Dear Kitty. Some blog

This video is called The Battle For Haditha.

From a report on a Stop the War rally in London:

Tony Benn: ‘Why we must all demonstrate on 24 February’

Tony Benn, the former Labour MP and the president of the Stop the War coalition, spoke at the Stop the War rally in London last Thursday:

‘People say, “What’s the point of demonstrations?”

I got some letters four years ago after the big demonstration then and people said, “we had the demonstration, there were two million people there, but the war went ahead.”

If you’re engaged in a serious business, as we are, you have to be impatient to get your case across, but you must also know that it takes time.

How long did it take to end apartheid? How long did the Chartists or the suffragettes take?

I remember four years ago we were “anti-American”.

Now it turns out the Americans are “anti-American”.

I think last year’s mid-term elections in the US are an indication of the value of all the campaigning that went on from the beginning of the war till now.

George Bush is now isolated.

We have won the argument with public opinion, and that’s the case for carrying on and intensifying.

It is worth reminding ourselves that our arguments are good.

Take any case you like, take Iraq.

They said it was about “democracy”.

It wasn’t about democracy at all, it was about oil.

“Democracy”, I ask you. What they mean is a government acceptable to the US.

Then they make this hideous use of religion as a justification.

They’re always talking about “Muslim terrorists”.

They never talk about the bombing of Fallujah as being by “Christian terrorists”.

They don’t talk about “Jewish terrorists” in the Occupied Territories of Palestine.

All the great religions of the world say the same thing – treat other people as you would expect to be treated yourself.

And that is what we are about, and that’s what gives us power.

Now the other thing, of course, is Iran.

Bush says, amazingly, that Iran is interfering in Iraq. This is another justification for war.

After Iraq, we’ve got the Iranian battle to fight and it’s a battle where, I think, again we’ve got public opinion on our side.

I think on 24 February we can carry it forward, but there’s a lot more to do.

I really do believe we’re at a turning point in world history and we who are living today and working in the Stop the War movement and all the other associated movements, we are the people with the responsibility.

And if we are strong, we shall make a success of this.’

Noam Chomsky on Iraq and democracy: here.

Fight in Labour party on succession of Blair: here.

Michael Foot biography: here.

From British weekly Socialist Worker:

Craig Murray elected as rector of University of Dundee

Craig Murray, the former British ambassador to Uzbekistan and critic of the “war on terror”, was elected last week as the rector of the University of Dundee.

Craig told Socialist Worker that he was “delighted to be elected” by the Dundee students.

He said, “It is a good sign that students voted for someone who is interested in the university, and not just for a celebrity.

“I think the argument that higher education is starved of funding while money is being wasted on war and Trident strikes a chord with many students.”

Craig’s first activity as the new rector was to attend a meeting of the university court (management body) on Monday in order to oppose cuts.

The meeting voted to push through a package that slashed £10 million from the university’s budget.

It will mean the closure of several departments and around 100 job losses if it goes ahead.

Around 350 staff and students held a lively protest outside the court meeting. Craig said, “The meeting was a real eyeopener about the state of higher education.

“Most of the members of the board talk about the university purely as a business.”

The cuts included the botanic garden.

Update: here.

Uzbekistan cotton picking, here.

See also here.

On Trident, see also here.

German artist Käthe Kollwitz, often included in the Expressionist movement, was born on 8 July 1867; in Königsberg (then in the German empire, today, Kaliningrad in Russia).

Her father had studied law.

However, being a non-conformist Protestant not belonging to the Lutheran state church, he was not allowed to be a lawyer.

The same dilemma which Karl Marx‘ father had faced decades earlier.

Heinrich Marx had solved that by changing his religion from Judaism to official Protestantism in order to be able to practice his profession; his wife Henriette, whom he had married in the synagogue of Nijmegen in The Netherlands, never changed.

Käthe Kollwitz’s father Carl Schmidt also did not change his religion.

Which meant he had to change his profession to mason.

Carl Schmidt supported his daughter when she wanted to become an artist.

In 1886, she saw paintings by Rubens in Munich, which impressed her much.

