Maggie's Farm

They went to Russia to build socialism.

Dems say they're OK with $10 gas.

Hey, John! You can be a celeb too. Moderate Voice

Why the growing Gulf dead zone?

What if Iraq works out? VDH

Monitoring the enemy's broadcasts. No Pasaran

Some real numbers on PC in education. h/t, David Thompson

They define them as those who seek to disrupt civil online discourse: The World of Web Trolling.

Just one more dumb hobby.

Definitely water on Mars.

And oil on Saturn's moon Titan. Lots of it. Well, it's close to oil. Is it possible that oil is not a fossil fuel?

Government bailouts are like potato chips: You can't stop with just one.

Tom Sowell, in his Random Thoughts this week

Some times I wonder whether we are electing a "Most Popular" or a High School Class President rather than a President of the USA. Even Maureen Dowd seems to wonder.

This toon via Theo:

It's Rush Week at Human Events, with many salutations to the big guy on his 20th anniversary.

I do not listen to Rush much these days, but back in '90-'93 I did every day, during my mid-day commute. I enjoy his humor, the apparent joy he takes in living, his self-mockery (eg "with half my brain tied behind my back, just to make it fair"), and his upbeat attitude, but it was his cheerful irreverence towards conventional views that engaged me. Plus his kindness and gentleness to all of his callers.

Whether you agree with him about everything or not, he is a brilliant entertainer.

Love this photo from our Kentucky friend at Slower Pace:

Via Vanderleun:

"Carbon control is what the West talks about. Carbon consumption is what the Non-Western Nations seek. Electricity efficiency and avoided generation is what the West talks about. Electricity supply is what nations big and small outside the West seek. Transportation efficiency is what the West talks about. Increased, greatly increased, mechanized mobility is what the nations of Asia, Africa, Eastern Europe and Latin America seek. The West wants to orate about wind, solar, geothermal and wave energy. The rest of the world wants more oil and natural gas, coal and uranium. The West worries about carbon control. The rest of the world, especially Asia, worries greatly about energy and food control. - Vinod K. Dar Earth Cools

Via No Looking Backwards:

Gateway found this Move On ad for Obama. Hope. It could happen to you.

Do they think I am 6 years old? I hope for a pretty pony, and $50 million in cash, unmarked bills.

This is a tale of minor woe, a "for the loss of a nail, the shoe was lost; for the loss of the shoe, the horse was lost..." story.

When a homeowner sees that ominous drip, drip, drip in the ceiling, coming out of some light fixture, his or her heart sinks. We all know that water and houses don't mix.

It turned out that the vibrations from the Jacuzzi tub had screwed up the drain. On further inspection, the dripping had rotted the subfloor. And, on further inspection, the underfloor in front of the shower was wet and crumbling too, partly because Mr. Shower Door installed the door opening out, not in. And the shower stall wasn't adequately vented. And, and, and...

This means plumbers, demolition guys, tile guys, new fixtures, dumpsters and carpenters. A new subfloor and a new floor for the bathroom, hopefully something less slippery than the shiny Italian tile we had. I think a marble floor is the idea.

And, since that is being done, let's take the vanity out and repaint it, and put a new marble top on it.

And since we have a great carpenter/contractor here anyway, why not have him move the non-supporting walls around in the master bedroom to expand the closets and expand the room the way we have always talked about? Yeah, why not? Not a big deal, right? You can move all your hunting gear to the basement.

And, since they're already doing that, let's finally put the fireplace in the bedroom. It can link right up to an existing chimney, after all. Cozy.

And since they're doing that, let's get rid of all the old carpet and replace it with good oak flooring upstairs. Let's do it everywhere upstairs. After all, it's not much more expensive than high-quality wool carpet.

And since the electricians will be around, let's replace all of that terrible hallway lighting, and then re-paint everything.

I guess one of the consolations of home-ownership is to know, as you watch your life savings evaporate, that you are helping to keep the economy going in your neck of the woods.

Were I single and childless, I could live in a shack in the woods, as long as I had a broadband connection. And a girlfriend or three for company.

A quote from AVI:

I was a theater and literature major in the 70's, with a contempt for Southerners, fraternity guys, all things military, hunters, and business majors. No matter how smart any of them might be individually, those groups were known to be generally closed-minded, uncurious, and shallow.

Not like Me. I was deep, you see. And sensitive. I was a socialist, not because I actually thought through whether it fed more people, but because it seemed generous, and the free market seemed selfish. I was against The War, not because I had any clear foreign policy ideas, but because I was convinced that liberals wanted to understand different cultures and get along, while conservatives just wanted to shoot people they didn't like.

Yes, read the whole thing. It's short and to the point.

A big h/t to Vanderleun, who is supposedly on vacation but isn't, quite. He found this piece at the Independent by an Irish journalist who had covered Africa, Writing what I should have written so many years ago. One quote:

The people of Ireland remained in ignorance of the reality of Africa because of cowardly journalists like me. When I went to Ethiopia just over 20 years ago, I saw many things I never reported -- such as the menacing effect of gangs of young men with Kalashnikovs everywhere, while women did all the work. In the very middle of starvation and death, men spent their time drinking the local hooch in the boonabate shebeens. Alongside the boonabates were shanty-brothels, to which drinkers would casually repair, to briefly relieve themselves in the scarred orifice of some wretched prostitute (whom God preserve and protect). I saw all this and did not report it, nor the anger of the Irish aid workers at the sexual incontinence and fecklessness of Ethiopian men. Why? Because I wanted to write much-acclaimed, tear-jerkingly purple prose about wide-eyed, fly-infested children -- not cold, unpopular and even "racist" accusations about African male culpability.

