Maggie's Farm

From a harshly critical op-ed by Matt Welch in the WaPo:

What the new president has not quite grasped is that the American people understand both irony and cognitive dissonance. Instead, Obama has mistaken his personal popularity for a national predilection toward emergency-driven central planning. He doesn't get that Americans prefer the slower process of building political consensus based on reality, and at least a semblance of rational deliberation rather than one sky-is-falling legislative session after another.

The god of this age has blinded the minds of unbelievers, so that they cannot see the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God. ⁵For we do not preach ourselves, but Jesus Christ as Lord, and ourselves as your servants for Jesus' sake. ⁶For God, who said, "Let light shine out of darkness,"^[a]made his light shine in our hearts to give us the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ.

 ⁷But we have this treasure in jars of clay to show that this all-surpassing power is from God and not from us. ⁸We are hard pressed on every side, but not crushed; perplexed, but not in despair; ⁹persecuted, but not abandoned; struck down, but not destroyed. ¹⁰We always carry around in our body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be revealed in our body. ¹¹For we who are alive are always being given over to death for Jesus' sake, so that his life may be revealed in our mortal body. ¹²So then, death is at work in us, but life is at work in you.

 ¹³It is written: "I believed; therefore I have spoken."^[b]With that same spirit of faith we also believe and therefore speak, ¹⁴because we know that the one who raised the Lord Jesus from the dead will also raise us with Jesus and present us with you in his presence. ¹⁵All this is for your benefit, so that the grace that is reaching more and more people may cause thanksgiving to overflow to the glory of God.

 ¹⁶Therefore we do not lose heart. Though outwardly we are wasting away, yet inwardly we are being renewed day by day. ¹⁷For our light and momentary troubles are achieving for us an eternal glory that far outweighs them all. ¹⁸So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen. For what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.

Bar exam. Oh boy. For Rules of Evidence, it's 70% exceptions to The Rules, after you learn The Rules. We did Wills and Estates yesterday. It caused us to rethink our wills.

We parents of the graduate Law Student are having fun learning this stuff. It's sort-of crazy, and sort-of not. Good rule of thumb: stay clear of The Law if possible. It seems to be its own wacko universe, and not for amateurs.

This series of photos came in over the transom, but I see that it was adapted from a NYT story:

"Clingstone, an unusual 103-year-old mansion in Rhode Island's Narragansett Bay, survives through the love and hard work of family and friends."

Sunshine doesn't cause the dangerous skin cancers (h/t, Englishman). People need that sunshine; what we used to term "bennies" - Beneficial Sun Rays. "Going out to catch some bennies and study chem."

Hold the sunblock, and go to the beach (h/t, Tangled):

Or to this one, in China:

This is too important an issue to leave with bureaucrats.

Samizdata, discussing space flight but applicable to most things

Via Dr. Clouthier:

From Jammie's piece on taxes, the view from NYC:

With The Band, 1976:

The centrist Dem Dick Morris discusses the Dem Leftist long-term plan:

Today, your medical care is between you and your Doc, and sometimes with an insurance company. Either a straight line, or a simple triangle.

Mr. Brady at New Majority plots the organizational chart of the Dem plan. The extent of the proposed bureaucracy is indeed baffling, if not insane. Who is in charge? Certainly not you, the paying patient (because you won't be paying: your Doc will be working for the government), and definitely not your Doctor:

Insty reports that the bill essentially eliminates Medicare:

ENDING MEDICARE? “Obama’s health care proposal is, in effect, the repeal of the Medicare program as we know it. The elderly will go from being the group with the most access to free medical care to the one with the least access.” So why aren’t we hearing more about this? “The interest groups that usually speak up for the elderly, particularly AARP, are in Obama’s pocket, hoping to profit from his program by becoming one of its vendors. Just as they backed Bush’s prescription drug plan because they anticipating profiting from it, so they are now helping Obama gut the medical care of their constituents.”

Who can understand all this crap?

Mrs. BD loves her Little Lambs. It is a very special paniculata hydrangea.

I have never known anyone who did not enjoy hydrangeas.

Before you mess with hydrangeas, you need to know whether a plant is a macrophylla, oakleaf, arborescens, or a paniculata-type. The handling of each type is different - especially the pruning - and they vary in spring frost hardiness.

A good hydrangea site.

These Dems in Congress are insane. They have no idea what they are doing. They are bargaining away America's medical freedom, doing any deal they can do, with zero consideration of unintended consequences or the costs, and trying for a government takeover of 1/5 of the economy. As if they could run anything successfully.

This is serious business to people, and not ordinary politics. They are trying to patch and rush this through before citizens have any idea of what they are doing. It is totally nuts and furthermore, I am not convinced that it is anything anybody really wants.

Dick Morris thinks so too.

We have posted in the past about that bumper sticker which Bill Buckley used when he ran for Mayor of NYC.

Nyquist takes on the theme re foreign policy. One quote:

Men who are not sufficiently cynical, who are soft-hearted, who do not have the stomach for what they propose, cannot do anything good.

"Universal health care isn't worth our freedom." From Dr. Tom Szasz in the WSJ this morning:

Henry David Thoreau famously remarked, "If I knew for a certainty that a man was coming to my house with the conscious design of doing me good, I should run for my life." Thoreau feared a single, unarmed man approaching him with such a passion in his heart. Too many people now embrace the coercive apparatus of the modern state professing the same design.

and

Our national conversation about curbing the cost of health care is crippled by the vocabulary in which we conduct it. We must stop talking about "health care" as if it were some kind of collective public service, like fire protection, provided equally to everyone who needs it. No government can provide the same high quality body repair services to everyone. Not all doctors are equally good physicians, and not all sick persons are equally good patients.

If we persevere in our quixotic quest for a fetishized medical equality we will sacrifice personal freedom as its price. We will become the voluntary slaves of a "compassionate" government that will provide the same low quality health care to everyone.

Our post yesterday morning moved me to look up some Bedford real estate. Since Bedford pretty much abuts CT, and used to be part of it, one might consider it part of New England Yankeeland.

Here's a pleasant 33-acre horse property on Guard Hill Road, Shannon Stables. It comes with a 2-BR cottage built in 1850. Asking $14.5 million. More photos here.

The weather is finally (just barely) warm enough for smokin' season.

I have had a gigantic, fat-covered pork shoulder in this thing for a few hours, covered with my good tasty stuff pork smoking rub.

With the cool breezes today - still waiting for real summer - it will take quite a few hours more until it is fork-tender.

This cheapo electric smoker never quite gets hot enough. My big smoker-grill is great, but I only have time to tend it on weekends.

The smell of the meaty, peppery, fatty smoke from the fresh pear tree chunks is at least half of the pleasure.

Booker in The Telegraph begins:

The moves now being made by the world's political establishment to lock us into December's Copenhagen treaty to halt global warming are as alarming as anything that has happened in our lifetimes. Last week in Italy, the various branches of our emerging world government, G8 and G20, agreed in principle that the world must by 2050 cut its CO2 emissions in half. Britain and the US are already committed to cutting their use of fossil fuels by more than 80 per cent. Short of an unimaginable technological revolution, this could only be achieved by closing down virtually all our economic activity: no electricity, no transport, no industry. All this is being egged on by a gigantic publicity machine, by the UN, by serried ranks of government-funded scientists, by cheerleaders such as Al Gore, last week comparing the fight against global warming to that against Hitler's Nazis, and by politicians who have no idea what they are setting in train.

What makes this even odder is that the runaway warming predicted by their computer models simply isn't happening. Last week one of the four official sources of temperature measurement, compiled from satellite data by the University of Huntsville, Alabama, showed that temperatures have now fallen to their average level since satellite data began 30 years ago.

Whole thing here. (h/t, Mr. Free Market)

Above: Lower East Side of Manhattan, 1937, where many waves of immigrants found their first foothold in America. Those 1860s-1890s tenements are still standing, in what is now one of the hippest young neighborhoods of NYC.

Below: Mulberry St., NYC, c. 1900, packed with southern Italian and Sicilian immigrants. The misguided Progressives wanted to tear down these neighborhoods, from the time of Teddy Roosevelt to Lyndon Johnson.

What's a "slum"?

The Dylanologist and I have always been interested in the tragedies of urban planning, and fans of the organic, natural growth of urban areas designed by market forces and human desires, not by hubris-infected government experts.

One of his great-grandmothers, 1st generation Irish, raised 5 kids (with great success) in a NYC tenement, using bureau drawers as cribs. The Dyl said to me the other day:

"I lived in tenements for eight years. No elevators: two to three-story walk-ups, no a/c, shared bathrooms down the hall, unreliable heat, no cable, no phone, no wireless, with one tiny room with a dirty window and an old single bed with one thin, lumpy mattress. For the first four years, my parents paid around $30,000 per year for the privilege, and for the second four years, closer to $40,000."

Here's Jane Jacobs:

  Brief history of European Music, Part 3 - with some perfect morning music.

Psalm 24

24:1 The earth is the Lord's and all that is in it, the world, and those who live in it;

24:2 for he has founded it on the seas, and established it on the rivers.

24:3 Who shall ascend the hill of the LORD? And who shall stand in his holy place?

24:4 Those who have clean hands and pure hearts, who do not lift up their souls to what is false, and do not swear deceitfully.

24:5 They will receive blessing from the LORD, and vindication from the God of their salvation.

24:6 Such is the company of those who seek him, who seek the face of the God of Jacob. Selah

24:7 Lift up your heads, O gates! and be lifted up, O ancient doors! that the King of glory may come in.

24:8 Who is the King of glory? The LORD, strong and mighty, the LORD, mighty in battle.

24:9 Lift up your heads, O gates! and be lifted up, O ancient doors! that the King of glory may come in.

24:10 Who is this King of glory? The LORD of hosts, he is the King of glory.