Maggie's Farm

From Steyn's post of the above title, re push-up bras and sexual interviews with 11 year-olds:

In a way, this is part of the same story as Libya, and I'm not so sure that in the long run it isn't the more important part. Islam will readily acknowledge our technological superiority: If you want to operate a no-fly zone over Benghazi or send an unmanned drone into Waziristan, we have the capability and they don't. The difference is that Islam thinks our technological superiority doesn't matter - because we're unmanned drones in a more basic sense: we believe in nothing except the most transitory and dreary self-gratification, an endless adolescence that begins with a push-up bra at eight and continues through free government condoms for 30-year olds. Not only do the surging Muslim populations in European cities have no wish to "assimilate" with such a culture, they do not believe they will have to - for they have bet that such a society cannot survive.

Are they right? A hyper-sexualized society becomes, paradoxically, sexless, and certainly joyless. Listening in recent weeks to young women in both New York and London complain that the men they meet would rather look at pictures of them naked on the Internet than actually see them naked in the same room reminded me of The Children Of Men, in which P D James' characters, liberated from human fertility, find sex too much trouble.

Our North Africa trip, with Egypt, plus Israel and a bit more of my beloved Turkey (southern coast) plan for September has been cancelled because Egypt, Tunisia, etc seem iffy right now. A shame. I wanted to get back on a ship. Readers know I love ships and boats, and I was in the mood for an exotic trip.

Mrs. BD also vetoed my alternative notion of a big house in Provence, to invite friends and family - and all of our Maggie's readers - to visit. She wants to give the kids time to get a bit more settled in their lives first.

She wants the land of the Umbri, with just grumpy Bird Dog and a rental car. Assisi, Orvieto (I do not like their wines), Perugia, Todi, Spoleto, etc. Etruscan walled cities and Hannibal's victories at Lake Trasimene, and Roman highway towns on the Via Flaminia. Maybe a day trip back up to Siena. OK by me. Love Italia, as my Brit cousins do - as long as there is no pasta or red sauce. And Mrs. BD has been working hard on her Italian. Dove cabineto?

Next year, God willing, either a south of France villa like this one, or the North Africa trip, but this seems not the year for that. Who makes the plans calls the shots.

I'll bring cameras of course, to bore our readers with my travel pics, but I'd be surprised if any of the old castle and rustic villa agritourismo inns Mrs. BD has picked out have Wifi. (When places say they have it, it's usually not working when you are there.)

Photo above is Assisi, a major tourist trap thanks to St. Francis' marketing skills.

An esterni view of one of the old inns where Mrs. BD informs me we'll be staying - Abbazia San Pietro in Valle :

 And this one too - Orto degli Angeli:

Such places are good reasons to save one's pennies. It all looks good to me. I am always happy to be banging around Italy (except Rome), although I have already done a lot of it. Thanks, Mrs. BD, for taking the time to plan it so thoughtfully.

I am sorry we cannot meet up with my wife's late cousin, Archbishop Prata, on our Italian trips anymore. I think of him every time I head for Italy. He was full of vitality and full of the joy of the Spirit - and could make doors open like you would not believe with a flash of his ring. Besides Jesus, the Church, and the Mass, he loved opera, food, wine, his relatives, Limoncello, Hazelnut gelato, and Italian pastries. An intellectual sort, he had been a professor and university president before they brought him back to the Vatican. My lad and he used to chat in conversational Latin. Very cool for them. We all miss Gennaro.

AMA quacks on climate

Old Urbanist: A (Defense!) of the Grid: Portland and 19th Century American City Grids

Senator Boxer: Dangerously Ignorant on CO2

She appears to think it's carbon particles

The Difference Between "Allies" and "allies"

President Obama looks to Rev. Al Sharpton for help in 2012 reelection bid

Al is so well-respected

Two Americas: Public vs. Private Employees

Official: wind farms are totally useless (h/t Gateway's Obama Says “This Is the Future of American Energy” at Bailed Out Foreign-Owned Wind Company)

New Jersey Governor Chris Christie Calls His State's Teachers Union 'Political Thugs'

Mead: Life Beyond Blue: Faith and the Inner City

He says they need God's help to fix their problems

NYM: Afghan Savages, Western Cowards

Push For 'Green' Energy Stokes Hunger Fears, Political Instability...

In a non-wonky way: We Can’t All Have All the Medical Care We Want. One quote:

Should the middle class get health care at public expense? No, there is no one to pay for our health care but us. We can pay out-of-pocket; we can buy private insurance to cover catastrophic risk and thereby get some control over how much health care we buy for ourselves. We can pay taxes to the government which it will then use to decide how much health care we can get; but it will still be us paying for it and decisions will still have to be made as to how much care we get; we'll just lose all control over how much we spend on health care as opposed to, say, food or education.

