Maggie's Farm

Maine's Seaway Boats are designed as much as work boats as recreational hulls which means, for one thing, that they are seaworthy in foul weather and seriously bumpy seas. I think there is the soul of a Maine lobster boat inside each one of their handsome  designs even though they say they can all get up on a plane.

And, by way of contrast, here's Al Gore's new boat. Looks like a ferry, or a royal barge. Designed for sunbathing, eating and drinking, and definitely not Yankee-style:

Ethics are for people who have no morals - no humility in the face of the good, the true, and the beautiful.

David Warren, in a piece on journalism and truth-telling

Excellent mini-marts. If you need your morning caffeine fix, and you're in New England but there's no Dunkin' Donuts nearby, there's always Cumby's. Trouble is, they usually don't open 'til 6 and that is way too late for us early-risers.

This is the Wellfleet, MA shop on Route 6, next to the liquor store. This one doesn't sell gas. The teen-aged gals who work there are from Bulgaria, while the American teens sleep until noon, when they decide where to surf or windsurf that day.

As you may know, not long ago a couple hundred thousand Berliners made a lot of noise for my opponent. I'll take the roar of 50,000 Harleys any day.

John McCain

Stanley Fish in The NYT. (h/t, Right Wing Prof). One quote:

Last week, I confessed to being a bad traveler. This week, I confess to something much worse. I resist and resent the demands made on me by environmental imperatives. I don’t want to save the planet. I just want to inhabit it as comfortably as possible for as long as I have.

Things reached something of a crisis point a few days ago when my wife asked me to read a communique from Greenpeace. (She thought, she told me, that if I read it rather than hearing about it from her, my unhappiness would be directed at the organization.) It said that Kimberly-Clark, the maker of the paper towels, facial tissue and toilet paper we buy, does not use recycled fiber and instead “gets its virgin wood fiber clear-cut from . . . the North American Boreal . . . one of the world’s most important forests.” And that meant, she told me, that we would have to give those items up and go in search of green alternatives. But we had already done that once before when it turned out that the manufacturer of the paper products we used to buy — Procter and Gamble — engaged in research on animals. That’s when we found Kimberly-Clark. So it seems that the pure were not so pure after all, and who’s to say that the next corporation won’t have an ecological skeleton in its closet, too? 

The Opinion Journal's piece on Solzhenitsyn begins like this:

"The hammer banged reveille on the rail outside camp HQ at five o'clock as always. Time to get up. The ragged noise was muffled by ice two fingers thick on the windows and soon died away. Too cold for the warder to go on hammering."

Thus did Alexander Solzhenitsyn begin "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich," his reveille for the world about totalitarianism. Published in 1962, in the brief post-Stalinist thaw under Khrushchev, the novel about a prisoner in a Soviet prison camp made Solzhenitsyn at first a Russian sensation and later the country's most famous dissident after the Kremlin reverted to brutal form.

And as quoted by Vanderleun,

"When all of the rest of the civilized world, as well as the Marxist world, was tossing God into the dustbin of history, Solzhenitsyn realized that only God really matters. He chided the West for embracing materialism and forgetting God, a lesson that is just as true today as thirty years ago." -

Back from my annual trip to family-friendly, glitz-free�Wellfleet on Cape Cod, whence no opportunities for fresh posting. You talk about Obama stickers - good grief. Never saw so many of 'em. Just a solitary NOBAMA bumper sticker, and�one Ron Paul sticker on a plumber's old F-150: the self-employed are an independent lot.

Only regret: no time to stop by and visit with our friend�Sipp on the way. With the vacation traffic, the drive took us 7 migraine-inducing stop-and-go traffic�hours.

Despite the drive, the Cape is where I need to go to clean my brain with (all-organic)�cold salt water and to refresh my innards with fresh Wellfleet oysters.�Here's where we stay:

�Here's the view of the harbor and our�home beach�from our deck, with its tiny boardwalk across the little�salt marsh:

More photos of the place on continuation page below -

by Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de La Brede et de Montesquieu, 1725. It begins:

The difference between great nations and savage peoples is that the former have applied themselves to the arts and sciences, while the latter have totally neglected them. Perhaps most nations owe their existence to the knowledge that the arts and sciences provide. If we had the mores of the American savages, two or three European nations would soon devour all the others; and then perhaps some people conquering our world would boast, like the Iroquois, of having devoured seventy nations.

But leaving aside savage peoples, if a Descartes had come to Mexico or Peru one hundred years before Cortez and Pizarro, and if he had taught these peoples that men, composed as they are, are not able to be immortal; that the springs of their machine, as those of all machines, wear out; that the effects of nature are only a consequence of the laws and communications of movement, then Cortez, with a handful of men, would never have destroyed the empire of Mexico, nor Pizarro that of Peru.

His whole piece at New Atlantis.

Ronald Bailey at Reason calculates the cost of "re-powering America."

Cost is one thing, but I don't see the purpose anyway. We have centuries of good fossil fuel here, and VA, oddly enough, is full of uranium.

From Mary Eberstadt, at First Things. It begins:

That Humanae Vitae and related Catholic teachings about sexual morality are laughingstocks in all the best places is not exactly news. Even in the benighted precincts of believers, where information from the outside world is known to travel exceedingly slowly, everybody grasps that this is one doctrine the world loves to hate. During Benedict XVI’s April visit to the United States, hardly a story in the secular press failed to mention the teachings of Humanae Vitae, usually alongside adjectives like “divisive” and “controversial” and “outdated.” In fact, if there’s anything on earth that unites the Church’s adversaries—all of them except for the Muslims, anyway—the teaching against contraception is probably it.

To many people, both today and when the encyclical was promulgated on July 25, 1968, the notion simply defies understanding. Consenting adults, told not to use birth control? Preposterous. Third World parents deprived access to contraception and abortion? Positively criminal. A ban on condoms when there’s a risk of contracting AIDS? Beneath contempt.

Modern contraceptive practices had a huge impact, and yet sex was not invented in the 1960s, and the ancient Egyptians and Greeks used contraceptives. Does sexuality have anything to do with Judeo-Christian morality? Read the whole thing.

David Horowitz discusses his book:

Nope. It's a bathtub. Good grief. More here.

They went to Russia to build socialism.

Dems say they're OK with $10 gas.

Hey, John! You can be a celeb too. Moderate Voice

Why the growing Gulf dead zone?

What if Iraq works out? VDH

Monitoring the enemy's broadcasts. No Pasaran

Some real numbers on PC in education. h/t, David Thompson

They define them as those who seek to disrupt civil online discourse: The World of Web Trolling.

Just one more dumb hobby.

Definitely water on Mars.

And oil on Saturn's moon Titan. Lots of it. Well, it's close to oil. Is it possible that oil is not a fossil fuel?

Government bailouts are like potato chips: You can't stop with just one.

Tom Sowell, in his Random Thoughts this week

Some times I wonder whether we are electing a "Most Popular" or a High School Class President rather than a President of the USA. Even Maureen Dowd seems to wonder.

This toon via Theo:

It's Rush Week at Human Events, with many salutations to the big guy on his 20th anniversary.

I do not listen to Rush much these days, but back in '90-'93 I did every day, during my mid-day commute. I enjoy his humor, the apparent joy he takes in living, his self-mockery (eg "with half my brain tied behind my back, just to make it fair"), and his upbeat attitude, but it was his cheerful irreverence towards conventional views that engaged me. Plus his kindness and gentleness to all of his callers.

Whether you agree with him about everything or not, he is a brilliant entertainer.

Love this photo from our Kentucky friend at Slower Pace:

Via Vanderleun:

"Carbon control is what the West talks about. Carbon consumption is what the Non-Western Nations seek. Electricity efficiency and avoided generation is what the West talks about. Electricity supply is what nations big and small outside the West seek. Transportation efficiency is what the West talks about. Increased, greatly increased, mechanized mobility is what the nations of Asia, Africa, Eastern Europe and Latin America seek. The West wants to orate about wind, solar, geothermal and wave energy. The rest of the world wants more oil and natural gas, coal and uranium. The West worries about carbon control. The rest of the world, especially Asia, worries greatly about energy and food control. - Vinod K. Dar Earth Cools

Via No Looking Backwards: