Maggie's Farm

Thanks for inventing the internet. You thought of everything. It never ceases to amaze me how much stuff you managed to put on there.

I just found out that I can buy opera tickets for the Arena di Verona (a vast Roman arena) for August online, now. Looks like a fun outing, but the arena seems to big for opera.

Our friend Right Wing Prof, who died too young of cancer after this past Christmas,  wrote this piece two years ago about his religion and worship and invited us to post it because he wasn't going to (I added the photo of the Good Friday cross in my church, taken before our Stations of the Cross worship):

Psalm 130, called De Profundis, is chanted after Holy Thursday Mass while the altar is stripped bare:

"Out of the depths have I cried unto thee, O LORD.
Lord, hear my voice: let thine ears be attentive to the voice of my supplications.
If thou, LORD, shouldest mark iniquities, O Lord, who shall stand?
But there is forgiveness with thee, that thou mayest be feared.
I wait for the LORD, my soul doth wait, and in his word do I hope.
My soul waiteth for the Lord more than they that watch for the morning: I say, more than they that watch for the morning.
Let Israel hope in the LORD: for with the LORD there is mercy, and with him is plenteous redemption.
And he shall redeem Israel from all his iniquities."

I rarely write about my faith. It is, to me, an intensely personal realm of my life I am uncomfortable sharing. As Holy Week is upon us, however, it is time to break that silence.

We often hear that Christianity in the U.S. is at a crossroads, but I believe that we came to the junction 20-30 years ago, and some stayed the course, while others did not. I am no fan of ecuminism, at least as it usually exists, which requires that we turn off the road to Gethsemane so as to make others more comfortable, or welcome them into our fold without asking that they believe. I do pray for reconciliation, and I believe that the body of Christ on earth is wounded. I am a traditional, conservative Roman Catholic, but I am not a denominationalist. I do not see how criticizing others for their faith can be productive, either to my salvation, or to the Church.

As I said, I believe we have come to the crossroads and chosen whether to remain on the path or leave it. I refer not to Catholics and Protestants, but orthodox Christians -- which encompass Roman Catholicism, Eastern and Oriental Orthodoxy, some of the Protestant traditions, and the LDS -- and heterodox groups -- which encompass the Anglican Communion and most mainline Protestant traditions. Each took their own path, one toward Christ, and the other, away. I do not condemn the heterodox groups, but I also do not take them seriously, nor do I consider them Christian in any meaningful sense of the word. And it is not by my judgment that I do not consider them Christian, but their own disavowal of Christianity.

I see little point in mourning their departure. They did so of their own free will, knowing exactly what they were doing. I feel for the Christians like my sister-in-law who have always been affiliated with one of these groups (she's a lifelong Methodist) and have not found the courage or will to leave. But I ignore the bodies, their statements, and agendas.

I said above that I pray for reconciliation, but I do not hope for it within my lifetime. I am content to worship, and let other Christians worship as they will. We are all children of God, and Christ died for us all. I bear no ill will to evangelicals, even those who believe that I drink baby's blood at Mass every Sunday.

I have been seeing healing over the years. I have a colleague who is a conservative Southern Baptist. He and I were talking some ten years ago when he told me he was going to Ash Wednesday services at his church. I found this a bit jarring: Ash Wednesday services at a Southern Baptist church? I said so, tactfully, of course, and we had a long, productive discussion, first about how his church was reaching back into the past and rediscovering the liturgical year, then the importance of the liturgical year in a Christian life. Since then, I have seen quite a few similar instances of Protestants from what we usually think of as the far opposite side of the spectrum from Catholicism rediscovering and celebrating the ancient rites of the Church, often during Lent.

One can easily be a Sunday Catholic, just as one can easily be a Sunday Presbyterian, and do no more than attend Mass on Sundays. Many do, and often migrate to parishes that cater to their kind, with clergy and laity that expect little. Those of us who feel their faith more poignantly, and more frequently than just on Sunday mornings, migrate to less feminized, more masculine parishes, where priests and laity expect a great deal more than weekly attendance. We expect more from each other because being a practicing traditional Catholic is a difficult faith that requires the most of us, even though we usually fall short. We keep ancient fasts, even though the Church no longer requires it of us. We read and pray the monastic hours daily, even though we are not ascetes. We do everything to keep our faith in the foreground of our lives every day. We pray that we may be better Christians and find stronger faith. And we look upon our brothers and sisters, Christian and non-Christian, with charity.

We are human, and so, we do not achieve the goas we set for ourselves. But without striving toward those goals, we believe we can no longer call ourselves Christians.

Central to our lives as Christians is the liturgical year. We anticipate the birth of Christ during Advent, and celebrate that birth on Christmas. During Lent, we contemplate the central mystery of Christianity, that God sent his Son to die for us that we may be resurrected to eternal life as He was. And while Advent is a sacred time, to Catholics, Lent is the most sacred, solemn part of the year because of that central mystery.

We celebrate that mystery at every Mass, but Lent calls us to make that mystery the center of our contemplation. On Ash Wednesday, the first day of Lent, we are reminded of our mortality, that we will die, as did Christ upon the cross. And Ash Wednesday leads to Holy Week, as our lives must lead to death and resurrection. During Lent, vestments are the purple of forgiveness and the passion, and the Alleluia is left out of the Mass.

At what point do American Liberals become Conservatives? I mean, at what point would government and government control and redistribution be sufficient to satisfy them so that they would cease seeking more, and just stop and try to freeze it in a Conservative fashion, as happened in the Soviet Union, North Korea, Cuba, and China?

One of the things that converted me to Conservatism years ago was that none of my Liberal and Lefty friends could or would answer that question. I liked to ask them what arguments they could make against free food, socialized legal insurance and auto insurance, free nose jobs and boob jobs and IQ injections - and free PhDs in Social Justice and Peace Studies for all.

It gradually dawned on me that they had a dream of an eternal childhood of ease, like many peoples' dream of a Florida or Arizona retirement or of being the wife of a hedge fund owner (but with them in control of it, I suppose, to keep the personal dreams and spirits of others stifled for the greater good).

Being a bred-in-the-bone New England Yankee Puritan, I find the idea of ease and irresponsibility to be repellent. Except occasionally...as a treat. We seek effort and additional effort - hence Maggie's Farm.

(Photo is of a life of ease. Even the effort of chasing birds is pure fun for this fine fellow, who has it made thanks to the benevolence of his master.)

Thus our stale repost below from a few years ago for those who haven't seen it -

At NY Rev of Books. One quote:

The number of legal chess positions is 10⁴⁰, the number of different possible games, 10¹²⁰. Authors have attempted various ways to convey this immensity, usually based on one of the few fields to regularly employ such exponents, astronomy. In his book Chess Metaphors, Diego Rasskin-Gutman points out that a player looking eight moves ahead is already presented with as many possible games as there are stars in the galaxy. Another staple, a variation of which is also used by Rasskin-Gutman, is to say there are more possible chess games than the number of atoms in the universe. All of these comparisons impress upon the casual observer why brute-force computer calculation can't solve this ancient board game.

Image is Turner's Childe Harold's Pilgrimage (1823)

A "childe" is a youth on the career track to become a knight. Our Massachusetts Maine friend Sipp brought Byron's (George Gordon, Lord Byron) masterpiece Childe Harold to mind with his killer quote from Canto 3 of the epic:

He who, grown aged in this world of woe,
In deeds, not years, piercing the depths of life,
So that no wonder waits him; nor below
Can love or sorrow, fame, ambition, strife,
Cut to his heart again with the keen knife
Of silent, sharp endurance: he can tell
Why thought seeks refuge in lone caves, yet rife
With airy images, and shapes which dwell
Still unimpaired, though old, in the soul's haunted cell.

The entire narrative poem is here, but is best read in dead tree form. Better yet, read out loud. Lord Byron, like Dylan and Sippican and a bunch of other special people, has (or is, or was) an Old Soul - regardless of age. It's a gift - or maybe a curse. Maybe both.

Dress shoes need to be shined regularly if you do not wish to look bedraggled, don't they?

A spit shine requires a little water (or spit). Here's the USMA method.

And from The Art of Manliness, here's How to Shine Shoes like a Soldier.

It takes a toothbrush to do it right and to get into the seams. People say 30-40 minutes per shoe for a definitive shine, less for a touch-up shine. Obsessionals like to top off a shine with a coat of clear polish.

I read that you are supposed to edge the sole too. News to me, but makes sense.

Photo is a good J. Press Oxford shoe - off the rack and not too fancy, but good enuf for government or academic work. Maybe when I win the lottery I'll have foot molds taken in London and Rome and have them make me custom shoes and loafers like my prosperous friends do.

'Liar' is just as ugly a word as 'thief,' because it implies the presence of just as ugly a sin in one case as in the other. If a man lies under oath or procures the lie of another under oath, if he perjures himself or suborns perjury, he is guilty under the statute law.

