden, Laura Bush, Jackie Kennedy, or even the formidable Barbara Bush as Darth Vader or Boris Karloff.
