Maggie's Farm

Some wonderful windstorm today here. Hurricane-like and packed with the majestic power of Nature. 66 mph gusts.

Most of the screens blown off ye olde cabin, and a few trees down or half-down. If Maggie's goes down for a while, that will be why.

Only comprehensible to those over 40 -

From an essay of the above name by Craig and Fennell in The New Atlantis, which uses Wolfe's novel as a springboard for a discussion of cultural issues, but let me say that I hated the book, but I enjoy Wolfe's writing very much - the book was just too disgustingly real:

"I Am Charlotte Simmons is an indictment of the primary centers of higher education in America today. These institutions do not well serve the real longings and earnest ambitions of the young people who flock to them, at great cost and with great expectations, year after year. Instead of pointing students to a world that is higher than where they came from, the university reinforces and expands the nihilism and political correctness that they are taught in public schools, imbibe from popular culture, and bring with them as routine common sense when they arrive on campus. Of course, these two ideologies are largely incompatible: nihilism celebrates strength (or apathy) without illusion; political correctness promulgates illusions in the name of sensitivity. But both ideologies are the result of collapsing and rejecting any distinction between higher and lower, between nobility and ignobility, between the higher learning and the flight from reason."

Read entire.

When I was a kid, Kedgeree was my favorite breakfast. My Mom was taken by it on all of her trips across the pond, and we kids just did not go for blood sausage. I think I first had it in Scotland.

This Indian-inspired Brit meal is as rare on US menus as Shrimp 'n Grits is on Maine menus. It's great thing for kids in the cool weather, or anytime. Supper too.

Rice, curry, haddock or smoked haddock, etc., and sliced egg on top. I like it with regular haddock, and even the frozen is OK with this. Wonderfully filling, tasty, and rib-sticking.

Here's one recipe, but it need not be so complex.

Men and women, relationships and politics. Villainous

Another runaway Toyota scam

Democratic candidates distance themselves from healthcare reform

Health care: What gimmick? We just pay the taxes for it for a few years before the thing starts to distort the apparent cost.

New poverty measurements to include government income and benefits. Makes sense. Of course, if poverty is defined as a standard percentage, it will never be eliminated no matter how many cars and TVs the poor own.

Jay Cost: It's Time for Moderate House Democrats to Stand Up to Obama

Moran: How the news gave up its objectivity

Climategate: Once Respected Nature Now Staffed By Moaning Ninnies

God's Grandeur

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
        It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
        It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
        And all is seared with trade; Bleared, smeared with toil;
        And wears man's smudge and shares man's smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent;
        There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
        Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs —
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
         World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

Founder of the American Red Cross Nursing Service. It's her birthday.

She said she didn't do it because she was moved by suffering, but because she liked the work.

I prefer people who do fine things because they want to, not because of pious self-congratulatory virtue or grandiose notions of changing the world.

To those for whom the intellect alone has force, such a witness has little or no force. It bewilders and exasperates them. It challenges them to suppose that there is something greater about man than his ability to add and subtract. It submits that that something is the soul. Plain men understood the witness easily. It speaks directly to their condition. For it is peculiarly the Christian witness. They still hear it, whenever it truly reaches their ears, the ring of those glad tidings that once stirred mankind with an immense hope. For it frees them from the trap of irreversible Fate at the point at which it whispers to them that each soul is individually responsible to God, that it has only to assert that responsibility, and out of man’s weakness will come strength, out of his corruption incorruption, out of his evil good, and out of what is false invulnerable truth.

It's about time people began piling on the arrogantly naive goo-goo prissy academic Woodrow Wilson. See George Will today:

Wilson was the first president to criticize the Founding Fathers. He faulted them for designing a government too susceptible to factions that impede disinterested experts from getting on with government undistracted.

Undistracted by the people, that is. Like the EU. Also, from Jonah at NRO - quoted there:

Wilson, once a professor of political science, said that the Princeton he led as its president was dedicated to unbiased expertise, and he thought government could be "reduced to science." Progressives are forever longing to replace the governance of people by the administration of things. Because they are entirely public-spirited, progressives volunteer to be the administrators, and to be as disinterested as the dickens.

God save us Americans from such disinterested expert mandarins. We are the mandarins, and they are our servants! Makes me wonder who came up with the wacky notion of political "science"?

Here's some real Political Science:

A snippet from 1965, Remember Me When the Candlelights are Gleaming (with Joanie), a wonderful Ernest Tubb tune. You can see that Albert Grossman just loves what he has found in Bob. 

How many songs does Dylan know?