#OCCUPYFAIL: Occupy San Diego Protester Asks For Moment Of Silence For White House Shooter. I’m guessing that there’d be more attention if a Tea Party group had done something similar.
Archive for 2011
November 17, 2011
MICHAEL YON: Pocket Spies.
WALTER RUSSELL MEAD: The Culture War Over Europe’s Money. “The European crisis repeats the same pattern endlessly. Bad news sinks markets, ultimately accelerating into a panicky wave of liquidation. European leaders convene, deliberate and emerge with what they say is a ‘fix.’ Markets leap in joy, until investors gradually read the small print and discover that the fix is a fudge and the core problems remain. Then the bad news starts up again and the markets sink. Repeat. Endlessly. That seems to be Europe’s core strategy for coping with the greatest challenge since World War II. This week we see the cycle at work again.”
AT AMAZON, a sale on CRKT knives.
CATHY YOUNG: The Rise Of Ayn Rand On Campus. “The question of Ayn Rand in academe has been made particularly relevant by the recent spike in her popularity. After the financial collapse of 2008, the Wall Street bailout, and the start of the Obama presidency—amidst widespread talk of the failure of markets and the inevitable rise of European-style social welfarism—there has been a marked resurgence of interest in Rand, an unabashed champion of capitalism and foe of big government. Sales of Atlas Shrugged, Rand’s 1955 mega-bestseller depicting a future America in the grip of economic collapse and socialist paralysis, soared in early 2009.”
#OCCUPYFAIL: CLASS DIVISIONS at Occupy Wall Street. “Congrats to the TDS writing staff for showing restraint and not making an overt ‘Animal Farm’ reference at the sight of the revolutionary vanguard plotting strategy inside the Deutsche Bank lobby. The temptation must have been enormous. My favorite scene: The chat with the guy who draws a sharp distinction between private property and personal property. In that genius insight lies the seed for a new economic order.”
SHOULD MURDERERS HAVE THE RIGHT to vote, and to be lawyers?
FINALLY: A raincoat that’s also an umbrella.
AT AMAZON, a sale on baking goods and cooking supplies.
HOW TO PLAN AHEAD for a second career.
SHOULD WE BE BULLISH ON SOLAR POWER? Probably not.
MICKEY KAUS: LET THE BROCCOLI ROT.
I’d just as soon get rid of the Commerce Clause and have a simple constitutional principle: “The Federal government can do anything a state government can do, and if there’s a conflict the Federal rule wins.” It would shorten legal textbooks considerably. Unfortunately, it’s not what the document at issue says.
Nevertheless, in the course of arguing for the constitutionality of Obamacare’s “individual mandate,” Einer Elhauge pretty much rules out the possibility that limiting the federal government to the regulation of “commerce … among the several states” inhibits the feds from doing anything. To counter the charge that then Washington could make you buy broccoli, Elhauge argues … um, Washington could make you buy broccoli! But don’t worry, there are other limitations . . . Well, OK then! As long as we can just leave it rotting in the fridge. … But it’s a little suspicious–-and surely not a selling point–-that under Elhauge’s argument the only limits on government would be the rights — like “bodily integrity” and privacy — that liberal lawyers have dreamed up but not the limit — i.e. whether or not something is “interstate commerce” – the Founders dreamed up.
Well, they were just dead white men.
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: U.S.C. Suspends Launch Of Its Graduate Tax Program. “The University of Southern California Gould School of Law has suspended the launch of its graduate tax program because of declining job prospects for tax LL.M. graduates in the Los Angeles area.” Huh. You’d think tax law would be a growth area under this Administration . . . .
TEST-DRIVING THE NEW 2012 Honda CR-V.
UPDATE: Link was bad before. Fixed now. Sorry!
BEAUTY IS IN the eye of the algorithm. “New technology from Xerox can sort photos not just by their content but also according to their aesthetic qualities, such as which portraits are close-in and well-lit, or which wildlife shots are least cluttered.”
SELENOGRAPHY: LRO camera team releases high resolution global topographic map of moon. “Although the moon is our closest neighbor, knowledge of its morphology is still limited. Due to instrumental limitations of previous missions, a global map of the moon’s topography at high resolution has not existed until now. With the LRO Wide Angle Camera and the Lunar Orbiter Laser Altimeter (LOLA) instrument, scientists can now accurately portray the shape of the entire moon at high resolution.”
THE WAR AGAINST the Mullahs.
THE WORLD’S MOST incredible wedding photo? It is kinda post-apocalyptic.
WARNING: It’s pretty detailed and substantive. The Tea Party budget reform proposal.
BILL MAHER’S awkward rape-joke discussion.
Plus, from the comments: “The thing that bugs me the most about Bill Maher [is] all that ‘Politically Incorrect’ BS, when in reality he has never in his life uttered a word that wasn’t calculated to get applause from the audience in front him. He’s a coward pretending to heroism.”
THE BANKER’S PRESIDENT: “Who would have thought Obama would turn out to be as wholly owned as John McCain?” Well, anyone who was paying attention.