A little prayer for justice

A picture I took at Second Life last year at the house a had.
I dedicate it to all of those who are fighting for justice.

True love

"Once" by Culpeo-Fox at DeviantArt

Fail: To my love

Alert: Fragile, handle with care

Girl before the mirror by Pablo Picasso

I just read some comments of this painting at a site and some girls were talking about they see themselves physically at the mirror. Of course the weight problem was raised.
It was a surprise for me because I remember looking at this painting when I was a girl and never thought about physical details.

She seems to be asking questions that will be with her for the rest of her life, those questions that has to do with our existential doubts, the way we conduct our lives, the incertitude, fears and emotions.
Her hands are at the mirror and I take it as a sign that we have to embrace all these questions that will never cease or which answers will always change and keep trying to do our best.
Have a great Saturday.
 

Vanessa Redgrave's anti-Zionist Oscar Speech

I have already expressed the way I feel about Vanessa Redgrave in other posts. As we are in times of Oscar I would like to remember her speech at the 1978's Oscar ceremony award:

"I salute you, I pay tribute to you and I think you should be very  proud that in the last few weeks you stood firm and you have refused to be intimidated by the threats of a small bunch of Zionist hoodlums  whose behavior is an insult to the stature of Jews all over the world and to their great and heroic record of struggle against fascism and oppression and I  to you that I will continue to fight against anti-semitism and facism." 

While she was doing this speech the Zionists hoodlums were burning her effigy at the stadium park.
Vanessa received the award for her movie "Julia", that was based on Lilian Hellman's novel "Pentimento", telling the story of a woman who helped Jews escape the Nazism.

At the same year Vanessa had produced and bankrolled a documentary "The Palestinians" that praised  PLO and condemned Zionism. The documentary caused anger which explains the Zionists hoodlums.

At the left video proves that she kept her promise of fighting fascism.

"I came to see that human rights and human rights law is the only basis for creating a world that my children, your children, our grandchildren can live in."
Vanessa Redgrave

Brutal rape to death of UK journalist by NATO in Libya: human rights activists where are you?

Update Feb, 24: The video was also censured at Vimeo. It is haunting the minds of those who watched and cannot forget the brutality. It hurts.
The YouTube censured version was also deleted.

YouTube censured the video because of the "shocking and disgusting content".
Now a censured version has appeared and some people have translated what the men are saying.
I have this video saved as draft and I'm still thinking if it is right to publish or not. The images are shocking, brutal and... no words as always.

I'm searching for reports of what is happening in Libya now and, as expected, the mainstream media is not reporting the numerous crimes that is being committed at Libya.
The mainstream media helped and keeps helping NATO. This video is about CNN creating false videos of  Gaddafi's soldiers rape. They used porno movies.

There are many videos at YouTube that show images that are more shocking than this one and even the rape of a girl...
Go to YouTube and watch the macabre and satanic rituals that US, Israel,  UK and France, using NATO to do the job, is doing in Libya.

Not even the independent media is denouncing these heinous crimes.
I decided that publishing the video, and I ask this British journalist to forgive me for showing these images, is the only way to raise awareness about these horrors, this barbaric and unbelievable display of how bestial and monstrous we, human beings, are.

For one year, the invasion started in March, 2011,  NATO is killing innocent civilians in Libya. Why they keep doing it? They have killed Gaddafi without trial, destroyed the country, destroyed water pipelines, destroyed faith, carped bombed the country killing more than 60.000 civilians... what else do they want?
These is Nazism, this is fascism...
...this is not acceptable.

Any person who keeps ignoring these crimes is responsible.
UK doesn't care about this woman, Amnesty International is campaigning for Syria intervention but not a single line about numerous crimes that are happening in Libya.

Human Right Watch does not care. Governments... we already know very well that they only do the crimes.
Where on earth are the human rights activists when people really need them?
Are there human right activists that are unbiased?  Stop the macabre and satanic rituals of murders in Libya.

State terrorism. US and allies

The intriguing cube

I found this animated gif and felt like sharing. This is very intriguing if we stop thinking how it was done and
just look at it.
It looks like another dimension.

