Maggie's Farm

The Earthquake. Acts 16: 16-34

¹⁶One day, as we were going to the place of prayer, we met a slave girl who had a spirit of divination and brought her owners a great deal of money by fortune-telling. ¹⁷While she followed Paul and us, she would cry out, “These men are slaves of the Most High God, who proclaim to you a way of salvation.” ¹⁸She kept doing this for many days. But Paul, very much annoyed, turned and said to the spirit, “I order you in the name of Jesus Christ to come out of her.” And it came out that very hour. ¹⁹But when her owners saw that their hope of making money was gone, they seized Paul and Silas and dragged them into the marketplace before the authorities. ²⁰When they had brought them before the magistrates, they said, “These men are disturbing our city; they are Jews ²¹and are advocating customs that are not lawful for us as Romans to adopt or observe.” ²²The crowd joined in attacking them, and the magistrates had them stripped of their clothing and ordered them to be beaten with rods. ²³After they had given them a severe flogging, they threw them into prison and ordered the jailer to keep them securely. ²⁴Following these instructions, he put them in the innermost cell and fastened their feet in the stocks.

²⁵About midnight Paul and Silas were praying and singing hymns to God, and the prisoners were listening to them. ²⁶Suddenly there was an earthquake, so violent that the foundations of the prison were shaken; and immediately all the doors were opened and everyone’s chains were unfastened. ²⁷When the jailer woke up and saw the prison doors wide open, he drew his sword and was about to kill himself, since he supposed that the prisoners had escaped. ²⁸But Paul shouted in a loud voice, “Do not harm yourself, for we are all here.” ²⁹The jailer called for lights, and rushing in, he fell down trembling before Paul and Silas. ³⁰Then he brought them outside and said, “Sirs, what must I do to be saved?” ³¹They answered, “Believe on the Lord Jesus, and you will be saved, you and your household.” ³²They spoke the word of the Lord to him and to all who were in his house. ³³At the same hour of the night he took them and washed their wounds; then he and his entire family were baptized without delay. ³⁴He brought them up into the house and set food before them; and he and his entire household rejoiced that he had become a believer in God.

A re-post from May, 2006

Japanese Wisteria blooms in May in New England. 

It's a sentimental Victorian plant that is perfect for shading pergolas, arbors and porches.

Once established, it grows like a weed, up to 10' per summer. It takes work to keep it under control.

Robins love to nest in their tangles: I have a pair of robins nesting in mine right now, so I cannot trim it until the babies leave the nest.

Like many exotic, introduced plants, it can be very invasive and aggressive: eliminating wild stands of wisteria is a tough job.

I grow sweet-smelling Autumn Clematis up my Wisteria vines, so the vine serves double duty. Autumn Clematis is another one of those strong vines that grow like crazy, with amazing September perfume.

Last year's Game Dinner menu. Yum yum.

The Connetquot River. Trout fishing on Long Island. Unique.

Must a man be willing to die?

Worm of the Week: Our friend, Mr. Earthworm

Harold Brodkey, from The State of Grace in a collection of short stories, First Love and Other Sorrows:

I had read too many books by Englishmen and New Englanders to want to know anything but graceful things and erudite things and the look of white frame houses on green lawns. I could always console myself by thinking my brains would make me famous (brains were good for something, weren't they?), but then my children would have good childhoods - not me. I was irrevocably deprived, and it was the irrevocableness that hurt, that finally drove me away from any sensible adjustment to life to the position that dreams had to come true or there was no sense in living at all. If dreams came true, then I would have my childhood in one form or another, someday.

...

I was fierce and solitary and acrid, marching off the little mile from school, past the post office, all yellow brick and chrome, and my two locust trees, and there was no one who loved me first. I could see a hundred cravennesses in the people I knew, a thousand flaws, a million weaknesses. If I had to love first, I would love only perfection. Of course, I could help heal the people I knew if I loved them. No, I said to myself, why should I give them everything when they give me nothing?

Image: Brodkey, drawn for The New Yorker in 1995.

It is now widely believed that essentially all 6000 world languages evolved, by geographical separation, from one proto-language. (This theory tends to undermine Chomsky's claim to fame for theorizing an internal hard-wired grammar - Chomsky's sole interesting idea, in my opinion.)