Under the higher law, under the great law of morality and righteousness, he is precisely as guilty if, instead of lying in a court, he lies in a newspaper or on the stump; and in all probability, the evil effects of his conduct are infinitely more widespread and more pernicious.

Teddy Roosevelt.

It reminds me that Dr. Bliss says "Lying is worse than theft of property, because it is the theft of somebody's reality."

Howard Zinn. America the Awful---Howard Zinn's History.

Old Stalinists never die, they just fade away.

What was never mentioned in the SOTU? National security.

How Mann and Jones hid the decline. They just abruptly eliminated all of the cooler weather stations.

Related: Brit climate people broke the law

Why Medicare is terrible for docs and hospitals. Dr. Bob

IPCC Head in Glaciergate Crime?

Why not return Detroit to the French?

Gerson: State of the Union: Obama's reality problem

It's about time: Dem Hold on Jewish Vote Slips

How Hugo Chavez's revolution crumbled

VDH: Trashing the job-makers

"Politicians never accuse you of 'greed' for wanting other people's money - only for wanting to keep your own money."

Joseph Sobran

We have it pretty good these days. From Gene Expression:

Geneticists have long known that the ancestors of modern humans numbered as few as 10,000 at some time in the last 100,000 years. The critically low number suggested that some catastrophe, like disease or climate change induced by a volcano, had brought humans close to the brink of extinction.

If the new estimate is correct, however, human population size has been small and fairly constant throughout most of the last million years, ruling out the need to look for a catastrophe.

Assuming an average census size on the order of 50,000, it seems as if our species stumbled onto a rather "risky" strategy of avoiding extinction. From what I recall conservation biologists start to worry about random stochastic events (e.g., a virulent disease) driving a species to extinction once its census size reaches 1,000. I suppose the fact that we were spread out over multiple continents would have mitigated the risk, but still.... It also brings me back to my post from yesterday, it seems that for most of human history we are a miserable species on the margins of extinction. For the past 10,000 years we were a miserable species. And now a substantial proportion of us are no long miserable (it seems life is actually much improved from pre-modern Malthusianism outside of Africa and South Asia). If only Leibniz could have seen it!

Driscoll notes that the one nation ignored by the O about their amazingly swift and generous aid to Haiti was Israel and their IDF medical and rescue teams. with their field hospitals.

Thus our photo of an IDF babe from Double Tapper, who has more. (h/t, Theo)

Off topic - We are adding to our blogroll the following good sites:

The Future of Capitalism

Fausta (who has a good post today about Venezuela)

Big Journalism

"If you love wealth more than liberty, the tranquility of servitude better than the animating contest of freedom, depart from us in peace. We ask not your counsel nor your arms. Crouch down and lick the hand that feeds you. May your chains rest lightly upon you and may posterity forget that you were our countrymen."

Samuel Adams (Image is Copley's 1772 portrait of the firebrand rabble-rouser and tea-partyer)

The new New Left consists of public employees and their handlers, says Malanga.

There are two Americas: the tax-eaters and the taxpayers. And, he says, there are no red or blue states: only blue metropolitan areas. One quote:

What makes these cities so Blue is a multifaceted liberal coalition that ranges from old-style industrial unionists and culturally liberal intellectuals, journalists, and entertainers to tort lawyers, feminists, and even politically correct financiers. But within this coalition, one group stands out as increasingly powerful and not quite in step with the old politics of the Left: those who benefit from an expanding government, including public-sector employees, workers at organizations that survive off government money, and those who receive government benefits. In cities, especially, this group has seized power from the taxpayers, as the vast expansion of the public sector that has taken place since the beginning of the War on Poverty has finally reached a tipping point. In New York City, this coalition has helped roll back some of the reforms of the Giuliani years. In California cities and towns...

Malanga at City Journal with The Real Engine of Blue America. (h/t, reader BL). I am reminded of Ben Franklin's quote:

"When the people find they can vote themselves money, that will herald the end of the republic."

As I was considering some dinner plans, naturally the idea of foie-gras-stuffed quail came to mind.

Quail, around here, are Bob Whites. (Hunters in the South call them "birds," hence the origin of the term bird dog.) Habitat loss and development is the main reason that these Eastern US birds are approaching endangered status in parts of their range. You can read about them here. 

I have heard them calling their name out on Nantucket, Long Island and on Cape Cod, but nowhere inland in New England.

Fortunately, they are readily pen-raised and thus easily available at supermarkets - and for preserve shooters who typically, even in the South, release thousands of pen-raised birds for the pleasure of the sports.

This site has 91 quail recipes.