Maggie's Farm

Kindness can become its own motive. We are made kind by being kind.

Eric Hoffer

Thanks for the fun pic, Loyal Reader. Remind me - how many millions did she and her hubbie make in real estate? 20? Gotta love the generosity of limo libs with OPM.  Now gotta get them peas planted, so there will be food for the babies when the Revolution comes. The seeds have soaked overnight, as recommended.

I'll vote for the guy. He is a sane and multi-talented heavyweight for whom politics has been only one of many interests and pursuits. Latest, via Instapundit.

And if he recants, and humbly apologizes for his McCain-Feingold vote, I might do more than just vote for him.  There is no valid defence for supporting McCain-Feingold, which I believe is both un-American and unconstitutional. (We like Rudy, and others, too, but Fred should be in the mix. Lots of good candidates. As long as you can express conservative principles - or anything -  better than our current Pres, we'll like ya.)

The ever-wise retired psychiatrist Ted Dalrymple takes a look at three books which document the decline of Britain, as their nanny-state government attempts to take over more and more of everyone's daily life. A quote from his piece, which focuses on education and policing:

Two of the books are by men who work in the front line of the public service, one in law enforcement and the other in education. Like me, they write pseudonymously. By describing their day-to-day routine, Police Constable David Copperfield and teacher Frank Chalk show how the British state now works, or rather operates, with devastating effect on the British character.

Copperfield, whose website is so annoying to politicians in power that they feel obliged to denigrate it in Parliament, and whose book is titled Wasting Police Time, is an ordinary constable in an ordinary British town. As he makes clear in his book, very little of his time at work is spent in activity that could deter crime, discover those who commit it, or bring them to justice. His induction into the culture of politically correct bureaucratic incompetence was immediate on joining up: he had naively supposed that the main purpose of his job was the protection of the public by the suppression of malefaction, instead of which he discovered that it was to “set about changing the racist, homophobic and male-dominated world in which we lived.” The first three days of his training were about prejudice and discrimination—in short, “diversity training.” There never was to be any training in the mere investigation of crimes, a minor and secondary part of modern police work in Britain.

The message seems to be that if you try to do everything, you do nothing right. Blair has been an utter disaster for the UK. Dalrymple's whole piece at City Journal here. Those of us for whom Britain is our ancestral homeland read such things and weep for the Brits, who seem determined to commit cultural suicide.

Viacom's case against YouTube. Sounds compelling to me. If stuff isn't public domain, it's private. But the way stuff moves around these internets, it can be hard to tell.

How to juggle three balls. This is great. Very clear instruction. Get off the dang computer, find some tennis balls, and teach the whole family to juggle. Update:  The Dylanologist would prefer to juggle oranges, heads of lettuce, eggs, or 20 year-old blond Swedish nannies. On the other hand, Roger says:

Tennis balls make lousy juggling balls. Go to the sporting goods store and buy three lacrosse balls. Get two orange and one white. You can use the white one to see how far along in any progression you are, and eventually you can use it to do unusual throws. Tennis balls don't weigh enough and bounce out of your hands. A lacrosse ball is heavy and sits right in there. It bounces, but not like a superball.

Also, magic/joke/book stores sell little square beanbags for juggling. They are great for learning, as they do not roll or bounce away when you drop them. Lacrosse balls at the beach in the sand are the ne plus ultra schizzle, though.

Remember how the Vernal Equinox works?

Druze, Bedouins, Circassians, etc: What's the deal with the Israeli Arabs, and did Jimmy Carter have a point or not? Berdichevsky at New English Review

2006 was the Chinese Year of the Dog, but we never highlighted all of the sporting breeds that we enjoy, so we will sporadically continue our Dog of the Week feature until we have done so.

Weimaraners are among the most attractive of all dog breeds, with their grey ghostly appearance. Bred mainly as pointers by Weimar aristocrats who were very protective of the bloodlines, they also make good retrievers but are not really ideal family dogs because of their energy level and "assertiveness". They are loaded with muscle and need lots of exercise. A daily walk is not sufficient.

Eisenhower was fond of Weimaraners. So is artist William Wegman.

I have not hunted with one for years, but I'd be happy to, anytime.

You can read more about Weimaraners here.

Lower image: a Wegman Weimaraner

Radical Kids: It's about getting chicks

Interview tips for college seniors

The Americans with No Abilities Act of 2006

Wheelbarrows

IQ

A case for plug-in hybrid cars, with the history of automobile power, by Andrew Frank at American Scientist. My question: If the plug-in power comes from gas- and oil-fueled power plants, what's the difference? Except that it might be easier to control emissions at the plants.

