Maggie's Farm

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.