Seems to me that there are three main drivers of high insurance costs: low deductibles (ie insurance that tries to cover everything including the sniffles, routine exams, and elective things like Viagra and hormone replacement); fear of malpractice lawsuits which is why everybody with a headache gets a $1200 CAT scan; and the frequently insane costs of end of life treatment such as catastrophic strokes or the millions for things like terminal cancer.

Coyote is very good on this too: Who Makes the Price-Value Tradeoffs? He quotes McArdle:

It seems quite likely to me that vouchers are going to be better at controlling health care cost growth than a central committee.  Every committee decision that cuts off a potentially useful treatment (and I’m afraid it can’t all be back surgery and hormone replacement therapy) will trigger a lobbying explosion from affected groups.  Each treatment is a decision with a small marginal cost to the taxpayer; it’s in aggregate that they become expensive.  Which means that the congressional tendency is always going to be to override–and while there are supposed to be structural barriers against this in the bill, they aren’t very strong . . . about like trying to quit smoking by hiding your cigarettes from yourself.

Friend just surprised me with a gift in the mail - a first edition of Massachusetts author Louise Dickinson Rich's 1942 We Took To The Woods. Knew about it, never read it. I will.

From her writings:

Now I am older. I have met with poverty, flood, famine, hurricane, brutalizing labor, and illness, on extremely personal grounds. I have seen the sudden and tragic deaths of those nearest and dearest to me. I have had to shoulder responsibilities, for which I am ill fitted, and the much more difficult burden of sudden, if brief, fame. I have been hard pressed for money, as we say in Maine. I’m not whining. I’ve had a wonderful life, with the joys far outweighing the sorrows. But still, in all, there have been times when I was fair to middlin’ desperate.

There was time when my husband and my year-old son and my mother-in-law and I had one meal a day. We ate baked potatoes and salt. It didn’t do us adults any harm, and my neighbor woman, Alice Miller, provided me with six oranges and six quarts of milk a week—she kept two cows—for the baby. She said her doctor’s book said that babies needed it.

Then there was the time in December. My husband and I were laughing together over a silly joke in the evening after dinner, relaxed in our slippers before the open fire. We’d spent the day snugging down the cabin for winter, and we felt good knowing that there were forty miles of lake and impossible road between us and the nearest settlement. We were having fun. “Louise, you gorgeous fool,” he said, and died.

Bruce linked about that this morning. I am more inclined to ask "What is music?" than "What is art?"

Impossible questions are usually the wrong questions. "What is art?" is the wrong question. Is this art?

That's an H&E- stained microscopic slide of the human Pituitary gland. A bit of the Anterior and the Posterior, with the margin. Absolutely beautiful. You could hang it on a wall, art or not. I call it "God's art."

Another pic of God's Art below the fold, which Gwynnie stumbled on while fishing his stream the other day -

I’ll take my chances with blowhard pastors, drearily “transgressive” artists and flag-burning provocateurs. I’m far more worried about a blundering clod like Graham presuming to protect us from them.

Mark Steyn, today at NRO

A book: Never Say Die - From séance to cryonic suspension, efforts to extend life indefinitely have been foolish, utopian and cruel.

Groups Facing Fund Cuts Tailor Right-Leaning Pitch

Stupid college kids line up to embrace their destroyer.  Related: A question for the young ones: Perhaps you’d like an 88 percent tax increase?

Congress makes first major dent in health care law

Maybe Americans Really Are Ready for Spending Cuts

Shhhh: Judeo-Christian Culture Is Actually...Superior

Howie Carr: Liberals on the run from voluntary tax

Sen. Grassley: Obama Wants America to Be 'Second-Class Nation'

ObamaCare worse than feared:

When it comes to statist intrusions and Big Brother doublespeak, it's hard to beat President Barack Obama's crowning achievement to bring the entire health care industry under government control because he thinks he knows better. Who needs a free market when we've got top-level bureaucrats and political wizardry?

So, what's Obamacare look like at age 1?

Re Testimony Sundays, at AVI:

Jonathan thought this was the coolest church service ever. Having only been to Lutheran services to that point, the idea of church where people would get up and cry and talk about their alcoholic parents and being beaten, going to school in awful clothes, having only bread and milk for food for a week - or alternatively, having husbands that went off for "affairs," - we had covered in our Ten Commandments teaching that "adultery" was stealing someone else's husband or wife, and I think he dimly grasped that something like this was up - and the police coming to your house or being teased at school... well my goodness, this is the most interesting church we have ever been in, Dad. Can we come back next week?

