Larry Elder for California Governor!

It was alarming to tune into Larry Elder's radio show and find somebody else had taken over the time slot. But then I found this interview of him by Tucker Carlson. Looks like he quit to run for Governor of California. Wow, he'd be a great governor for that benighted state if only he can get through the usual leftist obstructions. Here's the interview:

How Art Became Anti-Art

somehow I lost this post. Update: Turns out I have a hard copy of it, which I make of some of my posts, and if I can see well enough to retype it later I'll do that.

Jon Voight, Another Victim of Demonic Manipulation. Tucker Carlson too.

Tucker Carlson interviewed Jon Voight who described an interesting experience he had when he heard a voice in his ear that changed his life. The headline calls this his "faith." It's no such thing. He's fallen for a demonic manipulation. The effect on him was similar to the effrect on those who have had near-death experiences, experiences of "heaven" and so on. this is all demonic manipulation but you have to be a Bible believer to recognize it. Looks like the demonic world wants to make humanity comfortable with the supernatural for some reason, besides, of course, leading whomever they can as far away from the gospel as possible.
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Of course the intrusion of these invisible beings convinces their victims of the other world, which they then take as proof of God assuming the experience came from God. A message from heaven. It changed his life, he is now motivated to be a better person. Like all those with the heaven experiences. They havve no idea that their souls are in dire danger though they are now lulled into complacency, sure that they will have a happy afterlife.

Tucker Carson doesn't seem to know any better either. No idea of the gospel of salvation, that we are all sinners destined for Hell unless we put our faith in the death of Christ for our salvation from our sins. The demons won't preach the gospel of course.

Interseiting that they seem to be constructing some kind of illusion as we approach the end times. These people they are manipulating would probably not find the gospel anyway but they seem to want to create some kind of false religoin around these experiences they are giving people. Probabgly to contribute to the end times global religion

There Are Different Sorts of Pleasure to be had from Art, but There's Really Only One That Interests Me.

To escape from the anxieties of the times I've been on an art kick. My eyes are pretty bad but I can make out the general form of a painting and can read material that's presented in certain ways, so I've been able for the most part to collect information on the subject. I've collected enough by now for a small book but I'm not going to write a small book and I don't even want to write a long post. I'd just like to sketch out the framework of my thoughts about art from what i've been reading and looking at and thinking about.

It's pretty simple once I get it boiled down. What I want from art is the aesthetic emotion Clive Bell wrote about as the essence of art. I want to be blown away by the kind of beauty that can be found in some art. Bell makes a distinction between natural beuaty, such as a beautiful face or a beautiful flower or butterfly wintgs, and the beauty that is a particular property of art. He had arrived at the conclusion that there is one quality in what he considered to be art worthy of the name, amounting in his view to the very definition or essence of art, and that he identified as Significant Form.

Bell's book "Art," which was published in 1913, and a book by philosopher Susanne K. Langer, "Feeling and Form" published in the 50s, together educated my eyes to the aesthetic experience of art. It was an experience I had had, and I believe it's what I always sought in art, but there are so many different ways of experiencing art that this one most important way is easily lost. Those two books cleared away all the irrelevant stuff that is so distracting and allowed me to see what mattered most to me, the experience of the special kind of beauty that art can give

There are many directions to go in this conversation but I want to stick to the bare bones if I can. I don't want to take a position on Bell's claim that significant form IS art and that's what art is, even if I am sympathetic to that view. Art can be whatever you want to it to be, I just want to say that the aesthetic experience is the whole point for me and nothing else enters into it. I may like different kinds of pictures for different reasons, but the ones I am inclined to call art are the ones that bring me that pecular pleasure called aesthetic. I don't know if Bell is ritght that Significant Form is the essencew of art and the only means to the aesthetic experience but I'm willing to entertain the idea. But it woujld take more research than I'm going to do in order to arrive at my own conclusion about that. Nevertheless, as he presents the idea in his book it so focused the experience of art for me that I shed a lifetime of irrelvant baggage and could finally identify in art what I'd always been looking for and hadn't found until then, until his book and Langer's.

Over the last few days I've been updating my knowledge of the art world, watching videos of lectures by today's reigning art critics, as well as interviews with them, did a google search for names of today's most prominent artists and skimmed through pages and pages of thumbnails of their paintings. Here and there I see something that sort of almost provokes an aesthetic emotion, but for the most part it is an amazing wasteland as far as aesthetic experience goes. It is as if they've turned Bell's concept upside down. What we are getting is all the very content he called inessential to art and none of the art itself according to his definition. In his frame of refrence on the other hand a work of art could contain much that is inessential to the aesthetic experience and yet also contain the significant form that provokes that experience. Today's art hits my eye as absolutely devoid of any shred of aesthetic interest whatever. And yet Bell is supposed to have been a major influence toward modern art.

If there is a true aesthetic experience to be had in this modern wasteland someone who has experienced it would have to walk me through it so i could see it for myself. All I can say is that I don't. I find i repugnant. Almost all of it with few exceptions Whatever people enjoy about this kind of art, it isn't beauty.

It may well be that if I understood better what Bell means by Significant Form that much of it wouldn't move me at all. I grant his superior sensitivity to such experiences and assume I'm the deficient one, but all I can do is like what I like. And it is an experience of the ecstatic sort that I've stumbled onto from time to time that makes me think he has the key to it since he speaks of his own ecstasies over art. He attributes them to Significant Form. He may be right.

The COVID Gulag Isn't Just Censorship and Threats and PC Opprobrium, it's Stupid Arguments

Bret and Heather are back temporarily on You Tube for a response to a really stupid critical article about their position on the vaccines and ivermectin.

Trying Not to Get Bulldozed by the Left

ABC News just reported that the Biden administration has been rolling back all the Trump policies on the border "because they are inhumane." They've said that before but this time I started crying and couldn't stop, crying and screaming. If the neighbors heard they don't care anyway. I needed to cry and scream. Too much as been coming at me from the insane Left, I couldn't take any more. They are letting in people some of whom are no doubt drug runners, human traffickers, rapists and murderers and other criminals. And that is what they consider to be humane. Same with letting BLM and Antifa destroy the businesses of law-abiding citizens without consequences. Same with letting criminals out of prison to repeat their crimes againt law-abiding citizens.

Same also with threatening to take away the guns of law-abiding citizens so they can't project themselve sagainst the criminals, the looters and burners. I think it was Chris Pinto who reported on a recent radio show that they actually did take away guns from some law-abiding citizens in New Orleans after Katrina. He played some audio of people protesting that they were law-abiding citiziens wnd this action against them was wrong, that they were now being left with no protection against the looters. This is "humane" according to the Left. Not that I think most of them even believe that themselves, it's just an excuse to take power away from the people. Unbelievable though that they actually did it and got away with it, in New Orleans. Even this degree of evil and denial of Constitutional rights is not beneath them.

Also earlier today -- oh way too much happening, no wonder I ended up screaming -- was listening to an inteview of New York art critic Jerry Saltz who doesn't try to contain his political views. I've been listening to some current art critics because I want to do a post about art from my admittedly inadequately educated understanding, and I don't want to come off TOO stupid, since I think I have something of value to say within my own limited experience. All the art critics I've heard, three now I think, are leftists who want to let you know they are leftists and in fact the doctrines of the left appear to permeate the whole world of contemporary art criticism, and in fact the art itself in many cases.

Did you know, for instance, that there was an exhibition of photographs of clouds the import of which was supposed to be that they were taken in Ferguson during the riots by Black Lives Matter? To his credit, Saltz, who reported this also objected strenuously to it, saying, No, those are photographs of CLOUDS. Nevertheless we can see that in 2018 in the New York City art world the lies of BLM continue uncorrected.

Then the interviewer read part of an article about a blunder this critic had made in extolling a work of art that some considered to be feeding a taste for pedophilia or something like that. He said that connotation had escaped his notice because he was responding to it purely as art, but that he now agrees that he was in the wrong. Anyway, it's 2018 and this article starts out with this: "In a time when American politics is being profaned by the purely personal whims of one white man the celebration of another doing the same in the arts raises some red flags for me." I'm glad a leftist gets some of the same treatment we on the right get, but of course what bugs me about this quote is the stab at Trump. They are obsessed with Trump. Oh and his race must be central. In fact in one way or another all the videos I listened to about a current art critic made race central. Marxist CRT is running the show on the Left wherever you look these days. Saltz apologizes for being white from time to time.

This starts about 38:28 at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lqk-7JtLINA

In another case the political statement came from the woman who interoduced the critic, who was going to interview Luchita Hurtado, a 97-year old woman artist oridinally from Venezuela. She introduced the artist as one of those immigrants who made America great" and got applause from her leftist audience who of course recognized it as a slam against Trump who as usual is being slandered as objecting to immigrants, which of course is nothing but the usual lying propaganda. Does the woman have eve a smidgen of a suspiciou of that? She seems sincere, so I asume she really believes the lie.

Yesterday I was upset about the craziness coming out of the Biden administration about how there is all this supposed "misinformation" about the vaccines that people are believing that they feel this need to censor. Not answer, which is the American way of dealing with wrong ideas, no, they must censor it, which is the totalitarian fascist Communist way of dealing with what they disagree with. I was inwardly screaming at that, since I know that those who are suspicious of the vaccines are basing it on the scientific considerations of people who know what they are talking about. Doctors with impeccable credentials for instance. IMPECCABLE. But even if they weren't so highly qualified to speak on the subject, it is anti-American to shut people up for their sincere opinions. Wrong opinions are to be answered. They have no answsers, all they have is their propaganda: vaccines good, if you don't agree you deserve to be shut up and subjected to all kinds of mistreatment, as a Biden spokesman said so very clearly recently She actually said they have to make it as uncomfortable as possible for those who reject vaccination. But that's OK with liberals, right? No more civil discourse in America. The Left is right about everything and that is that.

So I didn't start screaming until the last straw hit this afternoon with that ABC news report about how the Biden administration is rolling back all the Trump policies about the border because they are "inhumane."

They are still attacking the man. And by extension all those of us who voted for him. And everything they have against him is a lie. He did not say white supremacists are good people, he denounced them a dozen times at least, he did not mock a man for his physical hanidcap, had mocked dozens of others in exactly the same way, he is not against immigration at all, only against illegal immigration, he is not a racist etc etc etc. But those lies and all the rest of them are apparently believes by those on the left. I have my own problems with Trump. I think his Operation Warp Speed was dangerous, pushing an untested vaccine on us that has already casues thousands of deaths and various injuries, and i don't understand why he couldn't do something to stop the rioting that hs abeen going on for months in major cities. He was the Presdient, the President has that kind of power. How do we explain that it wasn't used?

Added next day: If I'm going to be making a list of current evils I don't want to leave out their accusation of supporters of voter ID and other measures to protect the integrity of elections, calling them racists who want to reinstate Jim Crow. This ought to set us all screaming. When you have no argument and your aim is to run the show, just call your opponents by some hateful name. Call their opinion "misinformation," call them racists and white sepremacists and so on. This is the essence of totalitarianism. You rule by character assassination, by lies, by censorship and ultimately by force. You take away their guns so they can't do what the second amendment was for: defend themselves against the government as well as violence from any direction.

And of course it's "misinformation," which seems to be the crime du jour of the Right, if you noticed the documented instances of fraud in the 2020 election. Off to the concentration camp for you.

And of course they keep harping on the January 6th "insurrection which from what I've seen is the most pathetic excuse for an insurrection in human history. One baseball bat, one knife found in the possession of two people in the building? One person might have had, or had access to, a gun, funny how that's not clear. None of these weapons was used. But they go on and on about this worst incident in the history of the country? Meanwhile rioting continued for months and months and months in Portland and other cities, looting, burning and destroying property, but that's not an insurrenction and nobody has been punished for it. Except the cops.

Do liberals REALLY want this to happen to the country? Really?

There are so many evils looming on the horizon these days it is hard to justify doing anything but trying to prevent them. I need a break from it all from time to time so I've been thinking about art as a relief from it. Sometimes I go on music binges as my relief. sometimes I binge on animal videos, sometimes I watch a movie, but perhaps we can't aford to take breaks in this current time.

Surrounded by Liberals, Leftists, Atheists and Apoliticals

I need an ally. Or a dozen.