Maggie's Farm

Story at Think Progress. It's a seriously, frighteningly wrong impulse to consider shutting up voices you don't agree with.

The way I see it, conservative talk radio emerged and blossomed because conservative views had been suppressed for so long in all mass media - TV, print, and radio. Back in the 80s, I would hear people say things like "Until I heard Rush on the radio, I thought I was the only person who thought that way." Around 60 million people listen to Rush Limbaugh now, I believe.

AM radio was a dying animal until daytime talk came along.

The fresh viewpoints have been great for the country, in my opinion. The debate is good for everyone, because it makes us think and re-think instead of stagnating. Even when you disagree, it helps sharpen and clarify your thoughts.

Talk radio remains one of the few places where alternatives to the MSM "establishment" views and spin can be heard. If print and TV were more balanced, some talk radio and some blogs wouldn't feel the need to exist. Their markets would shrink.

Still, I suspect that if some cheerful, optimistic, warm-hearted, avuncular, humorous, and self-mocking (all traits I attribute to Rush) liberal came along on the radio, he or she could build a sizeable audience. But maybe not.

About clouds and solar wind, from Canada's National Post, a quote:

Solar scientists predict that, by 2020, the sun will be starting into its weakest Schwabe solar cycle of the past two centuries, likely leading to unusually cool conditions on Earth. Beginning to plan for adaptation to such a cool period, one which may continue well beyond one 11-year cycle, as did the Little Ice Age, should be a priority for governments. It is global cooling, not warming, that is the major climate threat to the world, especially Canada. As a country at the northern limit to agriculture in the world, it would take very little cooling to destroy much of our food crops, while a warming would only require that we adopt farming techniques practiced to the south of us.

Not only will we all freeze to death in ten years, but the freezing of Arctic ice will kill off all of the seals and Polar Bears, not to mention all of the Eskimos. "Mommy, let's take the SUV so the Polar Bears don't freeze to death."

Addendum: We tend to see it the way Vaclav Klaus sees it.

750 lb. male Griz caught in Montana, collared, and released, near beautiful Choteau, MT - "The Paris of the Rocky Mountain Front."

In reality, if he was looking for a decent meal then downtown Choteau is not the place, but you can buy cigareets and whusky there. I have been there.

Volunteers at Good Samaritan Hospital (not sure which one) in 1957, delivering cigarettes and candy to patients. I'll take two packs of Luckies and a Clark Bar please, Ma'am, and some matches.

We always hear about the uninsured. Who are they? Some answers. (h/t, Dr. Helen)

Comment from Dr. Bliss:

A recent exchange with a new consultation, after three office visits during which we had established some good rapport and understanding:

"My recommendation to you is that we begin a course of psychotherapy to deal with all of these issues, which I believe are connected and which I think we can do something about."

"OK, I knew that, and I guess I have known that for a long time. But will my insurance cover it?"

"I don't know. I would need to meet with you two times a week to do this properly. But whether your insurance will or will not help you with that, I will expect you to pay me from your own pocket, beyond and above whatever your insurance reimburses you."

"You will? I have car payments, credit cards, tuitions, vacations planned - all sorts of expenses. If insurance doesn't cover it, I don't want do it. I don't see how."

"Well, it's a matter of priorities. I'd suggest that you think it over for a little while to decide how important dealing with these things is to you. If something is valuable enough to you, you will find a way to pay for it."

Life is like that, isn't it? Everybody is now trained to want a free lunch... but when they get it, it is no darn good, because the free lunch is a baloney sandwich on Wonder Bread. Life is filled with tragedy, is it not? These sorts of situations sadden me deeply, but reality is about limits. It is useless to pretend that it is not.

No philosophy could be more impoverished than one which denies the existence of this radiant interior Light -- or that reduces it to some material property of physics. "Divine light" is not a metaphor borrowed from our sensory apparatus. Rather, the reverse is true: the radiant light that fills the cosmos is an analogue of God's infinite luminous presence.

Marxism is the opiate of academia.

Anonymous

Eric at Classical Values has an excellent piece on creeping totalitarianism. His views on the subject sound like ours at Maggie's Farm. A quote:

...the problem is, people vote for it, and we live in a democracy. Perry de Havilland has also called the process "Democratic totalitarianism":

...a total state really is what a great many people have in mind for us all. They seek a sort of 'smiley face fascism' in which all interactions are regulated in the name of preventing sexism, promoting health, and defending the environment. The excuses will not invoke the Glory of the Nation or the Proletariat or the Volk or the King or the Flag or any of those old fashioned tools for tyrants, but rather it will be "for our own good", "for the Planet", "for the whales", "for the children", "for the disabled" or "for equality".

But if they get their way it will be quite, quite totalitarian.

It would be an error to dismiss such warm and fuzzy totalitarianism as the product of top-down rule by a Leviathan state. Pliant and well-meaning citizens (some of whom I suspect in my darker moments are wannabe eunuchs) voluntarily condition themselves first to accept self-imposed limitations, following which it becomes easy to impose them on others.

One Hundred Years of Solitude turns 40 as Gabriel Garcia Marquez turns 80.

From an essay on the novel, by Ilan Stavans at The Chronicle Review:

In my 40s, I've returned to García Márquez's masterpiece. Now it seems to me that, like Cervantes's Don Quixote, it decodes the DNA of Hispanic civilization. It's a "total" novel, designed by a demiurge capable of creating a universe as comprehensive as ours.

1874. L'allee au Bouffan

The Comprehensive Bill is part of the War on America: a point of view, with many facts and details, from LinknZona.

The purpose of this unsatisfactory and unsuccessful photo in the rain on Saturday was to try to capture the excellent and highly-varied Hosta beds in front of the little antique farmhouse. How many sturdy, self-reliant Connecticut Yankees have been raised in this humble 1720 home?

As narrow-minded, knuckle-dragging traditionalists, we Maggie's Farmers honor fathers: fathers that stick around and do their best to do what grown men need to do for their families and for their communities.

Few of us can reach the Atticus Finch ideal.

Here are a few Dad-related links from our archives:

The Incredible Shrinking Father

A few pretty sailboats

M200 carbine

Are boys just defective girls?

Bring back dueling!

Fine powerboats: This one and this one

David Grossman's Ode to his son Uri

What do men want?

Banging around Yankeeland in the rain all day, and ended up driving through a hailstorm like I have never seen in New England. It looked as if it had snowed, or as if God had dumped his largest box of mothballs on us.

There's a herd of Black Angus in the distance on this farm in beautiful Litchfield County. Taking photos in the rain is evidently not my thing.

Maggie's Farm supports and admires the work of The Land Trust for Tennessee - as we do the good work of all land trusts. 

Photo from yesterday's celebration of a donor of a conservation easement on her working farm. Some things in life mean more than money.

Yes, Maggie's Farm has had a conservation easement for a number of years, and can never be developed.

Nice old farmhouse. What style would ya call that, Sippican?

Sippican: It's "a nice little spindle-style Queen Anne house, a little spare on the embellishment."

One angry email and one - or more - flaming posts. Other blogs, I know, get more anger, but we tend to be civil. Where does this come from?

First, an email response to today's post highlighting the introspective liberal:

What dribble but coming from a party who's (sic) hero is a big fat white guy on the radio who needs drugs to get an erection what can you expect?

Aaah, you mean like such not-angry and thoughtful political philosophers as Rush Limbaugh, Mike Levin, Ann Coulter, Michael Savage, Neil Boortz, and Michelle Malkin, right? If only liberals could bring to their movement the authenticity and intellectual consistency of the three pillars of modern Republicanism: nigger-hatred, religious fanaticism, and proto-fascist war-mongering.