Congress has just acted to increase unemployment. It did so by raising the legal minimum-wage rate from $1.25 to $1.60 an hour, effective in 1968, and extending its coverage. The result will be and must be to add to the ranks of the unemployed. Does a merchant increase his sales by raising prices? Does higher pay of domestic servants induce more housewives to hire help? The situation is no different for other employers. The higher wage rate decreed by Congress for low-paid workers will raise the cost of the goods that these workers produce—and must discourage sales. It will also induce employers to replace such workers with other workers—either to do the same work or to produce machinery to do the same work or to produce machinery to do the work. Some workers who already receive wages well above the legal minimum will benefit—because they will face less competition from the unskilled. That is why many unions are strong supporters of higher minimum-wage rates. Some employers and employees in places where wages are already high will benefit because they will face less competition from businessmen who might otherwise invest capital in areas that have large pools of unskilled labor. That is why Northern manufactures and unions, particularly in new England, are the principal sources of political pressure for higher legal minimum-wage rates. The groups that will be hurt the most are the low-paid and the unskilled. The ones who remain employed will receive higher wage rates, but fewer will be employed. As Prof. James Tobin, who was a member of president Kennedy’s Council of Economic Advisers, recently wrote: “People who lack the capacity to earn a decent living need to be helped, but they will not be helped by minimum-wage laws, trade-union wage pressures or other devices which seek to compel employers to pay them more than their work is worth. The more likely outcome of such regulations is that the intended beneficiaries are not employed at all.” The loss to the unskilled workers will not be offset by gains to others. Smaller total employment will result in a smaller total output. Hence the community as a whole will be worse off. Women, teen-agers, Negroes and particularly Negro teen-agers, will be especially hard hit. I am convinced that the minimum-wage law is the most anti-Negro law on our statute books—in its effect not its intent. It is a tragic but undoubted legacy of the past—and one we must try to correct—that on the average Negroes have lower skills than whites. Similarly, teen-agers are less skilled than older workers. Both Negroes and teen-agers are only made worse off by discouraging employers from hiring them. On the-job training—the main route whereby the unskilled have become skilled—is thus denied them. The shockingly high rate of unemployment among teen-age Negro boys is largely a result of the present Federal minimum-wage rate. And unemployment will be boosted still higher by the rise just enacted. Before 1956, unemployment among Negro boys aged 14 to 19 was around 8 to 11 per cent, about the same as among white boys. Within two years after the legal minimum was raised from 75 cents to $1 an hour in 1956, unemployment among Negro boys shot up to 24 per cent and among white boys to 14 per cent. Both figures have remained roughly the same ever since. But I am convinced that, when it becomes effective, the $1.60 minimum will increase unemployment among Negro boys to 30 per cent or more. Many well-meaning people favor legal minimum-wage rates in the mistaken belief that they help the poor. These people confuse wage rates with wage income. It has always been a mystery to me to understand why a youngster is better off unemployed at $1.60 an hour than employed at $1.25. Moreover, many workers in low wage brackets are supplementary earners—that is, youngsters who are just getting started or elderly folk who are adding to the main source of family income. I favor governmental measures that are designed to set a floor under family income. Legal minimum-wage rates only make this task more difficult. The rise in the legal minimum-wage rate is a monument to the power of superficial thinking. ____________________________________________________________________________ Reprinted in Milton Friedman, An Economist’s Protest: Columns on Political Economy, pp. 144-145. Glen Ridge, New Jersey: Thomas Horton & Daughters, 1972. Compiled by Robert Leeson and Charles Palm as part of their “Collected Works of Milton Friedman” project. Reformatted for the Web. 10/25/12
Here is the video clip and transcript of the film series FREE TO CHOOSE episode “What is wrong with our schools?” Part 5 of 6. Volume 6 – What’s Wrong with our Schools Transcript: Are your voucher schools going to accept these tough children? COONS: You bet they are. (Several talking at once.) COONS: May I answer […]
Here is the video clip and transcript of the film series FREE TO CHOOSE episode “What is wrong with our schools?” Part 4 of 6. Volume 6 – What’s Wrong with our Schools Transcript: It seems to me that if one is truly interested in liberty, which I think is the ultimate value that Milton Friedman talks […]
Most Woody Allen movies fall into simple categories — broadly defined as giddy comedies and sullen dramas — whether or not they succeed. But on certain occasions Allen approaches a rare hybrid, the comedy-drama, which generally produces more intriguing results. The last time Allen attempted such a combination, 2013’s “Blue Jasmine,” marked one of the more potent displays of the prolific writer-director’s talent in years, combining fiery performances with crackling, narcissistic dialogue pitched somewhere between unfettered anger and acerbic wit.
Now comes “Irrational Man,” a similar fusion of Allen’s dominant modes that’s decidedly more minor, but still a competent showcase of the way the productive filmmaker’s voice remains effective with the right synthesis of material and cast. There may be no more obvious premise for a Woody Allen movie this decade than Joaquin Phoenix as a possibly deranged philosophy professor who enters into a dangerous liaison with his student, spouting heady diatribes about Immanuel Kant in between bouts of unfulfilling sex and murderous schemes. After last year’s forgettable “Magic in the Moonlight,” the latest feature marks a small but welcome return to form.
At first a lighthearted romp that shifts into dark comedy midway through, “Irrational Man” owes much to Phoenix’s subversive energy and Allen’s capacity to write involving monologues loaded with existential ideas. That’s not quite enough to make up for a pair of under-realized female characters played by Emma Stone and Parker Posey, or the rather unconvincing depictions of romantic confusion that complicate the plot, but it’s close — and for Allen fans, it’s enough.
Phoenix portrays the philandering academic thinker Abe Lucas with an intensity that radiates from his beady eyes and erupts with his ongoing brainy declarations.
As with “Blue Jasmine,” which relied on Cate Blanchett to drive the movie forward, “Irrational Man” turns to Phoenix for its chief appeal. Beefier than you’ve ever seen him before (his puffed-up gut marks the best special effect in an Allen movie since “Zelig”), Phoenix portrays the philandering academic thinker Abe Lucas with an intensity that radiates from his beady eyes and erupts with his ongoing brainy declarations.
An esoteric thinker driven to psychotic extremes by his anxious tendencies, Abe is a typical outlet for Allen’s regular fixations. As the story begins, the lonely professor narrates his disillusioned state as he gears up for a teaching gig at a remote university and complains about the futility of his career. Gliding along on a vibrant jazz score, Allen quickly introduces his pompous leading man’s inevitable foil, Jill Pollard (Stone), the brainy student with whom he eventually falls in love. Jill gets her own voiceover, setting the stage for dueling perspectives on the decisions necessary to achieve happiness in life.
Naturally, things go awry, but “Irrational Man” holds plenty of appeal even before the twists take shape. Allen relishes the opportunity to explore the vulgar, cynical ecosystem of an isolated academic community. As one character puts it, anticipating Abe’s arrival on campus, the coarse professor has been hired to “put some viagra into the philosophy department” with his brooding, romantic perspective on moral relativism and other high-minded conceits. Before long, we’ve been treated to tidbits of his edgy lectures, where he assails the “theoretical bullshit” of classic philosophies and hopes to apply his ideas about behavior to a real-life situation.
Abe’s central conundrum, that he lacks the inspiration necessary to appreciate his life, leads him down a series of crummy encounters. He’s barely able to receive the affections of colleague Rita Richards (Posey), a married woman hoping to woo Abe so he’ll take her away from her own drab existence, and turns to the bottle as a cheap source of solace. After he drunkenly plays Russian Roulette with a loaded gun in front of horrified students at a house party, it seems as though Abe has hit rock-bottom — but he’s actually on the cusp of his darkest decision yet.
As Abe forms a questionable friendship with Jill that has the entire town whispering behind their backs, their bond naturally frustrates Jill’s young boyfriend Roy (Jamie Blackley, the only seemingly well-adjusted person in the entire script. (Naturally, this being an Allen movie, the one kind of normal guy plays a very small part in it.) But it’s not Abe’s eventual relationship with Jill that takes “Irrational Man” into refreshingly devious territory; instead, that comes with Abe’s sudden inspiration to commit a criminal act to help a random stranger.
With its grim turn of events, “Irrational Man” enters “Crimes and Misdemeanors” territory, catapulting its witty banter into increasingly nefarious developments. Even then, however, “Irrational Man” retains a playful tone. “He could always cloud the issues with words,” Jill recalls of her newfound lover — though one could just as easily apply that description to Allen, for whom even the more straightforward narrative trajectory is just a conduit for ruminative asides and one-liners. Though Abe complains that “much of philosophy is verbal masturbation,” Allen sure relishes every opportunity to indulge in its appeal.
But that’s ultimately part of the movie’s twisted charm, as Abe’s brilliance perpetually threatens to destroy him. Unsurprisingly in this male-centric tale, Stone’s gullible character is dispiritingly half-baked, to the point where she even confesses “I’m so dumb and vulnerable” when it comes to her relationships. No kidding. The actress manages a few moments where she gets to convey legitimate shock at her increasingly troubled connection to Abe, but well-honed reaction shots can only go so far.
Posey, who has developed subtler layers to her performances in recent years, obtains far greater depth in her depiction of a middle-aged woman dreaming of escaping her limited routine. A rain-soaked scene in which she confesses her infidelities to her despondent husband could fit right in with one of Allen’s straight dramas.
Though “Irrational Man” never settles the tension between its two modes, Allen has at least developed a scenario that fits both of them. In between the incident that inspires Abe’s violent act and the rushed conclusion, a pair of expertly-staged moments pair suspenseful endeavors with the absurdity of the motivations behind them. These scenes bear a closer resemblance to the black comedies of the Coen brothers’ oeuvre than anything in Allen’s standard routine.
If the genre elements sustain the work as a whole, the plot suffers from the meandering quality that frequently plagues late period Allen work. Still, the filmmaking finds its groove in individual moments. Cinematographer Darius Khondji latches onto delicate images rich with implications, none better than Phoenix gazing into a magnificent sunset from the beach while contemplating the liberating sensation he’s experienced from committing a deadly crime. Not since a smirking Michael Caine muttered “I’ve got my answer” after coming on to his character’s sister-in-law in “Hannah and Her Sisters” has Allen managed to strike an ironic note while evoking sympathy for his misguided protagonist.
These scattered moments of genuine depth never transport “Irrational Man” into foreign territory. This is, at the end of the day, a middle-of-the-road Allen picture — but one of the better ones among that fairly robust category. Per usual, Allen’s world has a notably outdated quality, with no cell phones or other internet technology in sight. But in this case it actually enhances the insular nature of small-town campus life — a place where crazy ideas can fuel decisive action and obsessive behavior is the norm. It’s the ideal playground for Allen’s usual routine, and anyone on board with that much will embrace the opportunity for another engaging round.
Grade: B
“Irrational Man” premiered this week at the Cannes Film Festival. Sony Pictures Classics will release it later this year.
___________ Fifty Years Ago, Woody Allen PlottedMidnight in Paris in This Stand-up Routine By Kyle Buchanan Follow @kylebuchanan 341Shares Share254Tweet70Share8EmailPrint When Woody Allen won the Best Original Screenplay Oscar this year for writing Midnight in Paris, he set a record at age 76 as the oldest person to ever triumph in that category. Turns out, […]
_____ _______ Woody Allen Stand Up Comic 1964 1968 09 The Science Fiction Film Woody Allen’s stand-up comedy albums reissued in new box set BY JOSH TERRY ON DECEMBER 16, 2014, 12:10PM 1 COMMENT FACEBOOK TWITTER TUMBLR STUMBLEUPON REDDIT Before Woody Allen became the prolific director responsible for such classics as Manhattan and Annie Hall, he was a […]
Woody Allen Stand Up Comic 1964 1968 15 Brooklyn Separating The Art From the Artist With Woody Allen: The Stand-Up Years By Samantha Allen January 20, 2015 | 11:30am Share Tweet Share In the liner notes for Woody Allen: The Stand-Up Years 1964-1968, longtime director and producer Robert B. Weide (Curb Your Enthusiasm) waxes nostalgic […]
_ The first picture from Woody Allen’s new movie confirms that Joaquin Phoenix and Emma Stone are its stars. But what do we know about the bigger picture? Not saying much … Emma Stone and Joaquin Phoenix in Woody Allen’s Irrational Man. Photograph: PR Andrew Pulver @Andrew_Pulver Monday 13 April 2015 08.27 EDTLast modified on Monday […]
I love it when I find someone else who has a love for Woody Allen movies like I do. Evidently Paul Semel is person like that. Below is Paul Semel’s fine review: Woody Allen Stand Up Comic 1964 1968 01 The Vodka Ad JANUARY 12, 2015 Woody Allen The Stand-Up Years 1964-1968 Review Given that he’s […]
Woody Allen Stand Up Comic 1964 1968 05 Mechanical Objects Standing Up and Floating Out Our favorite things this week include Woody Allen’s “The Stand-Up Years,” “Inherent Vice” by Thomas Pynchon not Paul Thomas Anderson, and “Saga” by Brian K. Vaughan. MILK & HONEY Email this page Posted January 14, 2015 Allen’s Stand-Up Roots: On […]
____ Woody Allen’s past movies and the subject of the Meaning of Life examined!!! Out of the Past: Woody Allen, Nostalgia, the Meaning of Life, and Radio Days Kyle Turner Jul 25, 2014 Film, Twilight Time 1 Comment “I firmly believe, and I don’t say this as a criticism, that life is meaningless.” – Woody […]
Woody Allen Should Have Quoted Pascal: “Magic in the Moonlight” January 7, 2015 by Roger E. Olson 9 Comments Woody Allen Should Have Quoted Pascal: “Magic in the Moonlight” I am no Roger Ebert and don’t watch that many movies, but in my opinion, for what it’s worth, Woody Allen’s 2014 film “Magic in […]
______________ If anyone has read my blog for any length of time they know that I am the biggest Woody Allen fan of all time. No one except maybe Bergman has attacked the big questions in life as well as Woody Allen. Furthermore, Francis Schaeffer is my favorite Christian Philosopher and he spent a lot […]
___________ Woody Allen to make first TV series for Amazon Prime ‘I’m not sure where to begin,’ says 79-year-old Oscar-winner about his small screen debut, as streaming TV service seeks to gain march on rivals with exclusive content Comment: in signing Woody Allen, Amazon Prime has delivered a nuclear blast to the competition Woody […]
You won’t want to miss a single meeting in 2015! We have another terrific lineup but we can’t be successful without your participation and support.
Our first full meeting will be Monday, August 24th, 2015 at the Little Rock Marriott and will feature Arkansas Razorback Head Football Coach Bret Bielema. Membership in the Little Rock Touchdown Club includes lunch at a reduced rate at all weekly meetings.
(Rex Nelson pictured below)
2015 Speaker Lineup
Rex Nelson impersonates Houston Nutt at LRTC 08 27 12
Published on Oct 2, 2012
Little Rock Touchdown Club has Rex Nelson do the stats for the games played that week. Rex does a lot of impersonations of different people but I like his Houston Nutt the best. Video by Popeye Video – Mrpopeyevideo
______________
Tom Osborne below:
_____________
Little Rock Touchdown Club founder David Bazzel announced the club’s new awards and 2013 speakers Tuesday
ADG File Photo
David Bazzel is the honoree of Big Brothers Big Sisters of Central Arkansas’ 41st annual Toast & Roast banquet Aug. 13 at the Embassy Suites in Little Rock.
When I interviewed David Bazzel back in late January, I finally got to ask the question I had wanted to ask him for a long time: “Do you ever sleep?”
