Friday, December 22. 2006
 A Christmas diamond idea for wives and/or girlfriends this year: the $30 million dollar diamond bikini.
Gal not included - you have to find your own, but with these trinkets in your hand, it shouldn't be too difficult. Watch for more of her in Sports Illustrated. Please note: If males readers are aware of suffering from Gynophilia, as may be characterized by an undue interest in such diamond photos, contact your local health care professional at once. Attraction to adult females could be a sign of a serious disorder. And hey, Jules Crittenden fans! Thanks for visiting - and check out Maggie's Farm while you're here. We are interesting, most of the time. Is that Maggie modeling the bikini? We will not tell you. (Ignore Continuation page - it's an error)
Continue reading "A special Christmas card for our readers, plus a last-minute shopping idea"
At Christmas I no more desire a rose
Than wish a snow in May's new-fangled mirth;
But like of each thing that in season grows..Shakespeare, Love's Labour Lost
Thursday, December 21. 2006
 A few points: First, no links from the NJ for a few days. Someone reminded me that Christmas is coming soon, so I should start to focus. Second, photo is Rockefeller Center, of course. I will be in NYC tomorrow through Christmas, I am happy to say, and out of the dark, pagan, socialist MA woods for a change. Third, we are still getting additions to the Family Holiday Game #1. Feel free to add some more equally lame offerings. Fourth, a Merry and Blessed Christmas from your very own, mostly-reliable, unpaid, and devoted News Junkie. I will pre-post a nice card for y'all to see tomorrow.
Top Ten Reasons American Women Suck. And Rightly So. You may not agree. Department of Unintended Consequences: How govt destroyed the family farm. Captain Ed Why won't gun criminals get with the program and be a little more progressive? What defeat in Iraq would mean. Lib. Leanings This is cool - the 90-second history of world religions About those "jobs American's won't do" Patterico If it were not a few days before Christmas, one of us would comment on this piece by Volokh: Adolf Hitler on Federalism. Good piece. I agree. And if were not a few days..., one of us might be more likely to comment on this very interesting piece about Michael Gersen and the Republican party, highlighted at Flares from Darkness. Maybe someone will find the time to do so.
Welcome to the Farm, Canadian Gun Nutz! Man, what a storm of new visitors. Please check us out, while visiting. You might like us. This sniper carbine made by CheyTac is functionally accurate at over 2 km. It has an integrated computer, a weather station, and has night vision, of course. With the CheyTac round, it set the world record for smallest group size at distance. This is pretty standard as the Iraq sniper weapon now. CheyTac is necking the .408 down to .375 and the 32-inch drop at 1500 yards is reduced to 21 inches. (The WW1 .50 cal drops 12.5 feet.)
Mr. Free Market would love one for foxes, and we'd like to find one in our Christmas stocking for popping rats down at the dump. Doubt the cops will mind, if we let them play with it.
It's the kind of weapon that makes a fellow wish they were young enough to go to Iraq or Afghanistan to try their hand with this baby on a few Jihadist Moslems. Gently but firmly introduce them to their waiting virgins, or to eternal darkness. Whatever.
"She's got everything she needs,
She's an artist, she don't look back.
She's got everything she needs,
She's an artist, she don't look back.
She can take the dark out of the nighttime
And paint the daytime black.
You will start out standing
Proud to steal her anything she sees.
You will start out standing
Proud to steal her anything she sees.
But you will wind up peeking through her keyhole
Down upon your knees.
She never stumbles,
She's got no place to fall.
She never stumbles,
She's got no place to fall.
She's nobody's child,
The Law can't touch her at all.
She wears an Egyptian ring
That sparkles before she speaks.
She wears an Egyptian ring
That sparkles before she speaks.
She's a hypnotist collector,
You are a walking antique.
Bow down to her on Sunday,
Salute her when her birthday comes.
Bow down to her on Sunday,
Salute her when her birthday comes.
For Halloween give her a trumpet
And for Christmas, buy her a drum." "She Belongs To Me," from 1965's Bringing It All Back Home. Here's a youtube of a (partial, sadly) 1965 performance.
This is a stupid time-waster. Get Santa drunk. You must use your arrow keys - and don't let Santa touch the train tracks. Turn on the sound for best effect.
 No tengo futoro, says Jeb Bush. Very sad.
Michelle labels 2006 as The Year of Perpetual Outrage, and summarizes the silliness. The Nokia Internet Tablet. A gift idea. Looks like a handy gizmo. Ralph Peters asks "What if they don't want what we want?" Indeed. We recently asked the same question. Dino Another idea: One-cup Mellitta coffee maker Women overcommunicate! Am Thinker. Yes! Sometimes a guy does not want to be a receptacle for your entire inner life. "Inner" means inner. Keep it with yours, or we will say "Shut up!!!" Marriage and Caste in America. View from 1776 highlights a review of the book of that name by Kay Hymowitz. A quote from the book: “Why would women working for a pittance at supermarket cash registers decide to have children without getting married while women writing briefs at Debevoise & Plimpton, who could easily afford to go it alone, insist on finding husbands before they start families?” The answer, in Ms. Hymowitz’s view, is that many among the urban poor have lost the “life script” for future-oriented child-rearing. Policy makers may assume that the problem is a shortage of employed, marriageable men. But the problem is more existential, a loss of a sense that marriage and children are connected. "
As reform stalls, things in Latin America looking worse. Quote from a good review at TCS: Even more disturbing than Latin America's tepid economic growth is the fact that its stuttering and half-hearted attempt at economic market reform over the past two decades has barely made a dent at reducing the region's mass poverty and chronic income inequality. In fact, various academic and multilateral bank studies suggest that Latin America still has the worst income distribution in the world and that there is more poverty in Latin America today than there was in the early 1980s when economic reform programs were being initiated.
In the end [the people] will lay their freedom at our feet, and say to us, "Make us your slaves, but feed us." They will understand themselves, at last, that freedom and bread enough for all are inconceivable together, for never, never will they be able to share between them! They will be convinced, too, that they can never be free, for they are weak, vicious, worthless, and rebellious. .
Wednesday, December 20. 2006
Dean Barnett has a brief and to-the-point essay at HH. And yes, he claims moral certainty - our moral certainty - if we wish to continue as we have.
 Bush targeting Pacific Coast indians. Like he did with Katrina, only worse.
Woops. It turns out real vegetarians are less smart: Big Lizards Four drinks per day: Instapundit. I'm sure they do not mean four Grey Goose martinis. Official dhimmitude at University of Leeds. View from the Right The New Zimbabwe diet. From piece by Right Thinking: There’s a great picture of fried rats on the linked page. It just goes to show, though, how an abundance of resources doesn’t mean jack shit if you don’t have a democratic capitalist political system to make good use of them. And as Hong Kong shows us, if you’ve got the democratic capitalist political system you don’t even need any resources. My God how I love the market.
Chavez brings back slavery. Publius. Hey - he means well. Right? A good howl against economic ignorance, by Coyote
Graham Owen can tie flies which can fool other bugs - and he can take stunning photos too. Thanks, Synthstuff, for the remarkable blog find - Flies with an Attitude. Sample: 
 It's an old joke -- that, eventually, in a true "nanny state," everything not forbidden will be mandatory.
The above noted in a piece by Jay Tea on how MA is considering extending the Nanny role that Mayor Bloomberg has in NYC. And he accurately points out that, of all things Americans ingest, alcohol is the most problematic. A trans-fat never killed anyone, after all. Meanwhile, also in MA, there is a move to revive sodomy laws - for health reasons! The gays will love that one. Maybe "health" and "safety" are our new, narcissistic religions, worshipping our oh-so-precious, irreplaceable selves? Or is it control just for the sadistic fun of it? Why don't I find such things simply silly or amusing? Because if the government can rationalize controlling things like this, they can rationalize controlling anything and everything - whether for "my good" (because I am an drooling idiot and cannot feed myself) or for the "common good" (because I don't matter as an individual). That is, fascism - whether our "very caring" leaders are elected or not. So it isn't funny. Image: Mary was not an evil nanny. Update. Related: The state cannot love you, at Never Yet melted
 Babes in Toyland. Yikes. Kirsten Powers. This is sick. Can I have one?
Corrupt Dems just can't get the press. Michelle Lobbying Reform? This has an ominous sound. Flares into Darkness. Every American is a one-person lobbyist for something. The booming Iraq economy, via Newsweek. Miller. The news you will not hear.
In passing, we should note this curious mark of our own age: the only absolute allowed is the absolute insistence that there is no absolute.
Tuesday, December 19. 2006
You guessed it, didn't you?
Best piece I have seen on the Lord Monkton letter (a perfect smack-down) and the whole politicization of geology and climatology in the interest of state and/or bureaucratic control over the world economy - at Classical Values. Read his piece - it is funny. One thing I wonder about is not how much politicans hurt themselves when they get on quasi-religious bandwagons like this - we expect them to be foolish - but about how much scientists discredit themselves and the profession in this way. I cannot remember a time in my life when loud scientists were right about any public policy or about any long-term prediction. Correct me if I am wrong (I know you will.). Just off the top of my head: the population "bomb," "Star Wars", the ABM Treaty, the Global Cooling Crisis, how to make peace with the USSR (surrender), Vietnam (surrender), the earth running out of oil (1970s), not to mention endless medical and health scares. People will gradually just tune out the hysteria.
 "Big Government needs little Hitlers".
Ain't that the truth. It's a new tagline of the UKIP, as discussed at Samizdata. And in that context, Moonbattery announces the return of It Takes a Village- a quote: As summed up by Human Events, the book dismisses the traditional family as inappropriate for the modern world. "The village" — i.e., government bureaucracy — should take its place. This point of view may explain why Shrillary opposed relief from the marriage tax, and favors publicly financed divorce — which she would treat as "a public health issue," presumably covered under HillaryCare.
