religio

[Photo: Yonatan Sindel]

In Israel, hassidic Jews associated with the Shuvu Banim yeshiva complex are protesting the arrest of their leader Eliezer Berland. Protests include picketing the police station, throwing rocks at policemen, attempting to suppress (via court order) the broadcasts about Berland's treatment of a terminally ill woman, and a coordinated assault on the house of one of the whistleblower witnesses (which led to arrest of one of the assailants). On the Shuvu Banim site, Berland is given this characteristic: "Rav Berland continues to act as the community’s powerful spiritual beacon, drawing thousands of newcomers closer to Torah and a mitzvah-observant lifestyle, while also continuing to provide guidance to thousands of Breslov chassidim both within Israel, and across the world."

This is not the first time the spiritual beacon has attracted the police's attention. In 2012, he was accused of sexual harassment and assault, fled Israel at once, switched several countries, eventually got extradited and tried and convicted in 2016. He said that he was "willing to accept any punishment in the world, including burning me and stoning me because that is Torah law", but for some reason did not insist on stoning and served the term. This time, though, it's not just him that got in trouble, but also his wife and five followers. It appears that the spiritual beacon was selling "miracle cures" to terminal cancer patients and insisting they quit regular medical treatment. Berland's "cure" included a ritual and Menthos or sugar pills; it were Berland's followers who went out hunting for marks in oncology departments of hospitals, promising cures. He claimed he took minimal payment for the rituals, but witnesses say they paid him tens of thousands sheqels for them, in some cases taking out loans to be able to pay Berland. It went on for a long while, and stayed within the "haredi" community, with attempts to get the patients back to medical treatment suppressed, until it blew up. There are at least 200 cases like that. In at least one case Berland's followers solicited more money from the family of a patient who died for "ensuring early resurrection on the Judgment Day". It also turns out that last year Berland's family already got in trouble for leeching about 50 million sheqels from the funds donated to the yeshivah, mostly spent on buying property abroad. The whole case looks so ugly that when Berland's lawyer petitioned for his release from arrest due to poor health, the judge(!) refused and told him to take a Menthos instead. The judge got reprimanded, but she only gave Berland what he gave the patients his followers preyed on.

Why am I telling you all this?

Well, because it may be very tempting to say this is abuse of privilege and these people do not represent the religion and so on. That their use of authority and appeal to deity and higher moral law to obtain money and status for themselves from people in precarious situations was an exceptional case.

But this stuff is exactly what religion *is*. Think of that.

Spaceman

A6 sketchbook doodle.

The artist and the automation

I had some time before the Bruegel exhibition, so I looked at the two nearby rooms. So I stand in front of Titian's Danae, and my automation turns on uninvited: 'This shadow under the left breast should be deeper... and this forearm is too long... and this hand was clearly painted by an apprentice from a male model..." Shut up, automation, you are interfering with my enjoyment of painting!

(Illustrations: the Vienna version of Danae I was looking at, and Bruegel's wonderful 'The Artist and the Buyer'. Or, in this case, the artist and the automation.

Brueghel exhibition report

I had returned from the big exhibition of Bruegel the Elder at the Vienna art history museum.

They've shown, besides their own collection (they have a whole room of Bruegel, including The Tower of Babel, The Massacre of the Innocents and the Seasons series) works from Britain, Germany, Netherlands, Belgium, Vienna Albertina and so on. A roomful and a half of drawings and woodcuts, five rooms of paintings, a little historical context and thematic exhibitions on Bruegel's painting techniques and restoration. 

Overall impression was great: not just the pictures, but there also was an educational component. Some paintings were exhibited in multiple versions: e.g., two variants of The Massacre of the Innocents and both Towers of Babel - their own and the Rotterdam one. There were no Blind Leading the Blind, but they brought the newly (and excellently) restored Mad Meg (Dulle Griet) and two of the three Adorations of the Magi. That was easily two thirds of Bruegel's known paintings.

Of drawings and prints there were the Sins and Virtues series, early studies, miscellany, and the wonderful Artist and Connoisseur drawing from Albertina. Especially nice was hanging many of the woodcuts next to the preliminary drawings they were made from. There were also several preparatory drawings for elements used in paintings.

Overall, everything was picked and presented very well. My favorites are still the Babel Tower and especially The Hunters in the Snow, but Mad Meg is also great, and the Swiss variant of Adoration of the Magi with the snow and The Triumph of Death. Bruegel was clearly a forerunner of the zombie apocalypse genre.

More impressions:

Bruegel, in places, is quite a Bosch. They both must have gotten some of their weed from the same vendor.

The younger Bruegels were for the most part pathetic imitators.

Some minuses: the descriptions would have been better placed to the side of each painting, not in front: in such dense crowd the readers had been causing unnecessary jams. The audioguide must die especially; I do understand it is extra profit for the museum, but it makes four or five m...useum-goers stand before each painting listening to their paddles and block the access. But overall the museum handled such heavy crowd well; it was much worse in Albertina in every regard. The hardcover catalog was available only in German; would it have killed them to make some in other languages?

