Sunday, March 4. 2007
Some of our readers enjoyed my trip to the Flower District a week ago, so I thought I might show some of the outcomes of the big flower show. After many years of helping out, us husbands learn to appreciate the artistry and thought that the wives put into their work. The Garden Club of America has no male members, nor will it ever have any. A bunch of radical, flower-growing feminists for sure. Have no fear: I'd hate to see the Lefty gals try to take over the GCA. They would all end up with flower clippers embedded in their unlovely bodies by the hands of these steel magnolias. I have winning samples from several of the competition classes. Forgive my poor photography - I will never get past the snapshot level. This creation is 8' tall. 
This one is also 8':  This one is about 30'': 
and this one is about 36": 
and here's another of the giant red ones. The gent obscures the red tropical flowers spilling out of the paint can: 
Reality check, from Flopping Aces. The MSM aren't talking about it, and the anti-war folks are strangely silent. Who would not like to be in that sniper's shoes? Photo from the piece. 
 Finding Osama: Trying again? NeverYet Melted. He is too tall to hide from a daisy-cutter, or so one might think.
No region will be spared. Tim Blair. I am scared. Help me! Why large businesses like big government. Gen Petraeus' message to his troops. Lib. Leanings In the Crime Capital of the US, Mayor Nagin decides to hold up the US Govt. Meaning you and me. We somehow never linked this Lego story, and most have probably seen it by now. I like Anchoress' take on it. My opinion? Do just like Mao did: Make the teachers custodians and the custodians teachers. Bill Maher. Never seen him on TV (and, like most of us at Maggie's, I refuse to waste any life time watching TV, and do not even own one), but I understand that he is is a big deal of some sort. If he likes the idea of assassination of American politicians, he is not sick - he has a twisted, criminal mind. Whoever he is. The political challenges of the surge. Jules. How did this place change from the cradle of civilization to a place incapable of civilization? Wealthy Brits continue to abandon the UK. Tim Worstall suggests facetiously that this might be good for equality. Cherokee Nation votes to expel descendents of their black slaves. Chew on that one for a while. Justice Thomas talks about himself. Althouse. I'd like to buy the guy a beer. Weenie culture. Quoted from a piece at Fred on Everything, via Small Boiled Polar Bears: Not too long ago, Americans were a hardy breed—foolhardy at times, but the one comes with the other. Now we see attempts to eliminate all risk everywhere. Cities fill in the deep ends of swimming pools and remove diving boards. We require that bicyclists wear helmets, fear second-hand smoke and the violence that is dodge ball. Warnings abound against going outside without sun block. To anyone who grew up in the Sixties or before, the new fearfulness is incomprehensible. The explanation I think is the feminization of society, which seems to be inseparable from modernity. The nature of masculinity is to prize freedom over security; of femininity, security over freedom. Add that the American character of today powerfully favors regulation by the group in preference to individual choice. Note that we do not require that cars be equipped with seat belts and then let individuals decide whether to use them; we enforce their use. The result is compulsory Mommyism, very much a part of today’s America. Image demonstrates the ongoing usefulness of newspapers in the internet age
Saturday, March 3. 2007
 A Christian urologist responds to an entitlement-minded guy who complains about the fee for an elective surgical procedure - a vasectomy reversal. Price, Value and Grace, at The Doctor is In. Wow. A sample:
I greatly appreciate your note, and understand well your frustration at the high cost of reversal surgery. To you these fees seem unreasonably high, an insurmountable barrier to the deepest need and desire of your heart. By any objective standard, my fees for this procedure are reasonable. My current expertise in this area has been acquired through a long and arduous education and training experience, augmented by nearly 30 years of experience in performing this microsurgical procedure, which is extremely demanding — perhaps one of the most difficult procedures in all of surgery, regardless of specialty. There are perhaps no more than a few dozen surgeons in the world who bring this kind of experience to the restoration of fertility after vasectomy — yet many surgeons with far less experience, using cruder and often unsuccessful surgical techniques, are charging as much or more than this for the procedure. Top specialists in this field — which you know if you have researched these costs — not uncommonly charge two, three, sometimes four or more times as much as the fees I have quoted. Do I believe that many of these charge far too much? Most definitely — but most have earned that right through rigorous training, long hours, and hard work. They most certainly have the right to charge what they will — as you have the right to have this procedure, or not. So I make no apologies for my fees. You say I do not live in your world, which is most certainly true; you also do not live in mine. Could you sustain the $40,000 a month which it costs to keep the doors of my small, efficient, one-doctor practice open? Do you believe these fees go merely to line my pockets, to keep me in Porsches and luxury yachts? Believe what you will, of course — but as the apostle Paul says in 1st Timothy (5:18), “The laborer deserves his wages.” The God who judges you also judges me — and before Him I am confident that these fees are just and not extortionary.
How many people do you know who complain about the price of medical care, but not about the price of a new car, or a new large-screen TV, or a new boat, or their estate-planning lawyer? Read the whole piece.
 People who would rather suppress ideas than discuss and debate ideas - once they have learned something - do not belong in any university in the Western world. Oxford Prof. Coleman strikes back at the student brownshirts. View from the Right.
He wants to expell those who work to suppress his ideas and speech. Profs are not known for having cojones. This fellow has a pair, and is our hero. We need more Prof. Colemans in the US.
Jesus meets The Terminator. A Youtube. And, related: "I totally found the tomb of Jesus." http://www.scriptoriumdaily.com/middlebrow/archives/i-totally-found-the-grave-of-jesus/ A very green solution to the human contribution to unpleasant greenhouse gasses. YouTube Canadadadanian wisdom: SDA on http://www.smalldeadanimals.com/archives/005686.html Britain to permit animal-human genetic mixes. Um, isn't that a tautology? Consider the moral issues here. It's all beyond my feeble animal brain. 2/3 of Americans are investors in the stock, bond or money markets. Ain't capitalism great? But some teachers don't think so. Who do they think makes the money to pay their salaries? Vaginal tightness, Myra Bradwell, and Mary Todd Lincoln (who did have a little emotional problem, I suspect). S,C andA. Bipolar or something. Her decorating and clothing bills from her routine shopping trips to NYC drove Abe nuts, and drove him deep into debt while President. She was known to spend a year of his salary on a single trip. I wonder whether those debts were ever paid. He had been a hugely successful railroad lawyer, but the big job in DC didn't pay very well. A smoking ban in Virginia? The primary home of the transfer of the joys of tobacco from the Indians to Europe? What is this world coming to? Although I know the Pilgrim women in MA smoked Indian tobacco too. Yes, they grew it in MA - as is still done today. Premium cigar-wrapping tobacco in the Connecticut River valley. Tobacco should be a multiculturally sacred tradition - at least as sacred as the right to pray to Mecca at Logan Airport. Islam flourishing among American blacks. Lovely. What an excellent foundation for life. Jesus was for our Grandma. Mohammed is hip. Isn't he? Like James Dean, or something? And speaking of Islam, from http://www.americanthinker.com/2007/03/theyll_never_stop_saying_shari.html Rather than solving the problem, many have foolishly allowed Sharia's gradual unchecked spread in the names of diversity and tolerance. Unfortunately, as this dark-age jurisprudence is totally incompatible with any democratic society, those buying into this creeping multicultist folly are doing so at the peril of their own heritage and freedom. Of course, it comes as little surprise that anti-American countries like France have all but surrendered. Yet, ironically, it also appears that our best ally in the war against Islamic extremism may unwittingly be among our worst in the struggle against its fundamental objective - a world ruled by the strict Islamic Law of Sharia
Steven Spielberg had a stolen Norman Rockwell painting in his collection. What a bizarre story. "Russian Schoolroom," a Rockwell painting stolen from a gallery in the St. Louis suburb of Clayton, Mo., more than three decades ago, was found in Oscar-winning filmmaker Steven Spielberg's art collection, the FBI announced Friday. Spielberg purchased the painting in 1989 from a legitimate dealer and didn't know it was stolen until his staff spotted its image last week on an FBI Web site listing stolen works of art, the bureau said in a statement.
The painting was commissioned by Look Magazine in 1967. Spielberg is a longtime collector of Rockwell paintings, and helped to found the Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. Good for him. Norman Rockwell was an artist and illustrator of great intuitive insight, famous for painting scenes from everyday life that encapsulate great themes. In 1967, the Soviet Union was still a going concern. Leonid Brezhnev was advancing Marxist insurgencies in Southeast Asia, Africa, Latin America. The point of the Soviet bayonet was prodding the United States through a proxy war in Vietnam. Being a closed society, the Soviet Union was able to sow the seeds of confusion about its aims and its depredations on the lives of its own people in the open western press.
Continue reading "Do Kulaks Love Their Children Too? The stolen Rockwell painting"
 An Amish boy and his father were in a mall. They were amazed by almost everything they saw, but especially by two shiny, silver walls that could move apart and then slide back together again.
The boy asked, "What is this, Father?" The father (never having seen an elevator) responded, "Son, I have never seen anything like this in my life, I don't know what it is." While the boy and his father were watching with amazement, a fat old lady in a wheel chair moved up to the moving walls and pressed a button. The walls opened and the lady rolled between them into a small room. The walls closed and the boy and his father watched the small circular numbers above the walls light up sequentially. They continued to watch until it reached the last number and then the numbers began to light in the reverse order. Finally the walls opened up again and a gorgeous 24-year-old blonde stepped out.
The father said quietly to his son....."Go get your mother."
 Although I suspect that "climate change" is of no significance, and represents just little blips on an ever-changing graph, I have a question for everyone who discusses the subject: Why does it matter whether warming or cooling is made-made or not?
Isn't there an assumption in that question that if, say, periods of warming correlate with solar radiation, that is somehow better or different or less scary - like organic spinach or something? Why should it matter? Warmth is warmth. Besides everybody going out to plant a palm tree to make them feel better, I propose an international effort to send fleets of fire-engine rocket ships to the sun to cool it off a tad. Not so much as to put the fire out, though. This would be a good project for the UN. Well, gotta run. Need to complete the documents for my new carbon-offset company so I can cash in before the fad goes the way of the hula-hoop. (Image: Palm trees in Chatham, MA)
(Borrowed from a cartoon selection at Flopping Aces)
 The guy who wrote The Soldier:
If I should die, think only this of me:
That there's some corner of a foreign field
That is forever England. There shall be
In that rich earth a richer dust concealed;
A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,
Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam;
A body of England's, breathing English air,
Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home.
And think, this heart, all evil shed away,
A pulse in the eternal mind, no less
Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England given;
Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day;
And laughter, learnt of friends; and gentleness,
In hearts at peace, under an English heaven. also wrote this (excerpted from The Old Vicarage, Grantchester): God! I will pack, and take a train,
And get me to England once again!
For England's the one land, I know,
Where men with Splendid Hearts may go;
And Cambridgeshire, of all England,
The shire for Men who Understand;
And of THAT district I prefer
The lovely hamlet Grantchester.
For Cambridge people rarely smile,
Being urban, squat, and packed with guile;
And Royston men in the far South
Are black and fierce and strange of mouth;
At Over they fling oaths at one,
And worse than oaths at Trumpington,
And Ditton girls are mean and dirty,
And there's none in Harston under thirty,
And folks in Shelford and those parts
Have twisted lips and twisted hearts,
And Barton men make Cockney rhymes,
And Coton's full of nameless crimes,
And things are done you'd not believe
At Madingley on Christmas Eve.
Strong men have run for miles and miles,
When one from Cherry Hinton smiles;
Strong men have blanched, and shot their wives,
Rather than send them to St. Ives;
Strong men have cried like babes, bydam,
To hear what happened at Babraham.
But Grantchester! ah, Grantchester!
There's peace and holy quiet there,
Great clouds along pacific skies,
And men and women with straight eyes,
Lithe children lovelier than a dream,
A bosky wood, a slumbrous stream,
And little kindly winds that creep
Round twilight corners, half asleep.
In Grantchester their skins are white;
They bathe by day, they bathe by night;
The women there do all they ought;
The men observe the Rules of Thought.
They love the Good; they worship Truth;
They laugh uproariously in youth;
(And when they get to feeling old,
They up and shoot themselves, I'm told) . . . His grave, on the Greek island of Skyros, bears these words: 'Here lies the servant of God, sub-lieutenant in the English Navy,
who died for the deliverance of Constantinople from the Turks'
One woman to another at a social event tonight: "I've decided that our new addition will have all-electric heat so we don't use oil and cause warming." (I am not kidding. I heard this. Where I live, 100% of our electric is from gas, coal, and oil.)
Friday, March 2. 2007
Is Bush too Christian to be an effective president? I know this is a slightly provocative question. I have never met the man, but I do respect his seriousness about his job and I do believe that he is greatly misunderestimated. But I'd like raise the issue. In at least two critical areas - illegal immigration and defence against Jihad, Bush has been unwilling to be tough and ruthless in the American interest - in the interest of the folks who pay his salary. FDR would have flattened Sadr City years ago, and Truman would have too. And certainly FDR would have closed our borders tight. He did. Is Bush "too compassionate" and too Christian to be a strong President?
This Roy Lichtenstein lifted from our cousin Mr. Free Market: 
Dissect them alive: A Japanese soldier remembers the war. If you have a strong stomach, read it...and enjoy your Lexus or your Toyota.
