Maggie's Farm

"If it were not for the intellectual snobs who pay -- in solid cash -- the tribute which philistinism owes to culture, the arts would perish with their starving practitioners. Let us thank heaven for hypocrisy."

Aldous Huxley, as quoted at Overcoming Bias

 Theo asks whether the advertising image above is demeaning to Italian women. I say NO! (that's Italian for "No"). I say it's art. Let's analyze the picture:

It's a compelling image, with the late Renaissance landscape in the background (the Garden of Eden, with Eve covering her private parts with pasta in her new-found shame? Or is the background the bleak, sterile desert of Western Capitalism?). The gal's hair and the dinner plate are obvious echoes of Botticelli's Venus. But why the cup of cappucino? Coffee with pasta? What exactly is the artist trying to say about gender, transexualism, race, power, veganism, consumerism, carbon trioxide or whatever, capitalism, spaghetti, and coffee? Or does she have some Barbera in the coffee cup? Wine or coffee - bloodthirsty Christian wine or peaceful, spiritual Moslem coffee? West vs. East? But assuming it's wine in the coffee cup, what's up with that? Is she a victim of Capitalism, too oppressed and impoverished by The System to afford clothing or a proper wine glass? Or is her nakedness a warning about the Crisis of Anthropolitical Capitalist Global Warming? Is there Christian meaning in that cup: "Take this cup. This is my blood..."?  For sure, she is saying "Eat me (and drink this)", but in what way, exactly? And does the lady represent a blasphemous pomo version of the Holy Virgin - or a faithful representation of the whores sex workers to whom Christ ministered? Madonna or sex worker? Or maybe a female Christ?  Is she saying "Drink of me" (a request for an oral, not a phallic interaction - as a critique of our phallus-dominated, warmongering culture)? Is the snake-like pasta a reference to Satan, or an echo of Laocoon and his Sons? Or both, a deft blending of pagan with Christian imagery? And how do the tensions of all of these dualities help us to interrogate the dangerous and discredited assumptions of Western Civilization?

(I can do this sort of BS all day long, without once mentioning that she's a hot and delicious Italiano babe. Our college readers are welcome to expand on this post for their Art History term papers. An "A" guaranteed from your crackpot pomo prof.)

I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poet's, the writer's, duty is to write about these things.

William Faulkner - The Nobel Prize Banquet Speech, December 10, 1950, quoted in Vanderleun's piece which we linked yesterday.

This weekend, I plan to use this pot roast recipe with a venison rump I have in the freezer. I wonder how it would work for shoulder too. I have one of those in the freezer. No, two shoulders.

There's always a navarin like this for the shoulder meat.

The case that the Western World has gone mad, that our elite leaders are fools, and that we live in a lunatic asylum. From Part 9 of From Meccania to Atlantis in The Brussels Journal:

The asylum’s restraining device, a chain and ball, is made of paper. The United States Federal Tax Code takes up 67,024 pages. The Federal Register, i.e. government rules and regulations, takes up 78,000 pages. These 145,000 pages, weighing about 730 kg, are just the nucleus of the crushing grid within which the American citizen has to try to go about his daily life. In addition, there are tens of thousands pages more of tax codes and sundry regulations in each of the 50 states. In addition, each spending bill with which U.S. Congress further destroys the country and debauches its money, is over 1,000 pages long and rarely read by the people who vote on it. 

In Europe, there were 80,000 pages of EU laws and regulations in 2005, 90,000 in 2006, and probably at least 100,000 now. Combined with the legal and tax code of each country, the EU citizen conducts his life with well over a ton of paper hanging from his neck. 

To quantify the measure of the insanity further, it suffices to grasp that the outstanding nominal value of global swaps and derivatives at the end of 2008 was $531.2 trillion. Estimated Gross World Product in 2008 was $70.65 trillion.  

We have therefore in our asylum inmates on the upper financial floor, hanging beyond the parapet with all of us in tow, unspooling toilet paper that they swear is worth 7.5 times the total value of all the goods and services produced on Planet Earth. And all of the West’s governments were blind as this was building up over many years, busying themselves instead with breaking their White subjects’ resistance to being governed by green pacifist lesbians or being invaded by over-100 million Muslims, Aztecs, and other assorted redeemers of the Euro peoples’ inexcusably Euro civilization. 

It just may be that in the course of human events, it’s the lot of this generation to stand up and walk out of the theater of madness. 

Horse domestication moved back 1000 years. Yet they are just as stupid as they ever were. Moron animals that will get you killed on them.

The Davis Cup, with Moslems. I didn't know that Moslems were big tennis fans.

Still forbidden at the NYT: The T Word

More on CT's attack on the RC Church

Jules uses the A Word. Rightly so.

Bloomberg defends the rich

Even Letterman making fun of Al Gore now. His insanity is not my fault. Blame the Supreme Court.

Bad, good; good, bad; and bad, bad. VDH

A great source of advice: A biz that makes no money. Cool, dude.

What is the CDS market telling us?

It was an insult, but nobody realized it except us.

Chavez to Obama: Wash your ass. Why can't the Socialists just get along?

