90 Miles From Tyranny

Thursday, August 8, 2013

The First Color Photographs of Norway, 1910

In 1910, Auguste Leon visited the German scientist and photographer Adolf Miethe, who helped to invent the flash camera. He used a different, much more rare, the method of color photography - color separation, ie filmed on a triple plate through color filters.

Here are some rare and interesting color photos of Norway circa 1910 in A. Miethe's collection.

More Awesome Photos HERE

Graphic Art: Girls With Guns

More Hot Graphic Art HERE

Some SteamPunk HERE

Cracking the Czars

As expected, Obama's second term has deteriorated into a welter of scandals unmatched by any previous administration, including those of Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton. Watergate was a minor scandal that simply grew amid the hothouse of D.C. politics and media, while most of the Clinton scandals involved either skirt or money grabbing. The Obama scandals uniquely strike at the heart of American democracy, based as they are on Obama's attempt to transform the nation to reflect his Augustan image of himself.

The scandals have not yet had the impact they should, due largely to media manipulation, public inertia, and serious fumbling among Republicans and conservatives -- for instance, Darryl Issa allowing the odious Lois Lerner 5th Amendment protection she was not entitled to.

The only solution is to continue the pressure. Watergate required nearly eighteen months of simmering before it boiled over. The same is likely to be true here. This leads us to the question as to why one of the most potentially fertile fields for administration scandal, the Obama czars, has been so far overlooked.

As with everything else, the concept of the czar -- extra-constitutional public officials hired by the Executive branch to spearhead particular efforts on an emergency basis -- has been abused by Obama. Czars go back to FDR's "dollar-a-year" men appointed to oversee various aspects of the war effort. The concept was revived in the 1960s to attack drug abuse, presented as a crisis situation not amenable to ordinary solutions.

In truth, the "drug czars" were no more than a PR gimmick. Drug smuggling could have been (and still could be) shut down utilizing already existing resources. This has not been done for a number of reasons, including relations with Mexico, criminal infiltration of law enforcement and politics, and the fact that many leading political families - the Kennedys and Gores, for example -- have drug addicts in