Maggie's Farm

Wymeswold Airfield

There is something hauntingly appealing about abandoned military sites, like bare ruined choirs. At the old English airfields of WW2, you can almost hear the sound of the engines warming up, almost see that recent past among the slowly crumbling buildings and the weedy landing strips. Wymsewold has its own website.

Pepsi Gives the US The Finger: The Final Episode

What an embarassing episode. The speech sounds remarkably naive, oblivious to the sophistication and IQ of the audience, unintelligent, condescending, anti-American in its undertones, sophomorically full of mixed metaphors that don't add up, and plain painful to read, much less to have heard. I entirely agree with Scott in that assesment. She needs a speechwriter - fast. PepsiCo can afford it with their profits from the trash they peddle around the world. Powerline is all over the story, in a balanced way, and has posted the text. One can only feel badly for Nooryi - she isn't quite ready for prime time, and no doubt she has learned this by today. If it were a guy, you would throw tomatoes, or at least nicely give her the old hook and yank her offstage for her own good. But who is ready for prime time, except for Krauthammer? Just one question - How does Great Scott at Powerline find time for all of this? And forget boycotting PepsiCo in indignation - who eats or drinks their junk anyway? I will promise one thing: If the MSM covers the story, I will eat a (small) bag of Fritos.

By this time of year, the fairly common Goldfinch has undergone the spring
molt and the canary-yellow males become much more evident. In the winter, they are a drab shade of olive. They are usually seen in small flocks in weedy fields and edges. If you don't think you have Goldfinches in your area, put out a thistle feeder for a few weeks.

Read more about the American Goldfinch.

A worried man with a worried mind
No one in front of me and nothing behind
There's a woman on my lap and she's drinking champagne
Got white skin, got assassin's eyes
I'm looking up into the sapphire-tinted skies
I'm well dressed, waiting on the last train

Bob Dylan, from Things Have Changed

Why Kim du Toit Moved to Texas

Quite an amusing account of how our favorite gun-loving blogger made his mind up about what state to move to. I am not sure why "work" never entered into his calculations - but Kim has more important considerations:

I’m just one guy, and we should be careful about using a sample of one to make any kind of judgement; but when we decided that Chicago was too much of a totalitarian state for us (even though we loved the place, and leaving it would cause us severe financial hardship, not to mention emotional stress), we didn’t move to Michigan (our first choice), because Michigan requires that its citizens register their handguns. Not gonna do that.

We didn’t move to Vermont, because the state required us to register as homeschoolers; we didn’t move to Pennsylvania because their state taxes were too high; and we went on and on through the states, checking to see which one incorporated the best mix of gun laws, homeschooling-friendliness, low taxes and low government involvement in its citizens’ lives generally.

Needless to say, New Jersey, California, Massachusetts, and New York were never considered at all.

Ultimately, we were left with Arizona, New Hampshire, Oklahoma, Idaho and Texas. New Hampshire and Idaho were too far from the Son&Heir (flights to DFW being both infrequent/inconvenient and expensive), and Arizona and Oklahoma were too desolate for our taste.

I'm afraid that, except for NH, many of Kim's "evil states" are clustered in our Northeast. Well, and in the Northwest too - for sure. I think perhaps political attitudes influenced his final selection, but Kim writes in a very nuanced fashion:

Of course I think that the politicians in the Evil States are a bunch of scum; of course I think that what they’re doing is reprehensible; and of course I think that they should be hanged from utility poles en masse, this prick Louis Manzo having the first place in line.

But they were elected, and if the people of the Evil States keep electing them, then there’s not a whole lot I can say that will change that.

So, to all my Readers in the Evil States (and you know who you are), I have only one thing to say, even though I’ve said it time and time before:

Leave.

Fidelito, Hollywood's Favorite Politician

Humberto Fontova, author of the definitive and detailed Fidel: Hollywood's Favorite Tyrant, is interviewed in Front Page:

HF: Let's start with its dimensions: Castro's gulag held more political prisoners, as a percentage of population, than pre-war Hitler's and --yes--even Stalin's. Also, the longest serving political prisoners OF THE CENTURY spent their hell in Castro's Gulag. Senores  Mario Chanes de Armas, Angel de Fana and Eusebio Penalver all served thirty years in Castro's dungeons.  To put this in proper perspective, Alexander Solzhenitsyn served 8 years in Stalin's Gulag.  So here's men who served over THREE times as long-- and who's heard of them? They all live in Miami today. So where's the PBS documentary on them? Where's the 60 Minutes interview with them? Where were the rallies (outside of Miami's little Havana) for their release? Where were the U.N declarations for their release? (Instead their jailer's regime is appointed to the UN's Human Rights Commission!)

Read entire, link above.

Paul Berman on Daniel Bell

Berman recounts his travels through the campus travails of the 60s and the adolescent foolishnesses of the "New Left", under the mentorship of the wise sociologist and ex-socialist Daniel Bell:

Now all this was fairly idiotic. Nothing is more bovine than a student movement, with the uneducated leading the anti-educated and mooing all the way. I'm glad to recall, looking back at those times, that my own radical activities pretty much avoided the student custom of persecuting the professors. I was much too fascinated by them to want to rail against them, except now and then. Besides, the anti-intellectual atmosphere began to weigh a little heavy on the bookish students. Hofstadter, in his study of American anti-intellectualism, had already put his finger on these moods and fads, as if predicting the uprising at his own university. And so I can understand, in restrospect, why Bell chose to flee Morningside Heights. To be sure, though, the student uprisings spread to Cambridge, too. There was no escape.

Berman's pal Szymanski lost persepctive on what was going on, while Berman took his own path through ideological mazes:

My own response to the Columbia strike and its revolutionary offshoots differed from Szymanski's almost entirely. The fervor for Marxism-Leninism in its several variations dismayed me from the start. The conservative Bolshevik instinct on cultural matters struck me as absurd. And so I rebelled against the rebels, and I did this by veering off in anarchist and anti-Communist directions—which always seemed to me truer to the original spirit of the New Left. I mentioned this to Bell, and he told me that he too had come under an anarchist influence as a kid. He had known the New York group around the German emigré anarchist Rudolf Rocker, and because of those connections he had come across an early exposé of Soviet tyranny by Alexander Berkman. Berkman's pamphlet had inoculated Bell against any temptation to join so many others of his generation in venerating the Soviet revolution.

He quotes Bell's powerful observation:

"Among the radical, as among the religious minded," he wrote, "there are the once born and the twice born. The former is the enthusiast, the ‘sky-blue healthy-minded moralist' to whom sin and evil—the ‘soul's mumps and measles and whooping coughs,' in Emerson's phrase—are merely transient episodes to be glanced at and ignored in the cheerful saunter of life. To the twice born, the world is ‘a double-storied mystery' which shrouds the evil and renders false the good; and in order to find truth, one must lift the veil and look Medusa in the face."

Read the entire piece in BookForum - it's a piece of school-yard history which has attracted far more attention than it deserves, and Berman seems to agree.

"You know that children are growing up when they start asking questions that have answers."

John J. Plomp

Missionaries to the Islamic World

Blame Newsweek, or blame the rioters and their inciters? Interesting thoughts from The Shape of Days:

There's something wrong, dangerously wrong, in the Muslim world. When a society is so willing to commit widespread violence over such an inconsequential thing, it just makes me nervous about what they'd be willing to do with, say, a nuclear bomb.

How can we fix this? The only answer I can think of will get me branded as an Ann Coulter-loving fascist racist homophobe who dresses funny: missionaries. I'm serious. I'm not saying that the only way to fix the obvious and terrifying problem with the Muslim world is by wiping it out and replacing it with Christianity, though there are certainly those out there who subscribe to that point of view. I think the answer could be less drastic. I think the cross-polination of cultures could do wonders for the Muslim world. Their language, customs, faith … these things are their business, and they're welcome to them. But the idea that God wants them to kill people, that it's okay to murder women, that Jews are the descendants of swine and deserve to be wiped out, these are dangerous, harmful ideas. Saying "that's just part of their culture" is the worst possible thing we can do right now. It would legitimize the horrors that are being committed all over the world in the name of Islam today, from these most recent riots to holy wars to honor killings and everything in between.

Read entire (link above)

"You can fool too many of the people too much of the time."

James Thurber