To the Hunters, the Tower and the Artist and Connoisseur I treated myself twice.

Bruegel was wise but terribly sarcastic. To the level of truly poisonous caricature. And not just in his treatment of the characters; in the middle of the Procession to Calvary painting, which features hundreds of figures in furious action (Bruegel the dad was certainly not lazy), one suddenly notices a white horse with a rider standing still, staring directly with a viewer with an awfully cynical grin. A real troll.

Bruegel's drawing is plain, almost medieval, none of the Italian prettifying, and his painting is likewise simple, done in clean spots, early Renaissance wise; but his color and atmosphere sing like few painters could ever manage. He obviously loved to paint tiny detail, with all the hair-thin branches and matchstick-tall soldiers, but it never turns into noisiness. Everything done masterfully, freshly, appropriately.

It was good.

Stumped

There is probably no wilder product of the ongoing dissolution of fact and knowledge, than the Flat Earthers.

So there is no wonder that their weirdness, and especially their rejection of intelligent argument, is bound to produce even weirder myths as time goes on. It's actually entertaining to watch their insane cosmology develop, in a way that one might observe a schizophrenic's attempts to make sense of the slipping reality with failing remnants of cognition and memory. Except here we have a whole community of would-be inmates who dote on the ravings of the most far-gone specimens and converting that into more mythopoeia.

Here's an article on their most recent twist. An epic post-apocalyptic myth in which the very mountains are stumps of felled trees which once reached into the crystal spheres of heaven and connected the earth below to the celestial realm.

I can almost understand their feeling of being excluded, cheated on, their longing for something grand and wonderful in their lives that they cannot find in the world around them.

Almost.

But then I realize that to be swept away by this mythology you have to be really, really, REALLY REALLY freakin' ignorant about the millennia of collected knowledge of that same world around them, that they pooh pooh on. They are so bought into the idea of “all opinions are equal” that they do not have any intellectual compass — they are vehemently fighting off any hint of an intellectual compass.They blather about conspiracies and profusely invent wild myths about the world which they haughtily dismiss but which they cannot be bothered to learn the first things about.

Not just any naive questioning ignorance. Malignant, militant ignorance that pretends to be knowledge and seeks to supplant it.

On not being understood

According to the legend, the inventor of these stick sugar packages committed suicide when he found out that people tear off one end. He had intended for them to be broken in the middle.

On one hand, it's understandable. The man offered a brilliant idea to the world, the idea that shone in his mind: people elegantly breaking the packages over their cups, from which sweet contents pour into the espresso. And what instead! Tearing off the end! Poking the stick into the coffee! Philistines! His aesthetic sense could not suffer it.

On the other hand, if he only had stopped to think whether something seeming obvious to him might not be obvious to others, he could have simply printed the "break here" line along the middle.

Myrmidons

A red ant is put on the surface of a mirror. The ant studies its reflection: moves its head, tries to feel the image with its antennae and mandibles.

If an ant is put instead on the surface of plain glass with similar ants on the other side, it doesn't behave like that. But if it receives a dot of blue paint on its "forehead" and then put on a mirror, it will clean the paint off upon seeing it. It won't do that before it is put on a mirror. If the dot is on the back of its head and cannot be seen in the reflection, it won't either. If the dot is brown, and cannot be seen on the background of the ant's head, the ant still won't clean it off.

A mark on the head is the standard test for self-recognition in a mirror. A creature that understands that it is seeing its own reflection will normally try to investigate the mark or remove it once it sees it in the mirror. Until now, this ability was shown (besides humans) in apes, dolphins, magpies and elephants.

And now, it appears, in red ants.

Seems like this nontrivial task doesn't require very many neurons!

Link to the article: http://www.journalofscience.net/File_Folder/521-532(jos).pdf

Legend of the One cover process

I have painted the cover for Elena Kasyan's ☞ The Legend of the One, and it is published!

Subscribe to my Patreon ☞ or my Facebook page ☞!

I have also painted both endpapers, and also did the typesetting, assembly and most of preprint.

The pen is mightier

When the movie "The Bridge on the River Kwai" came out, tourists flocked to Thailand to see the bridge that the British POWs had built.

Problem was, there was no bridge. Or rather, there was, but in the wrong place. Pierre Boule, who wrote the book which the movie was based on, did not check his facts, assuming that if the Bangkok - Rangoon railroad, building which the Japanese killed off 12,000 POWs and around 90,000 local residents, had run along Kwai, the bridge must have crossed the same river. In reality the famous bridge was across Mae Klong.

In the end, Thailand renamed the river. Now a stretch of Mae Klong a few miles long, across which the bridge runs, is called Kwai Yai - Big Kwai. I expect the tourists are happy.

Alien vs Monstro

Is it just me, or does the whale actually look much scarier?

African dreams

A teaser for a new exciting project in the works. This is the style, color and texture test.

Stay tuned!

Watching paint dry

Whoever uses the expression "as boring as watching paint dry" has never tried painting in watercolor.

