Maggie's Farm

Delicious, packed with flavor, and inexpensive: the Bolivar Suntuoso. I like to have some tasty everyday cigars, some moderately good cigars, and some fancy cigars (absolutely never any Habanos - no, no, no. They are quite illegal here.) on hand at all times.  (Just the same as with with wines - some cheap everyday table wines, some nice wines, and then the really good special stuff for occasions.)

I am also enjoying the Partagas Black Label mini Prontos these days. Quite a punchy cigar, and a quicker smoke.

A Back to Basics education with 24 students in one room, and a teacher salary of $240,000. This is great. It would entail a meaningful pay cut for me, but I'd do it in a New York minute for the joy and challenge of it. Can I say whatever I want, and can I use my whip? 

I have always claimed that John Adams and Abe Lincoln got better educations than our public school kids get. Of course, they were not the average kids - and you don't "get" an education anyway - you "take" one. Or not.

It is no longer PC to acknowledge that relatively few are able, interested, motivated, or inspired to engage in a serious classical education. For good reason, too: it's not practical and it's difficult, and most jobs do not require calculus or music theory. Result? Watered-down non-rigorous gruel and As and degrees for all, accompanied by a dose of leftist propaganda and multicultural BS. And that's OK, because you cannot get wisdom in school (except maybe a basis for historical wisdom, but that's easy to do on your own once your Mom teaches you to read).

Now back to do the bidding of She Who Must Be Obeyed in the gardens. Adding "organic material," ie our recent truckload of slightly aged manure (a sweetly odoriferous and oozing mountain in the back driveway) from my dairy farmer pal, to the new perennial beds. I will have to dig it in, 2' deep. I will dump some on top of my vegetable garden too, as mulch to be dug in next Spring. Then horseplay later, if it doesn't rain: I could use a sherry or two for courage and a vintage stogie this afternoon, followed by a good gallop over hill and dale with the Mrs. to let today's cool Yankee wind clear my head of the nonsense in life. If rain, maybe indoor horseplay with the same goal.

Editor note: Photo is an early 1800s one-room schoolhouse in Norwalk, CT

Mark Steyn and his book America Alone published by Maclean's face a Canadian Human Rights Tribunal next week. The issue is "hate speech" involving Moslems. This is all about defending Western values (eg free speech). Belmont reports on Steyn's speech in Vancouver - a quote:

Steyn's insight -- that the War on Terror is essentially the consequence of a Western disease (ed: multiculturalism) that manifests itself in the newly found power of medieval madmen -- is the key point. All September 11, Iraq, Afghanistan have done is focus attention on a silent struggle that has been going on within Western culture for last hundred years. It is the ideational counterpart of violent struggles of the 20th century. The men who we remember on Memorial Day only buried the physical corpus of totalitarianism. It remains for us, in the twenty first century, to lay its ghost to rest.

Can we do it without restarting the violence of the last hundred years? Perhaps. But can we do it without a mental and legal struggle. Definitely not. And so Mark Steyn continues in defiance of the thought police. Because that's the kind of guy he is.

In an opinion piece in Maclean's last month, Steyn attacked the "totalitarianism" of the Human Rights Commissions, noting:

It's true that "hurtful actions that undermine freedom" and lead to "unspeakable crimes" usually have some fig leaf of intellectual justification. For example, the ideology first articulated by Karl Marx has led to the deaths of millions of people around the planet on an unprecedented scale. Yet oddly enough, no matter how many folks are murdered in the name of Marxism-Leninism, you're still free to propound its principles at every college in Canada.

He goes on to say:

Ah, but that's the Good Totalitarianism. What about the Bad Totalitarianism? You know, the one everybody disapproves of: Nazism. Isn't it obvious that in the case of Adolf Hitler, "hateful words" led to "unspeakable crimes"? This argument is offered routinely: if only there'd been "reasonable limits on the expression of hatred" 70 years ago, the Holocaust might have been prevented.

There's just one teensy-weensy problem with it: pre-Nazi Germany had such "reasonable limits." Indeed, the Weimar Republic was a veritable proto-Trudeaupia. As Alan Borovoy, Canada's leading civil libertarian, put it:

"Remarkably, pre-Hitler Germany had laws very much like the Canadian anti-hate law. Moreover, those laws were enforced with some vigour. During the 15 years before Hitler came to power, there were more than 200 prosecutions based on anti-Semitic speech. And, in the opinion of the leading Jewish organization of that era, no more than 10 per cent of the cases were mishandled by the authorities. As subsequent history so painfully testifies, this type of legislation proved ineffectual on the one occasion when there was a real argument for it."

