Tag: Amusing

German experts? Experts at what? Smiles or Art? Both sound unlikely…

German experts crack Mona Lisa smile

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German academics believe they have solved the centuries-old mystery behind the identity of the “Mona Lisa” in Leonardo da Vinci’s famous portrait.

Lisa Gherardini, the wife of a wealthy Florentine merchant, Francesco del Giocondo, has long been seen as the most likely model for the sixteenth-century painting.

But art historians have often wondered whether the smiling woman may actually have been da Vinci’s lover, his mother or the artist himself.

Now experts at the Heidelberg University library say dated notes scribbled in the margins of a book by its owner in October 1503 confirm once and for all that Lisa del Giocondo was indeed the model for one of the most famous portraits in the world.

“All doubts about the identity of the Mona Lisa have been eliminated by a discovery by Dr. Armin Schlechter,” a manuscript expert, the library said in a statement on Monday.

Until then, only “scant evidence” from sixteenth-century documents had been available. “This left lots of room for interpretation and there were many different identities put forward,” the library said.

The notes were made by a Florentine city official Agostino Vespucci, an acquaintance of the artist, in a collection of letters by the Roman orator Cicero.

The comments compare Leonardo to the ancient Greek artist Apelles and say he was working on three paintings at the time, one of them a portrait of Lisa del Giocondo.

Art experts, who have already dated the painting to this time, say the Heidelberg discovery is a breakthrough and the earliest mention linking the merchant’s wife to the portrait.

“There is no reason for any lingering doubts that this is another woman,” Leipzig University art historian Frank Zoellner told German radio. “One could even say that books written about all this in the past few years were unnecessary, had we known.”

The woman was first linked to the painting in around 1550 by Italian official Giorgio Vasari, the library said, but added there had been doubts about Vasari’s reliability and had made the comments five decades after the portrait had been painted.

The Heidelberg notes were actually discovered over two years ago in the library by Schlechter, a spokeswoman said.

Although the findings had been printed in the library’s public catalogue they had not been widely publicized and had been received little attention until a German broadcaster decided to do some recording at the library, she said.

The painting, which hangs in the Louvre in Paris, is also known as “La Gioconda” meaning the happy or joyful woman in Italian, a title which also suggests the woman’s married name.

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Congress wants to reduce dependence on foreign oil, but they won’t approve increased domestic extraction of known reserves. No new nuclear plants, either. And coal? They want to do something about that too, as in “we shouldn’t burn any of it.” Throw the Bums Out!

Congress Conjures Up an Energy Deficit

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Let’s understand a simple fact. You cannot squeeze any more energy out of a gallon of gasoline than already exists. If you mix it with an additive which itself provides less energy, what you get is less energy.

So, when Congress passed a so-called energy bill in mid-December that demanded more “fuel efficiency” by a measure of forty percent, requiring that automobiles be built to get 35 miles per gallon in 2020 as opposed to the former mandate of 25 mpg, it was essentially telling American auto makers to start making cars out of paper mache or something so lightweight that the driver and passengers will have to be extracted from a crash with a sponge.

Then, too, there’s a strange notion that 300 million Americans, some of whom have been known to drive cars and trucks, are somehow going to be able to “conserve” their way to “energy independence.” You can’t save or conserve the energy in a gallon of gasoline or any other fuel. You either use it or you don’t. If you don’t use it, you better find another way to get to work or anywhere else.

Democrat Majority Leader, Steny Hoyer of Maryland, said the energy bill will cut demand for foreign oil and promote non-fossil fuels that will reduce greenhouse gases linked to global warming. This is worse than just being stupid, this is dangerous nonsense because (1) there is no global warming and (2) one way to reduce the importation of foreign oil is to encourage the discovery, extraction, and refining of the oil sources that are known to exist in and offshore America.

Does the new “energy bill” permit for drilling and extraction of the millions, perhaps billions, of barrels of oil in Alaska’s ANWR? No. Does the new bill encourage the exploration for oil and natural gas off the nation’s continental shelf on our vast east and west coasts? No. Did it give the oil companies any tax breaks to build the billion-dollar refineries the nation needs? No. Did it encourage the building of nuclear plants? No.

