Maggie's Farm

A re-post from our archives:

Excellent piece in the CS Monitor on the condition of religion in Europe by Peter Ford. In it he quotes Grace Davies, who notes that the Enlightenment led in different directions in the US and Europe - here, we tend to view, as did the Founding Fathers, religious belief and practice as something that needed protection from State power, while in Europe they tended to see the State as protecting the people from powerful religious institutions.

It's an interesting difference in the role of the State in relation to religion, and I wonder whether it reflects a larger difference in the view of individual rights in general - whether they are seen as being provided by the State, as if from a King, or whether they belong to the individual by virtue of being human, in other words, granted by God or by Natural Law rather than by the State.

I wonder whether different expectations of the State derive from this.  If the State is seen as the provider of rights, then why not a provider of everything? After all, you can contort the concept of freedom rights and label anything a "right" if you want to, including a right to watch TV in jail, a right to a driver's license, or a right to a stress-free life. But if the State is an organization we have created to protect the freedoms we own anyway, will we not be less inclined to view the State as a benevolent, loving, parental provider in general? 

The liberals/progressives have already transferred their dreams and hopes and faith to the State. Their fascistic/statist undercurrent has been apparent for a long time - there will never be enough government to satisfy them.

The piece is a good update on European attitudes towards God, with some surprising findings:  What place for God in Europe? | csmonitor.com

Before my brain's hard drive deteriorates, a few more random thoughts about our northern Italy trip a few weeks ago, a trip which has been more-than-amply photo-documented here.

1. An ottica in Verbania fixed my glasses, for free. The nose-thingy fell off, and she put two new ones on. She was young, blonde, and lovely, and wore high black leather boots and a short-short skirt under her lab coat. My thanks to her.

2. Each morning from my balcony in Baveno I watched two families of Grebes, with their young'uns, paddling around the edge of Lago Maggiore. About the size of our Western Grebe. The chicks were just beginning to learn to dive. Sometimes, one would try to climb on Mom's back the way young grebes too, but they were really too big to fit. The Dad hunted for minnows to feed the chicks, and the Moms herded them so they wouldn't wander too far.

3. Wherever you go in Italy - city, town, country village, or farmland - you are being watched. There will be an old lady peeking from behind a curtain watching you go by. Just stop for a moment to admire somebody's tomatoes, and you will see the curtain move and an old face peer out. It never fails. Italians have a paranoid streak to them. Some old lady is always watching you. She thinks I might steal her zucchini.

4. The church choir rehearsal in Baveno. Pure magic.

5. Gelato? An overrated item, in my opinion, although the hazelnut is very nice indeed. Any dessert is always welcome. I have visited Italy several times, and keep hoping that I will discover the specialness of gelato, but Haagen Dazs is better. The local wines are more fun to sample.

It's a quick water taxi ride from Orta San Giulio to Isola di San Giulio. The basilica on the tiny island was first built in 926 but has had many revisions and renovations since then. It's part of an active Benedictine monastery.

Here's a brief history of the island.

Most interesting to me were the frescoes, which ranged in age from early medieval to Renaissance. This one, on a pillar, looked Byzantine in influence. I was sure I took more fresco photos, but I don't find them on my camera. Maybe I spaced out.

Here's a site with more photos of the frescoes.

A few more of my photos from the island on continuation page.

Our post on Richard Gatling and his Gun prompted a reader to inform us about two other hand-driven machine guns of the 19th Century: The Nordenfelt Gun and the Gardner Gun.

Here's a clip of the Nordenfelt gun in operation:

A quote from Kristof's essay in the NYT about Asia (h/t, Jungle Trader):

For most of the last several thousand years, it would have seemed far likelier that Chinese or Indians, not Europeans, would dominate the world by the year 2000, and that America and Australia would be settled by Chinese rather than by the inhabitants of a backward island called Britain. The reversal of fortunes of East and West strikes me as the biggest news story of the millennium, and one of its most unexpected as well.

and

A half-century before Columbus, Zheng He had reached East Africa and learned about Europe from Arab traders. The Chinese could easily have continued around the Cape of Good Hope and established direct trade with Europe. But as they saw it, Europe was a backward region, and China had little interest in the wool, beads and wine Europe had to trade. Africa had what China wanted -- ivory, medicines, spices, exotic woods, even specimens of native wildlife.

In Zheng He's time, China and India together accounted for more than half of the world's gross national product, as they have for most of human history. Even as recently as 1820, China accounted for 29 percent of the global economy and India another 16 percent, according to the calculations of Angus Maddison, a leading British economic historian.

