Autocracy photos on Flickr

Stephen Kotkin: Putin, Stalin, Hitler, Zelenskyy, and War in Ukraine | Lex Fridman Podcast

Why do Russians Support Putin? | Konstantin Kisin

www.monumenteromania.ro/index.php/monumente/detalii/en/Na...

'F--- the war!' Russians defiantly chant against war in St Petersburg concert

Stand with Ukraine!

Stop Putin now!

.

photo:

Romanian democratic solidarity with Ukraine against Putin autocracy and resentment in the center of Bucharest, on the walls of the former royal palace.

MNAR

National Art Museum of Romania (former Royal Palace)

Category: Palaces

Period: 1928-1937-1947

Importance: A

LMI code: B-II-m-A-19856

Address: Calea Victoriei 49-53 sector 1

Location: municipiul BUCUREŞTI

District: Bucuresti

Region: Muntenia

Romania

Initial plans by architects Paul Gottereau and Karl Liman

Additional works by architects N.N. Nenciulescu, Karl Liman and Arthur Lorentz

Palatul Regal, azi Muzeul Naţional de Artă al României

www.monumenteromania.ro/index.php/monumente/detalii/ro/Pa...

Categorie: Palate

Perioada: 1928-1937-1947

Importanta: A

Cod LMI: B-II-m-A-19856

Adresa: Calea Victoriei 49-53 sector 1

Localitate: municipiul BUCUREŞTI

Judet: Bucuresti

Regiune: Muntenia

Romania

Planuri initiale: arh. Paul Gottereau si Karl Liman. Lucrari de reconstructie si extindere dupa incendiul din 1926: arh. N.N. Nenciulescu, Karl Liman si Arthur Lorentz.

some cartoons, sadly more relevant than ever by Christopher DunstanBurgh

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some cartoons found on flickr some time ago, meanwhile nothing has become better

By Sarah: Luminous Hoodoo Bryce Canyon by Todd & Sarah Sisson

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Digging Through the ol' Velvia scans today, this one was from 1999. That's the beauty of nature - it never ages - it's beauty is sublimely timeless.

Most of these flickr shots are BIGGER on our website. You can also view more of our New Zealand landscape photography there :)

My gradual decline towards senility is also charted on my blog - The Photo Autocracy

And finally, we have also just posted our latest FREE New Zealand landscape photography guide for Mt Cook / Lake Pukaki

Driven out of Hungary by Wolfgang Bayer

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The Central European University (CEU) at its new location in Favoriten, the 10th district of Vienna. Teaching will start there in October.

"CEU is ranked as one of the world's top universities in social sciences.

[It] was founded in 1991 by hedge fund manager, political activist, and philanthropist George Soros." en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_European_University

"Mr. Orban has long viewed the school as a bastion of liberalism, presenting a threat to his vision of creating an “illiberal democracy,” and his desire to shut it down was only deepened by its association with Mr. Soros, a philanthropist who was born in Hungary.

Mr. Orban has spent years demonizing Mr. Soros, a Jew who survived the Nazi occupation of Hungary, accusing him of seeking to destroy European civilization by promoting illegal immigration, and often tapping into anti-Semitic tropes." www.nytimes.com/2018/12/03/world/europe/soros-hungary-cen...

"The university was a casualty of Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s turn toward authoritarianism, his development of a quietly repressive system that I’ve termed “soft fascism.” CEU, a university dedicated to liberal principles and founded by Hungarian-American billionaire George Soros, posed a threat to Orbán’s ideological project. So he put in place a set of characteristically sneaky regulations aimed at forcing out CEU without needing to formally ban them, eventually crushing the university’s ability to operate." www.vox.com/world/2018/12/4/18123754/hungary-ceu-orban-so...

grief and anger. not removing this photo by Laura Sorrells

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I don't know what we can do. I definitely support any drive to impeach the Supreme Court justices who yesterday brought the US one step closer to real autocracy.

some cartoons, sadly more relevant than ever by Christopher DunstanBurgh

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some cartoons found on flickr some time ago, meanwhile nothing has become better

My Father by Ty Siscoe

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Father.

Authority. Protector. Teacher. Provider.

Friend.

Monday morning, my father was dying. His kidneys, those brilliant bilge pumps of the human body, were failing, dumping raw proteins overboard like a ship’s captain vainly throwing out precious cargo to stave off inevitable sinking. Death was near, very near: six months, a year perhaps.

‘I won’t do dialysis,’ he explained, ‘it’s not a cure. I won’t leave you and your brother with a mountain of debt either. That wouldn’t be right.’

He turned down my offer of one of my kidneys. ‘You will need it yourself one day.’

We are all mortal. We will all die one day. After we emerge from the reckless arrogance of Youth, we know that our lives are no longer a blank check, but a balance sheet where every transaction has a cost and one day ahead a final bill will be rendered. The pithy advice to ‘Live fast, die young and leave a good looking corpse' was an attempt to game the system and avoid the painful and often humiliating compromises that come with a long and uncertain life.

