Thursday, May 31. 2007
"Not since I was 16 have I wanted so badly to be on my own." Powerline's Scott Johnson, in response to Hillary Clinton's statement this week: "It's time for a new beginning, for an end to government of the few, by the few and for the few, time to reject the idea of an "on your own" society and to replace it with shared responsibility for shared prosperity. I prefer a "we're all in it together" society." How is that as a contrast to the earlier QQQ today from our hero Maggie Thatcher in 1980?
 Al Gore flunked out of Vanderbilt Divinity School, then dropped out of Vanderbilt Law School.
I didn't know those facts. He ain't qualified to either preach to, or lecture at me. By the way, how did he do in Physics 101?
"It is not the State that creates a healthy society. When the State grows too powerful people feel they count for less and less. The State drains society, not only of its wealth but also of initiative, of energy, the will to improve and innovate as well as to preserve what is best. Our aim is to let people feel that they count for more and more." Margaret Thatcher (h/t, Samizdata)
Fascinating video via Ace. One guy says that the impetus for the anti-amnesty storm, from all sides of the political spectrum, is the unspoken motive of "it's cultural". It is partly cultural, for sure, which is why we often term it an "invasion." On the other hand, the amnesty bill is purely politically-driven. With black votes securely on the Dem plantation, everybody wants to pander to the (present and future) Mexican vote, which is now of sufficient size to determine elections.
Since we're on the subject of dams this week, the Johnstown Flood was 118 years ago, today. The dam broke.
"You have given everything to me.
What can I do for You?
You have given me eyes to see.
What can I do for You?
Pulled me out of bondage and You made me renewed inside,
Filled up a hunger that had always been denied,
Opened up a door no man can shut and You opened it up so wide
And You've chosen me to be among the few.
What can I do for You?
You have laid down Your life for me.
What can I do for You?
You have explained every mystery.
What can I do for You?
Soon as a man is born, you know the sparks begin to fly,
He gets wise in his own eyes and he's made to believe a lie.
Who would deliver him from the death he's bound to die?
Well, You've done it all and there's no more anyone can pretend to do.
What can I do for You?
You have given all there is to give.
What can I do for You?
You have given me life to live.
How can I live for You?
I know all about poison, I know all about fiery darts,
I don't care how rough the road is, show me where it starts,
Whatever pleases You, tell it to my heart.
Well, I don't deserve it but I sure did make it through.
What can I do for You?" "What Can I Do For You," from 1980's Saved, the second of Dylan's three Christian-content albums, and the least well regarded despite the presence of several excellent songs. Here's a youtube from a 1980 performance in Toronto.
A propos of the post of the WSJ article yesterday about the Greenies who want to get rid of the Klamath River dams, here is a photo essay of what one of those dam projects, the Boyle Dam, has done to the Klamath river. It isn't pretty. Photo below of the Boyle Dam. 
 Microsoft launches Virtual 3D New York City. Flares
If Liberals want to imitate Europe, here are some ideas worth imitating: Lowering taxes They will believe anything in Russia. Man, that is dumb. Do not eat any food from China, Part 5. Or any food in China. What is the ideal climate for the earth? Damn good point, from yet another skeptical scientist with the big picture in mind. Blue Crab. Sometimes I think the whole world is insane. Ferdinand the Bull and other children's books, and Iraq. Excellent piece from neoneo. Academic moonbattery isn't as bad as you might think. RWN. Sharpen up your message, Fred. Powerline What are people's images of God? Interesting, and not what you might think.
Wednesday, May 30. 2007
Ardent Greenies find fault with every power source except solar panels, which are trivial. In the end, I think they want us to live in the stone age. On Maggie's Farm, of course, we have our own mini-fusion reactor in the basement which provides all of our power needs along with an endless source of truly hot water. It is entirely safe, designed by Arnie, our brilliant tractor-repair guy, constructed from old cast-iron tractor parts, and any dangerous radiation is fully contained by solid hardwood planks. The cracks are secured with duct tape, and all is painted with a coat of lead paint, just to be extra-safe. But Greenies hate nuclear, and I don't know why - France gets 70% of their power from nuke plants. Greenies don't like windmills. They hate oil, gas, and coal - and wood. They make laws (Belgium) that you cannot cook on a grill. In today's article in the WSJ, they want to tear down the Klamath River hydroelectric dams. Fine - but propose a non-frivolous alternative and don't play childish fantasy games like telling me to change my lightbulbs or to plant a tree. A quote from the article: Al Gore has been hectoring Americans to pare back their lifestyles to fight global warming. But if Mr. Gore wants us to rethink our priorities in the face of this mother of all environmental threats, surely he has convinced his fellow greens to rethink theirs, right? Wrong. If their opposition to the Klamath hydroelectric dams in the Pacific Northwest is any indication, the greens, it appears, are just as unwilling to sacrifice their pet causes as a Texas rancher is to sacrifice his pickup truck. If anything, the radicalization of the environmental movement is the bigger obstacle to addressing global warming than the allegedly gluttonous American way of life. Once regarded as the symbol of national greatness, hydroelectric dams have now fallen into disrepute for many legitimate reasons. They are enormously expensive undertakings that would never have taken off but for hefty government subsidies. Worse, they typically involve changing the natural course of rivers, causing painful disruptions for towns and tribes. But tearing down the Klamath dams, the last of which was completed in 1962, will do more harm than good at this stage. These dams provide cheap, renewable energy to 70,000 homes in Oregon and California. Replacing this energy with natural gas -- the cleanest fossil-fuel source -- would still pump 473,000 tons of additional carbon dioxide into the atmosphere every year. This is roughly equal to the annual emissions of 102,000 cars. Given this alternative, one would think that environmentalists would form a human shield around the dams to protect them. Instead, they have been fighting tooth-and-nail to tear them down because the dams stand in the way of migrating salmon. Environmentalists don't even let many states, including California, count hydro as renewable. They have rejected all attempts by PacifiCorp, the company that owns the dams, to take mitigation steps such as installing $350 million fish ladders to create a salmon pathway. Klamath Riverkeeper, a group that is part of an environmental alliance headed by Robert Kennedy Jr., has sued a fish hatchery that the California Department of Fish and Wildlife runs -- and PacifiCorp is required to fund -- on grounds that it releases too many algae and toxic discharges. The hatchery produces at least 25% of the chinook salmon catch every year. Closing it will cause fish populations to drop further, making the demolition of the dams even more likely. But the end of the Klamath won't mean the end of the dam saga -- it is the big prize that environmentalists are coveting to take their antidam crusade to the next level. "This would represent the largest and most ambitious dam removal project in the country, if not the world," exults Steve Rothert of American Rivers. The other dams on the hit list include the O'Shaughnessy Dam in Yosemite's Hetch Hetchy Valley that services San Francisco, Elwha River dam in Washington and the Matilija Dam in Southern California. Large hydro dams supply about 20% of California's power (and 10% of America's). If they are destroyed, California won't just have to find some other way to fulfill its energy needs. It will have to do so while reducing its carbon footprint to meet the ambitious CO2 emission-reduction targets that Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has set. Mr. Schwarzenegger has committed the Golden State to cutting greenhouse gas emissions 80% below 1990 levels by 2050 -- a more stringent requirement than even in the Kyoto Protocol.
Hey, Arnold - 80%? Pretty to think so, but it will never happen. The whole piece is subscription-only in the WSJ.
Played hookie from work today with a couple of Maggie's Farmers and friends. It's getting late in the spring season here for trout. This is our ultra-secret ultra private trout stream in CT. The old story is you tell the wife that you're taking the day off to do some things with friends. She asks, slightly annoyed by the irresponsibility, what you're doing. You reply, "Well, we're going over to the Indian casino, and I hope you don't mind our acting foolish once in a while." She says "OK, I do not approve, but have fun and don't come home drunk." Then you sneak off and do what you really want - trout fishing. Why are my photos today blue-tinged and out of focus? I need to get this camera fixed. 
 MIT prof Alex Byrne takes on the subject of meta-ethics in the Boston Review. Byrne is of the view that moral law is built into the structure of nature itself (which I would hear translated as "the Creator made it that way"). One quote:
Everything, in short, is a natural phenomenon, an aspect of the universe as revealed by the natural sciences. In particular, morality is a natural phenomenon. Moral facts or truths—that boiling babies is wrong, say—are not additions to the natural world, they are already there in the natural world, even if they are not explicitly mentioned in scientific theories. Fundamental sciences such as particle physics and molecular biology do not speak explicitly speak of sand dunes, or boiling water, or lobsters, but facts about sand dunes and the like are implicitly settled by more fundamental facts: arrange bits of matter a certain way and you have an eroding sand dune, or boiling water, or (here the arrangement needs to be very complicated indeed) a lively lobster. And, presumably, the same goes for the moral facts. But how can morality be a natural phenomenon? We ought not to boil babies, but the natural world seems not to contain any trace of an “ought,” or an “ought not.” A dropped stone is under no obligation to fall, it just does. Admittedly, I might say, before dropping a stone out of the window, “This stone ought to hit the ground in three seconds,” but here I just mean something like “It is likely that the stone will hit the ground in three seconds.” If the stone doesn’t do that, it has done nothing wrong, and is not to be blamed for anything. In the natural world, nothing ought to happen, or ought not to happen, in the relevant sense of “ought.” Keeping within the confines of nature, there is no space for the fact that we ought not to boil babies. Yet since nature is all there is, there is no place left to go.
Is pleading "nature" a cop-out, or profound? The piece is a heck of a good summary of the current and past basic thinking about meta-ethics, but you have to put your Thinking Cap on before reading.
“…go figure out who is trying to kill you and who is actually trying to save your foolish ass.” The Anchoress, to Rosie O'Donnell
 The same old tired politics of greed, envy, resentment, and whining emerge once again from multi-millionaire, private-jet-addicted Mrs. Clinton. Does she have a single middle-class friend? Or a single real friend? I doubt it.
Well, she knows first-hand that the distribution of riches and power aren't "fair." She got them purely by exploiting - and putting up with - a hideous marriage. However, she does not realize that most people seek neither riches nor power, but seek just freedom from government burden and government interference to build their own lives according to their own lights. She must imagine that everybody is like her: hungry, greedy, angry, empty, and unfulfilled. It's a psychodrama. It has always been darkly amusing to me that the most redistributionist of our politicians are always the greediest and the most worshipping of personal wealth: see Edwards, Kerry, Kennedy, Soros, Clinton, Reid, Pelosi, etc etc. There is a level at which taxes no longer effect your daily life, and are just another minor expense. No doubt her advisors told her that this could be a winning theme, plus a distraction from her Iraq vote. Although this theme stands in opposition to the hearty and healthy red-blooded American themes of opportunity, risk, adventure, and the freedom to chose your own path through life, pursuing whatever heart and conscience decide - and living with the consequences - I guess her pollsters have concluded that there are voters out there who are mad that somebody else has more toys than they do. This is a truly infantile, negative, and mean-spirited appeal to the lowest and least admirable aspects of human nature. Editor's note: Blue Crab calls it a fresh new exciting idea for America - socialism.
 Can personality change? Well, it depends on how you define "personality" and on how you define "change."
Certainly manner of behavior and attitudes can change over time as people adapt and "grow," but the deep foundations of personality are genetically hard-wired (we term that "temperament"), along with the first few layers above that (which we often think of using concepts like "character structure" or "constellations of unconscious assumptions/fantasies about people, one's self, and the world"), are highly resistant to alteration - which is where psychoanalysis comes in. That question was asked in the context of two movies at PsyBlog, who took the trouble to review the best of the psychology blogs: Part 1 and Part 2. (h/t, Neurophilosophy.) I am going to check them all out. I am not aware of any dedicated psychoanalytic blogs. There should be at least one, but analysts tend not to be compulsive talkers and, when they write, it is always too long-winded and jargon-packed for the average ADD reader. The shrinks on our blogroll are more politically-driven than focused on the art and science of the analytic therapies.
The subject of the study and handsome Mockingbird, whose songs have fooled many a beginner birder, comes up because of this nifty story about one from Attack Machine. They are remarkable mimics.  The Mockingbird, (Mimus polyglottos), once a Southern bird, is now found across the US and into southern Canada. His repertoire of over 200 songs - copies of the songs and calls of other species - caused him once to be caged as the American nightingale.
The family of Mimic Thrushes also includes thrashers and the catbird. All are fond of tangles, shrubs and borders. Many of our Mockingbirds in New England overwinter here, and occasionally visit the bird feeder, but they do not seem to like seeds very much. You can read more about them here.
Tuesday, May 29. 2007
If you are white, you have one on your back, filled with goodies. David Thompson. There is a germ of truth in this racist nonsense, though: people from the same subcultures have more in common, which makes trust - or detecting reason for distrust - easier. Nothing to do with race, though. There is no "black culture" and no "white culture."
If Bush is a liberal (which I believe he is), what is Hillary Clinton? She seems to want the USA to be one big happy kibbutz, or collective, or whatever, and is quite clear that she does not approve of the "on your own" society. I don't know about her ancestors, but mine came here precisely to live in the fresh air of an "on your own" place.
Last evening: 
Not from us, but from Daily Kos. (h/t, LGF). I guess there are people - even in America - who value some things more highly than the freedom of the individual mind, soul and spirit. It's a shame.
 Greenpeace: Lost whales as a good source of renewable oil.
Don't go to the beach. The sand can make you sick. Science Daily Whose jobs are the illegals taking? Coyote says "nobody's" Are CEOs underpaid? The Prof has the link. Britain has become a fascist state. Tangled Web. Not to worry, Brits. It's for your own good. Pictogames. Make games out of your photos. This actually looks kind of fun. Yesterday, Chavez closed another independent TV station. Gateway. It gives me the creeps that the American Left supports this. As Tammy Bruce says: "...that pesky tyrannical authoritarianism is a hallmark of "socialist revolution" folks. Always has been, always will be." I am saying nothing about Cindy Sheehan. How the government is going to tax your Social Security checks. Viking. Is "dyslexia" a euphemism for "not too smart"? Daily Mail At the Supreme Court: interesting Seattle case on the use of race for public school admissions.
 Czech President and tennis fanatic Klaus is the only world leader who has been bestowed the honor of being named an Honorary Member of Maggie's Farm.
Our wisdom in that selection is further reinforced by his May 18th speech discussing his reservations about the EU. One quote: I am... in favour of redefining the whole concept of the European Union.
I suggest going back to the intergovernmental model of European integration. I suggest going back to the original concept of attempting to remove existing barriers among countries. I suggest going back to the consistent liberalisation and opening-up of markets (not only economic ones). I suggest minimising political intervention in human activities. Where this intervention is inevitable, it should be done close to the citizens (which means at the level of municipalities, regions and states), not in Brussels.
To summarize, I want freedom in Europe, not democratic deficit, I want democracy in Europe, not postdemocracy.