Wordless Wednesday: Tango

Wordless Tuesday: Stonehenge

A touch of surreal in a landscape in Switzerland

This is Moon and Venus in Switzerland next to the border with Liechtenstein a photography by David Kaplan that is at Nasa's site.
Explanation:
Sometimes a morning sky can be a combination of serene and surreal. Such a sky perhaps existed before sunrise this past Sunday as viewed from a snowy slope in eastern Switzerland. Quiet clouds blanket the above scene, lit from beneath by lights from the village of Trübbach.

A snow covered mountain, Mittlerspitz, poses dramatically on the upper left, hovering over the small town of Balzers, Liechtenstein far below.

Peaks from the Alps can be seen across the far right, just below the freshly rising Sun. Visible on the upper right are the crescent Moon and the bright planet Venus. Venus will remain in the morning sky all month, although it will likely not be found in such a photogenic setting.

Angelina Jolie: Praising NATO for killing 60.000 Libyans

I'm not sure if Angelina Jolie is aware of what she is really doing being ambassador for United Nations as GoodWill and United Nations refugee agency UNHCR.
Every time she visits a country instead of hope it is anger she inspires on those who are fighting for their country.
This is a very sad situation.
She is expressing sympathy for the devil when she praises Libyan's "revolutionaries" - or" rebels" - or the transitional council.
Does she think that the revolutionaries are Libyans?
Please, could  anybody inform her that the so-called "revolutionaries" or "rebels" is NATO not the people of Libya? She should also be informed that it was not a revolution. On the contrary: it was an invasion that destroyed the whole country and killed 60.000 civilians and they are still torturing, killing and massacring Libyans.
Soon she will be visiting Syria and again she will praise crimes against humanity.
How someone accept to work for United Nations without knowing the consequences of this position?
This is sad. She is helping misinforming and distorting the truth every time she makes a speech:

""I have come to Libya for a variety of reasons, to see a country in transition at every level and to witness efforts to fully realize the promise of the Arab Spring," Jolie said on Oct. 11, 2011 in her visit to Libya.

"I'm also here on behalf of the Libyan people to show them solidarity. I think this revolution on behalf of human rights, which is what I feel these people really have been doing and what they have pushed for, and to help them to implement these new laws and help them with the future of their country." 

Revolution on behalf of human rights? Transition? Arab Spring? New laws for the future of the country? This is outrageous.
She should go back or at least search for information about what is happening in Libya now or read the messages Libyans are sending her in comments where she appears doing her "humanitarian aid".
Take a look at this video Angelina. It is a NATO Spring not an Arab Spring that has been happening.

Sean Penn in Libya helping NATO do their work

I just found out that Sean Penn had visited Libya two weeks before Angelina. What is happening to Hollywood celebrities? Seriously! A Hall of Shame should be created for those who don't know what they are really doing. This is what I hope that is happening because it sounds unbelievable that these people are helping massacres.
Who are the rebels? Read this article by Peter Dale Scott.

Frankie and Johnny: "No matter what..."

I always watch movies with Michelle Pfeiffer and Al Pacino and in "Frankie and Johnny" Frankie, Pacino's character keeps telling Johnny, Pfeiffer's,  that they are meant to be together.
Check this ending scene.
It will make you want to know the whole story and listen to Debussy's "Claire de Lune".

Wordless Friday

Alexander Calder's wire portraits

These are wired portraits by Alexander Calder.
We remember Calder's mobiles and stabiles and forget that he created in other mediums with other intentions. Some exhibitions brought back these great works to public attention last year.

On the top left Fernand Léger is holding by the chin his wired profile done by Calder. This is a great picture and there are more here of others of these great profiles. Top left is Artur Varese at the Whitney Museum and the the last picture is Alexander Calder looking at two of his works.

Click at the images to enlarge.

Rip Cronk's Mural inspired by Van Gogh

These is a mural that the artist Rip Cronk did inspired by Van Gogh.
in an homage to "The Starry Night".
I didn't find any reference to Rip Cronk other than these two works and I'm curious
to know more about him.
I hope I find something.

