Maggie's Farm

Our friend Dr. Merc invited us to address his piece on the Heller gun control case, titled The Roots of Fear. He believes that the purpose of the 2nd was to balance federal power with state power, including the states' power to raise armies of their own - and that the NRA has instilled unnecessary fear in gun users for their own institutional purposes.

As a humble farmer and no lawyer, my take on the history of the 2nd is that it is a mere reaffirmation of ancient English common law which enshrined the right to self defence to all combined with an affirmation of the military power of each state. Since the Bill of Rights is all about being clear about the rights of the individual and the limits of the power of the Federal government, it makes no sense to me that the authors would have slipped anything in there with a different purpose.

We recall that the Bill of Rights was a bit of an afterthought. Many thought it was unnecessary, and that such rights of the people were assumed. In the end, NY and others refused to sign without those basic rights being made explicit.

At that time in America, no-one would have even considered taking away anybody's private weapons.

In any event, I think that the plantiff Mr. Heller made his case when he observed that he can carry a weapon on his job, to protect VIPs and politicians - but not to protect himself and his family. That makes him a second-class citizen in Washington, because I doubt that Mr. Heller could afford his own bodyguard.

Viking, who listened to the arguments on C-Span, says:

...my favorite moment was when Justice Scalia revealed his knowledge of firearms: "You mean you can't have more arms than you would need to take with you to the militia? You can't have...a turkey gun and a duck gun and a 30.06 and a 270..."

Lithwick at Slate reviews the oral arguments here, which makes Dellinger's position clear:

Dellinger asks the court to avoid turning every phrase of the Second Amendment into a "libertarian right." A well-regulated militia isn't about everyone owning a gun willy-nilly. The Constitution does not create some kind of sacred, fundamental right to guns. If there's a right here at all, he says, it's at the "penumbra of the periphery" of the Constitution: in a shack behind the river where the other unenumerated rights huddle.

Perhaps Liberty is not high on his agenda? Dellinger is walking proof for the necessity of the Bill of Rights, because that "penumbra" is where most of our rights exist (including the rights to privacy, abortion, etc etc). It seems to me that he comes from the position that, if an individual right isn't made crystal clear and specific, then it doesn't exist. He wants to always tip the balance towards government power, and I think that impulse is un-American and ignores Amendment Nine - which I think says it all:

The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.

The outcome will be interesting, but not as interesting as the case would be if some restaurateur would take NYC's trans-fat ban to the Supreme Court. That would be really fun.

White people like to throw dinner parties. Yes we do, and cocktail parties too.

College students are stressed? Wait 'til they try real life.

The fun part of war.

I want one. Olympus Stylus 1030 SW

Arthur C. Clarke's last message. Video

This Easter, use a well-maintained whip.

For Robocop fans.

Obama, Fairy Tales, and Failure at S,C&A. Thoughtful. Related: "Teplost" commenting on Roger Simon's "Barack, I didn't do it for this" poem:

How are people in this country going to face each other as human beings when white liberals won't stay in changing neighborhoods? We don't need Obama to bring us together, and all the high minded white folks espousing his rhetoric don't want it either. They want to PRETEND that's what they want. They want to believe that all they have to do is vote for a black candidate, and they are off the hook. Hey, if all those high-minded white liberals wanted us to come together, why did they move out of my neighborhood? All they ever had to do is stay. What a bunch of bull!

So true.

Roger Scruton's 2003 New Criterion essay on discovering Burke, which we re-post annually, begins thus:

I was brought up at a time when half the English people voted Conservative at national elections and almost all English intellectuals regarded the term “conservative” as a term of abuse. To be a conservative, I was told, was to be on the side of age against youth, the past against the future, authority against innovation, the “structures” against spontaneity and life. It was enough to understand this, to recognize that one had no choice, as a free-thinking intellectual, save to reject conservatism. The choice remaining was between reform and revolution. Do we improve society bit by bit, or do we rub it out and start again? On the whole my contemporaries favored the second option, and it was when witnessing what this meant, in May 1968 in Paris, that I discovered my vocation.

Read the whole thing.

The Spring fishing season is coming on fast. It's about time to exchange our Currier and Ives "Maple Sugaring" picture, up on top, for "The Trout Pool." That picture does look like our Berkshire Hills, but it could also be the Poconos or the Adirondacks.

Education without values, as useful as it is, seems rather to make man a more clever devil.

C.S. Lewis

Two fine posts on PC gleaned from Big Lizards' Weasel Watchers:

In a PC nation, how will the GOP run?

The economic impact of political correctness

Finally, it looks like the Supremes are going to reaffirm the Second Amendment despite Justice Breyer's incomprehensible musings, roughly "I'm not sure why Washington DC shouldn't have the right to ban handguns, with their terrible crime rate."

Hey, Mr. Justice: Why doesn't Waterbury CT have the "right" to ban McDonalds, with their terrible obesity rate?

I thought people had rights to protect them from government powers. Or did I get it wrong? If this deal goes down the right way, there will be much to thank Pres. Bush for. Decision expected in June.

One of my many planned gardening projects this spring is to put in a row of three tree hydrangeas behind a low fence on which my climbing roses grow (they are New Dawn. Note to rose fans: those New Dawn roses need monthly fertilizer during the summer. In fact, all roses want regular feeding or they will not do well).

I like the old-fashioned look of the tree form, and they can be pruned to keep them small for a garden. The one in the photo is too droopy for my taste, I think, but it makes for a living bouquet.

This G.K. Chesterton essay seemed related to our piece on Deontological Ethics, and AVI touches on the same topic today:

From a report of a talk titled "The Need for a Philosophy"  by Chesterton in 1923, which is introduced thus:

...the sometimes lightly described 'Philosopher of fun' produces a powerful attack on two modern 'isms' that he accuses of being profoundly un-philosophical. If utilitarianism, ('brutaliarianism',) and relativism are allowed to become the modern way, "It means full steam in the darkness with lights out."

A quote:

There was a famous American who said that England had no weather, only samples. That is true today of modern views about life. They are scrappy. Now what is excellent as regards weather is not excellent as regards the things of the mind. Modern England has no thinking, only thoughts. Thoughts can be brilliant and suggestive - journalism, literature and fiction are full of random thoughts on human life - but thinking is something different and it is extraordinarily rare. Some people, especially those who do not think, imagine that thinking is a painful process, but to my mind it is the best game in the world, and connected thinking of some kind - knowing what you mean and not following catchwords - is necessary for us all. 

and

...what began as free thought has now developed into freedom from thought. All through history, there have been broad conceptions of the aims of life, tests of morality which masses of men have held and applied with certainty; but in the modern world these various systems have been abandoned and what is left of them is nothing but debris - a collection of broken bits, the ruins of past philosophies. There are some, like myself, who hold a mystical philosophy, a belief that behind human experience there are realities, powers of good and evil, and the final test for things is their influence for good or evil. The good power intends us to be happy and we are justified in being happy, but the real question is not whether we are happy, but whether, behind the things wherein we seek our happiness lies the, power of good. Are they parts of the good or of the evil? 

Read the whole summary here.

A reader sent us two good arborist sites. I would never go up a tree with a chain saw, but I realize that I might not be all that safe with one even with my feet on the ground.

ArboristSite

ArborMaster

Don't look at it. It will distract you from Maggie's Farm and cause you to waste time. There is only so much time in the day:

The Borderline Sociopathic Blog for Boys.

Mini-daffodils, and Brant decoy. (That's a tall Schipka "Skip" laurel out the window.)

From Riverdance:

Re the excellent post below about Rev. Wright, here's a truth about America, quoted via Attack Machine:

Q. Are Americans more or less charitable than citizens of other countries?
A. No developed country approaches American giving. For example, in 1995 (the most recent year for which data are available), Americans gave, per capita, three and a half times as much to causes and charities as the French, seven times as much as the Germans, and 14 times as much as the Italians. Similarly, in 1998, Americans were 15 percent more likely to volunteer their time than the Dutch, 21 percent more likely than the Swiss, and 32 percent more likely than the Germans. These differences are not attributable to demographic characteristics such as education, income, age, sex, or marital status. On the contrary, if we look at two people who are identical in all these ways except that one is European and the other American, the probability is still far lower that the European will volunteer than the American.