My father, in his youth, went all in. He was an extreme adrenalin junkie before there was a word for it. Low altitude skydiving, street racing motorcycles, explosives enthusiast; if there was a boundary, he liked to push it - to show the world that limits were tethers reserved for the fearful or mediocre.

My father and mother met in San Francisco, during the summer of 1968, in the wild heart of the counter-culture scene. When Dad and Mum accidentally made a Me (they used protection, but stopped when a quack doctor told her that she was pregnant, with no more diagnostic test than a Marcus Welby-esque pat on the belly. 10 months later, I was born. Sometimes medical incompetence is fortuitous…) My parents immediately married – quite counter to the spirit and mores of the time and place, and my father stepped away without complaint from his reckless youth to take the sober reins of adulthood.

My father got a job with an insurance company doing data processing. In 1969 computers were megaliths of diodes, tubes, and punch cards. Everything was massive and manual and new. Born with an engineer’s aesthetic for precision, he appreciated the certainty of computation. 1s and 0s. Black or white. Something was coded correctly and it worked, or it was coded incorrectly and failed. While doing the grunt work of loading tapes and hauling reams of printer paper, he taught himself the ins and outs of programming and quickly moved on another position with EDS, a big data processing powerhouse in its day. Father liked working as close to the binary nature of the computers as possible. Extension languages built on libraries of predefined tasks and actions were anathema to him. It gave him a sense of intellectual self-reliance to be able to start from scratch, to know every input, control the flow of the data, and be certain of the output.

He is also a man of God, profoundly but quietly. Never one for Hosannas and hymnals, his faith is personal and direct in the sense that it is only between himself and God, not worn on his boot or his sleeve. His faith is Jobian, accepting duties and burdens stoically. He has never been a supplicant begging for heaven, only a good soldier handling the tasks set before him, wanting no more reward than to have the strength to do what was right. He taught his sons one, primary lesson: take care of your family. That defines a man.

Understanding the certainty of numbers and God, he has always raged against the autocracy of the incompetent or unjust that hides behind the shield of authority. He has no circuit breaker for stopping himself from calling out a politician, policeman, or employer that was wrong or abusive – and it has cost him plenty of work (and perhaps some sanity.) I remember, 30 odd years ago, walking along with my father down some railroad tracks in a small town in Kentucky.

I asked him, “Why are there bad people?”

“I don’t think there are bad people. God doesn’t make bad people. There are people who do right things and people who do wrong things,” he replied.

“Why do they do wrong things?”

“Because its easier…” he replied.

“Do you do good things, dad?”

“I try. Everyday.”

“Why?”

“Because the only thing you have at the end of your life that stands for anything is your character. If you don’t have that, you really didn’t live your life.”

“But I know guys at school who lie and beat up people and nothing bad ever happens to them. Why do people who do bad thing get away with it so much? Why aren’t they punished?”

“I’ve asked God that question a few times myself, son.”

“What did He say?”

“Ask Him for yourself, son, and don’t be afraid to listen.”

E.coli-infected kidney stones and family genetics brought Dad diabetes a few years ago. His own mother died of diabetes and renal failure. He watches his diet, moderately exercises fixing this and that on the farm, and taking his dog, Caesar, for a walk up the road and back every day. He tracks his glucose levels precisely and religiously. He spends his nights researching the family genealogy. It’s become his life’s work, one of the two things he wants to hand down our generations. The other is the land where we live, 200 acres of farmland in southern Virginia that we jointly own. Father watched as hospital bills destroyed his own father’s estate and vowed he himself would not die as a bankrupt billing item on a Medicare invoice.

So when his internist’s lab called him late last week and gave him test results that indicated that the microalbumin protein levels present in his urine were 4 to 5 times the norm, he saw himself facing end stage renal failure. He was dying, now. Soon his life would be over.

Except not…

The lab had given him incomplete information and they were not authorized to explain what the numbers meant. Late this week, after the swelter of knowing he was going to die, we went to his internist, a really remarkable physician, who immediately told Dad ‘Whoa, time out! Time out! You aren’t dying. Who told you that you could die on me,’ and then went on to explain in specific detail that his glomerular filtration rate was very good, and there were no other precursor organics in his urine to indicate an incipient failure. Basically, his kidneys were in fact working quite well for a 65-year-old diabetic. He was not dying. His life was not over.

You really see the character of someone when they face death. Perversely, it is akin to the freedom that Youth alone thinks it possesses, being no longer accountable to the past or the future. My father’s choice was not to flinch or flee.

He faced death as he lived life – with character.