NATO rape Libyan journalist and cut her breast

This is what is happening in Libya. Yes, it is still happening. Barbarians, monsters... I don't find adjectives that describe what is being done not only in Libya.
Is it what is called "evolution"?
Those who are responsible are having a great life in their penthouses feeling no remorse.
What about those who receive these orders and... OBEY?
Criminals... this is the word for both but it seems that being called a criminal nowadays has a certain charm for some.
These crimes must be punished!

Picture: the millionaire French philosopher and Israeli lobbyist Bernard Henri Levy and French president Nicolas Sarkozy.
I'm sure that they are both happy with the humanitarian aid they are promoting in Libya, and we also have to thank US and the other allies.
Good job! This is democracy being implanted in Libya and all the other countries invaded, oops, that received NATO's humanitarian aid.

WW3 scenario: 45 US Bases Surround Iran and Israel blames Iran for bombs

Just in case you are not paying attention on what is happening this is the map showing the 45 US bases surrounding Iran, each star is a base.
Today Israel:
"The Israeli prime minister has accused Iran of being behind car bombings in India and Georgia. Explosive devises were attached to cars belonging to the Israeli embassies in Tbilisi and New Delhi." here.

The threat of a WW3 is not  that far. I don't want anybody to get caught by surprise. The mainstream media keeps helping by reporting th

The map is at Juan Cole's blog.

Update:
Paul Craig Roberts wrote this article about this issue.

Arthur Koestler and Cynthia's suicide notes

Arthur and Cynthia few months before their suicide

This is the second suicide note I'm publishing and I intent to post another one. Virginia Woolf's was the first. I think that the silence about suicide, a taboo topic with the explanation that only by talking about it can trigger more suicides, must be broken.
When it comes to suicide three sentences are often heard:

"S/he was weak."
 "S/he was selfish."
 "S/he didn't think about the pain of their family."

There are other cliches sentences and moral judgments that I think we have to discuss because the number of people that are facing and struggling suicide ideation, including many teenagers, is huge and the pain they are facing is very hard to endure. Silencing about it makes it harder.
 First let's read some of the explanations in some suicide notes.

Arthur Koestler's suicide note:

"To whom it may concern. The purpose of this note is to make it unmistakably clear that I intend to commit suicide by taking an overdose of drugs without the knowledge or aid of any other person. The drugs have been legally obtained and hoarded over a considerable period. 

Trying to commit suicide is a gamble the outcome of which will be known to the gambler only if the attempt fails, but not if it succeeds. Should this attempt fail and I survive it in a physically or mentally impaired state, in which I can no longer control what is done to me, or communicate my wishes, I hereby request that I be allowed to die in my own home and not be resuscitated or kept alive by artificial means.

 I further request that my wife, or a physician, or any friend present, should invoke habeas corpus against any attempt to remove me forcibly from my house to hospital.

My reasons for deciding to put an end to my life are simple and compelling: Parkinson's Disease and the slow-killing variety of leukaemia (CCI). I kept the latter a secret even from intimate friends to save them distress. After a more or less steady physical decline over the last years, the process has now reached an acute state with added complications which make it advisable to seek self-deliverance now, before I become incapable of making the necessary arrangements.

I wish my friends to know that I am leaving their company in a peaceful frame of mind, with some timid hopes for a de-personalised after-life beyond due confines of space, time and matter and beyond the limits of our comprehension. This 'oceanic feeling' has often sustained me at difficult moments, and does so now, while I am writing this.

What makes it nevertheless hard to take this final step is the reflection of the pain it is bound to inflict on my surviving friends, above all my wife Cynthia. It is to her that I owe the relative peace and happiness that I enjoyed in the last period of my life – and never before."

The above note was dated June 1982. Below it appeared the following:

"Since the above was written in June 1982, my wife decided that after thirty-four years of working together she could not face life after my death."

Further down the page appeared Cynthia's own farewell note:

"I fear both death and the act of dying that lies ahead of us. I should have liked to finish my account of working for Arthur – a story which began when our paths happened to cross in 1949. However, I cannot live without Arthur, despite certain inner resources.

Double suicide has never appealed to me, but now Arthur's incurable diseases have reached a stage where there is nothing else to do."

Puzzuka the largest puzzle ever build online

I did this puzzle at the Puzzuka site because it helps "Enfants du Monde" (Children of the World). I'm a little bit puzzled about the whole concept of the largest puzzle online.