Bazzel, a former Arkansas linebacker, told me that the answer — which is especially true during football season — is: “Very little.” Bazzel’s day job is co-host of the morning-drive radio program The Show With No Name on KABZ-FM, 103.7 The Buzz. The show airs weekdays from 6-10 a.m. He says he regularly stays up until midnight working on his other projects that include the Little Rock Touchdown Club, which is now in its 12th year, and the Broyles Award, which honors the nation’s top college assistant football coaches. He admitted during the interview that he doesn’t profit financially from either endeavor, even though he pours hundred of hours into the events each year. He does those things, as well as originated the The Golden Boot, the trophy awarded to the winner of the Arkansas-LSU game, because he genuinely loves football and promoting the game, Little Rock and the state of Arkansas.
Add to that, attending every University of Arkansas football game as an analyst for The Buzz and KATV, Channel 7 and the numerous speaking engagements, commercials and other business ventures Bazzel somehow manages to do all of those things at a high level. Something I have long admired.
He also squeezes in time to volunteer. While his work ethic is to be admired, it is his humble, genuine personality that shines through. Always friendly, always smiling (his teeth are the whitest I’ve seen) and very approachable. He gets ribbed from time to time because of his attention to his finely coiffed hair, his teeth, muscular physique and flair for fashion (he must own 200 suits and matching pocket squares), but he is well liked by many because, at the core, he is a good, caring person. He is also a devout Christian and shared his testimony with the congregation of Chenal Valley Baptist Church last winter.
Because of those qualities, Big Brothers Big Sisters of Central Arkansas tabbed Bazzel as its 41st annual Toast & Roast honoree. The banquet begins Thursday at the Embassy Suites in Little Rock with a reception at 6 p.m., and the program begins at 7 p.m. Tickets can be purchased for $150. The cause is terrific (it is the biggest fundraiser of the year for the organization), and the entertainment will be outstanding. Check out this lineup of roasters: Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson; former NFL tight end and play-by-play voice for Arkansas football Keith Jackson; former Hog and NBA center Joe Kleine; former Hog, NFL receiver and co-host of Overtime on The Buzz Matt Jones; former Hog guard and The Buzz’s The Zone co-host Pat Bradley; Arkansas Democrat-Gazette sports editor Wally Hall; KATV sports director Steve Sullivan; KATV co-anchor Beth Hunt; car dealer Frank Fletcher; longtime journalist, broadcaster and Simmons First National Corp Director of Corporate Communications Rex Nelson; Tommy Smith, Bazzel’s co-host on The Show With No Name; Roger Scott, another co-host on The Show With No Name; and Bill Vickery, political consultant and host of The Sunday Buzz on The Buzz.
KATV morning show anchor Chris Kane gets the unenviable task of emceeing this free for all. It could get a tad uncomfortable for ol’ No. 53. No doubt, it will be funny with the cast of characters that have been assembled. Scott and his many impressions could fill the the entire time slot by himself. Most all of the roasters love to hear their own voices, so the biggest challenge of the evening might be wrapping it up by 9 p.m., as I am told is the goal. Good luck with that.
I attended my first Toast & Roast last year with former Arkansas basketball coach Nolan Richardson as the honoree. Bradley, current UA basketball coach Mike Anderson, and former Hogs and NBA standout Todd Day raised a high bar for this year. With some of the stories told and jokes delivered by last year’s emcee — KTHV-TV, Channel 11’s Craig O’Neill — I didn’t quit laughing.
Congratulations to Bazzel. The honor is well deserved, and his presence and the all-star roaster roster should make for a huge crowd and a memorable night for all.
For more information on purchasing tickets, go to bbsca.org. Read Nate’s sports blog atgoingdeep.syncweekly.com.
____
David Bazzel, Muskie Harris, Ron Calcagni, Lou Holtz of Orlando, Fla., Bert Zinamon, Kelly Lasseigne, and Nancy Monroe at the Little Rock Touchdown Club
Andrews supports athletes Share on facebook Share on twitter More Sharing Services0 By Jeff Halpern This article was published November 25, 2014 at 2:37 a.m. PHOTO BY JEFF HALPERN Former Arkansas offensive lineman Shawn Andrews was the guest at the Little Rock Touchdown Club on Nov. 24, 2014. Comments aAFont Size It’s been 11 years […]
_______ Little Rock Touchdown Club – November 3, 2014 I really enjoyed the stories that Rocket told about Lou Holtz. I noticed another big crowd today at the lunch when I looked around at the audience. Lou told Rocket to make the play Share on facebookShare on twitterMore Sharing Services0 By Jeremy Muck This article […]
________ SEC Network Analyst Dari Nowkah said at the Little Rock Touchdown Club that those outside the SEC say the conference is overrated but that obviously is not true!!!! With SEC teams winning seven consecutive national championships in 2006-2012 and having at least one team in each of the past eight BCS Championship Games, Nowkah […]
___________ Little Rock Touchdown Club – October 6 2014 This is what the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette had to say about Lee Roy: After last season, Alabama lost a three-year starter at quarterback, AJ McCarron, who led the Crimson Tide to national championships after the 2011 and 2012 seasons, and was a fifth-round draft pick of the […]
Little Rock Touchdown Club Ed Orgeron Published on Sep 29, 2014 Ed Orgeron speaks to the Little Rock Touchdown Club. ____________________________________ Coach O did a great job speaking at our luncheon on Monday. Former USC, Ole Miss coach Ed Orgeron enjoys being with family after years on the road Ed Orgeron, center, is happy to […]
Little Rock Touchdown Club Ed Orgeron Published on Sep 29, 2014 Ed Orgeron speaks to the Little Rock Touchdown Club. ____________________________________ I enjoyed hearing Coach Orgeron at luncheon this week. Ed Orgeron covets Kansas job 9h ago Charlie Weis had barely been gone as head coach of the Kansas Jayhawks for 24 hours when former […]
Little Rock Touchdown Club Ed Orgeron Published on Sep 29, 2014 Ed Orgeron speaks to the Little Rock Touchdown Club. ____________________________________ I always enjoy going to the Little Rock Touchdown Club and hearing Rex Nelson go through the SEC Roundup of the previous week is usually one of the highlights. He started off by saying: […]
Little Rock Touchdown Club Ed Orgeron Published on Sep 29, 2014 Ed Orgeron speaks to the Little Rock Touchdown Club. ____________________________________ I really enjoyed hearing Ed Orgeron speak at the Little Rock Touchdown Club yesterday and Little Rock native George Schroeder got to interview him afterwards and his is the result below. Ed Orgeron, college […]
________________ I really enjoyed hearing Jerry Jones’ daughter speak at the Little Rock Touchdown Club this week. Like it is Savvy Anderson graces Jerry’s Cowboys Share on facebookShare on twitterMore Sharing Services1 By Wally Hall This article was published September 23, 2014 at 2:31 a.m. Comments aAFont Size Looks like Jane, plays like Tarzan. Charlotte […]
___________ Today downtown at the Little Rock Touchdown Club Mike Singletary is speaking. Mike Singletary: Christ Means Everything – CBN.com SPORTS Mike Singletary: ‘Christ Means Everything’ By Shawn BrownThe 700 Club CBN.com – Mike Singletary spent 12 seasons as a key member of the celebrated Chicago Bears defense of the 1980s. This NFL Hall of […]
Harry Truman once complained he wanted to find a one-handed economist because he was tired of asking a direct question of those on his economic team, only to have them say, “On the one hand … but on the other hand.”
If there was one hand that noted economist Milton Friedman favored, it was the “invisible hand” of the free market.
Today marks the 102nd anniversary of Friedman’s birth. He died in 2006, but during his long career Friedman won over admirers and drove left-of-center critics crazy with his direct and eloquent defense of capitalism.
Friedman won the Nobel Prize in economics in 1976. But perhaps his greatest influence was nudging people who otherwise may have had little interest in the “dismal science” of economics to look at the world through a new set of eyes and question their assumptions.
Here’s a look at some of Friedman’s most notable quotes:
“The most important single central fact about a free market is that no exchange takes place unless both parties benefit.”
“Most economic fallacies derive from the tendency to assume that there is a fixed pie, that one party can gain only at the expense of another.”
“A society that puts equality before freedom will get neither. A society that puts freedom before equality will get a high degree of both.”
“When everybody owns something, nobody owns it, and nobody has a direct interest in maintaining or improving its condition. That is why buildings in the Soviet Union—like public housing in the United States—look decrepit within a year or two of their construction…”
“Concentrated power is not rendered harmless by the good intentions of those who create it.”
“One of the great mistakes is to judge policies and programs by their intentions rather than their results.”
“If you put the federal government in charge of the Sahara Desert, in five years there’d be a shortage of sand.”
Rob Nikolewski is a reporter for Watchdog.org, a national network of investigative reporters covering waste, fraud and abuse in government. Watchdog.org is a project of the nonprofit Franklin Center for Government & Public Integrity.
Milton Friedman’s Free to Choose (1980), episode 3 – Anatomy of a Crisis. part 1
TEMIN: We don’t think the big capital arose before the government did? VON HOFFMAN: Listen, what are we doing here? I mean __ defending big government is like defending death and taxes. When was the last time you met anybody that was in favor of big government? FRIEDMAN: Today, today I met Bob Lekachman, I […]
Milton Friedman: Free To Choose – The Failure Of Socialism With Ronald Reagan (Full) Published on Mar 19, 2012 by NoNationalityNeeded Milton Friedman’s writings affected me greatly when I first discovered them and I wanted to share with you. Abstract: Ronald Reagan introduces this program, and traces a line from Adam Smith’s “The Wealth of […]
Milton Friedman: Free To Choose – The Failure Of Socialism With Ronald Reagan (Full) Published on Mar 19, 2012 by NoNationalityNeeded Milton Friedman’s writings affected me greatly when I first discovered them and I wanted to share with you. Abstract: Ronald Reagan introduces this program, and traces a line from Adam Smith’s “The Wealth of […]
and you will hear what far smarter people than I have to say on this matter. I agree with them.
Harry Kroto
Below you have picture of 1996 Chemistry Nobel Prize Winner Dr. Harry Kroto:
____
__________________________
There are 3 videos in this series and they have statements by 150 academics and scientists and I hope to respond to all of them. Wikipedia notesAlexander Vilenkin (Russian: Алекса́ндр Виле́нкин,Ukrainian: Олександр Віленкін; 13 May 1949, Kharkiv,[1]Ukraine, Soviet Union) is Professor of Physics and Director of the Institute of Cosmology at Tufts University. A theoretical physicist who has been working in the field of cosmology for 25 years, Vilenkin has written over 150 papers and is responsible for introducing the ideas of eternal inflation and quantum creationof the universe from a quantum vacuum. Inflation is the idea that space expanded at trillion times faster than the speed of light right after the big bang. His work in cosmic strings has been pivotal. With Arvind Bordeand Alan Guth, he is one of the originators of the Borde-Guth-Vilenkin theorem.
Vilenkin received his undergraduate degree in physics in 1971 in the former Soviet Union (University of Kharkiv). He later moved to the United States, where he obtained his Ph.D. at Buffalo. His work has been featured in numerous newspaper and magazine articles in the United States, Europe, Soviet Union, and Japan, and in many popular books.
_____________________________
In the second video below in the 82nd clip in this series are his words and my response is below them.
50 Renowned Academics Speaking About God (Part 1)
Another 50 Renowned Academics Speaking About God (Part 2)
A Further 50 Renowned Academics Speaking About God (Part 3)
The simple question I will answer immediately is that about a personal God and that I don’t believe, a God that concerns himself with human affairs. We don’t have much evidence for that. As for a more abstract God some people suggest the level of abstraction that makes the concept pointless. If we identify God with the laws of nature I don’t see why we need another term for the laws of nature.
Second, are the scientists ahead or behind the Bible? There is plenty of evidence that the Bible is historically and scientifically accurate. Adrian Rogers notes:
Every now and then science may disagree with the Bible, but usually science just needs time to catch up. For example, in 1861 a French scientific academy printed a brochure offering 51 incontrovertible facts that proved the Bible in error. Today there is not a single reputable scientist who would support those supposed “facts,” because modern science has disproved them all!
The ancients believed the earth was held up by Atlas, or resting on pillars, or even seated on the backs of elephants. But today we know the earth is suspended in space, a fact the Word of God records in Job 26:7: “He . . . hangeth the earth upon nothing.” God revealed the facts of cosmology long before man had any idea of the truth.
For centuries man believed the earth was flat, but now we know the earth is a globe. The prophet Isaiah, writing 750 years before the birth of Christ, revealed that “God sitteth upon the circle of the earth” (Isaiah 40:22). The word translated here as “circle” was more commonly translated “sphere.” In other words, Isaiah explained that the earth was a globe centuries before science discovered it.
When Ptolemy charted the heavens, he counted 1026 stars in the sky. But with the invention of the telescope man discovered millions and millions of stars, something that Jeremiah 33:22 revealed nearly three thousand years ago: “The host of heaven cannot be numbered.” How did these men of God know the truth of science long before the rest of the world discovered it? They were moved by the Holy Spirit to write the truth. God’s Word is not filled with errors. It is filled with facts, even scientific facts.
Pantheism is the belief that what religions call “God” is the universe itself, in all its splendour and horror. In Pantheism the universe and God are synonymous. Pantheism is as old as the marrow of Indian philosophy; the Upanishads (etymology – “sitting close to” a guru) , and as new as “New Age.” The Jewish Kabbalah, Pantheist to the core, states:
“The essence of divinity is found in every single thing — nothing but it exists. Since it causes every thing to be, no thing can live by anything else. It enlivens them; its existence exists in each existent. Do not attribute duality to God. Let God be solely God. If you suppose that Ein Sof (the Eternal, literally “without end”) emanates until a certain point, and that from that point on is outside of it, you have dualized. God forbid! Realize, rather, that Ein Sof exists in each existent. Do not say, “This is a stone and not God.” God forbid! Rather, all existence is God, and the stone is a thing pervaded by divinity” (Rabbi Moshe Cordovero, Shiur Qomah to Zohar 3:14b; Idra Rabba).
Rabbi Moshe Cordovero’s grave in Safed, Israel
Adorning the pantheist pantheon in the late 18th to early 19th centuries were the greats Goethe and Hegel in Germany, Shelley and Keats in England, and Emerson and Thoreau in America. Later in the 19th century pantheism was close to becoming the dominant philosophy.
If pantheism is as old as the Upanishads (the bulk of it probably written circa 600 BCE), how old is materialism? At least as old as the pre-Socratic Greek philosophy of 600-500 BCE, reaching its peak in the 4th Century BCE with the atomists Democritus and Epicurus. “Atomism” was the philosophy that ultimate reality consists of invisible, indivisible bits of randomly colliding matter. Not very different from the materialism of modern times, spearheaded by the Enlightenment. It believed that human beings and nature could be controlled by reason and empirical methods. The reasoning was the laws of society emerge from the laws of nature. Once these social laws where understood, it would be possible to create a better world.
The Enlightenment
In his What is Enlightenment?Emmanuel Kant describes the Enlightenment as “man’s release from his self-incurred tutelage”, where “tutelage” is (Kant continues) “man’s inability to make use of his understanding without direction from another”. The “Enlightenment” has profound relevance not only for understanding modern man. God saw that the light was good, but man saw that enlightenment was better – much better. “Enlightenment” puts man at the centre. Whereas theology, previous to the “Enlightenment,” was the handmaiden of science, after the “Enlightenment,” the movement of “positivism” (August Comte) reduced it to the “charwoman” of science (Frederick Copleston in one of his volumes on the history of philosophy. (Deconstruction and the Inworming of Postmodern theology).
