Maggie's Farm

Ali Akbar Khan, master of the sarod, died today. He has been considered by some to have been the greatest living musician, but I have no idea how anybody could, or would want to, determine that.

Here he is pickin' a raga.

As we grow up, we realize that no Dads are "great men" in the usual sense. Just as flawed as we are. But, in my view, any Dad who sticks by his kids and keeps 'em in sneakers is a darn good one.

Neptunus discusses his Dad for Father's Day.

A CT friend emailed these (you can readily tell in what sorts of directions his interests lie):

Danbury Railway Museum

Connecticut Antique Machinery Association

The Shore Line Trolley Museum

and, if your travels happen to take you near Coalbrookdale, England,

Ironbridge, Birthplace of Industry.

Photo: An old trolley at the Trolley Museum. I remember how the old trolley tracks could twist your bike tires when you rode over them as the tracks were gradually consumed by layers of asphalt. The bus lobby beat out whatever trolley lobbies there were and roads, unlike tracks, were built and maintained by government. A shame.

Photo below: Cylinder of a Corliss Steam Engine at the Machinery Museum

Our engagement kid ran off with one of our cars to get to his Dartmouth reunion. That's OK, we have spare cars.

But what is it about Dartmouth that loyalty would lead to such felonious behavior?

My uncle went there, and he was a D nut too. Wa-hoo-wah!

A friend sent a photo he took of the Darien, CT train station. At 5:45 am the southbound platform would be jammed with riders to NYC:

Firesign Theater, 1974:

Ruling cleric warns protesters. I know it doesn't take 51% of a population to make a revolution: it only takes a 5% highly-motivated core or, as in our American Rev, about 30% support.

But what if their election was relatively legit, with only Chicago-style fraud?

We would all be pleased to see Iran return to modern civilization, but what if the majority do not think that way? What if the majority want a combative Islamic theocracy with a dopey selected figurehead in his Members Only jacket?

What if a majority value their religion over modernity and the Western community, and the protesters are mainly the urbanites and students? Then what?

Photo: Esfehan protest this week, via Gateway who is constantly on top of this story

Related: No hope and change for Iran. Krauthammer

I thought it was just an Alaska-style lawn sculpture, but the thing moves, too. Battlefield potential no doubt. Can you picture 30 of these, heavily armed, at the Battle of the Somme? h/t Jonah at NRO

Got rain? Man, have we had rain. Great for our new transplants. We are working on an ark as I type. No doubt global warming is causing the cooling and rain.

Why Waterloo is important to us all. Jules

 A Kangaroo story, with special photo.

Pure reasonableness re Iran. Tiger. Proof that these intertubes need not always be an emotional vomitorium.

Also reasonable: Get off the O's garden. Fake or not, gardens are good. Rich folks like the Os can afford instant gardens - but we pay the bills for them. Thus it's your garden too, in a government sort of way. Ask for a tomato.

And also reasonable: AVI speaks on on Health Care

 Let's discuss medical insurance. No, says ABC and the WH. I guess it's settled science.

Why higher ed is stuck in the middle ages

 Here's a dumb lawsuit for ya. Althouse

Rural Dems have beefs with the O. Of course they do. He doesn't know any of those us people.

Where did life come from? The NYT wants to know. Let's just call it a Cosmic Life Force. God forbid we term Cosmic Forces "God." h/t, LGF

Insty:

P.C. POLICING: British cops stop and hassle thousands to “balance racial statistics.”

So true: Stressful life events are themselves quite heritable.

"I'll never trust a man again." Good idea. We are all Evil. Barely human.

Related, from Dr. C:

The problem for the feminists is that the brand is ruined beyond recognition. When people think feminists they think man-hating, abortion-loving, children-resenting, big-mouthed butch lesbians.

We sure do. Once their goals were accomplished, they were coopted by the loonies. Like this one.

Via No Pasaran:

A primary reason America is "waiting" and "watching" and "monitoring" while Iranians are beaten in the streets of Tehran is that the country is led by the left.

