In Canada we are coping with the inevitable transition from First-Past-The-Post (FPTP) elections to the more representative proportional electoral system. Because no political party will ever actually introduce the latter, we have to go through various contortions to make the FPTP system work like proportional representation. The Coalition is the contortion and it has to happen.

The old FPTP system was never presented to the Canadian electorate. Electors never approved it. The system was simply handed down as a tradition --- in what area of society do we accept handed down traditions any more? Society is becoming more complex, particularly with the newly recognised ecological component, and proportional representation of some kind is the future.

The political parties have negotiated a coalition that will see off the billionaires and their so-called Conservative party. It is high time. Consider Saanich-Gulf Islands constituency: we had the election rigged by con-men who performed a fake "robophone" campaign the day before the ballot, causing thousands of NDP votes for a non-existent candidate and thereby causing the Conservative incumbent to win. Those criminals should be investigated and thrown in jail. The people who employed them are in power in Ottawa and they must be removed immediately. The new Coalition is the way. It will be imperfect, and it will make mistakes. It will probably throw money at the incompetent automobile industry, and at the clearcutting logging corporations. However, that is preferable to having cirminals in power, and is a cost I am willing to pay. Which is why I am placing this 62 per cent logo in my drawing slot.

Photo Synthesis

David Dees spent many years promoting consumer products, and then promoting Hollywood movies. Eventually, his political awakening came when he realised the the 9/11 events had been an inside job, organised to trigger a new cold war, enrich the military-industrial complex and hand totalitarian powers to the booming world of spooks. When he collided with the MSM clamp-down on 9/11 scepticism, he adapted his skills to creating satirical political art that could populate the internet universe, and subvert the imagery presented by the corporate whores. There's a load more of his pictures here , or there's a slide-show on YouTube. There are about two million Americans who list themselves as artists. I wish more of them would turn their hand to this kind of art and make it current in schools and on campuses.

The picture above illustrates the juggernaut effect of NAFTA, spreading big-box outlets, freeway consumer hangers and exurban automobile mazes across the old woods, farms and market towns of the earlier U.S. and Canadian landscape. Where I live, we have a new Wal-Mart, western Canada's biggest, where every shopper goes in a carbon-guzzling automobile. This is exactly the opposite of the kind of integrated, energy-saving, locally-controlled communities we need, and Mr. Dees's picture says it all at a glance.

Phantoms in the sky

Before the Pentagon exploded on September 11th, 2001, people around the panicking White House looked up and photographed or videoed a white plane that was circling about 500 feet overhead in the most interdicted airspace on earth. All non-military aircraft over the USA had been ordered to land. This aircraft was identifiable as one of the Pentagon's fleet of four converted jumbo jets known as "doomsday planes" because they are equipped to run the U.S. security-state in the event of a national emergency or nuclear war. This shot, included in a commercially available DVD called The Flight That Fought Back, shows all the key elements: the white colour (for protection from heat) the blue stripe on the side, the flag on the tail-plane and the distinctive dome behind the cockpit. There can be no mistake, this aircraft is an E-4B doomsday plane. View full shot here.

Even though so many people saw the aircraft (and there is even a BBC video clip that records someone shouting "it's the doomsday plane!"), the Bush Pentagon and the Bush FAA and the Bush Secret Service all flatly denied any knowledge of its existence that day, circling low over the White House in full view of thousands of U.S. citizens.

Governments have a free hand in the sky, because humans cannot fly and are powerless to know what is occurring, except when bombs or bullets rain down and smash and pollute their habitat. And so this E-4B, normally equipped with from 50-80 technicians and a shed-load of communications gear, plus top Pentagon officials, flew low over the White House before the Pentagon exploded, but as far as officialdom is concerned, it never existed.

The news channel CNN also videoed the doomsday plane, and its news bulletins briefly showed it circling at the time, then suppressed the video for six years, before internet revelations caused CNN to broadcast a four-minute news item confirming that the jumbo actually had been seen, even though the newsclip noted that officials denied it. None of the other news channels took any notice, and the news story died for a second time.

Now an author called Mark Gaffney has produced a book , The 9/11 Mystery Plane and the Vanishing of America, in which you can read about this cover-up that proves official deception around the 9/11 events. Use Amazon to send a copy of it to your legislative representative and demand they read it and call for a new public inquiry.

Model poses

Models in life-drawing sessions may be unaware of it, but they adopt poses that reflect western artistic assumptions. Henri Matisse helped to reinforce such assumptions in the 20th century. There's a photograph of middle-aged Matisse in his Granpa three-piece suit and spectacles examining a naked model that says a lot about the Bohemian artist-model relationship. The painting above similarly shows Matisse formally dressed, with a scantily-clad model. This scene is never reversed, with a formally dressed woman painting a naked man. The poses adopted by models in life-drawing sessions today reflect the Bohemian life-style: they are typically the poses adopted by mistresses or servants, submissive to their master artist. Obviously, women expose themselves naked to men most commonly in the bedroom, particularly now that central heating is widely available. But there are other traditions. Models should be thinking about autonomous poses that reflect the new reality. Some religious traditions offer postures that have a mandala-like completeness. Models should explore folk dancing and yogic poses that convey female independence.