There are these little puzzles we do but they are part of the big project that contains over 260 million mini-puzzles, over 40 billion pieces. How can we see this image?
I'm still trying to understand so I'm reading this post at Puzzuka's blog.
This is the important aspect for me:

"Our aim is to generate funds that will help drive education initiatives. Currently, we have teamed up with Enfants du Monde (Children of the World) to help us launch the project. We have agreed to give 20% of the funds generated to Enfants du Monde to help them with their important work in developing countries. The remaining funds will be allocated to other similar initiatives. In fact, I am working on an idea to have Puzzuka players determine how the funds raised are spent. This will allow people to get more involved in the project."

I hope the project that is still being done keeps helping good initiatives and doesn't lose it on the way.

The Scarlet Umbrella photography by Sami Soutar

I found this photography at Sami's album at Facebook. I love looking up under trees as I wrote at this post and I never was under a scarlet tree. How many faces to you see at the trunk? This is a bonus of this beautiful picture.

Prices of Elizabeth Taylor's art collection auctioned creates confusion

Her father was a successful art dealer from whom  she inherit her taste for art.

Chirstie's is auctioning some of her belongings and it has reached the amount of $ 183 million dollars.
One of the items was the Van Gogh painting "Vue de l'asile et de la Chapelle de Remy" that reached $16 million dollars which creates some astonishment in some people.

It is not only in auctions that how much a work of art must cost is confuse. The art market is being done in mysterious ways for the last two decades.
The price of a work of art is not due to it's intrinsic values and for it's appreciation the price, or prices since it can be sold many times, has to be forgotten.

A portion of proceeds from the auction will be donated to the Elizabeth Taylor Aids Foundation which was founded by Lyz in 1993.

Wordless Wednesday: Clint Eastwood x Clint Westwood

"Freedom" by Zenos Frudakis: A sculpture commissioned by the slave creator lab GlaxoSmithKline

The sculpture "Freedom" by Zenos Frudakis, done in 2001 for the laboratory GlaxoSmithKline, is exhibited at the Philadelphia headquarter of the laboratory.
He also did two works with GlaxoSmithKline former CEOs Joseph J. Ruvane and Sanford Altwood and painted Sir Paul Girolami, former CEO, Glaxo PLC.

I believe that the Zenos is not aware of the numerous harms caused by medicines sold by this laboratory.
The antidepressant Paxil/Seroxat alone causes addiction; suicidal and violent behavior that makes people kill themselves or others; it is tetarogenic, and all the other harms caused by SSRIs antidepressants - Prozac-like.

Antidepressants SSRIs don't help depressed people and the most common is that the person who has clinical depression takes all the brands on the market and are not helped, The numerous side effects are added to the pain. The hypothesis that depression is caused by a "chemical imbalance" of serotonin has already been proved wrong and these antidepressants  reuptakes serotonin in the brain, 5 per cent, and rest, 95% goes to other parts of the body creating a huge amount of harms.

Impotence and lack of sexual desire, inability to achieve orgasm and other sexual dysfunctions are caused by SSRIs and it can last even when the person quits the drug.

There is a Yahoo group  SSRI-sex Yahoo group created in 2005, where some people exchange their pain and try to find solutions but they didn't find any relief. 

 "Freedom" is not a concept that goes well with laboratories as many people have been saying over the internet in testimonies and in blogs. 

For GlaxoSmithKline Bob Fiddaman haa been exposing  at his blog Seroxat Sufferers:  Stand up and Be Counted. Seroxat is paroxetine that is sold in America as "Paxil" and in other countries as "Aropax".

The UK Parliament has already done a good review in 2005 , "The Influence of the Pharmaceutical Company"(click at the link to read the .pdf.) but nothing has changed.

Excerpt:

5. Problems with Seroxat and other SSRIs
Prozac and Seroxat are the best-known examples of SSRI and related antidepressants, but others are widely used. The introduction of SSRIs led to a threefold increase in antidepressant prescriptions between 1990 and 2000. Prescriptions for antidepressants now match those of the benzodiazepine tranquillisers at their peak, 25 years ago.