…the world is "closely following the situation," just as it followed the situations of the Jews during the Holocaust, the Ukrainians, the Chinese under Mao, the Rwandans, the Cambodians, Tibetans, and so many others.

 

Oh, help me in my weakness
I heard the drifter say
As they carried him from the courtroom
And were taking him away
"My trip hasn't been a pleasant one
And my time it isn't long
And I still do not know
What it was that I've done wrong.

Well, the judge he cast his robe aside
A tear came to his eye
"You failed to understand", he said
"Why must you even try ?"
Outside the crowd was stirring
You could hear it from the door
Inside the judge was stepping down
While the jury cried for more.

"Oh, stop that cursed jury"
Cried the attendant and the nurse
"The trial was bad enough
But this is ten times worse"
Just then a bolt of lightning
Struck the courthouse out of shape
And while ev'rybody knelt to pray
The drifter did escape.

Best version I've heard of the song, except for maybe the one Bob and Jerry did together. This from the mid-90s, no video.

Scientists pan Obama climate scare report. But the uninquisitive NYT swallows it whole. Related, from Tim Blair:

This administration forcefully confronts Americans but kisses up to those who would destroy America. God moves in mysterious ways.

The report, produced by more than 30 scientists at 13 government agencies dealing with climate change, provides the most detailed picture to date of the worst case scenarios of rising sea levels and extreme weather events: floods in lower Manhattan …

Like the 1953 flood that was caused by a high tide? Or the 1961 flood, also caused by high tides? Or maybe like the NYC floods in 1901, 1903, 1927 and 1977 that were simply caused by rain? Hey, what if New York is hit by a Paris-style flood? That would be a climate change nightmare. Further from Obama’s worst-case confrontation case file:

… a quadrupling of heat waves deaths in Chicago …

More information, please. Would that be a quadrupling of the 64 deaths during one day in 1911? The 2996 deaths across the northwest in 1936? The ten deaths in one Chicago morning 131 years ago? The 20 deaths in two days during 1900? Would the rise match the 65 per cent increase in heat-related deaths from 1935 to 1936? Might one person die every thirty minutes, as happened during a 1916 heatwave?

… withering on the vineyards of California …

Now you’re getting serious.

From Chris Muir:

If there were omniscient men, if we could know not only all that affects the attainment of our present wishes but also our future wants and desires, there would be little case for liberty.

F.A. Hayek 

Have you used Bing? Do you like Bing? Is Bing better?

They do have nice photos (looks like Switzerland today), a better name, and, I am told, a slicker algorithm.

From a Canadian, via Right Wing Prof via SDA:

The cognitive behavior of Western intellectuals faced with the accomplishments of their own society, on the one hand, and with the socialist ideal and then the socialist reality, on the other, takes one’s breath away. In the midst of unparalleled social mobility in the West, they cry ‘caste.’ In a society of munificent goods and services, they cry either ‘poverty’ or ‘consumerism.’

In a society of ever richer, more varied, more productive, more self-defined, and more satisfying lives, they cry ‘alienation.’ In a society that has liberated women, racial minorities, religious minorities, and gays and lesbians to an extent that no one could have dreamed possible just fifty years ago, they cry ‘oppression.’ In a society of boundless private charity, they cry ‘avarice.’ In a society in which hundreds of millions have been free riders upon the risk, knowledge, and capital of others, they decry the ‘exploitation’ of the free riders. In a society that broke, on behalf of merit, the seemingly eternal chains of station by birth, they cry ‘injustice.’

In the names of fantasy worlds and mystical perfections, they have closed themselves to the Western, liberal miracle of individual rights, individual responsibility, merit, and human satisfaction. Like Marx, they put words like ‘liberty’ in quotation marks when these refer to the West.

Somebody please remind me what the alleged rationale is for a government take-over of medical care in America.

It sure isn't those uninsured, since the plan admits it would only cover 1/4 of them (16 million out of a supposed 50 million uninsured).
Is it to reduce the cost of medical care to Americans by rationing medical care by an appointed board charged with cost-effectiveness? Nobody would put up with that.

Or is it a simple power grab of a large % of the US economy by the politicians, who admit that they intend to eliminate any private medical care and any private medical insurance thus putting us all helplessly and powerlessly into the hands of a government monopoly?

I, for one, would hate to see the destruction of American medicine purely for ideological (Socialist) and power-lust reasons. Primum non nocere. Mind you, I always thought that Social Security and Medicare should be means-tested for the poor, and not general entitlements.

Related: This is what happens when medical care becomes politicized. Do you think some ER Doc wants to spend a half hour on the phone explaining to a government bureaucrat why he wants you to have a CAT scan when he has an acute MI in the next bed, a GI bleeder in the next room, and a non-English-speaking drunk attacking your security guard down the hall?

Related: Moonbattery puts it this way

I don't think we posted this already, but maybe we did. This interview was with MTV producer Bill Flanagan in anticipation of the release of Dylan's Together Through Life in April.

Bob is a smart man and always interesting, especially when discussing music.

Parts 1-3 together here.

Part 4 here.

Part 5 here.

Once small excerpt:

BF: Have you ever tried to fit in?

BD: Well, no, not really. I'm coming out of the folk music tradition and that's the vernacular and archetypal aesthetic that I've experienced. Those are the dynamics of it. I couldn't have written songs for the Brill Building if I tried. Whatever passes for pop music, I couldn't do it then and I can't do it now.

BF: Does that mean you create outsider art? Do you think of yourself as a cult figure?

BD: A cult figure, that's got religious connotations. It sounds cliquish and clannish. People have different emotional levels. Especially when you're young. Back then I guess most of my influences could be thought of as eccentric. Mass media had no overwhelming reach so I was drawn to the traveling performers passing through. The side show performers - bluegrass singers, the black cowboy with chaps and a lariat doing rope tricks. Miss Europe, Quasimodo, the Bearded Lady, the half-man half-woman, the deformed and the bent, Atlas the Dwarf, the fire-eaters, the teachers and preachers, the blues singers. I remember it like it was yesterday. I got close to some of these people. I learned about dignity from them. Freedom too. Civil rights, human rights. How to stay within yourself. Most others were into the rides like the tilt-a-whirl and the rollercoaster. To me that was the nightmare. All the giddiness. The artificiality of it. The sledge hammer of life. It didn't make sense or seem real. The stuff off the main road was where force of reality was. At least it struck me that way. When I left home those feelings didn't change.

BF: But you've sold over a hundred million records.

BD: Yeah I know. It's a mystery to me too.

The Complete Idiot's Guide to the Bible.

Photo is the Bird Dog family Bible.

Via Drudge, ABC turns programming over to White House. Good grief. So much for the MSM, press ethics, and journalistic healthy skepticism and integrity. But that's not news.

This is a sick, perverted symbiosis.

This is where Ed Driscoll is:

Photo quality looks like the Bird Dog pup took these with her cell phone yesterday, in Chelsea (aka Hell's Kitchen):

The Bird Dog family has a multi-generational attachment to Bermuda. We always stay at Cambridge Beaches: it's our place. No glitz, unostentatious, no jacuzzis, heavy on Brits, lots of little one-room "villas" perched on the hill over the ocean, sort-of mediocre but edible food. I like to feed on Grouper, Bermuda Fish Chowder, Conch fritters and Dark 'n Stormies whenever I am in Grouper-land. (We do not golf, so we do not need the Mid-Ocean Club.)

You can walk to a place that rents little Whalers and snorkeling or scuba gear, and they will give you a map of the good coral reefs. You go offshore and find them yourself. Mopeds always, but you drive on the left so it's a bit of an IQ test in the traffic circles.

It would pain me to see the US take over Cambridge Beaches as a place to put the Gitmo terrorists. It would tick off the Brits too, no doubt.