Emmanuel Kant (1724-1804)
Force and Chemical Stuff
Scientists such as Lavoisier (1743-94) in France and John Dalton (1766-1844) in England promoted a materialistic philosophy where all entities including human beings were entirely the product of physical and chemical forces. One of the most popular books of the 19th century was Ludwig Büchner’s, “Kraft und Stoff (Force and Matter, 1855). The argument of the book is that there is no need for a transcendent (immaterial) force to explain the universe: the laws of physics and chemistry are sufficient to do the job. Here is Büchner strutting his Stoff in hisconcluding observations (English translation (1870) by J. Frederick Collingwood, p, 251-52):
“Exact science inculcates modesty ; and it is perhaps for this reason, that our modern naturalists have hitherto neglected to apply the standard of exact science to philosophy, and from the treasury of facts to forge arms for the overthrow of transcendental speculations. Now and then there issued from the workshops of these industrious labourers a ray of light which, reaching the noisy philosophers, did not fail to heighten the existing confusion. These single rays were, however, sufficient to cause in the camp of speculative philosophy a feverish excitement, and gave rise to sallies in anticipation of a threatened attack. There was something ludicrous in it to see these philosophers so desperately defend themselves before they were seriously attacked. It certainly will not be long before the battle becomes general. Is the victory doubtful ? The struggle is unequal ; the opponents cannot stand against the trenchant arm of physical and physiological materialism, which fights with facts that every one can comprehend, while the opponents fight with suppositions and presumptions.”
Büchner’s Force and Matter was followed four years later by the sensational materialisation of Charles Darwin’s “On the origin of Species,” 1859). Darwin’s theory of evolution by means of natural selection dumped the notion that there was design or purpose in the universe. All phenomena could be explained by chemistry and physics, even history; to wit, the “historical materialism” of Marx and Engels and the evolutionary psychology of Herbert Spencer.
“The first premise of all human history is, of course, the existence of living human individuals. Thus the first fact to be established is the physical organisation of these individuals and their consequent relation to the rest of nature….Men can be distinguished from animals by consciousness, by religion or anything else you like. They themselves begin to distinguish themselves from animals as soon as they begin to produce their means of subsistence, a step which is conditioned by their physical organisation. By producing their means of subsistence men are indirectly producing their actual material life.”
Pantheism takes a sandwich break
I contrast the views of Francis Schaeffer and Herman Bavinck on the relationship between materialism and the “infinite creator God (Schaeffer) in 20th century humanism. Here is Schaeffer in 1982:
“[I]nstead of the final reality that exists being the infinite creator God; instead of that which is the basis of all reality being such a creator God, now largely, all else is seen as only material or energy which has existed forever in some form, shaped into its present complex form only by pure chance.(F. Schaeffer, “A Christian Manifesto”).
The above position describes the Darwinian position as it exists today in 2013.Now, here is Herman Bavinck in 1908. Note how the second paragraph contrasts with Schaeffer:
(My italics)
“The term evolution embodies in itself a harmless conception, and the principle expressed by it is certainly operative within well-defined limits throughout the imiverse. But the trend of thought by which it has been monopolized, and the system built on it, in many cases at least, avail themselves of the word in order to explain the entire world, including man and religion and morality, without the aid of any supranatural factor, purely from immanent forces, and according to unvarying laws of nature.”
“Nevertheless, the transition from the nineteenth to the twentieth century has witnessed an important change in this respect. The foremost investigators in the field of science have abandoned the. attempt to explain all phenomena and events by.mechanico-chemical causes. Everywhere there is manifesting itself an effort to take up and incorporate Darwin’s scheme of a nature subject to law into an idealistic world-view. In fact Darwin himself, through his agnosticism, left room for different conceptions of the Absolute, nay repeatedly and em- phatically gave voice to a conviction that the world is not the product of accident, brute force, or blind necessity, but in its entirety has been intended for progressive improvement. By way of Darwin, and enriched by a mass of valuable scientific material, the doctrine of evolution has returned to the fundamental idea of Hegel’s philosophy. The mechanical conception of nature has been once more replaced by the dynamical ; materialism has reverted to pantheism; evolution has become again the unfolding, the revealing of absolute spirit. And the concept of revelation has held anew its triumphant entry into the realm of philosophy and even of natural science.”
Bavinck’s “The mechanical conception of nature has been once more replaced by the dynamical ; materialism has reverted to pantheism.”
This implies that in the 19th century (recall Bavinck wrote this in 1908) the purely mechanical conception of nature was in vogue, just as it is in vogue again in the late 20th and 21st century. This is not to say that “creationism” is insignficant in the 21st centrury. The interesting observation in Bavinck is that between the mechanical conceptions of the late 19th century and our time, there existed a pantheistic hiatus.
Herman Bavinck (1854 – 1921)
Here is Carl Sagan:
“We’ve arranged a civilization in which most crucial elements profoundly depend on science and technology.” And: Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known.” One thing Sagan, while alive, was sure of; it wasn’t God.
“During an oceanside conversation, David presses her to stand up and assert the presence of the ‘God-truth’ within. After suggesting several affirmations, he selects a powerful one for Shirley: ‘I am God.’ Timidly, she stands at the Pacific. Stretching out her arms, she mouths the words half-heartedly. ‘Say it louder.’ Shirley blusters about this statement being a little too pompous. For him to make her chant those words is – well, it sounds so insufferably arrogant. David’s answer cuts to the quick: ‘See how little you think of yourself?’ This deep insight embarrasses MacLaine into holy boldness. Intuitively, she comes to feel he’s right. Lifting both arms to the sky, she pumps it out — ‘I am God! I am God!’ — as the ocean laps at her feet.”
Shirley Maclaine (1934 – )
______
Fourth, if. Dr. Alexander Vilenkin wants more evidence that a personal God has interacted with humans through the centuries then he needs to check out this issue of the accuracy of the Bible:
The Bible maintains several characteristics that prove it is from God. One of those is the fact that the Bible is accurate in every one of its details. The field of archaeology brings to light this amazing accuracy.
_________________________-
Many people have questioned the accuracy of the Bible, but I have posted many videos and articles with evidence pointing out that the Bible has many pieces of evidence from archaeology supporting the view that the Bible is historically accurate. Take a look at the video above and below.
For years I have been quoting a book by Peter Stoner called Science Speaks. I like to use a remarkable illustration from it to show how Bible prophecy proves that Jesus was truly God in the flesh.
I decided that I would try to find a copy of the book so that I could discover all that it had to say about Bible prophecy. The book was first published in 1958 by Moody Press. After considerable searching on the Internet, I was finally able to find a revised edition published in 1976.
Peter Stoner was chairman of the mathematics and astronomy departments at Pasadena City College until 1953 when he moved to Westmont College in Santa Barbara, California. There he served as chairman of the science division. At the time he wrote this book, he was professor emeritus of science at Westmont.
In the edition I purchased, there was a foreword by Dr. Harold Hartzler, an officer of the American Scientific Affiliation. He wrote that the manuscript had been carefully reviewed by a committee of his organization and that “the mathematical analysis included is based upon principles of probability which are thoroughly sound.” He further stated that in the opinion of the Affiliation, Professor Stoner “has applied these principles in a proper and convincing way.”
The book is divided into three sections. Two relate directly to Bible prophecy. The first section deals with the scientific validity of the Genesis account of creation.
Part One: The Genesis Record
Stoner begins with a very interesting observation. He points out that his copy of Young’s General Astronomy, published in 1898, is full of errors. Yet, the Bible, written over 2,000 years ago is devoid of scientific error. For example, the shape of the earth is mentioned in Isaiah 40:22. Gravity can be found in Job 26:7. Ecclesiastes 1:6 mentions atmospheric circulation. A reference to ocean currents can be found in Psalm 8:8, and the hydraulic cycle is described in Ecclesiastes 1:7 and Isaiah 55:10. The second law of thermodynamics is outlined in Psalm 102:25-27 and Romans 8:21. And these are only a few examples of scientific truths written in the Scriptures long before they were “discovered” by scientists.
Stoner proceeds to present scientific evidence in behalf of special creation. For example, he points out that science had previously taught that special creation was impossible because matter could not be destroyed or created. He then points out that atomic physics had now proved that energy can be turned into matter and matter into energy.
He then considers the order of creation as presented in Genesis 1:1-13. He presents argument after argument from a scientific viewpoint to sustain the order which Genesis chronicles. He then asks, “What chance did Moses have when writing the first chapter [of Genesis] of getting thirteen items all accurate and in satisfactory order?” His calculations conclude it would be one chance in 31,135,104,000,000,000,000,000 (1 in 31 x 1021). He concludes, “Perhaps God wrote such an account in Genesis so that in these latter days, when science has greatly developed, we would be able to verify His account and know for a certainty that God created this planet and the life on it.”
The only disappointing thing about Stoner’s book is that he spiritualizes the reference to days in Genesis, concluding that they refer to periods of time of indefinite length. Accordingly, he concludes that the earth is approximately 4 billion years old. In his defense, keep in mind that he wrote this book before the foundation of the modern Creation Science Movement which was founded in the 1960’s by Dr. Henry Morris. That movement has since produced many convincing scientific arguments in behalf of a young earth with an age of only 6,000 years.
Peter Stoner’s Calculations Regarding Messianic Prophecy
Peter Stoner calculated the probability of just 8 Messianic prophecies being fulfilled in the life of Jesus. As you read through these prophecies, you will see that all estimates were calculated as conservatively as possible.
The Messiah will be born in Bethlehem (Micah 5:2).
The average population of Bethlehem from the time of Micah to the present (1958) divided by the average population of the earth during the same period = 7,150/2,000,000,000 or 2.8×105.
A messenger will prepare the way for the Messiah (Malachi 3:1).
One man in how many, the world over, has had a forerunner (in this case, John the Baptist) to prepare his way?
Estimate: 1 in 1,000 or 1×103.
The Messiah will enter Jerusalem as a king riding on a donkey (Zechariah 9:9).
One man in how many, who has entered Jerusalem as a ruler, has entered riding on a donkey?
Estimate: 1 in 100 or 1×102.
The Messiah will be betrayed by a friend and suffer wounds in His hands (Zechariah 13:6).
One man in how many, the world over, has been betrayed by a friend, resulting in wounds in his hands?
Estimate: 1 in 1,000 or 1×103.
The Messiah will be betrayed for 30 pieces of silver (Zechariah 11:12).
Of the people who have been betrayed, one in how many has been betrayed for exactly 30 pieces of silver?
Estimate: 1 in 1,000 or 1×103.
The betrayal money will be used to purchase a potter’s field (Zechariah 11:13).
One man in how many, after receiving a bribe for the betrayal of a friend, has returned the money, had it refused, and then experienced it being used to buy a potter’s field?
Estimate: 1 in 100,000 or 1×105.
The Messiah will remain silent while He is afflicted (Isaiah 53:7).
One man in how many, when he is oppressed and afflicted, though innocent, will make no defense of himself?
Estimate: 1 in 1,000 or 1×103.
The Messiah will die by having His hands and feet pierced (Psalm 22:16).
One man in how many, since the time of David, has been crucified?
Estimate: 1 in 10,000 or 1×104.
Multiplying all these probabilities together produces a number (rounded off) of 1×1028. Dividing this number by an estimate of the number of people who have lived since the time of these prophecies (88 billion) produces a probability of all 8 prophecies being fulfilled accidently in the life of one person. That probability is 1in 1017 or 1 in 100,000,000,000,000,000. That’s one in one hundred quadrillion!
Part Two: The Accuracy of Prophecy
The second section of Stoner’s book, is entitled “Prophetic Accuracy.” This is where the book becomes absolutely fascinating. One by one, he takes major Bible prophecies concerning cities and nations and calculates the odds of their being fulfilled. The first is a prophecy in Ezekiel 26 concerning the city of Tyre. Seven prophecies are contained in this chapter which was written in 590 BC:
Nebuchadnezzar shall conquer the city (vs. 7-11).
Other nations will assist Nebuchadnezzar (v. 3).
The city will be made like a bare rock (vs. 4 & 14).
It will become a place for the spreading of fishing nets (vs. 5 & 14).
Its stones and timbers will be thrown into the sea (v. 12).
Other cities will fear greatly at the fall of Tyre (v. 16).
The old city of Tyre will never be rebuilt (v. 14).
Four years after this prophecy was given, Nebuchadnezzar laid siege to Tyre. The siege lasted 13 years. When the city finally fell in 573 BC, it was discovered that everything of value had been moved to a nearby island.
Two hundred and forty-one years later Alexander the Great arrived on the scene. Fearing that the fleet of Tyre might be used against his homeland, he decided to take the island where the city had been moved to. He accomplished this goal by building a causeway from the mainland to the island, and he did that by using all the building materials from the ruins of the old city. Neighboring cities were so frightened by Alexander’s conquest that they immediately opened their gates to him. Ever since that time, Tyre has remained in ruins and is a place where fishermen spread their nets.
Thus, every detail of the prophecy was fulfilled exactly as predicted. Stoner calculated the odds of such a prophecy being fulfilled by chance as being 1 in 75,000,000, or 1 in 7.5×107. (The exponent 7 indicates that the decimal is to be moved to the right seven places.)
Stoner proceeds to calculate the probabilities of the prophecies concerning Samaria, Gaza and Ashkelon, Jericho, Palestine, Moab and Ammon, Edom, and Babylon. He also calculates the odds of prophecies being fulfilled that predicted the closing of the Eastern Gate (Ezekiel 44:1-3), the plowing of Mount Zion (Micah 3:12), and the enlargement of Jerusalem according to a prescribed pattern (Jeremiah 31:38-40).
Combining all these prophecies, he concludes that “the probability of these 11 prophecies coming true, if written in human wisdom, is… 1 in 5.76×1059. Needless to say, this is a number beyond the realm of possibility.
Part Three: Messianic Prophecy
The third and most famous section of Stoner’s book concerns Messianic prophecy. His theme verse for this section is John 5:39 — “Search the Scriptures because… it is these that bear witness of Me.”
Stoner proceeds to select eight of the best known prophecies about the Messiah and calculates the odds of their accidental fulfillment in one person as being 1 in 1017.
I love the way Stoner illustrated the meaning of this number. He asked the reader to imagine filling the State of Texas knee deep in silver dollars. Include in this huge number one silver dollar with a black check mark on it. Then, turn a blindfolded person loose in this sea of silver dollars. The odds that the first coin he would pick up would be the one with the black check mark are the same as 8 prophecies being fulfilled accidentally in the life of Jesus.
The point, of course, is that when people say that the fulfillment of prophecy in the life of Jesus was accidental, they do not know what they are talking about. Keep in mind that Jesus did not just fulfill 8 prophecies, He fulfilled 108. The chances of fulfilling 16 is 1 in 1045. When you get to a total of 48, the odds increase to 1 in 10157. Accidental fulfillment of these prophecies is simply beyond the realm of possibility.
When confronted with these statistics, skeptics will often fall back on the argument that Jesus purposefully fulfilled the prophecies. There is no doubt that Jesus was aware of the prophecies and His fulfillment of them. For example, when He got ready to enter Jerusalem the last time, He told His disciples to find Him a donkey to ride so that the prophecy of Zechariah could be fulfilled which said,“Behold, your King is coming to you, gentle, and mounted on a donkey” (Matthew 21:1-5 andZechariah 9:9).
But many of the prophecies concerning the Messiah could not be purposefully fulfilled — such as the town of His birth (Micah 5:2) or the nature of His betrayal (Psalm 41:9), or the manner of His death (Zechariah 13:6 and Psalm 22:16).
One of the most remarkable Messianic prophecies in the Hebrew Scriptures is the one that precisely states that the Messiah will die by crucifixion. It is found in Psalm 22 where David prophesied the Messiah would die by having His hands and feet pierced (Psalm 22:16). That prophecy was written 1,000 years before Jesus was born. When it was written, the Jewish method of execution was by stoning. The prophecy was also written many years before the Romans perfected crucifixion as a method of execution.
Even when Jesus was killed, the Jews still relied on stoning as their method of execution, but they had lost the power to implement the death penalty due to Roman occupation. That is why they were forced to take Jesus to Pilate, the Roman governor, and that’s how Jesus ended up being crucified, in fulfillment of David’s prophecy.