Almost from the outset, there was concern about two main problems with SSRIs. First, there was suspicion (initially centred on Prozac) that these drugs could induce suicidal and violent behaviour – infrequently, but independently of the suicidal thoughts that are linked to depression itself. There was also concern (centred on Seroxat) about a risk of dependence; some users found it impossible to stop taking SSRIs because of severe withdrawal symptoms.

The MCA/CSM formally reviewed these problems on several occasions. The suicidality problem was first investigated in 1990/1; withdrawal reactions were investigated in 1993, 1996 and 1998. In 2002, the MCA organised a further intensive review of both problems. This review was abandoned in April 2003, following criticism about conflicts of interest involving key figures on the review team. (emphasis added)

For a long time most artists are committed with the great causes like human rights, freedom of speech and all the problems that citizens of the world are facing. It is disappointing when it goes the other way.  
Mark Twain, Martin Luther King, Abraham Lincoln, Joe DiMaggio, contemporary governors, mayors and academical people were sculpted by Zenos creating a heteroclite and strange hall of fame.

"I'm not duplicating life. I'm making a statement about human values." said Duane Hanson a great sculpture that used hyper-realism to talk about human condition. I did two posts about him: "Duane Hanson complex's world" and here.


Update: April, 17, 2013
The sculptor Zenos Frudakis left a long comment explaining that the sculpture was not commissioned by GlaxoSmithKline although all the data I search claims that it was done for the laboratory. This is what he said:

"I am Zenos Frudakis, the sculptor of Freedom and the portraits you have discussed. I appreciate your concern about prescription drugs. The tragedies of Whitney Houston and Michael Jackson are witness to this justifyable concern. There are some things you won’t know about the sculpture if you are not standing in front of it.

The client for this sculpture was the building developer, not the pharmaceutical company. GSK is not the owner of the sculpture, nor does it have anything to do with the sculpture. The developer asked me to create this sculpture for the front of his building. The major renter of the building for some years has been GSK, who is now moving, and not taking the sculpture with it. It doesn’t belong to them. I do not have control over the renter of the building. The next client will likely be a business, because it is an office building, but it could be a non-profit organization like Red Cross or Greenpeace.

I agree that artists need to be ethically responsible, and of course I did not create the sculpture to promote drug addiction. The sculpture is about freedom. Long after many renters come and go in that building, the sculpture will remain and Freedom will endure.

Regarding the variety and scope of my portrait sculpture, I am a professional working sculptor. As such, I am commissioned to create portraits of people. I have, from time to time, declined to sculpt people I felt would compromise my ethical integrity.

This is how I make my living. On my own, I sculpt people I admire. If you view my portfolio, you will see I have created portraits of Martin Luther King, Jr., Gandhi, Margaret Sanger, Darwin, Einstein, Thoreau, Emily Dickenson, Churchill, Anne Frank, Roosevelt, Nietzsche, John Muir, Rachel Carson, Alan Turing, Harriet Tubman, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and many more. Portraits that I do on my own are my personal choice, and they are not going to coincide with everyone’s personal favorites.

I am driven to create art that promotes a better world, but like everyone, I am limited by time and financial resources. I sincerely do my best."

This is what Zenos wrote but I still do not understand  the reason he used as models two GlaxoSmithKline former CEOs:

Joseph J. Ruvane, former CEO of GlaxoSmithKline. Bronze, over-life-size sculpture. Research Triangle Park, NC

Sir Paul Girolami, former CEO, Glaxo PLC. Oil on canvas, life size. London, England.

Joseph J. Ruvane, the GSK former CEO by Zeno Frudakis

The Umbrellas by Renoir

A moment in a day captured by Auguste Renoir.
It is interesting that the title of the painting is "The Umbrellas" and they are the elements that holds the structure of the composition.
The rain is absent wither in the "environment" or in the attitudes of the crowd.
The children and the lady at the right side are painted in the way Renoir used do while all the others received a different treatment. Renoir spent some years doing this work ant it might explain these difference.

But the unity is not affected. It is also remarkable that the women at the front seems to be posing to a painter or a photographer while those who are in the back are portrayed more spontaneously.
Umbrellas have been fascinating some painters as we can see in Raoul Dufy, Carl Spitzweg, Oswald Goeldi, just as some examples.