Next year, she became engaged to a member of Karl Marx’ party, the Social Democratic Party of Germany (banned by the government then): the student of medicine, later doctor, Karl Kollwitz.

The novel Germinal, on workers by the French realist author Emile Zola, influenced Käthe’s art.

So did German playwright Gerhart Hauptmann, who inspired her graphics on rebeling weavers.

In 1891, she married Karl Kollwitz.

Also after her marriage, she continued to sign her work with K(äthe) S(chmidt), as in the self-portrtait from 1906 in this article.

They went to live in Berlin, where Karl became a doctor in a poor working class neighbourhood.

In 1898, the jury at an art exhibition wanted to honour Käthe with a medal, for her graphics on the weavers’ uprising.

However, Emperor Wilhelm II did not want any honours for this artist, rebellious in both form and subject.

In 1898, Käthe Kollwitz got permission to be a teacher at her old art school; a school for women only, who were taught separately from male students.

In 1899, she participated in the first ever exhibition of the “Berliner Secession“, for artists, hated by the emperor, whose non-conformism meant they were refused at official art exhibitions.

In 1904, she learned sculpture in Paris, visiting the workplaces of Auguste Rodin and others.

In 1906, she made a poster for an exhibition on house industries.

The Empress Auguste Viktoria refused to visit the exhibition because of who made the poster; and because Kollwitz’s poster showed a woman worker, clearly suffering from bad conditions.

Only after lots of paper and glue had removed Käthe’s posters from sight, Her Imperial Majesty visited the exhibition.

Next year, Kollwitz was in Florence in Italy, from where she walked to Rome, reaching it after three weeks.

From 1908 to 1910, she worked for satirical magazine Simplizissimus, mocking in her caricatures the oppression of workers in Wilhelm II’s empire.

In 1912, she made a poster on the miserable housing situation in East Berlin.

The authorities banned it.

In 1913, there was a split in the “Berliner Secession” between old artistic vanguardists who had become sort of a new establishment themselves, and the rebels, who became the “Freie Secession”.

Käthe Kollwitz, though 46 by now, sided with the latter, and went from the executive of the “old” Secession to the executive of the new “free” Secession.

In the same year, she also joined the executive of the newly founded women artists’ association, as chair.

In the next year, the First World War broke out.

Also among many socialists, whose international congresses had decided that war should be fought by workers’ strikes, the wave of nationalist hysteria accompanying the outbreak of the war did have at least some effects.

Käthe Kollwitz’s eighteen year old son Peter volunteered to be a soldier.

Shortly afterward, he died at the front in Diksmuide in Belgium.

His mother became very depressed.

Then, Käthe Kollwitz decided to strongly oppose war, also in her artistic work.

On 30 October 1918, the Social Democratic party daily, Vorwärts, published an anti war letter by Kollwitz.

The war was going badly for the German empire.

Like in the Bush empire concerning Iraq in 2007, some people, including Tony Blair, claimed “final victory” was still possible, with a final “surge“.

Kollwitz’ letter opposed this.

She wrote: “Es ist genug gestorben! Keiner darf mehr fallen.

Ich berufe mich gegen Richard Dehmel auf einen Größeren, welcher sagt: ‘Saatfrüchte sollen nicht vermahlen werden.”

[Enough people have died!

Nobody should die any more.

Against [German militarist author] Richard Dehmel, I base myself on a greater [poet; meaning Goethe], who says: ‘You should not grind down seed bearing fruits’].

Now, on a much more dramatic scale than Kollwitz’ artistic home, the Secession, before the war, her political home, Social Democracy, split into Left and Right wings.

The Right wing allied itself with Rightist paramilitary groups, many of whom would later join Hitler’s nazi party, against the Left wing, who would become the Communist Party.

In 1919, the paramilitarists murdered Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, the Leftist leaders.

At the request of Liebknecht’s family, Käthe Kollwitz made his portrait in the mortuary.

In spite of sympathies, she never joined the Communist Party.

In 1924, ten years after the beginning of the war, at the request of the international trade union movement, she made her famous poster: The Survivors. Fight war, not wars.

