Maggie's Farm

If there were no God, there would be no atheists.

G.K. Chesterton

It's not a Grand Banks trawler - it's a 1970 "Grand Banks-type," which makes it more affordable. Nice 50' boat. A single guy or gal could live on her quite happily.

From Thomas Merton, via Anchoress' Memories of God:

At the center of our being is a point of nothingness which is untouched by sin and by illusion, a point of pure truth, a point or spark which belongs entirely to God, which is never at our disposal, from which God disposes our lives, which is inaccessible to the fantasies of our own mind or the brutalities of our own will. This little point of nothingness and of absolute poverty is the pure glory of God in us. It is, so to speak, His name written in us…It is like a pure diamond, blazing with the invisible light of heaven. It is in everybody, and if we could see it we would see these billions of points of light coming together in the face and blaze of a sun that would make all the darkness and cruelty of life vanish completely.

When man ceases to worship God he does not worship nothing, but worships everything.

Contrary to a widespread impression, G.K. Chesterton apparently never said that. 

Still, it's a fine statement, and relevant to the modern form of Paganism which views the lives of the unborn, ready-to-be-born, or born-damaged as insignificant, but the social lives of Goldfish - and now the souls of asparagus - as sacred.

A quote from Smith at Weekly Standard:

"What is clear, however, is that Switzerland's enshrining of "plant dignity" is a symptom of a cultural disease that has infected Western civilization, causing us to lose the ability to think critically and distinguish serious from frivolous ethical concerns. It also reflects the triumph of a radical anthropomorphism that views elements of the natural world as morally equivalent to people.

Why is this happening? Our accelerating rejection of the Judeo-Christian world view, which upholds the unique dignity and moral worth of human beings, is driving us crazy. Once we knocked our species off its pedestal, it was only logical that we would come to see fauna and flora as entitled to rights."

Insty has a hilarious video to dramatize the subject.

Regular readers know that all of creation is precious to us here at Magggie's Farm. We love plants, trees, birds, butterflies, rocks, mountains, meadows, rivers, intensely. Love them, love to be amongst them, and learn all we can about them. But we still hold that there is a big difference between "precious" and "sacred."

These folks have taken the Pathetic Fallacy to a psychotic extreme. One is forced to wonder whether the only dining acceptable to Greenie Gaia-worshippers would now involve cannibalism, since they want us to worry about the souls of asparagus and lobsters, and view human life as an obnoxious intrusion on an otherwise beautiful Eden (except that most animals eat plants and/or other animals).

Still, I must confess that the shrill scream of asparagus when it hits that steam always whets my pre-post-Christian appetite.

Why is a wheelbarrow load of soil or firewood easier to move around than a wagon load?

It's not spring yet, but I recently had a discussion about this subject, which led to some minor research. Like simple devices like the nutcracker, the human arm, scales, a see-saw, the crowbar, ratchet wrench, scissors, catapults, and the fishing rod, a wheelbarrow is a lever. In fact, a Type 2 Lever.

By a miracle of physics, levers magnify the force that can be applied with a given amount of effort. Archimedes was the first to attempt to describe the principles of levers. As the physics limerick goes:

One morning while eating my Wheaties,
I felt the earth move 'neath my feeties.
The cause for alarm
Was a long lever-arm,
At the end of which grinned Archimedes.

So, using by using your body to apply effort, with lever action, you are magically carrying a fair amount of the load of the wheelbarrow. A wagon offers no such advantage. (I will spare you the math with the factors of friction, torque, vectors, etc. that make a seemingly simple tool like a wheelbarrow surprising challenging to define.)

(As an aside, let me ask whether they let kids nowadays graduate from high school and college without taking calculus, physics and statistics? If so, wrong, wrong, wrong. This stuff is BASIC. An educated person knows Latin or Greek, calculus, basic physics, basic chemistry, and statistics. Or they are only half-educated about reality and seriously handicapped in the tools for understanding this world. Saddest thing: you forget it all, over time, but, like bike-riding, it's in there somewhere, and the brain can re-connect with it with the right "links".)

I am partial to two-wheelers. The increase in friction, I feel, is compensated by the lack of wobble (torque). Photo is the Ultimate Wheelbarrow from Cariola.

Glitter and be Gay, from Candide:

The varieties of Heuchera available these days is remarkable.

Thanks to the magic of genetic engineering, these excellent shade plants, grown best in masses as ground-cover (more for their foliage than for their delicate and modest Spring flowers) now come in every imaginable leaf color.

This site has a number of new varieties. Their "Ginger Ale" is cool.

"Whoever undertakes to set himself up as a judge in the field of Truth and Knowledge is shipwrecked by the laughter of the gods."

Albert Einstein

From our mens' Bible study this morning:

If you had one chance to learn the time and mode of your death, would you say yes or no?

A quote from Allan Gurganus' The Lessons of Likeness: being a true history of Thomas Eakin's Portrait of Walt Whitman:

This oil portrait braids the sagas of two self-described toughs: Walt Whitman very much of Brooklyn-New York and Thomas Eakins, a definite Philadelphian. A couple of American pioneers, the John Muir of literature and at least the Kit Carson of 19th century Main Line aesthetics! Of all the portraits depicting our nation’s outsized Gandolphian wizards, I have fixed on this one for the simplest reason: I love the work of both sitter and artist. Their efforts go on changing and enlarging my own efforts. Respect and awe leading to love—surely that’s at least the beginning of an understanding?

Image: Walt Whitman, shortly before his death, by Thomas Eakins

Don't tax you, don't tax me: tax the fellow behind the tree.

Who was always saying that, dear readers?

As if to reinforce the post below, today AOL news creates a Depression-era scare story: People selling their belongings to survive. You would think things were terrible because of tag sales. Meanwhile, economic data say no recession yet, but if people are fearful enough, the media will provoke one in time for the election.

So what's the big issue, other than everybody's normal everyday challenge to build the life that suits their desires and their conscience?

If economists only do things that make economic sense, then Captain Capitalism lists a few things they surely do not do.

I would add one more: they would never run a blog like Maggie's Farm.

It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts.

Sherlock Holmes

A propos the piece on reading in college which we linked this morning, Insty came across another bit in The Chronicle titled America's most over-rated product: the Bachelor's Degree.

Today, amazingly, a majority of the students whom colleges admit are grossly underprepared. Only 23 percent of the 1.3 million high-school graduates of 2007 who took the ACT examination were ready for college-level work in the core subjects of English, math, reading, and science.

Perhaps more surprising, even those high-school students who are fully qualified to attend college are increasingly unlikely to derive enough benefit to justify the often six-figure cost and four to six years (or more) it takes to graduate. Research suggests that more than 40 percent of freshmen at four-year institutions do not graduate in six years. Colleges trumpet the statistic that, over their lifetimes, college graduates earn more than nongraduates, but that's terribly misleading. You could lock the collegebound in a closet for four years, and they'd still go on to earn more than the pool of non-collegebound — they're brighter, more motivated, and have better family connections.

Read the whole thing. It makes sense that the degree must be degraded as more people seek it, and as more colleges seek students to fill their buildings.

I am reading the new biography of Albert Einstein. Few college students today could pass the entry exams that he took, which included calculus, literature, French, physics and chemistry. He failed them the first time, in part because his French exam was judged to be weak. (No, he never flunked math.) He spent a year after high school studying to take them a second time.

My point is that "education" or a liberal arts degree was never intended to be a "consumer product." Now it is viewed that way, in the US. And that is a big part of the problem in how we think of education today, because it is not something that can be bought for any price: it is something that can only be taken by those who really want it.

Photo:  Columbia College's Alma Mater - one college where a BA degree still means something. Same goes for the great University of Chicago.

As Englishman notes, the tropical troposphere should be the most sensitive indicator of global warming. It just isn't happening. Full discussion and details at Climate Audit.

There is another class of colored people who make a business of keeping the troubles, the wrongs, and the hardships of the Negro race before the public. Having learned that they are able to make a living out of their troubles, they have grown into the settled habit of advertising their wrongs -- partly because they want sympathy and partly because it pays. Some of these people do not want the Negro to lose his grievances, because they do do not want to lose their jobs.

Booker T. Washington, via Vanderleun

Springtime, and amore is in the air. (h/t, Theo)