More of his speech at EU Referendum/
Ilya Somin at Volokh takes on the paternalistic/fascist notion that our lives should be designed and regulated by experts. I wish I had written it, because Ilya does a great job of ripping the notion to shreds. ...some advocates of libertarian paternalism try to get around the problem of political ignorance by suggesting that their policies be implemented by government-appointed experts rather than by elected officials. This is not a new argument. Totalitarians from Plato to Lenin have argued that the ignorance of the masses can be offset by concentrating power in the hands of an expert elite. So too have some moderate liberal scholars such as Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer and even libertarian Bryan Caplan. Breyer, the libertarian paternalists, and Caplan would never think of taking the argument as far as Plato or Lenin. But the core logic is similar: the experts know better than the average person - and therefore they should make the decisions. For advocates of limited government, the rule of experts is like the vampire that refuses to die no matter how often we drive a stake through its heart. We've been fighting it for 2500 years, but have never quite managed to finish it off. Nevertheless, I'm going to put on my vampire slayer hat, and take a wee little stab at it.
Read the whole thing. My opinion, as you might imagine as a Maggie's Farm contributor, is that common sense beats expertise nine out of ten times; that character beats intelligence nine out of ten times, that too many people have the mental disease of wanting to control people they don't even know, and that regular folks like me - "the masses" - are much smarter than the experts think, and quite capable of making our own choices.
Monday, May 28. 2007
 Our blog: Predictably and amusingly, lots of search hits on our Box Turtle post for "farm p*rn" and "animal p*rn." If we wanted hundreds of thousands instead of our elite thousands of discriminating readers, farm p*orn would surely be the way to go because there are clearly tons of still-closeted bestiality fans out there. Unpredictably but also amusingly, I see lots of hits on "Removing Pachysandra." At Maggie's Farm, one must admit, you never know what you might find. We are pleased that our Brit blog pal Theo named us his "Best Blog in the Known Universe" - or something like that - for the week. Thanks, Theo. You have exquisite taste in both blogs and women. And how was the sailing in Newport, I hear you asking. Wonderful, but we didn't win. Deservedly so. A fairly good strategy for the breezy but shifting conditions, but our tactics didn't work out and, in one race, we fouled another boat at the windward mark. Fouled them badly, but unintentionally, and put a nice ding in their fiberglass in addition to annoying their crew quite a bit in doing so to the point of using unsavory language. We were coming on too fast, and had little room to maneuver. We apologized profusely after that race, and bought them boat drinks.
Let's chat. Dems meet with Muslim Brotherhood. Activist Cash. Where does the money come from? Look it up here. Democracy is no defence against tyranny. Samizdata on the Venezuela mess. True to Socialist form, Chavez sent in his tanks. Another Worker's Paradise in the making. How I learned to love Vlad. A 2006 Guardian piece on Putin. h/t, Free Republic. Apparently Russians don't mind being ruled. The UK becomes more Orwellian. Small Drowned Baby Polar Bears Al Gore's fan club. Rich folks with SUVs. h/t, My Vast Right Wing Conspiracy Gag me with a spoon. The life of Bill and Hillary. These two are what my friend would term "rude, crude, and socially unacceptable." Soft drinks bad for your health? Somebody tell Mayor Bloomberg. Rachel Carson. A bad person? Moonbattery. True, she was a pioneer enviro-hysteric, but she was right that DDT was harmful to animals, especially those higher on the food chain. But if not for DDT, we would still have malaria in New England. In 1900 it was a major public health problem up here. It is not a tropical disease. Be very afraid of "Big Recreation." And quit using your grill, too. A town that told the food Nazis where to stick their transfats. Why infant morbidity rates in the US are higher than in other countries - we spend too much money. Right Thinking. Never take a statistic at face value. People are too stupid for democracy. An old argument in new clothes. Cafe Hayek
 Villages in Yankeeland - and surely everywhere in America - know how to have a parade on Memorial Day. All you need are some Boy Scouts and Brownies, some firemen and an antique fire truck, the Volunteer Fire Department Marching Band, and anybody else who feels like joining in.
Including people with their dogs, adorned with flags. (And yes, in Yankeeland, we are big on Volunteer Fire Departments, and volunteer everything including volunteer Town Meetings as a form of local government.) What a great country. How fortunate, optimistic, well-intentioned, and patriotic we are! Photos from a neighbor, today. Thanks! 
 Half the county was at Home Depot this morning. We aren't into buying Hostas at Home Depot, but their tomatoes are good, and mine are in the ground now. And I have 20 more bags of black mulch to carry around.
But getting back to Hostas, Mrs. BD found this site. Long-time readers know that we have rules about Hostas - never anywhere near the sun and never less than 5-20 plants of the same type en masse. Done right, they can be wonderful, but done wrong, they can be tacky. One of their downsides is that they take a few years to fully establish themselves. One of their upsides, besides their preference for dense shade, is the astonishing variety of sizes and colors of foliage available these days. Here's our previous piece on Hostas.
 I find it difficult to remember fallen soldiers in the abstract, so I am going to focus on gratitude for Maj. Zembiec today (h/t, Michelle), along with a guy I knew - a gentle soul in my high school writing class and later briefly a classmate in college until he enlisted - who didn't come back from his first tour in Vietnam.
Photo from The Tennessean.com, which I hope will forgive the use of this photo. The story of 8 year-old Christian Golcynski accepting the flag from his father's casket is at The Tennessean, here.
Sunday, May 27. 2007
 James Edwards at NRO demonstrates the emptiness of the Jesus-exploitation of the illegal immigration fans. One quote:
Amnesty, moreover, risks abrogating the “love your neighbor” commandment and biblical standards of justice. It privileges the foreigners who broke our laws to get and stay here, and puts at a disadvantage the poorest citizens, law-abiding employers, and legal immigrants. This doesn’t sound at all like what Romans 13 describes, where the civil government wields the sword of justice to punish the wrongdoer and protect the innocent.
We all can empathize with someone who aspires to a better life. We wish the same for ourselves and our children. But there are lawful ways to achieve it.
Particularly in light of the utter failure of previous amnesties, the legalization route would constitute the government’s failure to mete out justice. It certainly wouldn’t be merciful, on balance.
When government tries to show mercy, it often results in injustice toward someone else. In this case, it’s native-born Americans who’ll suffer government-inflicted injustice.
Some 12 to 20 million illegal aliens have broken just, duly enacted laws that deserve to be enforced. Mass amnesty and a failure to enforce immigration laws subject all our laws, to contempt. That is a very high price to pay, because the rule of law protects us all against tyranny.
Whenever politicians invoke Christ's name, watch out. They are desperate. There is a little thing called the Third Commandment -Catholics call it the Second - it's about using the name of the Lord in vain, eg for your own purposes.
We have not given Dr. Sanity proper credit for occasionally posting our insanities on her weekly, always-amusing Sunday Carnival of the Insanities. Thanks, Dr. S, for linking our piece on Nanny Bloomberg. And thanks for helping to resist the gowing crisis of Global Insanity.
 Christina Hoff Summers on the silence of the feminists (h/t Thompson). They have no problem with multicultural denial of women's rights. One quote from the interesting piece:
One reason is that many feminists are tied up in knots by multiculturalism and find it very hard to pass judgment on non-Western cultures. They are far more comfortable finding fault with American society for minor inequities (the exclusion of women from the Augusta National Golf Club, the "underrepresentation" of women on faculties of engineering) than criticizing heinous practices beyond our shores. The occasional feminist scholar who takes the women's movement to task for neglecting the plight of foreigners is ignored or ruled out of order.
Which makes them look more like stereotypical cry-babies than heros. Photo to right - a lady friend of Theo. She is no cry-baby, and she seems so feminine that she must be a real feminist. Department of glass houses: Gore decries trivialities and nonsense in news. Mookie's party bombs. A lot of easy money to be made. Anybody with a pool could do this. (h/t, Patterico) Al Zawahiri: "Al Quaida is winning in Iraq. It's time to expand the war." The bit about the pangolins especially bothered me. Who would eat a cute lil' pangolin? Now mesquite-grilled raccoon I can relate to, but they aren't endangered. Dallas HS students protest not passing graduation exams. Good grief. What have we bred in this country? Sheesh. Show a little dignity. NYT immigration poll reported at Blue Crab. Just one bit from the piece: A New York Times/CBS News poll released yesterday found that 69% of American adults believe illegal immigrants should “be prosecuted and deported for being in the U.S. illegally.” Just 24% disagree and say they should not. The survey of 1,125 adults was conducted May 18-23, 2007.
Sen. James Inhofe's opening comments at Senate hearings on global warming and recreation. His focus is on unintended consequences - something which, it seems, Congress rarely considers in its short-term view of the world. The Shumer Strategy. The drip, drip, drip of manufactured scandal. This is war, folks. Bill wanted a divorce. Hillary had other plans. A lovely couple. Searching for leftist commentators worthy of respect. Hatemonger found a few. We agree, and we look for them too.
 Verily I say unto you, Except ye turn, and become as little children, ye shall in no wise enter into the kingdom of heaven. Matthew 18
On the way to Costco yesterday to pick up a load of stuff for today's church coffee hour, the Mrs. Bird Dog and I were discussing C.S. Lewis' notion of "the shadow of God" - the indirect manifestations of God's presence in our world. I was thinking that it is similar to Plato's analogy of the cave, but Mrs. BD thought that the recent proofs of the abundance of dark matter in the universe - discoverable only through its effects on other things but not directly knowable - was a better image. One Cosmos has two recent, typically thought-provoking pieces on intelligence and its relationship to truth-seeking - and the necessity of intelligence to subordinate itself to truth: On the Intelligence of the Stupid and the Stupidity of the Intelligent and The Truth about the Truth about Truth. A few quotes: In short, there is no necessary connection between intelligence and truth. At first blush this seems odd, but at second blush I think you can see why. It has to do with the two aspects of our intelligence, one natural (or animal), the other supernatural (or divine). For example, at this moment I have a nine week-old puppy playing at my feet. She is obviously very intelligent, but no matter how intelligent she becomes, she will never know truth. This is because she has only natural intelligence -- the sort of intelligence that can more or less be explained by natural selection (not really, but we'll let it slide for the moment).
and ...This is again why we should value good character over intelligence, since good character implies a kind of intelligence that is faithful to the transcendent object of human existence, whereas intelligence alone assures no such concordance. The former implies "cardiac comprehension," or intellection, which transcends mere mental knowing. And as we mentioned yesterday, a truly intelligent person is a humble person, since he does not fundamentally seek recognition but transcendence: "he is interested in surpassing himself; hence in pleasing God more than men" (Schuon).
and ...Polanyi has written extensively of how the intellectually gifted scientist (as opposed to the typical "worker bee" scientific laborer) employs a kind of translogical vision in order to identify a fruitful problem that will then be susceptible to conventional reasoning. But this vision can never be reduced to some mechanical or deterministic rational formula (any more than great songwriting can be reduced to knowledge of musical scales). Rather, it is much more analogous to artistic vision, to a sort of holistic seeing, than to scientific reason. It is a kind of "seeing within," or into the "withinness of things." It is what Einstein meant when he said that he wanted to understand the mind of God.
Photo: Hubble image of gas pillars in the star-formation region of the Eagle nebula. How trivial are our daily concerns?
Acts 2: 1-21  When the day of Pentecost had come, they were all together in one place. 2And suddenly from heaven there came a sound like the rush of a violent wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting. 3Divided tongues, as of fire, appeared among them, and a tongue rested on each of them. 4All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other languages, as the Spirit gave them ability.
5Now there were devout Jews from every nation under heaven living in Jerusalem. 6And at this sound the crowd gathered and was bewildered, because each one heard them speaking in the native language of each. 7Amazed and astonished, they asked, “Are not all these who are speaking Galileans? 8And how is it that we hear, each of us, in our own native language? 9Parthians, Medes, Elamites, and residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, 10Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the parts of Libya belonging to Cyrene, and visitors from Rome, both Jews and proselytes, 11Cretans and Arabs—in our own languages we hear them speaking about God’s deeds of power.” 12All were amazed and perplexed, saying to one another, “What does this mean?” 13But others sneered and said, “They are filled with new wine.” 14But Peter, standing with the eleven, raised his voice and addressed them, “Men of Judea and all who live in Jerusalem, let this be known to you, and listen to what I say. 15Indeed, these are not drunk, as you suppose, for it is only nine o'clock in the morning. 16No, this is what was spoken through the prophet Joel: 17‘In the last days it will be, God declares, that I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh, and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, and your young men shall see visions, and your old men shall dream dreams. 18Even upon my slaves, both men and women, in those days I will pour out my Spirit; and they shall prophesy. 19And I will show portents in the heaven above and signs on the earth below, blood, and fire, and smoky mist. 20The sun shall be turned to darkness and the moon to blood, before the coming of the Lord’s great and glorious day. 21Then everyone who calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved.’ Fifty days after Easter and related symbolically and historically to the Jewish shavuot, Pentecost seems like the most mystical of holy days in a religion which abounds in mystery and wonder. Image: El Greco's depiction of Pentecost.
Saturday, May 26. 2007
A very fine blues selection streamed from Dust My Broom. You cannot stream the beer, however. One might hope that Bill Gates and Coors are working on that challenge.
Post-modernism is the idea that everything is just an affectation, and so you can pull it apart and make little jokes out of the bits. I reject the approach, and not just in architecture. The problem with the Daily Show and Colbert is not that they are smarmy wags, it's that they derive their smugness from making fun of a establishment that no longer exists, if it ever did. Yes, everything sucks. But I hate to break it to you: You're the everything now. The proprietor of Sippican Cottage
The Traveller's Dilemma. It's a variation on the Prisoner's Dilemma, but what is interesting about these games is to play them yourself multiple times, and see what happens. We like Game Theory, but the math eludes us as this point. But it's not just about math - it's about how illogicality can often be logical. Here's the premise: Lucy and Pete, returning from a remote Pacific island, find that the airline has damaged the identical antiques that each had purchased. An airline manager says that he is happy to compensate them but is handicapped by being clueless about the value of these strange objects. Simply asking the travelers for the price is hopeless, he figures, for they will inflate it. Instead he devises a more complicated scheme. He asks each of them to write down the price of the antique as any dollar integer between 2 and 100 without conferring together. If both write the same number, he will take that to be the true price, and he will pay each of them that amount. But if they write different numbers, he will assume that the lower one is the actual price and that the person writing the higher number is cheating. In that case, he will pay both of them the lower number along with a bonus and a penalty--the person who wrote the lower number will get $2 more as a reward for honesty and the one who wrote the higher number will get $2 less as a punishment. For instance, if Lucy writes 46 and Pete writes 100, Lucy will get $48 and Pete will get $44. What numbers will Lucy and Pete write? What number would you write?
To keep it simple, play with three people - same as The Prisoner's Dilemma. You play it over and over. Of course, they cannot discuss the strategy together.