However, languages are dropping like flies, as the planet shrinks. McWhorter in the NYSun argues that this is a good thing, but he hopes hobbyists will keep the old ways alive.

Will the universal language be English? I hope so. It's a pretty good language, but Italian is far more musical, and I'd be happy to have an excuse to learn it. Would no longer need a translated libretto for the operas I love.

The man who views the world at fifty the same as he did at twenty has wasted thirty years of his life.

Muhammed Ali, who I still remember as Cassius Clay

By Dorothy Fields / Jimmy McHugh, and famously sung by Billie Holiday

Grab your coat and get your hat
Leave your worry on the doorstep
Just direct your feet
To the sunny side of the street

Can't you hear a pitter-pat
And that happy tune is your step
Life can be so sweet
On the sunny side of the street

I used to walk in the shade
With those blues on parade
But now I'm not afraid
This rover crossed over
If I'd never have a cent
I'd be rich as Rockefeller
Going to set my feet
On the sunny side of the street

Excellent youtube of the song as sung by Marie Bryant  - good photography. Woops - youtube cancelled that one. Here's Cyndi Lauper.

There is a Harvard study of life success and health. A quote:

Early wealth and privilege did not predict life success and health of the study subjects nearly as well as the original investigators thought it would. What did separate successful subjects from failures was their level of maturity and their optimism.

The assertion that "Character is destiny" is attributed to Heraclitus, around 500 BC. Read the whole thing.

Lightning strikes the Empire State Building on May 15. Photo from The Daily Mail.

Rudy Giuliani might not be your favorite candidate, but he is an impressive, likeable, and engaging communicator. Watch. It is quite amazing that the Repubs have such a deep bench. Lots of folks I'd happily vote for, and no-one is ever perfect. Rudy is not my candidate, but I'd vote for him without complaint.

Climate momentum shifting. Summary of scientists who have switched sides in the debate. (h/t, Jawa)

Black-on-white crime just doesn't fit the narrative. LaShawn. More from Cramer.

Another grim milestone. Dust my Broom.

The ongoing lying of the pols about illegal immigration proposals. Rick at RWNH. But Kesler is not quite so negative about it.

Widgets, drive-bys, and bots. Nasty things from websites. BBC

The Hollywood blacklists. Mark Steyn via Driscoll. Probably like you, I was taught that the blacklists were one more reason that America was a bad country. Wrong. These guys were traitorous, hated America, and allied themselves with Russia via the Communist Party. Nothing was wrong with pointing that out.

Al Gore threatens the free press. I missed this scary quote from Anchoress' piece:

“I think if it is important to look at the pressures that made it more likely than not that mainstream journalists in the United States would convey a wholly inaccurate conclusion about the most important moral, ethical, spiritual and political issue humankind has ever faced.”

Sheesh. Al, check in with your doctor, and check your porphyrin levels.

It looks like a set-up for a lawsuit to me. Protein. To what extent should religious accommodations be made in schools and the workplace?

No more blunts. Vaporizers are the thing, dude. Like healthy, man.

Behind the DC gun lawsuit. Alphecca.

What ever happened to Magic Johnson? Classical Values

I'm a registered Republican and consider socialism a violation of the American principle that you shouldn't stick your nose in other people's business except to make a buck.

PJ O'Rourke

A quote from our pal Coyote:

In Closing of the American Mind,  Allan Bloom tells the story of a question he used to ask his classes vis a vis income inequality.  He would ask something like "Would you vote for a law that reduced income inequality but at the same time reduced total wealth, such that the poor might get a larger slice of a smaller pie, and might even be worse off on an absolute basis afterwards."  Apparently, he would get solid majorities for "yes" and in fact I have been in classes where this same question was asked and at least 40% said "yes."  This is a situation a bit similar to the one above, but without it being personal.  In other words, no one has explicitly hosed you, they have just done better.

I hope you can see the parallel.  Large numbers of people are willing to pay (or equivalently make less money) to reduce the earnings of people who are wealthy and/or successful. They are even  more willing to do so if they think that they have been treated unfairly.  Which is why you see so many politicians and media outlets working so hard right now to convince the middle class that current income distribution patterns are somehow "unfair."  Politicians are pandering to this base human emotion, the desire to spitefully bring someone else down (in the case of income equality laws, someone the person has likely never even met or transacted with) even if it makes oneself worse off.   

I can understand why Pete Best might harbor a grudge against the Beatles.  But why do so many Americans harbor a grudge against people they have never met, just because they make more money?

Last I heard, Envy was a deadly sin. Whole piece here.

Comment from The Barrister: Coyote gets right to the point. America is not about making money. It's about having free choices to do what you want, and, as Bird Dog said yesterday, being adult enough to live with the consequences of one's choices. If you want to pursue wealth, great. If you want to pursue other things, great. All I ever wanted to pursue was a bit of modest comfort, work, friends, a relationship with God, and a happy family, and  I feel  blessed to have found those things. I love to make money (doesn't everybody?), but it has never been my main objective. However, I do hate being held up as an object of angry envy by pandering politicians just because my life plan worked. I had a basic life plan, and I just followed it. It was not rocket science. To maintain my plan, I will need to keep working - if I live - until I am 75 or more. No problem. I am happy to do that, as was my Dad, my Grandpa, and my great-grandpa, who died at 86 in the fields with his hands on the plow on his farm in CT just up the road from here. That farm was lost, to the family's perpetual resentment, to cover estate taxes and is now covered with absurd mini-mansions on 1/2 acre lots and has a street called Azalea Drive. Great Grandpa would be rolling in his grave if he saw that on the land that is soaked with generations of family sweat. And, if he ever saw an azalea (which I doubt, up here in those days), I am sure that he would have considered it a vulgar display. Even today, where I live, the wealthy happily drive rusty old cars, Yankee-style.

A disturbing brief video memory of Communism. Thompson. Thank God police-state-enforced socialism is in the past...or is it?

Fear not - the bold, brave, cantankerous, gnarly farm hands of Maggie's Farm are manning the barricades against those who want to "do us good" whether we want it or not. Do not do good to me. I am a moderately intelligent adult who is capable of making decisions and choices, for better or worse. My ancestors came here so people would leave them alone. Leave me alone, because I have the Yankee American attitude: I do not trust experts, and I am willing to live with my own mistakes without asking anything from anyone. Self-reliance, no matter how tough it can be at times. Reliance on God is good, but reliance on government is for the birds.

Our friend and Aliyah Diary author has been truant for quite a while. Too busy writing books and patrolling Jerusalem by bicycle, armed -  but he sent this in yesterday:

For the 40th anniversary celebration, a few moments from the ceremonies at the Kenneset building  in front of Chagal's mosaic.

Eliaz Cohen's Yeru-shalem has been set to music and was sung beautifully; a play on words - everyone "yeru" (throws, shoots) peace, (Shalem) at Yerushalem.

Yehuda Amichai, whose widow was there, wrote: "Yerushalem is God's Venice."  Films of Amichai walking up the steps through the old city or Mahane Yehuda.

And Shuli Natan, before singing Naomi Shemer's Yershalaim Zahav, said that Teddy Kolek, before he died last year, asked Shuli Natan to sing Naomi Shemer's song in his memory. So she did. And so did everyone, everyone - Knesset members, Yithak Navon, Supreme Court justice.

And an Ethiopian singer sang a song of return to Jerusalem both in Amharic and Hebrew.  As she sang, night-time movies of the first Operation Solomon, flying Ethiopian Jews to Israel was shown. Some were flown in the cargo section of a plane. And no complaints.

As I watched the films of the recapture of Jerusalem in 1967, the soldiers slamming into walls before peering over to shoot, men climbing out from under tanks to run across the narrow streets that I now walk, I thought of one of my soldiers, whose father, Chanan Porat, was one of these soldiers.

Altogether, I wish I could transmit how moving this was.

Weds., I go on a hike to see some of the critical battle sites.

Editor's Note:  One of these days, we will post an excerpt from one of Nathan's books (linked above), which mainly consists of in-depth interviews with Israeli citizen-soldiers from elite combat units.

From Alphecca:

I really think most liberals are just developmentally arrested people who look at the world –regardless of their age– through the mentally immature eyes of a 12-year-old. How else to explain this silliness?

It's about guns.

At dinner on Friday night I was talking with a friend about fusion as a power source. He told me that he had had a conversation about energy with physicist and Benedictine priest Stanley Jaki.

