We are a commune of inquiring, skeptical, politically centrist, capitalist, anglophile, traditionalist New England Yankee humans, humanoids, and animals with many interests beyond and above politics. Each of us has had a high-school education (or GED), but all had ADD so didn't pay attention very well, especially the dogs. Each one of us does "try my best to be just like I am," and none of us enjoys working for others, including for Maggie, from whom we receive neither a nickel nor a dime. Freedom from nags, cranks, government, do-gooders, control-freaks and idiots is all that we ask for.
Why do we extend to universities the priviledge and advantage of being tax-free and partly if not largely tax-supported institutions?
What is it that they do which is so special? Is it their duty to be conservators of knowledge and wisdom, or to be "adversarial" critics of society?
I would make the case that few of the great thinkers of world history worked for universities, almost none of the great writers, and, until the past 30-40 years, few to none of the great scientists. I would make thae case that, in a world of high liteeracy and high levels of education, professsors no longer represent a unique intellectual priesthood as they might have in the Middle Ages. And I would make the case that there is nothing about being a professor which renders their views of anything outside of their teaching expertise of any more value than my own views.
Mark Bauerlein takes on The Adversarial Campus. One quote:
...the Adversarial Campus Argument isn't really an argument. It's an attitude. And attitudes aren't overcome by evidence, especially when they do so much for people who bear them. For, think of what the Adversarial Campus does for professors. It flatters the ego, ennobling teachers into dissidents and gadflies. They feel underpaid and overworked, mentally superior but underappreciated, and any notion that compensates is attractive. It gives their isolation from zones of power, money, and fame a functional value. Yes, they're marginal, but that's because they impart threatening ideas. The powerlessness they feel rises into a meaningful political condition.
The idea of academic administrators and professors picturing themselves as Luke Skywalker figures - pitted against an evil empire of oppressive bourgeois vales - is rather quaint and not without comic potential. And, as we’ve seen, ‘rebellion’ of this kind is often difficult to distinguish from absurdity, psychodrama and reactionaryrole-play.
Well, the United Nations has its Intergovernmental ... its Interglobal... its Climatological...
Oh, why even bother getting the title right. We all know what it is. It's a global taxation system tarted up with a graph and a chart or two. The United Nations has never accomplished anything. Let me retract that. The United Nations has never accomplished anything beneficial to mankind. Every once in a while, you can shove it aside if you bribe enough of its members and get something done. You can put a UN patch on a US uniform and kick North Korean ass, for instance. But let's not pretend the UN did anything. It's a talking shop for the worst kind of people, representing mostly venal or totalitarian governments. The only successful program run by the UN was Saddam's Oil for Food scam. And by "successful," I mean Kofi Annan's and Saddam Hussein's kids got theirs. It took the US military to give Saddam's kids what they deserved.
Santa Claus is bipartisan. The Bush administration is unveiling its plan to rescue people who gambled and lost in the housing markets when the bubble burst.
We now have a bipartisan tradition of the government stepping in to rescue people who engaged in risky behavior -- whether by locating in the known paths of hurricanes in Florida or in areas repeatedly hit by wildfires over the years in California or by doing things that increase the probability of catching AIDS.
Why not also rescue people who gambled away their life's savings in Las Vegas? That would at least be consistent.
Apparently the only people who are supposed to be responsible are the taxpayers -- and they are increasingly made responsible for other people's irresponsibility.
I drove to southern New England from Waitsfield, Vermont last night. Wish we skiied, 'cause the locals said the new year entered with the best snow since whatever.
Well, anyway, the Massachusetts flatlanders had to, we mean HAD TO, get their pups back for a Jan 2 school opening, and good old crunchy, stupid Vermont doesn't salt its roads, nope! Might harm the environment. Near killed the flatlanders. Dumb bastids drive too fast anyway...
Well, what harm can the 53 spin-outs do, anyway? Locals pull them out and pocket Big Boston Bucks. However, how about the 29 serious damage accidents Gwynnie saw? How about all the gasoline and lubricating oil -- and yes, flatlander blood -- that will seep into Vermont's interstate medians tomorrow? How graphic can it be that the Greenies don't give a damn about people.
Cross the Massachusetts border and all-of-a-sudden, roads are safe! (Sorta). Ice is gone;there's still a lotta snow, and we needed to be careful, but it was snow, not ice.
Lemme see -- Vermont gets money from farming and tourism. Help us -- anything else? Farming's dead and so are many tourists -- help us figger out when there will be something that makes one of the world's loveliest places work financially -- if only for the locals without flatland trust funds.
Brussels cancels New Years Eve out of terror fears. The EU is supposed to run everything in your life, but just keeping Brussels reasonably safe is too much for them?
Without hesitation, Bloomberg responded, "No, I will not run for president, but I will speak out to try to get people to really focus on the issues and to get rid of partisanship and special interests."
What people mean by that is that everybody ought to agree with them. Partisanship is fine, as long as it has intellectual integrity and is consistent with reality - which is asking a lot of politicians. They always say "We can't get anything done": Thats good!
From Freedom, Morality, and New Year Revolutions at One Cosmos:
You will notice that when you pick up most any "new age" type book -- in fact, unfortunately, many conventional religious books as well -- the language conveniently goes "wobbly" just at that critical juncture when you most need it. These frauds use language in such a way that they make you feel as if the fault is within you, not them. Philosophers and academics pull the same thing all the time. But if you truly understand something, then it shouldn't be difficult to find the words to convey that understanding to another, at least assuming adequate communication skills, along with good will in the reader. (I might add that where the new agers use fuzzy language to conceal their ignorance, the conventionally religious often fall back on overly rigid and saturated formulas to cover over their lack of understanding.)
It's a good observation, and I have noticed that too. And mea culpa, Gagdad Bob: I have done the same sometimes.
Since weather events have always existed, all the warming alarmists need to do is to blame every weather event on global warming, or, to stay on the safe side, "climate change." From John Tierney in the NYT:
In his acceptance speech, Mr. Gore didn’t dwell on the complexities of the hurricane debate. Nor, in his roundup of the 2007 weather, did he mention how calm the hurricane season had been. Instead, he alluded somewhat mysteriously to “stronger storms in the Atlantic and Pacific,” and focused on other kinds of disasters, like “massive droughts” and “massive flooding.”
“In the last few months,” Mr. Gore said, “it has been harder and harder to misinterpret the signs that our world is spinning out of kilter.” But he was being too modest. Thanks to availability entrepreneurs like him, misinterpreting the weather is getting easier and easier.
Tierney is quite correct: it's boob bait for the gullible and ignorant, regardless of what the climate is doing. Climate isn't local weather. Read the whole thing.
Our Brit farmer pal Theo, who provides the world with daily romantic fantasy material for gentlemen (aka "totty") along with tired old jokes, weapons systems and miscellaneous centrist political news and views, has his new site up today: Last of the Few. Meet the new site: same as the old site!
My take-home message from these data is that we have become a solid and steadily-growing small-to-medium-sized "boutique" site - a bit obscure but but surprisingly more often-read than many of the wonderful sites we read, admire, look up to, and depend upon for good stuff and interesting thinking. With millions of sites out there, we are grateful for our readership and for its steady growth as folks find us.
If we did not have fun with this, learn things, and receive some appreciation from our readers, we would quit. For 99.99% of "blogs," it's a hobby and closer to vanity publishing than to anything else. (If we could take in $1 per visit, we'd be more than delighted! But we decided not to do ads, etc., because of the hassle, the messiness, and the reality of the de minimus after-tax income from it.) That is why we have not chosen to be a an official member of the excellent Pajamas Media site, despite being on their blogroll: we would have to take the ads.
Our recurrent question is whether we have any slight impact on "the world" at all. In some ways, we would like to: in others ways, we would not like to, because we suspect that people who want to save the world might be a bit insane. (Still, we would love to have 100,000,000 readers across the globe, of all political stripes and colors.)
So we forge onward into a new year with the hope of adding something fun, stimulating, informative and provocative to the life of each individual reader in 2008, and with full awareness that what matters most is our own integrity and intellectual integrity, clarity of thought, our bred-in-the-bone Yankee skepticism and distrust of politicians and experts, our various random interests, the joy we are able to take in life, and the firmness of our foundational ideas and beliefs about "man and God and law," as the Dylan line goes. Trust us to question these all the time: we do.
We have had many comments about the amount of totty on Maggie's - some positive and some negative. It's really never been all that much, but it has led to some awkward situations at work or school for some of our readers. We will deal with that issue, somehow. Perhaps we need to control our inner 13 year-old.
Also,we have had frequent suggestions that we create a place for comment threads, because they become diluted among all of our daily posts. Well, we have been determined to reduce the amount of daily "product," but it never seems to happen. I cannot think of a solution to that. Furthermore, is reducing productivity a worthy goal anyway?
Finally, another response to a repeated question: Why the anonymity of our writers? For a variety of personal and professional reasons, we want to keep it that way for now. We are sorry if you disapprove of our modestly hiding behind the cybercurtain, but it is our choice because, as RR would say: We paid for thismicrophone.
Happy New Year, and stick with us! And tell your friends about us, if you haven't yet. They might get a kick out of Maggie's Farm.
Image: Ingres' depiction of the Maggie's Farm newsroom. (We felt obliged to photoshop out all the the Coors Lite empties and the bottles of Wild Turkey from his artistic effort, to protect the children.)
Too sane to 
I drove to southern New England from Waitsfield, Vermont last night. Wish we skiied, 'cause the locals said the new year entered with the best snow since whatever. 
A solar-powered fisherman's 
We have had many comments about the amount of totty on Maggie's - some positive and some negative. It's really never been all that much, but it has led to some awkward situations at work or school for some of our readers. We will deal with that issue, somehow. Perhaps we need to control our inner 13 year-old.
From last January, The Hybridization of America by