Am I able to rebut good and honourable people like John O'Shea, who are now warning us that once again, we must feed the starving Ethiopian children? No, of course I'm not. But I am lost in awe at the dreadful options open to us. This is the greatest moral quandary facing the world. We cannot allow the starving children of Ethiopia to die.

Yet the wide-eyed children of 1984-86, who were saved by western medicines and foodstuffs, helped begin the greatest population explosion in human history, which will bring Ethiopia's population to 170 million by 2050. By that time, Nigeria's population will be 340 million, (up from just 19 million in 1930). The same is true over much of Africa.

Thus we are heading towards a demographic holocaust, with a potential premature loss of life far exceeding that of all the wars of the 20th Century. This terrible truth cannot be ignored.

But back in Ireland, there are sanctimonious ginger-groups, which yearn to prevent discussion, and even to imprison those of us who try, however imperfectly, to expose the truth about Africa. And of that saccharine, sickly shower, more tomorrow.

We missed this one: Global warming causes kittens. No doubt predicted by Climate Models. Related, from Al Gore to the Brits:

As your parliament moves forward to debate legislation this session, it is essential that you imagine this not solely as a scientific discussion or even a political dialogue, but as a moral moment where we decide who we are as human beings, and what obligation to the future we feel is appropriate for us to accept as part of our responsibility in this generation. At stake is nothing less than the survival of human civilisation and the habitability of the earth for our species.

Good grief. He wanted to be the Messiah, but Obama one-upped him in that department. Now, he's just a regular crank again.

Why it's so hard to teach students these days. h/t, Minding the Campus

I have felt this way about power tools many times.

AP stunningly acknowledges that the surge has worked spectacularly. Ace

They went down fighting hard. Villainous. Sons and warriors.

The NEA is our Taliban. Moonbattery

Maybe appointing his transition team was a bit premature. Related, via Classical Values:

The New Republic has a pretty good article up explaining European misconceptions of America. The article especially looks at Obama's recent German rallies and how those rallies feed European misconceptions.

Europe's favorite dream: a post-Bush America cut down to size and chastened, a meeker and more modest America, a more "European" (that is, a more social-democratic) America, which at last casts off some of its nastier capitalist habits. An America that is a lot more like us Europeans who have forgone power politics and sovereignty in favor of communitarian politics and integration.

From Insty:

MICHAEL BARONE: "Sometimes public opinion doesn't flow smoothly; it shifts sharply when a tipping point is reached. Case in point: gas prices. $3 a gallon gas didn't change anybody's mind about energy issues. $4 a gallon gas did. . . . In a country with less in the way of checks and balances, which can be gamed by adroit lobbyists and litigators, we would be building more nuclear plants, and would be drilling offshore and in ANWR. We would be phasing out the corn ethanol subsidies that are enriching Iowa farmers and impoverishing Mexican tortilla eaters, and we would be repealing the 54-cent tariff on Brazilian sugar ethanol (the sugar for which would be produced not in defoliated Amazon rainforests but in the desolate and currently unused certao)."

Why would Maliki vote for Obama? Krauthammer

What Dr. Roy Spencer said to the Senate

Still life, 1883. You can read about this piece here.

McCain hits hard: Powerline

Media misses the big story: Pajamas

The only place the Dems want to drill: Michelle

Our blogmeister Chris is a sailboat man himself, but he knows nice powerboats when he sees them. In response to our Hinckley powerboat post a couple of weeks ago, Chris offered the opinion that they were too "common." He attached this photo from his yacht club as proof:

I happen to think that the Hinckley jet drive is cool as hell, but Chris prefers the Shelter Island Runabouts made by CH Marine. They built Billy Joel's commuter boat. Here's one of their Runabouts:

I always found the Shaker hymn "Simple Gifts" to be devoid of content despite the loveliness of the tune.

 For simple lyrics which have depth, here are three. First,

 Wow. How can so much be said about life in so few words?

Also:

Twinkle, twinkle, little star,
How I wonder what you are!
Up above the world so high,
Like a diamond in the sky!

The rest of that song is here. 

And one more, the verse that some claim captures everything about Christian faith:

Jesus loves me! This I know,

For the Bible tells me so.

Little ones to Him belong;

They are weak, but He is strong.

The rest of that song is here.

Via Theo:

What might have been, by Fred Siegel in City Journal. I always thought that the impeachment was insane overreach, and dumb politics. The Repubs were rabid.

Rabid is never a good idea.

The Green Fad is done. Nobody is listening anymore and it doesn't sell: Moonbattery, whence the image.

That's what happens when you hysterically oversell something. This video we posted from 50 years ago tells the whole story.

And the earth is cooling. That is really scary.

We stuck with the Piedmont's local Barbera wines during our Italy trip. Barbera d'Asti and Barbera d'Alba. That same grape has been grown up there at least since the 13th century.

I did not realize that the Barbera grape is the most abundantly-grown grape in Italy. These are basically good table wines, nothing too complicated or fancy, and far down on the wine totem pole from the great Northern Italian wines like Amarone and the Nebbiolo grape-based Barbaresco and Barolo.

About Barbera d'Alba, this site says:

In the hilly area around Alba, only vineyards in the hills with suitable slopes and orientations are considered adequate for production. The terrains must be primarily clayey-calcareous or sandy-calcareous in character. DOC recognition is excluded for terrains with northern exposures and the bottoms of valleys that are flat or semi-flat. The colour of the wine is intense ruby red when young with a tendency to garnet after ageing.

This site says:

The high-in-acid Barbera Grape of north-western Italy is a chameleon-like grape which changes considerably according to yield. As an everyday variety, it is a juicy glugger but it can metamorphose into a concentrated, rich, plumy and cherryish wine with undertones of sweet vanilla and spice when aged in small new casks. In Argentina, it tends to the former style with a little less acidity thanks to plentiful Andean sunshine.

Photo: Barbera grapes