ART FOR ART'S SAKE.

The re-dating of these  Indonesian cave paintings has aroused controversy among those who already knew of them and delight in newcomers to these, what would we call them, tracks of our tears, aides memoire, expressions of our need to express ourselves, early  signs of our boundless  image-ination.

It seems that there was, hitherto, an expert  belief that  the creation of  the earliest European (Spanish) cave art, dated at 10,000 years ago,  represented, coincided with an increase in the brain size of homo sapiens, was an embodiment, in a way, of EuroSupremacy.  It turns out that the nig-nogs were doing it long before the white folks and now, with the reassignment  of  these Indonesian works to a period 40,000 years ago, the art historians' house of cards collapses.  Well, it would wouldn't it, history being bunk, art history being snobbish bunk.

Following some online commentaries and discussions  about this re-dating one finds academic vitriol and showy Know-It-Allism mixed with quite understandable sentimentality, newcomers, as I said, confessing to floods of tears, at the sight of these images, touching them, across millennia. I know in which group I belong. 

I was intrigued, further,  to read  that Australian aboriginal art, 75,000 years old, is being destroyed by GlobaCorp's mining activities in Western Australia, doing the right thing, creating wealth and employment for hard-working families.  I don't know but I wouldn't be surprised.

However impossibly complex it becomes, what we call technology can be understood as - for it is - an amplification of  an existing, opposable-thumbed, humanoid bodily function; rock, club, hammer, pile-driver and so on, these amplify the fist; the earliest saw, an animal's jawbone, complete with teeth, amplifies the tearing of fibres with our own canines and incisors; the wheel amplifies the foot;  the spyglass or the Hubble telescope, these amplify the eye; writing amplifies the voice, in fact replacing the previously rhymed and remembered knowledges of pre-histoire, that vast passage of time before the symbologies of language could be chipped from stone, written on skins, scratched on papyrus or stored, magically, in digital retrieval systems, like this one.  

Sometimes, it all seems so simple, technology; Art, though, that's a whole other barrel of monkeys, Art, unlike a club or a stone axe, serves no readily perceptible practical purpose; nobody needs to make Art but  something drives us, most of us, to do it or consume it or both.  And it isn't just the Whatever-You-Can-Get-Away-With tossers, like Tracey Emin, worthless, in it for the money;  decent people, too, are driven to make something they have imagined, something that hadn't been imagined before.
 
It may have been seen, originally, as magic, representational art, may have been an adjunct to shamanism, as is so much Christian art and architecture -  you know, knowledge kept secret from the laity, like priests and lawyers and doctors do; it might just have been clever-monkey curiosity and while there is certainly technology in finding and using the colouring materials, the urge to do it, for its own sake,   that, like the need for God, 40,000 years ago or today,  
is something else.   
God and Art, just my imagination, 
running away with me.    

LEGAL NEWS. MARTIN BRUNT TO WIN BAFTA NEWS

You've been reported to the police, you know.

Makes you a criminal, that; probly go to jail.

 

 DOOR-STEPPED LOW-LIFE TROLLING OLD BITCH DIES AFTER ENCOUNTER WITH FEARLESS BULLY AND HIS CAMERA CREW.

  

Yeah, mad old bitch killed herself because she was a nutter and a troll.

FROM WIKIPEDIA:

The eggshell skull rule (or thin skull rule or you take your victim as you find him rule of the common law) is a well established legal doctrine used in some tort law systems,^[1] with a similar doctrine applicable to criminal law. It increases the liability of a person who may commit a tort against another, from results arising out of those tortious acts.

Contents

• 1 The law
• 2 Case illustrations
• 3 Exceptions
• 4 References

The law

This rule holds one liable for all consequences resulting from his or her tortious (usually negligent) activities leading to an injury to another person, even if the victim suffers an unusually high level of damage (e.g. due to a pre-existing vulnerability or medical condition). The term implies that if a person had a skull as delicate as that of the shell of an egg, and a tortfeasor who was unaware of the condition injured that person's head, causing the skull unexpectedly to break, the defendant would be held liable for all damages resulting from the wrongful contact, even if the tortfeasor did not intend to cause such a severe injury.