My humble opinion? Hate speech is in the eye of the beholder. Steyn's book contained none that I am aware of, but he did present unpleasant truths about the Islamization of the West. Regardless, I am in favor of protecting speech, even hateful and insulting speech: poor manners are not a matter for law, and it's difficult to have any opinion without offending somebody, just as Canada's hate speech laws deeply offend me. Cliche: The solution to speech is more speech.

Photo on top: A young librarian searching the stacks for Steyn's dangerous book. (Theo)

Barry Goldwater's journals, reviewed at Reason. (h/t, Insty.) One quote:

Goldwater was for liberty, as he conceived of it. “Our country, of course, was born on the very simple idea that freedom is our only cause,” he wrote in his journal, “and that freedom was not given to us by government.” In another entry, he declared, “The American economic system could only work well, and at its best, when it was unhampered by government and was allowed to be controlled only by the marketplace.… Thus, the core of my economic philosophy is the free market system—when it is working as it should.”

Re Obama's Liberalism (I would say Leftism), from Beston at TCS as quoted in a piece by Ed Driscoll:

In arguing that "labels don't apply anymore," Obama is making the same claim, nearly verbatim, that Michael Dukakis, John Kerry, and other Democrats have made over the years, stretching back over a generation. What these candidates found out the hard way was that labels mean plenty, especially when they refer to something that people understand--like liberalism.

Americans learned over several decades what liberalism, at least modern liberalism, was all about. Contrary to some claims that conservatives, in a sinister plot, defamed the word, liberalism did a pretty good job defaming itself: from the anything-goes ethos of the 1960s to radical war protestors, from tax-and-spend government and welfare policies to lax criminal justice, pacifism abroad, and a wide-ranging contempt for the institutions and values of American life, liberals took what had been the dominant political current in American politics and made it into a pejorative term. Today, while centrist American voters may blanch at some of the Republican Party's positions, they have no wish to go back to governmental progressivism.

If they did, Obama-never one to miss a rhetorical trick--would be resurrecting the word "liberal" as change we can believe in.

Old Gorilla v. Young Gorilla: Viacom is suing YouTube owner Google for copyright infringements. (Thanks, reader.)

I know nothing about copyright law, but it would seem to me that different sorts of internet ISPs and sites present different sorts of legal complications, eg whether commercial or non-commercial, whether a site is a billboard, or whether the use is innocent or educational. For example, the Liquid Kelp image posted earlier today may be a copyrighted image (I have no idea whether it is), but its appearance here consists of an unpaid advertisement for which the company would surely be grateful.

A case might be made that posting major chunks of news or commentary from a newspaper, magazine or other website constitutes a copyright violation, even with attribution.  However, much interesting stuff, the provenance of which is unknown and indeterminable, rockets around the internet via email and websites and ends up on posts - jokes, images, stories, videos, hoaxes, lies, quotes, etc. Who knows who produces and sends out all that fun stuff into cyberspace? Nobody, except the first person who emailed it, created it, or posted it.

Blogs and other websites present interesting new areas for law to romp and play in. It's the wild West. Nobody violates a copyright malevolently, or without attribution if known. I did find the following quote at this interesting site for bloggers:

The Digital Millennium Copyright Act, 17 USC § 512, creates a "safe harbor" immunity from copyright liability for service providers who "respond expeditiously" to notices claiming that they are hosting or linking to infringing material. The DMCA does not make ISPs liable if they do not remove content, but gives them a strong incentive to take the content down. That in turn gives those who want your material removed from the Net a strong incentive to make claims of copyright infringement.

Editor's comment: Any original material clearly identifiable as being produced by us at Maggie's Farm is not copyrighted at all. Not even Creative Commons: our original stuff is free for the borrowing, stealing, or linking. However, we appreciate and expect attribution just as we offer attribution to others whenever we are able to: "Do unto others..."  "Fair use" and "public domain" get complicated when we are talking about email and websites. Our general disclaimer is that we are a non-commercial amateur site, and cannot always determine where some content or images originated. If asked, we will gladly and respectfully take down, link, or attribute any copyrighted material which we have innocently, educationally, or unknowingly posted or linked.