Maggie's Farm

You know about PEBD, right? (h/t, Jules C):

Recovering PEBD victims vividly confirm Leveran's description of the disease. "I found myself completely paralyzed by joy," said Malcolm Renner, whose website recently sold for 1.2 billion dollars. "I could tell--foggily--that my Maserati teetered on the edge of a mountain road in Tuscany," he recalled, "but if the supermodels in my back seat had been an ounce lighter, I wouldn't be here today."

Whole heart-breaking article here. I think we need a Federal program to help these people. Teams of counselors and social workers, ready to go at a moment's notice. Maybe involve FEMA, too.

Definitely unusual - but life is strange. Here. Piece at Ace.

Ace, predictably, wondered about their future sex life, but we wondered about motor control. Whose brain does the walking? It seems to me that the one on the right just kinda goes along for the ride. Anyway, the whole thing is fascinating, and they are remarkable in their "normalcy."

A clever reader coined the term "evangelical atheists" the other day. Yesterday, an opinion piece by Tobias Jones in The Guardian on "secular totalitarianism." A quote:

That is why these (secular) fundamentalists are so in evidence. They're not only needled by their own hypocrisy; they are also furious that believers have broken the old pact to stay out of public debate. Witness, for example, Mary Riddell's astonishing sentence in the Observer last month (try replacing "religion" with "homosexuality" to get the point): "secularists do not wish to harm religion or deny its great cultural influence. They simply want it to know its place." In other words: get back in the closet.

Christians feel particularly aggrieved because we believe that Jesus invented secularism. Jesus's teachings desacralised the state: no authority, not even Caesar's, was comparable to God's. As Nick Spencer writes in Doing God, "the secular was Christianity's gift to the world, denoting a public space in which authorities should be respected, but could be legitimately challenged and could never accord to themselves absolute or ultimate significance". Christianity, far from creating an absolutist state, initiated dissent from state absolutism.

Right. Whole thing here.

That is why Statists hate religion: it competes in significance. Why else would they care so much - or even care at all?  Science is generally and properly humble about its offerings (the global warming scam excepted), but The State is never humble.

A new bio of the remarkable, irrepressible William James is out. Quote from review in the Boston Globe:

In "William James," Robert Richardson, whose previous subjects were Thoreau and Emerson, seeks to understand James's "life through his work, not the other way around." Richardson presents no new interpretations of James's theories of pragmatism and pluralism. Nor does he attempt to critique them. But he has a knack for explaining complex ideas clearly and elegantly and for bringing to life a fascinating character. Various William Jameses, Richardson suggests, lived inside the man: As he willed himself into optimism, he was often sad, irritable, and depressed. But the "central" or "essential" James was an apostle of activity, spontaneity, doubt, chance, and chaos, "astonishingly, even alarmingly open to new experiences," including a headlong plunge into the maelstrom of American modernism.

The whole thing is here.  Image: Henry and brother William (on right) James. Two brothers could hardly be more different in temperament. Henry was "an old lady," and William a wild and crazy, drug-abusing, skirt-chasing dude.

We do not really have a bleak one here, this year, with Palm Trees sprouting up in Yankee-land, and dinosaurs returning to latitudes in which they have not been seen for many years, but I love this song:

In the bleak midwinter, frosty wind made moan,
Earth stood hard as iron, water like a stone;
Snow had fallen, snow on snow, snow on snow,
In the bleak midwinter, long ago.

Our God, Heaven cannot hold Him, nor earth sustain;
Heaven and earth shall flee away when He comes to reign.
In the bleak midwinter a stable place sufficed
The Lord God Almighty, Jesus Christ.

Angels and archangels may have gathered there,
Cherubim and seraphim thronged the air;
But His mother only, in her maiden bliss,
Worshipped the beloved with a kiss.

What can I give Him, poor as I am?
If I were a shepherd, I would bring a lamb;
If I were a Wise Man, I would do my part;
Yet what I can I give Him: I can give my heart.

Christina Rossetti wrote these memorable lines. The music is perfect, too. The music Midi file here.

I guess this is a guy question: Laura Ingraham or Monica Crowley? Laura seems more my type - a Yankee gal, a Dartmouth gal, and less intense than Monica. But I do love listening to Monica on Saturday afternoon on 770 from NYC. Here's one of my favorite Laura (post-cancer surgery) photos, which captures her spirit if not her loveliness:

 and here's a toothsome Monica photo:

Who ever said you can't be in love with more than one person at once? That person had no imagination whatsoever. Probably a Calvinist party-pooper. I love them both, in different ways, I think. And, as a brand-new but closet Mormon, I'd be happy to take 'em both on, and their incomes would help quite a bit with the new gun budget. Yes, that Serbu looks good: a guy has to protect what belongs to him.

With pin-up calendars for hospitalized vets. (h/t, Iowahawk)

This healthy-lookin gal Gina has really nice hats.

And what could be more health-promoting than cute girls?

You can buy one for yourself too, if you want one - but it's not tax-deductible. If you go there, tell 'em Dave from Iowahawk sent ya. Dave deserves the credit.

Shamefully, furtively, guiltily stolen in full from YARGB:

The New York Review of Books: A Mission to Convert: "The reason Dawkins thinks he has something to say about God is, of course, clear: he is an evolutionary biologist. And as we all know, Darwinism had an early and noisy run-in with religion. What Dawkins never seems to consider is that this incident might have been, in an important way, local and contingent. It might, in other words, have turned out differently, at least in principle. Believers could, for instance, have uttered a collective 'So what?' to evolution. Indeed some did. The angry reaction of many religious leaders to Darwinism had complex causes, involving equal parts ignorance, fear, politics, and the sheer shock of the new. The point is that it's far from certain that there is an ineluctable conflict between the acceptance of evolutionary mechanism and the belief that, as William James put it, 'the visible world is part of a more spiritual universe.' Instead, we and Dawkins might simply be living through the reverberations of an interesting, but not especially fundamental, bit of Victorian history. If so, evolutionary biology would enjoy no particularly exalted pulpit from which to preach about religion.

There is no conflict, and the whole Dawkins thing is silly. From what I've heard, scientists are just as religious, or non-religious, as the rest of the population. Science and religion exist in entirely different spheres of experience.

Thinking about Tuscany today. This is the Franciscan cloister of Santa Croce, in Firenze, taken last year. Who is entombed in the basilica? Among others, Michelangelo, Galileo, Enrico Fermi, and Machiavelli. A true Hall of Fame.

A villainously good post from Villainous Company. One quote:

Submission. What a stale, moldy, outdated, concept. I cringe, even while I'm typing it because I'm sure it will bring the wrath of God down on my poor head for daring even to suggest that I agree wholeheartedly, unreservedly, with the author on this score. Marriage is a parnership meant to last a lifetime, and it's not easy making a marriage work. It's a serious promise, not just a few silly words you toss off unadvisedly, thinking in the back of your mind, "Well gosh, now I kinda sorta love her, but if the feeling passes I can always get a divorce."

I believe you are promising, not to feel love, but to practice it, and that is an entirely different matter when you are looking at a four or five decade time horizon. On the day you marry, if both a man and wife aren't willing to put their marriage ahead of their careers, their children, and most importantly their own private selfish interests: if they aren't willing to submerge at least a part of themselves into this larger thing called "the marriage", it won't survive.

Does that mean you lose yourself? Of course not.

Read the entire, thoughtful piece.

Dalrymple, a retired psychiatrist, takes on the subject of evil through the lens of Rwanda. A quote:

The murderers were pleased with their work, they thought of all the corrugated iron roofing, cattle and so forth that they were ‘earning’ by it. They had never been so prosperous as during this period of slaughter and looting. Unaccustomed to eating meat very often (the Tutsi were pastoralists, the Hutu cultivators), they gorged themselves upon it, like hyenas finding an abandoned kill in the bush. Very few were their pauses for thought.

 

Let us not console ourselves with the thought that these were unsophisticated Africans, without the mental capacity to know better: in short, mere savages. Again, I do not know how much Hatzfeld has edited their words, but his perpetrator interlocutors seem to me more articulate than most of the people with whom I have had to deal in Britain as patients over the last decade and a half. Indeed, their language occasionally becomes poetic: though poetic language in this circumstance is mere euphemism.

Where does wealth come from? Not from natural resources, but from knowledge and culture. Shulz discusses David Warsh's new book at TCS. Quotes:

But what about growth itself--especially the sustained economic growth that we now take for granted (however sluggish it may be at times)? At an informal academic conference in Buffalo, N.Y., in 1988--assembled by Jack Kemp, then a member of the House--the Stanford economist Paul Romer presented a paper that ultimately turned the economic thinking on its ear. In Mr. Romer's work, as Mr. Warsh puts it, "the concept of intellectual property was, if not exactly 'discovered,' then formally characterized for the first time in the context of growth." Mr. Romer saw that knowledge was "both an input and output of production."

Thus instead of land, labor and capital--the traditional inputs of economic theory--it was "people, ideas and things" that mattered, driving technological change and entrepreneurial creativity. "No longer were the advantages of technical superiority to be understood as a case of 'market failure,'" Mr. Warsh writes. "They were part of the rules of the game." Such superiority was by its nature temporary--i.e., nonmonopolistic. New knowledge constantly trumped old, and the law (rightly) gave ideas only limited property-protection.

Read the whole thing.