Gerechtigkeitsbrunner, Justice Fountain, Bern, Switzerland by Snuffy

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Excerpt from Wikipedia:

The Gerechtigkeitsbrunnen (Fountain of Justice) is a 16th-century fountain in the Gerechtigkeitsgasse in the Old City of Bern, Switzerland. It is the only Bernese fountain to retain all original design elements, and is listed as a cultural heritage of national significance.

The fountain consists of an octagonal main basin and two smaller spillover basins. The main basin, made out of unadorned limestone plates held together with an iron ring, bears the date of one of the renovations, MDCCCXLV. In the centre of the main basin, bronze tubes emerge from the central pedestal, which was replaced in 1949. Atop it stands a narrow, festooned stone pillar decorated by an acanthus frieze.

The life-sized statue on the pillar is Iustitia, "Lady Justice", the personification of justice. She is portrayed standing in gracious counterpoise holding her traditional attributes—sword of justice in her right hand, a balance in her left hand and a blindfold over her eyes. Her costume is fashioned in an antique manner, with sandaled feet, one knee bared, wearing a decorative golden suit of armour adorned with bas-relief arabesques over her blue robes.

At the feet of Justice, four smaller busts crowd the pedestal: a Pope, an Emperor, a Sultan and a Schultheiss, whose golden chain of office is believed to have originally borne the Bernese arms. All figures have closed their eyes as in submission. They represent the Four Earthly Powers, the four forms of government according to Renaissance humanism: theocracy (the Pope), monarchy (the Emperor), autocracy (the Sultan) and the republic (the Schultheiss).

Symbolism

The ensemble represents the supremacy of Justice over all Earthly authorities; a variant of the medieval pictorial formula of virtue defeating vice. The contemporary belief in the divine nature of Justice is made more apparent in a 1558 Bernese drawing for a stained-glass window by Hans Rudolf Manuel; there, a winged Justice strides over the heads of princes whose symbols of power are broken. Divine Justice was a frequent element of political discourse in Reformation-era Bern. In the view of the reformators, doing justice according to God's word was the highest duty of all authority, superseding feudal rights. Such arguments were used, among others, to justify Bern's conquest of Vaud in 1536 from the dukes of Savoy.

While the sword and scales are traditional attributes of Iustitia, the Bernese statue's blindfold is a novelty; only later did it become a common element in personifications of Justice and a general symbol for the principle of equality before the law. The blindfold implies that justice ought to be done without respect to rank or standing; that a just verdict is arrived at through introspection rather than with a view to outward looks. Gieng's Iustitia is a symbol of republican justice, and was a forceful public reminder of the Bernese Republic's authority through law.

The fountain was constructed in 1543, essentially in its current state, to complement an older well at the Nydegg. Its current name is first recorded in 1687. Renovations are recorded in 1584, 1589, 1668 and 1687. The sword and balance were removed, allegedly by the invading French, in 1798 and disappeared for many years; they and the figures' other paraphernalia have frequently been replaced. The figure was repainted in 1890 by Christian Bühler and in 1925 by Victor Surbek. In 1949, parts of the pedestal were replaced.

State autocracy by Augustinian Friar

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DSC_1327Pwm by Trevor Ogle

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8010 pulls a train load of autocracies southbound on the Mactier Sub through Palgrave Ontario

autocrats and oligarchs by Christopher DunstanBurgh

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Chapatte cartoons found in the wonderful stream of my flickr friend Chaalors.

have a look here: www.flickr.com/photos/185704789@N06/

Next predicament by ArrrRT eDUarD

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.... buy before censored or blacklisted

Otago Peninsula by Todd & Sarah Sisson

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Looking towards Hoopers Inlet and Taiaroa Head on Otago Peninsula. As seen from Peggy's Hill.

Most of these flickr shots are BIGGER on our website. You can also view more of our New Zealand landscape photography there :)

My gradual decline towards senility is also charted on my blog - The Photo Autocracy

And finally, we have also just posted our latest FREE New Zealand landscape photography guide for Mt Cook / Lake Pukaki

Cheers - Todd & Sarah

Conceived in the passionate autunno caldo of 1938 by Ty Siscoe

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Conceived in the passionate autunno caldo of 1938, i was born to spit up the shellac of Latin on my fetal tongue.

Maman, my great Maman, thrust me from her flesh cradle with an emphasis of her thick Haitian thighs - into the cool, patient fisherman-calloused hands on mon papa. As he swatted my tiny empennage, he tenderly hushed my blither with the sweet fermented rine of a melon, and by the setting of my first Caribbean sun, Maman was cooing delicious vodoun fables in time with the lazy metronome of her steel drum rocker. "What a

terrible baby you are, shaking inside your mama's belly like a Carnival boy; my insides are an atelier, not a dance hall...'

