Maggie's Farm

This photo, and more, at Atlas:

On lithe girly-men, from Mr. Free Market:

It is no wonder than dear Albion is sliding inextricably into the mire if men are now spending time in front of the mirror, wondering do these jeans make my bum look big? No, they don’t – its all the Mars bars you eat & if you have a problem with that, don’t eat any more. As one of the 66% of those who don’t have a problem with my burgeoning middle age waistline, this morning I had a full fat boy breakfast, all served up with a side order of extra lard because you know it makes sense.

Mar 6 2006             Lop-idary       
    Lop-idary, I have chosen to call it, this lopping art which is pruning by any other name.  My actions in the kibbutz persimmon orchards, this stand of 8,000 souls with limbs akimbo, askew, I anoint as Lop-idary.  For it is lopping, plain and simple.  Yet, it has a topiary quality to it, sans the fanciful, artful outcome and the aim of good topiary to make imaginary forms, even of imaginary beasts -- unicorns, Sphinxes in the better gardens -- so that the underlying tree-being loses its character. Topiary is like what is done to poodles: changing handsome, proud dogs bred with burr-collecting fur into prancing decorations, with bulbous tail ends and swellings mid-torso, tuberous hair balls above the ankles. 

No, what I do with the persimmons is not topiary, for I am to lop to bring
more fruit, bring more light to the inner, lower limbs, make these trees, well, more persimmon-y.  Yet, lop-idary, I baptize my new discipline, as it shares something with lapidary art: to cut, polish the rough gem, enough to bring out the radiance within -- to capture as much light as possible to make the gem more beautiful -- yet, not make that fatal cut that will ruin a fine gem, make it second rate, even shatter it.

I am an old man and have known a great many troubles, but most of them never happened.

Mark Twain

"War is sometimes better than a bad peace." Tacitus.

A reader challenged us to comment more on the Iraq War. We don't ignore the subject, but we aren't preoccupied with it either, despite our interest in the news of the day. Why not, when it seems like such a big issue?

For one thing, I view it as more of a police action, enforcing UN resolutions, than a full-scale war. Second, once Iraq was fully invaded, it has not been so much of a war as a force-supported effort at democratic nation-building. That is a tough job which has rarely been attempted anywhere. It worked in Japan after WW2, but they already had a strong sense of nationhood, and a strong legacy of civilized behavior - if you exclude their barbarism in wartime which is their legacy of shame.

Was regime change in Iraq a great idea? Time will tell. I hope so. Is it a central theater of the so-called War on Terror? I don't know- I doubt it, but it has certainly brought them to the killing floor, has it not? Surely no-one is weeping for Saddam, and surely the whole world is delighted to see Iraqis voting. But an end to mad bombers we will not see in our lifetime in the Middle East - its the way a small, and increasingly small, number of them amuse themselves. Regrettably, their leaders do not chose to lead by example. 

The real war, I believe, is a war against an expansionist Jihad, which thinks it can convert the world to a primitive and violent version of Islam by intimidation. Anyone who will blow themselves to bits to kill a Jew, or a couple of Iraqi policemen and children, would not hesitate to push a button to nuke France, Denmark, the US, Britain, or anywhere else where the Infidel dwells in freedom. The Anglosphere and the Western World just want to be left alone.

I think Iraq is more of a TV/political event than anything else. Just as the news has to find a fire, a homicide, a baby animal at the zoo, etc, every night, they have to report a bomb in Iraq. It wears people down, and it causes a loss of perspective - which it seems intended to do on the part of the Jihadists and, it seems, on the part of the media whose disingenuous exaggeration of the negative is shameless. It's the "drip, drip, drip" effect.

For some perspective, California had 2400 homicides in 2004, and 4000 motor vehicle fatalities. During the three years that we have been in Iraq, there have been an average of about 650 US casualties per year. And unlike the car crashes and homicides, these are folks who have been willing to do the dangerous work and to take their chances. Heroes, every one.

