Is it immoral to give people the opportunity to exit the stone age?
Freeman Hunt: People Are Not Pets
Posted by Ron Coleman on June 6, 2008
Posted in Homo sapiens, O Mores!, Oppression | Leave a Comment »
Lamp and portal
Posted by Ron Coleman on June 6, 2008
Door to judge’s chambers, Newark historic courthouse
Originally uploaded by Ron Coleman
The door to a judge’s chambers in the restored Newark historic courthouse. Note the fasces on the lintel.
Posted in Americana, Ars Longa, Lex scripta, Metropolis | Leave a Comment »
Pass the mayo
Posted by Ron Coleman on June 6, 2008
I spent an inordinate amount of time last night writing a post about mayonnaise on LIKELIHOOD OF
CONFUSION®. I am gratified that it’s getting quite a bit of very unexpected play!
If you’re among the somewhat more select audience that reads this blog, though, you shouldn’t miss the post. Because, as you’ll see, it… it means quite a lot to me.
Posted in Blogophilia, Heart and spirit, Jocularity | Leave a Comment »
And her little dog, too
Posted by Ron Coleman on June 5, 2008
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Shoot him now?
Posted by Ron Coleman on June 4, 2008
From the New York Times blog:
This morning, a Boston-born performance artist, Yazmany Arboleda, tried to set up a provocative art exhibition in a vacant storefront on West 40th Street in Midtown Manhattan with the title, “The Assassination of Hillary Clinton/The Assassination of Barack Obama,” in neatly stenciled letters on the plate glass windows at street level. . . .
“The Secret Service had to do a whole questionnaire with me,” he said. “It was about an hour of questioning. They asked if I owned guns, if I was a violent person, if I had ever been institutionalized.”
Mr. Arboleda answered no. Nonetheless, he said the Secret Service asked him to take down the exhibition title from the window.
“I’m renting that space; the space was allocated for an exhibition and it’s my right to put those words up,” he said. “They said it could excite someone to do something crazy, like break the window. It’s terrible, because they’re violating my rights. If someone breaks a window, they’re committing a crime.”
He added, “The exhibition is supposed to be about character assassination. It’s philosophical and metaphorical.”
I wonder whether anyone has ever pushed a legal challenge to this generally well-understood, and popular, policy that the Secret Service has certain extraordinary legal powers it can execute in connection with a perceived threat to any person it is in the business of guarding.
It does seem constitutionally problematic. Because it seems here as if the authorities may have overreacted.
I would prefer merely a broad prohibition on “performance artists.”
Posted in Americana, Ars Longa, Metropolis, Oppression, Politics and Poker | 1 Comment »
Obama the intellectual?
Posted by Ron Coleman on June 3, 2008
My friend Pamela Geller offers, in somewhat more polemic language than I would use, a nonetheless compelling antidote to the largely unexamined conception — to some extent uncritically passed along by me — that Barack Obama has serious intellectual achievements of which he can rightly boast.
I very much appreciate the point. It’s one I began to ponder at about the same time her post went up, just by coincidence. I recalled that, like Bill Clinton, Barack Obama was a law professor at one point, and that Clinton, too, was frequently cited by supporters as a genius, a genuine intellectual — “brilliant,” as they say.
My thinking regarding both of them was the same: Intellectuals may achieve many things, but if they are truly intellectuals there is inevitably some novel or at least rigorous contribution to some art, science, philosophy or other body of thought-powered endeavor, such as law, by which that intellection may be proved and measured.
And in the case of both men (the comparison keeps coming up), there is neither. There is no book or book chapter, no judicial opinion in a case where one of them acted as counsel, no published article in a scholarly or professional work. There is not even a genuinely original great work of oratory or say, a riveting course-pack.
Intellectuals are as intellectuals do. Bill and Barack utilized their credentials, as they had every right to and as almost everyone else does, as stepping stones toward the realization of their grand ambitions. But neither of them can in any way be credited as having demonstrated a genius for anything other than achievement of that ambition. And this is not the same, we should recall, as a genius for leadership or government, with which we might credit a Franklin Delano Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy or Ronald Reagan. Neither man can be credited with being the moving or creative force behind the building of any great institution, public or private; of a noteworthy government program, initiative or policy; or a political movement that transcended the political institutions of their time and place.
There is no reason that a President must be any of these things. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Medialites, Politics and Poker | 8 Comments »
Baseball whiffs
Posted by Ron Coleman on June 2, 2008
You’re outta here!
Major League Baseball and the players association struck out on Monday when the U.S. Supreme Court rejected their appeal of a ruling that sided with a company that uses player statistics for fantasy baseball.
The high court declined to hear the appeal of a lower-court ruling that a St. Louis-based company called C.B.C. Distribution and Marketing Inc. has a free-speech right to use the names and performance statistics of famous athletes.
So, that’s that, right? Uh…
After the Supreme Court refused to get involved in the dispute, a spokesman for the players union said, “We’re considering our options.” Officials from Major League Baseball declined to comment.
The only “option” would seem to be the gift of legislation, awarding Baseball unprecedented rights to control names and numbers and what people do with them. Heck, Hollywood gets these kinds of things all the time — they’ve extended copyright until forever, after all. Why can’t Baseball have “such a”?
Or is Senator Spector, looking for a pastime and finding professional sports a fertile field in which to seek some latter-day political relevance, maybe going to be a… problem for the billionaires of baseball?
Cross-posted on LIKELIHOOD OF CONFUSION®.
Posted in Americana, Gelt, Lex scripta | Leave a Comment »
Not fired yet; not in jail yet
Posted by Ron Coleman on June 2, 2008
Keith Olbermann must find all this attention from Bob Cox taxing.
Posted in Medialites | Leave a Comment »
A new way we’re all racists
Posted by Ron Coleman on June 1, 2008
Black bloggers “fight to make [their] voices heard,” says the SF Chronicle (via Glenn, again):
With its power-to-the-individual approach, the new media world promises anyone with a laptop the possibility of a publishing empire. But, as some black bloggers are finding out, the new media world is a lot like the old one: racially segregated, with many prominent black voices still fighting to be heard.
“The progressive [sic] blogosphere is segregated,” said McCauley, whose What About Our Daughters blog was accepted to the DNC’s blogger pool. Essence magazine named McCauley one of its 25 most influential people last year alongside Illinois Sen. Barack Obama and filmmaker Tyler Perry. “Black bloggers link to other black bloggers, and progressive [sic] white bloggers link to other white progressive [sic] bloggers,” she said.
How progressive! It makes you want to spit. “Progressive.” Puh-lease.
For the rest of us, though, and this “fight” to “be heard”: Is there a widget that flags which blogs are written by black people and which ones are written by white people? Does it work in WordPress? Can I view it on Firefox? Is that why everyone knows I’m a sheeny? Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Blogophilia, Homo sapiens, Medialites, Oppression | 2 Comments »
Shoes drop, crows roost, the whole thing
Posted by Ron Coleman on June 1, 2008
SO WHY — AFTER FAILING TO DO SO WHEN IT WOULD HAVE DONE HIM THE MOST GOOD — did Obama decide to quit the Trinity Church now? Larry Johnson says that another shoe is about to drop. Hmm. Stay tuned.
UPDATE: Related item here.
ANOTHER UPDATE: Also here.
The sub theme is Michelle Obama who, I kind of had a sneaking suspicion, was going to “help” flush out certain… issues here.
It’s not really a surprise, because it was always preposterous to argue that Barack Obama could get as far as he did, as fast as he did, whence he did, and be “different.” Precisely because he did all those things, we knew this was wrong.
In fact, he reminds very much of another young, ambitious politician — Bill Clinton — who had the whole thing mapped out from very early on but, far from being a different politician, only came to epitomize how a new, slicker generation works the system. Clinton made the “mistake” of losing some elections up front, while Obama locked onto the abundant teat of Chicago politics, which dispenses only sure things.
But despite the gifts of brilliant plans, talent and motivation, Barack and Bill could never have actualized their ambitions without great women at their side. And, as Clinton before him — and, as we may yet see, perhaps even more so? — Obama is seeing that there is sometimes a harsh price to pay for the super-talented, modern, accomplished woman fit to play that role and yet subsume, or seem to subsume, herself in her husband’s political career.
One way or another, that bill will be paid.
Posted in Politics and Poker | 1 Comment »