In that conversation, Jaki posed this question: If energy were endlessly abundant and free, what would life be like, what would people do, and what would matter to people?

It's a round ball and a round bat, and you got to hit it square.

Pete Rose

I have told my kids that one optimistic yet realistic way to look at life is that it is like standing in front of a conveyor belt upon which a stream of opportunities are passing by, but each one will never pass by again in the same form.

I am referring to every sort of opportunity: opportunities to make friends, to be kind, to find love, to have fun, to stand up for your beliefs, to show mercy, to develop interests, to develop good habits of character, to make money, to be forgiving, to practice strength, to find God, to learn, etc, etc.

Alas, that conveyor belt offers just as many opportunities to make mistakes and poor choices.

It is a tough part of maturity to accept the reality limitation, however, that any opportunity grabbed will reduce the number of opportunities passing by on the conveyor belt, because time is an arrow.

A friend reminds me of the old story:

The levee broke and the water is rising in the town. One guy gets on his knees and prays "God, save me from this flood." There is a knock at the door and a firetruck offering to evacuate him. "No thanks, God will rescue me."  He waits as the water fills the first floor.  A guy in a rowboat shows up.  "No thanks, God will save me."  Water fills the second floor and he goes to the attic and punches a hole in the roof.  A helicopter comes by.  "No thanks, God will rescue me."  The water rises further, and he starts treading water, but finally tires and drowns. Up in Heaven he berates God.  "Hey, you said you would help me when I was in need. Where the heck were you?" 

God replies "I sent you a firetruck, a rowboat, and finally a helicopter. You rejected every one..."

You can locate anyone's cell phone with this GPS mobile phone tracking system.

But, if my ringer is turned off, can it help me find my cell phone in my house?

With all of the exciting news about wildfires, I want to make a pitch in favor of wildfire. Wildfire is part of nature, and it's a good thing.

Fire suppression makes natural fires worse when they occur, because kindling builds up on the floor of the forests.

Why is wildfire good? Not just because it is "natural." I am not a pagan who believes that whatever is "natural" is good. But fire is nature's way of creating swaths of ash-fertilized space for plant succession on the land, and new habitats for the species that like newer growth. In fact, mature forests probably have the lowest biodiversity of any non-polar habitat. For one example, the Elk and songbird populations of Yellowstone took a huge jump after the big fires.

Smokey the Bear was wrong. Wildfire is part of the creative destruction of nature. Suppressing it is little more than sentimentalism combined with a subsidy to logging business. Whether millions of taxpayer's money should be spent, and lives risked and lost, to support that sentimentalism and that industry is a political question (to which my answer is "No").

We have written more about the virtues of wildfire and clear-cutting before. 

I am not one who was born in the possession of knowledge; I am one who is fond of antiquity, and earnest in seeking it there.

Confucius

Excellent cartoon about Truthers and Conspiratorialists. No Pasaran.

The arrogance of experts. Samizdata

A reader brought to mind a book to consider reading. The Death of Satan, by Columbia prof Andrew Delbanco. It's about how the idea of the Devil was replaced by a de-personified, impersonal "evil," and how the notion of "evil" is being replaced by social and psychological, rather than moral, concepts.

World's most powerful cordless drill. YouTube

A very nice hydrangea we bought yesterday at the nursery. Kardinal, It is said to tolerate more sun than most hydrangeas can.

A Ukrainian explains it (h/t, reader). One quote:

Anyone who had lived through the attempt by Soviet hardliners to take back the power and restore a Stalinist dictatorship would be astounded, just as I am, with allegations by today’s American “progressives” that George W. Bush is a dictator whose “junta” has usurped our freedoms and reversed decades of progress, turning America into a “fascistic autocracy.” Such people don’t even begin to know what “junta” really means nor what it feels like to live in a dictatorship. These pundits may think of themselves as enlightened “defenders of freedom,” but in reality they only expose their own moral blindness. By shooting in the wrong direction they are hurting the very cause they claim they fight for. Freedom cannot be attained by erasing the objective criteria of liberty and democracy. Dictatorship cannot be fought by misleading the nation about the true nature of tyranny and oppression.

Read the whole thing at Pajamas. The author of the piece is the creator of a humor site on our blogroll, People's Cube. Below is an image from Cube, and from the article: