Maggie's Farm

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.

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Much Sorry with Delays
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Your "identity"
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Psychology Experiments' Questionable Results

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Wednesday, November 13. 2019

Wednesday morning links

Man Wears Sweatshirt Just In Case Wife Gets Cold


And she will


More about WD-40 


A house without duct tape and WD-40 is not a home 


Unearthing the Atrocities of Nazi Death Camps - Forensic archaeologists are finally exploring what lies beneath the dirt—but not without resistance


 "A Generation of Ignoramuses"


 Politically Incorrect Paper of the Day: The United Fruit Company was Good!


Illustrating the Corruption in Climate Science


 Environmentalists Ban Cooking w/Fire in California


But lots of fires in CA 


Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker re-named the state capitol "holiday tree" the "Christmas tree," and the new governor, Tony Evers, renamed it back to "holiday tree"... and declared that it would "celebrate... science."


 Why DACA Is Legal


 SARA CARTER: Horowitz Report on FISA Abuse Will be Damning, Expected to Contain Several Criminal Referrals


 Democrats putting Trump through a modern Twilight Zone


That's the point 


 A BIG WEEK FOR THE PRESIDENT AND HIS ENEMIES


 Trump: ‘Everything We Have Achieved Is Under Threat From Left-Wing Ideology’



 “But everything that we’ve achieved is under threat from the left-wing ideology that demands absolute conformity, relentless regulation, and a top-down control of the entire U.S. economy. Far left politicians in our nation’s capital want a massive government takeover of health care. They want to give government bureaucrats domination over every aspect of your business and your life. They want to eliminate American oil and natural gas. They want to enlist us in global projects designed to redistribute American wealth and kill American jobs all over our nation.”



 Erdogan Wants to Redraw the Middle East’s Ethnic Map


 The Myth of a Progressive Palestine

Posted by Bird Dog in Hot News & Misc. Short Subjects at 06:51 | Comments (27) | Trackbacks (0)

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Environmentalists Ban Cooking w/Fire in California

No problem. Put the meat on a stick, the veg in a Dutch oven, and take it all out to the back yard. Plenty of fire there. The electricity will be turned off anyway.
#1 Mike Anderson (Link) on 2019-11-13 08:01 (Reply)
I don't understand the problem with wildfires anyway. Why don't they just ban wildfires?
#1.1 Texan99 on 2019-11-13 08:35 (Reply)
Ban them? No, make them ILLEGAL . (Same, same, essentially.)

#5,Anon wrote: "They Japanese killed far more civilians and often in far worse ways than the Japanese." I think you meant that last word to be "Germans".
#1.1.1 Sam L. on 2019-11-13 14:39 (Reply)
Ironic isn't it. We're banning home gas fires because we prefer for you to be beholden to the electric grid, which we arbitrarily put into widespread blackout - because of fires.
#1.2 Aggie on 2019-11-13 12:08 (Reply)
Shush.

Those people (in charge) know what's better for you, than you do.
#1.2.1 fjord on 2019-11-13 12:54 (Reply)
WD40 is a menace to moving parts, useful only for short-term repairs to machines you don’t want to last. Never use on firearms
#2 Cm Sullivan on 2019-11-13 09:08 (Reply)
I don't recommend or use WD-40 on firearms but I know one avid duck hunter who uses it on his shotguns. I thought it was foolish but then it is designed to disperse water and it has some lubrication properties so it makes sense to use it on a gun that is exposed to water. After probably fifty years of duck hunting, he still swears by it.
#2.1 mudbug on 2019-11-13 16:00 (Reply)
Everyone should memorize this...
https://www.flickr.com/photos/dullhunk/7214525854
#3 oolioo on 2019-11-13 09:29 (Reply)
From the reports about yesterday's hearing at the Supremes, it sounds like they may not agree with Ilya Somin. Could it be that it is not a matter of whether it is legal or not, but that whether to have it OR NOT falls entirely within the President's scope of authority? I don't know, because IANAL. But I know that Somin doesn't think much of Trump.
#4 Basil L. Copeland Jr. (Link) on 2019-11-13 10:03 (Reply)
As I see it, DACA supporters are in a Catch-22. If the program is not a valid exercise of executive authority, then It can't stand. If the program exists solely on the basis of executive authority, then the executive has the authority to terminate it.

Personally, I think it fails legality at the point where they set up the regime to make the application for eligibility. at that point it stops being policy and becomes an unauthorized program.
#4.1 Another guy named Dan on 2019-11-13 12:14 (Reply)
The Nazi Death Camps: I'm not sure what the value would be. If they discover that it wasn't 900,000 killed but in fact it was 900,001 does it really matter? And why no investigation into the similar and even worse acts by the Japanese. They Japanese killed far more civilians and often in far worse ways than the Japanese.
#5 Anon on 2019-11-13 10:34 (Reply)
Read the next story down - A Generation of Ignoramuses. Except recognize that we are now working on Generation #3. Anything that informs our understanding of the death camps, presented in an unsparing light and clinical detail, should be promoted and widely communicated. I am still horrified when I read the accounts of something that happened that many years ago. War and civilian targeting is an atrocious, horrible, repugnant thing. Industrialized genocide is nothing less than pure evil.
#5.1 Aggie on 2019-11-13 12:13 (Reply)
There is no shortage of information, pictures and actual death camps to visit. So the question remains; what is the value or purpose of digging up this piece of land when they already know far more about what happened there than we care to know. And why is there little to no mention of the Japanese atrocities.
#5.1.1 anon on 2019-11-13 12:57 (Reply)
I expect this study is Eurocentric because it was initiated by Europeans and Israelis.
But point taken, for some reason the far more extensive war crimes that occurred by the Japanese in the South Pacific are given a pass today. I recently participated in a genealogical project that involved the digitization and preservation of some WWII material. One article was about a local man who had survived the Bataan Death March, only to die when the unmarked transport ship carrying POWs was torpedoed in the China Sea. The young man who assisted me in on this project was in his mid 30s to mid 40s; he didn't know about the Bataan Death March. I was quite taken aback. I thought, if you don't know about that or about the millions of civilians, including women and children, and POWs that were tortured, starved and died at the hands of the Japanese, you don't understand the role it played in the decision to drop the Bomb. It was this and the well founded fear that the Japanese would kill all their POWs as they retreated.
#5.1.1.1 Exasperated on 2019-11-13 14:17 (Reply)
I used to wonder why the Koreans (and to a lesser extent, the Chinese) are still so upset at Japan about colonization, World War II, and atrocities. Can't both sides just put down the sword? (Relations between S. Korea and Japan are particularly rocky right now.)

And then for the first time, several weeks ago I went to the Hiroshima "Peace Museum," which impressed me as one of the most sophisticated propaganda pieces I have ever seen. A whole building dedicated to portraying the Japanese as innocent "victims" of the A-bomb. A number of Japanese high school students walking through the museum were breaking down and crying, one girl fainted and had to be removed by the museum security personnel. All being indoctrinated that somehow the Japanese were "victims" of World War II.

Sure, the bombing was a horrible thing, I get that. But there was absolutely no acknowledgment of why the bombing happened or honest explanation of why Hiroshima was the target. We were told that they wanted to test out the radius of the bomb damage and Hiroshima was the best city for that, and that the fact it was surrounded by mountains would magnify the effect and kill more people.

That was not why we bombed Hiroshima. We bombed Hiroshima because it was a major military base and port and also the headquarters of the Japanese armies that would be defending Japan if we had to invade. (Much of the military leadership and officers were killed in the attack, thus basically cutting off the head of the military resistance. Ironically, the military casualties included a senior prince of the Korean royal family who was serving as a Japanese Army officer at the time, possibly one factor in the Korean royal family not being restored after Korea being liberated from the Japanese. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yi_U.)

Anyway, it then just really struck me that to this day there is no acknowledgment in the Japanese psyche about how much evil they were responsible for throughout Asia. So now I understand why the Koreans are still so upset about things like the "comfort women" (Korean, Chinese and other women kidnapped and forced into prostitution for Japanese soldiers)--there is really still not a recognition by Japan of what it did.
#5.1.1.1.1 Jim on 2019-11-13 16:24 (Reply)
WRT the A-bomb, it is useful to remember throughout the war, very few Japanese soldiers surrendered and there was every reason to believe that an invasion of Japan would be even more bloody to Japan and the allies, leaflets were dropped for months warning that devastating bombing would continue, and that Japan did not surrender after the first bomb at Hiroshima. They did not surrender after Truman warned, "If they do not now accept our terms, they may expect a rain of ruin from the air, the like of which has never been seen on this earth..." It wasn't till after the bomb at Nagasaki that they finally surrendered.

There's no disputing the toll at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was unlike anything anybody had ever seen but the Japanese should remember they had plenty of responsibility for what happened.
#5.1.1.1.1.1 mudbug on 2019-11-13 16:49 (Reply)
The Japanese were not part of the Geneva Convention. They had no problem with not feeding and not providing water to POWs. In the Bataan death March they beat to death the stragglers or those that collapsed from exhaustion and/or lack of food and water, in addition to torture and abuse. Recalling from memory, I think only 500 of the 10000 Americans who surrendered at Bataan were alive at the end of the war. The survival rate for the captured 65000 Filipinos was much worse. The Japanese forced British soldiers to drink so much water that their bellies distended and then jumped on their abdomens trying to pop them like balloons. At the end of tbe war, they forced POWs into ditches,poured gasoline on them, and lit them on fire. A POW in Germany had a decent chance of surviving the war, a Japanese POW, not so much. This is insignificant compared to the millions of civilians who died in Burma, India, China, Indonesia, the Philippines ....The movie "Alice Springs" is a real eye opener for the treatment of civilians.
#5.1.1.1.1.2 Exasperated (Link) on 2019-11-13 18:30 (Reply)
In putting "civilian deaths world war 2" into a search engine, I get 7.4 to 11.5 million civilian deaths for China.
That number alone informs me that Japanese weeping over Hiroshima and Nagasaki is, to say the least, not taking into account Japanese responsibility for the war.

From Louise Steinman's book The Souvenir, a book about her father's participation in WW2. She also visited the Hiroshima Peace Museum, and had a reaction similar to Jim's.
QUOTE:
An uncomfortable thought kept insinuating itself in my mind: part of the story was missing here. I tried to push it away but it bore down with some insistence. There was little introspection here on the larger context of why Hiroshima was incinerated, of what else was happening in the world on August 6, 1945. The wording on the Pearl Harbor display was a troubling example: “On December 7, 1941, a bomb was dropped on Pearl Harbor and Japan was hurled into the war.” Was dropped. Was hurled. In this “victims’ history,” as one scholar called it, “the war appears as a natural catastrophe which ‘happened’ to Japan, as if without the intervention of human agency.”

True, there were some displays downstairs, added as recently as 1994, which showed that Hiroshima was a hub of military activity. But the possible reasons listed in large block type for why the United States dropped the bomb—(1) limiting U.S. casualties, (2) to force Japan to surrender before the Soviet Union could enter the war, and (3) to measure the effectiveness of the bomb—do not mention the responsibility of Japan’s own military government’s refusal to surrender as a cause.


Had there been no atomic bombs dropped on Japan, the Japanese civilian casualties would probably have been much greater than the roughly 200,000 killed at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

From what I have read, the atomic bombs were what convinced Japan to surrender.
#5.1.1.1.1.3 Gringo on 2019-11-13 20:49 (Reply)
The bombings were the best thing that happened to Japan. Literally saved more than 20million lives. The Japanese were preparing for a land invasion and were going to use every male 14and older to defend the homeland. Their own estimtes were 20 million Japanese deaths and 2-5 million Americans and allies. The two bombs were a godsend.
#5.1.1.1.1.3.1 Oneguy on 2019-11-15 13:43 (Reply)
DACA may or may not be legal but it begs the question. The question is if a president (Obama) can simply declare that something happen (give DACA individuals what amounts to amnesty) can another president (Trump) declare that that policy is overturned? If the SCOTUS does not find the simple truth in this issue then we will know that the constitution is meaningless.
#6 OneGuy on 2019-11-13 10:38 (Reply)
Politically Incorrect Paper of the Day: The United Fruit Company was Good!

The 1954 coup in Guatemala overthrowing Arbenz has continually been cited as an example of the US getting rid of Arbenz because he had nationalized land that United Fruit had owned.
The Central American Crisis Reader gave some interesting information about the relationship between Arbenz and the US. It has a record of a conversation between Arbenz and a US official, which I believe was the Ambassador to Guatemala.Arbenz said to the US official that the US was against him because he had nationalized land that United Fruit had owned. The US official replied that Bolivia recently had a revolution which resulted in the nationalization of the tin mining companies-then the leading export income for Bolivia- and given land to the poor. The US official replied that the US had good relations with the revolutionary government of Bolivia.

The issue the US had with Arbenz, replied the US official, was the Communists in his government. As salami tactics had been successfully used to turn Eastern Europe Communist, this was a valid concern.
#7 Gringo on 2019-11-13 10:38 (Reply)
On DACA, I always thought the reason for Trump's action was that he wanted to spur Congress to actually legislate. They didn't, and he followed through with his threat/promise.
#8 JaneG on 2019-11-13 12:11 (Reply)
California is going to open inquiry on power companies shutting off power. The stupid runs deep in California. They sued PG&E into bankruptcy claiming that PG&E's power lines caused fires. That may in fact be true. But the trail lawyers smelled deep pockets and went into a feeding frenzy. So is it really unexpected that power companies and local utilities would then choose to cut power when wind and other conditions make it likely that a fire will occur and that the power company will be blamed and sued into oblivion? What other choice does the power company have at this point? Keep in mind that the conditions, i.e. very dry plants and very high winds, are the problem. But if a homeless person were the cause of the fire (and that could in fact be the case) no one would sue and the legislature wouldn't investigate the homeless or take any steps to prevent homeless from starting fires. It is ONLY because of the perceived deep pockets of the utility that they were sued into bankruptcy and NOT because they were causing fires. So, what is a power utility to do????
#9 Saul on 2019-11-13 13:39 (Reply)
It's pretty obvious to me that the long game is for the State of California to force PG&E into receivership, so they can revoke it's operating permits and condemn its assets, placing it under the control of the state government. Seize the ultimate means of production: they've already got water, grab electricity, then set their sights on all fossil fuels.
And no one will buy or sell unless they have the mark....
#9.1 Another guy named Dan on 2019-11-13 14:22 (Reply)
Bill Nye: "Tyler, I LOVE your music. Could you write my new theme song?"
Tyler: "Sure how about something like...

Go 'head admit it faggot, this shit is tighter then butt rape
That involve Ballpark franks and silver duct tape...

Bill Nye: "Hold on, hold on, hold on. Can you add the word "Science" in there somewhere?"
#10 Rusty on 2019-11-13 15:48 (Reply)
Re: SARA CARTER

I love you Sara, but wake me when there are indictments.
#11 mudbug on 2019-11-13 16:02 (Reply)
Yes, jam yesterday and jam tomorrow, but never jam today.
#11.1 Assistant Village Idiot on 2019-11-14 15:20 (Reply)

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