LtCol. Pete Pike retires on Friday, 9 May 2008.

He is the longest serving active duty Marine — he has been on active duty since Feb 10, 1966. That’s not a typo — 1966. He may very well be the last Vietnam Vet on active duty.

Graphic by Robert Tracy
For larger view see: LtCol. Pike

Fare Thee Well Col. Pike! And:

Semper Fi!

Look at Jay Schmetz’ works.

Happy. Funny. Ironic.

One can already see in his college work his detachment from the norm.

Just Peachy
Jay Schmetz
Oils on canvas
10 x 10″
1997

Beautifully crafted, with a hint of what’s to come a decade later.

Look at him now! How he’s found his way looks to be inevitable.

Oriole on a Trapeze
Jay Schmetz
Oils on canvas
16 x 20″
2008

A delight to see and you try to identify his trademark! I can get close, but it’s so first-handed and new. And although I’m an artist, I’m not an art critic so I get only so far.

Enjoy!

Caught O’Reilly’s interview with Hillary Clinton. She, like Obama, is very clear about her rush to force Socialism on America.

She said she would: “…put a windfall profits tax on the oil companies.” “There is no basis for them to have these huge profits….you’ve got to elect a president who’s going to take on the oil companies….”

What she’s saying for anyone who can see it is that she’ll solve the oil crisis by destroying the source–at least in America–the oil companies. This is a deep hatred of the money makers in our society.

This is not new but her lust for power and her virulent hatred of the businessman is new in that it’s stated so openly by Hillary.

But it is precisely these money makers who get things done in America.

“It is this small minority that carries our world on its shoulders.

“Loneliness is the underground to which we have condemned the Money-Maker–a bewildered loneliness that is not erased by his occasional moments of boisterous gaiety. It is the loneliness of sensing that he is the victim of some incomprehensible injustice. His coldly uncommunicative manner hides his enormous, frustrated benevolence, his childlike innocence–and his profoundly earned pride.

“Toward the end of his life, Colliss P. Huntington–one of the builders of the Central Pacific Railroad…made a startling change in his manner of living. He had lived his life in Spartan austerity, contemptuous of all material luxuries…but in his sixties he turned to a sudden, frantic orgy of extravagance, indiscriminately buying palatial residences, French funiture, real works of art…the sort of things he had condemned his partners for buying.

“Among these haphazard acquisitions, there was a painting, depicting an ancient scene, for which he paid $25,000–an action that seemed incomprehensible to his contemporaries. But here is what Huntington wrote about that painting in his autobiographical notes:

‘”There are seven figures in it―three cardinals of the different orders of their religion. There is an old missionary that has just returned; he is showing his scars, where his hands are cut all over; he is telling a story to these cardinals; they are dressed in luxury. One of them is playing with a dog; one is asleep; there is only one looking at him―looking at him with that kind of an expression saying what a fool you are that you should go out and suffer for the human race when we have such a good time at home. I lose the picture in the story when I look at it. I sometimes sit half an hour looking at that picture.”‘

The Missionary’s Adventures
Jean-Georges Vibert (French, 1840–1902)
Oil on wood
39 x 53 ”

“What story was Huntington seeing? He was seeing a lonely, unappreciated fighter….He was seeing the Money-Maker, the fighter for man’s survival in the jungle of inanimate matter―the man who alone remembers that the world’s work has to be done.”

Ayn Rand, “The Money-Making Personality“, The Objectivist Forum, February, 1983.

Obama showed up at in Kokomo, IN to shoot some basketball wearing a USMC T-shirt.

Now, Marines out there ought to be offended by this. Obama’s soul mate, President Clinton (who by the way acts like he’s doing all he can to get Obama elected) has said “I loathe the military”. In any case, although Obama has the right to wear anything he wants, why select a USMC T-shirt to wear for this game? Having never been a Marine (unless I missed it somewhere), what’s he doing wearing a shirt with a symbol that he never earned?

This guy is offensive to the Marines, and to America in general. His hard left politics is sure to not include being on the offensive in the use of the military in the defense of America.