To put the Iraq effort in comparison to other wars, see this chart, stolen from Instapudit who posted it a while ago:

Along with the political battles that seem to swirl around every military effort in US history, there has been a major effort by the opposition party to paint the war as "another Vietnam". Our reader sent us this essay by Gen. Odom, who tries to draw parallels which I do not see. Just for starters, there is no opposing army in Iraq. Second, there is no world power clash here. Third, there is no civil war, nor will there be, as is convincingly argued by Miller at History News. Fourth, casualties are low.

Thus I am not persuaded by the defeatists and the gloom-mongers, who are politically invested in failure. And I do believe that those who assert that Middle Eastern folks are too backward to handle freedom are not only racist, but plain stupid. These folks can figure out, in time, that being a part of the world community, and political freedom, are good things.

Wisely or unwisely, we have given the Iraqis a great gift. But don't expect the Jihadists to appreciate it: nobody told them that paradise has run out of virgins - same as Massachusetts.

"Scarcely have you descended on the soil of America, when you find yourself in the midst of a sort of tumult: a confused clamor is raised on all sides; a thousand voices come to your ear at the same time, each on of them expressing some sort of social need. Around you everything moves here, the people of one neighborhood have gathered to learn if a church ought to be built; there they are working on a choice of a representative; farther on, the deputies of a district are going to town in all haste in order to decide about some local improvements; in another place, the farmers of a village abandon their furrows to go discuss the plan of a road or a school."

"Citizens assemble with the sole goal of declaring that they disaprove of the course of government. To meddle in the government of society and to speak about it is the greatest business and, so to speak, the only pleasure an American knows..An American does not know how to converse, but he discusses; he does not discourse, but he holds forth. He always speaks to you as to an assembly."

From Democracy in America, 1844

How do nations create wealth? Liberating people's minds, and rewarding effort and ambition, seem to be key factors. Coyote at Coyote Blog plays Adam Smith and offers this:

...here is Coyote's First Theorem of Wealth Creation, first expounded in this post on the zero-sum economics fallacy:

Groups of people create wealth faster in direct proportion to the degree that:

1. Their philosophical and intellectual culture values ordinary men (not just "the elite", however defined) questioning established beliefs and social patterns.  This is as opposed to having a rigid orthodoxy which treats independent thinking as heresy.
2. Individuals, again not just the elite, have the ability through scholarship or entrepreneurship to pursue the implications of their ideas and retain the monetary and other rewards for themselves.  This is as opposed to being locked into a rigid social and economic hierarchy that would prevent an individual from acting on a good idea.   

China, for example, just by cracking open the spigot on #2, however inadequately, has gone from a country with mass starvation in three or four decades to one where the worry-warts of the world are scared of juvenile obesity.  To a large extent, this theorem is really just a poor restatement of Julian Simon's work.  Simon's key point was that the only relevant resource was the human mind, from which all wealth flows.  All I have done is break this into two parts, saying that to create wealth a society has to value the individual's use of his mind and has to allow that individual free reign to pursue the products of his thinking.

It's a good succinct piece. Read the whole thing.

Time and the hour run through the roughest day.

William Shakespeare

An excellent point by David Warren (my highlights):

The violent audacity of a generation of Muslim neo-jihadis happens to correspond precisely with the self-loathing of a generation of Western post-hippies. Perhaps never before, in the history of interaction between the “Dar al-Islam” (Muslim-ruled world), and the “Dar al-Harb” (the external world with which it is perpetually “at war”), have aspiring Muslim conquerors met such willing candidates for “dhimmitude”.

The definition of a “dhimmi” is one who pays the “jizyah” tax to his Muslim rulers; who, in return for this protection money, enjoys an ambiguous special status. This is, as Islamist propaganda is eager to propagate, exactly what is going on when, for instance, governments of the West send foreign aid to Muslim regimes, in the (vain) belief that this will exempt them from the next round of terror hits, or rioting. More generally, the equation of Western aid and domestic welfare payments with the “jizyah” is common in Arab media. It expresses contempt for the West, and our “so-called freedoms”.

Read entire.

3/14 is naturally World Pi Day. Most good geeks celebrate with a pie or two.

Here's an easy way to remember pi to 22 decimal places. Why "pi"? It's the Greek letter p, an abbreviation for the Greek "periphereia."