He begins thus:

The idea of a hybrid vehicle—one that propels itself using both a conventional engine and an electric motor—is not new. Indeed, some hybrid automobiles were produced more than a century ago, when the internal combustion engine was still in its infancy. These cars were designed to address the limited range of existing electric vehicles and the difficulty of starting the early engines, which had to be cranked by hand (a procedure that resulted in not a few broken arms). The early hybrid vehicles, and the purely electric cars that dominated the fledgling automobile industry early in the 20th century, eventually gave way to a proliferation of cars based on the now-ubiquitous internal combustion engine, a development made possible by the relatively low cost and widespread availability of gasoline.

Read the whole thing - link above.

As quoted by Rick Moran in his piece on the House vote:

“You really have two options here: One is that you can vote for a change of course here and say we’re going to find a way out of Iraq, or, two, you can vote against it and hand George Bush a victory,” said Jon Soltz, a veteran of the Iraq war and co-founder of VoteVets.org, a group that opposes the war.

I think that quote sums it up. There is an interesting ambiguity in Soltz's statement, though: does he mean deprive Bush of a victory in the House, or a victory in the Middle East? Or both?

Roger Simon reports on the hate-filled mood in DC these days.

We try not to worry too much about keeping up with day-to-day news, but the House vote today was shameful.

With 20-20 hindsight, we can all have our own opinions on Iraq, but turning one's back on one's country in a time of war is contemptible. I don't think this has ever happened in American history - with or without peanut storage and spinach farmer subsidies and the whatever billions of vote-buying (with your hard-earned money and mine) required to produce a plan for defeat.

Why not put the energy into helping figure out how to be successful? 

It makes me sad. I can't imagine how soldiers and their families must feel to have half of their government rooting for their failure. No wonder people hate politics and politicians.

And, to be a bit self-revealing, the idea that Osama and Al Quaida in Iraq are popping champagne tonight with the Dems sickens me.

There is something non-serious and high-school-ish about all of this. 

h/t, No Pasaran:

Our blog friend and Physics Prof Lubos Motl on Al Gore:

This Gentleman is a mad megalomaniac and it is surprising to see what kind of a special treatment such an insane person can get in the Parliament of the most powerful and advanced country in the world.

Read the whole thing. I agree with Lubos. In the clips I saw of his testimony to Congress, his tone had that eerily calm, certain tone you hear from psychotics about their alien abductions. The absence of any self-doubt or humility is the tell.

What happened to this guy?

From the always-interesting Edward Luttwak in Harper's. It begins:

Modern armed forces continue to be structured for large-scale war, but advanced societies whose small families lack expendable children have a very low tolerance for casualties. Even supposedly warlike Americans gravely count casualties in Iraq that in three years have yet to reach 3,000—fewer than were lost in many a single day of battle in past wars. Fortunately, this refusal to spill the blood needed to fuel battles diminishes the likelihood that advanced societies will deliberately set out to fight one another (pas des enfants, pas des Suisses, pas de guerre) unless they are somehow able to convince themselves that a war could be entirely or very largely aerial and naval. Such wars, however, are difficult to imagine, except when islands are involved, as in a China-Taiwan war, which is very improbable for its own reasons. Air and naval forces can certainly be employed advantageously against any less advanced enemy incautious enough to rely on a conventional defense, conducted by regular forces, but in that context as well there must be severe doubts about the continued usefulness of the ground forces of advanced countries that are intolerant of casualties. It is easy enough to blockade the enemy, to successfully bomb all the right nodal points and shut down electrical, transportation, and communications networks. Air strikes can disable runways and destroy both sheltered and unsheltered aircraft, ballistic missiles, and nuclear installations. Air power can also sink warships, or rout any mechanized forces deployed in the open, as the United States did with Iraq in 1991 and partly in 2003, and as it could do with Iran. No real role would remain for ground forces except to dislodge the enemy from any territory he had occupied, or to occupy his own territory. That, however, is bound to cost casualties that might not be tolerated; it is also bound to provoke an insurgency.

Insurgencies understand this very well. A thoughtful piece. Read the whole thing. As we always say at Maggie's Farm, "Hope is not a plan." Neither is hopelessness, of course.

"That's the problem with moralistic, messianic crusading - people expect you to live up to it."

Glenn Reynolds, re Al Gore's refusal to reduce his energy use