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https://2000mules.com/ You decide
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There is a Yiddish expression, beshert, which means it was meant to be.
About a month ago Abby, who bikes 100 miles every weekend, came upon a black puppy on the side of the road. Loving animals and having a big heart she stopped and concluded the puppy had been abandoned and probably injured by a car. She was far from home but called a friend and, to make a long story short, she arranged to have the puppy picked up and cared for, surgery and all. It was quite an expensive undertaking so she began collecting funds from friends and family. Eventually the puppy's treatment cost was absorbed by an animal rescue unit. While this was happening Kahlua was not doing well and, as previously noted in a sad memo, had to be put to sleep.
"Penny" has now been released by the vet, has been adopted by the Nelson family and started living with her new family yesterday along with PJ their other rescue dog.
Abby felt it was meant to be. Penny Nelson!
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America has become the land of laws but no order. We have progressives, the radical Democrat Party and money from America's equivalent of Russian oligarchs and you know their names.
https://townhall.com/columnist
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Our Elite is No Elite At All
By Victor Davis Hanson
The only real recent public service of elites has been to persuade us why they were never elites at all.
An elite is always variously defined.
The ideal elites, as ancient philosophers argued, were a “natural elite” due to their exemplary character, aptitude, and work ethic. Understandably, a towering few ascended from all walks of life to positions of power, influence, and occasional wealth.
But such a natural meritocracy, for obvious reasons, rarely leads to an equality of result.
Who Are Our Elite?
Our current idea of ostensible elites could be defined by noting their money and influence. But money alone—even in the huge sums now found on Wall Street and in Silicon Valley—is not the only elite criterion.
Donald Trump is a billionaire with much influence and lives accordingly. Yet few of our “elite” would consider him a kindred soul. Ditto Elon Musk. He is the richest man in the world. But the elite mostly despise and ostracize him.
Birth itself has given way somewhat to insider influence and professional parentage. You may be a fifth-generation scion with a name such as Mellon, Vanderbilt, or Rockefeller, but if your dad was not an ambassador, your mom not a VP at CBS, your sibling not a Harvard professor or Google executive, you have fallen out of the elite.
Zip codes still count. Although there are certainly “elites” who hail from Kansas City, Boise, or Sacramento, most of those who exercise national clout are found inordinately on the two coasts, from Boston to Washington, D.C., and from Seattle to San Diego—with respective windows on the wealth of Europe or Asia.
The Obamas were going to be anointed as multimillionaires wherever they lived. But they would not necessarily remain as elite as they have become living back in Chicago rather than in a tony D.C. neighborhood and out on Martha’s Vineyard. So, it was an easy call for them to follow the trajectory of the Clintons rather than the Georgia-bound Carters.
In the 21st century, other elite criteria seem to count as much as the old markers of lineage, money, and location. “Certification,” defined as degrees from the “right” undergraduate and graduate schools, is essential for an elite resumé.
Such brands have little to do with education per se or aggregate knowledge acquired. (It is not clear that an Ivy League student would do better on the same SAT, taken upon graduation as earlier, upon admittance). Are our best generals those with Yale degrees, and our best CEOs those with Stanford MBAs? And are Harvard Law Review editors—think Barack Obama, the boss of Lois Lerner, Eric Holder, James Comey, and John Brennan—our top legal and ethical minds?
The point of certification is that it is the cattle brand to open networking doorways and empower even banal arguments from authority. A Harvard MBA or a Princeton BA is not difficult to obtain. But getting into such places in the first place to obtain such a certification most certainly was hard. And whether it was in the past a matter of being white, rich, and well connected, or in the present being non-white, female, and well-connected, the key is joining an elite club—not justifying one’s membership in it by current and future demonstrable excellence.
Another route to being an elite is found in some sort of political, media, academic, sports, or entertainment celebrity—the Robert De Niros or LeBron Jameses of the world. We are not sure how all these celebrated people became elites, only that some exercise influence and win adherents through their ubiquity—and notoriety. A Don Lemon or Jeffrey Epstein is not an elite by virtue of proven achievement or innate talent, much less character. But they sort of became mysteriously famous for being famous (or infamous).
The Kardashians are elites. But they reached this status by merchandising and popularizing larger than normal posteriors—and to be frank, more shamelessly than others—posting selfies of their ample boobs and butts. Ditto an earlier Madonna or Britney Spears, both of whom could somewhat sing in addition to doing burlesque.
