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This story isn't new, but it came to my attention recently while looking into some of the work that the Mellon Foundation is funding and discovered this defilement of The Four Freedoms. I'll also be the first to admit that I'm not a big art person, but I have some favorites. And right up there is the great Norman Rockwell. What I've always loved about his work is the attention to detail and how every painting he created could easily be an entire short story captured in one frame. The facial expressions, the small details (such as headlines on a...

The Old Right/New Left/Neo-Nazi AllianceBy Steven Zak FrontPageMagazine.com | May 12, 2005 How much difference is there, really, between the far-Left, the far-Right, and overt white supremacists? How do the public stances of Michael Moore, Pat Buchanan, and David Duke compare? Proponents of both extreme views now think and sound so much alike, they sound like soulmates. Somehow these fringe characters have moved so far around the edges that they have arrived at the same territory, spouting identical positions in copycat rhetoric on such issues as Iraq, the broader War on Terror, and the Jewish state of Israel. Their own words...

Freedom Works. 2 words that are magic together. But not always true. The fantasy of gazing at the exquisite form of a babe like Gloria Vanderbilt is wonderful (click the red link under the above title if you are wondering where the proof is) but, for most of us, it IS a fantasy. Roosevelt and Rockwell sounded and looked great in putting forward powerful words and images for freedom, but the big government stupidity, which got a huge kick along from FDR, ravages freedom over and over again now across the western world. Edward The Sixth's Regency Council put through...

I live in a picture-perfect region — the Hudson Valley, memorialized by painters and poets; a patchwork of autumn reds and yellows, majestic hillsides, storied waterfalls, and little homesteads dotted picturesquely on the slopes of sleepy hamlets. Towns in our area look like Norman Rockwell paintings: there is Main Street, Millerton, with its white 19th century church steeple, its famous Irving Farm cafe with the excellent curated coffee beans, its charming antiques mall, its popular pizzeria. When you drive to Millerton, it looks like you are driving into the heart of archetypal America; everything that Woody Guthrie songs memorialize, everything...

The association between the Boy Scouts of America and Norman Rockwell spanned more than six decades, yielding dozens of commissioned coming-of-age portraits that evoke virtue, bravery and Americana. But now faced with tens of thousands of sex-abuse claims, the debt-saddled organization is poised to do the unthinkable: Sell its collection of Rockwell’s art.

There are streets, schools and parks across the country named after a violent racist who urged the KKK to murder civil rights activists and claimed that racial integration was a Jewish conspiracy. There’s a boulevard in Brooklyn named after a racist who admired Hitler and boasted of being the first fascist. Harvard has a prominent institute named after a bigot who defended Nazi bigotry. New York City, Washington D.C. and Los Angeles all have streets named after a supremacist and nationalist who palled around with Nazis. New York City has a statue of him. Washington D.C. has an art tribute...

Rockwell’s greatest sin as an artist is simple: His is an art of unending cliché.” In that Washington Post criticism of a 2010 exhibition of Norman Rockwell paintings at the Smithsonian, Blake Gopnik joined a long line of prominent critics attacking Rockwell, the American artist and illustrator who depicted life in mid-20th-century America and died in 1978. Norman Rockwell was demonized by a generation of critics who not only saw him as an enemy of modern art, but of all art,” said Deborah Solomon, whose biography of Rockwell, “American Mirror,” was published last year. “He was seen as a lowly...

The loss of Doctor Richter's suggested reading list that saved my life was tragic, a fact that I am constantly being reminded of. Some books -- Whittaker Chamber's Witness, for example, or Orwell's Homage to Catalonia -- were unforgettable. Others, especially those that I could not locate at the time, never got read, so I had no memory at all in order to reconstruct. I did have a wisp of a memory about a book that had, I thought, the words "rebel colonel" in the title, but was marked down in Richter's precise handwriting as "American political economy." Imagine...

Link only: http://www.csmonitor.com/Books/chapter-and-verse/2013/1204/Norman-Rockwell-family-calls-Deborah-Solomon-s-Rockwell-bio-fiction

Norman Rockwell's "Saying Grace" sold on Wednesday for more than $46 million, double its high pre-sale estimate, setting a new auction record for an American painting, Sotheby's said. "Saying Grace," which shows a Mennonite family praying at a restaurant, was voted the favorite cover by readers of the American magazine The Saturday Evening Post when it was published in 1951. The previous auction record for an American painting was for "Polo Crowd" by George Bellows, which sold for $27.7 million in 1999. "This is just a wonderful result for American art and for Rockwell," Elizabeth Goldberg, the head of...

A retired Massachusetts state trooper, immortalized in a famous Norman Rockwell portrait as the wise and caring cop giving good advice to a little boy, died in his home state of New York over the weekend, state police said. Staff Sgt. Richard J. Clemens Jr., who posed in 1958 for Rockwell’s famed painting, “The Runaway,” died Sunday at age 84. “The painting of a trooper bending over in counsel to a young boy intent on leaving home captures — much more than any of the images of shootouts and car chases favored by popular culture — the highest ideal of...

“When you look that closely at someone, you almost always develop sympathy for them,” Rockwell says. “It's like sitting next to someone for a long bus ride. … I want to think about who these people are and why they made the choices they did. I want to share the results of my thoughts, which are my paintings, with other people.” She was particularly inspired to paint bin Laden. “We take for granted who he was and what he did and why, and stop thinking of him as a human being with profoundly human motivations. The war on terror is...

A few years ago a company by the name of AirLaunch had a novel idea for a rocket—put it in a C-17 cargo plane and then slide it out the back at high altitude. The rocket would rotate until it was vertical and then fire, heading into orbit. You can watch video of the drop tests. “We examined a wide variety of propellants ranging from storable hypergolics, RP/LOX, to fluorine/deuterium.” That may sound exotic, but Ehrlich joked that “this was a paper study!” Now imagine that instead of a relatively small rocket, there was a much larger rocket, with a...

Back when Norman Rockwell ruled Saturday evenings, Adobe wasn't even a gleam in some nerd's eye, but a new book shows that the painter was, nevertheless, a photoshop god. Very few Gizmodo readers were even born when Rockwell painted his last Saturday Evening Post cover, but we all know them. You hear that name and suddenly you can picture those overly detailed, cartoonishly dramatic but ultimately kinda corny depictions of American life. Well, Norman Rockwell: Behind the Camera, written and compiled by Ron Schick, has given me immense newfound respect for the man, for the meticulous photography, the real people...

Mainstream economists dismiss the Austrians as cranks. Nobel economist Paul Samuelson wrote that "I tremble for the reputation of my subject" after reading the "exaggerated claims that used to be made in economics for the power of deduction and a priori reasoning [the Austrian methods]." (1) Noted economist Mark Blaug has called Austrian methodologies "so cranky and idiosyncratic that we can only wonder that they have been taken seriously by anyone Perhaps the defining difference between mainstream and Austrian economists lies in their opposing philosophies towards learning truth. Mainstream scientists use a well-developed process called the scientific method. This method...

SANTA ANA, CA—A former Rockwell and Boeing engineer from Orange County was remanded into custody this morning after a federal judge convicted him of charges of economic espionage and acting as an agent of the People’s Republic of China, for whom he stole restricted technology and Boeing trade secrets, including information related to the Space Shuttle program and Delta IV rocket. Dongfan “Greg” Chung, 73, of Orange, Calif., who was employed by Rockwell International from 1973 until its defense and space unit was acquired by Boeing in 1996, was found guilty by United States District Judge Cormac J. Carney, who...

In addition to the members of his own family, Michael Jackson collaborated with a number of top performers like Paul McCartney and the cast of “We Are the World”. But one of his better (and stranger) guest spots was on the hit single “Somebody’s Watching Me” by Rockwell (currently heard in remix form on those Geico commercials). Rockwell was born Kennedy Gordy, the son of Motown founder Berry Gordy. Though he was signed to his father’s label, he supposedly managed to secure a deal without Berry’s knowledge. Jackson (who was a childhood friend of Rockwell’s) sang the hook for “Somebody’s...

According to http://www.rasmussenreports.com/, only 16% of the nation strongly disapproved of Barack Hussein Obama on the day of his inauguration. That number has since become 32%, doubling during his first six weeks in office. Not even all those who approved strongly on inauguration day, still approve today, that number dropping from 41% to 38%. This most likely has a lot to do with the fact that Obama and Pelosi’s Obamanomics adventure into Marxism, has already cost average Americans nearly $3 Trillion in lost investments and savings, as the DOW lost another 30% of its values just since the day Obama...

A judge agreed Monday to postpone for 13 months the trial of a Chinese-American engineer charged with stealing military and aerospace trade secrets on behalf of China. Kenneth Miller, the attorney for 72-year-old Dongfan "Greg" Chung, asked for the delay because he is involved in a lengthy trial, said Assistant U.S. Attorney Greg Staples. The trial was scheduled for April 8, but U.S. District Judge Cormac Carney agreed to delay it until May 5, 2009. The government alleges that Chung stole trade secrets on the space shuttle, C-17 military transport and the Delta IV rocket during his decades of employment...

WASHINGTON - The Supreme Court left an 81-year-old retired engineer without a penny to show for his role in exposing fraud at a former nuclear weapons plant in a ruling that makes it harder for whistle-blowers to claim cash rewards. James Stone stood to collect up to $1 million from a lawsuit he filed in 1989 against Rockwell International, now part of aerospace giant Boeing Co., over problems with environmental cleanup at the now-closed Rocky Flats nuclear weapons plant northwest of Denver. A court eventually ordered Rockwell to pay the government nearly $4.2 million for false claims the company submitted....