Maggie's Farm

Pulling the army out of Northern Ireland, that is.

After 38 years of counterinsurgency  operations, they are turning it over to the local cops.

You can't really find vast fields of wild Lowbush Blueberry south of Maine. They especially seem to grow where there has been forest fire or clear-cutting. Always keep an eye out for bears in a lowbush blueberry field.

And Rightly So has a little photo essay on the subject. Here's one of her fine photos:

Building on flood plains. Free Market Fairy Tales

The generic blog post. Sippican. Just fill in the blanks.

Harry Reid wants power without power plants. Miller

Counting hurricanes. How can you compare the present with the pre-weather satellite era? Wizbang

Adding a blog to our Education category: Minding the Campus. (h/t, Classical Values)

Cartoon from Leo Cullum's excellent Scotch and Toilet Water?

This moth on a window (thanks, reader) reminds me of Billy Gibbons, with the RayBans and the dirty beard. I think I'll post a ZZ Top tune (below).

Correction: That is two moths, facing in opposite directions, mating. It's more farm p*rn from Maggie's Farm. I did think the leg count was strange.

How do they produce so much sound? Every girl crazy about a sharp-dressed man.

Some folks like to read and think about reason and revelation. For some reason, when I think about it much my brain gets numb. Maybe I believe that existence itself is a mysterious dream from the mind of God. 

Dr. Bob takes on the subject of reason and faith once again. A quote:

Sweeping generalizations about what “most Christians think” seem common among those who understand little of what any Christian thinks, and miss the mark anyway: the standard is not what “most Christians” believe, but what Christianity as a faith has taught and maintained throughout its two-thousand year history. And while Christianity maintains that aspects of its core beliefs may be reached through reason alone — such as the existence of God, the nature of the soul, and the existence of a natural moral law — Christianity is above all a faith based on revelation. It maintains that God exists, that He is personal, and that He has intervened in human history, making Himself known both by written revelation and through the person of Jesus Christ. While the secular materialist views such a position as irrational – contrary to reason — Christianity maintains instead that it is supra-rational: not contrary to reason, but above reason by the very nature of God. It stands to reason that man — confined by his very nature to space and time — cannot through reason alone understand a Being who transcends space and time — eternal and self-existent in nature, unlimited in intellect and power, unchanged and unbound by time, having existed both before time and throughout eternity.

From American.com:

The U.S. now has 125 opera companies. That’s more than Germany or Italy, and roughly as many Americans attend live opera performances as attend NFL football games. Jonathan Leaf examines a surprising phenomenon—beyond the Met.

If that is true, then why don't we have more opera on TV? I wish we did. Read the article here. Readers know that we like the Met, but are also very happy with the NYC Opera just next door. Other than in Lincoln Center, where in the world are there two opera companies performing next door to eachother?

He died at 89. A genius, or just pretentious? I don't know.

He always had excellent cinematography, and The Seventh Seal, which was ostensibly about The Plague, was darn interesting to watch.

I saw it the first time at The Thalia. 

Our friend at Sippican Cottage has a mind-boggling photo collection. For example, last night he emailed me a photo he had of the interior of Penfield Light, which we wrote about yesterday.

Where does he find this stuff? He won't say.

Penfield Reef, a long-time hazard to ships and boats, extends south from the Fairfield (CT) beach one mile into Long Island Sound. It is covered at high tide, but exposed otherwise as a broad ridge of sand, now reinforced with large riprap in parts so you can walk out - but not without slipping on slabs of rockweed.

Here's a photo of Jennings Beach, the wide and excellent town beach of Fairfield:

During the Revolution the Brits landed on this beach, marched a mile into town, and burned a few houses and the Congregational Church. I don't think they killed anybody. I knew a girl whose family showed the burn marks on the inside of their house. After the Brits began to march back to their boats, the owners quickly returned and put the fire out.

Many moons ago, an awkward, dorky, bookish young Bird Dog was rejected by a number of young fillies on that beach in the sunshine, and made out with one or two others on that beach in the dark. That photo brought back memories...

And I shot my first duck from Penfield Reef, just a few hundred yards away. In the good old days, the hunters would huddle on the reef with their Labs and get wonderful passing shots at the Bluebills buzzing around. I don't know whether they even allow it anymore, but a mile-long reef could accommodate quite a few duck hunters comfortably and happily.

On the southernmost tip of the reef sits Penfield Light, a handsome 1880s structure which was manned by a lighthouse keeper until 1970. The light is automated now. The place is well-known for being inhabited by a ghost. Here's Penfield Light at high tide:

The subject of Penfield Light comes up because the Coast Guard, which is responsible for navigation aids, has decided that they don't need to own it, and are putting it up for sale. It would be a fine dwelling for a non-social blogger who wants to get away from it all, and who wants to shoot their supper every day in the winter from the front porch, and to catch their fish dinner the rest of the year from their back porch.

Moonbattery noted that PETA is considering buying it, and using it as a place to study the souls of fish, or something equally PETA-ish. I would like to warn them off. In a good storm, spray and crashing wave tips reach the level of the roof. I doubt that PETA types would be comfortable with that much raw nature... not to mention the cormorant shit everywhere.

The world is full of insanity. Dr. Sanity offers a collection each Sunday, and always links our relevant pieces. Make it part of your Sunday afternoon ritual. I believe it is important to label insanity for what it is, or we could lose our fragile grip on reality.

I like this quote from Bob at One Cosmos (whose puns and triple-edged spelling you have to let yourself enjoy), from a piece of the above name:

Eckhart said that we are held back or "estranged" from God by three primary conditions, time, multiplicity and matter. As a result, one cannot "know" God per se. Rather, one can only undergo him. Bion would have oppreciated this observation, for he recognized that if one cannot suffer pain, one cannot suffer pleasure, and knowledge is rooted in the pain of separation -- separation from O. Unknowing this separation is the highest form of knowledge, but it can only happen if you exert enough passivity or strive with enough effortlessness.

Me? I've given up completely.

One of my favorite letters of Paul - 1 Corinthians, 1:18

For the word of the cross is folly to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. 19 For it is written,

“I will destroy the wisdom of the wise,
and the discernment of the discerning I will thwart.”

20 Where is the one who is wise? Where is the scribe? Where is the debater of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? 21 For since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, it pleased God through the folly of what we preach to save those who believe. 22 For Jews demand signs and Greeks seek wisdom, 23 but we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles, 24 but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. 25 For the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men.

26 For consider your calling, brothers: not many of you were wise according to worldly standards, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth. 27 But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; 28 God chose what is low and despised in the world, even things that are not, to bring to nothing things that are, 29 so that no human being might boast in the presence of God. 30 And because of him you are in Christ Jesus, who became to us wisdom from God, righteousness and sanctification and redemption, 31 so that, as it is written, “Let the one who boasts, boast in the Lord.”

A brief photo history of the church steeple

Our Bovine Final Exam

The Difficult Paradox of Conservatism: Seeking Power to Increase Freedom

Flying Machines: Summer Fun with Toy Airplanes

The Gin and Tonic, Malaria, and Sickle-Cell

A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London

Never until the mankind making
Bird beast and flower
Fathering and all humbling darkness
Tells with silence the last light breaking
And the still hour
Is come of the sea tumbling in harness

And I must enter again the round
Zion of the water bead
And the synagogue of the ear of corn
Shall I let pray the shadow of a sound
Or sow my salt seed
In the least valley of sackcloth to mourn

The majesty and burning of the child's death.
I shall not murder
The mankind of her going with a grave truth
Nor blaspheme down the stations of the breath
With any further
Elegy of innocence and youth.

Deep with the first dead lies London's daughter,
Robed in the long friends,
The grains beyond age, the dark veins of her mother,
Secret by the unmourning water
Of the riding Thames.
After the first death, there is no other.

There is a good commentary on the poem here.

Remember the Seattle Lego story? A Seattle school banned Legos because, well, it's hard to explain rationally. Something about capitalism.

However now, after a bit of Mao-style indoctrination for the little kiddie-poos, Legos are allowed back - but with strict rules about Lego construction.

Ya can't make this stuff up.

(Thanks for the correction, reader)

Photo below: A Lego church, which I am sure would be forbidden in any Seattle schools.

After the Eastern Box Turtle, the Wood Turtle, clemmys insculpta, is my favorite.  Nowadays, it is a treat to see one, since they are threatened or endangered over most of their range, which is the Northeast, south to Virginia and west to Iowa and Michigan.

Illegal collection of these handsome turtles has been a big problem, and dogs can easily kill them by crunching their shell.

I have usually seen them in moderately-sloped streams with pools, but occasionally the pup has located them in the Spring, rambling in wet fields or moist woods, not too far from a stream.

Photo is from this Wisconsin Wood Turtle site.

The terrible story of the home invasion-murder-rape in a peaceful, leafy Connecticut suburb this week reinforces the necessity to have an armed home, as Never Yet Melted notes.

The right to self-defence is the most basic human right.

It matters not to me that such crimes are rare. Lightning strikes on houses are rare, but where they are possible, we have lightning rods. We have them on the house and on the barn. It's a reasonable, cheap precaution against a low-likelihood but catastrophic event. Like fire insurance.

More thoughts: I have been thinking about this doctor for days, since the Dylanologist emailed the story to me. How does he feel? I cannot imagine losing a whole family - his life - in that way, or in any other way. Does he regret that he could not protect his family - or that he could not die trying? Surviving something like this must be a world of pain.

Our longer essay on the topic of the CT invasion, and home defence,  here.

We are adding San Francisco's Cinnamon Stillwell to our blogroll.

All human situations have their inconveniences. We feel those of the present but neither see nor feel those of the future, and hence we often make troublesome changes without amendment, and frequently for the worse.

Benjamin Franklin

I do not recommend that anyone waste any time on Shakespeare's plays without listening to Prof. (and Shakespearean actor) Peter Saccio talk about them first.

For us, it has been like being half-blind, and finally getting the right glasses.

Prof. Saccio's retirement from Dartmouth is a huge loss for the College, but anyone can listen to his course via the Teaching Company's recordings. A bit expensive, but if your library doesn't have them, ask them to buy them.

Listening - and re-listening - to Saccio is a pure delight. A quote from the piece in Dartmouth Life:

On the day of the lecture, Saccio begins almost dispassionately. "The death of Falstaff," he says, "is a short passage, in prose, related by simple characters leading common lives."

And then he begins to act the parts of those characters, explaining between lines how Shakespeare employs biblical allusion, Elizabethan thought and culture, word play and stage direction. He describes how Falstaff, near death, plays with his bedclothes and examines his fingertips, noting that contemporary doctors tell him that what Shakespeare portrayed four centuries ago is grounded in the physical reality of death.

The room becomes electric.

Saccio continues, "For Falstaff, in his final moments the world is getting smaller and smaller. He is 'focusing down'—as dying people do." He points out a reference to the 23rd Psalm towards the end of the scene and begins, "The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want..." and the classroom becomes utterly silent, spellbound.

Breaking the silence, Saccio concludes, "I've been trying to enter into Shakespeare's imagination. He imagined a scene that was peaceful, hopeful, bawdy, silly, childish, drunken, lecherous and terrifying—terrifying both physically and spiritually. All at once, in only 40 lines. I put my cards on the table," he concludes. "The man could write."

Photo: Leon D. Black Professor of Shakespearean Studies Peter Saccio

That pesky old Law of Unintended Consequences. MA health plan running into a major problem: not enough primary care docs. WSJ. If I know anything about government, they will proceed to create another program to deal with that problem of their own creation. (h/t, Bruce Kesler)

What is your source of hope? Your own brain and spirit, God, or the government? Liberalism Dangerously Defined, by Medved.

Rudy is in trouble with CAIR. Good for him.

CBS is trying to fool you. Powerline

Photo: Bill and Hillary in law school. Since we've been posting on hippies, I think this photo demonstrates that the fad was more about fashion and wanting to be - or look -hip, than anything else. Ruthlessly ambitious, power-hungry, and calculating, these two hardly embodied the true hippy spirit. Peace, baby.

I do not understand the physics of Bussard Fusion, or whether it can ever be commercial. Interesting that California wants to fund it, though.

Update: Above story is not true. Thanks, reader.

It is 40 years since the silly and juvenile 1967 "Summer of Love." Cinnamon Stillwell remembers it. Quote: 

Among '60s disciples, it's an article of faith that everything that came out of that summer was a boon to American society. This has certainly been the impression conveyed through popular culture. Rarely are the more pernicious offshoots of the social and political experiment known as the Summer of Love referenced in the glowing and groovy portrayals seen on PBS and the History Channel.

But in its haste to dispense with all tradition that came before, the Summer of Love generation threw out much of the good along with the bad. The attempt to live in a manner that is essentially unsustainable led to a proliferation of divorce, drug use, promiscuity, sexually transmitted diseases, and all the perils and problems associated therewith. Too many people left their families, became addicts, and in some cases, lost their lives.

When all social boundaries are tossed aside and self-fulfillment becomes one's raison d'etre, society breaks down and, with it, all sense of morality. Seen in this light, the Summer of Love starts to seem more like the Summer of Folly.

Exactly. Read her whole piece.