“AND NOW FOR SOMETHING DIFFERENT….ART OF LANDSCAPE GARDENING

“Whither Goest Thine Eye?”……(with your landscape in mind)

Whether one lives in the woods, in suburbia, the city with “a yard” or on the 24th floor of some structure, most of us have two eyes which help lead us on our path from birth “to dusty death” as Shakespeare described the end for some.

Our eyes  absorb things ugly and things of beauty.   What the eye absorbs usually becomes  habit forming.    Our todays are not carbon copies of yesterdays personally, collectively, and morally.   So, who are we today….from the view of the author of this ‘note’ crowding in on his 82nd birthday?

Beauty is far less cherished today than yesterday’s yesterdays.   The human animal is no longer  surrounded by  cause for beauty as an expression in life to uplift one’s soul.    If today something is deemed beautiful, it means something else  is LESS beautiful, therefore causing discomfort, sorrow,  despair and jealousy for  the ‘victims’.   Therefore, in today’s  America it is better NOT to have “SOUL”, the center of beauty and inspiration….so all of us can feel ‘equal’…….

Today in our ‘cultural’ year 2016, NONE  of our artistic expressions including the art of landscape gardening, are focused upon creating beauty.    Nearly all ‘professionally’ are products of  our America’s departments of  “ART” where university bureaucrats preach the pictures, forms, and politics of their day.

Things beautiful were “forever”  created by the human male animal…..whether in old China, old Europe, Old Amazon territory, in ‘barbaric’ Vikingland, or the Easter Islands.   It is in the human male animal DNA to roam, explore, defend, build, protect, be curious, be industrious, to invent, to paint, sculpt, landscape,  from his genetic material driving him to produce comfort, health, and beauty for his mate and off spring.  It has been the human male animal’s DNA in his Nature, the  God-given drive to survive,  which has driven the world until the arrival of today’s politically, sexually  “remodeled”  western institutions where FEELINGS  now replace LEARNINGS.

I was in first grade a couple of years before the bombing of Pearl Harbor.   My teacher’s name was Florence Ray…a tall beautiful woman,  but no relation to my family.   Although I lived in the city, St. Paul, Minnesota, knowing the outdoors was considered very important in the learning world of the  day.   So was classical music and  some kind of introduction to beautiful literature, paintings, sculpture, and the appropriate  placement of words whenever such words were needed.  (Swearing  in public whether on the street,  at home, or in school, did not occur.   People then  were churched to feel ugly whenever  performing the ugly and  to believe a price would be paid for selling or acting out the ugly.)

It was in first grade I first received classroom instructions to collect tree leaves for identification. I learned what a conifer was.     It was then I  discovered perennials “Obedience”, “Bleeding Heart”, “Peonies”,  and  biennials – annuals;   “Evening primrose “,  “4 O’Clocks”,  Hesperus, “Petunias, Marigolds, and shrub roses, Pfitzer junipers, and Bridal wreath Spiraea.   The following year I fell into “paradise in exile”, when it became my responsibility to have ‘sole’ as well as “soul”  care for  a double empty lot -sized Victory Garden across our alley.   “I” grew and maintained nearly every kitchen vegetable you could name….even okra.   Digging by hand  for potato tubers made me feel  like digging for gold.

I even learned to dive bomb the potato beetles as I plucked them off leaves  and smushed them by hand.  It was world war time, remember.   I was pretending to aid the war effort.   I also knew exactly where tomatoes came from…for there were very few super markets in those days.

I wonder how many households today include children.  I wonder how many of the households who do have children, bother to teach the young what I was taught about the outdoors  by setting examples   exploiting their home grounds to become a teaching “room” for discovering beauty of the landscape garden.    I wonder how many households of people who pay taxes for the grounds they occupy  yearn to enter the outdoors for the beauty it offers the eye, mind, and soul of anyone who enters it.

Landscape gardening, in the ideal, is supposed to be a visual  art form to inspire all who enter.  It should be to the eye, what Beethoven’s adagios are for the ear…..to help you,  for a moment or several ,  enter some place special to escape the outside day, and discover beauty over which you have a piece of control.

Some things are simply  more beautiful than others…..with reasons too many to describe or even know.   However there are some ‘rules’ many of which are vital in creating the visually spectacular or quiet.   “Tricks of the trade”, we at Masterpiece Landscaping call them.     Beethoven’s adagios were no bought!   They came from a human brain led to by the ear,  knowledge, and experience  of his day.

On the front page entry to  this website,    http://www.masterpiecelandscape.com/  you will find a series of pictures, nearly 100, of various settings we have created for clients.   Not all of them are of equal beauty.   Beauty in our business relies primarily on space available, choice of material,   maintenance,  and a  location based upon controlling what the eye should see from primary, secondary and so on, settings.     As you view the settings,  ‘grade’ the beauty  of the picture….and then, far more importantly,  determine by language why it is more or less beautiful than another.

 

 

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Paul Ryan’s America Rising in Switzerland

Uproar in Switzerland after school excuses Muslim students from having to shake hands with women teachers

By  ALLAHPUNDIT  at HotAir:

(How will the American fascist feminists at university handle this Islamic shaking hands with women teachers problem?  Answer:  Silence….during the present B. Hussein Obama regime anyway.)

“In a different age, involving a different faith, this would be a curio about how different western values — religious tolerance and equality for women — can conflict. In this age, with this faith, amid a huge population transfer from the Middle East to Europe, it’s big news.

There has been little support for the school’s decision to grant special dispensation to the boys, who are 14 and 15 and have lived in Switzerland for several years.

Therwil Mayor Reto Wolf said the community was unhappy with the decision taken by the school, which is run by the local canton.

“In our culture and in our way of communication a handshake is normal and sends out respect for the other person, and this has to be brought [home] to the children in school,” he told the BBC.

Felix Mueri, the head of the Swiss parliament’s education commission and a member of the anti-immigration Swiss People’s Party, said the decision sent out the wrong message. “Today’s it’s the handshake and what will it be tomorrow?”

It’s a Swiss custom to have a handshake between teacher and pupil before and after class. The two Muslim students objected on grounds that it’s against Islam to touch a woman who’s not a relative. So the school copped out, allowing the students to skip the handshake with female teachers provided that they skipped it with their male teachers too. That’s a classic western dodge, reminiscent of news outlets thinking twice about publishing images offensive to Christians now in order to appear “evenhanded” after they’ve censored images of Mohammed for fear of jihadis. In both cases, not only have you not addressed the underlying problem, you’ve flattered illiberalism by restricting even more behavior to accommodate it. I much prefer overt double standards to disingenuous evenhanded solutions like these because the double standard doesn’t paper over the serious cultural debate that lies beneath. Every time a paper mocks Jesus while censoring mockery of Mohammed, every time a Muslim student is permitted not to shake a woman’s “unclean” hand while forced to shake a man’s, it reminds all involved that multiculturalism requires special dispensation for some cultures’ illiberal customs. If you’re going to have that system, do it with your eyes open. Make people confront the implications.

Three wrinkles to this story. One: Interestingly, the local teachers’ union in Switzerland is firmly on the side of forcing the students to shake hands with women teachers in the name of gender equality. Am I selling American teachers’ unions short in thinking that their view of this would be more … nuanced? You don’t see left-wing power bases in the U.S. pounding the table against multiculturalism very often, especially when Islam is involved. Two: Not unexpectedly, Muslim activist groups disagree on whether touching a woman really is against Islam. The Swiss Federation of Islamic Organisations says nope; the Islamic Central Council of Switzerland says it is, noting that after the infamous New Year’s sex attacks in Cologne, Muslims have been told to stay away from European women. How can we rightly expect students to shake their female teachers’ hands then, they ask? Which, as far as stupid political trolling goes, is the equal of anything I’ve seen this year on Twitter. But never mind that. If the school has backing from a Muslim group for the proposition that refusing to touch a woman is a fundamentalist, not mainstream, Islamic point of view, why accommodate the kids? They’ve got political cover to make them shake hands”……….There’s more below:

 

http://hotair.com/archives/2016/04/06/uproar-in-switzerland-after-school-excuses-muslim-students-from-having-to-shake-hands-with-women-teachers/

Feminist Fascists at Marquette Working Overtime

Demand That Marquette University Reinstate Prof. John McAdams

SIGN THE LETTER

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MARQUETTE UNIVERSITY WILL FIRE POLITICAL SCIENCE PROFESSOR JOHN MCADAMS FOR BEING CONSERVATIVE.

Stand up for John McAdams—a courageous and beleaguered professor at Marquette University—and demand that Marquette’s leftist administrators back down.

Marquette announced it will fire political science professor John McAdams unless he apologizes for defending a student who was told by an instructor to drop her class because he said that there are two sides to the same-sex marriage debate.

In a November 2014 blog post, McAdams exposed leftist instructor Cheryl Abbate for telling a conservative student to drop her class. The student’s “sin”? Saying that the instructor’s philosophy students deserved to hear both sides of the same-sex marriage debate.

Marquette bureaucrats then suspended McAdams, and he has since remained suspended. Then, on March 26 of this year, Marquette said McAdams’ suspension will continue without pay for the rest of the year, and that he will be fired unless he essentially begs for forgiveness, says he was “reckless and incompatible,” and expresses “deep regret for the harm suffered” by the instructor, who has since moved on to a tenured position at another university.

This is totalitarian, and it’s a recurring leftist tactic of administrators, whose goal is to silence conservative students and faculty.

SHOW SUPPORT FOR Prof. John McAdams. Tell Marquette to drop its threat and to reinstate Professor McAdams.

Signed,

PragerFORCE

FIRST NAME *

LAST NAME *

EMAIL *

Attacks on Electronic Health Record Systems

Is Your Hospital Next?        

……a report from Twila Brace at Citizens’ Council for Health Freedom:

 

Hacker attacks using ‘ransomware’ endanger patient lives. Recent attacks on electronic health record (EHR) systems have disabled hospitals full of sick and dying patients.

Under this digital extortion scheme, hackers infect EHR systems with malware that locks down hospital computers and then demand Bitcoin ransom payments to decrypt the data. In 2014, ransomware thieves extorted $27 million in just six months. Some IT experts worry ransomware could be the downfall of health care. Hospitals are particularly vulnerable to these crimes:

“Without quick access to drug histories, surgery directives and other information, patient care can get delayed or halted, which makes hospitals more likely to pay a ransom rather than risk delays that could result in death and lawsuits.”

EHRs are used to order treatment, deliver care, monitor patients, track physician decisions, and conduct financial, coverage, and administrative functions. EHRs are not computerized versions of your paper medical record, and therefore much more valuable. The most recent of the 10ransomware attacks we’ve heard about are:

• Alvarado Hospital Medical Center, San Diego, CA – this week
• MedStar Health (10 hospitals, 250 outpatient clinics) – last week
• Prime Healthcare Services, 2 hospitals – March 18, 2016

How did we get here? In February 2009, less than one month after Obama’s inauguration, Congress passed the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA), which included a mandate that all clinics and hospitals adopt and “meaningfully use” a government-certified EHR or face financial penalties (reduced Medicare payments). This mandate was considered the foundation of Obamacare. But as HIStalk reports:

The transition away from paper records to digital systems has helped hospitals become a hacker’s sweet spot.

The reason, according to one expert, is because the new EHR, filled with financial information, “can be a source of monetization.” The following federal chart shows the growth of EHRs between the 2009 passage ARRA and the January 1, 2014 “implement or be fined” date:

In the midst of these dangers to patients and privacy, health care costs are rising to pay for the unfunded EHR mandate…and to fund the ransoms necessary to reclaim hijacked EHRs.

TAKE ACTION: Call on Congress to repeal the EHR mandate.

Protecting freedom by protecting patients,

Twila Brase, RN, PHN
President and Co-founder

Mark Levin: Hating Trump Must Not Extend to the General Election

Mark Levin to #NeverTrumpers: The “Stop Trump” effort must not extend to the general election

By  ALLAHPUNDIT  at HotAir:

“Via Breitbart and the Right Scoop, you can grumble about this if you’re #NeverTrump but we all understand, I think, that the vast, vast majority of the party will come around to his position by November, right? Don’t get me wrong, stalwart anti-Trumpers may have the numbers to fatally damage Trump’s chances even if they’re just five percent of the electorate. But that’s probably what they’ll be — five percent, not a third of the party despite how much fun it is to ooh and ahh over numbers like that. Never underestimate the power of partisanship, especially when you’ve got a Democrat as unlikable as Hillary topping the other ticket.

And even if five percent of Republicans do end up as #NeverTrumpers, that’s not necessarily a death sentence for Trump’s campaign. Why? Because some segment of Bernie fans claim thatthey’re #NeverHillary:

One out of four Sanders supporters– 25 percent – say they would not back Clinton in a general election if she became the Democratic nominee for president, while just 69 percent say they would support her, according to a new McClatchy-Marist poll.

By comparison, Clinton supporters are considerably more open to supporting Sanders should he overtake her large lead in delegates and win the nomination. Just 14 percent of Clinton supporters would shun him in the general election, while 79 percent would support him, the poll found……”   Please read more below:

http://hotair.com/archives/2016/04/06/mark-levin-to-nevertrumpers-the-stop-trump-effort-must-not-extend-to-the-general-election/