Brits urged to stop visiting Disney World. That is good advice, but the rest of it is pure BS: Alas, the Brit footprint on the world gets smaller every day.

Book him, Dano

Is Obama lazy? Or is he overwhelmed?

CT goes to war against the RC Church

Our blog friend Prof Bainbridge is always re-working his site, but this is a complete change.

Nyquist: Why not the truth? "The truth will set you free. But freedom signifies responsibility, and who wants to be responsible? Ignorance, after all, is bliss – and bears no responsibility whatsoever. The most common excuse in any language is, “I didn’t know.” ?

Moral bankruptcy. Megan McArdle doesnt want to pay her Home depot bill

Harvard climate scientist Willie Soon: It's the sun, stupid. Related: Alternative Energy is a joke. Reality will rule, eventually.

Dems have doubled Rush Limbaugh's audience. Related: Samples of Rush's hate speech. Speaking about freedom and opportunity and human potential is hateful, right? Of course it is.

The triumph of the Fabians in England, and what we face today

Volker: Bring back Glass-Steagall

Obama keeps looking for enemies

Plenty of opposition to cap and trade

Overtures to Cuba

More on the teleprompter story

It was terrible when Bush wanted to do it, but it's OK for Obama to de-list the Gray wolf

A re-post from 2007 -

The post about Beantown food yesterday, with the link to Sissy Willis' baked bean recipe, put me to thinking about some of my favorite fall and winter foods. I guess spending yesterday afternoon getting a couple of loads of firewood with a friend's truck helped.

Johnnycakes, or Cornmeal pancakes, or these. You can do them with or without flour in the mix. I like to add a can of canned or frozen corn to the batter: it's one of the very few valid uses of canned corn.

(In fact, corn is a nice addition to regular pancake batter too. Give it a try. Of course, cranberries are great in pancakes. Their tartness adds a lot of zip to a dull pancake.)

Indian Pudding. It's what was called "Hasty Pudding," but made with corn meal, and cooked slowly - never hastily. A little ice cream or drizzled heavy cream on top.

Why is Boston called Beantown? It's because of the triangular trade. Here's a Durgin-Park recipe. Really good with black bread. Heck, I even like baked beans from the can. Our reader reminds us that, in the old days, beans or peas in the pot were termed "Pease Porridge."

I'll do Yankee apple desserts in another post.

Thanks to Gwynnie, I am entirely absorbed by Empires of the Sea: The Siege of Malta, the Battle of Lepanto, and the Contest for the Center of the World.

The war of Islam against the West must be the longest war in history. During this era, it was the remarkable Sulieman the Magnificent.

Pruning is a subject of great interest to us, as it is to all gardeners. It is now the last chance to do our winter pruning of those late-blooming shrubs and trees which bloom on new growth.

This site from Texas A&M is an excellent pruning overview, with special attention to the pruning requirements of Crepe Myrtle.

Shrubs which are pruned wrong offend my delicate gardening sensibilities.

Photo: One of my young Crepe Myrtles blooming a couple of Augusts ago. Up here in Yankeeland, north of their growing zone, they have a small chance of thriving if they are a hardy variety, and are well-sheltered and well-mulched for the winter. Mine do just fine. While they are commonplace in the South, up here nobody seems to know what they are.

As with hybrid Rhodadendrons and azaleas, it's an iffy proposition up here - but well-worth when it works.

Mark 8:31-38

 8:31 Then he began to teach them that the Son of Man must undergo great suffering, and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes, and be killed, and after three days rise again.

8:32 He said all this quite openly. And Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him.

8:33 But turning and looking at his disciples, he rebuked Peter and said, "Get behind me, Satan! For you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things."

8:34 He called the crowd with his disciples, and said to them, "If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.

8:35 For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it.

8:36 For what will it profit them to gain the whole world and forfeit their life?

8:37 Indeed, what can they give in return for their life?

8:38 Those who are ashamed of me and of my words in this adulterous and sinful generation, of them the Son of Man will also be ashamed when he comes in the glory of his Father with the holy angels."

From Stuart Taylor (h/t, Insty). He begins:

Having praised President Obama's job performance in two recent columns, it is with regret that I now worry that he may be deepening what looks more and more like a depression and may engineer so much spending, debt, and government control of the economy as to leave most Americans permanently less prosperous and less free.

Other Obama-admiring centrists have expressed similar concerns. Like them, I would like to be proved wrong. After all, if this president fails, who will revive our economy? And when? And what kind of America will our children inherit?

Read the whole thing.

A book: What he must be if he wants to marry my daughter

Hopeful about Afghanistan

Imagine what they'd be saying if Bush did this

How did California commit suicide? VDH

Via Animals as Weapons at Ace:

”A couple drove 170 kilometres (100 miles) from South Africa's famous Kruger National Park with a highly venomous spitting cobra in their car, the Beeld newspaper reported on Wednesday.”

“Gordon Parratt, 69, felt the 85-centimetre (33-inch) long snake wind itself around his leg while he was driving.”

Always check your car for snakes.