(S)He shouldn't have dressed that way

The scientists and engineers landed a machine on a comet, and all the crowd is interested in is the way one of the scientists was dressed. He was bullied to tears - because he wore a shirt, painted by his girlfriend, which featured some women in swimsuits.

Apparently, he invited that on himself because he dressed too provocatively.

A street scene somewhere in the east continent of the focco home world.

Pastel, 50 by 70 cm. Way too many working hours.

Enjoy.

Kill all humans

Look at the face of this guy. Would you believe that this is the face of someone who wants to kill you, and everybody you know?

Yet he does.

You are looking at the professor of philosophy, John Zerzan. He is an “anarcho-primitivist”. That means he wants the humanity to return to pre-agricultural, forager lifestyle, claiming that it would solve all problems that we are facing and make us happier.

If only we got rid of this huge mistake called civilization, Zerzan says, everything would become just great. After all, Zerzan says in an interview, “early humans had a workable, non-destructive approach” that kept them “intimate with nature”.

Oh, you are such a hoot, Professor. Tell all that to those early human guys who hunted the megafauna into extinction, burnt forests into desertification, and had general clean fun like epidemics, cannibalism and death before thirty-five — and kept inventing things until they (us) became what we are.


Zerzan not only decries technology and science for being removed from the reality. He even laments the invention of language, which he calls “a mediation between ourselves and reality”. He says:

“We lived more directly, immediately before these dimensions arrived, fairly recently. Freud, the arch-rationalist, thought that we once communicated telepathically.”

Telepathically. Right. Communing with the spirits of happy little trees. And he calls science removed from reality! I am a little surprized that Zerzan did not bring up Atlantis, Lemuria and ancient alien visitors from Nibiru, but perhaps these imply too much technology for his taste.

He popularized the "noble savage" legend in 1754.

The idiocy of this philosophy is so thick you need an axe to cut it. How comes Zerzan does not realize that the early humans did have a "workable approach" — it is called technology, which they improved from sticks and stones to bows and spears to agriculture to industrial manufacturing to information age? The approach is the same, and bettered along the way — and he wants to throw all that away for the tired, ages-old Rousseauist fallacy of the “noble savage”. 
 
It does not come to Zerzan's mind that even if you could strip all the technology from the whole of humanity, how are you going to control the neo-primitives' technology development and prevent them from inventing the whole civilization thing all over again?

How is he going to make everyone left on the planet to forget that they used to have machines, powered flight, firearms, libraries, long-distance communications, infrastructure, medicine, law, and keep them content with the subsistence living at the mercy of elements? How is he going to remove all traces of technology from Earth? How is he going to control the warlords and feudal chiefs that will spring up the next day he gets his Rousseauist dream? Does he think he is going to use bows and arrows to stop the reinvention of steel and firearms — or is he planning to keep a contingent of military-industrial caste, armed with the modern technology to keep everyone else in the stone age?

The fact is, the longer you think about this silly fantasy, the less silly it seems and the more grim and terrifying it becomes.

Because if you and your followers do it voluntarily, you will end up being a hypocritical colony of hippies depending on the civilization they pretend to not exist. But if you try to do it on the planetary scale, you are talking either about installing a monstrously oppressive regime over the whole world to keep your primitive fantasy from evolving civilization again, or killing nearly all humans on Earth.

In fact, you cannot even have the oppressive regime without killing nearly all humans on Earth. If you go back to the hunter-gatherer level, the planet can sustain about one hundred million flea-bitten Noble Savages. The other seven billion must go to make this dream of Zerzan's happen. Who is going to do the culling, Professor?

This is beyond ghoulish. Yet there he is, blithely preaching his little post-apocalyptic paradise, sitting on an imaginary mountain of seven billion dead people, in an air-conditioned room, wearing correcting eyeglasses, with tooth decay in check by his dentist, wearing machine-made clothing — and calling for civilization's suicide over the Internet. (Before you find this ironic: he calls the Internet "a necessary evil", to be used to dismantle the civilization. And then got rid of with disgust, I imagine, or perhaps left in the hands of the select few who will ensure that the "mistake of agriculture" never happens again.)

But he is a dangerous waste of intellect not only for this reason. He professes unfeasible plans for us to become throwbacks, stop all evolution and sit there waiting for the nearest asteroid strike to wipe us out — when he could have studied the actual human group psychology and invent ways to make the existing society as happy and sustainable as his imaginary Noble Savages are supposed to be. One group at a time, or, with luck, as an influential thinker swaying the culture to higher functioning. But no, he sits there advocating insane plans to return to savagery, using for his proselytizing the very technology he decries. I have to wonder: if language, as he says, is the source of the whole detachment from mother nature thing, then wouldn't it be best to abandon it with all technology, and become apes again? Why doesn't he advocate a return to animal state, rather than savage state? Perhaps he thinks that if we do, telepathy will kick in?

Oh, I forgot. He is a philosopher. His job description forbids looking at the real world.