Maggie's Farm

Maggie's turns three this winter. Well, more or less three. We actually opened up shop in 2005, but it was more of a practice run for about a year without stats or any visibility. That's the way these intertube thingys go - unless you're a prominent tabloid celeb already like Theo Spark or Caroline Kennedy or Jules Crittenden or Lindsay Lohan or Neoneoneo.

Fact is, we still haven't figured out how to master this blog thing, and we are happily confused about our identity. Erik Erikson would consider us "unresolved," no doubt. Are we a diary? A Kindergarten Show-and-Tell? A Punditorium? A Link Blog?

Well, we call ourselves "eclectic" and and just leave it at that. We post whatever we feel like, and whatever we stumble upon in our lives which we think needs or deserves whatever cyberspace we can offer it. (That's an awkward sentence. We specialize in those, at times. And in incomplete sentences and also in run-on sentences. We always have to dash off to feed the chickens, plow a field, or butcher an ox.)

As we have said at least once a year, readers are our only reward. In our minds, commenters even more so, but we know most people have neither the time nor the inclination.

We seem to be almost doubling our readership each year. By our internal stats (not Sitemeter) we are running around 200,000 visits/month now. (Hits mean nothing other than intertube presence, but they're around 4.5 million per month.) Sitemeter, our Webmeister tells us, isn't very accurate but is useful as a relative measure for comparison purposes. The numbers of "unique readers" is our key metric - and our readers are indeed unique.

Jan 2008

Feb 2008

Mar 2008

Apr 2008

May 2008

Jun 2008

Jul 2008

Aug 2008

Sep 2008

Oct 2008

Nov 2008

Dec 2008

Why do readership numbers matter to us? Vanity, I guess, and simple attention-seeking. (The real secret, shameful truth is that we enjoy doing this, and that we learn from doing it.)

So that's the annual Maggie's update. If you like us, do us a favor and send us around to folks who might enjoy reading us. We aren't famous - yet.

The price is right.

And, while we're on the subject, a big thanks to Chris Southern Consulting, the Vermont born-and-bred blogmeister who makes this site possible and who solves all the glitches and problems with good cheer. If you need website work, give him a shout.

Broadway for 20 bucks.

Hope and Change! 600,000 new government jobs. Heck, we all work for the gummint half the year already.

Keep a civil tongue in your head for the next 365 days

Obama's New Deal. Bad as the Old New Deal?

The Gramsci Award du Jour: Bill Ayers

Chavez' secret fan club

Sea Ice back to 1979. The earth is cooling, but it doesn't fit the narrative.

The funny business, in Minnesota. Related: Stop, thief cries Dick Morris

Harry Reid's "worst President," and what he's done

The gang rape of a Lesbian you never heard about

A blog whose time has come: Democracy in Venezuela

Will Neo-Conservatism die for Compassionate Conservatism's Sins?

We emailed our cuz Mr. Free Market to ask him whether we had borrowed the image of that ceegar-smokin' gal from him. Yes, we had.

He went on to inform us that the lady in question is none other than Miss Dita Von Teese, a burlesque performer and a walkin', talkin' pin-up - with her own web site.

Algore got so many innocent and well-intentioned but scientifically-uneducated people upset with his fear-mongering silliness. It's a damn shame. Those with a familiarity with how science works, and who had no political agenda to drive, just stood back and watched bemusedly.

Finally, even the HuffPo gets it. Harold Ambler's Mr. Gore: Apology Accepted. (h/t, No Looking Backwards, whence the borrowed  image.) One quote:

If not carbon dioxide, what does "drive" climate? I am glad you are wondering about that. In the short term, it is ocean cycles, principally the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, the "super cycle" of which cooling La Niñas and warming El Niños are parts. Having been in its warm phase, in which El Niños predominate, for the 30 years ending in late 2006, the Pacific Decadal Oscillation switched to its cool phase, in which La Niñas predominate.
Since that time, already, a number of interesting things have taken place. One La Niña lowered temperatures around the globe for about half of the year just ended, and another La Niña shows evidence of beginning in the equatorial Pacific waters. During the last twelve months, many interesting cold-weather events happened to occur: record snow in the European Alps, China, New Zealand, Australia, Brazil, the Pacific Northwest, Alaska, the Rockies, the upper Midwest, Las Vegas, Houston, and New Orleans. There was also, for the first time in at least 100 years, snow in Baghdad.

