Frozen Mid-Cut: Log Sculpture Shows How Trees Get Sliced

Vincent Kohler   "Ever wonder how boards turn from trees into building materials? While not a secret, the process is also not entirely obvious - and rarely this clear or quite so visceral."

 

"Vincent Kohler (photos by Geoffrey Cottenceau) shows the art and geometry of the dissection process in much the same way an insect specialist might cut and splice a living specimen (or a butcher's chart shows where slabs of meat can be found).

 

"The result is a kind of three-dimensional version of a logging diagram drawing, showing in frozen time and physical reality how each cut is made and what the resulting sizes are, from which our minds can also reverse-engineer the order of cuts."

 

 

Hat tip to Jeff Hayden; Plano. TX

Vlad vs. Barry in pictures

 

 

 

 

 

 

Krauthammer: Obama’s pathetic response to Putin’s invasion of Crimea

Charles Krauthammer    ... "During the Ukrainian prime minister’s visit to Washington last week, his government urgently requested military assistance. The Pentagon refused. It offered instead military ration kits."

 

"Putin mobilizes thousands of troops, artillery and attack helicopters on Ukraine’s borders and Washington counters with baguettes, American-style. One thing we can say for sure in these uncertain times: The invasion of Ukraine will be catered by the United States.

 

"Why did we deny Ukraine weapons? Because in the Barack Obama-John Kerry worldview, arming the victim might be taken as a provocation. This kind of mind-bending illogic has marked the administration’s response to the whole Crimea affair."

ELIZABETH WAHL: I Was Putin’s Pawn

"What it was like to work for the Russian propaganda machine, and why I quit on live TV."

Politico   ... "My heart racing, I took my earpiece out and got up from the anchor chair. As I gathered my belongings, the news director said he wanted to have a word with me in his office. He asked me why I did it, as though I had some reason other than the one I had just announced on live TV. I explained that it really was because of the propaganda RT [Russia Today] was pushing about Ukraine. Then I left the building and walked a couple blocks to a restaurant to sit down and let the reality of what I did settle in.

"Fifteen minutes later, my phone started ringing." ... Full article

Well, RT lost Wahl but got Larry King

Wahl's resignation

 

Reason.com

Fred Phelps, 1929-2014; " … God still hates fags.” (UPDATED)

World Magazine

 

... "Phelps’ most public era began in 1991 after alleged homosexual activity in a local Kansas park brought on his first protests. Taking his crusade national, he thrust himself into the spotlight for picketing after the 1998 murder of gay college student Matthew Shepard.

"Westboro Baptist picketed at the funerals of victims of everything from tornadoes to AIDS to school bus crashes, declaring the deaths retribution for society’s acceptance of homosexuality. The family says it spends $250,000 a year on travel, and the church’s website now claims to have staged more than 53,000 pickets."

Westboro Baptist Church protests Lorde concert; first protest since Phelps' passing 

Don't Give Away the Internet! UPDATED: Counterpoint from Legal Insurrection

bokbluster.com

Big Peace   ..."As former senior State Department official Christian Whiton has observed, there are predictable consequences to having the “directory and traffic signals of the Internet” come under the control of such hostile forces, including the following: 

• Greater control over the content of the Internet, including censorship, by governments who regard it as a threat to their holds on power.

• Impediments to technological innovation as bureaucrats and hostile governments seek to dictate what can and cannot be done with the net.

• UN taxation of domain name registrations and, in due course, other Internet transactions. Such international taxation will make the United Nations even less accountable and afford it the latitude to fund activities detrimental to U.S. interests and those of its allies.

• Control of the Internet can allow it to be used as an instrument of warfare. While the United States has refrained from making such use, allowing actual or potentially hostile powers to exercise such control may mean the Internet is simply disabled at a critical moment, or perhaps employed against us.

 Giving up US control of internet naming while #Twitterisblocked in Turkey

 

"One of the memes hitting the blogosphere recently has been that the US just “gave up control of the internet”.

"This week on Canto Talk, Legal Insurrection’s Mandy Nagy explained why that wasn’t the case.   Legal Insurrection

Hitler at 50: Color Photos of a Despot’s Birthday

Time Life   "We do not usually give so much space to the work of men we admire so little.

"So began a remarkable editor’s note to LIFE’s readers in an April 1970 issue of the magazine, introducing a photographer named Hugo Jaeger — a man who, the note pointed out, “was a fascist before the Nazi party was formed.”

 

"In that issue, LIFE published a series of startling color pictures that Jaeger made in the late 1930s and 1940s, when he enjoyed unprecedented access to the Third Reich’s upper echelon, traveling with and chronicling Adolf Hitler and his Nazi cohorts at massive rallies and, frequently, in quieter, private moments, as well. Jaeger’s photos were, it turned out, so attuned to the Führer’s vision of what a Thousand Year Reich might look and feel like that Hitler declared, upon first seeing the kind of work Jaeger was doing: “The future belongs to color photography.' ”

....

"Here, in grudging acknowledgment of the scope of Jaeger’s achievements as a photographer — acknowledgment, in other words, of the work of a man we admire so little — LIFE.com presents a series of color pictures from the over-the-top celebrations in Berlin marking Hitler’s 50th birthday (April 20, 1939), as well as some of the ludicrously gaudy gifts bestowed on the German leader by his Nazi peers and sycophants.

 

"Seen today, Jaeger’s photographs elicit an unsettling sense of both dismay and dread: dismay at the sheer scale of the tribal, nationalist madness that once, not so long ago, convulsed a country of millions; and dread at the horrors that, we know, such madness was soon to unleash."

Read more:  Full article

 

Ghosts in the Sun: Hitler’s Personal Photographer at Dachau, 1950

  

 Judgment at Nuremburg

How amusing that Werner Klemperer, the man who will one day play Colonel Klink on "Hogan's Heroes" portrays a sadistic jurist in the movie. 

 

World's worst hunting dog

Hat tip to Danny Balmer, Bay City, Oregon

Too Busy to be President

 

American Thinker   "None other than the truly sycophantic thinks for a second that President Obama cares a whit for anything that does not involve

fundamentally altering the social composition of this country.  Or golf.  During the five-plus years that we have been without a real president, meaning one who actually was aware of all aspects of the position and tried, even just a little, to perform them, everything that was predicted to occur during his tenure has materialized.  We are weaker, less respected, less feared, less liked and, well, just less.  No surprise there, really.  Conservatives had this guy figured out early in the first campaign, and they were spot on.  No record, no experience, no consistency, no integrity, no background, no evidence of morals, no normal friends or associates, and no supporters who cared more about their country than about their silly self-congratulation over electing the first black man who seemed just like them: unserious.

 

Democrats and foreign affairs; the charge of the lightweight brigade

Moscow completes Crimea annexation as Ukraine moves West   "The latest U.S. sanctions, which targeted Putin’s chief of staff along with other senior Kremlin aides and four businessmen considered to be his lifelong friends, dealt a painful blow to Russia. Obama also warned that more sweeping penalties against Russia’s economy, including its robust energy sector, could follow."

The Incoherence of Western Foreign Policy   "The crisis in Ukraine is just the latest in a long series of foreign policy failures brought about by the incoherence in our thinking about foreign relations. On the one hand, we have championed ethnic-national self-determination as the highest international good, while on the other we have assumed that all these various nations and peoples share the same ideals, principles, and goods, and so can comprise a transnational order that will eliminate war and conflict and create peace and prosperity. Over a hundred years of history reveal these ideals not just to be incompatible, but also to foment and worsen inter-state violence."  Bruce S. Thornton

 

Apologies to Charlie Brown

Hat tip to Walt Stier; Santa Maria, Ca

"President Obama takes a big risk and scores a win for democracy -- and no one gives a damn."

Credit where credit is due.

 

Foreign Policy  "President Obama pulled off a master stroke this week. He deployed U.S. military force in support of an infant democracy that desperately needs our help. The result was a resounding success, a vivid illustration of how the United States can put its unchallenged power to positive ends.

 

"He did it, once again, by sending in the SEALs, the U.S. Navy's famous special forces. But this time they weren't double-tapping a terrorist. Instead they seized a mysterious tanker that had skipped out of Libya with a shipment of oil that one of the country's rogue militias was trying to sell on the open market. By doing it the SEALs foiled a potentially game-changing challenge to the authority of Libya's hard-pressed government -- one of the very few in the Arab world to have actually been elected by its own country's people." 

Full article

 

SEALs seize oil tanker from Libyan rebels

The Pentagon said the tanker will return to Libya under control of the destroyer Stout.