Maggie's Farm

From our guest poster Bruce Kesler:

If conditions and challenges weren’t ominous enough for the new Obama administration, his strong-willed mother-in-law is moving into the White House.  If that alone isn’t enough for most, imagine yourself facing a relocation to very difficult new job, almost every one with power affecting you having differing wants and confronting you with demands often at odds with your own, literally not enough money in the world to satisfy everyone’s desires and the demands increasingly undercutting even necessities, and gangs of lethal thugs roaming the streets around you. Even your formerly most staunch supporters begin to report that most of your previous smooth talk is empty that got you the job and that you’re in over your head.  Like vultures expecting a fat carcass but facing a rotting pigeon of a meal, they squabble and fight each other.  Almost all your mentors expose they haven’t really much clue what to do. Well, here’s a piece of advice: Don’t just do something, stand there.  Most of the challenging conditions will sort themselves out.  Running around like a chicken without a head, or doing for the sake of doing, will not only likely have little positive effect but will probably have worse consequences.

Let’s go through a brief list:

The Economy:  Not every one, but in aggregate, individuals are better deciders of what is worth working for and spending on than any Delphic group in Washington.  Money is the motivation to work and risk.  The only economic measure by Washington with a track-record of supporting and increasing this motivation is low taxes.  Federal spending, on anything, is inefficient and tends to favor means and ends that reduce individual incentives.  Further, in excess -- and multi-trillion dollar printing of dollars is certainly excess, it has been proven, sadly repeatedly, to lead to lasting inflation that is even more impoverishing and destructive of incentives.

Healthcare:  As we’ve become wealthier, compared to any other nation, the portion of our personal and national incomes that need be devoted to food, clothing and shelter has declined.  That has unleashed the means for medical technologies and treatments that, although often overused, we decide we can afford and deem worthwhile to our better living.  Every scheme for “reforming” healthcare is based on forcing us, against our better judgment and self-caring, to have less healthcare, through reduced access and innovation.  Bureaucrats’ choices of what they think “cost-effective” for spending our own earnings and taxes are not our choices.  The only ones to benefit are government-employment and government-employee unions.

Education:  Surely, a well-educated workforce, allowed incentives to be productive, enriches most.  Major portions of our enormous spending on education, however, are wasted or siphoned off to non-enriching ends.  In higher education, we have lavish campuses failing to serve quality or practical degrees.  In primary education, we have multiplying programs that shortchange the basics, while teacher unions expend their huge political war chests to battle reforms.  Allowing the influx of uneducated illegal immigrants has diverted a large percentage of education spending to their remedial teaching, reducing standards and programs for excellence among the rest.  Border and employer enforcement in motion has and will reduce illegal immigration.  Budget restraints are directed by those in power to punish the customers.  With the necessity of budget restraints evident, those ideologic and self-serving pedagogues will lose some of their influence to undermine core, productive education. 

National Defense:  From the pains of combat, we’ve learned that a larger professional armed forces is critical.  At the same time, sophisticated, expensive major weapons systems cannot be avoided if we are to have deterring diplomacy with major adversaries, or soundly defeat them if diplomacy fails.  The ‘90’s, Clinton path of virtually ignoring the emergence of such threats only leads to larger, more dangerous crises.  Cutting defense spending to fuel wasteful domestic spending by Washington is proven suicidal behavior.  An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.  Cutting the ounce is deceptively self-destructive.

Middle East:  Our avoidance of domestic sources of energy and of transmission has increased our dependence upon and hefty self-impoverishing buying of oil from hostile and trouble-making countries.  Take that US financial underpinning out from under them and they are less of a global or regional threat, less capable of attacking  Israel as well.  A regional conflict is less of a threat to itself or the world.

Having, thus, freed up Obama from otherwise counter-productive activities outside the White House, he personally will benefit not only from things sorting themselves out better but will have more time to deal with his mother-in-law.

An unusual recording from Dylan, from his often-disparaged 1970 Self Portrait record. I cannot embed this YouTube, but it's here.

My guess is that he never got around to making up words for the tune.

Brings back poignant memories for me, but I won't tell you what they are other than that they involve a stunningly beautiful but erratic girl who had two Chessies.

Earth on brink of new Ice Age.

We are all screwed.

Finally back from South Pacific at the Beaumont. Slow, snowy, slippery, mind-rattling drive home through blinding snow on unplowed highways. What a wonderful performance, though, and well-worth the conditions. Ms. Kelli O'Hara is a doll. We saw her in her NYC debut in Light in the Piazza. I'd guess her future looks bright.

The Dyl would have loved this. And, I was thinking, so would the Sipp Clan. A real treat, thanks to Mrs. BD.

When you want the best of anything, or want to be the best in anything, you go to New York. Sinatra said it better. It ain't for everybody, nor should it be. Sure is mightly pleasant to visit, though.

We have many ex-NYC readers who like these sorts of photos, and I am happy to oblige despite my lousy camera skills.

NYC is at its most lovely in a snowstorm. It wasn't coming down heavily yet -

More of my NYC photos below the fold -

via theo:

This will make your day. Respighi's Ancient Airs and Dances, Suite 2, mvt 2:

We have been officially notified that Maggie's Farm has probably won the top blog award from the highly-respected ICEIE.

It's quite remarkable and deeply gratifying to us, especially since we think blog awards tend to be bogus and a bunch of baloney, and therefore have nothing to do with them.

But not this one. This one is a keeper. The Grand Pricks. We will treasure it always.

Remembering Antietam. Jules

What card check would do to the Sun Belt

In search of the just-right desk. Desk feng shui? Gimme a break.

via Jim Miller:

U.S. household debt, which has been growing steadily since the Federal Reserve began tracking it in 1952, declined for the first time in the third quarter of 2008.  In the same quarter, U.S. consumer spending growth declined for the first time in 17 years.

Bailing out one of the 20th Century's best business models. Quote from Reason:

Blaming the customer is the second-to-last refuge of any crappy industry, business, or organization (the last refuge being asking for a handout on Capitol Hill). As my ex-L.A. Times colleague and current Reason magazine Contributing Editor Tim Cavanaugh has noted in our pages, the paper we both short-timed for was filled with people making jokes about whether we could just "fire our readers." Over the recent holidays, an entire journalistic Festivus celebration of customer-blaming broke out over New Yorker finance columnist James Surowiecki's lament that, "The real problem for newspapers…isn't the Internet; it's us. We want access to everything, we want it now, and we want it for free." To extrapolate, if only us greedy human beings would realize that our very democracy was at stake, that we "are taking an active step in the formation of a country without a civic conscience," then we'd damned well volunteer to pay an unnecessary premium to keep our finest journalists in permanent six figures. Sounds precisely as convincing as the argument that enlightened voters will surely agree to pay extra taxes so that political campaigns can be financed through "clean" money.

Related: The Seattle P-I is dying.

Allah Akbar in Oslo. Oslo?

Where to put your money: Why mattress sales will take off. Warren Buffet:

“This should be bullish for Berkshire. With great foresight, I long ago entered the mattress business in a big way through our furniture operation. Now mattresses have become fully competitive as a place to put your money, and sales will soon take off.”

EZRA POUND, PISAN CANTOS, LXXXI

From Surber:

Let’s all sing.

Oh, the weather outside is frightful/ But the fire is delightful/ And since we’ve no place to go/ Let it uncommonly widespread conditions of instability, let it uncommonly widespread conditions of instability, let it uncommonly widespread conditions of instability.

Related, Zoroastrologicalclimatology. Everything explained.

Fact is, Baby, it's cold outside. Let's go skiing.

Good obit at the National Catholic Reporter. (thanks, RWN)

What an angelic face!

You cannot bring about prosperity by discouraging thrift.
You cannot help small men by tearing down big men.
You cannot strengthen the weak by weakening the strong.
You cannot lift the wage-earner by pulling down the wage-payer.
You cannot help the poor man by destroying the rich.
You cannot keep out of trouble by spending more than your income.
You cannot further the brotherhood of man by inciting class hatred.
You cannot establish security on borrowed money.
You cannot build character and courage by taking away men's initiative and independence.
You cannot help men permanently by doing for them what they could and should do for themselves.

Rev. William Boetcker, 1873 - 1962

Via Small Dead Archeopteryxes (http://www.smalldeadanimals.com/archives/010430.html) - pardon today's continuing linkage problem which is driving our News Junkie nuts - comes this question:

If sociologists ignore genes, will other academics — and the wider world — ignore sociology?

One quote from the linked site, South Dakota Politics (http://southdakotapolitics.blogs.com/south_dakota_politics/2009/01/sociology-is-al.html), which reveals these folks to be paleo-Marxists at heart:

In fact, a lot of sociologists are as offended by Darwin as your average Creationist.

Just two years ago, in his presidential address to the American Sociological Association, Troy Duster, an eminent sociologist at New York University, went so far as to suggest that any sociologist who embraced genetic approaches was a traitor to the discipline. Two of the biggest problems facing sociology, he argued, were the "increasing authority of reductionist science" and "the attendant expansion of databases on markers and processes 'inside the body.'" If anything defined sociology, Duster said, it was its role as "century-long counterpoint" to such efforts to connect the roots of social problems to biology.

Via HuffPo:

"Actually, one of my favorites during the political season is 'Maggie's Farm,'" Obama said of one of Dylan's tracks. "It speaks to me as I listen to some of the political rhetoric."

Here's the 1965 recording:

This is live, from Cork, 2006:

Fr. Neuhaus was administered Last Rites yesterday: http://corner.nationalreview.com/post/?q=OTg2NGUyYzdhNTU4MDJmZjk0MTY1OGM5Zjg0ODdiMDc=

Here's an interview with him: http://www.ad2000.com.au/articles/1991/jun1991p10_706.html

Sorry about the link mess.

Still having linking problems. This from Insty:

IF ONLY BUSH HAD BEEN SUCH A RAMPANT FREE-MARKETEER: “Mythmaking is in full swing as the Bush administration prepares to leave town. Among the more prominent is the assertion that the housing meltdown resulted from unbridled capitalism under a president opposed to all regulation. . . . Rather than a failure of capitalism, the housing meltdown shows what’s likely to happen when government grants special privileges to favored private entities that facilitate bad actors and lousy practices.”

Fitz Hugh Lane, aka Fitz Henry Lane (1804-1865) is considered to be sort-of a member of the so-called Hudson River School of painters (a label slapped on these folks by later art historians). Lane is known as a "luminist," for obvious reasons.

This is Becalmed Off Halfway Rock (Casco, ME), 1860:

This is Boston Harbor (1856):

Amusing (h/t And Rightly So):

It's a "best essay" because it is thought-provoking. The Claremont Institute has reposted Charles Kesler's 2005 The Crisis of American Identity in memory of Harvard's Samuel Huntington. One quote:

Huntington outlines two sources of national identity, a set of universal principles that (he argues) cannot serve to define a particular society; and a culture that can, but that is under withering attack from within and without. His account of culture is peculiar, narrowly focused on the English language and Anglo-Protestant religious traits, among which he counts "Christianity; religious commitment;…and dissenting Protestant values of individualism, the work ethic, and the belief that humans have the ability and the duty to try to create heaven on earth, a 'city on a hill.'" Leave aside the fact that John Winthrop hardly thought that he and his fellow Puritans were creating "heaven on earth." Is Huntington calling for the revival of all those regulations that sustained Winthrop's merely earthly city, including the strictures memorably detailed in The Scarlet Letter? Obviously not, but when fishing in the murky waters of Anglo-Protestant values, it is hard to tell what antediluvian monsters might emerge. If his object is to revive, or to call for the revival of, this culture, how will he distinguish its worthy from its unworthy parts?

another:

Modern liberalism, beginning in the Progressive era, has done its best to strip natural rights and the Constitution out of the American creed. By emptying it of its proper moral content, thinkers and politicians like Woodrow Wilson prepared the creed to be filled by subsequent generations, who could pour their contemporary values into it and thus keep it in tune with the times. The "living constitution," as the new view of things came to be called, transformed the creed, once based on timeless or universal principles, into an evolving doctrine; turned it, in effect, into culture, which could be adjusted and reinterpreted in accordance with history's imperatives. Alternatively, one could say that 20th-century liberals turned their open-ended form of culturalism into a new American creed, the multicultural creed, which they have few scruples now about imposing on republican America, diversity be damned.

To his credit, Huntington abhors this development. Unfortunately, his Anglo-Protestant culturalism, like any merely cultural conservatism, is no match for its liberal opponents. He persists in thinking of liberals as devotees of the old American creed who push its universal principles too far, who rely on reason to the exclusion of a strong national culture. When they abjured individualism and natural rights decades ago, however, liberals broke with that creed, and did so proudly. When they abandoned nature as the ground of right, liberals broke as well with reason, understood as a natural capacity for seeking truth, in favor of reason as a servant of culture, history, fate, power, and finally nothingness. In short, Huntington fails to grasp that latter-day liberals attack American culture because they reject the American creed, around which that culture has formed and developed from the very beginning.

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.