Monthly Archives: August 2013

Check out this Harry Potter fashion line. Very sexy. Going to have to get some of this stuff.

Alternative Shakespeare book covers.

Mona Charen on Reagan, Obama and The Butler…

Buried in a New York Times story about the economy was this arresting statistic: Median family income for black Americans has declined a whopping 10.9 percent during the Obama administration..That’s not the only bad news for African Americans. The poverty rate for blacks was 25.8 percent in 2011. The black labor-force-participation rate, which rose throughout the 1980s and 1990s, has declined for the past decade and quite sharply under Obama to 61.4 percent. The black unemployment rate, according to Pew Research, stands at 13.4 percent. Among black, male high-school dropouts, PBS’s Paul Solman reports, the unemployment rate is a staggering 95 percent…The press resolutely ignores these figures, while the propaganda arm of the Democratic party in Hollywood serves up distorted history to distract and pacify the public. The latest entry appears to be The Butler, which misrepresents President Reagan (as I gather from those who’ve seen it) as, at best, insensitive to blacks, and at worst as racist. Eugene Allen, the actual White House butler on whom the film is supposedly based, kept signed photos of Ronald and Nancy Reagan in his living room (pictures of the other presidents he had served hung in the basement). According to a 2008 Washington Post profile, Allen served eight presidents for 34 years until his retirement. He did not, as the movie portrays, resign to protest Reagan’s policies on civil rights or South Africa. His wife happily reminisced to the Post about the time the couple were invited by the Reagans to attend a state dinner in honor of the West German chancellor. “Drank champagne that night,” Mrs. Allen recalled with pleasure. The film apparently depicts the invitation as tokenism. The filmmakers also insert a horrific childhood “memory” for Allen — his mother being raped and his father shot by a white landlord. Didn’t happen…Would it interest black moviegoers to know that under Ronald Reagan’s policies median African-American household incomes increased by 84 percent (compared with 68 percent for whites)? The poverty rate dropped during the 1980s from 14 percent down to 11.6 percent. The black-unemployment rate dropped by 9 percentage points. The number of black-owned businesses increased by 38 percent and receipts more than doubled. Obama’s economic record is dismal because he is inflexibly attached to the wrong ideas. Hollywood is of course free to worship at his tattered shrine. But to smear Reagan — a man who deeply loathed bigotry in any form and actually improved the lives of all Americans including blacks — in an attempt to prop up the drooping Obama standard is contemptible.

Italian scientists are planting vineyards with the aim of making wine using techniques from classical Rome described by Virgil.

What fresh hell is this, Slate? Parents should be able to send their kids to whatever school they want, you statist freak. Luckily, we have Sonny Bunch at the Free Beacon to do some expert trolling. Absolutely hilarious. “In conclusion, the next time you hail a cab, think about how terrible you are, how you’re destroying your city, and why you deserve to die in a fire.”

The one and only Ms. Camille Paglia with an epic Miley Cyrus takedown.

Most of the media backlash focused on Cyrus’ crass opportunism, which stole the show fromLady Gaga, normally no slouch in the foot-stamping look-at-me department. But the real scandal was how atrocious Cyrus’ performance was in artistic terms. She was clumsy, flat-footed and cringingly unsexy, an effect heightened by her manic grin. How could American pop have gotten this bad?…Pop is suffering from the same malady as the art world, which is stuck on the tired old rubric that shock automatically confers value. But those once powerful avant-garde gestures have lost their relevance in our diffuse and technology-saturated era, when there is no longer an ossified high-culture establishment to rebel against. On the contrary, the fine arts are alarmingly distant or marginal to most young people today…What was perhaps most embarrassing about Miley Cyrus’ dismal gig was its cutesy toys — a giant teddy bear from which she popped to cavort with a dance troupe in fuzzy bear drag. Intended to satirize her Disney past, it signaled instead the childishness of Cyrus’ notion of sexuality, which has become simply a cartoonish gimmick to disguise a lack of professional focus. Sex isn’t just exposed flesh and crude gestures. The greatest performers, like Madonna in a canonical video such as “Vogue,” know how to use suggestion and mystery to project the magic of sexual allure. Miley, go back to school!

What a goddamn clusterfuck our Syria policy is right now. After practically declaring war all week, the State Department has now admitted that they have no hard evidence that the chemical attack was carried out by Assad. The Administration has also been leaking like a sieve all week, which has created this fresh hell. What’s Mr. “Rogue IRS Agents in Cincinnati” going to say when Assad claims he doesn’t have control over rogue people in his government? That it’s unbelievable? Jesus god, I wouldn’t count on these people to know how to sit on the toilet the right way, much less resolve an international crisis. And the hypocrisy of the Left this week has been a sight. “Assad is doing the same things Saddam Hussein did, but it’s different, because Bush!” The same people who insisted on video evidence of Saddam Hussein personally putting sarin gas into missiles are now satisfied with third-hand rumors in Syria. Obama says we should act because, if unchecked, Syria’s chemical weapons could be used against America. I’m old enough to remember when that was crazy talk! Congressional approval for bombing another country? What’s that? The Constitution? Meh. The UN and NATO? Never heard of them. I felt a great disturbance in the Force yesterday when The New York Times published an op-ed with the headline, “Bomb Syria, Even If It Is Illegal.” Had that been published during the Bush years, the Left would have had a mass hemorrhage. There’s silence from the anti-war crowd, as well. Ironically, much of the anti-war caution is coming from Republicans, who have learned some lessons over the years and who also know this Administration doesn’t know its ass from a hole in the ground when it comes to foreign policy. I’m on Team Ramesh Ponnuru on this one. We blew it. We should have intervened two years ago to get rid of Assad, weaken Iran and secure those chemical weapons. The only options now are to do nothing, which is probably the best idea, or to bomb hard and kill Assad. But then what happens to the chemical weapons? Al-Qaeda grabs them? There’s the third option, the dumbest option, which, naturally, Obama seems to be leaning toward. That is bombing just enough to “send a message” and “save face,” or as one U.S. official put it, “just muscular enough not to get mocked.” Gee, that’s great strategic wisdom. If we do that, we’ll end up just killing civilians and possibly endangering Israel and ourselves. Meanwhile, the UN is being helpful as always, with the Secretary General imploring everyone as recently as yesterday to just “give peace a chance.” WHAT PLANET ARE YOU LIVING ON?

Meanwhile, Andrew McCarthy explains why the Founding Fathers might have been ok with impeaching such a lawless president. By the way, I’m not endorsing impeachment, but this article is a good thought-provoker on what “high crimes and misdemeanors” actually means, so I’ll quote it at length.

Impeachment is not a legal matter; it is a political remedy. But law is how the Left strangles politics. Alexis de Tocqueville foresaw the enervation of democratic society at the hands of the Left’s vast, hyper-regulatory administrative state. In parallel, the political vitality of a once self-determining culture is suffocated by the ubiquity of the litigator’s trick bag…The Framers did not believe free people needed lawyers to figure out how to govern themselves. The standard they gave us for removal from high public office is so simple that obstetricians and even wind-bags should have no trouble grasping it…The Framers settled on “high crimes and misdemeanors,” a standard that had been used by the British parliament for centuries. The concept is not rooted in statutory offenses fit for criminal court proceedings. Instead, it involves damage done to the public order by persons in whom great public trust has been reposed. In Federalist No. 65, Hamilton described impeachable offenses as those

which proceed from the misconduct of public men, or in other words from the abuse or violation of some public trust. They are of a nature which may with peculiar propriety be denominatedpolitical, as they relate chiefly to injuries done immediately to the society itself.

A useful article published by the Constitutional Rights Foundation is more concrete about the Framers’ understanding:

Officials accused of “high crimes and misdemeanors” were accused of offenses as varied as misappropriating government funds, appointing unfit subordinates, not prosecuting cases, not spending money allocated by Parliament, promoting themselves ahead of more deserving candidates, threatening a grand jury, disobeying an order from Parliament, arresting a man to keep him from running for Parliament, losing a ship by neglecting to moor it, helping “suppress petitions to the King to call a Parliament,” granting warrants without cause, and bribery. Some of these charges were crimes. Others were not. The one common denominator in all these accusations was that the official had somehow abused the power of his office and was unfit to serve.

Jon Roland of the Constitution Society emphasizes the political aspect of impeachment that distinguishes it from technical legal procedures. It was immaterial, he explains, whether the cited offenses “were prohibited by statutes”; what mattered was “the obligations of the offender. . . . The obligations of a person holding a high position meant that some actions, or inactions, could be punishable if he did them, even though they would not be if done by an ordinary person.” In that sense, a president is like a soldier, whose duties make him punishable for actions that would not be offenses if committed by a civilian: such things as abuse of authority, dereliction of duty, moral turpitude, conduct unbecoming, and the violation of an oath.  President Obama, of course, has sworn to uphold the Constitution and is bound to “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed” (Art. II, Sec. 3). In stark contrast, he has usurped the lawmaking power of Congress by unilaterally amending some statutes and expressly refusing to enforce others — not because they are arguably unconstitutional but because he disagrees with them on policy grounds. For years, he has ignored the law requiring the executive branch to propose Medicare reforms when the program’s trustees issue a warning about inadequate funding. He has made recess appointments when Congress was not in recess. He has flouted judicial rulings, including those invalidating the work of illegally appointed officials. His Justice Department openly and notoriously flouts the Constitution by enforcing the civil-rights laws in a racially discriminatory manner. His administration has knowingly transferred firearms to murderous Mexican criminal enterprises, predictably resulting in the killing of at least one federal Border Patrol officer. He has sued sovereign states in order to extort them into acceptance of his gutting of immigration and voter-identification laws. After willfully empowering jihadists in Libya by instigating an unprovoked, unauthorized war against a regime the United States regarded as an ally and was funding, the president and his State Department were shockingly derelict in failing to protect American personnel they recklessly kept stationed in Benghazi despite repeated attacks. When American installations there were predictably besieged yet again by jihadists on the eleventh anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, the commander-in-chief compounded his default by abandoning Americans who were under lethal attack, failing to take action to attempt to save them. As a result of this serial malfeasance, four American officials, including the United States ambassador to Libya, were killed — a scandal the administration has exacerbated by stonewalling congressional investigations; attempting to defraud the public into believing an obscure anti-Muslim video provoked the siege; and shamefully jailing the video producer in a transparent effort to prop up the fraud and in violation of the producer’s constitutional rights. The president, moreover, oversees an administration that has turned the IRS loose to harass his political opponents, frustrating their capacity to organize prior to the 2012 election. And Obama has stood behind his attorney general despite the latter’s citation for contempt of Congress and multiple episodes of false congressional testimony — most recently in connection with the investigation of journalists covering the administration. With a record like this, George W. Bush would long ago have been impeached and removed…The Framers intended impeachment as the ultimate accountability. Without at least the credible threat of it, there is no realistic checking of a president who seems increasingly disposed to abuse his awesome powers, in fulfillment of a promise to “fundamentally transform” the United States of America. Maybe we are already transformed. The Framers did not see impeachment as outlandish; it was a realistic response to an imperious executive’s seeking to upend our constitutional order — the specter of which gripped the constitutional convention with fear. In today’s America, there is more political peril in engaging the question of impeachment than in doing the things that make the question relevant.

In South Africa, a deadly new drug is being made with HIV medication.

Charles C.W. Cooke addresses the absurd need the Left has to label everything racist.

Yesterday we approached peak “racist,” moving one step closer to that welcome point at which the frivolous, often downright ludicrous, accusations of prejudice that invariably punctuate our national discussions will begin to deliver diminishing returns and an exhausted American public will stamp its collective feet and shout, “Enough!” The media’s interminable focus on the gyrating non-entity that is Miley Cyrus was dippy enough before the ugly legion of the professionally offended arrived to make it somehow worse. Afterwards it was unendurable, bringing to mind that refrain of tired conservatives everywhere: “Can a society this stupid really survive?” Chief among the purveyors of critical inanity was The Nation’s Aura Bogado, a woman who is so obsessed with race and sex that her takeaway from the Manning trial last week was that “Bradley Manning was found guilty of wanting to make the world a better place for women of color like me” and claiming in an open letter that Manning’s statement had improved upon the Declaration of Independence. Reacting in a similar vein to the MTV Video Music Awards, Bogado ranged from the incomprehensible assertion that “White is the new Miley” to the self-parodic confession that “Every time I see ‪@MileyCyrus slap that black woman’s butt, I think about the way that enslaved blacks were whipped for white entertainment.” If this is true, I would suggest Bogado seek professional help. During her act, Cyrus wore a skin-colored latex bikini, ran a foam finger down another performer’s crotch, and “twerked” (a dance move in which one shakes and twists ones hips in a sexual fashion). Tasteful or not, none of these things has anything to do with race — let alone with slavery. It takes a particularly depraved mind to link a glorified pop concert to the transportation and subjugation of an entire class of people. It is reasonable to conclude that those that are capable of so doing lack even the most basic political judgment…New York Magazine‘s Jody Rosen went on to observe, apparently without irony, that “a doctoral dissertation could (and will) be written on the racial, class, and gender dynamics of Cyrus’s shtick.” But of course it will. Graduate liberal-arts schools, the only places in the country in which such preposterous nonsense can make it far enough past the hysterical laughter to gain any respect, are primarily devoted to teaching students to discover things that are not there. This is not just an academic instinct, but a financial one too. To ensure the future of the college, the faculty must ensure that America’s debt-laden and probably unemployable perpetual students feel as if they have gained something concrete from their efforts, and, in the modern era, this something is the ability to see in a dimension that nobody else can. (This is a skill that is apparently better suited to inviting universal mockery on the Internet than to ensuring success in the job market.)

Zimbabwe is planning to build a “Disneyland in Africa.” Lucifer help us all.

Apparently, no one wants to be a drone pilot. From PopSci…

The Air Force can’t get enough people to volunteer for the training…Drones are usually chosen for jobs that are “dirty, dangerous, or dull”—with dull being the key word here. Some surveillance drones require round-the-clock shifts, and the very stressful work is so time intensive that drone pilots often cannot take advantage of additional training and education, which in turn dampens their prospects for career advancement, according to the study. Burnout also seems to be a major concern, as drone pilots quit at three times the rate of manned aircraft pilots…One way to increase the number of drone pilots would be for the Air Force to alter its requirements for pilots. The Air Force only allows commissioned officers to fly drones, and commissioned officers must have a bachelor’s degree in addition to technical training. By contrast, the Army allows warrant officers, who only need a high school diploma or GED, to fly both unmanned aircraft and helicopters. Or, it just might be that actually flying through the air will always be more awesome that piloting an aircraft from the ground.

To the English major, life is sweeter, more tragic, more intense, says Mark Edmundson.

The English major reads because, as rich as the one life he has may be, one life is not enough. He reads not to see the world through the eyes of other people but effectively to become other people. What is it like to be John Milton, Jane Austen, Chinua Achebe? What is it like to be them at their best, at the top of their games? English majors want the joy of seeing the world through the eyes of people who—let us admit it—are more sensitive, more articulate, shrewder, sharper, more alive than they themselves are. The experience of merging minds and hearts with Proust or James or Austen makes you see that there is more to the world than you had ever imagined. You see that life is bigger, sweeter, more tragic and intense—more alive with meaning than you had thought…The English major believes in talk and writing and knows that any worthwhile event in life requires commentary and analysis in giant proportion. She believes that the uncommented-on life is not worth living…The English major wants to use what he knows about language and what he’s learning from books as a way to confront the hardest of questions. He uses these things to try to figure out how to live. His life is an open-ended work in progress, and it’s never quite done, at least until he is. For to the English major, the questions of life are never closed. There’s always another book to read; there’s always another perspective to add…Love for language, hunger for life, openness and a quest for truth: Those are the qualities of my English major in the ideal form. But of course now we’re talking about more than a mere academic major. We’re talking about a way of life. We’re talking about a way of living that places inquiry into how to live in the world—what to be, how to act, how to move through time—at its center. What we’re talking about is a path to becoming a human being, or at least a better sort of human being than one was at the start. An English major? To me an English major is someone who has decided, against all kinds of pious, prudent advice and all kinds of fears and resistances, to major, quite simply, in becoming a person.

Elliot Abrams absolutely nails it in his piece, Obama’s “citizen of the world” presidency.

This global citizenship we all share would, at first glance, seem to reflect a genuine concern with how average men and women and families are living around the world. Such a concern ought to lead to two sets of policies: one to help them overcome political oppression, and one to help them meet the daily challenges of poverty and disease. And here is the second innovative aspect of Obama’s foreign policy: the startling absence of concern on either front. On the human-rights side, administration policy has been marked by indifference. When the people of Iran flooded the streets to protest the theft of their presidential election in June 2009, President Obama was silent for 11 days. This was an early sign that “engagement” was to be with regimes and rulers, not populations—not even, as it turned out, with Muslim populations, and not even with Muslim populations rising up in protest…So does “global citizenship” instead mean people-to-people assistance, avoiding politics and military action to aid the millions facing poverty and disease? Such an approach might well justify engagement with certain regimes we would otherwise seek to isolate, and in any event it would show deep solidarity with fellow human beings whatever their religion, nationality, or politics. But the Obama administration has shown no interest in such an approach. Its maligned predecessor developed vast programs to stop the spread of malaria and AIDS. PEPFAR (President’s Emergency Plan For AIDS Relief) had spent $18 billion by the time George W. Bush left office, and even in the view of Bush skeptics has saved millions of lives. By contrast, Obama largely ignored Africa during this first term, leading to news stories with terms like “unmistakable sense of disappointment,” “widespread cynicism on the continent,” and “positively neglectful.” If “global citizenship” requires assisting people who are poor or sick, the key post for advancing it in Africa is that of assistant administrator for Africa at the Agency for International Development. Obama left that post vacant for more than three years. Similarly, the post of ambassador-at-large for international religious freedom was vacant for half of the president’s first term—another indication of his interests and priorities. The pattern, then, is one of considerable indifference to the fate of the poor, the persecuted, and the oppressed. They are allocated their fair share of rhetoric, but their plight does not much impinge on policy. Now, such an approach can theoretically be defended—as a return to realpolitik after the excesses of the Bush administration’s “freedom agenda” and in the face of America’s economic and fiscal crisis. Hardhearted, perhaps, but realistic: This is the age of limits. Such would be the defense. The problem is that a realpolitik policy would build on American alliances to maintain and magnify American power. It might downplay ideological or ethical matters and marginalize human rights (wrongly, in my view), but it would do so in an effort to secure and advance the American national interest. Is that the Obama approach?…Practitioners of realpolitik would be seeking to strengthen existing alliances, as the first Bush administration’s foreign-policy team did at the close of the Cold War. That has not been the Obama way. In 2009, the administration left allies in the Czech Republic and Poland high and dry by canceling a ballistic missile defense site in Eastern Europe in an effort to curry favor with Russia. Lech Walesa, the great anti-Communist Polish leader, and others criticized the policy reversal and worried about American efforts to tilt toward Moscow rather than Warsaw and Prague. And those East European politicians who had run risks to defend the American proposal on missile defense in 2007 and 2008 learned a painful lesson about sticking their necks out for Washington. But closer allies have faced the same lack of respect as well. The British learned that the bust of Winston Churchill was removed from the Oval Office as soon as Obama arrived. Then they learned what the new team thought of them and of the so-called special relationship. During the visit of Prime Minister Gordon Brown in 2009, a State Department official notoriously said: “There’s nothing special about Britain. You’re just the same as the other 190 countries in the world. You shouldn’t expect special treatment.”…So the Obama administration is pursuing neither an idealistic foreign policy based on altruistic considerations of “world citizenship,” nor a realpolitik policy designed to maximize American power and influence in an age of limits through careful assertions of power and the strengthening and utilization of alliances. What foreign policy is it pursuing, then?…For Obama, national power is an improper goal. In 2013, he returned to Berlin and this time said about people striving for freedom—he named Israelis, Palestinians, Burmese, and Afghans—that “they too, in their own way, are citizens of Berlin.” As Matthew Continetti wrote in the Washington Free Beacon: “If everyone is a citizen of Berlin, then the concept of ‘citizen,’ which implies rootedness, partiality, particularity, has no meaning. If we are citizens of everywhere, we are also citizens of nowhere.” Just as the British were told they were not special, so we Americans must learn that we are not special, either—except perhaps that we are more dangerous because we are more powerful. Thus we require more strenuous efforts from our leaders to hold us back, as Obama is doing. American leadership is a dangerous narcotic, one that can make us feel good for a while but will in the end bring tragedy to us and to many others around the world. Obama’s task is to explain this to us and, using the powers of office, keep us away from this drug for eight years and diminish our capacity to use it when he is gone…And while this is happening, from Washington come not cries of alarm but the self-satisfaction of an administration that believes we are moving closer each year to our proper place in the “international community.” Who does not feel a growing sense of unease, then, and who does not feel rising alarm? The answer may be the president who is the author of these policies, for they are doing just what they were meant to do. If not reversed, they will produce an America that is a “citizen of the world” like all the others, shorn of the ability to lead and believing that leadership means little more than hubris and risk. For Barack Obama, this will mean his foreign-policy ideas have won the day.

Paris hotels are attempting to lure people via literary themes.

Change in Iran will come via the bravery and creativity of its young women. (By the way, how beautiful are Iranian women? It’s ridiculous.)

Shakespeare gets funky and fresh during the summer.

Zarqawism lives on even after Zarqawi is dead: Iraq’s al-Qaeda nightmare returns.

Two years later, the head of NASA still tears up when he talks about ending the shuttle program.

“The gut-wrenching, really hard work of operating a shuttle, preparing it for each flight, was done by the massive contractor workforce, and that was United Space Alliance (USA). When we finished the last flight, Atlantis was the cleanest vehicle we ever had. They were very proud of that. They wanted to make sure that, if somebody changed their mind, Atlantis would be able to turn around and go fly again. You had no idea—no idea—of the loyalty of the workforce. Those were contractors, and they worked right until the very last day as if they were getting ready to fly again. I remember running on the beach down at the Cape, where my wife and I had gone down for STS-135 [the final mission of the shuttle program]. You always run into people. I was up one morning running on the beach, and I passed this young couple. They were middle aged, and they stopped me and they said, ‘Are you Charlie Bolden?’ And I said, ‘Yeah.’ They said, ‘We work for USA.’ And I figured, oh my gosh. These guys are going to give me some sob story and they’re going to make me really feel bad. But they said, ‘We just want to let you know, we are as proud as we can be. We voluntarily decided that we’d take a buyout, because we feel there are people who have not had the experience we had. We’ve done all we can do. We just want to thank you for having had the opportunity.’ And I, right there on the beach, I kind of just collapsed. They are just incredible people. And not many people in government, except maybe military, have an opportunity to be around people like that—who are that dedicated, that motivated and that flexible to go with programs that we evolve because the Congress or the White House or somebody else says let’s go do that. So I’m a blessed person to have an opportunity to be around them and work with them.”

Your feel-good story of the day…

After a year and a half behind barbed wire as a prisoner in World War II, 2nd Lt. David C. Cox had just about reached his breaking point. Deliveries of Red Cross parcels to Stalag VII-A had all but ceased, and the U.S. Army bomber co-pilot and his fellow POWs were subsisting on scanty rations of bug-infested soup and bread. Outside the wire, Adolf Hitler’s forces showed no signs of giving up. Cold and hungry, the North Carolinian made a difficult decision. He slipped the gold aviator’s ring — a gift from his parents — off his finger and passed it through a fence to an Italian POW, who handed back a couple of chocolate bars. He would never again see the ring. But it did not disappear. Last week, about a dozen family members and friends gathered in the living room of David C. Cox Jr.’s Raleigh home and watched as he slit open a small yellow parcel from Germany. The 67-year-old son dug through the crinkly packing material and carefully removed a little plastic box. “And here it is,” he said with a long sigh as he pulled out the ring. “Oh, my goodness. … I never thought it would ever happen. I thought it was gone. We all thought it was gone.”…The story of how the ring made it back to the Cox family is a testament to a former enemy’s generosity, the reach of the Internet and the healing power of time…

Click the link to read the whole story…and have a box of tissues next to you.

Don’t have time to make coffee before work? Problem solved with “Handpresso,” a small, car-based espresso machine, so you can make coffee during your commute!

Check out the surreal architecture that was dreamed up, but never built, in the great city of Chicago.

Not a single student in Liberia passed this year’s university admission exam.

Here’s a map of the 35 places in Syria most likely to get hit with a U.S. cruise missile.