Maggie's Farm

Lepanto (1915)

     White founts falling in the Courts of the sun,
     And the Soldan of Byzantium is smiling as they run;
     There is laughter like the fountains in that face of all men feared,
     It stirs the forest darkness, the darkness of his beard;
     It curls the blood-red crescent, the crescent of his lips;
     For the inmost sea of all the earth is shaken with his ships.
     They have dared the white republics up the capes of Italy,
     They have dashed the Adriatic round the Lion of the Sea,
     And the Pope has cast his arms abroad for agony and loss,
     And called the kings of Christendom for swords about the Cross.
     The cold queen of England is looking in the glass;
     The shadow of the Valois is yawning at the Mass;
     From evening isles fantastical rings faint the Spanish gun,
     And the Lord upon the Golden Horn is laughing in the sun.

(Read the rest on continuation page below. Image of the second-most famous naval battle in history (1571), familiar to every schoolchild, is by an unknown artist.)

"Cold and lonesome" is the gritty low-down heart of the blues. (That is not Jimmy Reed in the photo. I don't know who that guy is, but the music is Reed.)

I hope y'all have enjoyed hearing Jimmy this week.

A couple of birder friends and I took an early morning trip down to the Jamaica Bay Refuge  in Queens, NYC, for some early warbler-watching last Saturday.

Since we had already had a wave of warblers passing through further north, it seemed like a good time to get a head start on the May warbler-watching before all the leaves came out. Wrong. Not a single one. As with hunting or fishing, it is so often "You shoulda been here yesterday."

Our birds have not bought into the global warming hysteria. The Spring migrants were absent, and the winter birds had left already. I did not even see the usual flock of breeding Ruddy Ducks.

The Jamaica Bay Refuge is a unique oasis. Behind you is JFK with planes constantly overhead, out to the ocean side is Far Rockaway, and in front is Brooklyn with Manhattan rising in the distance. It's a special green and watery stopping-place for migrants on the Atlantic Flyway, but the refuge hosts plenty of breeding birds too. Mixed habitat: beaches, woods, vast bayberry fields, salt- and fresh-water marshes.

Plenty of Tree Swallows. Here's my pal walking up to one of them while fumbling with his fancy camera, Far Rockaway in the distance:

 More photos etc below the fold -

My men's study/confessional group has been reading the Letter to the Hebrews for a couple of months. One of the topics we stumbled into this week was a discussion of obedience to God, and dutifulness. (Here's a recent post on obedience via Vanderleun.)

While we guys all seem to acknowledge the need for discipline for spiritual growth, many of us confessed our tendency to lazily and self-congratulatingly replace a life in the spirit with "Christian" dutifulness and "doing good." We more or less ended up thinking of moral and religious dutifulness, if lacking the Holy Spirit and the direction of God, as clanging cymbals - empty noise. Of course, that was one of Christ's teachings.

From a Christian standpoint, pride in one's Christian dutifulness and righteousness is a devil's snare - as is pride in one's humility. From Screwtape's Letter #14 with his advice to his apprentice Wormwood:

Your patient has become humble; have you drawn his attention to the fact? All virtues are less formidable to us once the man is aware that he has them, but this is especially true of humility. Catch him at the moment when he is really poor in spirit and smuggle into his mind the gratifying reflection, “By jove! I’m being humble”, and almost immediately pride—pride at his own humility—will appear. If he awakes to the danger and tries to smother this new form of pride, make him proud of his attempt—and so on, through as many stages as you please.

Creators of carbon credit scheme cashing in on it. h/t, Buddy.

Neither an imminent 10-meter ocean level rise nor the prospect of a flooded basement deters the Fearless Al from this waterfront purchase.

So does anybody still think he really believes his nonsense? Yes, he is making ark-loads of $ from it but, even so, he is so on board that it would be too late for him to change his mind regardless of facts.

Like Al Sharpton and Tawana Brawley.

But "facts" and "evidence" are just patriarchal and racist tools of oppression anyway, aren't they? In this brave new world, we all get to pick our own facts, depending on how we feel or on which side our bread is buttered, and reality is a politico-socio-emotional construct. Isn't it?

Remind me to post my bit on "Psycho-utopianism" some time soon.

This feature back by popular demand. I will post the info later today, although our readers will figure it out first.

We seem to have some knowledgeable birders here. What a world!

"You ain't so big, you're just tall that's all."

Probably Reed's best-known song, and it's about work, not love. Everybody can relate. Dylan's "Maggie's Farm" echoes this classic in another way, does it not?

As in many of his recordings, you can hear his wife "Mama" chiming in sometimes.

City Journal: Preservation Follies - Excessive landmarking threatens to make Manhattan a refuge for the rich.

NASA doubts climate model certainty

BBC: Climate party is winding down

Competition for The Teaching Company: Free Yale intro courses on DVD

Yale bans student-faculty gay sex. (I assume gay sex is included in this.) What about platonic romance?

Why women wear make-up. Villainous

Just what we need: A new mental diagnosis. Computer Stress Syndrome.

Americans, if not Obama, know Israel's strategic value

There is little new in the Arizona law. When I enter a foreign country, I carry a passport. Whether you agree with the law or not, "illegal" means illegal. Americans understand that. Our friend Never Yet Melted sees it differently.

More People Figuring Out that Law School's a Bad Value

Stay away from Mexico

Big biz considering dumping their insurance. Quote:

From John's Demonizing Goldman Sachs:

I'm not a particular fan of either Goldman Sachs or Congress, but today's hearing confirms that, given a choice, I'd rather have Goldman Sachs regulating Congress than Congress regulating Goldman Sachs. Goldman's employees are much smarter, considerably more honest, and far more likely to have my interests at heart. 

Palin:

“I’m sick and tired of Obama and the White House coming out with yet another new crisis that has to be fixed by government sticking it to the people and taking more of what we earn and produce. Instead of allowing our small businesses especially to keep what we earn… But see, to many in the White House including our own president, I don’t know when they’ve run a business. I don’t know when they’ve been a CEO where they had to look out for the bottom line and they had to make payroll and live within their own means with a budget. They’re from government. They’re community organizers. They’ve been spending other people’s money for so long that the free enterprise principles that all of us believe in, it’s all foreign to them.“

Guitarist and harmonica player Reed was really the first cross-over bluesman. Whether he was marketed as blues, rhythm and blues, or rock and roll, he was really a bluesman all the way. His music feels familiar even to those who have never heard him because so much of his style was borrowed by rockers in the 60s.

He drank too much, died at 51.

Excellent, from Daniel Pipes: In Europe, Remorse Has Turned to Masochism. He nails it. One quote:

... it is Europe’s very readiness to acknowledge its faults that prompts self-hatred, for societies that do not engage in such introspection do not lacerate themselves. Europe’s strength is thus its weakness. Although the continent has “more or less vanquished its monsters,” such as slavery, colonialism, and fascism, it chooses to dwell on the worst of its record. Thus his book’s title, The Tyranny of Guilt. The past, with its violence and aggression, is frozen in time, a burden Europeans expect never to throw off.

Related, Sowell's Misusing History: Inhumanity, like humanity, is universal.

We saw this play in NYC a year or two ago, but now it's back in town at the Westside Theater: The Screwtape Letters.

It is straight from CS Lewis' book. Mrs. BD's lady's Alpha group is going to see it together.

From a piece on dinosaur extinction - my bolds. (h/t, SDA):

''We believe dinosaurs were most likely to be cold-blooded creatures and would have needed the warmth to keep them alive,” he said.

“If they were unable to migrate south they could have been wiped out. Climate change is now very much on the agenda in trying to determine how the dinosaurs became extinct.

“We now believe that they died out gradually and it is very possible that this could have been caused by a series of climatic changes.''

The drop in temperature is thought to have occurred because high levels of CO2 were in the atmosphere which caused global temperatures to rise and polar ice to melt – a phenomenon currently predicted for Earth.

"After a century of épater le bourgeois, why on earth can’t le bourgeois épater l’artiste primitif? And why is the bourgeois and reactionary management of the Museum of Modern Art stifling the artistic creativity of its customers?"

Name the bird, from this site.

Dr. Merc likes Lady Gaga, and our pal and sometime poster Tom Francis likes Ladytron. Well, Jimmy Reed (1925-1976) is one of my favorites. We'll begin the week with Bright Lights, Big City:

Driscoll: Modern art comes full circle

Green corruption in the White House

What tradition knows: Overcoming Bias

Andy Revkin going after the children

City Journal: The Banality of Race - David Remnick’s life of Obama exemplifies the moral laziness of today’s liberalism.

The normally tepid Douthat on the South Park subject:

This is what decadence looks like: a frantic coarseness that bravely trashes its own values and traditions, and then knuckles under swiftly to totalitarianism and brute force.

I posted this early Sunday morning:

Farm chores for my aging parents regularly pull me away from church, but this morning we trek down to NYC to meet the pup at Gascogne for a cheap brunch (I'll have the mussels - I always do when they are on a menu - and a healthy and organic Bloody Mary) before treating her to Paul Taylor ll's final day at the Joyce.

Mrs. BD is a big Taylor fan. Our blog pal Neoneo loves Taylor too. Despite being married to a dancer/choreographer for about 100 years, I remain a bit of a dance agnostic. I always did like Merce Cunningham, though, and Meredith Monk. Very quirky.

Follow-up:

It was a wonderful program from the Paul Taylor ll (the 80 year-old Taylor's 6-person touring company), but I would have been fine just seeing Esplanade. In fact, just one dance is really all my brain can process in one day. Powerful stuff, Esplanade. Substantial. Recklessly physical and driven by physical momentum, romance, and gravity and, as I sometimes say about some dances, a poem without words - or like a dream. Mrs. BD could discuss it endlessly; how his Graham background evolved and how ballet training is essential to modern dance, etc., but I lack the skill, the words, and the knowledge. The dance is in my head, though, along with the Bach.

Brunch was good, too. Free Bloody Marys. And it is always a treat to spend some time with the Bird Dog pupette Wall Streeter who returned to work after the performance. Those folks work on weekends, keeping the engines of capitalism humming so that people have money to support Paul Taylor.

I have never seen the TV show South Park, but I have heard that it is clever in a goofy, sophomoric and irreverent sort of way.

You have probably heard that fanatics have threatened Comedy Central about South Park's irreverence towards Mohammed (pbuh). Comedy Central folded like a cheap camera. Hence South Park now has the Prophet appearing in a bear costume, and as Santa Claus. Kinda funny, if you can take a joke. Doubt they can.

As Kate observes:

The "extremist" is the one with the death threat.

The "moderate" is the one who explains what you've done to deserve it.

If you want to have religion in the world today, you have to be big enough to take some teasing and/or annoyance from those who don't get it. If you have a religion with vocal murderous and hateful people in it today, teasing is the least one should expect.

But Everybody Draw Mohammed Day is just teasing.

I stumbled onto Myron Magnet's fine 2003 essay of the above title. Magnet says that good writing is about higher and deeper truths than "knowledge," "information," or "data" can provide, and I agree of course.

One quote:

What’s wanted is wisdom: the ability to see into the heart of things. This is the kind of knowledge that Plato describes so poetically in that most literary of all philosophical passages, the allegory of the cave: the knowledge that sees through the world of appearances to the Truth, of which the appearances are but an emanation—a knowledge that requires a lifetime of reason and study to attain but that comes finally in a flash of intuition, because the Truth is in us, in an inner nature we can glimpse by introspection and intuition, as well as in the world. And this is the knowledge—a knowledge, one might say, that resides in our souls as well as in our minds—that great literature embodies.

He includes a smack-down of the one-dimensional pomo critics, but that's far from his main point.

And since Magnet mentions Cosi Fan Tutte so often in his piece, here's the truly ridiculous and lovely Act 1 Finale, in which the cheating suitors fake committing suicide to re-engage their girlfriends:

I have always thought that Cape Dory made fine boats.This pretty 33' Cape Dory is for sale.

Psalm 23

1 The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want.
2 He maketh me to lie down in green  pastures: he leadeth me beside the still waters.
3 He restoreth my soul: he leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for his name's sake.
4 Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.
5 Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies: thou anointest  my head with oil; my cup runneth over.
6 Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life: and I will dwell in the house of the Lord for ever.

A reader minded us that the Polka and the button box came to North America via eastern European immigrants, and became Tex-Mex in a happy if unlikely union with the Mexican sound. Always was fond of the Texas Tornados, with the late greats Doug Sahm and Freddy Fender, plus Flaco Jiminez, Augie Meyers, et al. A motley crew, and good fun.

Got your Camaro?