 It's Friday, and early Spring in lovely Hartford, CT. How do I know? I hear the spring song of the Song Sparrow and of the Cardinal, and they are telling to me to think about planting some Sugar Snap peas soon. And soon our local Box Turtles will be clomping out of their cosy winter dens in the leaf and mulch piles, in their Wellies, looking for slugs and early shoots in the garden and hoping I will toss them a rotten tomato from the kitchen.
What to do on a dark rainy day like this, besides work? Well, we can reminisce about Fridays of old at Sippican Cottage, while waiting for Dust My Broom's Friday Blues and Beer series. And we can reminisce about the 20th anniversary of Plato and Shakespeare scholar Allan Blooms' The Closing of the American Mind with R.R. Reno at First Things (h/t, View from 1776). An important book, and a best-seller, somehow. A few quotes from the Reno piece: Bloom’s book was a real sensation and a surprise bestseller. Looking back, I can see why. The Closing was more than a highbrow attack on contemporary academic careerism (a la Jacques Barzun), a middlebrow defense of great books (a la E. D. Hirsch), or a populist exposé of tenured radicals and puerile campus ideologues (a la David Horowitz). The gist of Bloom’s polemic—and the book was nothing if not a long, erudite, and hyperbolic polemic—was a brief against the cultural revolution of the 1960s. He said out loud what liberal elite culture could only regard as heresy: The supposed idealism of the 1960s was, in fact, a new barbarism. Whatever moral and spiritual seriousness the long tradition of American pragmatism had left intact in university life, the anti-culture of the left destroyed. The result? Higher education has become, argued Bloom, the professional training of clever and sybaritic animals, who drink, vomit, and fornicate in the dorms by night while they posture critically and ironically by day. Bloom identified moral relativism as dogma that blessed what he called “the civilized reanimalization of man.” He saw a troubling, dangerous, and soulless apathy that pleasured itself prudently with passing satisfactions (“Always use condoms!” says the sign by the dispenser in the bathroom) but was moved by no desire to know good or evil, truth or falsehood, beauty or ugliness. I remember reading Bloom in 1987, feeling as though he was describing what I was experiencing as a young graduate teaching assistant. Bright, energetic, ambitious Yale students could master material with amazing speed. They could discuss brilliantly. They could write effective, well-researched papers. But they possessed an amazing ability to understand without being moved, to experience without judging, to self-consciously put forward their own convictions as mere opinions. On the whole, they seemed to have interior lives of Jell-O.
 The “carbon credits” scam actually increases pollution.
Simple example: let’s say companies are required to reduce their emissions to X parts per million (ppm). Now let’s say that Company A, or an underdeveloped agricultural nation without flatulent cows, already operates entirely on hydroelectric power and produces zero ppm. Similar-sized Company B operates on coal and produces an excessive 1.5X ppm. With carbon trading, dirty Company B pays A (who already doesn’t pollute) and gets the right to increase its pollution to 2X ppm through burning cheaper and dirtier coal, for example. If B couldn’t buy carbon credits it would have to reduce its emissions to 1X ppm (and B taken with A would average 0.5X ppm).
Carbon trading allows people to continue to pollute and the atmosphere to continue to degrade. Non-polluters make money, but my lungs see no change. Then they made it even dumber – funds that buy shares in green companies (like enterprises which plant trees) can sell carbon credits to polluters and allow them to keep polluting! Finally, if that’s not bad enough, now we have Al Gore buying his carbon credits from his own investment fund, Generation Investment Management LLP of which he is chairman and a founding partner. Generation is a boutique international investment firm that invests other peoples’ money, for a fee, into the stocks of ‘green’ companies. Al uses these credits to compensate for flying himself and his wife around in private jets, driving his SUVs and compensating for his famous $1,200/month electric bills. See http://www.ecotality.com/blog/?p=350 and http://neveryetmelted.com/?p=2237. What is clear is that Al himself doesn’t believe his own propaganda. Ecotality said it this way: Hypocrisy, after all, abounds. Even Gore’s huge electric power usage at his Nashville home isn’t the only example of how the prophet of environmental doom hasn’t always lived as if he believes his message. During the eight years Gore was vice president, he voted in four national elections. Every single time, he and his entourage and security detail and accompanying media flew to Nashville on a large government jet, burning thousands of gallons of fossil fuels and pumping huge amounts of carbon emissions directly into the earth’s atmosphere, and then rode in a caravan of fossil fuel-burning vehicles from Nashville International Airport about 40 miles east on I-40 to Carthage, Tennessee, so the local and national TV cameras could get video of him at the voting booth. And then the whole caravan headed back to Nashville for the plane ride back to DC. Traffic had to be halted on Nashville’s interstates and side streets every time - sometimes during rush hour - idling thousand of vehicles that just sat there, burning fossil fuels and emitting carbon pollution, just so Gore could create a media photo-op.
He could have instead voted by mailing in an absentee ballot - that would have been the “green” thing to do - and a skillful press aide could easily have turned that into a widely publicized pro-green photo-op. Image: Gwynnie's favorite location for, and method of, carbon pollution.
 The "functioning core" of the world economy. Big Lizards. And its history.
Arthur Schlesinger: Rick Moran has an excellent obit Re Dr. Bliss' piece on Good Spanking yesterday, related thoughts from Code Monkey Been to Gabon recently? They have 28 gorillas, and a darn nice preserve, and all the game meat you can eat. I would go in a flash - if invited. Conservative anti-poverty programs. Chequerboard. Just one of many conservative ideas Bush could have championed. This is what should happen when an ACLU-type runs a school like William and Mary. I never heard of Katie Couric or ever saw her on TV, but it sounds like she is making a name for herself. Family-First Conservatism. Interesting idea. Evangelical Outpost. This might be what I think, but never really articulated. Jews still using blood of Christian children in their matzohs, according to Egyptian "researcher." LGF Al Gore said: "I think if it is important to look at the pressures that made it more likely than not that mainstream journalists in the United States would convey a wholly inaccurate conclusion about the most important moral, ethical, spiritual and political issue humankind has ever faced."
Meanwhile, along with our Gwynnie, Austin Bay and Protein wisdom each take a look at the reality of "carbon offsets."
Thursday, March 1. 2007
 Maggie's Farm is blocked - censored - in China. No wonder when I check the Sitemeter world map of visits to Maggie's, China is a big dark blotch, same as Africa.
I hate to think of all of those people being deprived of our handy-dandy farming advice. Maybe they don't like our Farmalls and our International Harvesters. Good ol' Right Wing Nation found the the site that tests whether your blog or website is blocked in China. Who does this for them? Google?
“If someone came into your house and offered you a cocktail of butanol, iso amyl alcohol, hexanol, phenyl ethanol, tannin, benzyl alcohol, caffeine, geraniol, quercetin, 3-galloyl epicatechin, 3-galloyl epigallocatchin and inorganic salts, would you take it?”
Question was raised here, h/t Junk Science. Sure you would drink it. It's a cup of tea.
Impartiality is a pompous name for indifference, which is an elegant name for ignorance. G.K. Chesterton (h/t, Samizdata)
Iowahawk has a plan to save Gaia. It's about carbon credits, natch. Good timing for Iowahawk's piece, as we learn today that the Rev. Al buys his carbon credits from himself! We told ya that he doesn't believe his own BS. Just another political con man, doing a "virtuous" schtick. As the NJ notes below, if he really believed it, and if he were truly worried, he would live differently. 
 Why John McCain's campaign is going down the tubes. Ace.
Department of Geeky chairs. Marg. Revolution "It's exceedingly hard to run a business." Sippican Sissy takes the David Brooks piece a bit further. SISU Powerline reminisces about the global cooling crisis of a few years ago. Yes indeed: temps are always going either up or down. Photos of Fort Drum troops in Afhanistan in February "Evil right-wingers just don't understand carbon offsets." SDA. No, because we're too stooopid. Doing Democracy. One of the books that tells leftist activists how to take over American institutions. (thanks, Reader) Thornton on suicidal good intentions, at Augean Stables No Pasaran found some great quotes about Europe's view of the USA: As I see it, having visited the United States, the great advantage it's citizens possess is the ability to succeed, should they so wish. There is no class culture, consequently those who are successful are admired and indeed encouraged to achieve more. Envy and jealousy simply do not exist. It is something the rest of the world cannot understand and this is manifested by the so called "hatred" expressed against a country which is totally different to the class system which dominates all other nations.
and The truth is it's not the US that's arrogant, it's the romantics that want a cause that exaults humanity into some kind of superman, when what is actually being offered is the chance to be ordinary.
Boston's institutional architecture. Is there any worse outside of the old Soviet bloc? Coyote Bush lives greener than Gore. Funny, but true. Not that it matters. What concerns me is that maybe Bush takes it seriously, while clearly Al secretly knows it's a crock: we always give more cred to what people do than to what they say. Here are some photos of one of Al's three houses (h/t, Gay Patriot). As Coulter said of Al's houses, etc: It’s great that he’s using solar panels and all that, but notice he’s not disputing how huge his electric bill still is. What the hell is he doing in there? Is he a Terminator from the future and requires constant recharging? (That would explain pretty much everything.)
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