From Krauthammer's The Big Bang Agenda:

...with our financial house on fire, Obama makes clear both in his speech and his budget that the essence of his presidency will be the transformation of health care, education and energy. Four months after winning the election, six weeks after his swearing in, Obama has yet to unveil a plan to deal with the banking crisis.

What's going on? "You never want a serious crisis to go to waste," said Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel. "This crisis provides the opportunity for us to do things that you could not do before."

Things. Now we know what they are. The markets' recent precipitous decline is a reaction not just to the absence of any plausible bank rescue plan, but also to the suspicion that Obama sees the continuing financial crisis as usefully creating the psychological conditions -- the sense of crisis bordering on fear-itself panic -- for enacting his "Big Bang" agenda to federalize and/or socialize health care, education and energy, the commanding heights of post-industrial society.

Clever politics, but intellectually dishonest to the core. Health, education and energy -- worthy and weighty as they may be -- are not the cause of our financial collapse. And they are not the cure. The fraudulent claim that they are both cause and cure is the rhetorical device by which an ambitious president intends to enact the most radical agenda of social transformation seen in our lifetime.

From Examiner:

Has this late winter storm left you scratching your head about global warming?  This winter itself has proven to be cold and snowy for most of the US, including many southern locations (Las Vegas, New Orleans, Houston, and Hawaii).  The snow finally arrived in the Mid Atlantic, albeit late in the season.  The irony of five inches of snow still did not stop the Global Warming protest in DC on Monday, but the onslaught of new research may hinder others.

 

Michael Reilly posted an article in Discovery News that is getting a lot of internet traffic, as well it should.  It brings up the possibility that warming of the planet will not resume. 

"A financial crisis is the worst time to change the foundations of American capitalism."

Powerline:

Most people ... have figured out that the Obama administration is making war on the private sector. No wonder the stock market is in the tank and employers continue to lay off workers.

The Obama stock market:

How about that grin on Cupid's face? And Psyche looks happy too.
Psyche and Cupid (1817)

When the Deal Goes Down, from Modern Times (2006). I think we posted this one in the past, but it's been on my mind -

"Well, I picked up a rose and it poked through my clothes
I followed the winding stream
I heard the deafening noise, I felt transient joys
I know they're not what they seem
In this earthly domain, full of disappointment and pain
You'll never see me frown
I owe my heart to you, and that's saying it's true
And I'll be with you when the deal goes down."

It's not embeddable, but it's worth listening to. The video isn't bad either.

Chart on right via Am. Digest

Via Lucianne:

President Obama's newly named Economic Recovery Advisory Board, the real-world Americans being asked to help solve the nation's financial crisis, includes a union executive who took the Fifth in a federal probe, a billionaire whose failed bank pioneered the subprime mortgage market, and deep-pocket donors who gave or gathered nearly $1.2 million for the president's campaign. In all, 11 of the 16 board members donated or raised money for Democrats in the last election.

8 harsh truths that will improve your life

Boys are "an enormous genetic experiment." AVI

Dr. Bob picks up his guitar again

The Left's romance with terror and tyranny. Radosh at Front Page

Which states are open for business? Not many in New England

Chavez update: Sell food at a loss, or else... And to media: Shut up, or else...

Chris Dodd update: A Kudlow run? Why not? And also via Insty, Bernie Loves Dodd

Geithner is a Warmist.

Cramer's response to the White House attack

Why did the WH snub Brown?

h/t, S,C&A

Politico reports that these tricks have been in the works for months. We need to get used to this new ball game. Can anybody imagine the Bush admin. doing stuff like this?

I do not believe that Conservatives, or Repubs, are up for these kinds of games and tactics. We have often observed here that the Left prefers to reserve their live ammo for their fellow Americans rather than for foreign threats or dangerous criminals.

Via Villainous:

“Deepen, exacerbate existing problems, crises, differences, and if they don’t exist, create them or convincingly claim that they exist, and then deepen, exacerbate them...and profit the most from them in any way you can, and, in the resulting chaos, blame our enemies for the whole thing.” -

Vladimir Ilich Ulianov (Lenin) - Thanks, reader.

One considered opinion, from Moderate Voice:

Let's put all of this in proper perspective: Rush Limbaugh and George Stephanopoulos are private citizens who are media celebrities. They do not run the RNC of the DNC, write any bills or pass any laws. Rahm Emanuel and Barack Obama are part of the White House. The President can veto bills and apply political pressure but the Presidency does not appropriate any money or is authorized to spend one dime without the legislative branch. Michael Steele hasn’t figured out his responsibilities at the RNC, and if he did, his role is to win elections not shape fiscal policy.

Barack Obama has got less than a year before the 2010 primary season begins. He has only got that window of opportunity to turn around the economic mess that he has inherited from Republican Administration and a Democratic Congress. If Republicans want to recover their political mojo, it is the Congress that has got to be the focus of any message. Stop playing their game - Obama is not important and you are not going to beat him… plus he not running for re-election for three years - last time I checked, you can’t beat someone who is not even running.

Nice icicles out my window today. 14 degrees F.