Maggie's Farm

Gateway found this Move On ad for Obama. Hope. It could happen to you.

Do they think I am 6 years old? I hope for a pretty pony, and $50 million in cash, unmarked bills.

This is a tale of minor woe, a "for the loss of a nail, the shoe was lost; for the loss of the shoe, the horse was lost..." story.

When a homeowner sees that ominous drip, drip, drip in the ceiling, coming out of some light fixture, his or her heart sinks. We all know that water and houses don't mix.

It turned out that the vibrations from the Jacuzzi tub had screwed up the drain. On further inspection, the dripping had rotted the subfloor. And, on further inspection, the underfloor in front of the shower was wet and crumbling too, partly because Mr. Shower Door installed the door opening out, not in. And the shower stall wasn't adequately vented. And, and, and...

This means plumbers, demolition guys, tile guys, new fixtures, dumpsters and carpenters. A new subfloor and a new floor for the bathroom, hopefully something less slippery than the shiny Italian tile we had. I think a marble floor is the idea.

And, since that is being done, let's take the vanity out and repaint it, and put a new marble top on it.

And since we have a great carpenter/contractor here anyway, why not have him move the non-supporting walls around in the master bedroom to expand the closets and expand the room the way we have always talked about? Yeah, why not? Not a big deal, right? You can move all your hunting gear to the basement.

And, since they're already doing that, let's finally put the fireplace in the bedroom. It can link right up to an existing chimney, after all. Cozy.

And since they're doing that, let's get rid of all the old carpet and replace it with good oak flooring upstairs. Let's do it everywhere upstairs. After all, it's not much more expensive than high-quality wool carpet.

And since the electricians will be around, let's replace all of that terrible hallway lighting, and then re-paint everything.

I guess one of the consolations of home-ownership is to know, as you watch your life savings evaporate, that you are helping to keep the economy going in your neck of the woods.

Were I single and childless, I could live in a shack in the woods, as long as I had a broadband connection. And a girlfriend or three for company.

A quote from AVI:

I was a theater and literature major in the 70's, with a contempt for Southerners, fraternity guys, all things military, hunters, and business majors. No matter how smart any of them might be individually, those groups were known to be generally closed-minded, uncurious, and shallow.

Not like Me. I was deep, you see. And sensitive. I was a socialist, not because I actually thought through whether it fed more people, but because it seemed generous, and the free market seemed selfish. I was against The War, not because I had any clear foreign policy ideas, but because I was convinced that liberals wanted to understand different cultures and get along, while conservatives just wanted to shoot people they didn't like.

Yes, read the whole thing. It's short and to the point.

A big h/t to Vanderleun, who is supposedly on vacation but isn't, quite. He found this piece at the Independent by an Irish journalist who had covered Africa, Writing what I should have written so many years ago. One quote:

The people of Ireland remained in ignorance of the reality of Africa because of cowardly journalists like me. When I went to Ethiopia just over 20 years ago, I saw many things I never reported -- such as the menacing effect of gangs of young men with Kalashnikovs everywhere, while women did all the work. In the very middle of starvation and death, men spent their time drinking the local hooch in the boonabate shebeens. Alongside the boonabates were shanty-brothels, to which drinkers would casually repair, to briefly relieve themselves in the scarred orifice of some wretched prostitute (whom God preserve and protect). I saw all this and did not report it, nor the anger of the Irish aid workers at the sexual incontinence and fecklessness of Ethiopian men. Why? Because I wanted to write much-acclaimed, tear-jerkingly purple prose about wide-eyed, fly-infested children -- not cold, unpopular and even "racist" accusations about African male culpability.

Am I able to rebut good and honourable people like John O'Shea, who are now warning us that once again, we must feed the starving Ethiopian children? No, of course I'm not. But I am lost in awe at the dreadful options open to us. This is the greatest moral quandary facing the world. We cannot allow the starving children of Ethiopia to die.

Yet the wide-eyed children of 1984-86, who were saved by western medicines and foodstuffs, helped begin the greatest population explosion in human history, which will bring Ethiopia's population to 170 million by 2050. By that time, Nigeria's population will be 340 million, (up from just 19 million in 1930). The same is true over much of Africa.

Thus we are heading towards a demographic holocaust, with a potential premature loss of life far exceeding that of all the wars of the 20th Century. This terrible truth cannot be ignored.

But back in Ireland, there are sanctimonious ginger-groups, which yearn to prevent discussion, and even to imprison those of us who try, however imperfectly, to expose the truth about Africa. And of that saccharine, sickly shower, more tomorrow.

We missed this one: Global warming causes kittens. No doubt predicted by Climate Models. Related, from Al Gore to the Brits:

As your parliament moves forward to debate legislation this session, it is essential that you imagine this not solely as a scientific discussion or even a political dialogue, but as a moral moment where we decide who we are as human beings, and what obligation to the future we feel is appropriate for us to accept as part of our responsibility in this generation. At stake is nothing less than the survival of human civilisation and the habitability of the earth for our species.

Good grief. He wanted to be the Messiah, but Obama one-upped him in that department. Now, he's just a regular crank again.

Why it's so hard to teach students these days. h/t, Minding the Campus

I have felt this way about power tools many times.

AP stunningly acknowledges that the surge has worked spectacularly. Ace

They went down fighting hard. Villainous. Sons and warriors.

The NEA is our Taliban. Moonbattery

Maybe appointing his transition team was a bit premature. Related, via Classical Values:

The New Republic has a pretty good article up explaining European misconceptions of America. The article especially looks at Obama's recent German rallies and how those rallies feed European misconceptions.

Europe's favorite dream: a post-Bush America cut down to size and chastened, a meeker and more modest America, a more "European" (that is, a more social-democratic) America, which at last casts off some of its nastier capitalist habits. An America that is a lot more like us Europeans who have forgone power politics and sovereignty in favor of communitarian politics and integration.

From Insty:

MICHAEL BARONE: "Sometimes public opinion doesn't flow smoothly; it shifts sharply when a tipping point is reached. Case in point: gas prices. $3 a gallon gas didn't change anybody's mind about energy issues. $4 a gallon gas did. . . . In a country with less in the way of checks and balances, which can be gamed by adroit lobbyists and litigators, we would be building more nuclear plants, and would be drilling offshore and in ANWR. We would be phasing out the corn ethanol subsidies that are enriching Iowa farmers and impoverishing Mexican tortilla eaters, and we would be repealing the 54-cent tariff on Brazilian sugar ethanol (the sugar for which would be produced not in defoliated Amazon rainforests but in the desolate and currently unused certao)."

Why would Maliki vote for Obama? Krauthammer

What Dr. Roy Spencer said to the Senate

Still life, 1883. You can read about this piece here.

McCain hits hard: Powerline

Media misses the big story: Pajamas

The only place the Dems want to drill: Michelle

Our blogmeister Chris is a sailboat man himself, but he knows nice powerboats when he sees them. In response to our Hinckley powerboat post a couple of weeks ago, Chris offered the opinion that they were too "common." He attached this photo from his yacht club as proof:

I happen to think that the Hinckley jet drive is cool as hell, but Chris prefers the Shelter Island Runabouts made by CH Marine. They built Billy Joel's commuter boat. Here's one of their Runabouts:

I always found the Shaker hymn "Simple Gifts" to be devoid of content despite the loveliness of the tune.

 For simple lyrics which have depth, here are three. First,

 Wow. How can so much be said about life in so few words?

Also:

Twinkle, twinkle, little star,
How I wonder what you are!
Up above the world so high,
Like a diamond in the sky!

The rest of that song is here. 

And one more, the verse that some claim captures everything about Christian faith:

Jesus loves me! This I know,

For the Bible tells me so.

Little ones to Him belong;

They are weak, but He is strong.

The rest of that song is here.

Via Theo:

What might have been, by Fred Siegel in City Journal. I always thought that the impeachment was insane overreach, and dumb politics. The Repubs were rabid.

Rabid is never a good idea.

The Green Fad is done. Nobody is listening anymore and it doesn't sell: Moonbattery, whence the image.

That's what happens when you hysterically oversell something. This video we posted from 50 years ago tells the whole story.

