Maggie's Farm

h/t, Tim Blair

We missed this piece from Vanderleun, which begins:

The Asheville, North Carolina restaurant was one of those common to our post-post-modern world. Open and airy with a wall of windows framing hanging plants. Casual to the point of paper napkins. Sporting a list of local beers and -- surprise -- local wines. Tarted up with the kind of overtly ironic art on the walls where the painter has one statement and one image in his repertoire and repeats it ad nauseam. This time it seemed that the sensibility being trotted out was one of Hieronymous Bosch meets Hello Kitty.

Read the whole amusing thing, then go to Dr. Bob who noted the above piece, for his links on medicine - and rock and roll.

October has been a very good month for new Maggie's readers. A fine harvest of new friends, whether you agree with us about things or not.

A hearty welcome to all of you in the US, Canada, the UK, Australia, and the rest of the world. We are pleased and honored to have you all as visitors.

Please sample some of our "recent essays" on the upper left column - we only post "thought pieces" there - not that we are really capable of orderly thought: we do our best, with limited time, limited IQ, not to mention our neanderthal lack of intellectual sophistication. We are simple country bumpkins, recently fallen off the turnip wagon, who aspire only to Common Sense - and a few other things.

And don't forget to send us around to all of your friends and enemies. They should not feel left out.

Image: Autumn, by Currier and Ives, 1871

The New Criterion discusses the current (through January) Hopper show at the National Gallery of Art.

 That is Nighthawks. Here's a good Hopper site.

"Congressmen who willfully take actions during wartime that damage morale, and undermine the military are saboteurs and should be arrested, exiled or hanged." 

President Abraham Lincoln 

Where the heck did this idea of a noose being a symbol for racism come from? To me, nooses always made me think of horse thieves and cattle rustlers, and hangin' judges out West. Frontier justice. Well, also of Nathan Hale, who gave his life for the cause of freedom.

I fully agree with the piece at Never Yet Melted that it is a newly-minted pseudo-symbol in the wake of the Jena scam, which he also discusses, as we did earlier today. A diversion from that embarassment, and a wholly disingenuous one.

Does anyone really believe "the offended" anymore? Nowadays, everybody wants to pose as "offended" or "abused." It's pitiful to proclaim that one sits on a pity pot, but society seems to give you more points for being pitiful than for being cheerful, resilient, and relatively productive in life. Cry-babies are emotional blackmailers.

I am deeply offended by "the offended" and by the semi-professionally offended, but, despite my offended status, nobody is pandering to me, giving me free stuff, or offering me a pass on my sins. Boo hoo.

Disregarding the truth, people are now going nuts about nooses: Free Speech Left Hanging - NY Post.

Let's keep nooses around, without inventing one more phony subject that everybody is supposed to try to look virtuous and sensitive about, and to tiptoe around. The noose worked just fine on Saddam, and Osama would look very handsome in one.

I wonder whether all of this just pre-Halloween, Haunted House craziness. (And, speaking of crazy, how many other blogs have "noose" and moose in their front page post titles at the same time? Not to mention Techno-Viking.)

The new bio of Dante by Barbara Reynolds is reviewed at Claremont: Between Riddle and Revelation.

Was Dante a mystic? 

Image: Giotto's portrait of the immortal Dante.

Raven is a heck of a photographer. This is Smuggler's Notch yesterday:

 Take a look at the rest of her leaf photos.

Tom Brewton quotes Derek Bok in a piece on Sowell on Education - Substance vs. Perception:

...former Harvard University President Derek Bok wrote, Many seniors graduate without being able to write well enough to satisfy their employers. Many cannot reason clearly or perform competently in analyzing complex, non-technical problems, even though faculties rank critical thinking as the primary goal of a college education. Few undergraduates receiving a degree are able to speak or read a foreign language. Most have never taken a course in quantitative reasoning or acquired the knowledge needed to be a reasonably informed citizen in a democracy. And those are only some of the problems.

Black and white is still the right thing for true photographs.

Thanks to David Thompson for finding some Paul McDonough photo links. I can remember when he was a lowly NYC "street photographer."

French accuse Dutch of "unacceptable cowardice."

The French economic decline. Yanks and Brits buying up their countryside.

Animal fats are good for you. 

And government anti-obesity programs don't work (duh). Teacher, leave them kids alone. Every classroom needs a fat kid to make fun of.

Re-posted: I still get a good giggle out of Weird Al's White and Nurdy. Nurds are who make everything in the world run - including blogs - while the rest just benefit from it all and take it for granted.

Entitlement creep isn't a law of nature - it's a leftist strategy. The original big error was not means-testing Social Security.

Steyn makes the case that ideas like expanding SCHIP to the middle class is the worst thing we can do "for the children." 

One quote:

 I’m in favor of tax credits for child health care, and Health Savings Accounts for adults, and any other reform that emphasizes the citizen’s responsibility to himself and his dependents. But middle-class entitlement creep would be wrong even if was affordable, even if Bill Gates wrote a check to cover it every month: it turns free-born citizens into enervated wards of the Nanny State. As Gerald Ford likes to say when trying to ingratiate himself with conservative audiences, “A government big enough to give you everything you want is big enough to take away everything you have.” But there’s an intermediate stage: A government big enough to give you everything you want isn’t big enough to get you to give any of it back. As I point out in my book, nothing makes a citizen more selfish than socially equitable communitarianism: Once a fellow’s enjoying the fruits of Euro-style entitlements, he couldn’t give a hoot about the general societal interest; he’s got his, and who cares if it’s going to bankrupt the state a generation hence?

That’s the real “war on children”: in Europe, it’s killing their future. Don’t make the same mistake here.

More from the Steyn editorial at Flopping

AOL is so yesterday.

Our blogmeister Chris, who says that AOL does not recognize any of the technical conventions of the 2007 internet. (I still use it, with great annoyance, due to long-established habit.)

A Jacksonian makes a detailed case for the sociopathy of the Clintons.

The fact that the details become tedious is because the pattern is so consistent.

Related: Has the silence begun to crack that they hang out with crooks, grifters, and scammers?