Finally, left-wing politics are essential for the new elite. The brilliant Tom Sowell or Shelby Steele is not an elite; the racialist Ibram Kendi or madwoman Joy Reid is.
The CNN masturbatory legal-eagle Jeffrey Toobin is considered an elite expert of jurisprudence, despite having never won a landmark case or being renowned for his courtroom presence or seminal legal scholarship. In contrast, proven expert constitutionalists, such as Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas or Samuel Alito, are not so well regarded as authorities on the law by the elite.
Does Harvard Law have a mini course on ethics, advising graduates not to expose their phalloi to female colleagues? That is the sort of Toobin illness that would earn a poor deplorable time in the clink or a lifetime on the sex-offender register,
So woke progressivism does not just cement elite membership. It also serves as an acceptable scab to mask a lack of character beneath, especially in the case of scoundrels like one-time would-be presidential contender Michael Avenatti, or the once blackfaced like Justin Trudeau and former Virginia Governor Ralph Northam. It covers the bloody work of former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo as well as long-ago discredited fabulists like Dan Rather and Brian Williams, or plagiarists like the famous Doris Kearns Goodwin, the late Steven Ambrose, and even Joe Biden.
The Elite Res Gestae
What counts more, however, is not so much who becomes an oligarchical elite, but what exactly has this newer sort of elite class done for our society at large?
Collectively, this generation’s record of leadership, such as it is, has been mostly dismal: no Hoover Dam, no subsequent moon-landing or trip to Mars, no Normandy Beach or Inchon, no polio vaccine, no “Casablanca,” “The Best Years of our Lives,” or “Shane” movies, and no novels like For Whom the Bell Tolls, The Grapes of Wrath, Tender is the Night, Absalom, Absalom! or Invisible Man—but plenty of California-like Solyndras and Stonehenge high-speed rails, skedaddles from Kabul and Benghazi, gifting of $80 billion in arms to the Taliban, double-vaxxed and boosted, sorta, kinda short-term immunity, “X-Men” and “Avenger” comic-book films, and How to Be an Anti-Racist best sellers.
The more we gained Silicon Valley billionaires, the more we moved into the world of 1984, merely substituting J. Edgar Hoover’s G-men for woke, suit-and-tied James Comey, Andrew McCabe, Peter Strzok, Lisa Page, and Kevin Clinesmith—or legions of nerds with cancel buttons sitting in rows of computer carrels in Menlo Park.
Movers and shakers who operate Facebook, Twitter, Spotify, or GoFundMe are much more devoted to Soviet-style censorship than to the First Amendment. They worry far more over profits rather than over the Uyghurs. And their creed is more McCarthyism than the Sermon on the Mount.
Our four-star elite officers have more degrees than ever, more contact with the Hill and the White House—and had no more idea, than the clueless bureaucrats who dispatched them, how to discover what was the purpose in Libya or the agenda in Afghanistan.
General Mark Milley was more interested in virtue signaling his furor at white rage than in keeping safe a $1-billion embassy in Kabul, $300-million worth of refits at the Bagram airbase, and $80 billion in arms. He was not so worried over how to win wars or keep the peace. As an elite, he knew he could ignore all that and still not be fired—if he at least virtue signaled his crusade against white rage.
In the current generation of our loud, woke military, we will likely see Afghanistan return as a pre-9/11 terrorist headquarters, Iran go nuclear, North Korea step up its missile launches, and Taiwan and Ukraine at best squeezed into Finlandization, and at worst absorbed.
The more the public listened to the architects of lockdowns, mandates, and quarantines—the elite at the CDC, NIH, and NIAID, the political hypocrites like California Governor Gavin Newsom, former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot, and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and sham-modelers such as Neil Ferguson of the Imperial College, London—the more people died in classical “the medicine is worse that the malady” fashion.
There are no finer degreed-elites in the world than our medical professionals such as Anthony Fauci, Francis Collins, and Peter Daszak. The three became international rock stars as they crafted a coverup by denying links between the pandemic and the Wuhan virology lab, and their own efforts either to fund or hide gain-of-function viral research.
We don’t quite know how we got into $30 trillion of debt, normative $2-trillion deficits, growing stagflation, and adherence to an unhinged modern monetary theory that assures us printing money ensures prosperity. We only know that the 7-Eleven manager, the owner-operator truck driver, and the electrician grasp a lot more about economics than do the Ph.D.s who wrote, argued, and led us into this mess.
The Elite Pantheon
Finally, examine the marquee elites of the past few years. Do we remember the late Jeffrey Epstein, the pedophiliac blackmailer who posed as a legitimate money manager? Do we remember the Lolita express paparazzi who jetted to his various hot spots, whether President Emeritus Bill Clinton or the royal Prince Andrew or allegedly even the global climate change scold Bill Gates? Why did the richest men in the world and so many from Harvard University court him? In contrast, most of the working class knows enough to steer clear of pedophiles.
We are suffering a plague of cop shootings. Yet in a few days, our multimillionaire Super Bowl entertainers will share one thing in common: They all have advocated or glorified violence against the police.
At one time or another, we were told the following elites were geniuses or cutting-edge—men and women in the know and to be known: Woody Allen, Alec Baldwin, the two Cuomos, the always shouting, always furious, always pampered, but otherwise inane and empty Greta Thunberg.
Our corporate elites gave millions in their stockholders’ money as penance to BLM, without a worry where, how, or why those millions were spent—or siphoned off in real estate investments by the grifter leadership.
Nikole Hannah-Jones is now our nation’s elite chronological expert whose rare insight on race, history, and war taught the nation that 1619, not 1776, was our true foundational date. But so far, she has failed to convince anyone of her latest notion that 1865 was the first year of the Civil War.
Ditto Whoopi Goldberg. She claims rare insight on the catalysts of the Holocaust, apparently better than its architect Adolf Hitler, who, we are told by her, really did not exterminate 6 million Jews because of his racial hatred of Jews. Instead, Professor Goldberg, of “Ghost” fame, lectures us that what went on at Treblinka was a sort of tit-for-tat catfight between white people. Had Goldberg said Hitler took chloroquine rather than killed 6 million for non-racial reasons, she would likely have been censored or kicked off social media.
Elites hate the truckers. We know that from their outrage over the Canadian trucker strike—and Justin Trudeau’s infantile meltdown. They care little for the working moms who lost their jobs when schools closed, and who had to quit work to watch their children. They have no concern for the small businesses that went broke, as the Zoom class made more money than ever during COVID-19. The more we elected credentialed district attorneys, the more crime shot up, the innocent suffered, and the elite shrugged.
The elite gave us the Russian collusion hoax, the beatification of the prevaricator Adam Schiff, the iconization of the disingenuous conniver Alexander Vindman, the neat idea of modern monetary theory, the bold idea of open borders, the beloved idea of critical race theory, and a spiking violent crime wave explained away by critical legal theory.
The only real recent public service of elites has been to persuade us why they were never elites at all.
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From a dear friend and fellow memo reader who thinks deeply and writes beautifully:
WHY “WHOOPIE” GOLDBERG MATTERS
A Memo to Caryn Johnson
from Lloyd F. Thompson
Caryn Johnson, aka, Whoopie Goldberg, created quite a stir with her incredibly ignorant, or willfully vile, comments on The View about the Holocaust, claiming it was whites against other whites and not racist. Inexcusable…period.
Yes, Whoopie, the Holocaust was about race and there are thousands of survivors and millions of documents to prove it. But, you’re probably too arrogant to take some time to do a little research. Ever look into the National Socialist German Workers' Party …The Nazi Party? You should.
Driven by distorted views about race and eugenics, the Nazis hoped to improve German society and commerce by purging them of undesirable racial elements. After taking power in early 1933, they initiated a series of racial policies targeting Jews and Germany’s 20,000 Romany, an eastern European race living nomadically within the Reich. It got much worse and soon included a wide variety of “undesirables” – Afro-Germans, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Poles, political opponents, clergy, and others at the will of the Nazis.
But don’t take my word it Whoopie, read what one of Nazi Germany’s leading proponents of “racial theory”, Dr. Gerhard Wagner, head of the Nazi organization for physicians said. At a 1936 Nuremberg Rally he proclaimed, “Only racial comrades may be citizens. A racial comrade can only be someone of German blood, without regard to religious confession. No Jew can therefore be a citizen.”
And where did all of this hatred lead…to the horrible hell-holes of Auschwitz, Dachau, Belzec, Chelmno, Majdanek, Treblinka and nearly 1,000 other concentration camps where the mission was to “Break the spirit, Break the body, Break the heart.”
Ever hear of that? Ever think about the millions of people who were constantly brutalized and murdered under such inhuman rule?
Now, why do you matter? Of course you matter as a human being. But you have taken on added importance. Your remarks have moved a lot of people, maybe millions, to think and learn about the Holocaust. And for that I thank you
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You gotta love this guy:
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Black hypocrisy is alive, well and ever present:
Who Gets to Join the Black Caucus in Virginia?