In the same year, she also made a poster for women’s rights on abortion (see on that issue also here).

Just before Hitler came to power, Kollwitz called for anti nazi cooperation between Social Democrat and Communist parties.

One of the nazis’ first acts was to expel her from the Prussian Academy of Fine Arts.

No longer could she teach at the Academy, where she had been the first female professor.

The temporary bans on her work in Wilhelm II’s Second Empire became a permanent ban in Hitler’s Third Reich.

In 1936, the Moscow daily paper Isvestija interviewed Käthe Kollwitz.

When the nazis found out, she was immediately subjected to a Gestapo interrogation.

One more ‘false’ move, she was told, and off to a concentration camp with you.

Though it could not be exhibited, Käthe Kollwitz continued making anti militarist art until she died.

In 1937, Kollwitz’s work was included in the infamous Degenerate Art exhibition organized by the nazi regime.

In 1943, her house, with much of her work inside, and her son’s house were destroyed in the air war.

On 22 April 1945, just before liberation from Hitler, Käthe Kollwitz died.

In Cologne, there is the Käthe Kollwitz museum; where much of the information for this article comes from.

There is also a Käthe Kollwitz museum in Berlin.

And in Moritzburg.

Quotes by Käthe Kollwitz:

“Every war already carries within it the war which will answer it.

Every war is answered by a new war, until everything, everything is smashed.

That is why I am wholeheartedly for a radical end to this madness, and why my only hope is in world socialism. … Pacifism simply is not a matter of calm[ly] looking on; it is work, hard work.”

“I am in the world to change the world.”

“One day, a new idea will arise and there will be an end to all wars. I die convinced of this. It will need much hard work, but it will be achieved.”

“Where do all the women who have watched so carefully over the lives of their beloved ones get the heroism to send them to face the cannon?

I am afraid that this soaring of the spirit will be followed by the blackest despair and dejection.

The task is to bear it not only during these few weeks, but for a long time - in dreary November as well, and also when spring comes again, in March, the month of young men who wanted to live and are dead.”

Also on Kollwitz: here.

And here.

Works by Kollwitz on line: here.

German expressionist Karl Hofer: here.

German sculptor Barlach and war: here.

From Mongabay.com:

Uganda may soon have a new species of monkey according to a report published in Kampala’s New Vision newspaper.

Dr. Colin Groves of the Australian National University told New Vision that the local population of the gray-cheeked mangabey (Lophocebus albigena) will soon be designated as a unique species, the Ugandan gray-cheeked mangabey (Lophocebus ugandae).

The decision is based on “new methods of analysis” that distinguish the monkey population from gray-cheeked mangabey living in Rwanda, Burundi and DR Congo (DRC).

“My taxonomic revision is based on new analyses, mainly multivariate analysis of skull measurements,” Dr. Groves said in an email exchange with mongabay.com.

“Multivariate analyses showed clearly that there is a sharp separation between Lophocebus in Uganda and those in DRC.

At the same time, I intend to upgrade the other putative subspecies of Lophocebus albigena to species level (osmani, johnstoni).

This makes, with aterrimus and opdenboschi, six species in the genus, and with the recently described kipunji, seven (as many as there are in the other mangabey genus, Cercocebus).”

The timing of the decision is noteworthy as the species’ habitat has recently been targeted for clearing.

Against the wishes of the National Forest Authority (NFA), Ugandan president Yoweri Museveni granted a 7,000 hectare concession in Mabira forest, a reserve since 1932, to the owners of a Uganda-based sugar firm.

Museveni’s decision was widely criticized by conservationists, parliament, and citizens of Uganda who said the sugar plantation would damage the tourism industry and impact local water supplies.

Dr. Groves said that his work has new urgency given the threat to Mariba.

“I presented the analyses in the International Primatological Society Congress in Entebbe last year,” said Dr. Groves.

“I had not thought it a priority to publish it – I have so many other things to be getting on with – but now the threat to Mabira Forest has emerged, and this makes it more urgent.

