His Imperial and Royal Highness Crown Prince Otto of Austria, Hungary, Croatia and Bohemia, Grand Master of the Order of the Golden Fleece (Austria), sometime titular Emperor of Austria, King of Hungary, Croatia and Bohemia (20 Nov 1912 – 4 July 2011)

Hat tip to Rafal Heydel-Mankoo.

The cat Frida Kahlo and her owner says she beats the shell game two times out of three.

Fireworks at Chicago’s Navy Pier.

Republicans believe every day is the Fourth of July, but the democrats believe every day is April 15.

-Ronald Reagan.

Wasting time reading Facebook at work and worried about getting caught? This handy web-site, developed by a 20-year-old Yale undergraduate, converts your Facebook feed into the format of an Excel spreadsheet giving at least the superficial appearance that you are doing something productive.

Via IvyGate.

Not useful for combat, these exquisite mechanical toys made in Geneva circa 1820 were probably used for amorous duels in some European court.

Bloomberg reported the sale results.

A pair of singing-bird pistols made of gold and inlaid with gems sold for HK$45.5 million ($5.8 million) at a Christie’s International sale in Hong Kong [on May 30th].

A huge round of applause erupted after a 10-minute fight that Christie’s head of watches Aurel Bacs described as “an epic bidding war between two of the world’s most connoisseur collectors.” The only publicly known matching pair in the world were included in a 456-lot sale of timepieces that raised HK$164.7 million ($21.2 million), the highest tally for an Asian watch sale, the London-based auction house said. Two Patek Philippe watches sold for more than $1 million each.

Hat tip to Fred Lapides.

3:20 video

Amy Alkon forwards a comment that followed Time magazine’s coverage on the TSA of the elderly leukemia victim’s diaper search which should make every Americans’ blood boil.

Question: What kind of a man knowingly surrenders his own daughter to one of us government workers to be molested, standing by passively even as her private parts are fondled while she screams “Daddy Daddy, please help me!”

Answer: an American man.

I speak only to you men when I say you gutless cowards will be lining up to hand over your wives and daughters in our airports, it will happen hundreds of time each day across our USA. You had better start explaining to your children that we government employees are allowed to touch their private parts whenever we want; it will make the whole thing a lot less dramatic. Seriously, the 1st time is always the worst. The next time you get molested will not feel as disturbing as we accommodate you to our abuses.

-Ksiadz_Robak

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Claire Berlinski quotes an anecdote from the Istanbul daily Zaman that also speaks volumes about what has happened to the citizens of the United States.

Something happened when I was at Atatürk Airport on my way to Beirut. We, as the passengers going to Beirut, were called to the gate for our flight. We went through security and boarding was supposed to begin but, just a few minutes before takeoff, the gate was changed. At the new gate, the security check started again and the officials did not even start the second X-ray machine for us, nor did they apologize.

Then the protest of the passengers started. Some passengers, including me, started to clap our hands in a peaceful manner and demand an apology. Then, at that moment, I noticed that the only passengers who were protesting the situation were Turks.

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Claire then states aloud what should have been obvious to everyone in the United States a long time ago.

I do think the American public’s collective willingness to go along with what any thinking person can see is a ritualized, invasive, offensive, time-wasting and humiliating farce is a very bad omen about our political culture.

It’s alarming both because there should be some kind of enraged reflexive reaction—”Hey, we shouldn’t put up with this, this is insane!”—and there just isn’t. Most people seem willing just to submit to it; the objections to these practices seem to be confined to the political periphery. Is there a single 2012 candidate who has made this a campaign issue? Why not?

And it’s alarming because it suggests no one party to this farce can think his or her way out of a paper bag. To see a stunning lack of common sense, on this scale, and to see a national willingness to believe that somehow it must all make sense and we should just trust the people who say it does—well, that’s really disturbing.

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It used to be possible to look at the events of the 1930s and 1940s in Europe, and think to oneself: “It could not happen here. Americans are not as domesticated as Europeans, not so habituated as Europeans to responding with kadavergehorsam (“corpse-like obedience”) to any edict of the Leviathan state. Americans are rugged individualists who would pick up their deer rifles and shoot some Stormtroopers, instead of obediently shuffling onto the cattle car going to the concentration camp.”

Not anymore.

Gold earrings depicting the goddess Nike [Victory]. Hellenistic (Late 4th Century B.C), Varna Archaeological Museum, Varna, Bulgaria

Yesterday, a Facebook friend Ekaterina Ilieva Ilieva posted a photograph of these extraordinary Hellenistic portraits of the Greek goddess Nike in the form of earrings.

(The earrings can be seen worn today in a 0:26 video here.)

I wanted to quote a favorite passage of mine from Xenophon illustrating the importance of Nike to Greek soldiers in the same period, but Facebook’s programmed formatting truncated the quotation, so I’m making my intended comment into a blog post.

Xenophon’s Anabasis is an account of the Middle Eastern campaign of ten thousand Greek mercenaries employed by Cyrus the Younger in an attempt to wrest the throne of Persia from his brother Artaxerxes II in 401 B.C.

Xenophon’s account of the Battle of Cunaxa, which took place 70 km. north of Baghdad on the left bank of the Euphrates, contains reference to the Greeks invoking Nike in the watchwords selected before the battle.

Anabasis, A, 8.6-8.17.:

Κῦρος δὲ καὶ ἱππεῖς τούτου ὅσον ἑξακόσιοι, ὡπλισμένοι θώραξι μὲν αὐτοὶ καὶ παραμηριδίοις καὶ κράνεσι πάντες πλὴν Κύρου: Κῦρος δὲ ψιλὴν ἔχων τὴν κεφαλὴν εἰς τὴν μάχην καθίστατο. ...

καὶ ἐν τούτῳ τῷ καιρῷ τὸ μὲν βαρβαρικὸν στράτευμα ὁμαλῶς προῄει, τὸ δὲ Ἑλληνικὸν ἔτι ἐν τῷ αὐτῷ μένον συνετάττετο ἐκ τῶν ἔτι προσιόντων. καὶ ὁ Κῦρος παρελαύνων οὐ πάνυ πρὸς αὐτῷ στρατεύματι κατεθεᾶτο ἑκατέρωσε ἀποβλέπων εἴς τε τοὺς πολεμίους καὶ τοὺς φίλους.

ἰδὼν δὲ αὐτὸν ἀπὸ τοῦ Ἑλληνικοῦ Ξενοφῶν Ἀθηναῖος, πελάσας ὡς συναντῆσαι ἤρετο εἴ τι παραγγέλλοι: ὁ δ᾽ ἐπιστήσας εἶπε καὶ λέγειν ἐκέλευε πᾶσιν ὅτι καὶ τὰ ἱερὰ καλὰ καὶ τὰ σφάγια καλά.

ταῦτα δὲ λέγων θορύβου ἤκουσε διὰ τῶν τάξεων ἰόντος, καὶ ἤρετο τίς ὁ θόρυβος εἴη. ὁ δὲ [Κλέαρχος] εἶπεν ὅτι σύνθημα παρέρχεται δεύτερον ἤδη. καὶ ὃς ἐθαύμασε τίς παραγγέλλει καὶ ἤρετο ὅ τι εἴη τὸ σύνθημα. ὁ δ᾽ ἀπεκρίνατο: Ζεὺς σωτὴρ καὶ νίκη.

ὁ δὲ Κῦρος ἀκούσας,—ἀλλὰ δέχομαί τε, ἔφη, καὶ τοῦτο ἔστω. ταῦτα δ᾽ εἰπὼν εἰς τὴν αὑτοῦ χώραν ἀπήλαυνε. καὶ οὐκέτι τρία ἢ τέτταρα στάδια διειχέτην τὼ φάλαγγε ἀπ᾽ ἀλλήλων ἡνίκα ἐπαιάνιζόν τε οἱ Ἕλληνες καὶ ἤρχοντο ἀντίοι ἰέναι τοῖς πολεμίοις.

Cyrus was with his bodyguard of cavalry about six hundred strong, all armed with corselets like Cyrus, and cuirasses and helmets; but not so Cyrus: he went into battle with head unhelmeted. ...

At this time the barbarian army was evenly advancing, and the Hellenic division was still riveted to the spot, completing its formation as the various contingents came up. Cyrus, riding past at some distance from the lines, glanced his eye first in one direction and then in the other, so as to take a complete survey of friends and foes;

when Xenophon the Athenian, seeing him, rode up from the Hellenic quarter to meet him, asking him whether he had any orders to give. Cyrus, pulling up his horse, begged him to make the announcement generally known that the omens from the victims, internal and external alike, were good.

While he was still speaking, he heard a confused murmur passing through the ranks, and asked what it meant. The other replied that it was the watchword being passed down for the second time. Cyrus wondered who had given the order, and asked what the watchword was. On being told it was “Zeus the Saviour and Victory,” he replied,

“I accept it; so let it be,” and with that remark rode away to his own position. And now the two battle lines were no more than three or four furlongs apart, when the Hellenes began chanting the paean, and at the same time advanced against the enemy.

50 years ago today, July 2, 1961, America’s generally-acknowledged greatest writer, Ernest Hemingway slipped away from his wife’s supervision in his home in Ketchum, Idaho, made his way to his gun closet, removed (according to traditional accounts) a highly-cherished 12 gauge Boss best London grade shotgun, and proceeded to self-administer orally two 1 and 1/4 oz., 3 and 3/4 dram, loads of high brass number 6s, permanently curing the increasing assortment of health and mental problems which afflicted him and made him miserably unhappy.

Although only 62 years old, Hemingway had been wounded in war, suffered an extraordinary variety of contusions and broken bones (most recently in two successive African plane crashes), and had maintained a heavy drinking habit for decades. Most dispiritingly, he had begun to find his powers of concentration and acuity waning, and it had become impossible for Hemingway to write. He had become increasingly querulous and suspicious, and had developed an intense fear of persecution by the federal government and the FBI. His family and friends scoffed at his ravings on the subject, but FBI files later did reveal that J. Edgar Hoover had been keeping Hemingway under surveillance.

Ernest Hemingway’s father, a doctor, also killed himself. Inevitably, Hemingway addressed the subject of suicide in his writing, as NPR aptly recalls:

Today, let’s remember the Hemingway who was 23 years old and indestructible, struggling in Paris to be a writer. He wrote a short story — not even 1,500 words — called “Indian Camp,” in which a boy named Nick Adams accompanies his father, who is a doctor, to an Indian camp in the Michigan woods one night, where his father delivers a baby and discovers that the baby’s father has slit his throat. It’s the first time Nick has seen a baby born, or a man die, and in a boat on their way back home across a lake, Nick asks:

“Why did he kill himself, Daddy?”

“I don’t know Nick. He couldn’t stand things, I guess.”

“Is dying hard, Daddy?”

“No, I think it is pretty easy, Nick. It all depends.” ...

They were seated in the boat. The sun was coming up over the hills. Nick trailed his hand in the water. It felt warm in the sharp chill of the morning. In the early morning on the lake sitting in the stern of the boat with his father rowing, he felt quite sure that he would never die.

Arnold Kling and Nick Schulz, in the latest National Affairs, discuss how government intervention has excluded market mechanisms from regulating the operations of health care and education, the two most rapidly growing and influential sectors of the current American economy.

The commanding heights of our economy today are not heavy manufacturing, energy, and transportation. They are, rather, education and health care. These are our foremost growth sectors — the ones most central to employment and consumption; the ones that, increasingly, drive our economy. And it is in precisely these two sectors that the case for extensive government intervention and planning, if not outright control, is dominant — and becoming ever more so. ...

If it were true only that health care and education are increasingly important sectors of our economy, there would be little cause for concern. Indeed, societies ought to desire economies that are strong and flexible enough to hum along as new technologies and other developments cause industries within them to rise and fall. The problem, rather, is that both health care and education are increasingly government-dominated industries. And this domination produces two ill effects that exacerbate the changes these sectors are already undergoing: Government’s influence artificially increases the demand for health care and education (by significantly subsidizing both), and it makes both sectors even less efficient than they would be otherwise (by heavily regulating them and shielding them from market forces). ...

[I]n the cases of health care and education — in large part because of the dominance of government in these sectors — the prices of various “features” are often barely related to consumer preferences. With much of health-care and education spending paid for by third parties (and ultimately subsidized by government), consumers generally do not make decisions based on perceived relative value. The medical patient, instead of asking which medical procedure offers the greatest value, asks only whether the recommended procedure will be covered by insurance — a decision made by insurance-company or government bureaucrats, who have little sense of what is most important to the patient. The parents of a student in an elementary school are not responsible for choosing the school’s teaching methods; as “consumers,” they have no say in — and indeed, no way of knowing — whether the costly programs they pay for with their tax dollars are in fact producing good “value” in the form of their child’s education.

The result is that, in the sectors of education and health care, the preferences of policymakers — not of consumers — become the driving economic forces. And as these sectors become the new commanding heights, policymakers — rather than consumers and producers — will come to dominate more and more of our nation’s economic life.

Under these circumstances, the supposed inadequacy of market economics will become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Markets can work in education and health care, but only if governments allow them to. This means that, for the champions of free enterprise, introducing market principles and mechanisms into health care and education must become a top priority in the years ahead.

Read the whole thing.

Hat tip to John C. Meyer.

Too bad the fight was fixed.

FoxNews:

The chief economic culprit of President Obama’s Wednesday press conference was undoubtedly “corporate jets.” He mentioned them on at least six occasions, each time offering their owners as an example of a group that should be paying more in taxes.

“I think it’s only fair to ask an oil company or a corporate jet owner that has done so well,” the president stated at one point, “to give up that tax break that no other business enjoys.”

But the corporate jet tax break to which Obama was referring – called “accelerated depreciation,” and a popular Democratic foil of late – was created by his own stimulus package.

Rajesh Rao, a computer scientist from the University of Washington, is using computational analysis to attempt to understand the 4000 year old Indus Valley script.

Hat tip to David Wagner.