For the view of the world which is close to that of us Maggie's Farmers, try Villainous Company on Free Will vs. The Nanny State. A classic blog rant on the subject of responsibility. A long quote, from a section on marriage: Because Dad made a decision, long ago, that his happiness was the only thing that mattered. How many people, over the years, will try to step in and take the place of that "man" who walked away from his vow, from a marriage that there was really nothing wrong with, from a promise, not that he would always "feel" love, but that he would always practice it, no matter what? In sickness, in health, for richer, for poorer, 'til death do us part. Only he didn't mean what he said. He couldn't be trusted. That small boy learned a valuable lesson, early in life. It is dangerous to trust. People make decisions on the basis of trust, like the decision to make yourself economically and emotionally vulnerable by having a child who will impose a lifelong responsibility on you. One that, on the basis of that promise, you thought would be shared between two people. This is a less obvious case, and no one in today's world is likely to argue for coerced enforcement of marriage vows. But that is not the point. The point is that it is not invalid to disapprove of irresponsible behavior. It is not wrong to wish people would do the right thing. It is not impolite to notice when other people's tendency to avoid their responsibilities keeps spilling over into your life and causing problems for people who would never dream of doing those things. And above all, it is not beyond the pale to observe that in our oh-so-tolerant quest to be nonjudgmental we have, perhaps unintentionally, also done away with many of the restraints on human behavior that used to encourage the more weak-willed members of society to buck up and stick it out when the going got tough. We used to call this being ashamed of yourself. But in today's climate so little invokes a feeling of shame that we have a woman who lies and cheats on her husband actually asking a therapist if this can ever be "wrong"? And other people defending her actions. Bizarre.
Read it all.
Florida's pythons. I hate this story. (h/t, HH) 750' bungee jump. Not for me, thanks - I just ate. Video Not worth reading: The real EU Islamophobia report. Just plain pathetic.
I have only one firm belief about the American political system, and that is this: God is a Republican and Santa Claus is a Democrat. PJ O'Rourke. The full quote is at Mr. Free Market
Europhobia on Rise in Europe! Truthiness at Crittenden The German Church defines limits for tolerance. Gates of V.
Kofi's illegal apartment in NYC? NYSun A nice intro to Mexican food: RWN. I salivated. Did you see Hawkins' Most Obnoxious Quotes of 2006? Ahmadinejad takes a political hit. We should not misunderestimate the sense of the Iranian people, despite their recent leadership. Rick has a good discussion. 1984 at Michigan State. Creepy.
From a review of a new book by Gregory Curtis on cave art, in WaPo: For centuries, cave art was ignored or dismissed as a clever prank. But in 1879, a Spanish scholar named Marcelino Sanz de Sautuola had a eureka moment when he was poking around in a cave called Altamira in Spain. He was overwhelmed by paintings of life-size bison on the cave's ceiling; this was, writes Curtis, "the first time we know of that an artist from the distant Stone Age touched the soul of a modern person." When Sautuola tried to publicize his findings, which linked the art to discoveries of prehistoric tools and carvings found on horns and other hard surfaces, archaeologists turned on him, mocking his conclusions with a savage fury. The great debate was on, and the theories and counter theories haven't stopped since. Curtis deftly leads us on a tour of contending interpretations, although some of the terms can be rather arcane.
Monday, December 18. 2006
 I feel badly about the climbers, and their families...but...if you want to climb Mt. Hood in December, get rescue insurance and have a rescue plan in place in case it is needed.
Either that, or sign something comparable to a DNR note: "We accept the risk, and we're on our own." Along with generous life insurance which covers it, to take care of your kids' educations. Mt. Hood has no guardrails, and no McDonalds. It is a dead-serious deal, and everyone knows that. The danger is the appeal. Why should the citizens of Oregon subsidize macho stunts like these with their hard-earned taxes? Isn't the whole point of climbing to risk life and limb? To encounter mortal danger when life is otherwise so soft, safe and protected? To find a trail without guardrails? To find a place where you cannot be rescued, and cannot find a McDonalds or a mall, and must face nature's harsh face? I have had just two friends who "climb." One saw his mother fall to her death on the Matterhorn (photo). The other saw his best friend fall to his death in a snow-covered crevasse in Alaska, and roped down to pull up the mangled body. Neither of them "climb" anymore: unpleasant memories. Death, when voluntarily courting mortal danger, is not a tragedy. It might be heroic, as in war, or an accepted risk, but not tragic: in our cozy, modern American life, you have to go well out of your way, and spend serious money, to find serious risk - unless you do something stupid and emotional like stepping on thin ice, or trying to outsmart the stock market. There is no tragic flaw involved. On Everest, you are on your own, and it is strewn with freeze-dried bodies as memento mori. I admire folks who take on such adventures. I do not care for heights, however. If you want a safe, comfy vacation, go to Tinsley World instead of Mt. Hood, or take a walk around the neighborhood with the pup and the camera. If you die on a mountain, we will remember you as someone with cojones, but not as tragic. People die on mountains all the time, but it only makes the news during slow news weeks. Hope the last two are OK, and that they can find another hobby.
In 1948, Bethlehem was 86% Christian. It is now 2%. Why? LGF
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