The bottom line is that the fulfillment of Bible prophecy in the life of Jesus proves conclusively that He truly was God in the flesh. It also proves that the Bible is supernatural in origin.
Note: A detailed listing of all 108 prophecies fulfilled by Jesus is contained in Dr. Reagan’s book,Christ in Prophecy Study Guide. It also contains an analytical listing of all the Messianic prophecies in the Bible — both Old and New Testaments — concerning both the First and Second comings of the Messiah.
For creation science resources see the following websites:
The Bible and Archaeology – Is the Bible from God? (Kyle Butt 42 min)
Does God Have to Be Good or Are Things Good Just Because God Says So?
Published onAug 24, 2012
Dr William Lane Craig was invited by the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) Christian Union, London to give a lecture titled “Can we be good without God?” In this video Dr Craig answers a question about the Euthyphro Dilemma.
The lecture formed part of the Reasonable Faith Tour in October 2011. The Tour was sponsored by Damaris Trust, UCCF and Premier Christian Radio.
I have discussed many subjects with my liberal friends over at the Ark Times Blog in the past and I have taken them on now on the subject of the absurdity of life without God in the picture. Most of my responses included quotes fromWilliam Lane Craig’sbookTHE ABSURDITY OF LIFE WITHOUT GOD. Here is the result of one ofthose encounters from June of 2013:
Hackett wrote, “I’m quite content with the reality of life as it is and have no need of faith and belief in any invisible being.”
____________
You have to base your morality on God’s revealed word or what are your left with? Reason is the answer most atheists give but where will that lead? Maybe to another Hitler? I have challenged those on this blog before to rent the movie “Crimes and Misdemeanors” through Net Flix and look at the valid attacks that Woody Allen makes on the morality that atheists are proposing and what the end result of that will be.
William Lane Craig has noted:
If life ends at the grave, then it makes no difference whether one has lived as a Stalin or as a saint. Since one’s destiny is ultimately unrelated to one’s behavior, you may as well just live as you please. As Dostoyevsky put it: “If there is no immortality, then all things are permitted.” On this basis, a writer like Ayn Rand is absolutely correct to praise the virtues of selfishness. Live totally for self; no one holds you accountable! Indeed, it would be foolish to do anything else, for life is too short to jeopardize it by acting out of anything but pure self-interest. Sacrifice for another person would be stupid. Kai Nielsen, an atheist philosopher who attempts to defend the viability of ethics without God, in the end admits,
We have not been able to show that reason requires the moral point of view, or that all really rational persons, unhoodwinked by myth or ideology, need not be individual egoists or classical amoralists. Reason doesn’t decide here. The picture I have painted for you is not a pleasant one. Reflection on it depresses me…. Pure practical reason, even with a good knowledge of the facts, will not take you to morality.8
But the problem becomes even worse. For, regardless of immortality, if there is no God, then any basis for objective standards of right and wrong seems to have evaporated. All we are confronted with is, in Jean-Paul Sartre’s words, the bare, valueless fact of existence. Moral values are either just expressions of personal taste or the by-products of socio-biological evolution and conditioning. In the words of one humanist philosopher, “The moral principles that govern our behavior are rooted in habit and custom, feeling and fashion.”9 In a world without God, who is to say which actions are right and which are wrong? Who is to judge that the values of Adolf Hitler are inferior to those of a saint? The concept of morality loses all meaning in a universe without God. As one contemporary atheistic ethicist points out, “To say that something is wrong because … it is forbidden by God, is … perfectly understandable to anyone who believes in a law-giving God. But to say that something is wrong … even though no God exists to forbid it, is not understandable….” “The concept of moral obligation [is] unintelligible apart from the idea of God. The words remain but their meaning is gone.”10 In a world without a divine lawgiver, there can be no objective right and wrong, only our culturally and personally relative, subjective judgments. This means that it is impossible to condemn war, oppression, or crime as evil. Nor can one praise brotherhood, equality, and love as good. For in a universe without God, good and evil do not exist—there is only the bare valueless fact of existence, and there is no one to say that you are right and I am wrong.
E P I S O D E 1 0 Dr. Francis Schaeffer – Episode X – Final Choices 27 min FINAL CHOICES I. Authoritarianism the Only Humanistic Social Option One man or an elite giving authoritative arbitrary absolutes. A. Society is sole absolute in absence of other absolutes. B. But society has to be […]
E P I S O D E 9 Dr. Francis Schaeffer – Episode IX – The Age of Personal Peace and Affluence 27 min T h e Age of Personal Peace and Afflunce I. By the Early 1960s People Were Bombarded From Every Side by Modern Man’s Humanistic Thought II. Modern Form of Humanistic Thought Leads […]
E P I S O D E 8 Dr. Francis Schaeffer – Episode VIII – The Age of Fragmentation 27 min I saw this film series in 1979 and it had a major impact on me. T h e Age of FRAGMENTATION I. Art As a Vehicle Of Modern Thought A. Impressionism (Monet, Renoir, Pissarro, Sisley, […]
E P I S O D E 7 Dr. Francis Schaeffer – Episode VII – The Age of Non Reason I am thrilled to get this film series with you. I saw it first in 1979 and it had such a big impact on me. Today’s episode is where we see modern humanist man act […]
E P I S O D E 6 How Should We Then Live 6#1 Uploaded by NoMirrorHDDHrorriMoN on Oct 3, 2011 How Should We Then Live? Episode 6 of 12 ________ I am sharing with you a film series that I saw in 1979. In this film Francis Schaeffer asserted that was a shift in […]
E P I S O D E 5 How Should We Then Live? Episode 5: The Revolutionary Age I was impacted by this film series by Francis Schaeffer back in the 1970′s and I wanted to share it with you. Francis Schaeffer noted, “Reformation Did Not Bring Perfection. But gradually on basis of biblical teaching there […]
Dr. Francis Schaeffer – Episode IV – The Reformation 27 min I was impacted by this film series by Francis Schaeffer back in the 1970′s and I wanted to share it with you. Schaeffer makes three key points concerning the Reformation: “1. Erasmian Christian humanism rejected by Farel. 2. Bible gives needed answers not only as to […]
Francis Schaeffer’s “How should we then live?” Video and outline of episode 3 “The Renaissance” Francis Schaeffer: “How Should We Then Live?” (Episode 3) THE RENAISSANCE I was impacted by this film series by Francis Schaeffer back in the 1970′s and I wanted to share it with you. Schaeffer really shows why we have so […]
Francis Schaeffer: “How Should We Then Live?” (Episode 2) THE MIDDLE AGES I was impacted by this film series by Francis Schaeffer back in the 1970′s and I wanted to share it with you. Schaeffer points out that during this time period unfortunately we have the “Church’s deviation from early church’s teaching in regard […]
Francis Schaeffer: “How Should We Then Live?” (Episode 1) THE ROMAN AGE Today I am starting a series that really had a big impact on my life back in the 1970′s when I first saw it. There are ten parts and today is the first. Francis Schaeffer takes a look at Rome and why […]
Francis Schaeffer: “Whatever Happened to the Human Race” (Episode 5) TRUTH AND HISTORY Published on Oct 7, 2012 by AdamMetropolis This crucial series is narrated by the late Dr. Francis Schaeffer and former Surgeon General Dr. C. Everett Koop. Today, choices are being made that undermine human rights at their most basic level. Practices once […]
The opening song at the beginning of this episode is very insightful. Francis Schaeffer: “Whatever Happened to the Human Race” (Episode 4) THE BASIS FOR HUMAN DIGNITY Published on Oct 7, 2012 by AdamMetropolis This crucial series is narrated by the late Dr. Francis Schaeffer and former Surgeon General Dr. C. Everett Koop. Today, choices […]
Francis Schaeffer: “Whatever Happened to the Human Race” (Episode 3) DEATH BY SOMEONE’S CHOICE Published on Oct 6, 2012 by AdamMetropolis This crucial series is narrated by the late Dr. Francis Schaeffer and former Surgeon General Dr. C. Everett Koop. Today, choices are being made that undermine human rights at their most basic level. Practices […]
Francis Schaeffer: “Whatever Happened to the Human Race?” (Episode 2) SLAUGHTER OF THE INNOCENTS Published on Oct 6, 2012 by AdamMetropolis This crucial series is narrated by the late Dr. Francis Schaeffer and former Surgeon General Dr. C. Everett Koop. Today, choices are being made that undermine human rights at their most basic level. Practices […]
It is not possible to know where the pro-life evangelicals are coming from unless you look at the work of the person who inspired them the most. That person was Francis Schaeffer. I do care about economic issues but the pro-life issue is the most important to me. Several years ago Adrian Rogers (past president of […]
Ecclesiastes 2-3 Published on Sep 19, 2012 Calvary Chapel Spring Valley | Sunday Evening | September 16, 2012 | Derek Neider _____________________________ I have written on the Book of Ecclesiastes and the subject of the meaning of our lives on several occasions on this blog. In this series on Ecclesiastes I hope to show how secular […]
Ecclesiastes 1 Published on Sep 4, 2012 Calvary Chapel Spring Valley | Sunday Evening | September 2, 2012 | Pastor Derek Neider _____________________ I have written on the Book of Ecclesiastes and the subject of the meaning of our lives on several occasions on this blog. In this series on Ecclesiastes I hope to show how […]
Ecclesiastes 8-10 | Still Searching After All These Years Published on Oct 9, 2012 Calvary Chapel Spring Valley | Sunday Evening | October 7, 2012 | Pastor Derek Neider _______________________ Ecclesiastes 11-12 | Solomon Finds His Way Published on Oct 30, 2012 Calvary Chapel Spring Valley | Sunday Evening | October 28, 2012 | Pastor Derek Neider […]
Ecclesiastes 6-8 | Solomon Turns Over a New Leaf Published on Oct 2, 2012 Calvary Chapel Spring Valley | Sunday Evening | September 30, 2012 | Pastor Derek Neider _____________________ I have written on the Book of Ecclesiastes and the subject of the meaning of our lives on several occasions on this blog. In this series […]
Ecclesiastes 4-6 | Solomon’s Dissatisfaction Published on Sep 24, 2012 Calvary Chapel Spring Valley | Sunday Evening | September 23, 2012 | Pastor Derek Neider ___________________ I have written on the Book of Ecclesiastes and the subject of the meaning of our lives on several occasions on this blog. In this series on Ecclesiastes I hope […]
Overview of the Book of Ecclesiastes Overview of the Book of EcclesiastesAuthor: Solomon or an unknown sage in the royal courtPurpose: To demonstrate that life viewed merely from a realistic human perspective must result in pessimism, and to offer hope through humble obedience and faithfulness to God until the final judgment.Date: 930-586 B.C. Ecclesiastes 2-3 Published on Sep 19, […]
Ecclesiastes 1 Published on Sep 4, 2012 Calvary Chapel Spring Valley | Sunday Evening | September 2, 2012 | Pastor Derek Neider _____________________ I have written on the Book of Ecclesiastes and the subject of the meaning of our lives on several occasions on this blog. In this series on Ecclesiastes I hope to show how […]
Ecclesiastes 8-10 | Still Searching After All These Years Published on Oct 9, 2012 Calvary Chapel Spring Valley | Sunday Evening | October 7, 2012 | Pastor Derek Neider _______________________ Ecclesiastes 11-12 | Solomon Finds His Way Published on Oct 30, 2012 Calvary Chapel Spring Valley | Sunday Evening | October 28, 2012 | Pastor Derek Neider […]
A 13 minute documentary about the legendary arts school in the mountains of North Carolina
Legend of Black Mountain
Uploaded on Apr 20, 2008
Black Mountain College was a phenomenal circumstance. The fact that so many artists of that level in their respective fields could organize and develop such an institution is unparalleled. Who would’ve thought that a small mountain town of western North Carolina would be their home, albeit for a short while.
20th Century Fox invited our writer, Jennifer Donovan, on an expenses-paid set visit to North Carolina for Nicholas Sparks’ new movie, The Longest Ride, in theaters April 10.
Earlier this week, I wrote about my visit to the set of The Longest Ride movie, focusing on the casting and the characters. In this post, I’m going to look at some of the interesting elements of the plot, which made for a great book, but will also look great on screen.
Nicholas Sparks on the Bull-riding Element
One of the great things about this film, but the partnership that Fox had with the PBR to develop this film was like nothing you’ve ever seen. And it was necessary because people who make movies are good at making movies. And every time you see an animal in a movie, that animal is tame or trained, so they go to their spot, and so you know where to put the camera.
You don’t know where that bull is going, so how do you get Scott on the bull? How do you get the angle right? Well, guess who knows How to do that? The PBR, among other things. So, then Fox can do things that the PBR can’t with the level of quality of the camera. It’s the most realistic stuff. These are real cowboys. They’re from the PBR.
These are the real bulls from the PBR. I mean, you can look up the bull in the PBR. The thing is ranked number three in the world right now. It’s unbelievable.
Art in post-war North Carolina
In my post at 5 Minutes for Books, On Reading Nicholas Sparks for the First Time, I wrote about talking with one of the other bloggers for whom this was her first experience with a Nicholas Sparks novel. One of the things she noted, and that I liked about this novel as well, was the rich backstory and characterization of Ira and Ruth Levinson. The backdrop of art was interesting to me, not only because my daughter is an artist, but because I always love learning about a different culture or hobby or occupation while I’m reading fiction. Between bull riding and art collecting in post-war North Carolina, I learned a lot while reading The Longest Ride.
So, I have this idea for this story, and Ira and Ruth, and I have in my mind that they’re going to collect art. And I’m sitting there thinking, “How am I going to pull this off? I live in North Carolina, right. There’s a nice Jewish couple in North Carolina. If they’re in New York, maybe you could see it happening, right.”
So, I said to myself, “How can I make this seem believable?” So, my first notion was that they were just going to meet an artist who happened to be vacationing in North Carolina, befriend this person, man or woman, go with him to wherever the art scene was, and that’s how they got started.
So, that was my plan. So, I said, “Okay. So, let’s find a North Carolina artist who might have been around in the ’40s, ’50s. So, I Google like literally “North Carolina artists in the 1940s,” or something.
And boom, up pops Black Mountain College. And it turns out that Black Mountain College was this experimental college, ran for about 24 years in the 1930s to, I think, 1956 or 1957.
And it was the center of the modern art movement for American painters. Everyone from Willem de Kooning was there, to Rauschenberg, to Franz Kline, to Pat Passlof.
I mean, De Kooning’s paintings, they go for $350 million. He’s over here teaching at Black Mountain College. Buckminster Fuller was there. Robert DeNiro’s father, who was a very famous artist, he was a graduate of Black Mountain College.
Came in, they did painting and sculpture, whatever they did. And it was there, and it was a couple of hours away.
So, there I’m writing, I’m looking for an artist, and I find out that this key element that I need to make the art collecting believable, that center was like two hours from where I placed them originally.
I was like, “Wow.” So, I called my agent and I said, “You are not going to believe this. You are not going to believe what I just found.” And so, of course, then I learned all I could about Black Mountain College.
The Longest Ride is in theaters April 10.
Based on the bestselling novel by master storyteller Nicholas Sparks, THE LONGEST RIDE centers on the star-crossed love affair between Luke, a former champion bull rider looking to make a comeback, and Sophia, a college student who is about to embark upon her dream job in New York City’s art world. As conflicting paths and ideals test their relationship, Sophia and Luke make an unexpected connection with Ira, whose memories of his own decades-long romance with his beloved wife deeply inspire the young couple. Spanning generations and two intertwining love stories, THE LONGEST RIDE explores the challenges and infinite rewards of enduring love.
Starring: Britt Robertson, Scott Eastwood, Jack Huston, Oona Chaplin, and Alan Alda
Directed by: George Tillman, Jr.
