Maggie's Farm

1 Samuel 15:34 - 16:13

Roxy Music in 1976 with Let's Stick Together, plus a cameo appearance by the appealing Jerry Hall. (h/t, the Englishman)

When professionals unionize, they are no longer professionals. I think we posted this last year, but Gates reminded us of this important piece:

It's time for a free ad for Sippican's craftsmanship. Readers may recall the stunning and unique humidor he made for me. He seems to be able to make anything, in any historical style, including custom built-ins.

I'm sure he'd love to build something for you, especially if you are friendly to him. Here's his furniture site. Here's a small (Shaker?) Tiger Maple side table he made for us:

Sipp was kind enough to bring over a similar table the other day, in an antiqued (can't appreciate the antiquing in my in photo) finish. It is situated among the pile of other engagement gifts, below: 

From The Committee of Public Sensitivity, at Pajamas:

Ezra Levant: I think most debates are won or lost before they’ve even begun. That’s because one side manages to define the terms of the debate and even the vocabulary. Take the very name “human rights commission.” How could you possibly argue against something so saintly? And me? I was accused of “hate speech.” Who could possibly support me?

Time to turn that around. I was actually the defender of human rights — freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of religion, property rights. The HRCs were violating my rights. I wasn’t a hater; I was merely publishing the news. But, as it turns out, many staffers of HRCs are so radical, their own politics can reasonably be called hate. Etc. My point is: I decided not to let the other side have all the good words. That’s a story about political correctness. But it’s about something much deeper than that; it goes back to George Orwell’s Newspeak and 1984. I wasn’t about to let some petty fascists tell me I was abnormal. They were. And it was my goal to prove it.

From Coyote:

Bill Whittle makes a great point in this video which is at the heart of the problems with this administration:  While Obama and his young policy wonks may be smarter (or at least think they are smarter) than other folks individually, they cannot possibly be smarter than the sum of 300 million well educated, relatively affluent Americans making decisions for themselves.  Every technocrat founders on these rocks, when they substitute their decision as command and control planners for individual decision making (example).   Everyone talks about a revival of interest in Ayn Rand, and that is great, but it is Hayek who has never been more relevent.

More on the failures of technocrats here.

His final link includes the key phrase "You don't have the right to make decisions for other people." Smart or not, most technocrats and policy wonks have never had a job outside of government, academia, or think tanks - and thus tend to be disconnected from how reality works. Their insulation protects them, and reinforces their rationalizations for their power-seeking.

Our current global cooling trend threatens world grain production.

If warming were doing this, it would be front page news. 

“You can get much further with a kind word and a gun than you can with a kind word alone.”

Al Capone, quoted at My Vast Right Wing Conspiracy in a piece on CaponeCare

Nina Anasiashvilli in Giselle:

High Water (for Charlie Patton)

Prof Ian Plimer on Global Warming: The Missing Science. (h/t, Samiz) Interview, Parts 1-3:

Dr X labels this photo:

Caruthersville, Missouri (Russell Lee).
Farm Security Administration client who will become a farm owner-operator under the tenant purchase program.

We posted Klavan's Why are Conservatives so Mean? video last week, which was very much based on de Tocqueville.

Samuel Gregg in the Phila Bulletin notes that this is the 150th anniversary of de T's death. A quote from his piece Despotism - The Soft Way:

For all their love of liberty, de Tocqueville stated, “Americans are so enamored of equality that they would rather be equal in slavery than unequal in freedom.”

Democracy, de Tocqueville argued, encouraged this fixation with equality because it requires people to relate to each other through the medium of democratic equality. This encourages us first to ignore, then to dislike, and finally to seek to reduce all differences that contradict this equality — particularly wealth disparities.

