M.J. Rose

Wow! This is huge news…

Hitler Shows Off
German art – purged of modernism, impressionism and cubism – is shown off by Adolf Hitler and propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels (far left) in Berlin in 1939. Photograph: Bettmann/Corbis

Modernist art haul, ‘looted by Nazis’, recovered by German police

About 1500 works, including pieces by Chagall, Klee, Matisse and Picasso, had been considered lost until raid in Schwabing

by Philip Oltermann in Berlin, The Guardian

“About 1,500 modernist masterpieces – thought to have been looted by the Nazis – have been confiscated from the flat of an 80-year-old man from Munich, in what is being described as the biggest artistic find of the postwar era.

The artworks, which could be worth as much as €1bn (£860m), are said to include pieces by Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Marc Chagall, Paul Klee, Max Beckmann and Emil Nolde. They had been considered lost until now, according to a report in the German news weekly Focus.

The works, which would originally have been confiscated as “degenerate art” by the Nazis or taken from Jewish collectors in the 1930s and 1940s, had made their way into the hands of a German art collector, Hildebrand Gurlitt. When Gurlitt died, the artworks were passed down to his son, Cornelius – all without the knowledge of the authorities…”

For the complete piece click here.

HAPPY HALLOWEEN!

Here’s a scary one for you…

Is this a case of a devilishly haunted hotel? Was it a brutal murder? The result of some sort of evil witchcraft? Or simply the tragic last moments of an insane and suicidal young woman? What did happened to Elisa Lam?

No one knows how to explain her death. It’s a true mystery, and a macabre one at that. Why was she acting so strange in the elevator videotape? What was she scared of? How did she end up in the water tank – and more importantly, how did she get the heavy top of the tank closed once she was inside?

There are so many troubling mysteries here. The whole thing is terrifying!

The Mysterious Case of Elisa Lam

(from The Vigilant Citizen)

“There are mysteries that are so eerie and strange that they boggle the mind for days on end. The case of Elisa Lam is one of them. In February 2013, this 21-year-old student from Vancouver, Canada, was found dead inside the Cecil Hotel’s rooftop water tank in Los Angeles. The L.A. County Department of Coroner ruled the death “accidental due to drowning” and said no traces of drugs or alcohol were found during the autopsy. However, there is much more to the story than what is implied by police reports. The first piece of evidence that needs to be considered is an elevator surveillance tape that recorded Elisa’s behavior only a few moments before she lost her life.

The four-minute video posted on YouTube shows Elisa pressing all of the elevator buttons and waiting for it to move. Seeing that the elevator doors are not closing, starts behaving extremely bizarrely. Here’s the video…”

…And read more here, if you dare!

Old Icelandic sorcery & witchcraft appears to have some very interesting magical customs. In particular, the concept of Necropants…

The Horrifying Necropants Of Iceland

By JacobSloan

“The Museum of Icelandic Sorcery & Witchcraft houses the only known intact pair of necropants, a beyond-disturbing item popularly used for purposes of traditional magic in seventeenth century Iceland. To make your own (and thus reap good fortune), strike a deal with a friend than whoever dies first will allow the other wear the lower half of their corpse as a pair of pants, day and night:

If you want to make your own necropants (literally; nábrók) you have to get permission from a living man to use his skin after his death.

After he has been buried you must dig up his body and flay the skin of the corpse in one piece from the waist down. As soon as you step into the pants they will stick to your own skin.

A coin must be stolen from a poor widow and placed in the scrotum along with the magical sign, nábrókarstafur, written on a piece of paper. Consequently the coin will draw money into the scrotum so it will never be empty, as long as the original coin is not removed…”

For the rest, click here to go to Disinformation.

…And if you’re truly curious about the sorcery behind such a thing, click here for the “stave” for Necropants on the website for the Museum of Icelandic Sorcery & Witchcraft.