Maggie's Farm

The Grateful Dead always performed on Persian carpets. Rug Rag takes a look at what The Dead, as they are now known, walk around on.

And speaking of rugs, here's a 5X6 Bakhtiari "flower bed" design I like. I now must brace myself for the rug expert readers to inform me of everything that is wrong with it...Our rug expert readers must understand that our rugs get rough treatment. They are subject to ice-melting salt, dogs, driveway gravel, work boots, mud, and the occasional spilled glass of red wine. Truly special antique rugs would a shame to use and abuse as we do. New-made rugs? Wouldn't touch 'em. Vulgar, garish-looking junk, most of it, with all the character of a Woolworth's velvet kitten picture.

Buffett tends to drive cars until the wheels fall off. His new one is a Chinese E-6. Good story.

Photo from the Fortune article.

Beyond Here Lies Nothin', from his new record Together Through Life (audio only):

Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it.

George Bernard Shaw (h/t Villainous)

Thanks, COSTCO. Good stuff, but I only needed 2 cups. Now what do I do with the rest?

"The Sleuth" in the WaPo thinks this must have been a thrill for the Dead.

I think that's exactly backwards - but it tells you where she's coming from.

Like you care, right? The purpose is really to highlight a novel, Brothers, by Da Chen.

I seem to read novels as 1/3 of what I read, but I will read whatever is put in front of me, and whatever serendipity provides me with. Nothing on TV engages me. I always bear in mind that somebody worked darn hard to write that book.

Da Chen is an American author, raised in China during the Cultural Revolution. Besides being a compelling story, the book offers lots of insight into how China really operates - especially inside the political aristocracy.

One thing you learn right away is that in most Socialist and Communist nations, power and money and chicks and perks and mansions with military guards and vacation homes and the best food and drink and fancy cars accrue to the pols and their kin instead of to the productive. They create their own ingrown, inbred aristocracy with the power of the money, the government, the bureaucracy and the military to support and maintain it. They re-create Feudalism with the Mandarins and the "masses." We, dear readers, are supposed to be "the grateful masses."

(At the time that he writes about, 80% of China's adults were government employees. Not any more, happily. Canada is now up to 20%, last I heard, and headed up. Government employees are easy to control - and very easy to tax.)

I wonder how many of the people who profess to believe in the leveling ideas of collectivism and egalitarianism really just believe that they themselves are good for nothing. I mean, how many leftists are animated by a quite reasonable self-loathing? In their hearts they know that they are not going to become scholars or inventors or industrialists or even ordinary good kind people. So they need a way to achieve that smugness for which the left is so justifiably famous. They need a way to achieve self-esteem without merit. Well, there is politics. In an egalitarian world everything will be controlled by politics, and politics requires no merit.

P.J. O'Rourke. Yes, for some people self-love is more important than accomplishment.

h/t, S,C&A

IRS agents see double standard on tax errors (Image via Theo)

Breaking news: Sunspots cause climate fluctuations

DHS targets conservatives instead of Moslem terrorists. I knew that creating that Dept. was a bad idea. She is watching me? This is a bad joke.

Illinois gets the pork. Like Roger says. Related, Jesse Jackson Jr. offered Blago $5 million for Senate seat

Faked Obama story passed off as real by the MSM

Are we wasting $ on Alzheimer's care? Sheesh. I think I have a mild case of it, but I do OK.

Black Caucus duped by Fidel. (Why is there a Black Caucus? Don't we have a black President, for heaven's sake? Sheesh. It's just skin tone.)

Gov. Rick Perry and the Tenth Amendment. Nobody told him that the Constitution was obsolete.

More on the paper scam. Mankiw. It's only $8 billion.

Kaus takes a look at medical care costs

Metrosexual Dems go all giddy about guns. Jules:

I’m thrilled about the handwringing, Kumbayah-singing, peacenik left’s new enthusiasm for swift, extra-judicial 7.62 justice by executive order, and the lack of calls for human rights investigations, prosecutions,  etc.

He's not joking: We have created more pirates. Good grief. We had the power to create Jihadists, and now we create pirates. Yo ho ho.

Mao and Marx have disappeared from China. Remarkable paean to Capitalism, but

...meanwhile in the USA,  Modern Collectivism. A quote:

Collectivism holds that the individual has no rights. Your life, your existence, your interests and the product of your labor now belongs to the group. If the group needs a bailout, heath care, green cars, low mortgage rates, a job, an education—anything at all, it now becomes your responsibility to provide it, whether you want to or not.

You see it in both the redistributive legislation, which takes money from people who’ve earned it and give it to those who have not, along with the language itself. Phrases like “we’re all in it together”, “I am my brother’s keeper” and “shared sacrifice” boil down to the same frightening reality: You are here to serve. And unlike the charity of volunteerism, the “will of the people” is implemented by force, not by voluntary trade.