I passed years like stalks of field cane (striaght and sweet and green) wrapping my child-body in a naked pastiche of creole jazz, muddy-ankle football, and the innocent sexuality of rhythm. Lazy days of cacao and calico were spent on the fetid foreshore of our village unraveling papa's gnarled fly-nets; while the humid python-winding nights were swallowed by the pulsing rapture of cheap cane rum and the tongue-on-skin throng of voudon arousal. When the sun calmed the winds, mon papa would let me steer the skiff to the fishing beds; as he ate his supper bread and sipped grape wine, I would stand on the tenuous bow of the boat and wave to the far inching trawlers and fattened cargo-ships. I have the memories of a scattered, but happy, diarist; poplin-rough Sunday school clothes and the gangly flush of pubescence, maman's unnerving truth serum stare and the droning lisp of our beetle-faced cure'...and when my lean body first began to yearn for the wettened loggia of a woman's legs,

I was awkwardly depulced by the silly youngest daughter of a wild tonton-man, who though she was a few years beneath me wanted only to mustang-ride on top of me.

Haiti is a violent wealth of color cloistered in a vault of shadows; a green and grise' catafalque bedecked with bright ribbons and gimcrack liturgies, big generals, and little girls, a lethal coup poudre potion mixed in a cardinal-purple zuchetto - once, in the citron mist of waking, Maman mumbled, 'Come here children...come inside, my house is warm, I will feed you...'

A man will attempt to run from the mange of furies that burrow into his pores, but the Haiti-man alone can drown his vermin in the dank, muscular suffocation of his black magic voudon. It is a carnal intercourse of spine and cortex, making love in a large wrought-iron washtub, hand-bathed in a rotgut sweat of fermented slave tears and corrupt eucharist wine - by the naked hands of writing and coming, which have submitted their strong backs to the raw dictatorship of fear and adoration. Mon papa, tapping his inert, Papa-Doc old boat engine with a scarred bonig knife, said, voudon is like a magic carburetor, mixing an explosive solution of Haitian blood and spirit breath - a glazed smile for his own wit; and then, in a guarded sotto-voce, he whispered as beaten men do, 'Maman...has a great lord sleeping inside her breasts, and when he awakes...he treats her to a powerful feast; she can tell the future and smell your lies, bottle your ti bon ange soul in a gas can if she feels like it, or even make a man's backbone shake like a dying jellyfish...be afraid of Maman, but love her well.' Year later, Maman in her chicory-scented pinafore, rolled with laughter when I retold what our late papa had said. "That man...I miss his simple grin and his slow hands...Tonight we will dance for him; you, who fed on the outside of my breasts, and my 'great lord' who is suckling inside them. Papa will smile, no?'

At Pentacost, when the pursed black lips of the green island hummed dark Catholic hymns, I would pilgrimage off to the eastern most Dominican tip of the island and imagine that I could see past the scattered lily isles of the soul-bayou Caribbean over the ungenial Atlantique and onto the gelid farshore of Europe; meditating, scrutinizing over the gendarme-sneer of the French or even the gaspacho-gold face of the

Spanairds. The Europeans fascinate me. I can picture the finger-tip calculations of the the captivated servant trying to understand how to climb the stairs between himself and the master, yet they fascinate me more because their paths have been so intricately woven with ours. They branded us with their perversion of Christianity and salved the wounds with whiplashes; we are the gross-deformed bastard-cattle brood of Europa, who abandoned us we she learned that are too stong too die, yet simple enough to decay. I remember a rumor of a blade-quarted Paris-dandy who drank riotous amounts of cognac in the company of a grand Tonton Macoute and then quipped with a sodomist's tongue, 'Ce country is manque'...ha, an unfinished sewer, smell it ! That odor can only be from an ulcerous wound...'I must laugh here. I know that what we are must scare them; the alieness of our revery, the scathing depth of our intensity, the human-bright colors

of violence and treachery that we parade upon our chests like the general's ribbons. Maman said that all the European men should be cooked a bit longer 'their bellies are too tender, they cannot stomach the face-up-close crimes that we can commit - they were built for killing anonymously - big missiles, bureaucracies, and world wars; they dont have the pride of naked resolve to stare into the crevices of a man's eyes and wrest out his soul...Put them in my belly. I will cook them a little more, make 'em more real." Would terrify you? The too intimate suffocation of a bokor queen's flesh womb, gaging blind in a solution of her great lord's semen and the belly-warm blood of sa mare, ma mere? You would be forced to gape with boarding -school eyes upon a blistering fantastique that mocks your swollen insolence. Mind, you can frighten me too; I would be scared beyond myself if I were staked naked between the trenches of Sommes. Pardon me, I do not hate the European gens, but scrutinizing them is like the thick frustration of a child learning to somersault; one day, when my mind is beyond intrigue though, I will roll over my preoccupied thoughts of them as if a playful steel drum rolled down a steep hill.'Voudon is the religion of the cerebellum, an allegro-alfresco celebration of the primal mind that perches beneath the tangled fugue of the forebrain like a trap-door spider. As night chars the canvas of day, the Haiti people start to breathe more freely. We smile with the heady anticipation of an addict carressing a loaded needle in the moments that the sugar cane torches flickr alive and finger drums begin to rumble from rickety porches. I remember the creeping euphoria of feeling my skull becoming light and translucent, the intravenous drip of human alkaloids saturating my veins and vertebrae as the id of my passions secreted a narcotic sweat of expectation. You feel the itch of a nine-month pregnancy, the salavation of salvation...'

