Sunday Reads: Forget Rubenesque Women, Try Willendorf

Morning Everyone!

Still feeling a little off, but somewhat better…I even tried to write this post on Friday night, only I just could not get it all together.

If this post doesn’t make much sense, blame it on my lack of brain activity.

Some GOP idiot was pulling an Akin over the weekend, by that I mean she was spouting crap about rape. Little Green Footballs takes a look at a California GOP Leader: Rape Pregnancy Is Rare Because “The Body Is Traumatized” 

When are Republicans going to learn that when the subject of rape comes up, they should shut the front door?

This time it’s the president of the California Republican Assembly, Celeste Greig, who thinks a woman who is raped is less likely to get pregnant because “the body is traumatized.”

All this when the California GOP is trying to change their image. Calif. Republicans seek to restore party’s luster

They sure as hell won’t get a sparkle continuing to talk shit about rape.

Of course with Fox and Friends pushing the right’s meme….You May Have Seen These Fox Graphics Before — In A GOP Press Release according to  Media Matters

Fox aired on-screen graphics that mimicked images included in the NRCC release in order to criticized what they termed Obama’s “sequestration priorities.” Here are those images, with the Fox versions on the left and NRCC versions on the right:

Fox News has repeatedly cut and pasted or otherwise parroted GOP materials without disclosing the partisan source of the research. In graphics used for one 2009 segment, Fox News even replicated a typo that had been included in the Republican research document that the network was reproducing without disclosure. After anchor Jon Scott subsequently apologized for the typo. CNN host Howard Kurtz castigated Scott at the time, saying that the Fox anchor should apologize for repeating “partisan propaganda from the GOP” unsourced.

Funny huh?

Then you have news from Wally World, Why Are Walmart Billionaires Bankrolling Phony School ‘Reform’ In LA? | Perspectives, What Matters Today | BillMoyers.com

For years, Los Angeles has been ground zero in an intense debate about how to improve our nation’s education system. What’s less known is who is shaping that debate. Many of the biggest contributors to the so-called “school choice” movement — code words for privatizing our public education system — are billionaires who don’t live in Southern California, but have gained significant influence in local school politics. New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s recent contribution of $1 million to a political action committee created to influence next week’s LAUSD school board elections is only the most recent example of the billionaire blitzkrieg.

For more than a decade, however, one of the biggest of the billionaire interlopers has been the Walton family, heirs to the Walmart fortune, who have poured millions into a privatization-oriented, ideological campaign to make LA a laboratory for their ideas about treating schools like for-profit businesses, and treating parents, students and teachers like cogs in what they must think are education big-box retail stores.

As a business chain, Walmart has spent a fortune — in philanthropy and campaign contributions — trying to break into the Los Angeles retail market with its low-wage retail stores.

Now the Walton family — which derives its fortune from the Arkansas-based Walmart — is trying to use that fortune to bring Walmart-style education to Los Angeles.

You know, even in my half-organized loopy sense of things, I can still appreciate the irony of this. I’ll explain after another quote from the Moyers blog:

The Waltons have long supported efforts to privatize education through the Walton Family Foundation as well as individual political donations to local candidates. Since 2005, the Waltons have given more than $1 billion to organizations and candidates who support privatization. They’ve channeled the funds to the pro-charter and pro-voucher Milton Friedman Foundation for Education Choice, Michelle Rhee’s pro-privatization and high-stakes testing organization Students First, and the pro-voucher Alliance for School Choice, where Walton family member Carrie Walton Penner sits on the board. In addition to funding these corporate-style education reform organizations, since 2000 the Waltons have also spent more than $24 million bankrolling politicians, political action committees, and ballot issues in California and elsewhere at the state and local level which undermine public education and literally shortchange students.

Read more at the link.

I wonder if these folks in Alabama would think Walmart has an agenda: Alabama GOP Official Warns Obama Plans to Indoctrinate Children | Right Wing Watch

I have to give you the rest in link dump fashion.

The rest of today’s reads deal with history…

Rise and fall of black America’s first fighter pilot – The Independent:

Out of America: Honoured by the French as a war hero, Eugene Jacques Bullard ended his days as a lift operator.

From The New York Times: The Holocaust Just Got More Shocking

THIRTEEN years ago, researchers at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum began the grim task of documenting all the ghettos, slave labor sites, concentration camps and killing factories that the Nazis set up throughout Europe.

 What they have found so far has shocked even scholars steeped in the history of the Holocaust.

New York Fashion Museum Shows its ‘Shoe Obsession’-Voice of America

The museum’s current show, “Shoe Obsession,” presents some of the most extreme examples of those objects of desire: fantastically wrought sky-high heels by leading designers, with prices equally unreachable.

Read about the history of shoes at that link, and you can look at more pictures, since they have a gallery at the link too.

And finally, this last story which connects to the title of this post. Seeking Meaning in the Earliest Female Nudes

 

Changing styles. Prehistoric female figurines started off voluptuous like the Venus of Willendorf (left) but then became schematic like these “Gönnersdorf” style statuettes (right), possibly signaling a shift in their meaning.

Credit: Bildersturm/Creative Commons

About 35,000 years ago, prehistoric artists across Europe suddenly discovered the female form—and the art world has never been the same. The explosion of voluptuous female figurines sculpted out of limestone, ivory, and clay directly inspired Picasso and Matisse. Researchers have debated the figurines’ meaning for decades. Now, two scientists think they have the answer. Presenting their work here last week at the European Palaeolithic Conference, they claimed that the objects started off as celebrations of the female form, then later became symbols that tied together a growing human society.

The talk, part of a special exhibition on Ice Age art at London’s British Museum, surveyed the more than 20,000 year-history of female figurines, which are found at dozens of archaeological sites from Russia to France. The earliest such objects, which include the famous Venus of Willendorf from Austria (see photo) and a statuette recently found in Germany that some have called the “earliest pornography,” date from as early as 35,000 years ago and are generally called the “Willendorf style” of prehistoric art.

Y’all have a good Sunday.