SCOTT OTT ON INDEPENDENCE DAY: It’s The “Independence” Stupid.
Related: Michael Walsh: Celebrating Liberty As It Slips AWay.
Archive for 2013
July 4, 2013
GOOD QUESTION: The Spy Who Bored Me: Why would anyone want to surveille the European Commission?
The real mystery (assuming the allegations are true) is what sort of intel did America’s spies think they could glean from snooping on the European Union?
Could it have been the early word on the European Commission’s directive this May (soon rescinded) mandating that olive oil be served only in nonrefillable bottles with tamper-proof caps and labels written in “clear and indelible lettering”? Or maybe it was the research notes of the three-year investigation leading to Brussels’s 2011 decision to forbid bottled-water producers from claiming that water prevents dehydration—on the basis that the claim lacked scientific evidence?
Far more interesting is the growing dismay at President Obama among his former idolators in Europe. The folks who gave him the Nobel Peace Prize before he’d brokered any peace are now disillusioned that he uses drones against terrorists, hasn’t closed Guantanamo, and hasn’t repudiated every Bush-Cheney security policy. And Europeans keep saying Americans are naive about the world.
Oops.
INDEPENDENCE DAY THOUGHTS FROM CALVIN COOLIDGE.
About the Declaration there is a finality that is exceedingly restful. It is often asserted that the world has made a great deal of progress since 1776, that we have had new thoughts and new experiences which have given us a great advance over the people of that day, and that we may therefore very well discard their conclusions for something more modern. But that reasoning can not be applied to this great charter. If all men are created equal, that is final. If they are endowed with inalienable rights, that is final. If governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, that is final. No advance, no progress can be made beyond these propositions. If anyone wishes to deny their truth or their soundness, the only direction in which he can proceed historically is not forward, but backward toward the time when there was no equality, no rights of the individual, no rule of the people. Those who wish to proceed in that direction can not lay claim to progress. They are reactionary. Their ideas are not more modern, but more ancient, than those of the Revolutionary fathers.
Yes, the progressives preach regress.
DEALS GALORE AT THE Amazon Fourth of July Sale.
FLASHBACK: I talk to Andrew Breitbart in 2010.
THIS IS LOOKING LESS RELEVANT AS NEW OIL DISCOVERIES APPEAR: Honda and General Motors announce future collaboration on hydrogen and fuel-cell technology.
I test-drove one of the GM fuel-cell cars a while back.
VIDEO: The late Sara Jordan at Market Square Mall 1996. With my brother Jonathan on guitar (he’s the tallest), top Knoxville personal injury lawyer Doug Weinstein on drums, and Billy Valentine (channeling Jimi and Stevie Ray) and Robert Higginbotham also on guitar. Plus Jeff Weinstein on bass.
BILL WHITTLE: Afterburner: Dependence Day.
MOTOROLA IS LISTENING: “In June of 2013, I made an interesting discovery about the Android phone (a Motorola Droid X2) which I was using at the time: it was silently sending a considerable amount of sensitive information to Motorola, and to compound the problem, a great deal of it was over an unencrypted HTTP channel.”
NEWS YOU CAN USE: Why It Feels Like Your Phone Is Vibrating In Your Pocket When It Isn’t.
MICHAEL BARONE REVIEWS Jim Bennett & Michael Lotus’s America 3.0.
FASTER, PLEASE: A Rudimentary Liver Is Grown from Stem Cells. Stephen Green, take note.
TEST-DRIVING the 2014 Audi R8. I’d like one of these. Not enough to make up for the price, but. . . .
THOUGHTS ON reading the Declaration of Independence today.
HAPPY INDEPENDENCE DAY: This Bud’s For You!
ROGER KIMBALL: July 4, 2013: Thinking about the Summer of 1776.
IN THE MAIL: From Radley Balko, Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America’s Police Forces.
SALENA ZITO: Where Independence Began.
SPENGLER: The Zombie Apocalypse — Ours and Theirs. “Sometime in 2011 the total number of film plots with the keyword ‘zombie’ passed the number of film plots with the keyword ‘cowboy,’ according to the Internet Movie Database. One might argue that the zombie has become the great American archetype of the postmodern era, as the cowboy was the American archetype a century ago. With the release of Brad Pitt’s $200 million zombie epic World War Z, what used to be the stuff of low-budget shockers has entered the American cultural mainstream. Therein lies a lesson.”
HOW’S THAT SMART DIPLOMACY STUFF WORKIN’ OUT FOR YA? (CONT’D):
RUSH LIMBAUGH INTERVIEWS JAMES O’KEEFE. (VIDEO).
THE OPPRESSED MASSES RISE UP (CONT’D): Former MSNBC and ‘Saturday Night Live’ Interns Target NBCUniversal in Lawsuit: The class action seeks unpaid wages for hundreds of interns who worked at the company in the past three years. The funny thing is, the people they’re suing probably have a “Living Wage” bumper sticker on the back of their Tesla.