War Artists

The US war machine only has three war artists. That's surprising, considering how thoroughly they normally cover all media, even including strip cartoon books. (In the linked picture, only an artist is able to insert Mohamed Atta where officialdom asserts he was, since no other evidence exists.)
The drawing here was sketched by Michael Fay. He told the BBC he was "inspired by the golden light and purple shadows as marines set a trap for Taleban snipers who had been shooting at them near Kandahar, Afghanistan."
Kandahar region happens to be where no fewer than eight Canadian troopers died last week, six of them in one explosion, two in the other. Does war get dirtier than this? Only an artist could evoke the "golden light and purple shadows" to describe the sordid scene he is depicting: grown men setting deadly traps for each other in a devastated village.
I met Leonard Brooks a few weeks back, a gifted Canadian water-colourist who served as a Canadian war artist in the world-war-two part of the 75-year war. He was a dutiful believer and fully embedded: he even took charge of a captured U-boat and (courageously) held a gun on its fanatical crew members.
Graham Sutherland made a more objective witness of the same war, perhaps because he depicted its brutal effects on the streets of Britain.
The Pentagon probably retains war artists to adorn the walls of its own scores of miles of corridors in its 500 bases world-wide. Its intelligence branch has plenty of ways of fixing pictures of its own, including Photoshopping them for their war-making propaganda, e.g. the "future force".

Botticelli's iconic woman

Botticelli only signed one picture, the Mystic Nativity, in which his single 'three beauties' model is replicated into a whole choir of dancing angels. Here she is in a drawing that plainly had to be attributed to Botticelli, even if unsigned. For it is she. I'd love to examine this picture closely in the museum that holds it. She is clearly talking, presumably something she did very much, although possibly not to Botticelli except when he was drawing her, because she may have been his servant and not his mistress. (Botticelli was probably gay: one of the few things we know is that he was arrested for sodomy in 1502, when his career was in freefall). Her plaits are bound at the side of the head in the manner of ancient Iberian women, who appear in the Valencian sculpture. So, it's a classic hair-do of the Mediterranean and can probably be found on the ancient mosaics in Crete and Santorini. Her bust is untypically full: the Gothic nudes of the era had little more than snake-bites. The nipples and aureoles are visible under her filmy garment, a modern touch. But her breasts may not have been drawn from life: they don't fall quite right. The artist makes her float by the device of having her hair and ribbons waving in an up-current, suggesting she is moving up and down. Her head angles to her right as if banking, and her mouth is open, perhaps in a cry of joy. She's not pregnant, indicating that she is not married and thus a virgin --- hence, perhaps, the breasts? I don't think any early Italian renaissance woman actually wore such gauzy garmentation: it's a meme replicated by Botticelli --- his signature style if you will. We'll never know who this model of Botticelli's was, (we know little enough about him) but in today's overcrowded world her figure and above all her face, are assured of immortality.

The Crucifixion Expert

Pieter Paul Rubens drew a crucifixion with special expertise. In the long war between his patrons, the house of Hapsburg in Flanders, and their opponents, the Dutch protestants, there was a crucifixion or a hanging at almost every crossroads in the Netherlands. Thus are memes replicated: the holy symbol becomes reality on the highway.
Here's what one website writes about the war: "(The Duke of ) Alva's errand was to punish those who had been concerned in the disorders at Antwerp and elsewhere. For this purpose he established a Council of Troubles, which was soon called by the people of the Council of Blood. Thousands of men and women, guilty and innocent, were put to death. They were hanged on scaffolds, on trees, at the door-posts of private house. Many of them were poor; but some were the chief citizens and nobles of the country. The whole business of the land was stopped; grass grew in the markets. Every family was in mourning. And against these cruelties the people could do nothing. They had had no experience in war. They were shopkeepers and schoolmasters. The Spanish soldiers had them at their mercy, and they showed no mercy." (The Baldwin Project)
Men crucified everywhere were morbid enough, but Europe had not yet witnessed the first Great Terror, in which the revolutionary government guillotined thousands of French nobles while "les tricoteuses" knitted and gossiped in the front row of the assembled crowds. The British internment and elimination of tens of thousands of the Boer warriors' families in South Africa followed. Turkish genocide of the Armenians came shortly afterwards. The unthinkable slaughter on the battlefields of World War One followed. Then in the 1930s, the Soviets introduced famine as a political weapon, and the knock on the Kulak door in the night. "This is nothing personal, you are being exterminated as a class." Finally, the appalling debauchery of the so-called "final solution", and the complete prostration of Roman Catholicism before the madness of the Bavarian Nazis (Bavaria being Roman Catholic territory). So, you can't help wondering how the Crucifixion of their founding martyr, and its memetic use over the ensuing millennia, helped the Christians develop a fierce sense of compassion for their fellow man. The only Europeans who displayed such feelings were the on-the-ground Communists who actually fought Nazism door-to-door, instead of hiding piously behind their crucifixes.