In fact, the Democrats wanted to roll back the $13.5 billion in “tax breaks” which some might otherwise call “incentives” that are granted oil companies. When you consider how much it costs to explore, extract, transport and refine oil, $13.5 billion is chump change, but Congress wanted to grant all kinds of tax breaks and other incentives to wind, solar, and biomass energy producers when none of these alternative forms of energy produce enough to keep the lights on in any American city, nor ever will.

Democrats claimed that American motorists will eventually save $700 to $1,000 a year in fuel costs. How anyone could make such a claim when even kindergartners know that the price of a barrel of oil is close to $100 defies reality. The only thing that will reduce the price of a barrel of oil is more oil. It’s called supply and demand.

The demand for oil worldwide is increasing because nations such as China and India are becoming more productive in the global marketplace and their citizens want to drive to work just like we do. More cars mean more competition for existing oil supplies. Improving economies mean more people want to eat meat and you get meat by feeding livestock corn, but the new “energy bill” also doubles the production and use of ethanol which is made from corn. As the price of corn rises, so does the cost of everything else, from food to fuel.

Finally, as the perfect example of how totally idiotic this new “energy” bill is, it includes a ban on the incandescent bulb by 2014, beginning with a phase-out of the 100-watt bulb by 2012, just five years from now.

The bill, signed by the President, runs counter to every standard of economics, physics, and common sense. If this is what Congress does with regard to energy, can you imagine what it would produce in terms of health care?

The American people could have filled the House of Representatives and the Senate chambers with chimpanzees and probably gotten a better “energy bill” than that foisted upon us by our elected representatives.

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The Democrats can’t even face FOX news much less the “Global War on Terror”. It is no wonder they are silent on the subject.

Also, they are constrained by rabid secular political activism that will go ballistic on them if they ever say bad things about Islam. The activists that they are afraid of are your classic upper middle-class leftists, trust fund political fanatics, etc. They care nothing for the people of this country or any of the threats the nation faces. All they care about is promoting their toxic anti-western agenda.

This is why Democratic polls are avoiding saying much of anything about foreign policy, immigration, etc. They don’t want to be a target of Move-On and DailyKos.

This isn’t the party of FDR; it’s a party of pasty faced bloodless yuppies and their spawn.

Dems Speak No Evil Of Islamic Jihad

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If the New Hampshire debates settled anything, it’s which party has the stomach to take on radical Islam. The Democrats couldn’t even identify the enemy. Not once. Really.

We scanned the transcripts of Saturday’s debates hosted by ABC News and tallied up the references to Islamic terrorism. The rhetorical divide between Democrats and Republicans on that score alone — ignoring the yawning gaps in policy — is stunning.

None of the four Democrat presidential candidates — despite running for an office that demands they lead the ongoing global war against Islamic extremists — could bring himself or herself to define the enemy we face as Islamic.

Their combined references to “Islam” or “Islamic” totaled zero — even though moderator Charles Gibson prompted them with a question about “Islamic radicals” threatening the U.S. with nuclear terrorism.

But Democrats refused to go there. Out of respect for their constituency, there was a complete blackout regarding Islamic jihad.

Instead, Hillary Clinton defined the enemy generically as “stateless terrorists,” while Barack Hussein Obama complained about the “politics of fear” that he thinks accurately defining the enemy has created.

John Edwards, meanwhile, continued to wage his own personal jihad against a phantom enemy of “irresponsible” corporations — from pharmaceutical and insurance companies to oil giants and multinational corporations.

Republicans, on the other hand, called the enemy by its proper name.

The candidates referred to terrorists and terrorism as “Islamic,” while also citing radical “Islam” as the problem, no less than 22 times. For example:

• Rudy Giuliani argued the U.S. must stay “on offense against Islamic terrorism.”

• Mike Huckabee said the source of the threat we face is from the “radical Islamic faith.” “This is an Islamic problem,” he said. “This is a jihadist problem. This is an Islamofascism problem.”

Huckabee elaborated: “They are prompted by the fact that they must establish a worldwide caliphate that has nothing to do with us other than we live and breathe, and their intention is to destroy us.”

• John McCain warned that “the transcendent challenge of the 21st century is radical Islamic extremists.”

• Mitt Romney said the “philosophy of radical jihadism says, ‘We want to kill.’ “

• Fred Thompson asserted, “We are in a global war with radical Islam. They declared war on us a long, long time ago. We took note, really, for the first time on Sept. 11, 2001.”

They get it. Democrats don’t. They talked a lot about “fighting” — fighting insurance companies and big business and Wall Street and polluters. But will they fight the real enemy — Islamic terrorists?