This is key to what de Tocqueville considered democracy’s tendency to “soft despotism.” Democratic despotism, de Tocqueville thought, would rarely be violent. Instead, it would amount to a Faustian bargain between the political class and the citizens. He predicted that “an immense protective power” might assume all responsibility for everyone’s happiness — provided this power remained “sole agent and judge of it.” This power would “resemble parental authority” and attempt to keep people “in perpetual childhood” by relieving them “from all the trouble of thinking and all the cares of living.”

Is America on the road to comfortable servility? “The American Republic,” de Tocqueville wrote, “will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public’s money.” Since Roosevelt’s New Deal, America has slowly drifted toward a political economy of soft despotism. Despite the Reagan Revolution, the trend-lines of government-spending and intervention have been in the anti-liberty direction. Entire constituencies of people now exist who regularly support politicians who promise that, in return for their votes, their entitlements (corporate-welfare, bailouts for those “too big to fail,” the old-fashioned welfare state, etc.) will be maintained and increased.

The problem is that governments can only tax-and-spend so much before incentives to wealth-creation (as opposed to wealth-transfers) begin disappearing. 

These folks waste no space on lawn, and seem to plant every spare inch except for grassy paths. But who does the weeding?

Via Mr. Free Market:

A few easy-growing salad (and I hate salad - rabbit food) greens for the garden that even I enjoy. I would never use these things in a mixed green salad, because you lose the flavor and character of the individual thing.

These are greens that you can plant every two or three weeks during the spring and summer, and harvest small and tender. Some of them will grow back after harvesting the leaves. They are often commercially grown hydroponically these days.

My favorite is Mache (aka Corn Salad), a sweet, tender mayonnaise-tasting leaf

Frisee, a member of the Chickory family. Bitter, tangy, crunchy: good to precede a game meal, grilled lamb, or steak. Never salad with the main course, in our view, unless it's a buffet, because salad dressing messes up the flavors of the main course.

Garden Cress, a member of the Mustard family. Sort of like Watercress.

Dandelion. Spicey with a bit of crunch.

Arugula. The strange kerosene flavor grows on you. Just try to ignore the fact that Liberals like it.

Is dating for adults only? Dating may be obsolete for the horny, thoughtless kids who just want to get into bed right away to accommodate their raging hormones and to find their animal pleasures, but married people still date all the time to maintain their relationships. From the piece on modern "relationships" (h/t, Insty)

"Going out on a date is a sort of ironic, obsolete type of thing," says 25-year-old Elizabeth Welsh, who graduated from college in 2005 and now lives in Boston. She says that among her friends, dating is a joke. "Going out on a date to dinner and a movie? It's so cliche — isn't that funny?"

 

Short growing season up here. Ours are just getting going, but I already have some blossoms. Please do not tell me what you have in South Carolina, Tennessee, and Missouri. Fact is, I do like it here despite the high taxes and the short growing season.

We do not even bother with the Beefsteaks and Beefmasters. No point to it. Lucky to get a decent harvest of them before the first frost. Big Boys work, though, and they are OK. Each one of my plants is a different variety. I like the pear-shaped mini yellows, the orange ones, the sweet millions, the Big Boys and the Big Girls, etc etc.

Of course I remember.

AVI wants some help remembering old 'Gansett commercials.

'Gansett, Knickerbocker, Rheingold, Piel's - I do recall them all. We are now just left with watery old Rolling Rock and the delicious Ballantine Ale - if you can find it.

The Maggie's Farm cafeteria refuses to serve fancy beers for breakfast or lunch, because beer ain't sposta be fancy (good stuff like Guiness is different - it's a meal, not a beer - and even more so if you stir one or two raw eggs into a pint for breakfast like they do in Ireland).

Wine is another matter.

A fun theory says modern humans are all about the home-cooked meal.

Make mine barbecued short ribs with sides of cheese grits and cucumber slaw, and a few Rolling Rocks.

The right side of the blogosphere is playing checkers, and the Democrats are playing Kill the Man With the Ball.

Roger de Hauteville, King of Sicily, at Maggie's Farm

For biographical reasons, this tune brings me back to the Kentucky Bluegrass. This is from 1991: