Thus Spake Moses

"Sacred stuff resides in that wooden stock and blue steel, something that gives the most common man the most uncommon of freedoms."
"When ordinary hands can possess such an extraordinary instrument, that symbolizes the full measure of human dignity and liberty."
[the late] Charleton Heston, spokesman, National Rifle Association, U.S.A.

"A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed."
Second Amendment, United States Constitution

The civil-rights, gun-ownership lobby in the United States is a precision instrument of defiance against the logic that when people are in possession of guns, bad things happen. Guns, not people may be the killing factor, but it is people who use the guns to advance whatever agenda for good or for ill, who are responsible for the carnage of deathfall, from young children playing with their parents' prized possessions, or psychopaths using their legally-gotten guns to create a modern-day massacre.

The history of gun ownership in the United States is the history of the making of the United States of America, when in the westward march to claim the abundant land awaiting the arrival of European settlers the aboriginal population of the geography felt compelled to respond to aliens insisting right of ownership to land held sacred by the nations that pre-dated their presence. Guns were needed to defend against the rain of arrows that made the statement that the land was the first-comers'.

Guns were required again when those former Europeans-turned-North American revolted against the edicts of Great Britain and the American Revolution made its historical entrance in the formation of the United States. But history has a habit of marching on, and the American Civil War entered the scene and not only were weapons required to enable the South to defend its ownership of black slaves against the interference of the North with its mistaken belief that all people should be free, but post Civil War, guns were needed to protect good white folk against the emancipated black hordes.

A pioneering nation needed its firepower. And when the American Constitution was being created, there were those among the founding fathers, suspicion of a national army that might become an instrument of tyranny, who felt that armed Americans who were capable of rising up against an unjust government might represent the best possible assurance that the people ruled, in a free and democratic society.

Today, America is a free and democratic society, one with the highest ratio of guns-per-population, and outbreaks of carnage are all too frequent, bringing horror and condemnation to the issue of gun ownership. Inciting the National Rifle Association's ire to defend its values on behalf of the people who love their guns, whether for sport shooting, game hunting, target practise or other lawful gun interplay. And this is why it is anything but uncommon to see gun racks in the cabs of half-ton pickups.

It's an attention-getter, is it not?

The popular gun-culture Guns & Ammo magazine informed readers in 1967 that the gun control movement represented a plot hatched by "criminal-coddling do-gooders, borderline psychotics, as well as Communists and leftists who want to lead us into the one-world welfare state." The National Rifle Association, once merely a club for sportsmen became a political organization warning members of "jack-booted government thugs."

This week, the United States Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit upheld a Florida law dating from 2011 making it an illegal practise for doctors to enquire of parents whether they keep a gun in their homes. According to some experts, the presence of such weapons in a home make it "43 times more likely to be involved in the death of a member of the household than to be used in self-defence."  

And this week, too, as it happens, James Brady, wounded in the 1981 attempted assassination of then-President Ronald Reagan, who was a tireless campaigner for gun control, has died.

James Brady was left paralyzed after being shot in the 1981 attempt to kill then-U.S. president Ronald Reagan. (Evan Vucci/Associated Press)

Legislation was signed by Georgia Governor Nathan Deal earlier in the year permitting residents of that state to carry guns into bars, government buildings and gun-friendly churches. Not to be outdone, Sam Brownback, the Governor of Kansas, signed a bill to ban any local government from enforcing restriction ordinances on the open carrying of firearms. "Kansans have long believed the right to bear arms is a constitutional right", he asserted.

Facebook: MomsDemandAction

 

In Texas "Open Carry Texas" members have been enabled by law to take their children into toy stores, their fathers armed with assault rifles. C.J. Grimsham, Open Carry Texas founder feels such proud openness shows Americans how "irrational" liberals' collective fear of guns really is.

The unfinished art business of World War Two

By Godfrey Barker Art market expert and journalist -- BBC News -- 4 November 2013

Manet's Wintergarden - stolen by the Nazis - was found by US troops in 1945, hidden in a salt mine

The astonishing find in a Munich flat of 1,500 paintings missing since 1939 points to two art crimes.

The first is Adolf Hitler's crusade to fill his Fuehrermuseum at Linz, Austria, with the supreme paintings of the world - looted, confiscated and purchased by the Nazis in the occupied countries of France, the Netherlands, Belgium, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland and Russia.
The second is the crime of covering up the truth ever since.

Cornelius Gurlitt, 80, whose hoard of paintings in Munich was allegedly hidden behind a wall of ancient cans of food, has kept his secrets for 68 years.
What they tell us about Hitler is more important than what they reveal about Gurlitt.

His pictures descend from his father, Hildebrand, one of four senior Modern Art dealers in Germany who were appointed in March 1938 to the Nazis' Confiscation Committee - with orders from Hitler and Herrmann Goering to sell "degenerate art" (entartete Kunst) for foreign currency.

Hildebrand Gurlitt, Karl Buchholz, Ferdinand Moeller and Bernhard Boehmer set up shop in Schloss Niederschonhausen, just outside Berlin, to sell the near-16,000 cache of paintings and sculptures which Hitler and Goering removed from the walls of German museums in 1937-38.

They were first put on display in the Haus der Kunst in Munich on 19 July 1937, with the Nazi leaders inviting public mockery by two million visitors.

Propagandist Joseph Goebbels in a radio broadcast called Germany's degenerate artists "garbage".
Hitler opened the Haus der Kunst exhibition with a speech, at the end of which saliva fell out of his mouth in rage. In it he described German art as suffering "a great and fatal illness".

The Nazis put modern art deemed "degenerate" on show in Berlin in 1938

 

Hildebrand Gurlitt and his colleagues did not have much success with their sales, mainly because art labelled "rubbish" had small appeal.

So on 20 March 1939 they set fire to 1,004 paintings and sculptures and 3,825 watercolours, drawings and prints in the courtyard of the Berlin Fire Department.

The propaganda act raised the attention they hoped. The Basel Museum in Switzerland arrived with 50,000 Swiss francs to spend. Shocked art lovers came to buy.

What is unknown after these sales is how many paintings were kept by Gurlitt, Buchholz, Moeller and Boehmer and sold by them to Switzerland and America - ships crossed the Atlantic from Lisbon - for personal gain.

Gurlitt was arrested by the Allies near Bamberg in 1945, hiding in the castle of Baron von Pollnitz. He turned down an offer from the baron to hide his art collection in a new secret place. Or so he let a writer know.

What we now know is that he did successfully hide more than 1,000 paintings - or his teenage son did.

It is possible they were cached in France. Gurlitt's chief job on the Confiscation Committee was to work in Paris during the war, where he lived from 1941 to 1945 in the Hotel de Jersey.

He had two ways of collecting for Hitler's Fuehrermuseum. One was to visit abandoned Jewish homes and remove their artworks; his licence was a Nazi law declaring that French nationals who had fled had lost French citizenship.

The other was to spend Reichsmarks at the Drouot auction house in Paris, where distress sales were big business.

Gurlitt was no small buyer. He paid more than one million French francs for the four most expensive paintings in the highest-value Paris sale of the war - the Georges Viau Impressionists auctioned by Etienne Ader between 11 and 14 December 1942, which fetched £922,000 in wartime values.

The sale's top price of 5m francs was paid by Gurlitt for Cezanne's Vallee de l'Arc et Mont Sainte Victoire. It demonstrated Nazi purchasing power. Unfortunately the tiny painting, for which Gurlitt gave 94 times the then record for a Cezanne, proved to be a fake.

So what was stored in his son's Munich flat? It is highly likely that pictures acquired in France are foremost and it is French families who will emerge to make claims for them.

But there must also be German museum confiscations of Picasso and Matisse and paintings taken from Jewish owners in both Germany and Austria.

In 1945 US forces used a church in Ellingen to store some Nazi-looted art

 

Gurlitt would have intimately known their value. The top price for Matisse reached £2,600 at auction in 1941, that for Picasso was £880 (paid for a Blue Period Blind Man by the Toledo Museum in Ohio). Gurlitt did not set fire to these nor hand them over. He kept them for himself.

Art is the last unfinished business of World War Two. Though the Allies uncovered large numbers of stolen paintings in 1945 in the Alt Aussee salt mines near Salzburg, and in a castle south of Munich, an unknown number have been lost forever. Russia holds more than 120,000 wartime art objects in three museums round Moscow.

In many cases, the quality of vanished art was the highest. An important Raphael - Portrait of A Young Man - taken from Catholic owners in Poland heads a list of missing art which amounts to a small National Gallery: paintings by Rubens, Van Dyck and Rembrandt to the fore.

Five years ago Austria revealed the existence of more than 10,000 paintings and sculptures, hidden since 1945 in monasteries along the Danube and in state institutions.

In 1937, the Nazis staged an exhibition to ridicule modern art - it went on to be one of the best attended modern art exhibitions of all time.

Their Jewish owners had not been traced; how hard the Austrian government had tried to trace them was not made clear. 

An Austrian list exists on the internet for descendants of the original owners to come forward - if, that is, they can prove the ownership of Jews in concentration camps, or who fled in panic without documents or photographs as Nazi forces approached.

London dealers close to the "restitution" business predict that 100 to 150 paintings will come off the walls of German museums in the next 25 years and be restored to the families of their original owners.

As paintings washed around Europe in the 1950s without clear ownership, German museums whose collections of the 20th Century had been wiped out by Hitler bought what they could, at cheap prices, without asking too many questions.

The past now catches up with the present. Lawyers in Vienna and Berlin now offer "no win no fee" deals to the descendants of concentration camp victims.
The Nazis and their art collecting will continue to make headlines.

Dubai rape case Norwegian woman 'free to go'

BBC News online -- 22 July 2013

Marte Deborah Dalelv's case has angered the Norwegian authorities

A Norwegian woman at the centre of a Dubai rape case dispute has been pardoned and is free to leave Dubai, she has said.

Interior designer Marte Deborah Dalelv, 24, was on a business trip in Dubai when she says she was raped in March.

She reported the attack to the police, but was charged with perjury, having extramarital sex and drinking alcohol, receiving a 16-month prison sentence.

The case has angered rights groups and the Norwegian authorities.

Ms Dalelv has had her passport returned and was free to leave the country, a Norwegian official told the BBC. She was not being deported, and was expected to return to Norway in the next few days.
The designer, who has been staying at the Norwegian Seamen's Centre in Dubai since she was sentenced last week, told the BBC she found out she was to be freed earlier on Monday during a meeting with public prosecutors.

"We came in and we sat down and they told us 'You've been pardoned'. It's from the ruler of Dubai. It's from him personally so that's - it just feels unbelievable - it's a very, very good day."

Marte Deborah Dalelv: "It's a very, very good day."

 

Her travel documents had now been returned to her and she was preparing to leave Dubai as soon as possible, Ms Dalelv said.

In Norway, Foreign Minister Espen Barth Eide tweeted: "Marte is released! Thanks to everyone who signed up to help."

The Norwegian government said it had been in daily contact with the Dubai authorities through diplomatic and official channels since Ms Dalelv was sentenced - arguing the jail term represented a human rights violation.

Ms Dalelv went public about the sentence last week in a series of interviews.

Ms Dalelv says she was on a night out with colleagues on 6 March when the rape took place.
She reported it to the police, who proceeded to confiscate her passport and seize her money. She was charged four days later on three counts, including having sex outside marriage.

Her alleged attacker, she said, received a 13-month sentence for extramarital sex and alcohol consumption.

The man she accused of raping her - a colleague - has also been pardoned, a Norwegian official has said.

Despite developing fast as a cosmopolitan tourism destination in recent years, Dubai remains deeply conservative, and its strict laws have caught out foreigners in the past.

Public displays of affection and drunkenness are frowned upon.