And the earth is cooling. That is really scary.

We stuck with the Piedmont's local Barbera wines during our Italy trip. Barbera d'Asti and Barbera d'Alba. That same grape has been grown up there at least since the 13th century.

I did not realize that the Barbera grape is the most abundantly-grown grape in Italy. These are basically good table wines, nothing too complicated or fancy, and far down on the wine totem pole from the great Northern Italian wines like Amarone and the Nebbiolo grape-based Barbaresco and Barolo.

About Barbera d'Alba, this site says:

In the hilly area around Alba, only vineyards in the hills with suitable slopes and orientations are considered adequate for production. The terrains must be primarily clayey-calcareous or sandy-calcareous in character. DOC recognition is excluded for terrains with northern exposures and the bottoms of valleys that are flat or semi-flat. The colour of the wine is intense ruby red when young with a tendency to garnet after ageing.

This site says:

The high-in-acid Barbera Grape of north-western Italy is a chameleon-like grape which changes considerably according to yield. As an everyday variety, it is a juicy glugger but it can metamorphose into a concentrated, rich, plumy and cherryish wine with undertones of sweet vanilla and spice when aged in small new casks. In Argentina, it tends to the former style with a little less acidity thanks to plentiful Andean sunshine.

Photo: Barbera grapes

A re-post from our archives:

Excellent piece in the CS Monitor on the condition of religion in Europe by Peter Ford. In it he quotes Grace Davies, who notes that the Enlightenment led in different directions in the US and Europe - here, we tend to view, as did the Founding Fathers, religious belief and practice as something that needed protection from State power, while in Europe they tended to see the State as protecting the people from powerful religious institutions.

It's an interesting difference in the role of the State in relation to religion, and I wonder whether it reflects a larger difference in the view of individual rights in general - whether they are seen as being provided by the State, as if from a King, or whether they belong to the individual by virtue of being human, in other words, granted by God or by Natural Law rather than by the State.

I wonder whether different expectations of the State derive from this.  If the State is seen as the provider of rights, then why not a provider of everything? After all, you can contort the concept of freedom rights and label anything a "right" if you want to, including a right to watch TV in jail, a right to a driver's license, or a right to a stress-free life. But if the State is an organization we have created to protect the freedoms we own anyway, will we not be less inclined to view the State as a benevolent, loving, parental provider in general? 

The liberals/progressives have already transferred their dreams and hopes and faith to the State. Their fascistic/statist undercurrent has been apparent for a long time - there will never be enough government to satisfy them.

The piece is a good update on European attitudes towards God, with some surprising findings:  What place for God in Europe? | csmonitor.com

Before my brain's hard drive deteriorates, a few more random thoughts about our northern Italy trip a few weeks ago, a trip which has been more-than-amply photo-documented here.

1. An ottica in Verbania fixed my glasses, for free. The nose-thingy fell off, and she put two new ones on. She was young, blonde, and lovely, and wore high black leather boots and a short-short skirt under her lab coat. My thanks to her.

2. Each morning from my balcony in Baveno I watched two families of Grebes, with their young'uns, paddling around the edge of Lago Maggiore. About the size of our Western Grebe. The chicks were just beginning to learn to dive. Sometimes, one would try to climb on Mom's back the way young grebes too, but they were really too big to fit. The Dad hunted for minnows to feed the chicks, and the Moms herded them so they wouldn't wander too far.

3. Wherever you go in Italy - city, town, country village, or farmland - you are being watched. There will be an old lady peeking from behind a curtain watching you go by. Just stop for a moment to admire somebody's tomatoes, and you will see the curtain move and an old face peer out. It never fails. Italians have a paranoid streak to them. Some old lady is always watching you. She thinks I might steal her zucchini.

4. The church choir rehearsal in Baveno. Pure magic.

5. Gelato? An overrated item, in my opinion, although the hazelnut is very nice indeed. Any dessert is always welcome. I have visited Italy several times, and keep hoping that I will discover the specialness of gelato, but Haagen Dazs is better. The local wines are more fun to sample.

It's a quick water taxi ride from Orta San Giulio to Isola di San Giulio. The basilica on the tiny island was first built in 926 but has had many revisions and renovations since then. It's part of an active Benedictine monastery.

Here's a brief history of the island.

Most interesting to me were the frescoes, which ranged in age from early medieval to Renaissance. This one, on a pillar, looked Byzantine in influence. I was sure I took more fresco photos, but I don't find them on my camera. Maybe I spaced out.

Here's a site with more photos of the frescoes.

A few more of my photos from the island on continuation page.

Our post on Richard Gatling and his Gun prompted a reader to inform us about two other hand-driven machine guns of the 19th Century: The Nordenfelt Gun and the Gardner Gun.

Here's a clip of the Nordenfelt gun in operation:

A quote from Kristof's essay in the NYT about Asia (h/t, Jungle Trader):

For most of the last several thousand years, it would have seemed far likelier that Chinese or Indians, not Europeans, would dominate the world by the year 2000, and that America and Australia would be settled by Chinese rather than by the inhabitants of a backward island called Britain. The reversal of fortunes of East and West strikes me as the biggest news story of the millennium, and one of its most unexpected as well.

and

A half-century before Columbus, Zheng He had reached East Africa and learned about Europe from Arab traders. The Chinese could easily have continued around the Cape of Good Hope and established direct trade with Europe. But as they saw it, Europe was a backward region, and China had little interest in the wool, beads and wine Europe had to trade. Africa had what China wanted -- ivory, medicines, spices, exotic woods, even specimens of native wildlife.

In Zheng He's time, China and India together accounted for more than half of the world's gross national product, as they have for most of human history. Even as recently as 1820, China accounted for 29 percent of the global economy and India another 16 percent, according to the calculations of Angus Maddison, a leading British economic historian.

Asia's retreat into relative isolation after the expeditions of Zheng He amounted to a catastrophic missed opportunity, one that laid the groundwork for the rise of Europe and, eventually, America. Westerners often attribute their economic advantage today to the intelligence, democratic habits or hard work of their forebears, but a more important reason may well have been the folly of 15th-century Chinese rulers.

Yes, the problem was that they didn't appreciate good claret. There's a lesson in that. Read the whole fascinating thing. The link is above.

Triathlon: The Hoyts - Dad and his disabled son -

The Dylanologist noted to me that almost every town in Italy has a Via Gramsci or a Piazza Gramsci. No wonder Italy's politics and economics are so messed up.

Readers know what we think about Gramsci (and his latter-day followers on the Left) from this and this.

Here's two I noticed in Italy a few weeks ago. Gramsci Street in Baveno, next to the train station:

 And here's Piazza Gramsci in Verbania, not far from the ferry dock:

If Gramsci is your hero, you are in trouble. He's the guy who invented the notion of incremental socialist fascism, which is the unspoken long-term plan of the American Left, I believe. Stepwise and slowly, so as not to scare people until we finally wake up one day and find our lives boxed in by communitarian goals as determined by elitist masters who "care so much" about us poor schmucks and suckers that they want to run every detail of our pitiful, ignorant lives.

A re-post from 2005:

Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets by Nassin Nicholas Taleb

My favorite quote from the book: "If you're so rich, how come you ain't smart?" From an Amazon review - it's better than I could do:

If the prescriptions for getting rich that are outlined in books such as The Millionaire Next Door and Rich Dad Poor Dad are successful enough to make the books bestsellers, then one must ask, Why aren't there more millionaires? In Fooled by Randomness, Nassim Nicholas Taleb, a professional trader and mathematics professor, examines what randomness means in business and in life and why human beings are so prone to mistake dumb luck for consummate skill. This eccentric and highly personal exploration of the nature of randomness meanders from the court of Croesus and trading rooms in New York and London to Russian roulette, Monte Carlo engines, and the philosophy of Karl Popper. Part of what makes this book so good is Taleb's ability to make seemingly arcane mathematical concepts (at least to this reviewer) entirely relevant in evaluating and understanding everything from the stock market to the success of those millionaires cited in the aforementioned bestsellers. Here's an articulate, wise, and humorous meditation on the nature of success and failure that anyone who wants a little more of the former would do well to consider. Highly recommended. --Harry C. Edwards