The angelus bells of the bokor draw us to their back-yard shacks, which they decorate in a whirl of colorful ideograms and homemade fetishes. Shirts undone and hemlines gathered up, bony chests and weathered chapeaux, we congregate like a brazen cabal, our tongues wagging in chirping mouths for the festivities to begin, to shed our sulking skin and dance nude in a soothing embrocation. Maman was a great bokor. She carried an infectious air of ebullience and pride, as if her eyes were saying can you believe that great things we will do tonight? She would enter the room with a corset of flunkies and a flowing train of petitioners; her hands touching the face of everyone present, laughing and smiling with them. She became a warm-blooded nucleus of a slowly, spiraling galaxy of children, she was Maman to everyone now. Here they called her La Chantelaine, mistress of the house.

The walls of the hovel, brown and tin and worn, would shake and quiver in the pulsing thrum of the swaying, wailing women and the driving beat of the drums. We danced in groups and couples and alone, smiling like pristine simpletons, letting the rhythm knead into us like a masseur's hands. Music is the riding rein of the soul; and the ever-rapid beat of our rhythms echo off the deepest ravines of our psyche, guiding the traveller inwards, through the dense strata of sharks of the upper brain, down into the cradle of the brain stem, where impulse and intuition are as inseperable as wave and light once were, pain and pleasure, sea and sun, woman and man. While voudon is the horse that carries us within, it has a deeper brilliance - the fierce embrace of total submission - as if a man who makes loves to his adored woman, his flaring tongue alive in the passion of realizing that he can go nowhere but inside his lover; he submits himself to the exploration of her depths, his body only a caisson, his soul a conspirator addcited to the narcosis of pilgrimaging inside the body of her spirituality. We, as a people, venture further in the bracing womb of archetypes, deeper into the mythic, yet nascent body of the great child unborn, than of any other people who can serioulsy claim to burrow into the flesh of understanding. Mon papa said we are dogs who can find their way home across a wild sea. This is true - we are suffering children who toil for penury, who sink in a slow misery - but it just may be us who will be blessed by the tears of Allah before the Mohamedans, our forgiving lips alone upon the weeping wound of Christ. I am not saying we are holier than you, only that we are much more human; our sins and sorrows are heavier weights upon our necks as we leap into the blue sea... You should pardon me when i gibber like this; in these later years I am learning to appreciate the breadth of my life, I no longer dwell upon its serated seams but adore the entire panorama; at times, my tongue is slower than my awe.

With the fear of crashing the crescendo of this story, I must tell you that I left behind my island of voudon dolls and emmigrated to the alleys of Paris. Maman died, poisoned. Papa was long dead, exhaustion. The Tonton Macoute wanted to cripple the informal oligarchy of the voudon queens; they would have snapped my back to break our lineage. I was forewarned with the brutality of Haitian subtlety; a black-painted disembowled kitten tossed on my doorstep like a newspaper (Maman was La Chantelaine, they teasingly called me Le Chat) and then after the swelter of a frightened week, they set fire to our house, to papa's old boat, to Maman's back-yard shack... I cried like an unsoothable baby until I reached the skirts of Port-Au-Prince, where I cleaned bilges on an Indochinese freighter for passage to France. I had no papers, no authorization. All I remember of the voyage were the long, rolling waves of fever that slept in my chest like a nervous rattlesnake. In Marseilles I stole down the anchorline of the ship and swam across the chilled harbor until I felt the sand bottom of beach under my feet, and then i melted into the city. After a month or so, I fell into the gravity of Paris.

There are many Haitians here, some wealthy, most nor. They showed me how to bribe the flic-policemen and to temper my slurring patois so its didnt hurt the sensitive ears of Paris. I found a cab to drive at night and a ten-body room to sleep in during the day. I stumbled into Saint-Germain one afternoon and drank coffee with a gabbing clique of student . They were amazed by the stories I told, probably found them charming, distracting. In return they gave me access to libraries and lectures and new thoughts. My mind seemed to grow from weeds into gardens. I began to write, paint a bit, make love to women in dusk-empty parks. I felt as if I were a cave dweller climbing foreign but delicious alps, shocked by the brightness of the sun and the limitless expanse of the sky.I learned to fish with a rod and reel. Some weekends I drop a line into the dirty Seine and ponder, my line bobbing for memories. When I think of my Haiti I cannot remember the people of the homes, they are like dry parchment paper, rather I see the cumulous balls of smoke lifting from papa's rosewood pipe or I smell the acrid resin of boiled candle wax and chicken entrails slipping from Maman's alchemist kitchen. More, I can still feel the reassuring constriction of voudon about my torso and tongue, as if i had been sewed into a new skin, one more alive, more luxuriant, more spohisticated than my own. Voudon made me fraternal brother of the gut; I lived like a wise homunculous, wild and alive, in the stomach of the human conspiracy. I know the grinding contortions of our hungers and the soothing coolness of our waters. My thoughts were simple peasants, knowing only the autocracy of impulse and the heady musk of desire. And on this far shore from my birth, I have discoverd that Time is like a scribbled blackboard running the breadth of your life, ever reteaching you lessons and exercises that you forgot or never understood. Now, living in the brilliantly glib pages of Paris, I have been given the luxury of contemplative distance to strip my ideology of voudon of its cosmologies and mythos, a sculptor leaning back for perspective, whitened chisel in hand. As if an elder son returning home to hold a father he can now better understand, I embrace voudon for its raw uniqueness, its power to shape our fears and tears back into a primordial clay, allowing us to reenact the passion drama of life and self-creation and death. While I am happy that no horsemen can ride my back now, I wince for children who can never escape from the gnawing brutality of fearing a lonely breathless night or who shirk form staring into the sun, never being able to spit up the bland, anonymous shellac of Latin upon their tongues.

grateful for NATO protection by fusion-of-horizons

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youtu.be/6TK9c-caEcw

Bertrand Russell on his meeting with Vladimir Lenin in 1920

youtu.be/h0L5sEc4Vkk

Dylan Moran on Russians

youtu.be/y2x9rmtAFl8

Dylan Moran about Putin

youtu.be/jcwSx-P3Y-Q

KEY INSIGHTS into Putin's war & Western Democracy

00:00 Intro & announcement about philosophy Q&A

00:20 Is Putin gaining or losing power? (David Harrison)

01: 18 Putin's delusion, Olive Stone, Lex Fridman (Tessa Piotrowski Kristensen)

04:55 Mariupol massacres (Grace philosophy)

07:00 Anne Applebaum and feminism (annular frisson)

10:46 Ukraine to become a US state? (Everyday Exercises)

13:40 Fear and freedom in Russia (Norman Boyes)

21:08 The right to privacy (Zeitgest)

23:09 Why is the West so slow? German response. (Michael O'Hara & Caro Demi)

25:10 Are all humans capable of evil? Vlad's knowledge. (Ninosninosninos)

33:08 Putin's nerves (Green Fire)

35:40 Will Russia break up? (Ana-Katarina Kralj)

39:54 Why do Russian 'elites' hates the West? (fourthchute)

42:50 Anti NATO propaganda (David Glickman)

44:15 Arestovych's prediction of the war (Tisteland)

46:50 How far does Russian imperialism go? (userofthetube)

49:50 Sending NATO troops into Ukraine? (Jaycee Fairclough - I'm sorry I was so blunt with you!)

53:18 How can Russians comfortable with what their military is doing? (Buddy Rojek)

55:39 Future wars (Pete Barnes)

57:35 End of the world? (Franchesca)

59:50 Rise of Anti-Westernism (Ferrari Guy)

1:01:55 Was the war avoidable? (Ron Langelaan)

1:04:32 Rotten compromises? (Steve Holmes)

1:09:58 Soviet legacy (Flyersfan64)

1:13:10 Endgame for the war? (Connie Pressley)

1:16:08 Are humans becoming less violent? (Schnauzpig)

1:20:50 Modern human society (Begrenzter Wiedererkennungswert)

1:23:44 Post-truth politics (Richard Oldfield)

1:26:48 How can you tell you live in a free society? (Paul Neilson)

1:29:07 Left-wing pro Russian views? (Malcolm Mann)

1:30:40 Agency of small states (Daniel Grant)

1:32:28 Putin's logic seems crazy (Ulrik Schack Meyer)

1:38:45 Fascization of Russia (DrScopeify)

1:41:31 Democracies getting sick (Alex Alex )

.

photo:

Statue with NATO logo near the Ministry of Defense in Bucharest, Romania.

Stand with Ukraine!

Stop Putin now!

Pantera PMK-11 'Peacekeeper' by DR.Church

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Keeping the peace in the future required a little more than tear gas and sandbag launchers. Pantera's proprietary AI can identify threats in real time and *take care of it*. No more turnip riots and cricket cracker revolutions! Invest in the peace of your autocracy today!

DETAIL SHOT

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I just had to get in on the mech-monday hype! This was a quick weekend build that ended up looking like it would fit right into the terran army in Starcraft. It all started with me wanting to use the garage door parts as some sort of gun barrel, and i'm pretty happy with the results.

Hope you like it!

Also, follow me on Instagram for more building shenanigans!