Finally, Kama Sutra competitor

Solution to all math problems

"Everybody cheats" Caravaggio

Top-right: The Cardsharps, 1597,
Top-left:  The Fortune Teller, 1594
Bottom-right: The Cardsharps, detail.
Bottom-left: The Fortune Teller, detail





Caravaggio portrayed men of the streets and their activities and this is one of
At The Cardsharps the young men is being cheated by the other player who has a card at his back and an accomplice that is watching the young's man cards (detail).

The Fortune Teller is reading the hand while steals the ring of her client. (detail)

Virginia Woolf's suicide note

Dearest,
I feel certain that I am going mad again. I feel we can't go through another of those terrible times. And I shan't recover this time. I begin to hear voices, and I can't concentrate. So I am doing what seems the best thing to do. You have given me the greatest possible happiness. You have been in every way all that anyone could be. I don't think two people could have been happier 'til this terrible disease came. I can't fight any longer. I know that I am spoiling your life, that without me you could work. And you will I know. You see I can't even write this properly. I can't read. What I want to say is I owe all the happiness of my life to you. You have been entirely patient with me and incredibly good. I want to say that – everybody knows it. If anybody could have saved me it would have been you. Everything has gone from me but the certainty of your goodness. I can't go on spoiling your life any longer. I don't think two people could have been happier than we have been.

Ari Folman's Sabra and Shatila movie: Poor Israelis suffered so much!

Director Ari Folman, right picture as president of the jury at Sarajevo in 2011, filmed "Waltz with Bashir" that "follows the filmmaker's emotional attempt to decipher the horrors that unfolded one night in September of 1982, when Christian militia members massacred more than 3,000 Palestinian refugees in the heart of Beirut as Israeli soldiers surrounded the area. Folman was one of those soldiers, but nearly 20 years after the fact, his memories of that night remain particularly hazy."

I  just saw the movie and I missed Palestinians. Ari Folman did a movie, and received awards, to make Israel once again victim of it's own atrocities. At the movie his psychologist tells him that he was only 19 years-old and was not guilty for the massacre and during the whole movie the massacre happened as if it was an accident: all of a sudden it happens because of... the reasons are not explained.

This review here shows the Palestinian side that is not at the movie:

"The question of who was doing whose dirty work is not so easily answered however Israel was nobody’s sidekick when it invaded Lebanon. The film does not show us the Israeli shelling of Beirut that led to 18,000 deaths and 30,000 wounded, the violations committed against civilians, the destruction of Palestinian and Lebanese resistance.And what about the fact that the Palestine Liberation Organization and armed resistors had been evacuated more than two weeks before the massacres, and that it was the day after multinational forces left Beirut that Israeli Defense Minister Ariel Sharon made it known that 2,000 “terrorists” remained in the camps? The focus of Folman’s quest for responsibility in Waltz with Bashir hones in on lighting the flares as the Phalangists “mopped up” the camps. That two months before the massacres Sharon had announced his objective to send Phalangist forces into the camps, that the Israeli army surrounded and sealed the camps, that they shelled the camps, that snipers shot at camp dwellers in the days before the massacres, and then having given the green light to the Phalangists to enter Sabra and Shatila, the Israeli army prevented people from fleeing the camps — all of this is absent in Waltz with Bashir."

There is more at the review by Naira Antoun, University of London, and after reading it I felt relief because all she wrote is what I was thinking.
It seems that it there will never be enough tears to mourn the holocaust and Israel can do whatever it wants with this currency in the minds of generations.

The fact that all Palestinians families have blood in their history is not of any importance because Israelis suffered more. Poor Ari Folman who wasn't even one of the soldiers who were massacring Palestinians at Sabra and Shatila. But his pain was the theme he decided to tell as if he was in a therapy session.
Poor Israelis, let's mourn their pain and forget about all the other genocides.
The irony is that Nazi ideology, eugeneticism included, inspired by US as Hitler stresses in Mein Kampf, is everywhere in the world now but it doesn't affect Israel. On the contrary.

Native American proverb on who the earth belongs

I did some posts claiming that the children are the owners of the world and this native american proverb is exactly what I meant.
Maybe if rulers have that in mind when making laws or disrespecting them we would have a different society.
Have a great February!