This is a profoundly anti-American ideal.

image by Big Fur Hat of iOwnTheWorld.com

George Bush had a dog too, but that pup wasn't a PR stunt - he had it long before he was elected, and it wasn't a stage prop.

Author and Junk Science blog host Steven Milloy discusses (video) his new book, Green Hell: How Environmentalists Plan to Ruin Your Life, at The Heritage Foundation.

I got a kick out of how CSPAN cut from Obama to go to Milloy.

Maybe the Brits aren't dead yet. From the Don't Judge a Book by Its Cover Department: Susan sings.

One unkind question though: Why do Brit women in their 40s tend to look like Monty Python guys in drag?

Everybody wants to save the earth; nobody wants to help Mom do the dishes.

P.J. O'Rourke

A 30-minute video by Capt. Irving Johnson as a young man in 1929, capturing, in vivid black and white, the reality of sailing around the world on the Peking - including a Cape storm. h/t to Powerline for finding this remarkable record.

In the old days, going to sea was like going to war. Men died. John doesn't like the Captain's narration, but I love it. Sounds like he's from VT or NH, that old-timey Robert Frost sound. (Nope, Hadley, MA. I know Hadley well.)

The Peking is currently berthed at South Street Seaport, NYC.

Here's the real story about who is and isn't covered by medical insurance.

Not that the facts matter all that much in politics - and everybody wants a free Easter buffet.

Related: How the government plans to create its own medical insurance monopoly. (Just like public schools.) And once they have done that, they will drive through their rationing, rules, and controls. - and freedom in medical care will disappear. At that point, Doctor, your proud and noble profession will be transformed into involuntary servitude to the State rather than voluntary servitude to your patient and, at that point, patient, your treatment choices will disappear.

Then watch "doc-assisted" suicide for those over 60 become all the rage in government circles.

It's one more government power and money grab.

Of the three white egrets that breed in New England (American, Cattle, and Snowy) the largest is the Great Egret, which I persist in calling by its old name, American Egret.

A reader sent in these photos of one from this weekend in salt marsh in CT. You can see some of their fancy breeding plumage, for which these birds were hunted to near-extinction through the 19th and early 20th Centuries until the Audubon Society was created to protect them. More about the Great Egret in CT here.

The populations recovered fairly well, as long as they have safe places to nest in their tree colonies - usually on small islands or the tip of a peninsula.

At first, I thought this was a Monty Python-esque spoof. It's not. I hope the weapons were unloaded.

And just a thought - how about getting the SEALs to sneak some of this stuff into the water supplies of Wherizzitistan? Might make those Taliban happy and spiritual.

From a pleasantly rambling post by Dr. Bob,  Open Hands:

The walk of faith is said to be belief in the unbelievable, the fool’s way out of life’s challenges and disappointments, the easy path of cowards and knaves. It is in truth none of these things, but rather the very hardest of things: submission. It is to bend the knee; to trust when sight is dim or absent; to rely on the benevolence and wisdom of One who knows all and reject the false knowledge we tenaciously trust in our self-will, fear, and deception. If there is a God — sovereign, transcendent, just, good in ways we cannot begin to fathom, and above all passionate in His love for us — then there is nothing to do but trust, to submit, to rest. It is the Cross — in all its horrors, irrationality, agony, foolishness — and victory.

This week the church celebrates Holy Week, commemorating and meditating on that moment in history when darkness seemed triumphant, when earthly hopes were dashed, when the irrational ruled and evil gloated. In that dark moment, the glorious hopes of man haughty and triumphant were forever dashed on the stones of Golgatha; the blood of a failed prophet sealed their fate forever. Such is as true now as then; it is a timeless certainty, eternal despite all appearances to the contrary.

And so I must — we must — open our hands, and bend our knees. It is a time for prayer, for humility, for fasting, for simplification. It is time for turning over the foolishness of man and the corruption of a culture to Him who alone knows the ways of man and the wanderings of nations. We must lift up the country, its leaders; the culture; the church. It is not ours to seize nor to save. We must stand in truth, suffering what consequences we may endure.

They do not refer to the church as "the body of Christ" for nothing.

Read this before you head off for your fancy and decadent Easter Brunch with beautiful flowers and wine and Mimosas and Bloody Marys and ham and cakes and pies and Eggs Benedict and rare roast beef with Yorkshire pudding and rare lamb with homemade mint sauce and lobsters and shrimp and oysters and Cherrystone clams and squid salad and smoked salmon with capers and a mountain of cheeses and etc (which I am about to do): The Easter Lily.

Photo from the piece. 

Foreigners may pretend otherwise, but if English is spoken loudly enough, anyone can understand it.

P.J. O'Rourke