To hear the Democrats in their debate, you’d think Islamic radicals had stopped plotting new attacks against us and scheming new ways of killing us.

You would think they hadn’t just assassinated a former world leader. You would think they hadn’t just issued a fatwah to assassinate our own president.

To hear them, you would think it was the 1990s again, when Democrats controlled the White House and the CIA and the Pentagon, and blew off Osama bin Laden after he and radical Islam declared war on the U.S.

These contrasting performances in New Hampshire should crystallize in voters’ minds more than any other recent example how one party understands the titanic challenge we face from radical Islam, while the other decidedly does not.

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This weekend’s entertainment: The FrogFather

You can add thermostats to the list of private property the government would like to regulate as the state of California looks to require that residents install remotely monitored temperature controls in their homes next year.

California Seeks Thermostat Control

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The conceit in the 1960s show “The Outer Limits” was that outside forces had taken control of your television set.

Next year in California, state regulators are likely to have the emergency power to control individual thermostats, sending temperatures up or down through a radio-controlled device that will be required in new or substantially modified houses and buildings to manage electricity shortages.

The proposed rules are contained in a document circulated by the California Energy Commission, which for more than three decades has set state energy efficiency standards for home appliances, like water heaters, air conditioners and refrigerators. The changes would allow utilities to adjust customers’ preset temperatures when the price of electricity is soaring. Customers could override the utilities’ suggested temperatures. But in emergencies, the utilities could override customers’ wishes.

Final approval is expected next month.

“You realize there are times — very rarely, once every few years — when you would be subject to a rotating outage and everything would crash including your computer and traffic lights, and you don’t want to do that,” said Arthur H. Rosenfeld, a member of the energy commission.

Reducing individual customers’ electrical use — if necessary, involuntarily — could avoid that, Dr. Rosenfeld said. “If you can control rotating outages by letting everyone in the state share the pain,” he said, “there’s a lot less pain to go around.”

While the proposals have received little attention in California, the Internet and talk radio are abuzz with indignation at the idea.

The radio-controlled thermostat is not a new technology, though it is constantly being tweaked; the latest iterations were on display this week at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.

Pacific Gas and Electric, the major utility in Northern California, already has a pilot program in Stockton that allows customers to choose to have their air-conditioning systems attached to a radio-controlled device to reduce use during periods when electricity rates are at their peak.

But the idea that a government would mandate use of these devices and reserve the power to override a building owner’s wishes galls some people.

“This is an outrage,” one Californian said in an e-mail message to Dr. Rosenfeld. “We need to build new facilities to handle the growth in this state, not become Big Brother to the citizens of California.”

The broader stir on the Internet began when Joseph Somsel, a San Jose-based contributor to the publication American Thinker, wrote an article a week ago on the programmable communicating thermostat, or P.C.T.

Mr. Somsel went after the proposal with arguments that were by turns populist (“Come the next heat wave, the elites might be comfortably lolling in La Jolla’s ocean breezes” while “the Central Valley’s poor peons are baking in Bakersfield”), free-market (“P.C.T.’s will obscure the price signals to power plant developers”) and civil libertarian (“the new P.C.T. requirement certainly seems to violate the ‘a man’s home is his castle’ common-law dictum”).

Word of the California proposal hit the outrage button in corners of the Internet, was written about in The North County Times in Southern California, and got a derisive mention on Wednesday on Rush Limbaugh’s radio program.

The fact that similar radio-controlled technologies have been used on a voluntary basis in irrigation systems on farm fields and golf courses and in limited programs for buildings on Long Island is seldom mentioned in Internet postings that make liberal use of references of George Orwell’s dystopian novel “1984” and “Big Brother,” the omnipresent voice of Orwell’s police state.

Ralph Cavanagh, an energy expert with the Natural Resources Defense Council, said in an interview that at a time of peak electricity use, “most people given a choice of two degrees of temperature setback and 14th-century living would happily embrace this capacity.”

Mr. Somsel, in an interview Thursday, said he had done further research and was concerned that the radio signal — or the Internet instructions that would be sent, in an emergency, from utilities’ central control stations to the broadcasters sending the FM signal — could be hacked into.

That is not possible, said Nicole Tam, a spokeswoman for P.G.& E. who works with the pilot program in Stockton. Radio pages “are encrypted and encoded,” Ms. Tam said.

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