The friend who can be silent with us in a moment of despair or confusion, who can stay with us in an hour of grief or bereavement, who can tolerate not knowing...not curing...not healing...that is a friend who cares.

Henry Nouwen

Basket of Fruit, 1597. I note that this still life, and the previous one, both had flawed apples. Makes it more interesting.

Quoted from a AVI piece on victimology, and the one candidate who never pulls the "poor me" stunt:

...it is amusing to take a snapshot of how all these people came up and what was happening in the legendary year 1969. Hillary Clinton was graduating from Wellesley or her way to Yale Law School; Gloria Steinem, after graduating from Smith and publishing a book, was the lioness of the women's movement; Geraldine Ferraro had interrupted her law career to raise children (there may have been some actual suffering in that; she went on to found the - irony alert - Special Victims Unit); Reverend Jeremiah Wright was getting his master's degree. Barack Obama was an eight-year old stepson of an oil company executive in Indonesia. He would go on to Occidental, Columbia and Harvard.

John McCain was being tortured in a North Vietnamese prison.

- reposted from April, 2005

  By guest author Shaun L. Kelly

           His distinct tenor, reassuring and cerebral, was the second-most heard male voice of my childhood.  Only my father’s fixed baritone surpassed his as the soundtrack of my years growing up in the greater Boston area.  For thirty-two summers - with discernible sagacity and style - Ned Martin served as the principal voice of the Boston Red Sox.   

          In an age where humility and grace slowly receded from our national character, Martin’s modesty and elegance separated him from a host of other announcers – and people.  He never intentionally developed a defined signature call for a homerun.  The ball was simply “gone”. 

          And yet, he used words as a composer uses the notes on a scale.  He seemed to embrace the notion first put forth by Emerson “that every word was once a poem”.  There was nothing ever “programmed” about Ned Martin.  Cogent phrases seem to tumble from his mouth like falling stars. 

          Unlike most sports announcers, Ned Martin was able to frequently quote from the most gifted bards of English literature - Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Dickens, Hemingway - in order to put the narrative of baseball into its proper context.  He was a reader, and he brought a reader’s sensibility to each and every broadcast.

           Ned Martin was also a deeply-rooted theorist and philosopher.  Because he had dipped into the bonfires of hell as a Marine at the close of the Second World War, Ned described each game as an inherent existentialist.  Like his beloved Frost, he had a lover’s quarrel with the world. 

          But Ned Martin was more than just a Red Sox announcer.  To me, he served as a personal captain, steering me through the choppy waters of both youth and adolescence - guiding, nurturing, and instructing me as I listened intently, his most loyal and devoted student.  

How's this ad? (h/t Powerline)

Reposted from April, 2005:

William Galston, Taking Liberty, in Washington Monthly:

"At a 1956 conference, Milton Friedman argued that a free market was the necessary foundation for societies in which individual liberty flourishes. What had begun as the precondition of freedom soon became its template: Libertarian conservatives redefined freedom as the right to choose and extended this understanding far beyond the market, to social relations and public policy.

These thinkers encountered a challenge within the emerging conservative movement, from traditionalists who focused on values such as order and virtue and who questioned the social consequences of the unfettered market. This tension was not in all respects an outright contradiction and thus proved to be manageable. In his classic Capitalism and Freedom, Friedman acknowledged that every form of social organization—including the market—relies on a framework of generally accepted rules, and that “no set of rules can prevail unless most participants most of the time conform to them without external sanctions.” Not only must participants internalize rules, he continued, they must also develop certain traits of character. These requirements are especially demanding in systems of liberty: Freedom can be preserved, he concluded, “only for people who are willing to practice self-denial, for otherwise freedom degenerates into license and irresponsibility.” "

Read entire here.

Only two very short videos exist of Woody Guthrie performing. Here's one of them, from 1945:

Verse 2 of The Burial of the Dead, from The Waste Land (entire poem here). You can hear Eliot reading the poem here. Worth doing. The words and rhythms of Waste Land have become part of our psyche, haven't they?