Maggie's Farm

Dark blue is +10 or above, dark red is -10 or below. Details at Ace:

Excellent essay from Fred Siegel at Commentary, The Anti-American Fallacy. (h/t, Insty). It is about "Down with the people!"

Adam Bellow's disenchantment with the Zabar's Left

Is it kiddie pron if the exhibitionist kids photo themselves?

JC Phillips: God in Our Classrooms

Church bells are insensitive. h/t, Moonbattery

The 50 most stressful colleges. If they think college is stressful, they should try real life.

Gay or not? Who cares? She looks slightly butch, tho. Politics is amusing.

It is Small Business Vs. Big Government

Seattle Tea-Party Lukewarm

What's wrong with Sousa? Everybody loves Sousa.

Steyn is hilarious about Canada. (the post on the left side of his page)

Can't wait for climate change legislation. These jerks want us to freeze.

When you tax a business, who pays?

"Economics is not always intuitive – and that is what makes it such a fascinating and important discipline. Take what economists call “incidence” – the study of who actually bears the burden of a particular tax. It is obvious enough that employees pay income tax. But it is much harder to actually work out who really ends up paying for other taxes; voters are often fooled into thinking that somebody else, usually big business, is being hit by higher taxes while in fact it is them who are picking up the tab, albeit in a way that is impossible to detect."

Who pays taxes on business? The shareholders and the consumers. As of 2002, 49% of Americans owned equities.

It's never too late for an Easter poem. I found this, the first Walcott poem I have read, at Mead's site.

Easter
(From Collected Poems 1948-1984.)

Anna, my daughter,
you have a black dog
that noses your heel,
selfless as a shadow;
here is a fable
about a black dog:
On the last sunrise
the shadow dressed with Him,
it stretched itself also—
they were two big men
with one job to do.
But life had been lent to one
only for this life.
They strode in silence toward
uncontradicting night.
The rats at the Last Supper
shared crumbs with their shadows,
the shadow of the bread
was shared by the bread;
when the candles lowered,
the shadow felt larger,
so He ordered it to leave;
He said where He was going
it would not be needed,
for there there’d be either
radiance or nothing.
It stopped when He turned
and ordered it home,
then it resumed the scent;
it felt itself stretching
as the sun grew small
like the eyes of the soldiers
receding into holes
under the petrified
serpents on their helmets;
the narrowing pupils
glinted like nailheads,
so before He lay back
it crept between the wood
as if it were the pallet
they had always shared;
it crept between the wood
and the flesh nailed to the wood
and it rose like a black flag
as the crossbeam hoisted
itself and the eyes
closed very slowly
extinguishing the shadow—
everything was nothing.
Then the shadow slunk away,
crawling low on its belly,
and it left there knowing
that never again
would He ever need it;
it reentered the earth,
it didn’t eat for three days,
it didn’t go out,
then it peeped out carefully
like a mole from its hole,
like a wolf after winter,
like a surreptitious serpent,
looking for those forms
that could give back its shape;
then it ran out when the bells
began making wide rings
and rings of radiance;
it keeps nosing for His shape
and it finds it again, in
the white echo of a pigeon
with its wings extended
like a shirt on a clothesline,
like a white shirt on Monday
dripping from a clothesline,
like the greeting of a scarecrow
or a man yawning
at the end of a field.

This site has indoor and outdoor mushroom-growing kits. Given the prices of fancy mushrooms, it makes sense. Too bad you cannot grow my favorites at home: Chanterelles and Porcinis.

Here's Have you seen the mushroom man?

From Rick Moran's Tea Partiers Epitomize the Tension Between the Individual and the State:

The importance of their advocacy becomes apparent when you consider that President Obama and the Democrats in Congress have adopted the even more problematic “communitarian” ideal as their template for government. Where the principle of utility is part of the historic, classical liberal definition of government, communitarianism is a more radical ideal that denies individual rights in almost all cases while making forced altruism the dominant force for change.

And from Shiver:

Having spent a good deal of time with tea partying patriots, I do not see them as easily fooled, however. A very wise group they appear to be. Whether highly educated or not so much, tea partiers on the whole have the one thing so many on the left, and especially in this particular administration, lack: real-world experience.

Barack Obama and his minions have unleashed and called to rhetorical arms a veritable legion of the kind of folks they probably didn’t even know existed a year ago. These are Americans who prefer liberty over the luxury of a government-guaranteed life of mooching off the labors of others.

Silent majority? Well, not any more.

Dumb rednecks? Now, there’s a laugh.

The only reason this far-left administration and its media mouthpieces don’t respect the tea partiers is that they hold the partiers’ all-American virtues in such virulent disdain.

Call me a dumb redneck if you want. I don't care.

Now, the pursuit of power is a zero-sum game: you acquire power only by taking it away from someone else. The pursuit of money, however, is not a zero-sum game, which is why it is a much more innocent human activity. It is possible to make a lot of money without inflicting economic injury on anyone. Making money may be more sordid than appropriating power—at least it has traditionally been thought to be so—but, as Adam Smith and others pointed out, it is also a far more civil activity.

Irving Kristol, as quoted in Chicago Boyz' Paying Higher Taxes Can Be Very Profitable. How many times have we said the same thing here at Maggie's? The pursuit of power is what is sordid and sick, but everybody has to make an honest living.

It's genetic, sort-of. In the NYT.

I think cilantro is a tired fad, but I do not dislike it. 

We do not want to dwell on the Tea Party subject, but this is cute (h/t, NRO).

Note the cheerful and friendly demeanor, the unabashed patriotism, the good grooming, and the absence of a Che t-shirt: she is the New Wholesome Cool - and the Vanguard of the Revolution!

She needs a bio, though. I can easily come up with one, but I won't.

Life, liberty, and property do not exist because men have made laws. On the contrary, it was the fact that life, liberty, and property existed beforehand that caused men to make laws in the first place.

Frederic Bastiat

It's the tragedy of the commons. It doesn't look good for the whales.

But what about Whale Farming? Like they do at Sea World.

Currier and Ives' The Trout Pool. The guy is fishing for Brookies. That's all there were in the East, back then. Browns are a European import, and Rainbows are an import from the Western US.

Info about it via Jules in Beantown.

I think it's just great for people to take the trouble to show up and express themselves. The folks are getting flak from the MSM, if not scurrilous and dishonest attacks and attempted sabotages, which must be a tell that these demonstrations/protests mean something real. As Palin always says, you know you're near the target when you start getting the heavy flak.

There was a fair amount of hate expressed - by the haters of the Tea Party.

The message of the Tea Partiers to the gummint, I think, is "You guys have done enough damage. Leave us alone to run our own lives." Hewitt is along the same lines.

Some protests are good, it seems, and some are bad. Back in the day, anti-war protests were good places to pick up "revolutionary" granola gals with no morals. When I consider how six batty old Code Pink ladies used to show up and get non-stop front page coverage about their "moral authority," and compare it to the MSM coverage of the thousands of women that show up for these Tea events across the country, I just have to smile.

It is so predictable.

We like TigerHawk's site, but I have two complaints about him which he will no doubt take to heart.

1. He needs to post more often. It is selfish not to.

2. He needs to learn the names and habits of the critters and birds and bugs and plants that he likes to post. He seems like a guy with curiosity - so why not learn them? It isn't rocket science for a Princeton guy, and it's fun to know what you're looking at. For example, he recently posted some very nice photos of butterflies in Virginia. These are Tiger Swallowtails on a Pink Lilac:

Stolen from Chicago Boyz:

"There is one aspect of the change in moral values brought about by the advance of collectivism which at the present time provides special food for thought. It is that the virtues which are held less and less in esteem and which consequently become rarer are precisely those on which the British people justly prided themselves and in which they were generally agreed to excel. The virtues possessed by Anglo-Saxons in a higher degree than most other people, excepting only a few of the smaller nations, like the Swiss and the Dutch, were independence and self-reliance, individual initiative and local responsibility, the successful reliance on voluntary activity, noninterference with one’s neighbor and tolerance of the different and queer, respect for custom and tradition, and a healthy suspicion of power and authority."

F.A. Hayek, Road to Serfdom.

Mud-brick highrises in Shibam, from this urbanism site.

From the NYT in 1997: On Ancient Terraced Hills, Urbanism Sprouted With Crops

h/t Theo

Jeff Goldstein posted a serious essay, “The Descent of Liberalism”. One quote:

A CNN poll conducted in February found that 56 percent of those questioned think the federal government has “become so large and powerful that it poses an immediate threat to the rights and freedoms of ordinary citizens.” The social reformer inspires in many Americans today the same dread he once inspired in John Stuart Mill, who in 1855 wrote that almost “all the projects of the social reformers in these days are really liberticide — Comte particularly so.” Such projects, Mill predicted, would lead to “a despotism of society over the individual, surpassing anything contemplated in the political ideal of the most rigid disciplinarian among the ancient philosophers,” and stood “as a monumental warning to thinkers on society and politics, of what happens when once men lose sight in their speculations, of the value of Liberty and Individuality.”

Liberals dismiss such fears as mere right-wing hysteria.

Ferguson's excellent essay at Weekly Standard, titled Nudge Nudge, Wink Wink: Behavioral economics—the governing theory of Obama’s nanny state, quotes the Prez: 

“Far more is now known about regulation—not only about when it is justified, but also about what works and what does not. .??.??. In this time of fundamental transformation, that process—and the principles governing regulation in general?—should be revisited.” 

Gee whiz, it sounds very "scientific." My response to the notion that my supposed betters need to regulate and nudge me and my life is not printable on a family website such as Maggie's. I do not care whether it "works" or not. Mussolini made the trains run on time, too.

I believe that our Maggie's team and our readers know far more about life than Barack Obama or Cass Sunstein will ever know.

A re-post from June, 2008. Was it that long ago? Seems like yesterday...It was a fine trip.

We took a day, last week, to hop the train over to Lake Como (and to stop by the Como Duomo), and took the fast ferry up to Villa Carlotta in Tremezzo - and then across the lake to Bellagio to see the equally renowned gardens of Villa Melzi.

The 17th-18th century Villa Carlotta and its gardens were a traditional and necessary stop on the "Grand Tour" of "the Continent." We anglophiles like to follow in those old paths.

It is impossible to capture on camera the feel of such vast and varied gardens, which are, in effect, both botanical gardens with worldwide collections of plants, and ornamental gardens designed to impress as much as to delight - some formal Italian and some English-style.

For example, these gardens have bamboo groves, Sequoia groves, acre-sized plantings of azalea, palm collections, collections of cacti, citrus arbors, etc. Even a turtle pool with happy and smiling American southern Red-eared Sliders and Cooters.

This photo is the entrance:

More of my mediocre photos on continuation page below -

Jars of Clay are wonderful, but I'd like to hear Dylan do this one with Paul Simon:

Video of Market St., San Francisco, 4 days before the quake. The camera is mounted on the front of a streetcar.  I cannot embed it...but maybe Dr. Merc, our Embedder In Chief, can figger out how to. 

The population of SF was 400,000. Some traffic, eh? No lights, no crosswalks, no rules. Everybody dodging cars, horses, and streetcars. Total chaos, and wonderful. I love the two guys running to jump-start the car in front of the streetcar.

Also, dig the serene dude on horseback weaving through the people and the traffic. Reminded me of the absurd end of the already-insane Blazing Saddles.

My Wife

Trusty, dusky, vivid, true,
With eyes of gold and bramble-dew,
Steel-true and blade-straight,
The great artificer
Made my mate.

Honour, anger, valour, fire,
A love that life could never tire,
Death quench or evil stir,
The mighty Master
Gave to her.

Teacher, tender comrade, wife,
A fellow-farer true through life,
Heart-whole and soul-free,
The august Father gave to me.

I had something else in the pipeline for today, but I could not resist this offering from Stevenson from our reader MM.