My first post in this serieswas on the composer John Cage and mysecond postwas on Susan Weil and Robert Rauschenberg who were good friend of Cage. The third post in this series was on Jorge Fick. Earlier we noted that Fick was a student at Black Mountain College and an artist that lived in New York and he lent a suit to the famous poet Dylan Thomas and Thomas died in that suit.
The fourth post in this seriesis on the artist Xanti Schawinsky and he had a great influence on John Cage who later taught at Black Mountain College. Schawinsky taught at Black Mountain College from 1936-1938 and Cage right after World War II. In the fifth post I discuss David Weinrib and his wife Karen Karnes who were good friends with John Cage and they all lived in the same community. In the 6th post I focus on Vera B. William and she attended Black Mountain College where she met her first husband Paul and they later co-founded the Gate Hill Cooperative Community and Vera served as a teacher for the community from 1953-70. John Cage and several others from Black Mountain College also lived in the Community with them during the 1950’s. In the 7th post I look at the life and work of M.C.Richards who also was part of the Gate Hill Cooperative Community and Black Mountain College.
In the 8th post I look at book the life of Anni Albers who is perhaps the best known textile artist of the 20th century and at Paul Klee who was one of her teachers at Bauhaus. In the 9th postthe experience of Bill Treichler in the years of 1947-1949 is examined at Black Mountain College. In 1988, Martha and Bill started The Crooked Lake Review, a local history journal and Bill passed away in 2008 at age 84.
In the 10th post I look at the art of Irwin Kremen who studied at Black Mountain College in 1946-47 and there Kremen spent his time focused on writing and the literature classes given by the poet M. C. Richards. In the 11th post I discuss the fact that JosefAlbers led the procession of dozens of Bauhaus faculty and students to Black Mountain.
In the 12th post I feature Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944) who was featured in the film THE LONGEST RIDE and the film showed Kandinsky teaching at BLACK MOUNTAIN COLLEGE which was not true according to my research. Evidently he was invited but he had to decline because of his busy schedule but many of his associates at BRAUHAUS did teach there. In the 13th post I look at the writings of the communist Charles Perrow.
Willem de Kooning was such a major figure in the art world and because of that I have dedicated the 14th, 15thand16thposts in this series on him. Paul McCartney got interested in art through his friendship with Willem because Linda’s father had him as a client. Willem was a part of New York School of Abstract expressionism or Action painting, others included Jackson Pollock, Elaine de Kooning, Lee Krasner, Franz Kline, Arshile Gorky, Mark Rothko, Hans Hofmann, Adolph Gottlieb, Anne Ryan, Robert Motherwell, Philip Guston, Clyfford Still, and Richard Pousette-Dart.
The story of Black Mountain College begins in 1933 and comprises a fascinating chapter in the history of education and the arts. Conceived by John A. Rice, a brilliant and mercurial scholar who left Rollins College in a storm of controversy, Black Mountain College was born out of a desire to create a new type of college based on John Dewey’s principles of progressive education. The events that precipitated the College’s founding occurred simultaneously with the rise of Adolf Hitler, the closing of the Bauhaus by the Nazis, and the beginning of the persecution of artists and intellectuals on the European continent. Some of these people found their way to Black Mountain, either as students or faculty. Meanwhile, the United States was mired in the Great Depression, and Franklin Roosevelt, committed to putting people back to work, established the Public Works Arts Project (a precursor of the WPA).
The founders of the College believed that the study and practice of art were indispensable aspects of a student’s general liberal arts education, and they hired Josef Albers to be the first art teacher. Speaking not a word of English, he and his wife Anni left the turmoil in Hitler’s Germany and crossed the Atlantic Ocean by boat to teach art at this small, rebellious college in the mountains of North Carolina.
Black Mountain College was fundamentally different from other colleges and universities of the time. It was owned and operated by the faculty and was committed to democratic governance and to the idea that the arts are central to the experience of learning. All members of the College community participated in its operation, including farm work, construction projects and kitchen duty. Located in the midst of the beautiful North Carolina mountains near Asheville, the secluded environment fostered a strong sense of individuality and creative intensity within the small College community.
Legendary even in its own time, Black Mountain College attracted and created maverick spirits, some of whom went on to become well-known and extremely influential individuals in the latter half of the 20th century. A partial list includes people such as Willem and Elaine de Kooning, Robert Rauschenberg, Josef and Anni Albers, Jacob Lawrence, Merce Cunningham, John Cage, Cy Twombly, Kenneth Noland, Ben Shahn, Franz Kline, Arthur Penn, Buckminster Fuller, M.C. Richards, Francine du Plessix Gray, Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, Dorothea Rockburne and many others, famous and not-so-famous, who have impacted the world in a significant way. Even now, decades after its closing in 1957, the powerful influence of Black Mountain College continues to reverberate.
Willem de Kooning was born in Rotterdam, in South Holland in the Netherlands, on April 24, 1904. His parents, Leendert de Kooning and Cornelia Nobel, were divorced in 1907, and de Kooning lived first with his father and then with his mother. He left school in 1916 and became an apprentice in a firm of commercial artists. Until 1924 he attended evening classes at the Academie van Beeldende Kunsten en Technische Wetenschappen, the academy of fine arts and applied sciences of Rotterdam, now the Willem de Kooning Academie.[3]
In 1926 de Kooning travelled to the United States as a stowaway on the Shelley, a British freighter bound for Argentina, and on August 15 landed at Newport News, Virginia. He stayed at the Dutch Seamen’s Home inHoboken and found work as a house-painter. In 1927 he moved to Manhattan, where he had a studio on West Forty-fourth Street. He supported himself with jobs in carpentry, house-painting and commercial art.[3]
De Kooning began painting in his free time; in 1928 he joined the art colony at Woodstock, New York. He also began to meet some of the Modernist artists active in Manhattan. Among them were Stuart Davis, the Armenian Arshile Gorky and the Russian John Graham, who together de Kooning called the “Three Musketeers”.[4]:98 Gorky, who de Kooning first met at the home of Misha Reznikoff, became a close friend and, for at least ten years, an important influence.[4]:100Balcomb Greene said that “de Kooning virtually worshipped Gorky”; according to Aristodimos Kaldis, “Gorky was de Kooning’s master”.[4]:184 De Kooning’s drawing Self-portrait with Imaginary Brother, from about 1938, may show him with Gorky; the pose of the figures is that of a photograph of Gorky with Peter Busa in about 1936.[4]:184
De Kooning joined the Artists Union in 1934, and in 1935 was employed in the Federal Art Project of the Works Progress Administration, for which he designed a number of murals including some for the Williamsburg Federal Housing Project in Brooklyn. None of them were executed,[1] but a sketch for one was included in New Horizons in American Art at the Museum of Modern Art, his first group show. From 1936, when De Kooning had to leave the Federal Art Project because he did not have American citizenship, he began to work full-time as an artist, earning income from commissions and by giving lessons.[3]
De Kooning’s paintings of the 1930s and early 1940s are abstract still-lifes characterised by geometric or biomorphic shapes and strong colours. They show the influence of his friends Davis, Gorky and Graham, but also of Arp, Joan Miró, Mondrian and Picasso.[1] In the same years de Kooning also painted a series of solitary male figures, either standing or seated, against undefined backgrounds; many of these are unfinished.[1][3]
By 1946 de Kooning had begun a series of black and white paintings, which he would continue into 1949. During this period he had his first one-man show at the Charles Egan Gallery; it consisted largely of black and white works, although a few has passages of bright color. De Kooning’s black paintings are important to the history of Abstract Expressionism of their densely impacted forms, their mixed media, and their technique.[5]:25
De Kooning’s well-known Woman series, begun in 1950 the time after meeting his future wife and culminating in Woman VI, owes much to Picasso, not least in the aggressive, penetrative breaking apart of the figure, and the spaces around it. Picasso’s late works show signs that he, in turn, saw images of works by Pollock and de Kooning.[6]:17 De Kooning led the 1950s’ art world to a new level known as the American Abstract Expressionism. “From 1940 to the present, Woman has manifested herself in de Kooning’s paintings and drawings as at once the focus of desire, frustration, inner conflict, pleasure, … and as posing problems of conception and handling as demanding as those of an engineer.”[7] The female figure is an important symbol for de Kooning’s art career and his own life. This painting is considered as a significant work of art for the museum through its historical context about the post World War II history and American feminist movement. Additionally, the medium of this painting makes it different form others of de Kooning’s time.
“Women” Drawing by Willem de Kooning, Hames Goodman Gallery, Buffalo, January 10-25.
Willem de Kooning: Retrospective Drawings 1936-1963, Allan Stone Gallery, New York, February[5]:126
1956
Willem de Kooning, Paul Kantor Gallery, March 22- April 30, and tour to Aspen Institute, Colorado
Willem de Kooning: A retrospective Exhibition from public and private collections, Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton, Massachusetts, April 8- May 2, and tour to Hayden Gallery, Massachusetts Institute of technology Cambridge.[5]:126
1966
De Kooning’s Women, Allan Stone Gallery, March 14- April 2.[5]:126
From left to right: Robot and star, 1995, Brains on fire, 1994, Black scratch I, 1994
“You have to paint abstract after you’ve been seeing Bill de Kooning” – Sir Paul McCartney
Paul credits the artist Willem de Kooning with being one of his greatest influences, as well as being a family friend. They met at the end of the seventies when de Kooning was a client of Linda’s father’s law firm.
Linda and Paul frequently visited the artist in his studio and Paul often became so fired up by the visits that he would go to the paint shop on the way home and buy all the same paints and canvases as de Kooning, or ‘Bill’ as he affectionately refers to him.
Paul remembers De Kooning’s attitude to his painting as a particular source of inspiration. One day he asked the artist what his painting was meant to be, to which de Kooning replied, “I don’t know, it looks like a couch, huh?” Paul found the remark profoundly liberating. In his own words, ‘he never looked back’.
“What was to go on the canvas was not a picture but an event.”
-Harold Rosenberg
One of the important experiments in American art education began in Asheville , North Carolina , in 1933. Black Mountain College was conceived at a critical moment in history; its founding occurred concurrent with ominous events abroad: Hitler became Chancellor of Germany, and the Nazi terror of book-burnings, street beatings, political arrests of Jews, communists, homosexuals and others, and incinerations in concentration camps. The Nazis closed the famous Bauhaus, the innovative school of art, architecture, and design. Josef Albers came to Black MountainCollege as director, bringing his Bauhaus experience to encourage artistic cross-fertilization. By the time the College closed in 1957 it had attracted a venerable Who’s Who of the avant-garde, including Robert Rauschenberg, John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Buckminster Fuller, Eric Bentley, Robert Motherwell, Paul Taylor, Alfred Kazin, and many others. Willem de Kooning taught there in 1948.[1]
In the late 1930s and early 1940s Abstract and Cubist art were formalist structures that did not necessarily embody transcendent, universal themes. Inspired by the Freudian method of free association, the Surrealists put great emphasis on the instinctual and invented “psychic automatism” to breed buried images unavailable to the conscious mind. The goal of forward-looking American artists (fellow artist Jacob Kainen called them “the alert artists”) was to synthesize the modern movements into an entirely new pictorial style; what interested them about Surrealism was its processes, its attitudes toward creativity and the unconscious, and its emphasis on content as opposed to form. A few of the Surrealist artists “painted responses to the political and historical events of the period … Picasso’s Guernica more successfully captured the Americans’ imagination as a direct response to disaster…” [2]
The Europeans had shown the way; yet the avant-garde American artists had to work desperately to break away from the influence of the School of Paris and especially from that Olympian, Pablo Picasso. Like the Collective Unconscious or the dreams of childhood, Picasso’s images and icons kept creeping in while the Abstract Expressionists used both Surrealism and Abstraction to break the Spaniard’s stranglehold. Discussing art in the 1930s and 1940s, Jackson Pollock complained, “Damn that Picasso, just when I think I’ve gotten somewhere I discover that bastard got there first;” Arshile Gorky mourned that they were “defeated” by Picasso; while de Kooning said, “Picasso is the man to beat.”
De Kooning drew on the School of Paris (Pollock called him a “French” painter); his “apparent aim is a synthesis of tradition and modernism that would grant him more flexibility within the confines of the Late Cubist canon of design,” stated Clement Greenberg; “… there is perhaps even more Luciferian pride behind de Kooning’s ambition than there is behind Picasso’s.” [3]Thomas B. Hess wrote, “He will do drawings on transparent paper, scatter them one on top of the other, study the composition drawing that appears on top, make a drawing from this, reverse it, tear it in half, and put it on top of still another drawing. Often the search is for a shape to start off a painting…” [4]Harold Rosenberg, who upheld the idea of “high art” in defiance of mass culture, applied existential relationships between artists and the world: “The vision of transcending the arts … rests upon one crucial question: What makes one an artist?” [5]He did not see abstraction as a projection of individual emotions so much as a reflection of overall psychic need. Abstract art in its final analysis, he asserted, was transcendental.
De Kooning admired Cubism for its emphasis on structure; [6] yet Asheville, (1948, Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.) its surface sensuality dominating compositional logic, is both linear and
Willem de Kooning, Asheville, 1948, oil and enamel / cardboard,
64.9×81 cm (25½x31-7/8), The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.
painterly as well as structural. The need for the ordered geometric background structure of Cubism did not begin to disappear from de Kooning’s work until he increased his gestural activity, probably under Jackson Pollock’s influence, by loosening shapes and allowing the paint to run in such paintings as Light in August.
Willem de Kooning, Light in August, 1947,
55×41½, Museum of Contemporary Art, Teheran
The use of the sign painter’s liner brush [7] allowed him to get the precipitate look of a quick expressionist sketch; each stroke is integrated with every other stroke that shift ceaselessly as forms merge with background as well as with other forms to mold a single consolidated surface. Art dealer and friend of the artist, Allan Stone, described the forms as opening up and flowing into the background, “creating fluidity and movement which can be termed ‘liquification of cubism.'” [8]
The push toward a new expression in Asheville is beyond literal legibility. [9] Nevertheless Charles F. Stuckey says the sulfuric color scheme of ocher, red, black and white “evoke flames, smoke and ashes”; [10] he reads a large dark “eye” to the right as looking like a “cigarette burn in cloth;” he also sees “torn and displaced legs, elbows, and torso”, body parts [11] scattered like martyr’s attributes, as well as “lips cracked to expose teeth”, and finds a “darkened left side of a mouth that
Diagram of Ashville
seems to curl forward to suggest the way paper curls when it burns” (there is a plethora of gnashing teeth in Picasso’s Weeping Women [“postscripts” to Guernica, summer,1937]).
Pablo Picasso, Weeping Women 1937
However, Stuckey also finds these conflagration similes in the frantic brushstroke of de Kooning’sLight in August as they refer to the fire episode in William Faulkner’s Light in August, a novel the painter especially liked. The titles of several of de Kooning’s black and white paintings at this time:Dark Pond, Night Square, together with Black Friday (the darker name for “Good Friday,” the day of the Crucifixion) and Light in August, are “drawn from the Bible, Aeschylus, and William Faulkner.” [12]
The title of Light in August is derived from the novel of the same name by Faulkner. Heir of the Symbolists, he was little appreciated until Malcolm Cowley’s Portable Faulkner was published in 1946. F. Scott Fitzgerald suffered a similar fate: when he died in 1940 none of his books was in print, “The revival – or, better, the apotheosis – of [The Great] Gatsby began after the author’s death …. That was in 1941. It took another five years for a new generation to rediscover it.”[13] De Kooning, a “fervent reader,” [14] may have been part of that generation and read about “the macabre valley of ashes presided over by the eyes on a billboard” in Gatsby.
Scott Fitzgerald and Zelda embodied the “flaming youth” [15] in the 1920s before she suffered a mental breakdown. Zelda was confined to mental institutions throughout the 1930s and 1940s until her tragic death in March of 1948 when fire destroyed the Highland Hospital inAsheville, North Carolina, where she was a patient. De Kooning may have read about Zelda’s death in the New York Times of March 12, 1948 : “Flames quickly engulfed the four-story central building of the Highland Hospital for Nervous Diseases. … Mrs. F. Scott Fitzgerald, widow of the author and a victim of the hospital fire, had been ill for some years and went to the Highland Hospital three months ago…”
Assuming de Kooning read of the tragic fire at Highland Hospital, he probably would have recalled the devastating fire in Gorky’s studio, Gorky’s Charred Beloved of 1946 and Agony of 1947 (Gorky committed suicide while de Kooning was working on Asheville), as well as the flames in Picasso’s Guernica (fig. 2) and related studies. Stalin’s scorched earth policy, the fire-storms ofEngland, Germany, and Japan during the war, as well as the frequent blazes in New York City , may have also occurred to him.
De Kooning’s penchant for the soot and detritus of the city is the reverse of Marcel Proust’s “golden morning brightness of a Parisian sidewalk” and more like Baudelaire’s “botanist of the sidewalk.” Edwin Denby, poet and friend in the 1930s and 1940s, recalled the artist’s attraction to minute details encountered in his environment: “I remember walking at night in Chelsea with Bill … and his pointing out to me on the pavement the dispersed compositions – spots and cracks and bits of wrappers and reflection of neon-light…” [16] Indeed, Rosalind Krauss similarly has commented on Picasso’s turning the dross of collage into art [17] as he shaped “these bits and pieces into an organized montage.” [18] In Apollinaire’s Zone, written just as Picasso was embarking on collage, the poet praised what the artist saw in the streets: “The inscription on the sign boards and the walls … You read the handbills, catalogs, posters that sing out loud and clear …” [19]
Willem de Kooning, Abstraction, 1949/50,
Thyssen-Bornamisza collection, Madrid.
De Kooning often began several pictures with related images; Asheville [20] andAbstraction (1949/50, Thyssen-Bornemisza collection, Madrid) have much in common. The floor line in the ashen-hued Abstraction, leading in from the bottom right corner, creates a “nook” on the right side (and a resting place for a dark skull – an unusually non-abstract and specific image for the artist at that time) which “houses” a ladder, window, and door, as well as the torso, leg, and rectangular structure at bottom left. The vibrant yellows, blues, and fuchsias are dispersed by black strokes within modified white areas. There is a Picassoid hoof-form in the upper left corner, a house structure in the upper right (the same double-bar as in Asheville, a visual abutment which undoubtedly corresponds to the window edge in Guernica and related sketches), as well as several rectangular window and door shapes and a ladder from Minotauromachia.
Pablo Picasso, Guernica , 1937,
oil / canvas, 349x777cm (137-3/8×305-7/8),
Museo Nacional de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid.
Pablo Picasso, Minotauramachia, 1935,
etching, 49.5×69.2 cm (19½x27¼).
Is the ladder a metaphor for escape? A fireman’s attempt at rescue? A passage from one plane to another? The ladder of life and the time-honored symbol of ascension, the primal idea that one climbs the ladder of one’s forebears (however Olympian) as with Jacob’s Ladder?
In Asheville de Kooning depicts a book of charred matches (left) which he seems to have used from his earlier Still Life with Matches (c.1942, collection Mr. & Mrs. Stephen D. Paine),
Willem de Kooning, Still Life with Matches, c.1942,
13.9×19 cm (5½x7½), Mr & Mrs Stephen D. Paine collection.
very much as Thomas Hess described his working methods. This detail is topped by a blackened circle that probably was originally a thumbtack (top left) to keep fragments of drawings in position as the artist worked. A second folded matchbook is at the top just below the “thumbtack.” Are the shapes references to squares, rectangles, openings, windows, doors, and other apertures? Are they meant to appear burnt and damaged? Geometric shapes, imbued with implied order, are usually inserted in an effort to stabilize the picture, but they keep getting lost in de Kooning’s shuffle of shapes. Certainly the series of rectangles on the left of Asheville includes a “spent book of matches” (Stuckey); they are also similar to the ladder in the Thyssen-Bornemisza Abstraction, both of which may have been prompted by the ladder in Picasso’s Minotauromachia, and/or the many ladders in Joan Miró’s and Paul Klee’s and other Surrealists’ works where the Jacob-like ladder leads upwards to a fusion of tangible and intangible, a transcending union of heaven and earth, to “higher realities.”
Indeed, below the spent safety matches is a form very much like the leg of the dying horse inComposition Study for Guernica comparable to the form in the lower left of Asheville, both in similar
Pablo Picasso, Detail, Composition Study for Guernica, (II), 1 May 1937,
pencil on blue paper, 21x27cm (8-1/4×10-5/8), Museo Nacional de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid.
areas of both paintings, not to mention two very Picassoid horse’s hoofs, bottom center (also bottom center in Guernica). The foot of the Rushing Woman in Guernica is comparable to the shape in the lower right corner of Asheville (similar areas of both paintings); the rectangles in the upper right corner of Asheville are like the right-angled edges of the window of the burning house in Guernica(similar areas of both paintings).
Picasso’s Guernica and Minotaur images, often reproduced in Cahiers d’Art and Minotauremagazines, could have been seen in the late ’30s and early ’40s by American artists. The mural itself was exhibited in New York at the Valentin Gallery in 1939, and an extensive Picasso exhibition was held at the Museum of Modern Art in the same year. De Kooning was undoubtedly familiar with the first important book on Guernica [21] with its related studies and photographs of the mural in progress.
If Asheville is turned upside-down, the matchbooks relate to the more recognizable rectangles, apertures, and ladder in the Thyssen-Bornemisza Abstraction, as well as to Picasso’s many ladders.
Other paintings at that time indicate fragments of drawings are shuffled and scattered in the search for new paintings. Specific forms in such as those in the upper right are identical to the forms in.
Willem de Kooning, Painting, c.1950,
76.5×101.6 cm (30-1/8×40), David Geffen collection, Los Angeles
Willem de Kooning, Little Attic, c.1949, oil / paper / press board,
77.4×10.1 cm (30½x40), Dr. Israel Rosen collection.
The imagery in these two works, both the same size, presumably derived from a single drawing and then migrated from one painting to another. [22] These “specific forms” are similar to the progression of rectangular forms on the left side of Asheville. Other forms in Geffen’s Painting, such as ladders and gaping mouths, are repeated throughout the compositions of this period (the heart shape on the right in Little Attic is reminiscent of the shape of testicles in much of Picasso’s depictions of bulls. Both organs relate to man’s emotional life, they bind male psyche and male soma).
The Olympian Picasso continued to possess his progeny.
De Kooning often used window-like rectangles (usually delineated with black paint) in his early work to organize the background and relate the composition to the edges of his canvas. With no directional trajectories, the tension of the window shapes make enclosure dynamic rather than ambiguous. An aperture for penetration into space, a window often symbolizes the eye* of the artist opened for revelation; one can look in as well as out [23] into larger vistas, or greater consciousness.
————————–
* After death, the eyes of the deceased are closed; this gesture symbolically shuts the “window of the soul.”
————————–
De Kooning was probably familiar with Wassily Kandinsky’s Concerning the Spiritual in Art, (N.Y., 1947) where he attributes to colors certain universal meanings: “Black is something burnt out, the ashes of a funeral pyre … The silence of black is the silence of death …” Completed shortly after the artist’s black and white period, Asheville combines color as well as black and white, but none dominates. Generally, color isn’t abstract in the sense that it involves nuances of mood, while black and white is more abstract because it relates less to nature. However, we’re often disconcerted by color schemes with values of equal importance when there is no dominant hue.
Space is a pre-condition of all that exists, its appearance is emptiness, and therefore can contain everything; or as de Kooning explained, space contains “billions and billions of hunks of matter … floating around in darkness according to a great design of nothingness.” [24] De Kooning’s picture plane, to which any shape or image could be attached, is not dissimilar to the relativistic unified field theory that tries to integrate into one comprehensive idea the many clashing bits of data and complex uncertainty of randomness that is modern physics.
In the manner of Levi-Strauss’s bricoleur, the handyman, tinkerer, or inventor of myths, memory accumulates appealing images and materials that can then be reshaped and used over and over again. Many of the abstract shapes in Asheville look like fragments from previous works, a kind of visual promiscuity, or what another critic called “willful pentimenti.” [25] Although there are many unrecognized and suggestive abstract forms in the painting, they pass before us almost without our recognizing them, like fleeting images in a dream. Yet Asheville , with its loopy liner brush lines and sooty colors, is certainly one of de Kooning’s most regal works. As Rudolf Arnheim explained, in reference to Picasso: “The creative process has systolic and diastolic stages. The artist condenses his material, eliminating unessentials, or paints an abundance of shapes and ideas, recklessly crowding the concept. Rather than grow consistently like a plant, the work often fluctuates between antagonistic operations.” [26]
Or, as Harold Rosenberg said, abstract art in its final analysis is transcendental.
– E N D –
NOTES:
[ 1 ] Martin B Duberman, BlackMountain: An Exploration in Community, Peter Smith, Gloucester ,Massachusetts , 1988. p.283: The artist and Buckminster Fuller became “great friends, really extraordinary friends,” said Fuller. “I used to have to go to Asheville to get things for my structures, for my classes…and Bill de Kooning used to like to ride along with me and talk philosophy. Bill is a very, very wonderful thinker.”
S. Naifeh and G.W. Smith, Jackson Pollock: American Saga, Clarkson Potter, N.Y., 1989, p.710: de Kooning and Rosenberg shared a thoughtful if not deep philosophical streak; when asked if he would rather be a “half-assed philosopher or a great painter, de Kooning replied, “Let me think about that.”
[2] Stephen Polcari, Abstract Expressionism and the Modern Experience, Cambridge University Press, New York, Port Chester, Melbourne, Sydney, 1991, p.28.
[3] Clement Greenberg, Art and Culture: Critical Essays, Beacon Press, Boston, 1961, p.213.
[4] Thomas B. Hess, Willem de Kooning, Museum of Modern Art , N.Y., 1968, p.47.
[5] Harold Rosenberg, The De-definition of Art, Horizon Press, N.Y., 1972, p.13.
[6] Willem de Kooning, “What Abstract Art Means to Me,” Museum of Modern Art Bulletin 18,Spring 1951, p.7; reprinted in Hess, p. 146. De Kooning also described Cubism as “a poetic frame … where an artist could practise his intuition;” in Hess, p. 146.
[7] Willem de Kooning: Tracing the Figure, essays by Cornelia H. Butler, Paul Schimmel, RichardShiff and Anne M. Wagner, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles , Princeton UniversityPress, Princeton and Oxford , 2002. Elaine de Kooning’s brother, Conrad Fried, remembered that deKooning made his own brushes with extra-long floppy hairs designed to make “fast,” whiplash lines.Shiff, p.158.
[8] Allan Stone, Willemde Kooning: Liquefying Cubism, Allan Stone Gallery catalog, New York, 1994, p. iii.
[9] Willem de Kooning: “I feel certain parts you ought to leave up to the world” in “The Renaissance and Order”, trans/formation 1, 1951; quoted in Thomas B. Hess, Willem de Kooning, Museum of Modern Art , N.Y., 1968, p.141; and in Robert Goodnough, ed., Artists’ Sessions at Studio 35, N.Y.,1950, p.16.
[10] Charles F. Stuckey, “Bill de Kooning and Joe Christmas,” Art in America, vol.68, no.3, March1980, p.78.
[11] Willem de Kooning: Tracing the Figure, essays by Cornelia H. Butler, Paul Schimmel, RichardShiff and Anne M. Wagner, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, Princeton UniversityPress, Princeton and Oxford , 2002. Shiff, p. 164, n. 1: “I nevertheless believe that nearly all of deKooning’s “abstractions” either began with a reference to the human figure or incorporated figuralelements along the way.”
[12] Sally Yard, “The Angel and the demoiselle – Willem de Kooning’s Black Friday,” Record of the Art Museum, Princeton University, vol. 50, no. 2, 1991, p.15.
[13] The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald, introduction by Charles Scribner III , N.Y. , 1992, p.xviii]: The Great Gatsby “led the Fitzgerald rediscovery and restoration of 1945-50…” Fitzgerald wrote of “…the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors’ eyes … commensurate with their capacity to wonder.” as well as the “…sporting life at Asheville …” [The Great Gatsby, preface and notes by Matthew J. Bruccoli, N.Y., 1992, p.23].
[14] Numerous friends, associates and critics have cited de Kooning’s wide reading, from Kierkegaard, Melville and Proust to Dostoevsky, Joyce and Whitman.
[15] John Tytell, Passionate Lives, Birch Lane Press , New York , 1991, .p.77. Fitzgerald said Zelda had “a more intense flame at its highest than ever I had.”
[16] Elaine de Kooning, “Edwin Denby Remembered – Part 1,” Ballet Review 12, spring 1984, p. 30; also, Edwin Denby, Willem de Kooning, N.Y., Hanuman Books, 1988, p.46.
[17] Rosalind E. Krauss, The Picasso Papers, N.Y., Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998, p. 72, quoting David Cottongton’s “turning the dross of the vernacular into the gold of art” in Picasso & Braque: A Symposium, (ed., Lynn Zelevansky) N.Y. Museum of Modern Art, 1992, p. 69.
[20] The painting is inscribed as Ashville [sic] on the back of the panel, with the emphasis on “Ash.” Charles Moore Brock, unpublished Master’s Thesis, “Describing Chaos: Willem de Kooning’s Collage Painting Asheville and its Relationship to Traditions of Description and Illusionism in Western Art,” 1993, University of Maryland , p.8.
[21] Juan Larrea, Guernica: Pablo Picasso, introduction by Alfred H Barr, published by the art dealer, Curt Valentin, N.Y., 1947.
[25] Sally Yard, Willem de Kooning: The First Twenty-Six Years inNew York– 1927-1952 ( New York : Garland , 1986, p. 57.
[26] Rudolf Arnheim, Picasso’s Guernica:The Genesis of a Painting, University of California Press,Berkeley & Los Angeles , 1962, p.56.
This paper was written with the help of a Release-Time Research Grant from Long Island Universityat Brooklyn . I wish to thank John Ott, educator, computer scientist, and mathematician, for his suggestions in preparing this study.
Pipes of Peace is the fourth studio album by English singer-songwriter Paul McCartney, released in 1983. As the follow-up to the popular Tug of War, the album came close to matching the commercial success of its predecessor in Britain but peaked only at number 15 on America’s Billboard 200 albums chart. While Pipes of Peace was the source of international hit singles such as “Say Say Say” (recorded with Michael Jackson) and the title track, the critical response to the album was less favourable than that afforded to Tug of War.
Upon its release, many were quick to notice that Pipes of Peace mirrored its predecessor in many ways. It was produced by George Martin, it featured two collaborations with the same artist (this time with Michael Jackson; the Tug of War collaborations being with Stevie Wonder), and continued McCartney’s alliance in the studio with Ringo Starr, former 10cc guitarist Eric Stewart and his last session work with Wings guitarist Denny Laine. The reason for all of this is that many of the songs released on Pipes of Peace were recorded during the 1981 sessions for Tug of War, with “Pipes of Peace“, “The Other Me”, “So Bad”, “Tug of Peace” and “Through Our Love” being recorded afterwards, in September–October 1982. By November, McCartney would start shooting his self-written motion picture Give My Regards to Broad Street, co-starring wife Linda, Ringo Starr and Tracey Ullman, which would take up most of his time throughout 1983. Due to the filming commitments (and to allow a reasonable lapse of time between his new album and Tug of War), Pipes of Peace was delayed until October for release.