Asia's retreat into relative isolation after the expeditions of Zheng He amounted to a catastrophic missed opportunity, one that laid the groundwork for the rise of Europe and, eventually, America. Westerners often attribute their economic advantage today to the intelligence, democratic habits or hard work of their forebears, but a more important reason may well have been the folly of 15th-century Chinese rulers.

Yes, the problem was that they didn't appreciate good claret. There's a lesson in that. Read the whole fascinating thing. The link is above.

Triathlon: The Hoyts - Dad and his disabled son -

The Dylanologist noted to me that almost every town in Italy has a Via Gramsci or a Piazza Gramsci. No wonder Italy's politics and economics are so messed up.

Readers know what we think about Gramsci (and his latter-day followers on the Left) from this and this.

Here's two I noticed in Italy a few weeks ago. Gramsci Street in Baveno, next to the train station:

 And here's Piazza Gramsci in Verbania, not far from the ferry dock:

If Gramsci is your hero, you are in trouble. He's the guy who invented the notion of incremental socialist fascism, which is the unspoken long-term plan of the American Left, I believe. Stepwise and slowly, so as not to scare people until we finally wake up one day and find our lives boxed in by communitarian goals as determined by elitist masters who "care so much" about us poor schmucks and suckers that they want to run every detail of our pitiful, ignorant lives.

A re-post from 2005:

Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets by Nassin Nicholas Taleb

My favorite quote from the book: "If you're so rich, how come you ain't smart?" From an Amazon review - it's better than I could do:

If the prescriptions for getting rich that are outlined in books such as The Millionaire Next Door and Rich Dad Poor Dad are successful enough to make the books bestsellers, then one must ask, Why aren't there more millionaires? In Fooled by Randomness, Nassim Nicholas Taleb, a professional trader and mathematics professor, examines what randomness means in business and in life and why human beings are so prone to mistake dumb luck for consummate skill. This eccentric and highly personal exploration of the nature of randomness meanders from the court of Croesus and trading rooms in New York and London to Russian roulette, Monte Carlo engines, and the philosophy of Karl Popper. Part of what makes this book so good is Taleb's ability to make seemingly arcane mathematical concepts (at least to this reviewer) entirely relevant in evaluating and understanding everything from the stock market to the success of those millionaires cited in the aforementioned bestsellers. Here's an articulate, wise, and humorous meditation on the nature of success and failure that anyone who wants a little more of the former would do well to consider. Highly recommended. --Harry C. Edwards

Let me use disappointment as material for patience;
Let me use success as material for thankfulness;
Let me use suspense as material for perseverence;
Let me use danger as material for courage;
Let me use reproach as material for long-suffering;
Let me use praise as material for temperance;
Let me use pain as material for endurance.

- from a prayer by John Baillie

Nice weather equipment - WeatherPeddler

Slainte! - Check out Malts.com.

Wonderful. You can read Smithsonian Magazine online

Cabela's sells floor mats for most cars and trucks.

Travel -See America.org

Cost-effective travel - Club ABC

Vacation Home Rentals by Owner - VRBO. For example, this nice weekly rental on Nantucket:

or this one in Bellaggio on Lake Como:

And, of course, there are always good pin-ups at Theo

A re-post:

Both the majestic American Elm and the Chestnut fell victim to blights imported from overseas. With their deaths, the New England landscape was altered, for the worse. No more village blacksmith "under the spreading chestnut tree," and no more village greens and churches graced by rows of giant vase-shaped Elms - the hallmark of old New England.

Yes, we still have some elms, but the young ones don't make it to adulthood, and any remaining trees are slowly dying off.

The good news is that there is a blight-resistant Elm available. You won't live long enough to see it in its glory, but planting some now in the right places will be a heck of a fine gift to the future.

You can find them at Miller Nurseries.

Readers know that I have a special attachment to Wellfleet on Cape Cod. I was a little kid in Hyannis when it was a sleepy village without malls, car dealerships, and retirement complexes, but my family soon fled up to Wellfleet for the summers.

By no means do we wish to encourage anyone to buy there, but most of the town is Cape Cod National Seashore so construction opportunities are limited. And the water, especially on the ocean side, is too darn cold for almost anybody except native New Englanders and kids.

Besides, as the old joke goes: "Cape Cod Real Estate - going fast." That's because Cape Cod erodes at the average rate of about 3'/year on the ocean side. Thoreau was impressed by that fact. Over the years, we have seen many nice oceanfront cottages disappear over the winter.

Wellfleet is not a fancy town (it's a glitz-free zone) and its waters produce the best oysters in the world. Wiki tells us: "Wellfleet was encountered by Europeans as early as 1606, when the French explorer Samuel de Champlain explored and named it "Port Aux Huitres" (Oyster Port) for the bountiful oyster population resident to the area."

I thought our readers might be amused by this piece of Wellfleet real estate, for sale now.