And who the heck cares? Well, apparently some people do. (h/t, Jules). Some people need to get a life. What did Tut do anyway, other than get born into the right family, die young, and have the luck not to have his tomb ransacked before the Brit archeologists arrived.
One thousand lbs? Take a look at this pig.
 A fine day for the beach, but I am going to Rhode Island this morning for a couple of days of sailing.
Duke group mocks Group of 88. Here's their newspaper piece. Tawfik Hamid on how to end Islamophobia. Exactly. New York's Bravest lowering standards to avoid DOJ problems. Apparently literacy standards are racist. LaShawn digs into the subject. If those of African heritage really have lower average "g" than other races, as abundant studies show, it's a big problem. I remain a skeptic. Norwegians getting rich on oil. Norway? Git offa my lawn, kid. Synthstuff. And I really mean it. Is Fred Thompson the Reagan Reagan? Fred visits New England. Is Obama the liberal Reagan? RWNH The mess in Lebanon, thanks to Al Quaida. A damn shame, because it could be and once was a fine country. Top execs face pay crunch. Stockholders must be deciding that enough is enough. Sarko wants to eliminate "tu" for profs. Right on! He is demanding some respect from Iran, too. Should home ownership be the American dream? Yes, as a defence against inflation. But if not? Tigerhawk. I think it's more sentimental and historical. Not to mention that it is forced savings. Valerie Plame? Ho hum. But she did push her husband forward, after all. Just One Minute. That is not what she said.  The MSM refuses to discuss Al Quaida and terrorist torture. Thjey would rather talk about panties on the head.
Prediction: Immigration bill will pass Senate China hopes to clean up pests and disease before the Olympics. Maybe their food, too? Peggy Noonan's excellent piece on illegal immigration. A quote: We should stop, slow down and absorb. We should sit and settle. We should do what you do after eating an eight-course meal. We should digest what we've eaten. We should close our borders. We should do whatever it takes to close them tight and solid. Will that take the Army? Then send the Army. Does it mean building a wall? Then build a wall, but the wall must have doors, which can be opened a little or a lot down the road once we know where we are. Should all legal immigration stop? No. We should make a list of what our nation needs, such as engineers and nurses, and then admit a lot of engineers and nurses. We should take in what we need to survive and flourish. As we end illegal immigration, we should set ourselves to the Americanization of the immigrants we have. They haven't only joined a place of riches, it's a place of meaning. We must teach them what it is they've joined and why it is good and what is expected of them and what is owed. We stopped Americanizing ourselves 40 years ago. We've got to start telling the story of our country again.
The photos are of International Etchells
 We linked this piece at Flares titled Facing the Market last week, but I thought it so usefully clear and succinct that I'd re-post it with a quote. Every kid in high school or college should read this to inject some reality into the romantic psychobabble about self-actualization which is endemic in our pampered society.
Some people have a "calling," but most do not. Some people have ego-driven compulsions to achieve to compensate for feelings of inadequacy. Some lucky people find work plain fun. But while work offers many rewards including money, social contact, dignity, and a variety of challenges, most people would not do their jobs if they won the Powerball. Otherwise, why is everyone planning for retirement? For most folks, work is not recreation. A quote from the piece at Flares about the labor market: The sad fact of life in a market economy is that you have to do what somebody else wants in order to get paid. You don't generally get paid for what is fun for you or for what you want to do; you get paid for what somebody else wants you to do, and usually that's something they themselves don't want to do for some reason. Maybe the work is tedious, maybe it requires high levels of responsibility, maybe it is dirty or dangerous. One thing you can be guaranteed is that it's something somebody else doesn't want to do themselves.
Now this is contrary to what most of us learn in school and in our cultural role models. We learn that we should be "free". We learn that we should be self-actualizing. We learn that we should break the rules and make things better and in the end everyone will reward us for "doing the right thing". Don't bet on it.
Ask your kids to read the whole thing.
Friday, May 25. 2007
Warming has finally hit New England today. Very pleasant indeed. I have always wondered about cloud chambers, but never bothered to learn more about them. Eric took the trouble, and connects clouds to warming.
Whatever your view of illegal immigration, let the bozos in DC know what you think - today. For phone, Michelle has the numbers. To sign a petition, here's one at And Rightly So. It's the American thing to do.
You can't arrest me. I am a very important community member. New Hampshire State Senator Burt Cohen (D-Portsmouth), via No Looking Backwards
 I heard Thomas Sowell quoted on the radio last night. I don't have the link, but he was asking something like "What problem does this immigration "reform" act solve?" His answer: just one problem - the politicians' problem, which is to look like they are doing something and to get the immigration theme off the table.
Too bad for the politicians: the voters aren't stupid. Too bad for the voters: the pols don't give a damn in this unholy alliance they have made. Primum non nocere is my advice. Second, a quote from me, yesterday (Buddy thought it was good): People are not annoyed because they are racist. They are annoyed because they are being invaded. The fact that this particular invasion is not lead by an army is irrelevant: nowadays, leaving your gun behind is more effective.
People tend to hate to be invaded. It's sorta human not to put up with it, unless you are French.
 Are bad manners and obnoxiousness hate crimes? I thought there had to be a crime before you could have a hate crime. Where's the ACLU? Heck, I've been called all sorts of names in my life. Sticks and stones...
15 year-old outsmarts UN Climate Panel The model graduation speaker: Mr. Rogers. I am sure that I would agree. Illegals register to vote in Texas. Al Quaida is better at media manipulation than at war. So they do what they're good at. Hispanic immigrants to the US: 42% of births are out of wedlock. Sarkozy wants to reform the Sarbonne. Excellent ideas. 30 years later, Argentinian mothers still march for justice for their dead. A pill that stops menstruation. Volokh A plague of locusts. The 17-year cicadas are crawling up from their 17-year stay in the soil, and will soon be all over the place. Predictably, there will be articles about how to cook them. This piece from 2004 explains how the broods work. I have always enjoyed watching birds try to catch them when they fly. More about the new WalMart walk-in clinics. Always amazing the way markets can figure out things that experts and government cannot: it's because experts always have blinders on, and government is stupid. Atheist donates 22 million to NYC's Catholic Charities. Good move. Great organization, with no political agenda. Your friend Google wants to know you much better. Yes, it is creepy. But if you don't like it, use Dogpile. This invasive species seems to have no friends. Not cuddly enough, I guess. A treadmill desk. Not a bad idea. But the irony in the concept does not escape me. Hansen: Cut America Some Slack. I agree. A quote: ...radical American egalitarianism is what terrifies our Islamist enemies. Bin Laden—many of the terrorist’s family were living in the United States on September 11—knows the insidious dangers of Americanization, both from his own wealthy youth spent enjoying the high life, and the failure of his Sharia law to compete with Spiderman for the attention of most of his flock.
Read the whole thing.
 The Torpedo Factory Arts Center in Alexandria's Old Town was saved from the wrecker's ball as the dock area of Old Town was about to be destroyed by urban planners.
Now, the saving of the Torpedo Factory (the building was a WWl-era torpedo factory) is considered to have been one of the triggers for the preservation and rejuvenation of Alexandria. I get a kick out of those old factories that were built in monumental style. Temples to manufacturing, industry, invention, and the American work ethic.
Thursday, May 24. 2007
There is one which specializes in the subject: The Center for Immigration Studies. Lots of info.
 More Bob Birthday stuff. That's a photo of Bob on April 26, performing in his beloved New Orleans. Lookin' good, Bob.
Here's a whole-hearted performance of Like a Rolling Stone from 1966. Tears of Rage from 1996, with one of his best bands, in my opinion. Just Like a Woman from 1971. Not Dark Yet, from 2006 (excellent recording).
 The chorus of protest over the bill in the Senate right now (the "No Illegal Alien Left Behind" act, as some would call it, or the "Destroy America Now" act) is coming from so many places, and from so many unlikely sources that it is getting difficult to keep up.
While criticism has come from the usual quarters, even such open-borders advocates as George Will and John Podhoretz have come down hard on the bill. The staggering costs of the bill, only just now coming to light, have revealed a total outlay of as much as 2.5 trillion over the next two decades. Ed Morrissey notes that the bill has achieved the remarkable distinction of having almost every single voting group in the USA opposed to it: Not a single demographic in the study favors this proposal, except under Race: Other. Democrats oppose it 51-28. Republicans oppose it 47-25. Men and women both clearly oppose it. Only people ages 30-39 come close to overcoming opposition, 34-32 in opposition. But when the subject turns to border security, the numbers turn even more dramatic....The data is so compelling, one has to wonder why Congress hasn't realized that they could offer a win for everyone by focusing exclusively on border security as an entrée to immigration reform. They literally would please every possible constituency by doing so, and would almost overnight dial down the emotion over the rest of the issue. Only in DC could the governing class be so out of touch with the national mood.
Meanwhile, another blogger eviscerates the irrational arguments of those like Dick Morris, Robert Novak and Fred Barnes that the GOP must support this bill or risk losing Hispanic votes: The GOP has got to understand that they will never, ever be able to compete with Democrats when it comes to appealing to poor, uneducated welfare cases -- which is exactly the category most of these illegal aliens would fall into. That's because Democrats, being big government socialists, will always be willing to offer them more goodies for their votes. The GOP's target audience among Hispanics will be more educated, more successful, more middle-class Hispanics, not poverty cases or the La Raza crowd. That means for the GOP to gain with Hispanics over the long term, we've got to push policies that will allow the Hispanics who are already American citizens to become more successful, not bring in penniless, uneducated manual laborers from South America by the tens of millions and hope that they'll vote for us because we're "democrat light" on amnesty and welfare.
In the most amusing quote of the day, Barack Obama set some sort of Democratic first in the following critique of one of the few sensible changes in the bill - placing a skills requirement for immigrants above that of extended family ties: This change "constitutes at minimum a radical experiment in social engineering and a departure from our tradition of having family and employers invite immigrants to come," Obama said.
A Democrat criticizing something for being a radical social experiment that's a departure from historical tradition? I'm expecting to see pigs flying around Nashville right about now.
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