Maggie's Farm

I happen to be one of the few people who dislike going to Whole Foods (except for their cheese department), but they will, no doubt, have an impact on Brit marketing of food. Samizdata. Brit marketing is like American marketing in the 1930s, from what I have seen.

America takes the art and science of Marketing very seriously. Americans can sell anything, from Snake Oil to Windows software to Ford automobiles to Global Warming Hysteria. America creates and invents like crazy, but our ace in the hole is our sales and marketing genius. What good is an idea if you can't sell it?

Whole Foods, like the A&P's Food Emporium years ago, is all about Upscale Marketing: you take a little Balducci's, a little Food Emporium, plus a little Yuppie Health Food Store ethos to make the customers feel like they are eating wholesome stuff and therefore their precious selves will stay young and live forever - and stir.

"Organic" is the "New! Improved!" of our era. 

The art of retail sales, I have been told by master salespeople, is all about appealing to people's narcissism - and never letting them admit that they have been "sold". "Let them feel good about themselves for choosing our stuff."

We have mourned, on these pages, the destruction of the great American downtowns during the 60s and 70s in the name of progress. And we have praised the liveable, human-scale cities which, for whatever reason, managed to escape the wrecking ball. Why does Savannah, GA always come to mind? Georgia on my mind, I guess.

In 1950, Louisville was the 12th largest city in the US, and a thriving place. But the downtown lacked parking lots, so lots of buildings "had to" come down.

Photo below: the 1920 Rialto Theater during the 1969 demolition, replaced by a parking lot. I'd be willing to bet they wish they had the Rialto now. An essay, Louisville after the Bombings, here. Our Dylanologist says the same essay could have been written about Nashville.

Western soldiers like to collect souvenirs of war. As quoted in a scholarly essay by Michael Stevenson :

'Many soldiers in the 24th Division's tank companies and Scout platoons began to collect battlefield souvenirs - especially Soviet AK-47 assault rifles carried by the military. … In one instance, an elaborate Iraqi Defense Ministry compound was broken into by the 2-4 Cavalry, and, under the eyes of its commander … soldiers loaded glassware, trays, sterling silver, gun collections, oversized rugs, and a huge photograph of Saddam Hussein onto tanks and armored cars to take back to America. … The items were to be used … for a Cavalry Ball, to be held after the war…'. In the case of this war, a 'war-souvenir officer' was even appointed to gather war trophies - flags, enemy tanks and artillery pieces, two camels, etc - for display at the Fort Stewart Museum, back in Georgia.

Stevenson's essay takes a look at how widespread this was during the 19th Century wars in Africa. Why did people go to the trouble of collecting this stuff, what meaning did it have for the collectors, and what meaning does it have for later owners?

The whole essay is linked above. Photo: Zulu shield and spear.

Sopranos. I can't watch - haven't caught up with the season yet. Disgusting people, but great television. Don't tell me what happens, but I'll probably hear somewhere anyway.

Peggy Noonan on The Greatness of the Sopranos.

Napoleon's battle sword at auction.

Want a simpler way of life? Go for it, but leave me alone.

Carnival of the Insanities. Always fun

Cool facts about ants.

Yo ho ho. Pirates and governance. Prof. B

Cockburn slams Gore. Blue Crab

Boy Scouts in Iraq. Surber

Rick Moran: "I like Paris Hilton."

Pelosi sleaze. Why are Dems always so obsessed with money?

From Gates of Vienna:

When reality clashes with dreams, is it then really the role and responsibility of the press to try to disguise reality? If so, I think the dream is becoming a nightmare, when unrealistic dreams are being forced upon us.

Sanity from Vaclav Klaus. Melanie Phillips (h/t, Tim Blair)

And more insanity from Sen. Russ Feingold. Were we mean to Germans during WW2? Damn right we were.

Psalm 30

¹I will extol you, O Lord, for you have drawn me up, and did not let my foes rejoice over me.

²O Lord my God, I cried to you for help, and you have healed me.

³O Lord, you brought up my soul from Sheol, restored me to life from among those gone down to the Pit.

⁴Sing praises to the Lord, O you his faithful ones, and give thanks to his holy name.

⁵For his anger is but for a moment; his favor is for a lifetime. Weeping may linger for the night, but joy comes with the morning.

⁶As for me, I said in my prosperity, “I shall never be moved.”

⁷By your favor, O Lord, you had established me as a strong mountain; you hid your face; I was dismayed.

⁸To you, O Lord, I cried, and to the Lord I made supplication:

⁹“What profit is there in my death, if I go down to the Pit? Will the dust praise you? Will it tell of your faithfulness?

¹⁰Hear, O Lord, and be gracious to me! O Lord, be my helper!”

¹¹You have turned my mourning into dancing; you have taken off my sackcloth and clothed me with joy,

¹²so that my soul may praise you and not be silent. O Lord my God, I will give thanks to you forever.

Last Weds, a mocking trout rises for a bug six feet to the right of our friend. Lucky photo, cruel fish.

Photos taken at a pick-up at the U.S. Military Academy's Summer Leaders Seminar, today. It's a week-long picnic only for those who want to be pushed hard, and who hope to have the right stuff. If you are not familiar with West Point, that is the great Hudson River down below.

The site was selected by Washington himself, and it is the longest-used military location in the US. At the time, it was a highly strategic site, commanding the water route to the inland northern colonies.

An architect friend recently designed this molding, called Rolling Wave. I like it. I guess it can be made in whatever size you want. Amazing the way they can translate a design into a plaster molding, but it has been done for a long time. Useful skills. And such fine custom things cost less than one might think.

At Home Depot, you can now just take whatever you want. That's what I call a good deal: why should greedy capitalist pigs make money on stuff I need, anyway? They should make it and give it to me because I am a nice person.

Well, maybe not all that nice, but I am special, right? We're all special, right?

A quote from Don Surber:

The first job of the government is not to give me food stamps; the first job of the government is not to give me Social Security; the first job of the government is not to give me a college loan; the first job of the government is not to give me free medical care if I am poor or old; the first job of the government is not to give me a guaranteed mortgage; the first job of the government is not to give me a check if I am unemployed; the first job of the government is not to give me one damned thing: The first job of the government is to protect the borders.

President Bush needs to start doing his job.

Our best piece on the late lamented bill is here.

If my theory of relativity is proven successful, Germany will claim me as a German and France will declare that I am a citizen of the world. Should my theory prove untrue, France will say that I am a German and Germany will declare that I am a Jew.

Albert Einstein (h/t, Free Market Fairy Tales)

Re "humanitarians":

“A strange coldness and unreality hangs about their love for men. If you ask them whether they love humanity they will say, doubtless sincerely, that they do. But if you ask them touching on any of the classes that go to make up humanity, you will find that they hate them all. They hate kings, they hate priests, they hate soldiers, they hate sailors. They distrust men of science, they denounce the middle classes, they despair of working men, but they adore humanity”

G.K. Chesterton, as quoted by Pat Deneen. Prof. Deneen's blog has got to be yet another regular read for us.

Aldous Huxley's Brave New World is more relevant today than it was when it was written 75 years ago.

This creepily prophetic, forcefully anti-utopian science fiction novel describes a world government which scientifically manages everything from hatchery to grave for the happiness and safety of all - except for the Alphas, who have the responsibility for running the whole thing. Truly rule by experts. Freedom is an antiquated illusion, and the government is an omnipotent, benevolent god.

Caitrin Nicol, in The New Atlantis, takes a fresh look at the book. Some quotes from her piece:

This “illusion of freedom” was cast into a clearer light by a reviewer who discerned that the temptation to sacrifice liberty to end suffering often becomes an attack on the reality of the liberty itself. Rebecca West, a prominent novelist and literary critic (and erstwhile mistress of H. G. Wells) said Huxley had “rewritten in terms of our age” Dostoevsky’s famous parable of the Grand Inquisitor from The Brothers Karamazov—“a symbolic statement that every generation ought to read afresh.”

and

An unholy alliance of industrial capitalist, fascist, communist, psychoanalytic, and pseudo-scientific ideologies has brought about the end of history. The past is taboo—“History is bunk,” as “Our Ford” so eloquently said—and there is no future, because history’s ends have been accomplished. There is no pain, deformity, crime, anguish, or social discontent. Even death has no more sting: Children are acclimatized to the death palaces from the age of eighteen months, encouraged to poke around and eat chocolate creams while the dying are ushered into oblivion on soma, watching sports and pornography on television. Postmortem, the useful chemicals in every corpse are recovered in cremation to be used as fertilizer. “Fine to think we can go on being socially useful even after we’re dead,” gloats one character. “Making plants grow.”

and

Unlike the other great dystopias, Huxley’s World State, though totalitarian in its orthodoxy, is ostensibly ordered on the wants of the governed rather than the governors. Threats are rarely used or needed. Rule by bread and circuses has proved more potent than force—and more pernicious, precisely because every means of control is a perversion of something people really want. The only people with any capacity for dissatisfaction are a handful of Alphas, who are as unable to articulate their objection as Russell is. It is difficult to reject the sinister when by slight distortion it masquerades as the sublime. Why feeling should be able to distinguish these things while reason cannot is an interesting question, one which could be left forever unsettled by tinkering, through biotechnology or psychological control, with what Huxley (in a later foreword to the book) called “the natural forms and expressions of life itself.”

One such expression, of course, is a certain measure of autonomy over the meaning and direction of our lives. Its total absence in the World State is ominously signified by the professional title of the genetic engineers: the Assistant Predestinators.

The scariest things about Huxley's book are 1) On a bad day, anyone might be willing to sacrifice some liberty for security, and, 2) On a bad day, the Brave New World Huxley imagined has a certain regressive, hedonistic appeal and, 3) There are politicians who, unknowingly, use the idea of such a world as an ultimate goal - assuming, no doubt, that they would be the Alphas, and not me.

At Maggie's Farm, we try to make a stand for the messy, often-difficult, often-painful freedom of the human soul and spirit. Please take the time to read the whole thing. And read the book, if you haven't.

It has been well-known for a long time that many, if not most, diseases have some genetic component - or at least a genetic predisposition.

Most of the single-gene diseases have been identified, but now researchers are identifying diseases which are contributed to by more complex polygenic predispositions, such as Bipolar Disorder.

Will insurance company actuaries want to rate your insurance based on your genes? Of course they will want to, same as they rate you according to other risk factors like obesity, smoking, and history of heart attacks.

But is that right? That's another question. Insurance is about risk, not right and wrong.

Rick, the esteemed, amiable, and often-provocative proprietor of the Right Wing Nut House, is indeed nutty enough to try to make a living blogging.

Who's gonna throw that minstrel boy a coin? We'd hate to lose him because he is one of those guys who has the time to dig into things rather than going off half-cocked, as we sometimes (some would say often) do here.

“...a struggle to preserve our Republic, our religion, and our civilization.” The FDR audio here.

D-Day was an excellent trick.

If you know wonderful Stowe, VT, you know St. John's in the Mountains church, on Mountain Road in full view of Mt. Mansfield. The old building, for some reason, now sits forlornly in the parking lot in the photo below. I'd buy the building if they included delivery.

The parish's brand new digs, on the same spot as the previous, here. It looks like a happy little church. (h/t Chris, a Stowe native who took the photo)