They are asking $1.8 million for that waterfront villa. It's probably the location on the harbor shore, not the structure - if you can call it that a structure.

For something with a little more charm, but no waterfront, this is my idea of a real Cape Cod house:

They are asking $3.625 million for this place. If you do the math, though (lot size 435600 at rule-of-thumb 44,000 sq ft/acre, that's a ten acre place. A solid foothold on the Cape. Worth every darn penny).

Richard Gatling believed that his rapid-fire gun would be a boon to mankind.

A quote from a review of the book on the right by Jonathan Yardley in the WaPo:

 'It occurred to me,' he wrote to a friend in 1877, 'that if I could invent a machine -- a gun -- which could by rapidity of fire, enable one man to do as much battle duty as a hundred, that it would, to a great extent, supersede the necessity of large armies, and consequently, exposure to battle and disease be greatly diminished.' As disingenuous and self-serving as that sentiment sounds, it ended up being quite correct: Innovations in arms steadily reduced the relative lethality of battles (not to mention the cost of waging war) throughout the twentieth century."

I hope our blog friend at Never Yet Melted doesn't mind this photo theft, but this one completely cracked me up:

From Totten:

What most of us still think of as “war” in Iraq is, at this point, a rough and unfinished peacekeeping mission. Whether it is officially over or not, it has certainly been downgraded to something else, and it’s about time more analysts and observers are willing to say so.

Photo via Villainous

An astute grown-up. h/t, the astute Astute bloggers

What did Manhattan, or Manahatta in the Lenapi language, look like in 1609 when Henry Hudson arrived? It is often forgotten that NY Harbor is where the Pilgrims were headed. November storms interfered with that.

A landscape ecologist is mapping it out. Slide show here. h/t, Neatorama

Today, from Dad to young lady teen studying advanced Shakespearean acting at Oxford with the Royal Shakespeare Company:

"Hey, babe. Leaning anything?"

Entire reply from teen:

"You betcha."

Very bad politics. Rick Moran has got this right. One quote:

Forget that Gramm’s remarks about America being in a “mental recession” and that our fellow countrymen are a “nation of whiners” were insensitive, crass, stupid, and abominably ill-timed. They were just plain bad politics and trying to justify them as “true” in any sense whatsoever is the heighth of political ignorance.

To chastise your fellow countrymen who are genuinely worried about the way the world seems to be giving way underneath their feet as change and uncertainty sweeps across the country in the form of ever rising energy costs and a housing crisis to which there doesn’t seem to be any bottoming out bespeaks an obliviousness to the political realities of what is happening beyond your own small corner of the world. Your appeal to an economic Darwinism as a model for the American people to follow is as outmoded as it is despicable.

Photo: The gardens of Villa Pallavicini in Stresa, two weeks ago. If a garden space is like a room, they put a row of picture windows in it.

In A Tribute to Italy, The Fjordman posting at Gates of Vienna takes a look at the European sickness, and sees a ray of hope in Italy:

Italy is by no means immune to the problems affecting everybody else in the Western world, but her odds are better than those of several other countries. Through contact with Italians, I get the impression of a country whose national heart is still beating, a people still in touch with their roots and believing that their cultural survival is desirable, which is no mean feat given the suicidal state of our civilization in this age. When observing Italy, I see sickness but also life; and where there is life, there is hope. Something tells me that the story of Italy as a vibrant heartland of European civilization still contains more chapters to be written. If we are lucky, her struggle for survival and rebirth can inspire others far beyond her borders.

Gates speculates about Italy's resistance to PC and modern multiculturalism:

...commenters speculated that Italy’s innate regionalism might be one of the key factors that inoculates it against the most pernicious post-modern political diseases.

Our regular Italian commenter Ioshkafutz confirmed this viewpoint, and provided us with a comprehensive and engaging summary of Italian culture, which is reproduced below. It has been edited minimally for spelling, punctuation, and clarity:

Italy is many countries. A Milanese is closer to an Austrian than to a Sicilian, A Torinese to a Frenchman than a Calabrese. When I go to my Roman caffé / bar at night and Neapolitans truckdrivers enter, I don’t understand a word, or rather, just barely enough to know they are Italians. The rest could be Ancient Greek.

They — the Neapolitans — have their own musical genres, theater, and even cinema… all still thriving.

They’ll defend the legacy of the Borboni when Naples was a Capital city. They never really digested the Piedmontese invasion. The Romans instead have, also because when Rome became the Capital city and Mussolini brought cinema to Rome (he is responsible for cinecittà) Turin was marginalized.

Maybe Italy is already multicultural enough. Ever since Italy was a province of the Roman empire, it never became a political entity again until 1861.