We are heading out to the Del Mar fairgrounds this year. America is in concert there tonight – along with the Marine Corps Band and fireworks.
Search
Archive Calendar
| M | T | W | T | F | S | S |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 2 | 3 | ||||
| 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 |
| 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 |
| 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 |
| 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 | |
Archives
Categories
- A Government That Can Force You to Buy Health Insurance Can Make You Do Anything (3)
- a protein wisdom philosophy primer (3)
- academics (25)
- armadillo (8)
- Friday Fiction 100 Word Challenge (51)
- from the protein wisdom conceptual series (136)
- identity politics (33)
- If Republicans Win the Senate in 2014 (1)
- in which celebraties comment on current events (67)
- language / intentionalism (88)
- legal (6)
- My brief conversations with inanimate objects (130)
- NSA / FISA (46)
- One Term to Serve, the 2012 Revival (6)
- Overheard in a Fallujah bunker (27)
- Poems from 196x, Revised by the Ghost of Richard Brauti (27)
- protein wisdom's DNC coverage (30)
- protein wisdom's RNC coverage (29)
- protein wisdom: the movie Lists (20)
- Provocateurism (16)
- real-time empirical observations (51)
- red pills found behind the sofa cushions (42)
- Scenes from my driveway (61)
- Talking back to 80s music (41)
- The Martha Stewart Chronicles (58)
- The protein wisdom interviews (10)
- The protein wisdom original poems (142)
- Uncategorized (20,046)
- Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance, abridged (34)
Recent Comments
- In The Mailbox: 02.28.23 (Afternoon Edition) : The Other McCain on Hey, longtime pw readers…
- In The Mailbox: 12.23.22 : The Other McCain on Patrick J. Carroll truly IS a sad, embittered psychopath
- Danger on Patrick J. Carroll might be a psychopath
- Danger on Patrick J. Carroll might be a psychopath
- In The Mailbox: 07.18.22 : The Other McCain on Patrick J. Carroll might be a psychopath
We’re accustomed to wish happiness to our fellows on Independence Day — have done since our birth and became sensible of the intention of those good wishes, with recognition of our blessings lived and hopes for blessings to come.
But truly, today?
Have a Rueful Independence Day friends, have some sorrow in the face of the pitiful state to which the meaning of that Independence has fallen. Doesn’t mean we should quit hoping — just that our hopes oughtn’t be veiled in ignorance or disregard of the mighty barriers we have yet to overcome. Throwing down those barriers is overcoming ignorance, both our own, and with our help, the ignorance of our fellow citizens.
Still, ’twas a great day in its time, as our memories can attest.
We will spend today as we have the last three days: working in a vacant house with no air conditioning, readying it for workmen who will prepare it for sale.
Then tonight we’ll sit in the comfort of our family room and watch concerts and fireworks on TV after a dinner of burgers and a dessert of watermelon.
And tomorrow we will be back at that other house working in the heat.
Independence means you have to earn what you enjoy.
As for me, yes, truly today.
Because tuba today.
For most Americans today, they are out celebrating being in dependence, rather than independence.
Soon.
Charles Ives, [A Symphony: New England Holidays 1897-1913], mvt. 3, The Fourth of July
or perhaps better yet, for the conveyance of a more thoroughgoing and wistful rue: Symphony no. 2, 1897-1901
– Tough to beat the Boston Pops 4th celebration show.
– I’ll be dragging junior son and no.2 daughter to the fair Dar. Promises to be a bit on the toasty side with all those fair goers packed in elbow to elbow, but hey the foodage is always worth it.
– …and fiddles and fiddles.
-#becauseinutopianothingiswrongandneverneedsfixing
America is an idea, one which the progressive left has its own ideas about.
A
horsepunctuation mark, ahorsepunctuation mark! MyKingdomRepublic for ahorsepunctuation mark!What merde who’ll sell, what trash who’d buy.
i got your patriotism right here
in my pants
– Feets, I hate to break it to you, but that’s a dead mouse.
oh sweet jesus
worst. independence day. ever.
lolmerica lolmerica
God chortles so to see
this dead broke joke
on food stamps choked
bereft of dignity
We’re still independent of the British. They ain’t reconquered us since.
So the holiday stands.
The supposed punctuation mistake in the Declaration, reminds me of the hubris of Jefferson in rewriting the Bible to “correct” it.
– Let me know Leigh when we get to the part where we smite down the pagan Progressives with the jaw bone of an ass.
– Ok, off to the fair. I’m a gonna score me one of those Aronco Vegimatic Popeal ShamWow pocket honey’s or sumpin. If I bump into Darleen in the Bing Crosby building I’ll let you know if she was wearing Red, White, and Blue.
Win something at the games! The prizes are all crappy, but it’s tradition.
The supposed punctuation mistake in the Declaration, reminds me of the hubris of Jefferson in rewriting the Bible to “correct” it.
This is purest BS… whether or not there is a period, a comma, a semicolon or a musical notation, the meaning remains the same. “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,….”
Jefferson meant to provide a few obvious examples: “that among these are…” The clear meaning is the same as the modern legalese “including but not limited to”, and it matter not how the listed examples end, because the next clause begins with a dash and a capital letter, intending to show a beginning of a new sentence and a thought: “That to secure these rights…”, etc.
But by all means, let’s do everything we can to limit the rights of the individual and empower the government.
Grammatically the period doesn’t belong there anyway; I fail to see how its presence or absence changes the meaning in any way.
After all, governments that don’t secure “certain unalienable rights” always degenerate to tyranny and must be overthrown — as Jefferson and his contemporaries went on to demonstrate.
rip
Mellon Heir, Newspaper Publisher Richard Mellon Scaife Dies at 82
http://i.imgur.com/S0znyH4.jpg
It doesn’t change a thing. It’s some PoMo professor’s take on turning Jefferson into a socialist.
Ole Tom was a lot of things, but a socialist wasn’t one of them.
Independence Day 2014
Thoughts from myself and various Friends In The Ether on this, the 238th Anniversary of American Independence. -Today is also the Anniversary of the deaths of the two main authors of the Declaration: Thomas Jefferson and John Adams. From Wikipedia: On…
A buddy of mine and I celebrated the 4th by conducting penetration tests on computer hard drives with various calibers of weapons.
A hollowpoint .308 makes quite the exit hole on the back side of the third hard drive of a 3 hard drive stack.
45 acp and .50 Desert Eagle do an excellent job of penetrating hard drives, but nothing like .308. Although, one shot from a 30.06 did make a large chunk of a hard drive travel an impressive distance straight up.
After many tests, we determined .308 was the superior round for hard drive destruction.
king baracky starts new revolution
Chicago Rejects Illegal Aliens – Senator Dick Durbin (D) and Congressman Randy Hultgren (R) Block Facility Use…
Ole Tom was a lot of things, but a socialist wasn’t one of them.
True, but somehow it is not difficult to conceive that he simply had not had enough time to have invented it yet. Displace his birth to 25-30 years later than the fact, and there isn’t much doubt in my mind he would have been straight to the heart of the thing. For he was a slave-owner, after all, besides being endlessly and incorrigibly inventive.
Breaking: Citizen Militia Units From California & Texas Are Joining Together to Defend US Border
He was a ginger, too. Washington was the exception to that rule.
MAP: Where feds are trying to relocate illegal border surgers
I have hope. At a get together tonight all sorts of people I’d never suspect came out on the side of constitutional conservatism. I think the under the radar phase is departing.
I believe it is Red. People I know who are apolitical are speaking up, as well.
July 2, 1787. A portentous day. Loggerheads. The question: How to constitute the Senate? Resolved: form a committee of members one from each state, let them study a compromise.
*** The Committee elected by ballot, were Mr. Gerry, Mr. Elseworth, Mr.
Yates, Mr. Patterson, Dr. Franklin, Mr. Bedford, Mr. Martin, Mr. Mason,
Mr. Davy, Mr. Rutlidge, Mr. Baldwin.
That time might be given to the Committee, and to such as chose to
attend to the celebrations on the anniversary of Independence, the
Convention adjourned till Thursday. ***
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.<
link
the effin’ pgh fireworks has the same soundtrack as nyc. lazy proggtards
the nyc sang the “national anthem” though at the end
with a commie mayor
Hurrah for the flag of the free
May it wave as our standard forever
– He’s not a commie, he’s a moron, the type of rank opportunists that all Communist cults are serviced by.
– The modern term is Progressive, same as it was back in the days of Emma Goldman.
Everything old is new again.
>There are certain ideas which are self-evidently true. One of those ideas is that we are created without legal primacy or inferiority with regard to one another. Another idea, which is just obviously true to people whose rational faculties are operating properly, is that the rights to life and liberty and the pursuit of a prosperous life (which is what the word ‘happiness’ meant in 1776) are not alienable, that is they cannot have a lien placed on them by any other persons, not even representatives of the state.
Not only is government denied the authority to put a lien on and repossess those rights, but it is further required to protect those rights. And in fact, the protecting of those rights is the only reason that government should exist in the first place! And not only is it necessary for government to protect these rights, but its use of power to do so is still only just if it also involves the consent of the people whose freedom and property are being protected. Further (and this is shocking, even to modern ears), when governments move from protecting those rights to injuring those rights, the people are allowed to erase the authority of the government.<
link
Also worth a read at Volokh.
****The World Cup has kicked USA pride into high gear (even we non-sports fans can’t help but get in on the hype—or stop staring at the hottest players…), and the timing couldn’t be better with the Fourth of July right around the corner. But certain celebs don’t need an international soccer tournament or one day in the middle of the summer to put their Americana pride on display. Here are our favorite examples of on-point celebrity patriotism. #USA!
[…]
Jay Z and Beyonce
The U.K. has William, Kate, and George. The U.S. has Jay, Bey, and Blue Ivy. And as much as we love our American royalty, they love us right back: Beyonce sings for the President and rings in birthdays with Michelle Obama, and Jay puts on a music festival each Labor Day weekend called Made in America. Oh, and they named their daughter Blue.
[…]
George Clooney
Clooney and Obama are likethis, and the actor proved his loyalty when he defended the President from Steve Wynn’s verbal assault at a dinner in April. You don’t have to agree with the politics, but there’s something inherently patriotic about Clooney sticking up for POTUS.****
Can I get an “Amen?”
I do believe this one nailed our current predicament…
I’ve harbored a fear for quite a while now, that Mr. B. Hussein Soetoro wants another term. But not as US President. Oh, no, nothing that small in scope. He wants the UN top spot, and to preside over the taming of Americans.
And I’ll wager quite a few of the remaining will be happy to follow his lead.
Wouldn’t he be surprised if, shortly after he becomes Head Head of the UN, America quits that organization so thoroughly without feck, and ejects it from Pickle Bay.
you hardly ever hear about the united nations anymore
they were a big fucking deal when Bush was in office
but with the cunt we have now not so much
The UN is addressing how to deal with the humanitarian crises of Detroiters being unable to pay their water bills.
And barry isn’t interested in doing anything after he gets of office except golf, and attempt to feel relevant and important.
Carin, I’m not even sure President Laziness Personified really cares enough to put forth any effort to feel relevant and important. President Laziness Personified leaves that stuff up to the sycophantic slavering press.
This is absolutely correct, and as Drumwaster, MgGehee, geoff, Leigh, and others have pointed out, the change is moot.
But I’ll go one step further, per Volokh, and note that the addition of the comma strengthens the case for individual liberty’s primacy, in that it attaches the very existence of a government to the protection of individual rights; to do this in practice, the Constitution then enumerates the powers the fed govt legitimately has in taking on that function, leaving — per 9th and 10th — all else out of their grasp. Declaring Independence from an overweening centralized authority — an aristocracy, in the case of our revolutionaries — cannot plausibly be interpreted as a call for an importance of centralizing governmental powers.
Actions by a fed govt., in the new “comma” reading, therefore must — as a point of sentence logic — protect individual rights, certain of which are unalienable. Ms Allen’s suggestion that there is an increased importance in the goverment’s protection of those rights may be correct; but per her own reading, that only underscores the essential truth that it is individual rights govt. is charged with securing — and that it’s behavior, insofar as it may impinge upon those rights by any “progressive” aggregation of power, or by any attempt to coerce individual rights into new modes of existence that are collectivist in scope — is doubly illegitimate under the very internal logic of the new reading.
Plus, we have enough ancillary writings, letters, Mason’s Virginia Declaration of Rights, etc., to tell us exactly what was intended by the Declaration of Independence in terms of its radical ambitions. And the codifying of law that draws on the Declaration, the Constitution, makes the intent doubly clear. Which is why we musn’t simply look at the “plain meaning” outside of its intended context; because that intended context controls what was, at the time of composition, the plain meaning.
I’m happy to have this conversation with Ms Allen. Or our “pragmatic” lawyer friends who are back on Twitter torching straw men wrt inentionalism. So I’ve decided to put the ball in their court. To wit: I argue, and will debate the proposition publicly, that any interpretative maneuver that doesn’t adhere to Originalism, which is the legal interpretive manifestation of the intentionalist stance, does violence to representative government by upsetting the coequal powers of the 3 branches; because signifiers can accrue any number of new and potential referents over time, courts have taken it upon themselves to use those post-hoc references (14th Amendment cases most notably) to expand what “plain language” read by “reasonable people” can come to mean.
But what it can “come to mean” is not the same as what was meant, and to alter that dynamic is to remove the legislature’s role in writing laws. After all, if a court can change them in essence after the fact by applying referents not applicable at the time of composition, they are essentially saying the legislator has given them a blank canvas, and they can, at their whim, arrange new referents with older ones to rewrite law at their own motivated whim. In that sense, the judiciary BECOMES the legislative branch while maintaining a veneer of merely interpreting and applying the law.
They are doing no such thing. Because as I’ve been at pains to point out — and the lawyerly types on the right whose bread is buttered by incoherent interpretative assertions have been at pains to try to bracket, mostly by marginalizing me after having first tried to run me down as a messenger — any supposed interpretation that doesn’t take at its starting point the corporate intent of those who passed the law, is but a realignment of whose intent becomes controlling.
To move that function to the judiciary through some linguistically (and quintessentially leftist (cf Gramsci, DeMan, the agrarian New Critics, et al) maneuver, is to, in all but appearances, obviate the legislative branch.
Which is why if we’re to regain control of the Constitution, we must insist upon a stable rule of law that is kept stable by a stable and coherent set of practices by the judiciary: namely, originalism. It is the only check on the judiciary that makes sure it cannot, with such recent ease, usurp the function of the legislature in writing and passing law.
End of story.
See? “Almost”. ;)
– What the Prog bastards are really worried about:
“If the ruling goes against the White House, it’s hard to overstate the impact. Without subsidies, consumers in 34 states would face huge additional costs and, because of those costs, potential exemptions from the law. And voters — a substantial percentage of whom have never liked Obamacare — would be further alienated from the Democratic Party just in time for midterm elections.”
– ACA on life support has other consequences.
-Well put, Jeff.
-You wrote:
Not quite. Any Constitutional reforms we enact will be wasted effort if we do not restore Virtue in our own Souls. As we have seen, the center cannot hold where Virtue is absent.
I agree w/ the sentiment, Bob, but mandating virtu(e) is not quite so simple as enacting prescriptions for how best to maintain its (often grudging) maintenance.
On Madison’s view in Fed. 51 . . . we cannot look to virtue for the maintenance of just government, but must look to vice and the control of it by setting vice itself to work against vice. This isn’t to say that virtue will necessarily be absent, but that we cannot be as dependent on the presence of virtue as we must be on the presence of vice.
I agree. I’m, of course, not saying that we should mandate it, but, rather, that the rediscovery of Virtue must accompany any mandates in the Law and The Constitution that we are able to effect.
I know it’s not simple, but I believe that it must happen.
A Republic such as The Founders bequeathed to us cannot long survive without the re-enforcement rods of Virtue, which provide it the strength to resist the kind of stresses that can cause the whole structure to collapse.
Actually, I believe it will be easier to effect those political reforms we desire than for us to embrace Virtue.
We cannot successful battle Vice [ie: destroy it when necessary and control it when that is the only possible option], Sdferr, if we do not possess the Moral Sense that is a one of the results of being Virtuous.
I just don’t think that the modern scheme of natural right is an any way dependent on virtue, but in fact, consciously eschews any such construction. See Machiavelli, Prince, 15., and following, Hobbes, De Cive, 1.
Low and solid ground, as the saying goes, build on low and solid ground. Fear. Fear of violent death. Not “airy-fairy” castles of imagination. And though these precepts aren’t generally made explicit among us today, they seem to me well nigh inescapable.
But someone might say to that, “Hey? What’s the deal here? Human life manifestly contains virtue in its particulars, so where is the role for that? How can it possibly be left out of government?”
And how would we answer?
Ah!, we would answer, but government is limited! It does not reach to all aspects of human life. Government is intentionally extremely circumscribed in its scope. We have in our scheme of government an inherent bifurcation of human life, on the one hand our private lives and social relations outside the reach of government, and on the other, our public lives in concert with one another inside the conduct of government or political life.
Government in our scheme goes primarily to the protection of our individual rights against force and fraud, whether threatened from foreign lands or domestically at home, and to the dispensation of justice in our public quarrels. It goes to the protection of our privacies in our private and social lives, both keeping its own hands off our lives as well as keeping any who would invade our lives at bay.
Government in the modern natural right scheme must leave us to our ownership of property, to our worshipping, our befriending, associating, thinking, writing, speaking, trading and so on.
Government in this view isn’t meant to be in the business of seeing to the contents of our souls — this must be left to our free society, to our religion (to the judgement of our god or gods), to our relations in our families and among our friends, to our own judgment of the demands of our honor or dignity, or to our “ideals” or however we choose to determine that.
Hands off, motherfuckers, is the thing to keep us hearty.
But no, no! The political left cannot keep its hands off. Hence the enlargement, hence the demands that government decide who we will cater to, what opinions we may hold, what words we may use, and so on to totality.
Rights are dependent on nothing. A scheme for safeguarding them, on the other hand, can be destroyed by any means the people will abide.
If people abide vice, their rights remain but they are out of reach under a vicious regime.
And here I had been mistaken all along believing that rights flowed from nature — i.e., were and are indeed dependent on the very existence of nature (which ‘nature’ is something and not nothing).
For if no nature, then no ‘something’ in which or from which to discover our needs. Heck, would we even have needs? May as well make right dependent on mere circumstantial force, power, or for that matter, history, or posited fictional propositions, if right is to depend on nothing as such.
<sigh>
I made a point other than that, sdferr. I’m willing to discuss it, but drop the gotcha games.
It’s just that the elimination of nature is the project of the political left, so I always feel like I don’t do right if I fail to mention we got plenty of nothing without it. Is all.
My rights exist because I insist that they do. Should I ever change my mind about that, they will surely cease to exist.
You might could call that natural.
By ‘natural rights’, I gather you mean those Rights that all of Mankind has been endowed with by God [aka: The Creator, aka: the Great Legislator of the Universe].
Those Rights exist outside of the actions of Man, but they cannot exist in Life, here on Earth, unless men and women are willing to enshrine them and protect them – hold them Sacred.
And men and women cannot perform such a duty and efficiently shoulder such responsibility unless they understand what is involved in mounting an effective defense of those Rights.
And such an effective defense cannot be planned, much less mounted, unless said men and women possess Virtue and live Virtuously as much as they are able in their Fallen condition.
This requires, in part, a constant striving to behave in a Moral Way and not a full embrace of Mr. Machiavelli and his deep cynicism [let alone the Totalitarian Hobbes].
Should I ever change my mind about that, they will surely cease to exist.
As would you, since your “right to life” exists only so long as you insist on defending it against predations. Any being not imbued with an insistence on persistence is better off on the dustbin of history, to clear space for people and fauna who actually want to be here.
As far as “right to liberty”, liberty is the one right that is never free of cost, and is least likely to be cheap. It must ALWAYS be purchased and maintained through hard effort, and those that refuse to put forth the effort end up losing it to those who do not believe that Man should be free (unless you define “free” as “doing what someone else tells you to do”). (This generation and the next are about to get a hard lesson in this.)
And as Heinlein pointed out, “pursuit of happiness” isn’t necessarily a right, but rather “a universal condition that tyrants cannot take away, nor patriots restore. Cast me into a dungeon, burn me at the stake, crown me king of kings, I can ‘pursue happiness’ as long as my brain lives—but neither gods nor saints, wise men nor subtle drugs, can ensure that I will catch it.”
– I think you’d be better served using “Artificer of the Universe”. Legislator is too limiting.
That was the term, BBH, used in The Massachusetts Constitution, which I’ve always enjoyed.
The phrase, not the Mass Con.
Someone sent me a picture of a plate of fried chicken next to a bunch of bananas and the caption was ” If you think this picture is racist you might be really seriously fucking stupid.”