Saturday, May 20. 2006
May 1 2006: Yom Ha Zikaron/Atzma’ut “Where is he wounded? You don’t know if the aim is a place on his body or a place on this Land. A bullet sometimes passes through the man’s body and wounds his Land’s earth.” ---- Yehuda Amichai A Jewish way to “celebrate” Independence: start with a day of mourning. Jewish holidays start with darkness, start the night before, to remind us that “in the beginning was darkness and waste.” But Independence Day here starts with a double darkness: not only the darkness of the night before, but also the darker entire night and day before to remember all those fallen since the State’s founding. I was encouraged, or perhaps warned unintentionally, not to miss the Yom Ha Zikaron (Day of Memory) ceremony in Ra’anana. Tel Aviv’s is more impressive perhaps: in Rabin Square every major singer, artist, alights the stage, sings one song and leaves. There is respect for the day: no protest speeches, no signs waving. But, little Ra’anana a town of some 60, 000, fills its Yad Le Banim square (Hand/Memory of the Sons’) with some 15, 000. On television, starting at 8 p.m. and for the next twenty-four hours precisely, runs the name of every person killed in the State. I had been asked to stay in the States a few days longer to work as an expert witness for the Court. I said, impossible. I did not say, that I would not miss my first Independence Day, as I had missed my first elections. I just said, impossible, and the Court backed down, worked out a schedule so that I could finish work late last week.
For me, Independence Day is the most important Jewish Holiday: holier than Yom Kippur, with only less food and ceremony than Pesach. I could not miss this.
I had not understand the weight of the preceding Yom Ha Zikaron. Precise was the timing. A very unJewish precision. The ceremony starts precisely at eight. I, a bit stunned with jet lag, get phone calls from Michelle Green, most of which I do not hear, until I call and she says that Ira is also returning from the states, will take Ben and Avital, two of their teen children, to the ceremony; Michelle is staying home with eight-year old Mayan. their oldest, Ben, will be recognizing the ceremony with his army unit. Thoughtless as I am, I bring my laptop, figuring that I will arrive a few minutes early, work in the wireless cafe across the street, then join. Streets are blocked off. The main street is blocked for some distance. The Kfar Saba fire engine parked across the square. Police direct traffic; soldiers abound, even those seen only in shadows. Ira phones me as I am approaching, around 745, to say that they have saved a seat for me on the side, near the stage, but obscuredc by a video screen. He comments that the previous mayor left much of the seats facing the stage open for the public; reserved only a few for the elite; this mayor seems to have more people demanding reserve seating, so we are relegated to the wings. Wings are enough for me, as I find tears pressing through much of the ceremony. The cafe is dark. All cafes, restaurants are closed. It is like Yom Kippur here in Ra’anana: main street empty of traffic, filled with people; stores dark, shuttered. And at eight, precisely at eight, all stand, air raid sirens begin simultaneously. They halt serially, as if distant echoes of each other. I sit between Ben --who has just received notice that he is being recruited for the air force, whose brother is in Nachshon -- and bleary-eyed Ira. I think during this ceremony, how, when Ira arrived to Israel, on his first Yom Ha Zikaron, a boy from Ra’anana is killed -- Daniel Greener, a name too close to his eldest son’s. I think during the ceremony of how war reverses the natural course of mankind: instead of sons and daughters burying parents, the opposite occurs. I can’t recollect if this is Heroditus who made this observation. I don’t know if I should congratulate Ben on his news, or admonish him never to be listed in this ceremony. I want to tell Ira that Daniel should always return home safely. I think how this country is guarded by such very young and prematurely aged soldiers .
Continue reading "Guest Author: Aliyah Diary #16"
Try it. Bressingham Gardens. All of our places should look like this, but Maggie's Farm sure does not: 
Friday, May 19. 2006
 North America's Northern Harrier, aka Harrier, aka Marsh Hawk, is one of my favorite birds, because he dwells in my favorite sorts of places. I am happy wherever the Harrier is happy.
He likes vast marshes and fields, where he tilts around very low, hunting small birds and rodents. He is never in the woods. Many a duck hunter has had one silently swing over their duck blind, six feet over your head, and reflexively raised the gun before making the ID. Never shoot one: forget illegal - it's plain wrong. For fun, you can draw them in by making a squeaking sound - like owls, they can hear well. And while you are busy fooling with the Marsh Hawk, no doubt a flock of Bluebills will pass over your decoys while you are distracted - it never fails. The males and females are very different in coloration, but the white rump, and the behavior, are the easy diagnostic points. With draining of marshes, and the reduction of farmlands in the East, their numbers are down. But in Britain, the essentially identical bird was almost extinct, but now happily making a comeback. More about the Northern Harrier here at CLO. I still call them Marsh Hawks. Photo courtesy of P. LaTourette.
The lunatic, the lover, and the poet, are of imagination all compact. William Shakespeare
Thursday, May 18. 2006
Canada is de-registering long guns and shotguns. Good for them. Isn't sanity a fine thing? Those of us who like to hunt in Canada will appreciate that, but I bet Canadian shooters will appreciate it even more. I have no doubt that their billion-dollar attempted gun registration system was designed to lead to total disarmament eventually, because it wouldn't help much with the bad guys - what bad guy would commit a crime with a legal gun? Cap'n Ed has more on the subject. And more at Canada's Small Dead Animals. Image: A favorite Maggie's Farm hunting location, in central Manitoba, last O ctober.
Quote from a piece on Britain from Atlas: There has been over the past 20 to 30 years an evisceration of British National identity and values which has created a cultural and moral vaccum being exploited by Radical Islamism which has come to fill that vacuum.
Life can't be all bad when for ten dollars you can buy all the Beethoven sonatas and listen to them for ten years. William F. Buckley, Jr.
Wednesday, May 17. 2006
Who's afraid of economic growth? Daniel Ben-Ami has written what I believe is a very important essay on Spiked on the anti-growth and limited-growth movement which is so much in evidence amongs environmentalists, the intelligentsia, and the leftist-minded these days. My own main problem with the anti-growth movement is that it contains, I believe, a latent fascism. There is an assumption that someone other than me ought to determine how I chose to live my life, and that they (the anti-growth folks) are the ones to do it. From his intro: The aim of this essay is to examine how cynicism about growth has become a central element of contemporary anti-humanism. It will examine the indirect forms that growth scepticism takes while pointing out its link to environmentalism. It will then consider how anti-growth thinking has moved from being an elite middle-class phenomenon to an idea widely held throughout society. A key factor in this shift was the capitulation of the left to environmentalist and anti-growth thinking from the 1970s onwards. The slowdown in economic growth over the same period, which in turn helped undermine the legitimacy of the market, was also important.
another: ...mainstream politicians and thinkers have maintained a formal attachment to economic growth despite any reservations they may express. A direct attack on growth would be almost unthinkable. If they argued explicitly for a levelling off of living standards, let alone their decline, it is hard to see how they could maintain popular support. This tension - between formal support for growth while expressing doubts about its benefits - is particularly worth exploring. It provides an opening for a restatement of the need for economic growth as part of a broader development of a new humanism.
Please read the whole thing. It is excellent brain food.
They say that when you owe a bank $100,000, the banker controls you, but when you owe a bank $100,000,000, you control the bankers. That's my analogy for illegal immigration: The government does fine with the acceptable trickle of welcome legal immigrants, but the hurricane of illegals makes them collapse.
We should sign up for the Day by Day cartoon strip, but so many other folks have it...here's today's: 
Tolerance is the virtue of the man without convictions. G.K. Chesterton
Tuesday, May 16. 2006
 If your dogs need work - hunt-training, obedience, etc., and you are in the CT area, Rick emailed us to recommend Quinebaug Kennels:
Jennifer is doing a great job with Parker and Sammy, my two hunting labs. Maggies should put her site up. A lady who can train dogs AND shoot guns. Nice. http://www.quinebaugkennels.com/
Oh - she has a new litter of black labs - only hunters need inquire.
 Bush does indeed want to be the First Hispanic President, just as Clinton was referred to as the First Black President.
And Bush is a stubborn guy, if nothing else. Once he makes his mind up, he stays with it. So, besides throwing a few bones to the enforcement-oriented majority of the country, he is sticking with his plan. And plenty of smart guys are with him on this, like Tony Snow and Kristol and others. I do not see their position as pure political calculation, but maybe as secondarily so, because all of these Mexican kids born in the US will be able to vote in just a few years. No, I believe that Bush and others believe it is the right thing to do - the virtual amnesty and all that. At Maggie's Farm we believe in managed, controlled immigration. We are not "a nation of immigrants" - we are a nation descended from immigrants, with, until recently, a small percentage of immigrants. An experiment such as Bush and the Senate propose - a Katrina-force flood of immigration into a settled and reasonably assimilated country - has rarely occcurred in history without force of arms. This is our country, and we do not want to be the guinea pig. If that is "nativist," then fine. Every nation is and must be nativist to a degree, if they value their culture and traditions and their approach to life. I doubt that any citizen would welcome 100 million new immigrant citizens in 20 years. We need to bear in mind that much of the world's population would rather be in the US than where they are, and it's much easier to move than to fix your own country. If someone wants to come to the US, my message is to imitate the US where you live. Linknzona has an analysis of the details of the speech, along with a bit of a rant: Something is seriously wrong. President Bush seems hell bent on putting the interests of Mexico ahead of the interests of the US; he seems hell bent on rewarding criminals at the expense of legal immigrants and US citizens; he seems hell bent on doing anything and everything to further the interests of Mexico and its millions of illegal immigrants; and he seems devoted to this cause beyond all reasoning and understanding.
He also adds this info - everyone needs to be heard, regardless of how they feel: Here is a site where you can email Repub Senators as they consider immigration legislations.
Here is the White House Site, where you can contact the President.
And here is a site where you can register and send free fax messages to all members of Congress and the White House. It is an excellent, personalized, and free site.
Image shamelessly emigrated from here.
Monday, May 15. 2006
It requires Tequila, Dos X, extra worms, plus lime, salt, 
etc. Gateway. It could be the only way to survive Bush's
speech. Why are those things necessary? Because the Pres will propose all of the wrong things. Quote from Michelle's update (quote is from Paul): Paul Mirengoff: "...the Hagel-Martinez legislation would lead to a rapid and fundamental transformation of the social, economic, and political nature of our society. This fact needs to be brought into the open and discussed -- something the bill's supporters seem reluctant to do."
That is for certain, if the 100 million number is accurate. One more comment from NRO (h/t, Driscoll): A political-junkie friend who I can always count on to find the political silver lining if there is one just said to me: "Tonight could be the first fully televised political suicide in history. I don't even want to watch."
We received the most heart-warming and 
encouraging compliment ever, as a comment on
our Sunday Nite/Monday Mornin' Links last night. That is the kind of soul food we need to continue slaving on Maggie's Farm. As Dickens said, only a fool would write without getting paid. We are thus fools, by definition: our compensation is your interest in our writing and "thinking", such as it is. All we ask is that the folks who enjoy our brand of eclectic stuff send us around to friends, relatives, enemies, and neighbors, so we can get the discriminating and intelligent readers we deserve. Image: Yes, that is our own Dr. Joy Bliss again, in a pensive mood, reflecting on Object Relations theory. She has promised us a major essay on "happiness" this week. In my opinion, an eyeful of Dr. Bliss is happiness enough for anyone.
I was so poor when I grew up, if I wasn't a boy I would have had nothing to play with. Rodney Dangerfield
Saturday, May 13. 2006
 If you are a Tom Wolfe fan, you will enjoy the speech he gave as the Jefferson Lecture at the National Endowment for the Humanities on Wednesday, printed in the New York Sun. In this wide-ranging and a bit random essay, he discusses speech, status, Freud, neo-Darwinism, immigration, Max Weber, rednecks, politics, college kids, drugs, and a host of other matters. One quote:
Evolution came to an end when the human beast developed speech! As soon as he became not Homo sapiens, "man reasoning," but Homo loquax, "man talking"! Speech gave the human beast far more than an ingenious tool. Speech was a veritable nuclear weapon! It gave the human beast the powers of reason, complex memory, and long-term planning, eventually in the form of print and engineering plans. Speech gave him the power to enlarge his food supply at will through an artifice called farming. Speech ended not only the evolution of man, by making it no longer necessary, but also the evolution of animals! Our animal friends—we're very sentimental about predators these days, aren't we—the lions, the tigers, the wolves, the rhinoceroses, the great apes, kangaroos, leopards, cheetahs, grizzly bears, polar bears, cougars—they're "endangered," meaning hanging on for dear life. Today the so-called animal kingdom exists only at the human beast's sufferance. The beast has dealt crippling blows even to the unseen empire of the microbes. Stunted adults from Third World countries with abysmal sanitation come to the United States and their offspring grow six or more inches taller, thanks to the wonders of hygiene. Cattle, sheep, pigs, chickens, turkeys would be extinct by now had not the human beasts hit upon the idea of animal husbandry. So far the human beast enjoys the luxury of crying sentimental tears over the deer because she's so pretty. But the day the human beast discovers deer in his cellar, fawns in his bedroom closet, bucks tangling horns in the attic at night above his very bedroom . . . those filthy oversized vermin, the deer, will be added to that big long list above. We're sentimental about the dolphins, because they're so smart. What about the tuna? It's okay to kill tunas by the ton because they're dimwits? It would take an evolutionary mystic (and there are such) to believe these animals will ever evolve their way out of the hole they're in thanks to man's power of speech.
Thursday, May 11. 2006
Call the Chianti Squad: Haha. It must smell like my kitchen. Blair Won't you be my neighbor? (h/t, Allah) 
I will be seeing an early pre-screening of the movie, and will share my impressions when I do. But I think I already know what they will be: Another solidly-made, tasteful, and very entertaining Ron Howard film, representing no danger either to God or man.
A Nukak tribe from the Colombian bush has arrived in town, and seems to enjoy the free food and shelter. NYT If it were the US, these folks would already be registered to vote.
 Quoted from the French feminist author Phyllis Chesler's new book, in a very entertaining mini-review at No Pasaran:
The kind of closed-minded "political correctness" which I have just described above is typical of groupthink and totalitarian thinking. If someone thinks for herself in an independent and creative way and dares to come up with non-party-line conclusions, she or he is then, in classic Orwellian style, deemed the enemy, a traitor, a non-person. Their work will not be read or discussed. They will not be invited to debate or to debate in a civilized and honorable way. They will be called a "racist" and a "neoconservative." If a feminist dares raise the specter of Jew-hatred and the demonization of the Jewish state among leftists and feminists, she will quickly discover that she has become unwelcome in the mainstream media and among leftists (who actually think of themselves as liberals), and among feminists.
But what is its safety record? 
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