Maggie's Farm

I asked Sipp what living in Maine was like. He did not reply to my email, but offers us a Maine Update, as of yesterday (with music, global warming snow, and deep-snark commentary about Life and Mozart).

I like the street. It's what I call "American." Hope my pal Sipp has a few fireplaces.

Down in more southern New England, I spent the weekend gardening while he spent hours producing that video, smoking Cuban ceegars and good Maine weed as the snowflakes fell, and sipping an ancient cognac by his cozy fireplace while the scent of osso bucco wafted from the kitchen where his sexy barefoot Goddess Mrs. Sipp was lovingly cookin' up a storm on the olde wood stove with nary a "Get off that damn computer and come help me, you lazy cyber-Yankee-would-be-Mozart-redneck."

It's on the Maggie's list of Best Maine Home-Made Videos of 2010.

"Bathers"

A friend of Maggie's is interested in urbanism websites, and found a good one.

This fellow spent a few years driving through all of the neighborhoods of St. Louis with camera. Good for him. Some neighborhoods are as bad as Detroit: Built St. Louis.

In my view, government construction of endless highways destroyed the American city - and the railroads. Why? I never heard of a huge national pro-highway Movement. Unless it came from...Detroit.

Iceland photo via Thompson, who links to more photos

AVI on parachurches

It's in the top ten most dangerous cities on the planet. h/t, Tiger.

Palin: “Mr. President, is a strong America a problem?”

Obama mocks me. That is not a respectful thing to do. IBD: Thanks for what?

The Limited-Government Big Tent 

VDH: How Could We Be So Stupid?

How the Left views Conservatives

Bill Clinton to America: Shut up and lie down

Afghanistan round up: Jules 

Still impressed by Gov. Christie

Like we often say:

...I can’t understand how these same people who distrust the power of large corporations tend to throw all their trust and faith into government.  The government tends to have more power (it has police and jails after all, not to mention sovereign immunity), is way larger, and the control mechanisms and incentives that supposedly might check bad behavior in governments seldom work.

Photo below via Vanderleun -

Revelation 5:11-14

5:11 Then I looked, and I heard the voice of many angels surrounding the throne and the living creatures and the elders; they numbered myriads of myriads and thousands of thousands,

5:12 singing with full voice, "Worthy is the Lamb that was slaughtered to receive power and wealth and wisdom and might and honor and glory and blessing!"

5:13 Then I heard every creature in heaven and on earth and under the earth and in the sea, and all that is in them, singing, "To the one seated on the throne and to the Lamb be blessing and honor and glory and might forever and ever!"

5:14 And the four living creatures said, "Amen!" And the elders fell down and worshiped.

It's something new and different this year: a trip down the Danube. Vienna, Ravensberg, Linz, etc. with the entire Bird Dog family crew and my excellent and adventurous in-laws.

Linzer torte. Sacher torte.

I have always been amazed by how the crazy Norsemen (Roger de Hauteville's gang of Normans) circled around the Med, into the Black Sea and way up the Danube. Where else did Barbarossa get his red beard? I think they just liked getting away from their families and being on boats.

Dark blue is +10 or above, dark red is -10 or below. Details at Ace:

Excellent essay from Fred Siegel at Commentary, The Anti-American Fallacy. (h/t, Insty). It is about "Down with the people!"

Adam Bellow's disenchantment with the Zabar's Left

Is it kiddie pron if the exhibitionist kids photo themselves?

JC Phillips: God in Our Classrooms

Church bells are insensitive. h/t, Moonbattery

The 50 most stressful colleges. If they think college is stressful, they should try real life.

Gay or not? Who cares? She looks slightly butch, tho. Politics is amusing.

It is Small Business Vs. Big Government

Seattle Tea-Party Lukewarm

What's wrong with Sousa? Everybody loves Sousa.

Steyn is hilarious about Canada. (the post on the left side of his page)

Can't wait for climate change legislation. These jerks want us to freeze.

When you tax a business, who pays?

"Economics is not always intuitive – and that is what makes it such a fascinating and important discipline. Take what economists call “incidence” – the study of who actually bears the burden of a particular tax. It is obvious enough that employees pay income tax. But it is much harder to actually work out who really ends up paying for other taxes; voters are often fooled into thinking that somebody else, usually big business, is being hit by higher taxes while in fact it is them who are picking up the tab, albeit in a way that is impossible to detect."

Who pays taxes on business? The shareholders and the consumers. As of 2002, 49% of Americans owned equities.

It's never too late for an Easter poem. I found this, the first Walcott poem I have read, at Mead's site.

Easter
(From Collected Poems 1948-1984.)

Anna, my daughter,
you have a black dog
that noses your heel,
selfless as a shadow;
here is a fable
about a black dog:
On the last sunrise
the shadow dressed with Him,
it stretched itself also—
they were two big men
with one job to do.
But life had been lent to one
only for this life.
They strode in silence toward
uncontradicting night.
The rats at the Last Supper
shared crumbs with their shadows,
the shadow of the bread
was shared by the bread;
when the candles lowered,
the shadow felt larger,
so He ordered it to leave;
He said where He was going
it would not be needed,
for there there’d be either
radiance or nothing.
It stopped when He turned
and ordered it home,
then it resumed the scent;
it felt itself stretching
as the sun grew small
like the eyes of the soldiers
receding into holes
under the petrified
serpents on their helmets;
the narrowing pupils
glinted like nailheads,
so before He lay back
it crept between the wood
as if it were the pallet
they had always shared;
it crept between the wood
and the flesh nailed to the wood
and it rose like a black flag
as the crossbeam hoisted
itself and the eyes
closed very slowly
extinguishing the shadow—
everything was nothing.
Then the shadow slunk away,
crawling low on its belly,
and it left there knowing
that never again
would He ever need it;
it reentered the earth,
it didn’t eat for three days,
it didn’t go out,
then it peeped out carefully
like a mole from its hole,
like a wolf after winter,
like a surreptitious serpent,
looking for those forms
that could give back its shape;
then it ran out when the bells
began making wide rings
and rings of radiance;
it keeps nosing for His shape
and it finds it again, in
the white echo of a pigeon
with its wings extended
like a shirt on a clothesline,
like a white shirt on Monday
dripping from a clothesline,
like the greeting of a scarecrow
or a man yawning
at the end of a field.

This site has indoor and outdoor mushroom-growing kits. Given the prices of fancy mushrooms, it makes sense. Too bad you cannot grow my favorites at home: Chanterelles and Porcinis.

Here's Have you seen the mushroom man?

From Rick Moran's Tea Partiers Epitomize the Tension Between the Individual and the State:

The importance of their advocacy becomes apparent when you consider that President Obama and the Democrats in Congress have adopted the even more problematic “communitarian” ideal as their template for government. Where the principle of utility is part of the historic, classical liberal definition of government, communitarianism is a more radical ideal that denies individual rights in almost all cases while making forced altruism the dominant force for change.

And from Shiver:

Having spent a good deal of time with tea partying patriots, I do not see them as easily fooled, however. A very wise group they appear to be. Whether highly educated or not so much, tea partiers on the whole have the one thing so many on the left, and especially in this particular administration, lack: real-world experience.

Barack Obama and his minions have unleashed and called to rhetorical arms a veritable legion of the kind of folks they probably didn’t even know existed a year ago. These are Americans who prefer liberty over the luxury of a government-guaranteed life of mooching off the labors of others.

Silent majority? Well, not any more.

Dumb rednecks? Now, there’s a laugh.

The only reason this far-left administration and its media mouthpieces don’t respect the tea partiers is that they hold the partiers’ all-American virtues in such virulent disdain.

Call me a dumb redneck if you want. I don't care.

Now, the pursuit of power is a zero-sum game: you acquire power only by taking it away from someone else. The pursuit of money, however, is not a zero-sum game, which is why it is a much more innocent human activity. It is possible to make a lot of money without inflicting economic injury on anyone. Making money may be more sordid than appropriating power—at least it has traditionally been thought to be so—but, as Adam Smith and others pointed out, it is also a far more civil activity.

Irving Kristol, as quoted in Chicago Boyz' Paying Higher Taxes Can Be Very Profitable. How many times have we said the same thing here at Maggie's? The pursuit of power is what is sordid and sick, but everybody has to make an honest living.

It's genetic, sort-of. In the NYT.

I think cilantro is a tired fad, but I do not dislike it.