If somebody wants to testify in my church, warn me in advance. I ain't coming. In my opinion, it's for private.

Since posting my E. 4th St. pics yesterday, I've been looking at some NYC real estate - for fun, not to buy. The East Village is by no means a fancy area. I focused on E. 4th because that's where I took my pics on Sunday.

They are asking $1.2 million for this one-bedroom on E. 4th:

They are asking a mere $519,000 for this 600 sq foot 1 1/2 bedoom on the 5th floor of a walk-up. Great for your legs, those 5th-floors:

I could not find a single available rental on E. 4th, but maybe I didn't try enough. Still, demand is strong. I think many of the young folk are doubling and tripling up to make their rents with the average 2 BR walk-up running from $4000/month and up - and in elevator buildings up to $10,000/mo - in this funky old neighborhood which was considered a semi-slum some years back.

I remember it well - Mrs. BD attended Tisch (before she was Mrs. BD, and when it was known as NYU School of the Arts and was housed in a huge old industrial loft building with only a freight elevator, yet was still maybe second only to Juilliard for the performing arts). The Fillmore East was there too, and I have memories of that: Leon Russell, Allman Brothers, Dr. John, etc.

Looking at the listings makes me wonder who all these people are who want to pay, or are able to pay, $10,000/month rent for smallish apartments in the East Village (referring to east of Greenwich Village).

And looking at the listings reminds me that, if you live in Manhattan and do not have money to burn to spend on housing, you sleep in your apartment - you don't live in it. You live at your gym or club or pub or cafe or library or park or meetings or dinners or work or wherever. Otherwise, the claustrophobia can get pretty ugly for those who are not used to it. I think so many New Yorkers run and jog and bike just to get the heck out of their little boxes.

Funny, though, when I think that I probably spend 90% of my time at home within 10% of my home living space - but that is by choice.

I confess, Readers, that I still get a kick out of New York. Vital, colorful, messy,  unpredictable, and jam-packed with talented people.

VDH's piece, Kingdom of Lies, begins:

I am a subject in a kingdom of lies. At 57, I have grown up with decades of untruth — advanced for the purposes of purported social unity, the noble aim of egalitarianism, and the advancement of a cognitive elite in government, journalism, the arts, and the universities.

Paul Ryan: The GOP Path to Prosperity

Somin: The Case for Paying College Athletes

Gateway: That Was Quick… Media Commits to Fully Support Obama in 2012 Campaign

Surber: Attack of the deadly CFLs

Jammie: Now They Tell Us: Climate Change to Mean Fewer Cyclones and Smaller Waves

Dhimmitude - Catch the Fever!

Paul Ryan's Budget Proposal: The Most Important Domestic Proposal of our Lifetimes·

Pics from yesterday afternoon. The East Village (not to mention the Lower East Side) has become a wonderful, youthful neighborhood, and the old walk-up "tenements" seem just fine abodes for the youth who flock to NYC although they lack the doormen, gyms with pools, laundry rooms etc. that the new buildings offer. The rents, alas, are not cheap in these old places -

More pics below the fold -

Wisconsin 'Ground Zero' of Battle to Reshape America

Do contrails affect weather?

Please explain again why we’re in Afghanistan

Also, Powerline: Is It Time to Get Out of Afghanistan?

Somin: The Morality of Political Ignorance

WaPo: Should professors be political?

Columbia University has voted to bring back ROTC

That is good

From Yuval Levin's Beyond the Welfare State:

For the left, it provided long-term goals, criteria for distinguishing progress from retreat in making short-term compromises, and a kind of definition of the just society. For the right, it was a foil to be combated and averted — an archetype of soulless, stifling bureaucratic hubris — and it helped put objections to seemingly modest individual leftward steps into a broader, more coherent context. But both ends of our politics seemed implicitly to agree that, left to its own momentum, this is where our country was headed — where history would take us if no one stood athwart it yelling stop.
 

This post feels like an idiotic Tweet, but that makes for a pretty solid day even though I seem to have a fever with sweats and chills. I just want to set a good example.... Each day is a gift, and I hate to waste a single one. I pruned the heck out of that old tree this year because I went too easy on it last year: the less fruit, the sweeter the yield. Better late than never. The bunnies are already gnawing the bark of my cuttings, despite my guard dog.

Name the maker of this very nice rare smoke a friend kindly gave to me the other day (our readers can name the bird easily). Smoke is a Ligero, but what maker?

John 9:1-41

9:1 As he walked along, he saw a man blind from birth.

9:2 His disciples asked him, "Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?"

9:3 Jesus answered, "Neither this man nor his parents sinned; he was born blind so that God's works might be revealed in him.

9:4 We must work the works of him who sent me while it is day; night is coming when no one can work.

9:5 As long as I am in the world, I am the light of the world."

9:6 When he had said this, he spat on the ground and made mud with the saliva and spread the mud on the man's eyes,

9:7 saying to him, "Go, wash in the pool of Siloam" (which means Sent). Then he went and washed and came back able to see.

9:8 The neighbors and those who had seen him before as a beggar began to ask, "Is this not the man who used to sit and beg?"

9:9 Some were saying, "It is he." Others were saying, "No, but it is someone like him." He kept saying, "I am the man."

9:10 But they kept asking him, "Then how were your eyes opened?"

9:11 He answered, "The man called Jesus made mud, spread it on my eyes, and said to me, 'Go to Siloam and wash.' Then I went and washed and received my sight."

9:12 They said to him, "Where is he?" He said, "I do not know."

9:13 They brought to the Pharisees the man who had formerly been blind.

9:14 Now it was a sabbath day when Jesus made the mud and opened his eyes.

9:15 Then the Pharisees also began to ask him how he had received his sight. He said to them, "He put mud on my eyes. Then I washed, and now I see."

My nightmare: Fuselage hole forces Southwest emergency landing

How come nobody got sucked out?

City Journal: Lionel Trilling and the Social Imagination - The liberal hero rejected the left-liberal idea that we could engineer the human soul

We can thank his psychoanalyst for his wisdom about human nature, despite his predictable and boring academically-fashionable -required Liberalism

When Your Husband Isn't Interested in Sex

The 7 Menopausal Dwarfs

WSJ: The Won't-Grow-Up Modern Male

Deadly Protests for Koran Burning Reach Kandahar 

"For Koran-buring"? Give me a break. It's the fault of some jerk in Florida? No. Just an excuse to go berserko and behead some filthy infidels. Muslims or anybody can burn all the Bibles they want. I don't care, and I won't want to harm anybody - I would just feel sorry for them. These are killers looking for excuses, and any excuse will do. That's just the way killers are: they kill because they are killers.

PJ: Smothering Medical Innovation - If we want to maintain our innovative mojo, the one thing we cannot do is continue down the road we are on of socializing the whole system.

Nice teacher: The face behind those anti-GOP death threats

Dems go after Sen. Brown's family's medical records

That is a declaration of war. Is Scott locked and loaded?

Prehistoric Americans Traded Chocolate for Turquoise?

Hot chocolate is delicious, especially in the winter

Professor Obama's College Completion Fixation

Why don't colleges simply sell their diplomas at the time of admission, and then offer a few years of coursework afterwards, just in case some kids want to contend with some college courses?

Youtube: Twin baby boys have a conversation

TNR: Brave New Race - Why the old assumptions about Mitt Romney are wrong.

DOE's Office for Civil Rights to investigate Yale for "hostile sexual environment"

Hoist on their own PC petard

and Huffington Post Refuses to Address Maher's Contributor Status After Vulgar Attacks on Palin

Here.

Very good essay on the fate of Detroit - and similar cities - by Wretchard: The Field of Dreams. A quote:

Mayor Bing’s plan to build developments recalls nothing so much as the South Seas cargo cults who believed all that was necessary to make the skies rain with goodies was to build a dirt airstrip and palm-leaf control tower to attract resupply flights from somewhere. “If you build it, they will come”.

Who “they” is remains unclear. But they are out there.

As Glenn Reynolds said (who he quotes):

The government decides to try to increase the middle class by subsidizing things that middle class people have: If middle-class people go to college and own homes, then surely if more people go to college and own homes, we’ll have more middle-class people. But homeownership and college aren’t causes of middle-class status, they’re markers for possessing the kinds of traits — self-discipline, the ability to defer gratification, etc. — that let you enter, and stay, in the middle class. Subsidizing the markers doesn’t produce the traits; if anything, it undermines them.

Change rarely comes from the outside, in. Recall "urban renewal." Now, those brownstone  "slums" that didn't get torn down go for millions in New York, while the "modern" and "dignified" public housing projects are nightmares, socio-cultural wastelands which even cops are reluctant to enter.

Don't bother reading this unless you are on the same page, or pages, that I am on this Lent. My musings and meanderings will bore you, and I do not understand my own religion very well, despite trying to.

As I understand it, to enter God's Kingdom one must die (in a metaphorical sense) and be reborn (in the spiritual sense). By "God's Kingdom" I mean living in Christ today, not in any hereafter.

"He who finds his life will lose it, and he who loses his life for My sake will find it." Matthew 10:39

The losing is like a dying of Self, along with an abandonment of one's worldly idols. "Self" is the modern totem and object of psychological and material worship, so that part is fairly difficult for me and, I assume, for all of us. A sort of suicide, or partial suicide. Displeased as I tend to be with my self, I am sort of attached to the old darn thing too. "Self," "identity," individuality," - all that current narcissistic "special Me" psychobabble. 

I know I am making it all too black and white, as if we could ever not be who we are, or become like the zombie Moonies in the subway stations. But Jesus understood very well that devotion to self was an obstacle to a connection with God. 

John 3:3: Jesus answered and said unto him, Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God.

The Christian offer is to kill off one's self and to be reborn in Christ to live a Kingdom life. The endeavor is not for sissies.

From Matthew 12:

¹⁸And Jesus, walking by the sea of Galilee, saw two brethren, Simon called Peter, and Andrew his brother, casting a net into the sea: for they were fishers.

 ¹⁹And he saith unto them, Follow me, and I will make you fishers of men.

 ²⁰And they straightway left their nets, and followed him.

 ²¹And going on from thence, he saw other two brethren, James the son of Zebedee, and John his brother, in a ship with Zebedee their father, mending their nets; and he called them.

 ²²And they immediately left the ship and their father, and followed him.

Leave my ship and my father? Can we discuss this, Jesus? And from Luke 9:

⁵⁷ And it came to pass, that, as they went in the way, a certain [man] said unto him, Lord, I will follow thee whithersoever thou goest.

⁵⁸ And Jesus said unto him, Foxes have holes, and birds of the air [have] nests; but the Son of man hath not where to lay [his] head.

⁵⁹ And he said unto another, Follow me. But he said, Lord, suffer me first to go and bury my father.

⁶⁰ Jesus said unto him, Let the dead bury their dead: but go thou and preach the kingdom of God.

⁶¹ And another also said, Lord, I will follow thee; but let me first go bid them farewell, which are at home at my house.

⁶² And Jesus said unto him, No man, having put his hand to the plough, and looking back, is fit for the kingdom of God.

The tension between the practical, material world and the Kingdom is ever-present, and all rationalizations for loving this world as I often do sound like convenient and self-justifying cop-outs to me. Thus, I am unfit. Therefore, I require grace.

Related, I saw that Anchoress had been dealing with some of these same issues.

The lost boys of Texas

Some in Italy not happy with Jersey Shore (h/t Insty)

Calif. drought officially ends after snowy winter

MESSENGER Sends Back First Image of Mercury from Orbit

Divorce and Despair

Study: Prepare for the Arrival of Chinese Tourists

McArdle: The Rich Really Are Different: Their Incomes Fluctuate More

Ohio House Approves Bill to Limit Collective Bargaining; Ohio crushes public unions

Coyote: California Points Gun At Own Head, Pulls Trigger

Greenspan: Greenspan: US Financial Regulations to Cause ‘Market Distortions’

Rush: The Obama Doctrine: 2012 or Bust

James Murdoch moves to New York

Mankiw: It’s 2026, and the Debt Is Due

EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW: RomneyCare author Jonathan Gruber

Rubin: The story the media missed in Egypt

From Yuval Levin, via here:

All over the developed world, nations are coming to terms with the fact that the social-democratic welfare state is turning out to be untenable. The reason is partly institutional: The administrative state is dismally inefficient and unresponsive, and therefore ill-suited to our age of endless choice and variety. The reason is also partly cultural and moral: The attempt to rescue the citizen from the burdens of responsibility has undermined the family, self-reliance, and self-government. But, in practice, it is above all fiscal: The welfare state has turned out to be unaffordable, dependent as it is upon dubious economics and the demographic model of a bygone era. Sustaining existing programs of social insurance, let alone continuing to build new ones on the social-democratic model, has become increasingly difficult in recent years, and projections for the coming decades paint an impossibly grim and baleful picture. There is simply no way that Europe, Japan, or America can actually go where the economists' long-term charts now point — to debts that utterly overwhelm their productive capacities, governments that do almost nothing but support the elderly, and economies with no room for dynamism, for growth, or for youth. Some change must come, and so it will.

But fully grasping this reality will not be easy. Our attachment to the social-democratic vision means that we tend to equate its exhaustion with our own exhaustion, and so to fall into a most un-American melancholy. On the left, fear of decline is now answered only with false hope that the dream may yet be saved through clever tinkering at the edges. On the right, the coming collapse of the liberal welfare state brings calls for austerity — for less of the same — which only highlight the degree to which conservatives, too, are stuck in the social-democratic mindset.