And wouldn’t you know it, the most popular prints correspond exactly to the previous post on my most popular art works. And here I’m offering a way to order prints of some of my works. I’ve ordered from devianArt’s print shop to test their quality and find them outstanding. And the prints are not expensive. Follow the link to order, and it’ll also lead you to other prints available besides these five.

By the way the print for the “Portrait of Ayn Rand” is available. The URL has changed.

“Popular”, adj. Finding favor with or approved by the people; liked, beloved, or admired by the people, or by people generally; favorite; acceptable, pleasing.

–The Compact Edition Of The Oxford English Dictionary

Over at deviantART I have submitted nearly 500 of my Art works from as early as 1965 to this year. The five most popular of my works there are these:

Tuomas Koivurinne is a young artist from Finland.

I’ve admired war art for a long time. There’s the incredible work by Andrew Wyeth at age 8.

Andrew Wyeth
Pencil and Watercolor
1925

I had found a favorite in Kerr Eby.

Now, Koivurinne ranks right up there with Eby in my favorite artists of war.

Here are two of my favorites by Koivurinne. The fitting monotone coloring of “Gallipoli Landing - part 3″ and the touching “Home on Leave”.

Enjoy!

Gallipoli Landing - part 3
Acrylics 2008

Home on Leave
Ink 2007

In the introduction to Sinclair Lewis’ 1935 novel “It Can’t Happen Here”, Michael Meyer (Signet Classics, 2005) writes “Although Lewis’s protagonist…is ‘a mild, rather indolent and somewhat sentimental Liberal’ who is slow to respond to the rise of an American version of a fascist dictatorship, Lewis responded quickly and intensely to the fascist threats he saw all around him.”

Doesn’t Lewis’ protagonist resemble so much today’s tired, edgy American populace? Read the novel and you’ll see what we’re in for if either Hillary or Obama gets to rule America. Both are saying right out in the open every day that they want to bring fascism to America. People hear it, can’t believe it, or don’t understand it. Obama is the scarier of the two because Americans seem desperate to show, by a vote for Obama, that racism is over in America. And because he’s the more consistent of the two.

“In any conflict between two men (or two groups) who hold the same basic principles, it is the more consistent one who wins.”

Ayn Rand, Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal, The Anatomy of Compromise, (SC), p.145

“This time we want to talk about the shuttered mills that once
provided a decent life for men and women of every race, and the
homes for sale that once belonged to Americans from every
religion, every region, every walk of life. This time we want to talk
about the fact that the real problem is not that someone who doesn’t
look like you might take your job; it’s that the corporation you
work for will ship it overseas for nothing more than a profit.”

“Let us be our brother’s keeper, Scripture tells us. Let us be our
sister’s keeper. Let us find that common stake we all have in one
another, and let our politics reflect that spirit as well.”

Barack Obama (emphasis mine)

Where’s any reference to you, as an independent person in this? He uses you in the context of race: “someone who doesn’t look like you”, and hatred of free trade: “take your job”. For Obama it’s all about the collective. “we want to talk”; “Let us“; “tells us“; “we all”; “let our“. This is all a slimy, slick method of bewildering an already confused individual into swallowing his intention to socialize America.

Francisco de Goya
Saturn Devouring His Sons
Oil on canvas

We or I?

‘At first, man was enslaved by the gods. But he broke their chains. Then he was enslaved by the kings. But he broke their chains. He was enslaved by his birth, by his kin, by his race. But he broke their chains. He declared to all his brothers that a man has rights which neither god nor king nor other men can take away from him, no matter what their number, for his is the right of man, and there is no right on earth above this right. And he stood on the threshold of the freedom for which the blood of the centuries behind him had been spilled.

‘But then he gave up all he had won, and fell lower than his savage beginning.

‘What brought it to pass? What disaster took their reason away from men? What whip lashed them to their knees in shame and submission? The worship of the word “We.”‘

‘Thus did all thought, all science, all wisdom perish on earth. Thus did men—men with nothing to offer save their great number—lose the steel towers, the flying ships, the power wires, all the things they had not created and could never keep.’

‘But I still wonder how it was possible, in those graceless years of transition, long ago, that men did not see whither they were going, and went on, in blindness and cowardice, to their fate. I wonder, for it is hard for me to conceive how men who knew the word “I,” could give it up and not know what they lost. But such has been the story, for I have lived in the City of the damned, and I know what horror men permitted to be brought upon them.

‘Perhaps, in those days, there were a few among men, a few of clear sight and clean soul, who refused to surrender that word. What agony must have been theirs before that which they saw coming and could not stop! Perhaps they cried out in protest and in warning. But men paid no heed to their warning. And they, these few, fought a hopeless battle, and they perished with their banners smeared by their own blood. And they chose to perish, for they knew. To them, I send my salute across the centuries, and my pity.’

‘Theirs is the banner in my hand. And I wish I had the power to tell them that the despair of their hearts was not to be final, and their night was not without hope. For the battle they lost can never be lost. For that which they died to save can never perish. Through all the darkness, through all the shame of which men are capable, the spirit of man will remain alive on this earth. It may sleep, but it will awaken. It may wear chains, but it will break through. And man will go on. Man, not men.

‘….And the day will come when I shall break all the chains of the earth, and raze the titles of the enslaved, and my home will become the capital of a world where each man will be free to exist for his own sake.

‘For the coming of that day shall I fight…For the freedom of Man. For his rights. For his life. For his honor.

‘And here…I shall cut in the stone the word which is to be my beacon and my banner. The word which will not die, should we all perish in battle. The word which can never die on this earth, for it is the heart of it and the meaning and the glory.

‘The sacred word:

EGO’

Ayn Rand, Anthem, p. 119-193 (SC)

“I have a little philosophy of my own…Want to hear that philosophy? It’s simple enough. Go after the big boys. Oh, don’t arrest them, don’t treat them to the dignity of the democratic processes of courts and law…do the same thing to them that they’d do to you! Treat ‘em to the unglorious taste of sudden death. Get the big boys and show them the long road to nowhere and then one of those stinking little people with little minds will want to get big. Death is funny…people are afraid of it. Kill ‘em left and right, show ‘em that we aren’t so soft after all. Kill, kill, kill, kill! They’ll keep away from us then!”

Mickey Spillane, One Lonely Night, p. 102

I Checked this out at Snopes.com for it’s accuracy. They give it a “True”. This is not some Urban Legend.

“Well, what do we have here. Looks like a small case of some people being able to dish it out, but not take it. Let’s start at the top. The story begins at Michigan State University with a mechanical engineering professor named Indrek Wichman.

“Wichman sent an e-mail to the Muslim Student’s Association. The e-mail was in response to the students’ protest of the Danish cartoons that portrayed the Prophet Muhammad as a terrorist. The group had complained the cartoons were “hate speech.”

“Enter Professor Wichman. In his e-mail, he said the following”:

Dear Moslem Association:

As a professor of Mechanical Engineering here at MSU I intend to protest your protest. I am offended not by cartoons, but by more mundane things like beheadings of civilians, cowardly attacks on public buildings, suicide murders, murders of Catholic priests (the latest in Turkey!), burnings of Christian churches, the continued persecution of Coptic Christians in Egypt, the imposition of Sharia law on non-Muslims, the rapes of Scandinavian girls and women (called “whores” in your culture), the murder of film directors in Holland, and the rioting and looting in Paris France.

This is what offends me, a soft-spoken person and academic, and many, many, many of my colleagues. I counsel you dissatisfied, aggressive, brutal, and uncivilized slave-trading Moslems to be very aware of this as you proceeded with your infantile “protests.” If you do not like the values of the West — see the 1st Amendment — you are free to leave.

I hope for God’s sake that most of you choose that option.

God
Robert Tracy
Oils on canvas
20 x 16″
1995

Please return to your ancestral homelands and build them up yourselves instead of troubling Americans.

Cordially,

I. S. Wichman, Professor of Mechanical Engineering