If Lefties want to take over the world's economy, they need to try Plan D.

A reader took these photos this weekend on the CT shoreline. That is the common Ring-billed Gull (sometimes known as the Parking Lot Gull), an inland, fresh-water breeder. They head for the coasts when the fresh waters freeze up.

 Gulls take seveeral years to reach maturity and to earn adult plumage. These, I think, are second-year Ring-billed gulls hunting in the surf. First year birds would have a darker brown plumage:

And a good portrait:

Matthew 2:1-12

1 After Jesus was born in Bethlehem in Judea, during the time of King Herod, Magi from the east came to Jerusalem 2 and asked, "Where is the one who has been born king of the Jews? We saw his star in the east and have come to worship him."

 3 When King Herod heard this he was disturbed, and all Jerusalem with him. 4 When he had called together all the people's chief priests and teachers of the law, he asked them where the Christ was to be born. 5 "In Bethlehem in Judea," they replied, "for this is what the prophet has written:
 6 " 'But you, Bethlehem, in the land of Judah,
      are by no means least among the rulers of Judah;
   for out of you will come a ruler
      who will be the shepherd of my people Israel.'"

 7 Then Herod called the Magi secretly and found out from them the exact time the star had appeared. 8 He sent them to Bethlehem and said, "Go and make a careful search for the child. As soon as you find him, report to me, so that I too may go and worship him."

 9 After they had heard the king, they went on their way, and the star they had seen in the east went ahead of them until it stopped over the place where the child was. 10 When they saw the star, they were overjoyed. 11 On coming to the house, they saw the child with his mother Mary, and they bowed down and worshiped him. Then they opened their treasures and presented him with gifts of gold and of incense and of myrrh. 12 And having been warned in a dream not to go back to Herod, they returned to their country by another route.

Image: Epiphany by Hieronymous Bosch, 1490

via Mankiw:

From our occasional guest poster Nathan in Israel:

Last night -

My coffee guy (long hair past his shoulders, very cool, very left) spent the night watching the news. "Eyn ma la'asot" - "Nothing else one could do." He says it is like walkiing into zefl (tar); have to fight meter by meter with mines and weapons not only in the ground but in houses.

My electrician , Avi, came back from Miluim a few days before the war started (father of four). He has more to say (will write when I have time) . Temenite background; very quiet, diligent. He describes how Isr airforce gives warning 10 minutes before hitting a target; then the Hamas tells women and children to stand on top of the roof to wave at the planes and deter the bombing. He goes on to speak about a Palestinian laborer worked for him for years; good worker. But, when he would telephone his wife, he would get violent and warn her that she would get what is coming to her when he got home. Avi asked him why he didn't speak more respectfully to her -- she makes a life for you, cooks, raises your kids. Guy says, "But, she's a woman."

I plan to visit the children in Kiryat Malachi on Monday.

It's out of the house, but my tradition is to extend the cheer outdoors for a while by keeping the lights on it and putting it outside a window:

Our post about Office Romance: Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar prompted this little bit of research. Freud on smoking:

"[Cigars have] served me for precisely fifty years as protection and a weapon in the combat of life...I owe to the cigar a great intensification of my capacity to work and a facilitation of my self-control."

Another:

"My boy, smoking is one of the greatest and cheapest enjoyments in life, and if you decide in advance not to smoke, I can only feel sorry for you."

Via Cigar Aficionado

Among other things, Kindleberger's classic Manias, Panics, and Crashes: A History of Financial Crises. From a review at Amazon:

Alinsky is the best-known American Gramscian. The Chicago community organizer who was an inspiration to Hillary Clinton (and maybe indirectly to Obama) wrote a deeply cynical handbook for radicals who seek power.

His rules for power tactics are here. We can see those rules followed and enacted every day, mainly in Left-wing in politics.

Kimball reacts to Thomas Franks' WSJ article on the need to "return" to government economic regulation. I think this laissez-faire vs. govt regulation debate is pure politics and boob bait for the economically-uninformed. Kimball agrees. One quote:

The next time someone bemoans the evil of “laissez-faire capitalism” to you, utter the number 69,428. That’s the number of pages in the 2006 edition of the Federal Register, the official government compendium of rules and regulations, the handy-dandy list of things you must do, and not do, if you want to do . . . well, just about anything. “Laissez faire” is the bogey man unhappy leftists use to frighten the credulous. Capitalism was never completely unregulated, and it certainly isn’t unregulated now. In fact, we have much more to fear from the ethic of “défendre faire”–the nanny-state ethic whose ultimate goal is to turn us all into wards of the state. Thomas Frank criticizes  rating agencies like Moody’s and banks like Washington Mutual for being insufficiently regulated. But the real problem was not lack of regulation but unintelligent and overbearing regulation. Mr. Frank derides those who believe that “all sin originates with the Community Reinvestment Act” (on which see here), but really he should pause to consider the disatrous effects of that piece of government regulation which, by intruding into the orderly operation of the market in order to further a utopian social goal, helped to precipitate the global credit crisis of 2008.

Read the whole thing. As we repeatedly note here, any crisis, real or manufactured, is used by the power-hungry as an opportunity to grab more. And, unfortunately, this process only ratchets in one direction.

Furthermore, booms and busts have forever been part of human economics - even in command-and-control economies. No-one should ever be surprised that they occur. Like hurricanes, they blow through and knock down the weak trees and blow away the poorly-built structures, leaving space for new opportunities and ventures. People get hurt in the process, which is why we have safety nets.

Thanks to SDA for alerting us to a new model of the Antikythera Device. It's more of a calculator than a computer.

Most remarkable: they still have the original instruction manual for the 2100 year-old machine. I am missing the manuals for stuff I bought a year ago.

The video about the machine here. 

My meals with W. H. Auden, E. M. Forster, Philip Larkin, and William Empson: American Scholar.

Very cool. Empson is a favorite here at Maggie's.

I have the expert word on the diagnosis of the hawk Gwynnie captured on camera the other day: "Cooper's vs. Sharpie? Impossible to tell from the angles of the photos. Nice photos, though."

Two males and a female, in their breeding plumage already. A reader in CT took this shot on the 31st on a stream-fed pond in southern CT. (No idea why it isn't frozen over. Maybe brackish.)

You can read about the fine Hooded Merganser here. I don't shoot Hoodies, but I know folks who will shoot the males for mounts. I think a photo is better.

From guest poster Bruce Kesler:

There are better states of “peace” and lesser ones.  A better peace is one that leads to or allows increases in mutual safety and respect; a lesser peace increases the security risks and leads to or allows more or larger conflict and suffering.

If that critical distinction is not understood, dictating decisions, then by default a lesser peace will result as actions are taken that undermine the focus and measures necessary for a better peace.

The primary element needed for a better peace is recognition by all sides that it is preferable to the alternatives.  This may require one side to lead the other to this thinking, and that thinking to be reinforced.

Sometimes, either sooner or later, or more usually as a last resort, this will require the side desiring a better peace to take forceful action, including armed ones.

That has always been the regretful but necessary course by Israel since its founding.

Successfully and decisively fending off repeated attacks by neighboring Arab states, soundly defeating them, Jordan and Egypt finally accepted the sense of a better peace with Israel.  The intervention of Iran and Syria into Lebanon’s nascent better peace with Israel, via their Hizbullah proxy, destroyed that better peace.  But, although Israel’s 2006 incursion into Lebanon was far from decisive, and Hizbullah has rearmed to more lethal levels than before, Hizbullah was severely bloodied and has restrained armed and missile attacks on Israel longer than most expected.

