Maggie's Farm

The start of the bike trip through the Negev. May 19 2006

Fluffernutter under attack in MA. This is worse than the Brits attacking ice cream. Millions of hearty and rugged Yankees, including my family, have been raised on this (disgusting) New England concoction. And Rightly So. My opinion: They can ban fluffernutters when they ban alcohol to politicians. OK?

The International Seed Vault. This is my idea of worthwhile international cooperation: making sure that we have seeds from every plant. Wonderful. Marginal Rev. found it.

If all our misfortunes were laid in one common heap whence everyone must take an equal portion, most people would be content to take their own, and depart.

Socrates

From Psalm 116, posted on Sunday:

^{"The snares of death encompassed me; the pangs of Sheol laid hold on me; I suffered distress and anguish."}

^{FYI, A brief history of Hell, Sheol, and Gehenna, here. 
Or you can just wait, and learn about it when you get there. ("Hell" is from Germanic mythology.)}

Judge not, lest ye be judged judgemental.

The Owner's Manual

In the long history of the world, only a few generations have been granted the role of defending freedom in its hour of maximum danger. I do not shrink from this responsibility - I welcome it.

John F. Kennedy

When I get older, losing my hair, many years from now,
Will you still be sending me a Valentine,birthday greetings, bottle of wine?
If I'd been out 'till quarter to three,would you lock the door?
Will you still need me, will you still feed me,
When I'm sixty-four?

McCartney update here at BBC. The full lyrics here.

^{1I love the Lord, because he has heard my voice and my supplications.
2Because he inclined his ear to me, therefore I will call on him as long as I live.
3The snares of death encompassed me; the pangs of Sheol laid hold on me; I suffered distress and anguish.
4Then I called on the name of the Lord: “O Lord, I pray, save my life!” 5Gracious is the Lord, and righteous; our God is merciful.
6The Lord protects the simple; when I was brought low, he saved me. 7Return, O my soul, to your rest, for the Lord has dealt bountifully with you.
8For you have delivered my soul from death, my eyes from tears, my feet from stumbling.
9I walk before the Lord in the land of the living.
10I kept my faith, even when I said, “I am greatly afflicted”;
11I said in my consternation, “Everyone is a liar.”
12What shall I return to the Lord for all his bounty to me?
13I will lift up the cup of salvation and call on the name of the Lord,
14I will pay my vows to the Lord in the presence of all his people. 15Precious in the sight of the Lord is the death of his faithful ones.
16O Lord, I am your servant; I am your servant, the child of your serving girl. You have loosed my bonds.
17I will offer to you a thanksgiving sacrifice and call on the name of the Lord.
18I will pay my vows to the Lord in the presence of all his people,
19in the courts of the house of the Lord, in your midst, O Jerusalem. Praise the Lord!}

Image: Rembrandt, David singing for King Saul

Everybody has been at the golf Open at Winged Foot this week. No-one in New England or New York has been working. Boring, if you ask me, but it's not my game.

But the Newport-Bermuda Race began yesterday. Your editor Bird Dog has always wanted to be asked to crew, but has never been asked, doubtless for good reason. He is blessed with a good feel for the sea, including a certain kind of comfort, or even joy, with very nasty and scary seas, but is cursed with some sort of ineptitude when it comes to practical mechanisms and instant decision-making. And a race in which things do not break is a bore - but something always does break on boats.

You can follow the race here. I only know one skipper in the race this year. Is it highly physical? You bet, unless it is one of those dull races with no wind from start to glorious finish, with drinks and abundant hot showers, at the Royal Bermuda Yacht Club in wonderful Bermuda. This 635 mile race is so long that a good start doesn't matter, but you have to keep your crew focused, energized, and on the ball. Why not try for a good start?  Photo from just before the starting gun in Newport, RI, below:

Sometimes I wonder whether Gaghdad Bob is just putting us on, or crazy, or (which I usually think), a good translator of logos-centered metaphysics for the metaphysically-impaired masses (such as me).

So before we can even say anything else whatsoever about the cosmos, we have to concede that it is the kind of cosmos in which some things can symbolize and stand for other things--almost as if the cosmos were having some kind of complex conversation with itself even before we got here. When they study creation, scientific Adams are simply eavesdropping on the conversation. If that weren’t true, there would be nothing we could say or know about the cosmos.

Normally, when we think of information, we think of communication. The purpose of language, for example, is to communicate. But the cosmos was full of information before there were any sentient beings to unpack the message. Now that we’re here, we can do that.

If you want to read a short essay I very much enjoyed, with those paragraphs in it, here it is. 

Image: Why the photo of Dr. Bliss waking up on a sunny morning? The photo is a mere symbol, plus a good, succinct piece of communication from the cosmos, plus I owe a photo to our reader Santay.

Besides worrying deeply and seriously and with the most sincere sense of urgency about obesity (see this mornings links), our dear cousins in Olde Englande have been busy worrying themselves silly about "this knife and gun culture we have."  Notice that they used to just say "this gun culture," but, with less guns, people are offing each-other with knives instead. When knives are gone - so you cannot cut meat and all they can eat is chopped liver and obesity-inducing fish-and-chips, they will kill each-other with cricket bats, and can refer to "this batty culture."  Better yet, they can use forks to kill each-other, thus neatly permitting themselves to appropriately complain about "this stupid forking culture." Atlas picked up the story, but I had previously read about it at Right for Scotland.

As we pointed out earlier today, perhaps they have bigger problems than trying to be nannies to a nation of proud adults from proud Anglo-Saxon/Celtic warrior stock. You just knew it was all over when Blair banned fox hunting: their foxy Moslems got the message loud and clear: the Brit government has no spine, no pride, and no sense of history whatsoever.

Your American cousins could not care less about the hopeless French, but we are worried about you all - because we love ya: you are us, but caught in a web.

Princes and governments are far more dangerous than other elements within society.

Niccolo Machiavelli

So far from engaging in a war to
perpetuate slavery, I am
rejoiced that Slavery is
abolished. I believe it will be greatly for the interest of the South. So fully am I satisfied of this that I would have cheerfully lost all that I have lost by the war, and have suffered all that I have suffered to have this object attained.

Gen. Robert E. Lee

What Bird Dog wants for Father's Day is a good Pogo collection.

Much as we love Calvin and Hobbes at Maggie's Farm (with well-worn collections all over the house, and with frequent apt uses of quotes from them), the gentle irony and the humble, loving satire of Pogo cannot be beat. Not a marauding marsupial, Pogo was a kind, rationalist, wry possum.

"I Go Pogo" was Pogo's campaign theme when he ran for president.

Bridgeport, CT's Walt Kelly was the cartoonist's cartoonist. Like poets, cartoonists can capture big chunks of life in a few words and images - and we verbose normal people must envy that skill.

Sadly, good collections of Pogo are not easy to find these days. Got any ideas? Email us with 'em. This is all we could find.

Since this is angleworm week at the blog, here's a sample:

Middle-East expert Amir Taheri revisits Iraq. A quote from his piece in Commentary:

Spending time in the United States after a tour of Iraq can be a disorienting experience these days. Within hours of arriving here, as I can attest from a recent visit, one is confronted with an image of Iraq that is unrecognizable. It is created in several overlapping ways: through television footage showing the charred remains of vehicles used in suicide attacks, surrounded by wailing women in black and grim-looking men carrying coffins; by armchair strategists and political gurus predicting further doom or pontificating about how the war should have been fought in the first place; by authors of instant-history books making their rounds to dissect the various “fundamental mistakes” committed by the Bush administration; and by reporters, cocooned in hotels in Baghdad, explaining the “carnage” and “chaos” in the streets as signs of the country’s “impending” or “undeclared” civil war. Add to all this the day’s alleged scandal or revelation—an outed CIA operative, a reportedly doctored intelligence report, a leaked pessimistic assessment—and it is no wonder the American public registers disillusion with Iraq and everyone who embroiled the U.S. in its troubles.

It would be hard indeed for the average interested citizen to find out on his own just how grossly this image distorts the realities of present-day Iraq. Part of the problem, faced by even the most well-meaning news organizations, is the difficulty of covering so large and complex a subject; naturally, in such circumstances, sensational items rise to the top. But even ostensibly more objective efforts, like the Brookings Institution’s much-cited Iraq Index with its constantly updated array of security, economic, and public-opinion indicators, tell us little about the actual feel of the country on the ground.

Read the whole thing in Commentary.

What I say is that, if a fellow really likes potatoes, he must be a pretty decent sort of fellow.

A.A. Milne

Your devoted editor will be too busy today to review any entries, so we won't have much new. But I have a stash for such days, if I can find it.

An email from a reader and fellow blogger: "We read you daily, as our daily dose of grounding sanity."  Aw, shucks! Ain't that nice? That is our goal, here at Maggie's Farm - solid ground. Dirt, rocks, and stubborn roots - good old terra firma: nothing fancy, and we try to be devilish to BS, in the sceptical, plain, unadorned, rock-ribbed, cantankerous Yankee manner, mixed with a dose of joy in God's creation (along with the recognition that He never meant to make it easy for us).