Billboard on Maryland Eastern Shore
2012 Election, Barack Obama, Billboard, Maryland
Bruce Kessler found it just over the border into Worcester County, Maryland from Virginia.
Archive for June, 2012
23 Jun 2012
Billboard on Maryland Eastern Shore2012 Election, Barack Obama, Billboard, MarylandBruce Kessler found it just over the border into Worcester County, Maryland from Virginia. 22 Jun 2012
Alexandra Pelosi Interviews the Desperate and Disenfranchised in NYCNew York, Relief Bums, Welfare StateBill Maher says this video by Nancy Pelosi’s daughter may “Make Liberals Go Insane.” 22 Jun 2012
Game of Thrones Attack Ads"Game of Thrones", Humor, Political CommercialsFrom Mother Jones (even Commies, at least sometimes, have a sense of humor): Daenerys Targaryen: Wrong For Dragons, Wrong For The Realm ————————— Joffrey Baratheon: Where Is The Birth Certificate? ————————— Robb Stark: The Biggest Celebrity in The North 21 Jun 2012
The Problem of “White Privilege”Racial Politics, Ressentiment, University of Minnesota at Duluth, White PrivilegeThe University of Minnesota at Duluth is campaigning against white privilege. CampusReform.org has the story. ———————- This mentality is sufficiently prevalent in educational circles that it has provoked the creation in response of a satire site called OK HOLD ON LET ME CHECK MY PRIVILEGE. ———————- I thought that if we just awarded an undeserved presidency to an African-American nobody from Illinois, whose only life-time accomplishment was writing a memoir after graduating from law school, that all our racial problems and divisions would vanish and the whole era of racial grievances and complaints would be finished and done with. Whatever happened to the deal that liberals kept promising? 21 Jun 2012
17th Century Forensic Anthropology of Jamestown & St. Mary’s City, MarylandAnthropology, Archaeology, Forensic Anthropology, History, Maryland, Science, Smithsonian, VirginiaThe video is associated with a Smithsonian exhibition: Written in Bone: Forensic Files of the 17th Century Cheasapeake, running currently until January 6, 2013. 20 Jun 2012
Today’s Art Schools Teaching Anti-ArtArt, Art Schools, Cultural Exhaustion, Decadence, Decline of the West
“‘Charles,’ said Cordelia, ‘Modern Art is all bosh, isn’t it?’ —–Brideshead Revisited Not all Modern Art is bosh really, but an ever-increasing percentage certainly is. How did it come to this? Jacob Willer, in an absolutely brilliant essay in Standpoint magazine, explains how the ideology of Romantic Rousseauianism has transformed the art schools and, along with them, most artists’ abilities and goals. Today, nobody learns to draw or paint at Art School. When you mess up a print, the instructor applauds your spontaneous expression and awards your blunder top marks.
Hat tip to Bird Dog via Karen L. Myers. 20 Jun 2012
I Knew Leicas Were Expensive, But…Auction Sales, Leica, Leica 0, PhotographyI guess it’s not surprising to find that Leitz invented the the 35 mm format, and that the reason a smaller film format was created in Germany was to make photography more convenient when visiting the mountains.
Last month, at Westlicht Galleries in Vienna, one of the ten or eleven surviving Leica 0-series, a still-functional camera numbered 116, sold at auction on May 12th to an anonymous bidder for €2.16 million euros, or roughly $2.8 million dollars, setting a new record for camera prices.
19 Jun 2012
Speaking of Beer CommercialsBarack Obama, Most Interesting Man in the World, ParodyHere is an effective parody. Hat tip to Tristyn Bloom. 19 Jun 2012
Banned Beer CommercialEntertaining Commercials, Max Beer, NSFWYou are not likely to see NSFW commercials like this on American television anytime soon. (Forwarded to me via mail by a childhood friend from back home.) Hat tip to Henry Bernatonis. 19 Jun 2012
Could This Have Worked on the Armada?Britain Sinking into the Sea, Royal Navy, Russia, Sad Modernity, Syria
The Royal Navy blocked invasion of the British Isles by the Spanish Armada in 1588 with cannon-fire and cutlass. So formidable was the Royal Navy’s fighting superiority in 1805 that Admiral Jervis was able to quip: “I do not say that they [the French] cannot come — I only say they cannot come by sea.” Where in days of yore, England maintained command of the seas with “hearts of oak,” clearly today Britain has succeeded in substituting hearts of ink. One pictures Napoleon glaring in frustration as Marshall Bertrand reports that Lloyds’ has cancelled the invasion fleet’s insurance, so the fleet cannot embark. 19 Jun 2012
The Left is Still in Constitutional DenialCommerce Clause, Constitution, Obamacare, Supreme Court, US Constitution, Wickard v. FilburnKevin Drum, in Mother Jones, contends that we diabolical conservatives first strong-armed the Republican Party into accepting our view of the unconstitutionality of the Obamacare individual mandate, then we successfully used the right-wing media to brainwash the mainstream media into accepting our arguments as legitimate, and all this, you see, gives cover to our partisan judges to make a partisan ruling.
Kevin Drum’s perspective amounts to assuming that extreme New Deal jurisprudence, like the 1942 Wickard v. Filburn (a decision which ruled that the Constitution’s grant of power to regulate Interstate Commerce gave Congress the power to tell an Ohio farmer named Roscoe Filburn that he was not allowed to grow wheat on his farm to feed his own chickens. Farmer Filburn using his own wheat, and not buying wheat on the market, was deemed to impact Interstate Commerce and therefore to provide a legal basis for Congressional authority.) was good law and destined to endure forever unchallenged by the reasoning of later courts. Kevin Drum studiously ignores the fact that the Constitution-in-exile of the New Deal era has been gradually coming back. The Supreme Court resumed, in a modest way, re-adopting the perspective that Constitutional authority to regulate Interstate Commerce actually required the legislative object to involve commerce crossing state lines. In U.S. v. Lopez (1995), the Court struck down a Gun-Free School Zone law because the regulated activity concerned actually had nothing to do with Interstate Commerce. A number of other once-thought-to-be-extinct Constitutional provisions, like the Second Amendment, have come roaring back to life in recent years. To believe, as people like Kevin Drum and Nancy Pelosi notoriously did, that it was completely unnecessary to look for an actual constitutionally enumerated power to permit Congress to tell Americans to buy health insurance policies is to reject the fundamental American idea of limited government. What has actually occurred, over decades, is a national debate over whether a long string of unprincipled, legal realist rulings simply setting the Constitution and the entire earlier history of constitutional law aside were correct. In law review articles, public debate, and in national elections leading to judicial appointments and ultimately to rulings, the left has been losing and the conservative position has been winning. In the end, there should be no surprise to anyone who takes the Constitution seriously when the Obamacare individual mandate is struck down. That was the intent of the framers, and those of us who contend that that is what the Constitution says inevitably have the better arguments. Feeds
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