In criminal law, the general maxim is that the defendant must "take their victims as they find them", a quotation from the judgment of Lord Justice Lawton in R v. Blaue (1975), in which the defendant was held responsible for killing his victim, despite his contention that her refusal of a blood transfusion constituted novus actus interveniens.

The doctrine is applied in all areas of torts - intentional torts, negligence, and strict liability cases - as well as in criminal law. There is no requirement of physical contact with the victim - if a trespasser's wrongful presence on the victim's property so terrifies the victim that he has a fatal heart attack, the trespasser will be liable for the damages stemming from his original tort. The foundation for this rule is based primarily on policy grounds. The courts do not want the defendant or accused to rely on the victim's own vulnerability to avoid liability.

 

EVENSONG. Tommy Emmanuel - Somewhere Over The Rainbow (live 2006 Leverkusen)

If we his ignore always distracting showmanship, Tommy Emmanuel's genius surely extracts from this much interpreted tune everything it contains. 

GERRY'N'CILLA. WE ARE THE REAL VICTIMS HERE.

 STOP PRESS: skymadeupnewsandfilth tonight hails its success in causing the suicide of a middle-aged woman whom it had hounded. Her offence was to react online to the huge tapestry  of lies, evasion, bluster and bullying that is Gerry McCann.

WHO DOES THIS HORRIBLE WHINING CUNT THINK HE IS?

Portugese police/gipsies/child molesters/killed this woman, wotsername. She may well be dead but of course Cilla and I are the real victims.

Mr McCann told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme that, while he had not seen the @sweepyface tweets, online abuse had caused his family “severe distress”.

“I think we probably need more people to be charged,” he said.

That is: We think people who question our account of events are criminals.

Gerry McCann wants to cleanse the entire fucking Internet of any words critical of him and his horrid Mrs, Cilla, and is assisted,  currrently, by parliament, by the Metropolitan Police and by filth like this, 

MARTIN BRUNT, ONE OF SKY'S FILTHIEST

 FROM TODAY'S DAILY TELEGRAPH:

A woman who was widely condemned in the media for allegedly writing abusive tweets about the parents of Madeleine McCann has been found dead.

The body of Brenda Leyland, 63, was found in a hotel room in Leicestershire on Saturday. Police are not treating her death as suspicious.

Last week Sky News identified Mrs Leyland as the author of a Twitter account named @sweepyface, which had been used to post abusive messages about Kate and Gerry McCann.

The broadcaster confronted her in her home village of Burton Overy, in an exchange that was shown on air on Thursday.

Mrs Leyland, reportedly a mother-of-two, was asked why she was attacking the couple and responded that she was “entitled to”.

She was informed by reporter Martin Brunt that she had been reported to the police and that officers were considering an apparent campaign of abuse against the couple by her and other online “trolls”. She responded that was “fair enough”.

Mr Brunt said he had later been invited into Mrs Leyland’s home where she told him she had questions for the McCanns but hoped she had not broken the law.

Residents in Burton Overy told the Leicester Mercury that Mrs Leyland had “fled the village” after she was photographed on Thursday afternoon.

Villagers said they were “totally surprised” to learn that she had been sending the messages but said they were “worried for her safety”.

Tweets from the @sweepyface account had said that the McCanns should suffer “for the rest of their miserable lives”.

Sky News said the tweets from the account were “not the worst” of the abuse, with other social media users posting death threats.

Mrs Leyland was widely condemned in the media.

  McCann told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme that, while he had not seen the @sweepyface tweets, online abuse had caused his family “severe distress”.

“I think we probably need more people to be charged,” he said.

Too fucking right we do, Gerry, only not the ones you mean,  for the majority,  those outside the charmed circle of MediaMinster, probably all think of you in a manner of which you would not approve.

Time for a backlash. From people unconnected to Gordon Brown and Kirsty Wark,  from people who do not routinely abandon a three-year old and two two-year olds in a strange room, in a strange town, in a foreign country, from people who would never dream of paying-off their mortgage from charitable donations.  Time for a backlash.  From decent people.

LOCAL NEWS. FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD'S IGNOBLE STRIFE. BUT NOT VERY.

People quite understandably think that that line is  from the Thomas Hardy novel, Far From The Madding Crowd, although it originates in the Grey's sublime Elegy in a Country Churchyard and refers not just  to  rustic seclusion but also to  Death's permanent exiling of us all, in far Eternity.

Far from the madding crowd's ignoble strife,
Their sober wishes never learn'd to stray;
Along the cool sequester'd vale of life
They kept the noiseless tenor of their way. It is not all plain sailing, however, in this particular, Northern vale of life.

The minister preached his horrid, scoldy Presbyterianism and now lies, his tomb enscribed in latin, segregated from  the common  crowding dead, ancient and modern, in its sea-threatened precincts.

Tranquil now, the Sound,  although when the gales come, when the tides are high, they maul and  claw at the stoutest sea-walls, undermine the road and threaten us with the sight of coffins bobbing away towards Norway, maybe America.  One of those big, freaky seas is all it would take. Funny how those closest to the sea underestimate its terrifying power, when  it is they, Tragedy's fools, who should really know better.

Never Morning Wore 'Til Evening But Some Poor Heart  Did Break. Tennyson.
Oil Painting by W. Langley, 1884, Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery.
A once-upon-a-time  mariner,  I  have a print of this kitsch melancholy on  my wall, as much for the title as for the painting, an antidote to the serialised nightly sorrows on skymadeupnewsandfilth - murdered schoolgirls; doughty, fundraising cancer victims and now headless recreational martyrs;  Tennyson could simply have said Shit Happens but poets are ever showy and  extravagant.

The cause of our local watery imperilment  is the continued existence of the Churchill Barriers, 
 

causeways linking  the archipelago,

 built with slave labour 



following the incursion to Scapa Flow of Gunter Prien's 

 
U Boat 47 and his sinking of HMS Royal Oak with the loss of nearly all hands, 



men whose ghosts could not but question the value of their fateful service, should they hear Mrs May and Mr Grayling introducing measures which they fought and died to defeat; For Shame! they would shriek. One day, when God is in his Heaven, skeletal hands will, as he takes his fat leisure on the shoreline,  grasp the ankles of Villainy's stooge, Orkney's Big Al Carmichael,  LibDem MP, 



and drag him, spluttering bulbous lies and wormy pledges, down to Davy Jones's Coalition of the Doomed Locker.

The Barriers, though, were erected by Eyetie POWs, in a belated, post-Royal Oak attempt to block  the sneaky entrances to  Scapa Flow, as well as  to provide previously non-existent road links between formerly separated islands and seventy years on, our smart, successful council has not found the wit or the means to replace them and as well as endangering motorists crossing in bad weather, 

as well as needing frequently to be closed, marooning many on the wrong sides, the Barriers obstruct the tidal current; where once it simply rushed from the confluence of the Atlantic Ocean and the North Sea headlong into Scapa Flow it now hits the barriers and rebounds, gnawing at, scoring-away the coastline, eating farmland, threatening not only the grateful dead in the kirkyard but roads, businesses, properties and - inevitably - lives.

Coastal erosion is just part of life, as is turbulent and destructive weather, no use whining about it, unless, as in this case,  it is due to man's interference, and now, seemingly,  something which we must bear until it washes us away.

 Scotland, after all, has no experience of bridge building,

The Kessock Bridge at Inverness.

Over the sea, to Skye.

The Forth road and rail bridges.

 our civil engineers would struggle to span these vast Churchill Barrier distances, one of them as much as a few hundred yards long; Project Europa, after all, has no experience of funding massive post-war infrastructure projects.

Happy to slash at a skyline unchanged since the Ice Age, Orkney Islands Council, force-feeding us pious, nonsensical Greenery, welcomes carpet-bagging windmillers bunging small landowners bribes funded from their neighbours' inflated energy bills;  councillors  have lied shamelessly to public enquiries investigating dodgy windmill planning applications from former councillors, clad in Green Pragmatism's sandals they tell us it is necessary to shit on everything of value in order to meet facetious and irrlevant Green targets yet bleat helplessly about the irreplaceability  of these wretched barriers, as though it was still 1939, as though  we might yet suffer attack from prowling unterseebooten.