With momentum building for his film project – and the accompanying soundtrack album – McCartney would spend much of his energies finishing and preparing Give My Regards to Broad Street for its release in the autumn of 1984.
In 1983 Pipes of Peace made its debut on CD on Columbia Records. In 1993, the album was remastered and reissued on CD as part of “The Paul McCartney Collection” series, with the previously unreleased “Twice in a Lifetime” (the title song for a 1985 film); his 1984 hit from the Rupert Bear project, “We All Stand Together”; and “Simple as That”, released in 1986 on the charity album The Anti-Heroin Project – It’s A Live-In World – all as bonus tracks. “Ode to a Koala Bear” (the B-side to “Say Say Say”) was overlooked for inclusion. The album is due to be reissued in remastered form during 2015, as part of the on-going ‘Paul McCartney Archive Collection’ series of releases.
Critical reaction was less than that which had greeted Tug of War, many feeling that Pipes of Peace was a weaker execution of its predecessor’s formula. In addition, author Howard Sounes writes, the album’s commercial reception was “slightly disappointing, considering the quality of the work”. Sounes views Pipes of Peace and its predecessor as “abounding with well-crafted tunes” that almost match the standard of McCartney’s work with the Beatles; yet, he adds, the two albums “must be marked down for a surfeit of love ballads with lamentable lyrics”.[10]
Reviewing the album for the NME, Penny Reel described Pipes of Peace as “A dull, tired and empty collection of quasi-funk and gooey rock arrangements … with McCartney cooing platitudinous sentiments on a set of lyrics seemingly made up on the spur of the moment.” Reel opined that the “one decent moment” was the title track, which he found to be “a Beatlish soiree surely destined as a Christmas single”, before concluding: “Even here, however, a note of insincerity in the vocal finally defeats the lyric’s objective.”[6]
The album featured the duet between McCartney and Jackson, “Say Say Say“, which reached number 2 in the UK and number 1 in the US, where it remained for six weeks through to early in 1984.
Following “Say Say Say”, the album’s title track became a UK number 1, while in the US, “So Bad” was a top 30 hit. Pipes of Peace peaked at number 4 in the UK and number 15 in the US.
Jump up^Larkin, Colin (2006). The Encyclopedia of Popular Music(4th edn). New York, NY: Oxford University Press. p. 1257.ISBN0-19-531373-9.
Jump up^Strong, Martin C. (2006). The Essential Rock Discography. Edinburgh, UK: Canongate. p. 696.ISBN978-184195-827-9.
Jump up^Graff, Gary; Durchholz, Daniel (eds) (1999). MusicHound Rock: The Essential Album Guide. Farmington Hills, MI: Visible Ink Press. p. 730. ISBN 1-57859-061-2.
^ Jump up to:abReel, Penny (5 November 1983). “Paul McCartney:Pipes Of Peace (Parlophone)”. NME. Available at Rock’s Backpages (subscription required).
Jump up^Nicol, Jimmy (October 1993). “Re-releases: Paul McCartney The Paul McCartney Collection“. Q. p. 119.
Jump up^Randall, Mac; Brackett, Nathan; Hoard, Christian (eds) (2004). The New Rolling Stone Album Guide (4th edn). New York, NY: Simon & Schuster. p. 526. ISBN 0-7432-0169-8.
Jump up^Sounes, Howard (2010). Fab: An Intimate Life of Paul McCartney. London: HarperCollins. p. 390. ISBN978-0-00-723705-0.
I’m Waiting for the Man sung by Nico in 1982 (about waiting for drug fix) __________ Nico Icon documentary part 3 Nico Icon documentary part 4 NICO – I’m Waiting For The Man – (1982, Warehouse, Preston, UK) One of the top 10 songs from The Velvet Underground and Nico is the song “I’m Waiting […]
Nico’s sad story of drugs and her interaction with Jim Morrison Nico – These Days The Doors (1991) – Movie Trailer / Best Parts The Doors Movie – Back Door Man/When The Music’s Over/Arrest of Jim Morrison Uploaded on Jul 30, 2009 A clip from “The Doors” movie with “Back Door Man”, “When The Music’s […]
Dennis Jernigan – You Are My All In All Uploaded on Oct 18, 2009 Dennis Jernigan – You Are My All In All __________________________________________ Christian Singer’s Controversial Journey Revealed in New Documentary: ‘I Placed Homosexuality on Jesus’ Shoulders’ Oct. 2, 2014 2:23pm Billy Hallowell Singer-songwriter Dennis Jernigan has been making Christian music for decades, recording […]
Cole Porter’s songs “De-Lovely” and “Let’s misbehave” ‘At Long Last Love’: Let’s Misbehave/De-Lovely Uploaded on Apr 1, 2009 Burt Reynolds and Cybil Shepherd give an extraordinarily charming performance of Cole Porter’s songs in Peter Bogdanovich’s absolutely wonderful tribute to the golden age of film musicals, ‘At Long Last Love’. _____________________ De-Lovely From Wikipedia, […]
________ _______ Cole Porter’s song’s “My Heart Belongs to Daddy” My Heart Belongs To Daddy Uploaded on Jun 20, 2010 Mary Martin became popular on Broadway and received attention in the national media singing “My Heart Belongs to Daddy”. “Mary stopped the show with “My Heart Belongs to Daddy”. With that one song in the […]
______________ Love For Sale (De-Lovely) Love for Sale (song) From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Jump to: navigation, search This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (September 2008) “Love for Sale“ Written by Cole Porter Published 1930 Form […]
Cole Porter’s song “Ev’ry Time We Say Goodbye” _________________ Natalie Cole – Ev’ry Time We Say Goodbye Ev’ry Time We Say Goodbye From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Jump to: navigation, search This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be […]
Cole Porter’s song “So in Love” __________________ So in love – De-lovely So in Love From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Jump to: navigation, search For the song by Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark, see So in Love (OMD song). For the song by Jill Scott, see So in Love (Jill Scott song). Not to be […]
____________________ Cole Porter’s song “Night and Day” Cole Porter´s Day and Night by Fred Astaire & Ginger Rogers Night and Day (song) From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Jump to: navigation, search This article includes a list of references, but its sources remain unclear because it has insufficient inline citations. Please help to improve this article […]
Johnny Cash – Big River Uploaded on Jan 16, 2008 Grand Ole Opry, 1962 _______________________________ John Lennon and Bob Dylan Conversation mention Johnny Cash and his song “Big River” _______________________ Big River (Johnny Cash song) From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Jump to: navigation, search This article may require cleanup to meet Wikipedia’s quality standards. No […]
Rand Paul on Planned Parenthood | “The Glenn Beck Program”
Francis Schaeffer predicted July 30, 2015 would come when the video “Planned Parenthood VP Says Fetuses May Come Out Intact, Agrees Payments Specific to the Specimen” would be released!!!!
4th video July 30, 2015
Planned Parenthood VP Says Fetuses May Come Out Intact, Agrees Payments Specific to the Specimen
Published on Jul 30, 2015
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
#PPSellsBabyParts PLANNED PARENTHOOD VP SAYS FETUSES MAY COME OUT INTACT, AGREES PAYMENTS SPECIFIC TO THE SPECIMEN
Planned Parenthood Rocky Mountains VP & Medical Director Savita Ginde Discusses Contract Details, Aborted Body Parts Pricing, and How to Not “Get Caught”
Contact: Peter Robbio, probbio@crcpublicrelations.com, 703.683.5004
DENVER, July 30–New undercover footage shows Planned Parenthood of the Rocky Mountains’ Vice President and Medical Director, Dr. Savita Ginde, negotiating a fetal body parts deal, agreeing multiple times to illicit pricing per body part harvested, and suggesting ways to avoid legal consequences.
Planned Parenthood of the Rocky Mountains (PPRM) is a wealthy, multi-state Planned Parenthood affiliate that does over 10,000 abortions per year. PPRM has a contract to supply aborted fetal tissue to Colorado State University in Fort Collins.
In the video, actors posing as representatives from a human biologics company meet with Ginde at the abortion-clinic headquarters of PPRM in Denver to discuss a potential partnership to harvest fetal organs. When the actors request intact fetal specimens, Ginde reveals that in PPRM’s abortion practice, “Sometimes, if we get, if someone delivers before we get to see them for a procedure, then we are intact.”
Since PPRM does not use digoxin or other feticide in its 2nd trimester procedures, any intact deliveries before an abortion are potentially born-alive infants under federal law (1 USC 8).
“We’d have to do a little bit of training with the providers or something to make sure that they don’t crush” fetal organs during 2nd trimester abortions, says Ginde, brainstorming ways to ensure the abortion doctors at PPRM provide usable fetal organs.
When the buyers ask Ginde if “compensation could be specific to the specimen?” Ginde agrees, “Okay.” Later on in the abortion clinic’s pathological laboratory, standing over an aborted fetus, Ginde responds to the buyer’s suggestion of paying per body part harvested, rather than a standard flat fee for the entire case: “I think a per-item thing works a little better, just because we can see how much we can get out of it.”
The sale or purchase of human fetal tissue is a federal felony punishable by up to 10 years in prison or a fine of up to $500,000 (42 U.S.C. 289g-2). Federal law also requires that no alteration in the timing or method of abortion be done for the purposes of fetal tissue collection (42 U.S.C. 289g-1).
Ginde also suggests ways for Planned Parenthood to cover-up its criminal and public relations liability for the sale of aborted body parts. “Putting it under ‘research’ gives us a little bit of an overhang over the whole thing,” Ginde remarks. “If you have someone in a really anti state who’s going to be doing this for you, they’re probably going to get caught.”
Ginde implies that PPRM’s lawyer, Kevin Paul, is helping the affiliate skirt the fetal tissue law: “He’s got it figured out that he knows that even if, because we talked to him in the beginning, you know, we were like, ‘We don’t want to get called on,’ you know, ‘selling fetal parts across states.’” The buyers ask, “And you feel confident that they’re building those layers?” to which Ginde replies, “I’m confident that our Legal will make sure we’re not put in that situation.”
As the buyers and Planned Parenthood workers identify body parts from last fetus in the path lab, a Planned Parenthood medical assistant announces: “Another boy!”
The video is the latest by The Center for Medical Progress documenting Planned Parenthood’s sale of aborted fetal parts. Project Lead David Daleiden notes: “Elected officials need to listen to the public outcry for an immediate moratorium on Planned Parenthood’s taxpayer funding while the 10 state investigations and 3 Congressional committees determine the full extent of Planned Parenthood’s sale of baby parts.” Daleiden continues, “Planned Parenthood’s recent call for the NIH to convene an expert panel to ‘study’ fetal experimentation is absurd after suggestions from Planned Parenthood’s Dr. Ginde that ‘research’ can be used as a catch-all to cover-up baby parts sales. The biggest problem is bad actors like Planned Parenthood who hold themselves above the law in order to harvest and make money off of aborted fetal brains, hearts, and livers.”
For more information on the Human Capital project, visit centerformedicalprogress.org.
The Center for Medical Progress is a 501(c)3 non-profit dedicated to monitoring and reporting on medical ethics and advances.
Dr. Francis Schaeffer: Whatever Happened to the Human Race Episode 1 ABORTION
Some have argued whenever anyone cries “Nazi” this is a good reason to reject their whole point of view because nothing could really compare. Nothing in our country could be properly characterized by that kind of comparison. Well, I don’t know. You be the judge.
I have a piece here that I would like to read to you. It’s not ordinary that I read a piece in its entirety, but in this particular case I think it is critical. It’s not only a critical issue, but it is said so well and so effectively that I just want to pass on what columnist Mona Charen has written November 9 in a piece that is simply entitled “Harvesting Part for Sale.”
If you have not heard anything about this, I suggest that you sit down. If you have younger children around the radio, they don’t need to hear this. You’re going to have a hard time hearing what I am about to read, to think that this is possible in our country.
Oftentimes we talk about causal slippery slopes and how one thing leads to another. I have talked and written in the past about moral velocitizing, the idea that when you take another step in moral decay for a few months or years it seems radical because it is such a change from what things have been like. Then we get used to it and it seems like normal. It’s like when you go out on the freeway and you accelerate to 60 mph. You’re moving pretty good until you get used to 60 mph and then it just seems like it’s not fast enough. Then you accelerate to 80 mph and that’s fast until you get used to it, and then it is just regular and you need to accelerate even faster. So you go faster, and faster, and faster at deadly speeds. It seems like you’re safe.
Morally, we have become velocitized because every time we take another step for just a few moments we feel uncomfortable. Then we get used to it and it is ordinary. As FrancIs Schaeffer has said, “What is unthinkable yesterday is thinkable today, and ordinary and commonplace tomorrow.”
We are witnessing a moral velocitizing in our culture. We have been witnessing it for some time. I have argued that one of the things that has contributed to this is the increasing death of humanness. The idea of being a human being is not something that makes one valuable or worthwhile in itself. We have been chipping away at the essential, inherent value of human beings, and we have been doing it with abortion, infanticide, doctor-assisted suicide. All of these things have chipped away.
In fact, twenty years ago when Dr. Francis Schaeffer and C. Everett Koop produced material that basically asked, What has happened to the human race, they warned that it would come to this. Everybody thought these people were like Chicken Little crying about the world coming to an end. But their sober warnings have come to pass as little by little we can see human dignity being chipped away, such that the unique value of humanness is dying.
And so, in 1973 when men of the Supreme Court consigned 1.3 million unborn human beings to the grave every year through the Roe v. Wade decision, it set aggressively in course a way of thinking about humanity that says, There is a life that is not worthy to be lived.”
This, by the way, was a motto of the Third Reich. A few years back, I wrote a piece called “Nazi Doctors” and I talked about having read the book by Robert J. Lifton by the same title. He asked himself the question, How is it that a culture could have come to this point and had doctors committed to caring for life and saving lives actually participate in one of the greatest killing machines the world has ever seen? A part of the answer was in the first 90 pages of the book, which is all that I read. I didn’t read the whole psychoanalytic position that he espoused and developed about how doctors get schizophrenic.
I read the first 90 pages that was really the sociological effort of the Nazi regime to encourage people to find this whole approach palatable. Ergo the slogan, there is a life that’s not worthy of being lived. This is the pro-choice position, actually, in many ways. And we see the same thing happening now.
But you know when I use the term Nazi here, many people are offended because it is easy to conjure up the image of the Third Reich, this malevolent image, to kind of color your argument. All you have to do is cry “Nazi” and people will immediately be influenced in your favor because of this powerful term.
Some have argued whenever anyone cries “Nazi” this is a good reason to reject their whole point of view because nothing could really compare. Nothing in our country could be properly characterized by that kind of comparison. Well, I don’t know. You be the judge. I’ve been to Auschwitz. I’ve been to Majdaneck. I’ve been to some of these camps where you see blankets made of human hair, the lampshades made of human skin, and the piles of teeth that have been busted out for the gold that was in them, where human beings became a cash crop. I’ve seen it.
That is all a backdrop to what I am about to read to you, published here in the Daily News in Southern California, Thursday, November 11, 1999, by Mona Charen. She is a syndicated columnist with the Creators Syndicate and therefore, her piece is read nationwide. You might have read it in another publication. But let me just read it.
“Kelly” (a pseudonym) was a medical technician working for a firm that trafficked in baby body parts. This is not a bad joke. Nor is it the hysterical propaganda of an interest group. It was reported in the American Enterprise magazine–the intelligent, thought-provoking, and utterly trustworthy publication of the American Enterprise Institute.
The firm Kelly worked for collected fetuses from clinics that performed late-term abortions. She would dissect the aborted fetuses in order to obtain ‘high-quality” parts for sale. They were interested in blood, eyes, livers, brains, and the thymuses, among other things.
“What we did was to have a contract with an abortion clinic that would allow us to go there on certain days. We would get a generated list each day to tell us what tissue researchers, pharmaceutical companies, and universities were looking for. Then we would examine the patient charts. We only wanted the most perfect specimens.’ That didn’t turn out to be difficult. Of the hundreds of late-term fetuses Kelly saw on a weekly basis, only about 2 percent had abnormalities. About 30 to 40 babies per week were around 30 weeks old–well past the point of viability.
Is this legal? Federal law makes it illegal to buy and sell human body parts. But there are loopholes in the law. Here’s how one body parts company–Opening Lines Inc.–disguised the trade in a brochure for abortionists: “Turn your patient’s decision into something wonderful.”
For its buyers, Opening Lines offers “the highest quality, most affordable, freshest tissue prepared to your specifications and delivered in the quantities you need, when you need it.” Eyes and ears go for $75, and brains for $999. An “intact trunk” fetches $500, a whole liver $150. To evade the law’s prohibition, body-parts dealers like Opening Lines offer to lease space in the abortion clinic to “perform the harvesting,” as well as to “offset the clinic’s overhead.” Opening Lines further boasted, “Our daily average case volume exceeds 1,500 and we serve clinics across the United States.”
Kelly kept at her grisly task until something made her reconsider. One day, “a set of twins at 24 weeks gestation was brought to us in a pan. They were both alive. The doctor came back and said, ‘Got you some good specimens–twins.’ I looked at him and said: ‘There’s something wrong here. They are moving. I can’t do this. This is not in my contract.’ I told him I would not be part of taking their lives. So he took a bottle of sterile water and poured it in the pan until the fluid came up over their mouths and noses, letting them drown. I left the room because I could not watch this.”
But she did go back and dissect them later. The twins were only the beginning. “It happened again and again. At 16 weeks, all the way up to sometimes even 30 weeks, we had live births come back to us. Then the doctor would either break the neck or take a pair of tongs and beat the fetus until it was dead.”
American Enterprise asked Kelly if abortion procedures were ever altered to provide specific body parts. “Yes. Before the procedures they would want to see the list of what we wanted to procure. The (abortionist) would get us the most complete intact specimens that he could. They would be delivered to us completely intact. Sometimes the fetus appeared to be dead, but when we opened up the chest cavity, the heart was still beating.”
The magazine pressed Kelly again. Was the type of abortion ever altered to provide an intact specimen, even if it meant producing a live baby? “Yes, that was so we could sell better tissue. At the end of the year, they would give the clinic back more money because we got good specimens.”
Some practical souls will probably swallow hard and insist that, well, if these babies are going to be aborted anyway, isn’t it better that medical research should benefit? No. This isn’t like voluntary organ donation. This reduces human beings to the level of commodities. And it creates of doctors who swore an oath never to kill, the kind of people who can beat a breathing child to death with tongs.
That is the end of the article.
This ghastly practice is getting more press. One wonders why it isn’t on the front page of every newspaper in this country. There is a massive industry for human body parts coming from unborn children whose lives are being taken, sometimes after they are delivered, so that we can have “the highest quality, most affordable, freshest tissue prepared to your specifications and delivered in the quantities you need, when you need it.”
This kind of news absolutely boggles the imagination.
As I mentioned earlier, when you raise the issue of Nazi Germany, people scoff. That’s just inflammatory rhetoric.
Well, how would you describe this?
Let’s forget about Nazi Germany for just a moment. Let’s just look at what we have come to. Again, it’s hard to know how to respond because if people can read this and say, Well, I don’t know what the problem is, then I don’t know what to say to them. If this is not obviously barbaric, I don’t know what to say. If you can’t see it for yourself, then I say that you are desperately morally velocitized and the spirit of the age has overtaken you.
Sometimes there is what can be called “unbelievable unbelief.” You know, in John 11 when Lazarus was raised from the dead, and those who were aware of the resurrection of Lazarus were so incensed at the powerful miracle that was done that was good evidence that Jesus was the Messiah, as He claimed, that they purposed to destroy Lazarus, as well as Jesus. They would kill Jesus, he was the troublemaker. But the problem was the proof was still walking around–Lazarus. They’d have to kill him too.
It’s kind of wild. You think, Wake up, folks! You only want to kill this man because he is proof against your view. But they didn’t get it. Sometimes people are so rebellious against authority that they can’t see what is so obvious.
Matt Drudge recently lost his job on the Fox News Channel. As I understand it, the reason was that he had footage he wanted to show on the air that was about a quite amazing medical procedure. It was a procedure that allowed doctors to rectify pre-natal problems by doing surgery on the unborn before it was delivered. They could actually go in and do spina bifida surgery to rectify this problem. To be more precise, they didn’t exactly go in, they brought the baby out. That is, they incised the mother’s abdomen and moved her uterus out in a sense onto her belly, opened her uterus just enough to do the surgery, did the microsurgery on the little developing child inside, repaired the problem, sewed up the uterus, replaced it inside the woman, stitched her up, and then she continued with a normal pregnancy.
That is pretty amazing. What a story!
But you see, it is not just a story about technology, is it? It is also a story about little precious unborn human persons. There is also a problem with showing this on T.V. because it gives a much more graphic window into the womb. But there’s more in this particular case because, not only was this a remarkable medical feat that obviously and visibly bore testimony to the humanity of the unborn, but in the course of these films being taken, that little baby that was being operated on while it was being filmed, reached up its little hand, and took hold of the finger of the surgeon. That was on film. Don’t you wish you could have seen that?
Well, you can’t because it won’t be aired.
The powers that be on that station told Matt Drudge he could not air that segment. Why not? It is a case that they never show gore on T.V.? It is the case they never show medical procedures on T.V.?
It is because in this particular medical procedure there was a powerful, factual, and emotionally compelling representation of the true and genuine humanity of the unborn, such that anyone watching it would realize that abortion destroys a precious unborn human person.
They wouldn’t let him show it. He was so incensed he walked off the set and, having walked off the set and not completing his show, he was in violation of his contract and so they fired him.
That’s unbelievable unbelief. You know why? Because those very people could see that very hand reach out of that mom and grab the finger of the surgeon. That little life, that little human person grabbing hold. It should have been obvious to them, as much as it would be obvious to anyone else watching, that there was a human being in there. But they didn’t want anybody else to see it. They just wanted it to be shut down so that abortion could go on.
Unbelievable unbelief.
I have the same feeling here about the harvesting of body parts at abortion clinics. There are some people who will read this and say, It doesn’t bother me, man. It’s okay. We’re killing them anyway. What’s the big deal? Might as well make some use out of it.
These folks would have fit in well at the killing camps peddling lampshades of human skin and blankets made of human hair.
I truly believe that many of the problems we have today in the USA are due to the advancement of humanism in the last few decades in our society. Ronald Reagan appointed the evangelical Dr. C. Everett Koop to the position of Surgeon General in his administration. He partnered with Dr. Francis Schaeffer in making the video below. It is very valuable information for Christians to have. Actually I have included a video below that includes comments from him on this subject.
Francis Schaeffer “BASIS FOR HUMAN DIGNITY” Whatever…HTTHR
Dr. Francis schaeffer – The flow of Materialism(from Part 4 of Whatever happened to human race?)
Dr. Francis Schaeffer – The Biblical flow of Truth & History (intro)
Francis Schaeffer – The Biblical Flow of History & Truth (1)
Dr. Francis Schaeffer – The Biblical Flow of Truth & History (part 2)
__________
Dr. Francis Schaeffer: Whatever Happened to the Human Race Episode 1 ABORTION
Dr Richard Land discusses abortion and slavery – 10/14/2004 – part 3 The best pro-life film I have ever seen below by Francis Schaeffer and Dr. C. Everett Koop “Whatever happened to the human race?” Over the years I have taken on the Ark Times liberal bloggers over and over and over concerning the issue […]
The best pro-life film I have ever seen below by Francis Schaeffer and Dr. C. Everett Koop “Whatever happened to the human race?” Francis Schaeffer pictured above._________ The 45 minute video above is from the film series created from Francis Schaeffer’s book “Whatever Happened to the Human Race?” with Dr. C. Everett Koop. This book really […]
The best pro-life film I have ever seen below by Francis Schaeffer and Dr. C. Everett Koop “Whatever happened to the human race?” Over the years I have taken on the Ark Times liberal bloggers over and over and over concerning the issue of abortion. I asked over and over again for one liberal blogger […]
Francis Schaeffer pictured above._________ The best pro-life film I have ever seen below by Francis Schaeffer and Dr. C. Everett Koop “Whatever happened to the human race?” Over the years I have taken on the Ark Times liberal bloggers over and over and over concerning the issue of abortion. I asked over and over again […]
The best pro-life film I have ever seen below by Francis Schaeffer and Dr. C. Everett Koop “Whatever happened to the human race?” On 1-24-13 I took on the child abuse argument put forth by Ark Times Blogger “Deathbyinches,” and the day before I pointed out that because the unborn baby has all the genetic code […]
PHOTO BY STATON BREIDENTHAL from Pro-life march in Little Rock on 1-20-13. Tim Tebow on pro-life super bowl commercial. Over the years I have taken on the Ark Times liberal bloggers over and over and over concerning the issue of abortion. Here is another encounter below. On January 22, 2013 (on the 40th anniversary of the […]
Dr Richard Land discusses abortion and slavery – 10/14/2004 – part 3 The best pro-life film I have ever seen below by Francis Schaeffer and Dr. C. Everett Koop “Whatever happened to the human race?” Over the years I have taken on the Ark Times liberal bloggers over and over and over concerning the issue […]
José Niño is a graduate student based in Santiago, Chile. A citizen of the world, he has lived in Venezuela, Colombia, and the United States. He is currently an international research analyst with the Acton Circle of Chile. Follow@JoseAlNino.
EspañolThe power of ideas to help shape political movements has been grossly underestimated over the years. In truth, some of the largest political transformations in human history have come from ideas that were developed in the secluded confines of an intellectual’s home or in obscure academic institutes. Regardless of the origins, ideas can snowball into powerful vehicles of social change.+
As Friedrich Hayek noted in one of his most powerful works, Intellectuals and Socialism,the triumph of socialist ideas can largely be attributed to the ideas first put forward by various intellectuals. They began with relatively well-off intellectuals and then made their way to “second-hand dealers” — journalists, scientists, doctors, teachers, ministers, lecturers, radio commentators, fiction writers, cartoonists, and artists — who then spread those ideas to the masses.+
Intellectuals like Milton Friedman took it upon themselves to reverse this trend and create an environment that was more favorable to free markets. Steadfast in his beliefs in the power of ideas, Friedman knew that big changes usually start out in small venues.+
It was in Chile where Friedman’s vision was first implemented on a large scale. The results were nothing short of spectacular, as Chile was able to escape a veritable economic collapse and experience an unprecedented boom.+
Chile’s economic success was no mere coincidence; it was the product of ideas that Milton Friedman put forward in the 1950s. To understand how such a radical change was brought about, one must first look at the origins of the Chicago Boys, the group of Chilean economists that played a pivotal role in the transformation of Chile’s economy during the 1970s and 1980s.+
The Chicago Boys
Under the tutelage of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), the University of Chicago signed a modest agreement with the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile in the 1950s to provide a group of Chilean students training in economics.+
In exchange, the University of Chicago would send four faculty members to help the Catholic University build up their economics department. Of these four faculty members, Arnold Harberger would serve as the Chicago Boys’ principal mentor.+
What at first looked liked just another exchange program between universities would play a substantial role in Chile’s economic rise.+
A Country Mired By Statism
At the start of this program, Chile’s economy was in the doldrums. Another victim of Raúl Prebisch’s Import Substitution Industrialization (ISI) policy, Chile had a very loose central banking policy, featured 15 different exchange rates, heavy tariffs, and a number of import and export controls. Subsequent governments maintained the same neo-mercantilist structure up until the 1970s.+
During this era of economic malaise, the Chicago Boys constructed El Ladrillo(The Brick), a text primarily shaped by economist Sergio de Castro which advocated for economic liberalization in all sectors of the Chilean economy. Sadly, this text was largely ignored at that time.+
It wasn’t until the presidency of Salvador Allende that the Chicago Boys’ talents would be desperately needed.+
On the Road to Cuba 2.0
Though democratically elected by a narrow margin in 1970, Salvador Allende was determined to turn Chile into the next Cuba by undermining all of its democratic institutions. Through price controls, arbitrary expropriations, and lax monetary policy, Allende put the Chilean economy on the verge of collapse. By 1973, inflation reached 606 percent and per capita GDP dropped 7.14 percent.+
Under the command of General Augusto Pinochet, the military deposed Allende’s government. Despite this tumultuous change, the military ruler did not have a clear economic vision for Chile.+
Enter Milton Friedman
Milton Friedman’s visit to Chile in March 1975 proved to be quite fateful. Friedman was on a week-long lecture tour for various think thanks. Eventually, Friedman sat down with the general himself for 45 minutes. Right off the bat, Friedman recognized that Pinochet had very little knowledge of economics. After their meeting, Friedman sent Pinochet a letter with a list of policy recommendations.+
Friedman was blunt is his diagnosis of Chile’s economy: for the country to recover, it had to truly embrace free-market measures.+
Ideas Put in Action
Cooler heads prevailed and Pinochet let the Chicago School disciples occupy various posts in the military government. In April 1975, El Plan de Recuperación Económica (The Economic Recovery Plan) was implemented. Soon Chile curbed its inflation, opened up its markets, privatized state-owned industries, and cut government spending. By the 1990s, Chile was experiencing the largest economic boom in its history.+
A principled libertarian, Friedman criticized Pinochet’s repressive political measures. Friedman understood that economic and political freedoms are not mutually exclusive. The principles laid in Friedman’s book Capitalism and Freedom inspired José Piñera, a notable Chilean reformer, to become a part of Chile’s classical liberal revolution.+
Like Friedman, Piñera understood the link between economic and political freedom. This motivated him to help ratify the Chilean Constitution of 1980. The most classically liberal constitution in Latin America’s history, it established the transition towards free elections and Chile’s return to democracy.+
Additionally, Piñera was the architect of Chile’s private social security system that empowered millions of workers and has fostered the growth of an ownership society. This model has been exported to dozens of countries abroad and has served as a market-based alternative to government-run pension systems.+
The “Chilean Miracle” represented the first major triumph against communism during the Cold War. Chile’s classical-liberal revolution subsequently inspired the Thatcher Revolution of 1979 and the Reagan Revolution of 1980. These ideas had resounding effects all over the globe and marked the beginning of the end for Soviet-style models of economic organization.+
There is still much work to do, as the illegitimate children of Marxist and Keynesian thought still run loose these days throughout Latin America. But one thing is absolutely certain: an idea whose time has come is unstoppable.+
RIP Milton Friedman
Milton Friedman is the short one!!!
Milton Friedman’s Free to Choose (1980), episode 3 – Anatomy of a Crisis. part 1
Milton Friedman The Power of the Market 5-5 How can we have personal freedom without economic freedom? That is why I don’t understand why socialists who value individual freedoms want to take away our economic freedoms. I wanted to share this info below with you from Milton Friedman who has influenced me greatly over the […]
The story of Black Mountain College begins in 1933 and comprises a fascinating chapter in the history of education and the arts. Conceived by John A. Rice, a brilliant and mercurial scholar who left Rollins College in a storm of controversy, Black Mountain College was born out of a desire to create a new type of college based on John Dewey’s principles of progressive education. The events that precipitated the College’s founding occurred simultaneously with the rise of Adolf Hitler, the closing of the Bauhaus by the Nazis, and the beginning of the persecution of artists and intellectuals on the European continent. Some of these people found their way to Black Mountain, either as students or faculty. Meanwhile, the United States was mired in the Great Depression, and Franklin Roosevelt, committed to putting people back to work, established the Public Works Arts Project (a precursor of the WPA).
.jpg)
The Daily Hatch 
Comments