Although L. ugandae is widespread in the western and lakeshore forests of Uganda, it is apparently very abundant in Mabira, and the loss of this population would probably mean the loss of about a quarter of the total population of what now turns out to be an endemic species.”

Lophocebus ugandae would be Uganda’s its first endemic species of primate and its 19th primate species overall.

It would likely be added to the IUCN Red List of threatened species.

A rare, red-capped mangabey monkey has been born at the Denver Zoo, one of only 27 living in North American zoos: here.

WACK: Art & The Feminist Revolution from Christine Turner on Vimeo.

After 1945, the economic and political center of gravity, and also the center of gravity in arts, shifted from Western Europe to the United States.

Like in the early part of the century, many artistic tendencies developed, with at least initially, a strong position for movements like abstract expressionism.

Techniques of expression also became more varied, with the rise of forms like first photography, later video art, still later computers.

Again, women participated in all this, influenced by movements in society like the feminism of the 1960s and later.

They include British sculptor Barbara Hepworth, 1903-1975.

Associated with abstract expressionists, though with style elements of her own, is Helen Frankenthaler from New York City in the USA, born in 1928.

Eva Hesse, 1936-1970, also worked in New York City, but was born in Germany, from where her Jewish family had to flee from Hitler.

She was an abstract sculptor, often using non-traditional materials, like latex, fiberglass, and plastics.

This kind of materials also features in the work of French sculptor Niki de Saint Phalle, 1930-2002.

The works of US, mainly conceptual, artist Jenny Holzer include War on the 1990 Gulf War.

Ernst Probst on women artists: here.

Suzanne Meunier, depicting pinups: here.

See also here.

And here.

Now, a continuation of the series on this blog about women artists.

After late nineteenth century Impressionism, the twentieth century saw many tendencies in art.

They did not have that much in common, except a desire to break with traditions in many of them.

As the twentieth century was also often a century of improvements in women’s positions, more women participated in these movements than in art of earlier centuries.

The artists with sub-chapters of their own in Elke Linda Buchholz’s book Women artists, chapter The Twentieth Century before 1945, include Welsh Gwen John, 1876-1939.

To make a living, she mas a model for artists, including the sculptor Rodin.

Like French sculptor Camille Claudel before her, she became his lover; leading to a personal crisis for her.

Famous in the early twentieth century German Worpswede artistic movement became Paula Modersohn-Becker, 1876-1907.

Like Vincent van Gogh, and quite some other artists, famous only after her death: she made some 750 paintings, 1,000 drawings, and a dozen prints; and sold just two or three paintings during her lifetime.

Gabriele Münter, 1877-1962, played an important role in German Expressionism.

Her parents had encouraged her desire to become an artist.

She had to have private art education however, as she was unable to enroll in the German art academies because she was a woman.

With her fiancé Wassily Kandinsky and others, she started the Blaue Reiter movement.

However, the outbreak of the First World War wrecked this.

It also wrecked her relationship with Kandinsky, who, as a Russian, had to leave Germany.

For a long time, this made her unable to work.

As a reaction to the First World War and its aftermath, Dadaism arose.

Hannah Höch, 1889-1978, was one of its participants, making photomontages.

According to Buchholz, from 1926-1929 Höch lived in The Netherlands, having a relationship with Dutch poetess Til Brugman (misspelt Brugmann by Buchholz).

From the BBC:

Iraq war a big no-no, actor says

Labour-supporting actor Richard Wilson says he suffered a “nasty and frightening” loss of heart in Prime Minister Tony Blair over the Iraq war.

Mr Wilson, who played Victor Meldrew in TV comedy One Foot in the Grave, has been a member of the party for years.

But interviewed for the parliamentary House Magazine, he said the Iraq invasion had been “a big no-no for me”.

He said he had thought he would never be “deeply upset” by the way Labour had “by and large moved to the right”.

In 2003, Mr Wilson wore a gag during a protest against the war in Parliament Square, London.

He and other stage actors, including Joseph Fiennes and Sheila Hancock, wore gags before reading out extracts from a Greek anti-war comedy.

Mr Wilson made his critical remarks ahead of his appearance in a new political play Whipping It Up.

‘Blair arrogance’

“I never thought I would see the day when I would be deeply upset and disappointed by the way the party had, by and large, moved to the right,” he said.

The 70-year-old actor said it was Mr Blair’s arrogance which angered him - “arrogance which makes him think he can stay, arrogance which makes him think he could run the country by himself”.

Big peace demonstration in London on 24 February: here.

Oil in Iraq: here.

This video is called Dinosaurs 3D: Giants of Patagonia.

From Neatorama:

Paleontologists, those scientists that study fossils of life-forms from prehistoric times, are a fun bunch. Apparently, sifting through fossilized bones, dung (yep, dung: look up coprolite [wiki]), stomach content (gastrolith) and even vomit (again, real: regurgitalith [wiki]), gives paleontologist a unique sense of humor.

How? They love to give dinosaurs silly names!

AACHENOSAURUS

Actually, this might be a bad way to start a list of weird dinosaur names. See, Aachenosaurus [wiki] fossil fragments were found and named by Gerard Smets in 1888, who argued that they were jaw fragments of a duck-billed dinosaur.

When paleontologist Louis Dollo proved that his “dinosaur” were actually petrified wood, Smets was so embarrassed that he withdrew from science completely.

If he had lived, Smets would probably feel better because someone else made the same mistake in 1941.

Then, German paleontologist Friedrich von Huene thought he had discovered the jaw bone of a new dinosaur he named Succinodon putzeri [wiki], which later turned out to be fossilized wood filled with wood-boring clams.

AEGROTOCATELLUS JAGGERI

In 1995, a trilobite species was named after The Rolling Stones’ singer Mick Jagger by Adrain and Edgecombe.

As if that’s not neat enough, turns out Aegrotocatellus means “sick puppy” in Latin.

Mick Jagger was quite popular amongst the paleontologists - turns out there’s another species named after him: a fossilized mollusk called Anomphalus jaggerius.

ARCTICALYMENE VICIOUSI, A. ROTTENI, A. JONESI, A. COOKI, A. MATLOCKI

That guy Greg Edgecombe (you’ll see more of him later) is one funny prankster.

He named (another) trilobite series after Sid Vicious, Johnny Rotten, Steve Jones, Paul Cook, and Glen Matlock of the Sex Pistols.

ARTHURDACTYLUS CONAN-DOYLENSIS

A pterodactyl named for Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

You may know him as the author of those Sherlock Holmes detective stories, but the pterodactyl was named for him because of his 1912 novel The Lost World about an expedition to a hidden plateau in South America where dinosaurs were still alive.

ATLASCOPCOSAURUS LOADSI

This Australian dinosaur [wiki] was named after the company Atlas Copco, which manufactured industrial tools and equipments.

The company provided the equipment for the expedition. The species name loadsi was named after William Loads, the state manager for Atlas Copco at the time, who also assisted during the dig.

AVALANCHURUS LENNONI, A. STARRI, A. SIMONI, A. GARFUNKELI

In 1993, Edgecombe (yup, again) and Chatterton named a series of trilobite species Avalanchurus after famous singers like John Lennon and Ringo Starr of the Beatles and Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel.

The two paleontologists didn’t forget Paul McCartney and George Harrison, they named other trilobites Struszia mccartneyi and S. harrisoni after them.

BAMBIRAPTOR FEINBERGI

Yup - this 75-million year old bird-like fossil was named after the famous Disney movie character.

As if that’s not remarkable enough, a near complete skeleton of Bambiraptor [wiki] was discovered in 1995 by a 14-year-old fossil hunter named Wes Linster, who was looking for dino bones with his parents in Glacier National Park in Montana.

Feinbergi was named after a wealthy family who bought and donated the specimen to the Graves Museum of Natural History in Florida.

These are only dinosaurs and other extinct animals starting with A and B, the list is much longer.

See also here.

Trilobite cookies recipe: here.

Video of sounds by dinosaurs and a pterosaur, as they might have sounded: here.

Videos of BBC series Walking with dinosaurs, part I: here.

Videos of BBC TV series Walking with monsters, life before dinosaurs: here.