But then here, as everywhere, we do suffer the madding crowd's infernal strife; here,  retiring councillors awarded themselves thirty grand, as a reward  for doing the decent  thing and allowing new blood to come in;  here, the last leader of the council, Steven Hagan,

tried to fund his second home from expenses  and remains outraged that his fiddle was disallowed;  here, a career public sector grafter, 

Mr Albert Tait, retired as the council's Acting Chief Executive, immediately took up another lucrative public sector post, paying himself virtually tax-free via  a limited company set up solely for that purpose. Al's current brief is with the local NHS, wouldn't wanna pay any tax towards that, now, would he?

There is no escaping corrupt and staggeringly incompetent local government, no escaping the rank hypocrisy of the career public servant, no escaping his or her stout indignation when found-out. At least in Rotherham a partial truth may yet emerge; here, in order to bury the infamous Orkney Child Abuse scandal - which was, in fact, largely an import from England -  a local sherrif, acting far beyond his  legal powers, simply ruled that there was no case to answer;  a local councillor, a bloated, insufferable bully, Cyril Annal, he of the thirty-grand retirement bung, endorsed - on national television -  the threatening of social  workers, going about their entirely lawful child protection business, with loaded shotguns. Far from scrutiny all sorts of Shit Happens.

Et in Arcadia Ego, Nicholas Poussin.1637
Musee de Louvre, Paris, France.

There are as many interpretations of Poussin's et in arcadia ego as there are art critics and of such there is a pestilence.  The one I like is that Arcadia was ancient Greece's pastoral, rural community, far from the shore and her cities, far from the madding crowd and that the ego of the inscription was Death and corruption - Even in Paradise am I.

Quality of Lifers, Northbound, racing towards imagined Paradise, take note.

RICH FOLKS IN THE NEWS.

 Downing Treat, I mean Street, has today announced the apppointment  of motor industry spokesman, Jeremy Klaxon, as Foreign Seckatry.

 

 The new foreign seckatry with his team.

 Mr Klaxon will replace Mr Philip Coma, who replaced Mr William Lube in one of the so-called  great  offices of state. 

Mr Klaxon, who will sit in the Lords,  will be known as Lord Jezza of Chipping Sodom.

 

The foreign seckatry designate with the head of his press team, Lady Becky Filth of the Old Bailey. Asked whether he would continue to work for Mr Rupert Murdoch, the foreign seckatry designate joked, why not, everyone else in govament does? 

The appointment follows Klaxon's triumphant tour of Argentina, where his diplomatic skills were so impressive that ordinary people threw stones at him in the street and ran him and his entourage out of town.

One of Mr  Gob's current employers, the Paedophile Broadcasting Corporation, commended his long service as one of the most boringly extended cliches. In the world.

A spokesman for the unelected prime minister, Mr David Cameron,  read a statement from Number Ten. Jezza is a mate, a neighbour, he went to the right sort of school and is filthy rich,  and that, let's be quite clear, is good enough for me. And doyouknowwot,   we are confident that under his stewardship British foreign policy will soon be going round corners sideways with its tyres on fire.

Jeremy Gob represents what is best about the country I am proud to lead;  hard-working, does the right thing and is a decent family man. Well, alright, perhaps not all of those things; alright, perhaps not any of them. But nevertheless, nig-nogs and foreigners and trade unions are trying to take over the world. Jezza's the man to put a stop to all that. Today, he insults Mexico and India and Birmingham. Tomorrow, the world.

 If, as I do, you long for a country distinguished by  War,  Homelessness,  Racism,  Poverty and Supidity then, with Jeremy Clarkson's help, I'm your man.  

Vote TorKip.

In next week's Rich Folks In The News:

Westminster arselicker, Michael Spit, MP,  on 

Why it would be not only homophobic but celebophobic to arrest rich people for cocaine use but entirely proper to nick ordinary people.

 

AN ORIENTAL AUTUMN?

RAF Tornado jets

 

today were not poised to fly over China in a show of solidarity with protesters in Hong Kong. 

Governor Emeritus, 

 

Lord Chris Fatso Of BBC Corruption, is not poised to enter the fray on behalf of   his former subjects, 

 

  I say, do I get any money for doing this?

nor are members of COBRA 

 

Quick, follow me, I know how to panic.

urgently carrying their folders into Downing Street;  laughable Defence Seckatry,

 

 Micky Spiv Fallon,  is not blowharding his stupid arse off   to anyone  mad enough to listen and as many as no Brigadiers General Rupert Golightly Jockstrap have urged extremely professional and highly-trained boots-on-Chinky- ground.

Help For Heroes, however,  has pronounced itself disappointed with this lack of aggression towards Beijing, saying, we in the heroes business are committed to the maintainance of a continuing supply of limbless footballers, basketballers and North Pole crawlers  and the govament, frankly, in ignoring the  huge business potential of a war with China, however brief, is letting-down current and potential amputees, plastic surgery patients, blind bastards and even common or garden headbangers, all of whom rely on HM govament for their hero status, even if they aren't.  Which nearly all of them aren't. Obviously.  

Joining-up isn't heroism, getting injured isn't heroism; doing something heroic is heroism, and it is something highly unusual, that's why it's called heroism, if everybody did it it wouldn't mean anything, so, saying that what everybody does is heroism, is actually shitting on heroism proper.  Help for Injured Soldiers,  that would be the right title. But it would still be wrong because the government

which sent them should help them. Not me. I never wanted them to go in the first place. 

What they should do, the Ministry of little but nasty Wars is every other Cruise missile, just don't fire it, won't make any fucking difference to anything, apart from not killing innocent people and making us even more enemies; every other Cruise missile that the Ruperts want to fire, just don't fire it and instead, give the half a million quid it costs to H4H;  just don't fire a hundred, fire fifty and send 25 million pounds to the North Pole Nutters, on the condition that they stay at home. And away from Harry Windsor, hero first class by association and complete arsehole, even by princely standards.

A choir of topless army wives has already volunteered to Sing for Sino-War 

 

on any TeeVee channel which will have them and as many as no programmes have expressed an interest in hosting the concert.  And Imelda Blair has,

 

 for only a small fee, promised to extend her expertise in drumming-up war, as a very profound and meaningful adjunct to civil liberties and human rights,  her husband's, anyway.  

 Blessed are the warmakers. 

 For they shall have their mouths stuffed with gold.

  China, are they muslems? If they are we must take them out immediately; it is the next Crusade.

MediaMinster, ever agog at the prospect of war and stories, as we set small countries ablaze, is strangely silent, too, perhaps this unaccustomed temerity is in some way connected to China having two-and-a-half-million men under arms, 

 

with two-and-a-half million in their Territorial Army; having ten thousand tanks, 

 

three thousand aircraft and

 

 five hundred warships.

 

China, depending on who you believe,  has between two hundred-and-fifty and three thousand nukes of the inter-continental variety. We have our own aircraft carrier capability,  the one without aircraft.

President Autocue will also be on tenterhooks, there are already tensions between Uncle Sam

 

 and Hoo-Flung-Dung 

 

over the South China Sea and the Pentagon is worried about the defensibility of its gazillion-dollar carrier fleet, no longer the four-acre fortresses they thought they were, vulnerable, it seems to Chinese smart missile attack. 

NATO, not even NATO can pretend that a Chinese colony is part of NATO, as were so many other unlikely places.  Maybe that joker, Gob Rassmussensen, head of NATO, could sort-of backdate Hong Kong's membership of NATO, as he did with the undemocratic gangster republic of Ukraine but if he did the chances are that Brussels - and him - would be toast in minutes.

All of the West's Ruperts, then, accustomed to fighting tribesmen  riding around in circles  in rusty Toyota Landcruisers and firing popguns in the air, they won't like this, will be hoping that this Chinese-Hong Kong difficulty just fizzles-out.  Freedom and Democracy are all very well, old chap, but hardly worth losing one's career over, much less one's life.Those Chinks, there's fucking millions of them, litlle yellow bastards,  billions, maybe and they're all tooled-up to fuck, fucking Mig fighters, tanks, guns, hundreds of fucking aircraft carriers, nukes, bug-bombs, death-rays and fuck knows what else.  You see that cunt Cameron and you tell him to stick his No-Fly Zone up his arse.

 I mean, Look, bullying some nig-nogs is jolly good sport but fighting an actual war, against a proper army,  fuck that for a game of soldiers.