By John Fund
Posted By Ruth King
If you’re not a liberal, you need not apply.A. C. Cordoza, a black Republican in the Virginia House of Delegates, is excluded from the legislature’s Black Caucus.
Virginia Democrats are certainly taking their defeat last November hard. Last week, they spitefully refused the application of the lone black Republican in the House of Delegates to join the Black Caucus — which in theory is open to non-Democrats.
A. C. Cordoza, who won a surprise election last November in a significantly minority district in Hampton, took to the House floor to say he had been excluded because he dared to have “diverse” ideas. “The questions for entry had little to do with being black and had more to do with being leftist,” said Cordoza. He said the questionnaire asked about his three top environmental-justice priorities, whether he favored charter schools, whether he would limit recalls of election officials to “end harassment,” and whether he would repeal laws limiting suits against police officers. He was also asked if he backed pro-union legislation, abortion rights, mask mandates, and gun control.
“These questions . . . spit in the face of our ancestors who fought to have all of our rights guaranteed,” Cordoza said. “I asked myself what any of those things mentioned have to do with being black. The answer is it has nothing to do with being black. . . . The caucus is not about being black, it’s about being leftist.”
Lieutenant Governor Winsome Sears, a Republican, a Jamaican immigrant, and the first woman of color elected statewide in Virginia, ridiculed the rejection, saying that maybe a new “You’re Not Black Enough Caucus” was needed. Sears was a member of the Black Caucus from 2002 to 2004, when she was a House delegate. She recalls that she was made to feel quite unwelcome. “Twenty years later, nothing has changed,” she told the Washington Post. “It is better for them to call themselves the Democratic Caucus. . . . . It’s healthy for us to have these discussions. White people don’t all think alike. Neither do Asians. Neither do Hispanics. Same here.”
L. Louise Lucas, a black woman from Portsmouth, the Virginia Senate’s president pro tempore, proved Sears’s point by questioning why Cordoza even bothered applying. “We seem to have nothing in common,” she said. “Why would you want to be a part of a group where you know there’s going to be controversy?”
Controversies about black Republicans being rejected or ridiculed for trying to associate with black caucuses are nothing new.
Gary Franks became the first black elected to the U.S. House from New England in 1990. A Republican, he was allowed to join the Congressional Black Caucus but was asked to leave some meetings and was excluded from others. Then Representative Bill Clay Sr., a veteran of the caucus, in 1996 issued a six-page letter that referred to “Franks’ foot-shuffling, head-scratching ‘Amos and Andy’ brand of ‘Uncle Tom-ism.’” Franks responded in measured terms: “Obviously Bill Clay is not a supporter of mine, but I wish him Godspeed.” Franks served in Congress until he was defeated in the 1996 Democratic landslide that reelected Bill Clinton.
J. C. Watts took a different course when he as elected as a black Republican from Oklahoma in 1994. He declined to join the Congressional Black Caucus — perhaps because of Franks’s experience — but found ways to work with its members. Although he debated the fairness of affirmative-action programs with the likes of Jesse Jackson, he felt that Republicans couldn’t dismantle some preference programs until they first took steps to revitalize inner cities and reach out to minorities.
Watts eventually left Congress in 2002 to go into private business. In 2020, he founded the Black News Network to provide a platform for news that isn’t adequately covered by other cable channels.
In an interview at the time, Watts told me that he sees hope that black thinkers who dissent from liberal orthodoxy are getting their message out and that he sees a more pro-entrepreneurial spirit among young African Americans. As in everything, some government institutions are lagging indicators. Asked about his experience with the Congressional Black Caucus, Watts laughed and said, “That was a long time ago, but I’m not surprised that change in Washington often happens more slowly than almost anywhere else.”
Last week, A. C. Cordoza discovered that goes for the level of tolerance that old-style liberal blacks in government have for those with different views.
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Now that it is in the open. that which any idiot should have already figured out by themselves, one should ask whether the BLM tent will eventually fold?
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Black writer: Scandal-plagued BLM harming blacks, donors
By Art Moore(WND NewsCenter)
The collapse of the scandal-plagued umbrella organization for the local Black Lives Matter organizations will harm black people along with donors, who largely were interested mainly in their self-righteousness, writes African-American writer Kira Davis in a column for DailyMail.com.
Spotlighting the $90 million raised by the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation (BLMGNF) in 2020, she recounts what “may stand as one of the biggest charity scandals in recent memory.”
Co-founder Patrisse Cullors, who describes herself and co-fund Alicia Garza as trained Marxists, stepped down after it was revealed that she owned $3 million in personal real estate holdings. Two of the purchases came amid an explosion of donations that followed the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis in May 2020.
“Now, there is also no word on who exactly is heading up BLMGNF right now or what exactly is happening to their bank account even as many BLM grassroots organizations are still waiting on their funding from the umbrella group,” Davis writes.
What is known is that BLMGNF transferred millions of dollars to a Canadian charitable foundation run by Cullors’ wife, Janaya Kahn, who in turn bought a Toronto mansion for over $6 million.
The mansion, Davis points out, also happens to have once belonged to the Communist Party of Canada.
Co-founder Garza has declared that her Black Lives Matter movement cannot succeed unless capitalism is “abolished.” Last July, BLM blamed the U.S. for Cuba’s economic woes and unrest while praising the communist régime for granting asylum to “black revolutionaries” such as convicted fugitive cop-killer Assata Shakur.
Davis writes that even California had such concern about Black Lives Matter it put a halt to organization’s ability to receive any more donations. Further, Washington state, citing a “lack of transparency,” told BLMGNF to “immediately cease” fundraising. And BLM’s charity registration, she said, is also out of compliance in Connecticut, Maine, Maryland, New Jersey, North Carolina and Virginia.
Indiana’s attorney general, called BLMGNF a “house of cards” and an “illegal enterprise.”
Davis says there is “no doubt that many powerful foundations and social justice worshippers have been complicit in the irresponsibility of Cullors and her cohorts.”
“They sought absolution over solutions,” she writes, which today is known as “virtue signaling.”
“It is born of narcissism, and the end result is that the people who really do need the help are left begging for scraps, like the BLM grassroots groups, who say they have seen no transparency, very few dollars and have no idea what has happened to the remaining $60 million still in the BLMGNF bank accounts,” says Davis.
She blames the “implicit trust” given to BLMGNF by “lazy philanthropists,” which gave “a wide latitude for corruption.”
“So while BLMGNF steals progress right out from under the communities they claim to support, donors get to bask in the glory of absolution. ‘I spent away my white guilt and all I got was this $100 t-shirt.’”
She says the NBA gave millions to BLM and donned their brand on the court not to combat racism, but to make their brand look good.
Davis recalls an encounter her husband, who also is black, had with a middle-aged white woman while shopping, illustrating “what happens when we seek absolution over reconciliation.”
The woman stared at him before he asked if he knew her from somewhere. She said, no she just wanted to say how sorry she was for her white privilege and that she hoped he would “feel comfortable in our community.”
Her husband, she writes, didn’t need a “white woman to make him feel comfortable, and the woman who tried only ended up making him feel more separated from his community, not more welcome.”
Likewise, says Davis, many BLM donors merely wanted the self-satisfaction of saying “I did something,” with little care about the aftermath.
“That woman used my husband as an emotional tissue and left lighthearted, while he had to figure out what to do with her trash,” Davis writes.
“Incurious BLM donors using the organization as an emotional tissue have aided in causing more pain to black communities, more disorganization and more bitterness.”
Rebutting the narrative
Black Lives Matter was launched in response to the jury acquittal of George Zimmerman in 2013 in the death of Trayvon Martin. BLM’s founders call Zimmerman and the officer involved in the death of Michael Brown in 2014, Darren Wilson, “murderers.” However, Zimmerman’s acquittal was confirmed by an investigation supported by open records that uncovered witness tampering and perjury. BLM took off when teen Michael Brown died in a struggle with a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri. But three separate investigations, including by the Justice Department under Barack Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder, found the officer acted in self-defense when he was attacked by Brown. Obama’s DOJ found the iconic “hand’s up don’t shoot” likely didn’t happen.
Manhattan Institute scholar Heather Mac Donald has presented compelling empirical evidence rebutting the BLM “systemic police racism” narrative that has gripped the nation.
She contends the claim that “policing in the U.S. is lethally racist” is provably false, presenting three types of evidence: the raw numbers, individual cases such as George Floyd’s, and academic research.
“A police officer is up to 30 times more likely to be killed by a black male than an unarmed black male is to be killed by a police officer,” she said, citing analyses by mainstream researchers of available data.
In 2015, under President Obama and Attorney General Holder, a Justice Department analysis of the Philadelphia Police Department found white police officers were less likely than black or Hispanic officers to shoot unarmed black suspects. In 2016, the Washington Post reported a Washington State University study finding that police officers are three times less likely to shoot unarmed black suspects than unarmed white suspects.
Black leaders and scholars, such as Thomas Sowell, Walter Williams and Shelby Steele, who reject the claim that America is “systemically racist” point to the breakdown of families that has accompanied the rise in dependence on welfare since the 1960s. Boys are growing up fatherless, a major indicator of crime and poverty, with more than 70% of blacks now born out of wedlock.
Civil-rights era activist Bob Woodson offers a forum for voices such as Steele’s to counter the narrative of the New York Times “1619 Project” called the “1776 Unites Campaign.” And his Washington, D.C.-based Woodson Center helps support “more than 2,881 neighborhood leaders in 40 states who are tackling issues ranging from homelessness, addiction, to joblessness, youth violence and the need for education and training.”
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When you build things in a hurry they often fall quickly.
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An invention that changed the world:+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
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Stacey shows her true colors.
America has sunk so low that even Stacey Abrams and her like believe they are competent enough to rule "we the people."
We have an octogenarian Socialist, a mentally challenged Doofuss, a laughing female hyena, movie stars, pothead athletes, all kind of kids wet behind their ears, and a woman who doesn't know whether she is a native America or overpaid professor turned Senator, along with an assortment of pathetics all vying to steer this nation into a ditch.
Then we look at who actually is running the nation and we find bureaucrats that can't answer simple questions, a general who feels duty bound to call China before the president gives an order and advised the same former president to leave $80 billion in sensitive military equipment for our enemy because it would be too expensive to ship it home.
We have the highest paid scientist in government telling us to shut the entire nation down because a bug from China flew over here without a mask and two health agencies with 30,000 employees dispensing conflicting information.
I could spend the rest of the week (it is Monday) identifying such events and people but by now you should have gotten the point. If not, then you are part of the problem.
Worst of all we no longer teach students to love our country. We have teachers who hate this country and want to see it end. They find nothing good about our history.
To you young ones who have little regard for this country this comedian will seem corny and what he has to say even cornier.
I feel sorry for you. You are always free to leave and find a better home.
The Pledge of AllegianceFor those of you who grew up loving Red Skelton - like me - you will enjoy this. For those who didn't and don't I feel you'll not understand this man. (This video was probably made around 60-65 years ago).WHAT A TREASURE !!!!
And:
This oughta crack you up.
Report: Biden admin to send crack pipes to drug addicts to advance 'racial equity'
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These photos are from our second stop on our 19 day Italian
vacation taken this past October. For these two+ days in Milan and Lake Como we
had private guides to take us around (the rest of the tour group joined us in
Venice).
Milan is the business and fashion capital of Italy. I have not seen so many men
in suits in years. Formality in dress was very prevalent.
The Duomo (Cathedral) is at the heart of Milan. It is a magnificent Gothic
church whose outside has over 1000 marble statues (with another 2000 in the
inside). We were able to get tickets to walk on the roof which was one of the
highlights of our Italy trip. Everywhere you looked were statues and gargoyles.
In the distance you could see the Alps.
Next store to the Cathedral was the amazing Galleria, the first shopping mall
in Europe. It contained Milan's most fashionable shops and restaurants. The
mall is topped with glass domes with walls and floors of mosaics. A block from
the Galleria is the La Scala opera house which was on the same block as our
hotel.
The only museum complex we visited in Milan was Sforza Castle which was the
renaissance era home of the rulers of Milan. There we saw the absolutely moving
Pieta sculpture of Michelangelo who was still working on it (for over 20 years)
when he died. This was one of the four Pietas of Michelangelo we saw while in
Italy.
A one hour drive from Milan is Lake Como and the Lakes district of Italy. We
visited the largest city on the lake, Como, a charming resort city founded by
the Romans. The lake is surrounded by small towns with many large villas built
right on the water. We took a boat ride on the lake and a cable car up one of
the surrounding mountains. Como also had wonderful shopping and a beautiful
cathedral.
I understand that some of you may not have received the photos from Cinque
Terra (the Italian Riviera) that I sent out last month; if so, please email and
I will resend.
As always, I hope you enjoy the photos and that you will email me if you had
any favorites or questions about the trip.
See more photos from this SmugMug site.
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++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ My oldest daughter , Debra, and her husband, Martin, took a dream trip to Italy. Martin is the family photographer:
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