A Yale acquaintance was ranting just the other day on Facebook about the stupid rightwing narrative of success through hard work. College tuition prices have become so high, she said, that no one without means can possibly get ahead. I replied that I had met a fair number of people who had become wealthy and successful through perseverance and hard work, who had never attended an elite university at all. And she got angry, delivered a few ad hominems, and stormed off.

This political ad represents a perfect reply to her nonsense.

Thanks to Stumbling On Truth, who forwarded it to me.

Barack Obama told ABC News that the presidential debate didn’t go his way, because he was “just too polite.”

That’s not a problem Joe Biden is likely to experience.

Biden has gone astonishingly far in national politics for a blithering idiot, largely on the basis of his ability to shout down opponents using inflammatory language, unbridled emotionalism, and the most extravagant version of ultra-partisan talking points delivered as alleged facts. Biden is a verbal bully and a shameless liar who has successfully shrugged off a series of personal scandals (in which his false statements or plagiarism were exposed) rising all the way to the Vice Presidency. Paul Ryan had better be prepared tonight. Now that Ted Kennedy has gone to his reward, Joe Biden is the democrat party’s thug-in-chief.

From Fashionably Geek:

The pretty model can sort of walk in these things, but they seem to make her knock-kneed, and they make me wonder why she would want to.

Hat tip to Leah Libresco and Tristyn Bloom.

Hat tip to Jose Guardia.

It’s amazingly easy to exploit the community of bedwetting holier-than-thous, you can even mock their stupidity while getting them to re-affirm all of it by supporting you. Follow the frog, wet ends, he’s more intelligent and better suited to survive than you are.

Hat tip to poor crying-his-eyes-out-over-the Obama-implosion Andrew Sullivan.

What is best in life? To crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentation of their women! –Conan the Barbarian

Yesterday, we got to listen to the delightfully loud lamentations of Andrew Sullivan, who continues to refer himself as a conservative while operating professionally as one of the left’s most prolific and mendacious spinmeisters.

Poor Andrew is currently panicking.

The Pew poll is devastating, just devastating. Before the debate, Obama had a 51 – 43 lead; now, Romney has a 49 – 45 lead. That’s a simply unprecedented reversal for a candidate in October. Before Obama had leads on every policy issue and personal characteristic; now Romney leads in almost all of them. Obama’s performance gave Romney a 12 point swing! I repeat: a 12 point swing.

Romney’s favorables are above Obama’s now. Yes, you read that right. Romney’s favorables are higher than Obama’s right now. That gender gap that was Obama’s firewall? Over in one night:

Currently, women are evenly divided (47% Obama, 47% Romney). Last month, Obama led Romney by 18 points (56% to 38%) among women likely voters.

Seriously: has that kind of swing ever happened this late in a campaign? Has any candidate lost 18 points among women voters in one night ever? And we are told that when Obama left the stage that night, he was feeling good. That’s terrifying. On every single issue, Obama has instantly plummeted into near-oblivion. He still has some personal advantages over Romney – even though they are all much diminished. Obama still has an edge on Medicare, scores much higher on relating to ordinary people, is ahead on foreign policy, and on being moderate, consistent and honest (only 14 percent of swing voters believe Romney is honest). But on the core issues of the economy and the deficit, Romney is now kicking the president’s ass.

Now it’s Saturday Night Live mocking Chris Matthews’ and the whole MSNBC gang’s reaction to the debate.

Hat tip to Lynn Chu.

Louis Béroud, Les Joies De L’Inondation (Dans La Galerie Médicis) [The Delights of Flooding (in the Medici Gallery)], 1910

From Sotheby’s catalogue of Sale 8783, 19th Century European Art, November 4, 2011, Lot 31:

After visiting the Louvre in the 1870s, an American traveller noted that “along the galleries are numerous temporary
stands, easels, etc., at which artists are constantly at work copying such paintings as they may have orders for, or
hope to find purchasers for”… Stumbling across a working artist and his accoutrements was not a rare
occurrence for the museum goer in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Viewing and copying the museum’s
masterpieces was a traditional part of an artist’s education, and a practice Béroud both enjoyed and used as the
subject of at least twenty-six of his compositions. Indeed, the artist was such a frequent visitor to the Louvre that he is
credited with sounding the alarm upon discovering the Mona Lisa’s theft in 1911.

The Louvre held the entirety of art history, and its crowded walls offered a bounty of choices for diverse study. In the
present work, Béroud places the dapper, mustachioed copyist among the paintings of the Marie de’ Medici cycle, an
aggrandized biography of the ruler, visualized in twenty four works executed by Peter Paul Rubens in the 1620s for
the Luxembourg Palace, later reinstalled into a devoted gallery at the Louvre. The copyist sits before The
Disembarkation of Marie de’ Medici at Marseilles, one of the most popular in the cycle. The painting depicts
Marie upon her marriage to Henry IV, as she walks down a gangplank into the open arms of an allegorical figure of
France, while a trumpeting angel of Fame flies above and Neptune and his naiads rise from the sea. The muscular,
fish tailed naiads proved particularly tempting subjects to copy. Eugène Delacroix had copied one of the sensual
mythological figures. …

Béroud’s copyist makes a similar choice, his canvas focusing on the figure on the right in broad, expressive strokes
and dissonant colors of a fauvist style. … His careful study is interrupted as the trio of naiads literally flows from the canvas on swirling waves which threaten to soak the gallery and wash him away. The copyist tosses his brush aside as his body is thrown back in shock at the surreal experience. The humor of the composition is further suggested by its title Les joies de l’inondation (The Joys of the Flood) as the rushing waters promise to bring the robust beauties into the artist’s lap. Such levity may also serve to counter a serious situation the artist and his fellow Parisians experienced: in January 1910, the year of the present work’s execution, when the Seine overflowed its banks, bringing quick and catastrophic flooding to Paris. … Water inundated several of the Louvre’s basements, threatening the stored artworks. It was only through the rapidly organized and heroic efforts of Parisians working to build sandbag barricades that further destruction to the museum was prevented — allowing Béroud, his fellow artists, and generations of visitors since to continue to enjoy its many treasures.

Alas, though estimated to bring $300,000-500,000, this amusingly surreal painting failed to make its reserve. The Recession, of course.

Hat tip to Marius Kaubrys.

Walter Russell Mead, in a typically witty and insightful essay, compares and contrasts the legacy of Massachusetts Bay and Harvard on this year’s two candidates.

When Wilsonians turn their gaze toward the United States, they become what I think of as the Bostonian school in domestic politics. Like the New England Puritans to whom they owe so much, today’s Bostonians believe that a strong state led by the righteous should use its power to make America a more moral and ethical country. This, I believe, is the tradition in American domestic politics that most profoundly shapes President Obama’s worldview; it inspired many of the abolitionists and prohibitionists who played such large roles in 19th century reform politics, and it continues to influence the country wherever the spirit of Old New England survives. (Not all domestic Bostonians are international Wilsonians, by the way; some believe that America should lead by example rather than by imposing its views on others.)

Bostonians over the years have changed their ideas about morality; few today would agree with Increase Mather and John Winthrop that the state should punish any deviation from Biblical morality as understood by 17th century puritan divines. But when it comes to punishing offenses against righteousness as defined by a congress of humanities professors, multiculturalist activists and foundation grants officers, the liberal morality police are ready to march — and to smite. Today’s neo-puritans would certainly agree that once morality has been re-defined in a suitably feminist, anti-racist, anti-homophobic, anti-tobacco and anti-obesity way, it is the clear duty of the Civil Magistrate to enforce the moral law—and that our governing constitutions and laws must be interpreted—by the godly who alone ought to be seated on the judicial tribunals—to give said magistrates all the power they require for their immense and unending task of moral regulation and uplift.

Read the whole thing.

This 0:31 second Romney ad is widely believed to the political ad that will be remembered as the decisive argument made in the course of the 2012 presidential election campaign.

2008, Room with painted mural from Palazzo Martelli, Florence (photo © Massimo Listri)

I came across a spectacular Daily Mail feature on the interior photography of Massimo Listri.

I had not previously heard of the remarkable work of Listri, but I was thoroughly impressed at both the technical quality and the aesthetic sensibility of this extraordinary artist’s work.

Listri’s photography of historic and aristocratic interiors has attracted extravagant, and entirely justified, praise.

“Loosing oneself in Massimo Listri’s images, strong oneiric webs entwine themselves in one’s thoughts. Mainly they are dreams, dreams which in any case, contrary to what happens normally when we realise to be dreaming, are inexpungeable from our minds forevermore…” — Cesare Cunaccia

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The central and frontal perspective of his photos involves the spectator in the silence of the rooms, in the magnificence of the constructions bringing to memory known spaces but ever visited in reality. Listri’s photographs, examples of technical perfection and formal rigor, testify his own personal aspiration to capture and to exalt the beauty, even where it doesn’t apparently seem to be present, and the desire to understand and to disclose the secrets of each human creation.

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What makes his work unique is how he has made interiors look so absolutely vivid, as if they had a secret life of their own that only he knows how to portray. Listri has the extraordinary ability to capture all the small details that make the difference and reveal all the stories that remain hidden behind the surface. When asked about his distinctive approach, he reveals: ”It is purely a question of sensibility. The secret is in the light which highlights the details. That’s why I definitely prefer to use natural light when possible”. Listri’s photos transmit an almost deafening silence, as if time had stopped and humans had suddenly disappeared and the only thing reminiscent of them are the interiors they’ve left behind, the remains of their lives and their passions, their art and their culture. –Apostolos Mitsios

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The Daily Mail feature seems to have been drawn from a tribute to Listri published in Yatzer last May.

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Apparently, it is possible to purchase copies of Listri’s photographs which are published in very small editions (of 4 or 5) by Maison d’Art/Piero Corsini Inc. in Monaco.

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Massimo Listri’s web-site.

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Past exhibitions.