Bucharest solidarity with Ukraine by fusion-of-horizons

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Stephen Kotkin: Putin, Stalin, Hitler, Zelenskyy, and War in Ukraine | Lex Fridman Podcast

Why do Russians Support Putin? | Konstantin Kisin

www.monumenteromania.ro/index.php/monumente/detalii/en/Na...

'F--- the war!' Russians defiantly chant against war in St Petersburg concert

Stand with Ukraine!

Stop Putin now!

.

photo:

Romanian democratic solidarity with Ukraine against Putin autocracy and resentment in the center of Bucharest, on the walls of the former royal palace.

MNAR

National Art Museum of Romania (former Royal Palace)

Category: Palaces

Period: 1928-1937-1947

Importance: A

LMI code: B-II-m-A-19856

Address: Calea Victoriei 49-53 sector 1

Location: municipiul BUCUREŞTI

District: Bucuresti

Region: Muntenia

Romania

Initial plans by architects Paul Gottereau and Karl Liman

Additional works by architects N.N. Nenciulescu, Karl Liman and Arthur Lorentz

Palatul Regal, azi Muzeul Naţional de Artă al României

www.monumenteromania.ro/index.php/monumente/detalii/ro/Pa...

Categorie: Palate

Perioada: 1928-1937-1947

Importanta: A

Cod LMI: B-II-m-A-19856

Adresa: Calea Victoriei 49-53 sector 1

Localitate: municipiul BUCUREŞTI

Judet: Bucuresti

Regiune: Muntenia

Romania

Planuri initiale: arh. Paul Gottereau si Karl Liman. Lucrari de reconstructie si extindere dupa incendiul din 1926: arh. N.N. Nenciulescu, Karl Liman si Arthur Lorentz.

Absurd Censorship of Art Attempted by Tyranny by ioannis_papachristos

23 13

UPDATE / 🆕 :

I was told this morning that the government WITHDREW the article 8 of the said law thanks to the protesting artists’ widespread outcry against it 😊

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Can €40-million-worth propaganda alter human perception of common sense?

The Greek government recently promulgated an “Act” (not voted by parliament at first, but merely signed by Cabinet Members instead) to abolish the freedom of speech regarding any constructive criticism for using RNA as antigen in vaccines (instead of using proteins); whoever publicly speaks so faces imprisonment of two years.

Now, the same government is about to pass a law censoring Art, too: if an artwork is imbued by a creative idea not abiding by the establishment's official doctrine, then it will be considered as a criminal offense (and the artist will be prosecuted).

“Donkeys do fly,” according to a saying in modern Greek, whenever the tyrant commands so… One looks forward to also hearing the government ordering water to flow upwards!

The freedom of thinking is next in line to be attacked by the tyranny-ready technological surveillance infrastructure.

Bucharest solidarity with Ukraine by fusion-of-horizons

145 9

Stephen Kotkin: Putin, Stalin, Hitler, Zelenskyy, and War in Ukraine | Lex Fridman Podcast

Why do Russians Support Putin? | Konstantin Kisin

www.monumenteromania.ro/index.php/monumente/detalii/en/Na...

'F--- the war!' Russians defiantly chant against war in St Petersburg concert

Stand with Ukraine!

Stop Putin now!

.

photo:

Romanian democratic solidarity with Ukraine against Putin autocracy and resentment in the center of Bucharest, on the walls of the former royal palace.

MNAR

National Art Museum of Romania (former Royal Palace)

Category: Palaces

Period: 1928-1937-1947

Importance: A

LMI code: B-II-m-A-19856

Address: Calea Victoriei 49-53 sector 1

Location: municipiul BUCUREŞTI

District: Bucuresti

Region: Muntenia

Romania

Initial plans by architects Paul Gottereau and Karl Liman

Additional works by architects N.N. Nenciulescu, Karl Liman and Arthur Lorentz

Palatul Regal, azi Muzeul Naţional de Artă al României

www.monumenteromania.ro/index.php/monumente/detalii/ro/Pa...

Categorie: Palate

Perioada: 1928-1937-1947

Importanta: A

Cod LMI: B-II-m-A-19856

Adresa: Calea Victoriei 49-53 sector 1

Localitate: municipiul BUCUREŞTI

Judet: Bucuresti

Regiune: Muntenia

Romania

Planuri initiale: arh. Paul Gottereau si Karl Liman. Lucrari de reconstructie si extindere dupa incendiul din 1926: arh. N.N. Nenciulescu, Karl Liman si Arthur Lorentz.

"Poster is Ready for the No Kings Protest, October 18, 2025" by Orland Park Birdie Girl

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Together we must stand up for Democracy or face the consequences of Autocracy!

Crowds gathered for anti-Trump "No Kings" rallies across the U.S. on October 18, 2025.

The estimate for the number of people attending the Orland Park, Illinois protest was three to four thousand people. Total participation nationwide was estimated to be 7 MILLION!

*I modified my poster prior to the event and created a "flip side" too, which was used at the demonstration. Both can be seen in the comment section below.

A Good Choice by Dom Haughton

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“Reuben! Reuben come back! Reuben! REUUUBENNNN! Reuben, make a good choice now! Reuben, you need to make a good choice!”

I'm not convinced that Reuben was ever going to make a good choice, and while I'm fully committed to the concept of the will of the people, I couldn't help feeling that here was a moment when a hefty dollop of parental autocracy was needed. Reuben was only just three. Not much older than my tiny little grandchildren. I know this because his mother, who seemed to be placing an inordinate amount of faith in Reuben's grasp of the concepts of action and consequence at such a tender age, had already pointed the fact out to him loudly enough for everyone on the right hand side of the beach to hear. Meanwhile, the small boy's eyes followed the older children up the cliff; the fifteen year old, pursued by the nine year old, next by the six year old, and then our little crusading sherpa with a death wish. Reuben was desperate to climb to the top as well, and after all attempts to reason with him had been ignored, was plucked from the sheer rock wall before he could escape. I wanted to make the short ascent too, but I was waiting until I could have it to myself. I hoped my eighty year old mother wasn't going to suddenly appear out of nowhere, yelling in my general direction at three thousand decibels when the moment came. It seemed that Reuben hadn't made a good choice. Later, he tried again, as I watched and wondered at how he’d given Mum the slip and trotted halfway across the stony beach to Base Camp Zero once more. Soon she hot footed it over after him, still trying to appeal for common sense, and managing to thwart his progress before I, or anyone else present felt the need to get involved. Modern parenting. Something tells me Reuben’s going to be a mountaineer when he grows up. Either that or a tree surgeon.

I wasn't sure whether I'd made a good choice either. Clevedon is undeniably lovely, but wasn't I just playing it safe by coming here? Earlier, on the long drive south from Cheshire, the Malvern Hills had briefly filled the distant horizon with a semi mountainous haze under an azure sky. I hadn’t visited Great Malvern in thirty-five years. I could have stayed nearby and walked up to the top for golden hour, to enjoy views towards the Brecon Beacons and the Black Mountains on the border with Wales. Later, phone snaps came from home, where clouds had gathered to absorb every last drop of pink from the setting sun. Here at Clevedon the sky was completely clear, save for a mass of burning cloud that hovered over the Bristol Channel a long way to the west. And we don’t like clear skies do we? Not when we’re taking pictures we don’t. Well it was too late. Here is where I was, and once Reuben and all of his associates had finally abandoned the scene, I clambered up to the raised area of rocks beneath the pier. I was soon followed up by a gang of adolescents, but Clevedon is an easy going sort of place, where people seem to be very chilled - at least in my experience they do - and they were perfectly peaceful as they waited for the sun to set somewhere over the Welsh coast. Hell, they were even playing some quite agreeable sounding music. I’m not sure what it was, but I was getting gentle overtones of early seventies progressive folk rock, which I far prefer to much of the banal noise we generally associate with young people these days. My goodness I’m starting to sound like my dear old Grandad who’s been gone for more than thirty years now. They were nice kids. I shall move on. Where was I? Oh yes, I was on top of a small cliff, setting up the camera in the direction of my favourite pier. Now I come to think of it, I’m not even sure if I’ve ever photographed any other piers.

Once I was up in this rarefied atmosphere, an entire fifteen feet above the pebbles, I began to wonder whether I was too close to the pier, almost looking along it as I was. If I'd stayed at the bottom I could have opened up the angle a bit and experimented with some variations to the composition. But I wasn't looking forward to abseiling back down the cliff, at least not until I'd watched those kids make their descents first. Everything looked different from the top, and I couldn’t even remember exactly what route I’d taken up here. But then again there was an advantage to this elevated viewpoint that I hadn't enjoyed in previous visits. A slightly different angle in fact, and in addition to this it was easier to lose the untidy foreground rocks that were being revealed by a rapidly falling tide.

Then came the glow, the green ironwork catching the golden sunlight against the clear blue sky as the clock moved towards six. Maybe I was in the right place. Maybe I'd made a good choice after all. Behind me, the strains of something soft and soporific came from the group of youngsters. Fairport Convention? Probably a modern reboot, but it fitted the mood well enough. They climbed down. I climbed down after them and watched an orange band of light slowly fade across the estuary above Cardiff’s waterfront. Reuben was probably at home, trying to smash his way out of his bedroom window and onto the roof by now. There was a pub just across the road and I wasn't driving anywhere until the next day. It was time to make another good choice and find a pint of something warm and hoppy. And then maybe another one.

Bucharest solidarity with Ukraine by fusion-of-horizons

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Stephen Kotkin: Putin, Stalin, Hitler, Zelenskyy, and War in Ukraine | Lex Fridman Podcast

Why do Russians Support Putin? | Konstantin Kisin