Within, Israel has tried to neutralize the enmity of Palestinians through raising their economics and education above that in Arab countries, succeeding in that but it failing to prevail against the power-lusting thuggery of almost all Palestinian leadership from 1967 to now who see greater personal advantage and profit from encouraging the hate that entrenches their position.  Even exiting Gaza, trying to have constructive trade and relations with it, failed to create a better peace as the most extreme of major Palestinian factions – Hamas – forcefully took control and destroyed all facets of external cooperation and internal development, further endangering Israel by thousands of terror missile and mortar attacks moving deeper into Israel till now about 700,000 in Israel are within range.

The West, particularly the US, has properly labeled Hamas as the primary culprit in Gaza’s downward spiral, and its targeting by Israel’s restrained and focused retaliations.  But, at the same time, the West has insisted on allowing flows of “humanitarian” food and medical supplies to enter Gaza, including from Israel.  This relieves suffering, but both through waylaying by Hamas for its own benefit and through reducing Gazan’s need to demand compromise or have hostility toward Hamas, it has contradicted the quest for a better peace.  Even now, during active hostilities, this Western demand continues.

It is harsh but necessary that all supplies to Gaza be cut off during present circumstances.  That is war.

Israel, it is said by all observers, cannot realistically afford to nor hope to eradicate Hamas.  But, it – with the West’s support – can at least hope to so bloody and weaken Hamas as to possibly – not probably, but better prospects than any other alternative – create conditions for a better peace through so weakening Hamas’ stranglehold on Gaza as to allow the opening for Gazans with Arab states’ active involvement to develop a better peace of security and respect under the realistic deterrence of facing a sharp sword of retaliation.

Along with a complete cutoff of external supplies, it may be necessary for Israel to launch a short land offensive into Gaza to further uproot Hamas strongpoints and infrastructure, to drive the point home that Hamas dare not face Israel’s purposeful and firm deterrence measures.

Stopping now, especially when the point is not sufficiently driven home, and appearing to kowtow to misled pacifist demands from the West, will only accomplish a disrespect for Israel’s deterrence and lead to another shorter-lived lesser peace.

Although, according to the latest Rasmussen poll, only 31% of Democrats back Israel’s choice to take military action in Gaza (75% of Republicans do), ironically soon to be president Barack Obama can right now provide the voice that can lead to a better peace.  Obama’s coy silence fosters Hamas’hope or expectation that a soon less resolved US will, in effect, save its necks by demanding Israel halt its attacks on Hamas.  If Obama would forcefully speak out now in favor of Israel’s measures and express his determination to continue to do so until Hamas assuredly ceases its missile attacks upon Israel, Obama could both prevent the necessity of Israeli troops having to enter Gaza and persuade Hamas that it can only lose more by its intransigence.  A better peace could emerge.

That would be real hope and change all would welcome.

Finally saw Shawshank Redemption. Very sorry I hadn't seen it before, but I don't see very many movies.

Best lines from Red (paraphrased):

"At first you hate these walls, then you get used to them. Finally, you get dependent on them. It's called institutionalization."

One good clip:

From 2006, with the above title. Linda Kimball begins:

There are two misconceptions held by many Americans. The first is that communism ceased to be a threat when the Soviet Union imploded. The second is that the New Left of the Sixties collapsed and disappeared as well. “The Sixties are dead,” wrote columnist George Will (Slamming the Doors, Newsweek, Mar. 25, 1991)

Because the New Left lacked cohesion it fell apart as a political movement. However, its revolutionaries reorganized themselves into a multitude of single issue groups. Thus we now have for example, radical feminists, black extremists, anti-war ‘peace’ activists, animal rights groups, radical environmentalists, and ‘gay’ rights groups. All of these groups pursue their piece of the radical agenda through a complex network of subversive organizations such as the Gay Straight Lesbian Educators Network (GSLEN), the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), People for the American Way, United for Peace and Justice, Planned Parenthood, Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States (SIECUS), and Code Pink for Peace.

Read the whole thing.

Today, the Jokerman seems like Father Time.

Well, the Book of Leviticus and Deuteronomy
The law of the jungle and the sea are your only teachers
In the smoke of the twilight on a milk-white steed
Michelangeo indeed could've carved out your features
Resting in the fields, far from the turbulent space
Half asleep near the stars with a small dog licking your face.

Audio only. Full lyrics here.

Fort Lauderdale, yesterday: