Maggie's Farm

Thus far this morning, the bird feeder outside my office window has been dive-bombed by a Red-Tail Hawk - on right - after a squirrel (he missed), and by a Sharp-Shinned Hawk - below - after an English Sparrow (he got it by pursuit, crashing through the shrubs). Not my photos, obviously.

h/t, MouseNaround:

Miss World Update, at Powerline. We feature Miss Dominican Republic -

Funny: The incredibly stupid thoughts of Deepak Chopra. Rick begins thus:

There are few human beings on planet earth more annoying than Deepak Chopra, the touchy-feely, New Age Guru whose fetid, gooey, and completely banal nostrums regarding health and healing have reached a new low in the history of civilized thought.

Our lying, cheating, stealing teens

Lovely Venice sinking beneath the waves. Visit now, or later with scuba gear.

I don't know how we overlooked this site, but Whited Sepulchre has a good bit on The Richardson Snub. We add this Texan to our Blogroll of Honour.

This is from our guest poster Bruce Kesler -

What if Peter, or Paul, is your son?

If Peter is your child, then you might think at least twice about robbing Peter to pay Paul.

Indeed, if Paul is your child, you might think twice about when Peter runs out of money to rob.

Today, we’re moving beyond robbing to literally looting Peter, and Paul will face standing on his own.

Our older, unionized industries centered around the domestic auto companies are yammering for federal tens of billions to keep them breathing a while longer.  Meanwhile, their smothering, very generous retirement pension and healthcare benefits are, at best, likely to be hardly trimmed.

Our states, whose heavily unionized employment has grown faster than in private companies, face almost $2 trillion of future payments on retirement benefits for which they don’t have funding.  Add in localities and the unfunded debts climb even higher.  Meanwhile, our governors clamber for hundreds of billions from the federal government to keep their mini-welfare states going with, at best, small temporary spending cuts.

Our federal government faces the imminent bankruptcy of Medicare and Social Security under the weight of trillions of unfunded benefits.  Meanwhile, nothing is done, while the remedies become more severe.  Add to this the trillion dollars or so, hidden behind misleading titles like “stimulus” or “growth”, already committed and more to come to briefly cushion the shock to some politically favored sectors.

Where is all this money to come from?

It can only come from four sources: It can come from increasing taxes or cutting future government benefits, both of which land on our child Peters, and the latter on our Pauls,  to reduce their standard of living and their incentives to excel and produce.  It can come from foreign and domestic lenders, the debt payments mounting and interest costs increased by the reduced credibility of repayment in non-inflated dollars.  It can come from speeding up the currency printing presses, devaluing investments and savings.  It can come from our Pauls learning to more care for themselves.

At a point in the not too distant future our Peters may well no longer have enough resources left to be robbed for the Pauls.

Our Pauls better learn, fast, how to be more productive and care for themselves.

We have a pretty clear choice:  The first choice is we can continue the fiscal and moral insanity of robbing Peter to pay Paul, of the impossibility of sustaining our heavy subsidies of so many currently over-benefited adults.

Or, we can redouble and redirect our efforts to provide a practical education to our Pauls.  That means several things.  It must be made clear, throughout our society, which includes our Hollywood and Times Square dream factories, that there is no free ride, but that an individual is dependent upon his own work and ethics.  It must be made clear that diligent attention to skill-enhancing education is the road to self-sufficiency.  It must be made clear that any individual, company or government which doesn’t live within its means has no other choice but to do so, at whatever adjusting discomfort to oneself,  owners, employees or clients.

The first choice, of fairly blithely continuing on the current path, downward, will soon hit a dead, self-destructive end.  The second choice will then not be a choice to be managed but the only harsher way remaining.  The sooner we head toward the second path, the easier the way will be.

The first step is to recognize that both Peter and Paul are our sons, to be cared about enough to be set on the right path.

Soros' Move-On is still in business. This is post-election, on Manhattan's Upper West Side. Free medical care seems to be one of their goals, but I think they want lots of free stuff from what others produce. It's quite evident that they do not know how to produce anything themselves.

It's hard to see how such feckless people can be effective, but there is no doubt that they now feel individually "empowered" by Obama. How nice for them. (h/t, Moonbattery). These people are "the useful idiots," as Lenin termed them. It's a fund-raising scam. Not that they need it, if Soros is really paying for the thing...

The potty-mouth blond is kinda hot:

During the past couple of months, I have noticed our bunny rabbit (Cottontail Rabbit) population taking a sharp decline.

Then we saw the fox. They must have moved in recently.

The diminutive Red Fox is the most widely distributed predator in the world, from Asia through Europe and North America. (Yes, he is a Fox and she is a Vixen.)

While our American Red Fox is likely a descendent of foxes imported from England for hunting, there was a pre-existing Red Fox here which inhabited boreal regions of North America.

In the US, they are hunted with horses and hounds, but I don't know anyone who shoots them for fun. In the UK, our cousin Mr. Free Market loves to blast them, but he is a deeply disturbed individual (like all Capitalist gun-lovers), and he also tries to protect his pheasants.

I tend to feel happy when I see one, which is not often, at dawn, trotting across a meadow. I think I have liked them since Roger and the Fox was a favorite of mine around age 6. They are increasingly semi-suburban, but are basically a rural animal.

These nocturnal handsome bushy-tailed guys are mainly mouse, fruit, and bug-eaters, but they have been known to steal a chicken or young pheasant. Both coyotes and wolves will kill foxes.

A bit about their range and natural history here.  More here.

No man’s life, liberty, or property is safe while the legislature is in session.

Mark Twain (h/t, LGF)

"Fresh antiques made daily" by our friend at Sippican Cottage. His biz site is Sippican Furniture.com.

This is serious handmade country furniture made by a Yankee fellow who knows wood inside and out - not department store stuff. Solid wood on antique designs.

Scroll down past the Victorian Christmas here at The Denver Post for an appreciation of Sipp's work.

Yes, he can deliver before Christmas, and he'll build you anything you want. (He's having lots of fun building me a large Spanish Cedar-lined Tiger Maple humidor.)

My next (post-Christmas) project for him may be a round kitchen table to seat 10.

Many are advising me to buy this camera, or one of their TZ line.

Why do people always want me to buy stuff? I like stuff but, being a stingy Yankee, I hate spending money, and I hate getting onto the mo bigga betta bandwagon. Well, more accurately, I should say that am ambivalent about it. (When it comes to guns, mo is betta until it's time to clean and oil them.)

Anyway, I saw they have them at Costco (where the optician is a heck of a nice fellow). I do not need a SLR, because I would never learn how to take advantage of its capacities because I have terminal ADD and, also, was dropped on my head too many times as a kid.

Maybe something for my Santa list...unless Obama gives me one first.

Mark 13:24-37

13:24 "But in those days, after that suffering, the sun will be darkened, and the moon will not give its light,

13:25 and the stars will be falling from heaven, and the powers in the heavens will be shaken.

13:26 Then they will see 'the Son of Man coming in clouds' with great power and glory.

13:27 Then he will send out the angels, and gather his elect from the four winds, from the ends of the earth to the ends of heaven.

13:28 "From the fig tree learn its lesson: as soon as its branch becomes tender and puts forth its leaves, you know that summer is near.

13:29 So also, when you see these things taking place, you know that he is near, at the very gates.

13:30 Truly I tell you, this generation will not pass away until all these things have taken place.

13:31 Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away.

13:32 "But about that day or hour no one knows, neither the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father.

13:33 Beware, keep alert; for you do not know when the time will come.

13:34 It is like a man going on a journey, when he leaves home and puts his slaves in charge, each with his work, and commands the doorkeeper to be on the watch.

13:35 Therefore, keep awake--for you do not know when the master of the house will come, in the evening, or at midnight, or at cockcrow, or at dawn,

13:36 or else he may find you asleep when he comes suddenly.

13:37 And what I say to you I say to all: Keep awake."

Here it is only late November, and the dang glaciers just keep on coming. 

Here's me this morning, trying to keep the Farm family warm in our Wooly Mammoth-bone igloo in New England (as you can see, the Mammoths have eaten all of the Rhododendrons and Azaleas):

Gene Expressions takes another look at Cultural Regions of the United States. One quote:

One of the obvious inferences that can be made from the data is that New Englanders shaped the culture and polities of many regions of the United States where they were a minority. Boston was self-consciously the Athens of America. Not only does this region have many elite universities, but the more prominent state institutions such as the Universities of Michigan and Wisconsin were started in part by Yankees who valued these sorts of public investments. The role of New Englanders in primary education throughout the United States is well known, Puritan America may have been the world's first universally literate society, and they were intent on spreading this trait across every group into the United States.

Though New Englanders were often outnumbered by later waves of immigration from the Upland South (e.g., Scots-Irish), as in the Pacific Northwest's Willamette Valley or Northern California, they were overrepresented among the intelligentsia and captains of industry. In the western Upper Midwest Yankees were absorbed by a sea of Northern European immigration, but for several generations they retained a hold on the cultural and capital classes. One might contend that many of the complaints about the "brainwashing" which occurs at elite universities of bright but impressionable young men and women is simply the latest manifestation of the conflict between numerically superior Middle America and the elitist New England outlook (even outside of New England, see Leland Stanford's biography).

I have never seen this famous Rosie person on TV, but I gather she is some big celeb of some sort, for some undoubtedly well-deserved reason which is unknown by me.

She must be a very big celeb, because she gets more TV viewers than we get daily visitors at Maggie's Farm! That's proof that the world is nuts.

Well, on the other hand, we don't have a broadcast monopoly either.

For Thursday Free Ad for Bob, his 1988 folk-rock recording of Shenandoah. To my mind, the best version of that tune I've ever heard. Give it a listen:

The new documentary Blocking "The Path to 9-11." A reader says it's fascinating, and so do the Amazon reviewers.

It's a DVD.

With the global cooling becoming increasingly obvious, when will it be declared a crisis? Still too many deniers, I guess.

Quoted at Gateway's It's a Hoax:

Climate change skeptics on Capitol Hill are quietly watching a growing accumulation of global cooling science and other findings that could signal that the science behind global warming may still be too shaky to warrant cap-and-trade legislation.

While the new Obama administration promises aggressive, forward-thinking environmental policies, Weather Channel co-founder Joseph D’Aleo and other scientists are organizing lobbying efforts to take aim at the cap-and-trade bill that Democrats plan to unveil in January.

On September 6, 1620, our Pilgrim Fathers and Mothers set sail from Holland, where many Puritans had fled, to England to furnish the boat and pick up more passengers, and headed to what was called "North Virginia" - New York harbor, specifically.

They left too late in the year. The leaky Speedwell slowed them down, and the Mayflower herself was an old tub. On November 9 they made landfall in Cape Cod (a mere 2 degrees off course), but found heading south to NY was treacherous with the autumn storms, so they gave up that effort and returned to the Cape, anchored in Provincetown Harbor, and began exploring Cape Cod (and stealing caches of Indian corn) until deciding on Plymouth as the spot to settle down for the very hard first winter.

Only 50 of the 110 on board the Mayflower survived the first winter. Had they anticipated that catastrophe, they never would have left Europe. Samoset and Squanto appeared in March (Squanto spoke English, and had already been to England, and probably to Spain too), and helped them figure out how to live, farm, hunt, and fish, in rugged New England. Plymouth, fortunately, had many large, abandoned Indian corn fields so it wasn't too difficult to get the spring planting underway.

How differently history might have developed had they ended up where they had intended in the environs of the soon-to-be wealthy Dutch mercantile colony of New Amsterdam.

Our occasional commenter "Retriever" has had her own blog up and running for a little while. She writes (and thinks) well.

Check it out: The Retriever. It's about life.

Yes, the photo is a tough Chessie, which seemed appropriate.

h/t, Theo.

This reminds me of the old genie joke:

60 year-old guy tells genie that he wants his wife to be 30 years younger than he is. Genie: OK, Poof - You're 90.

This is something different. You need to stick with it. It's in English, despite the intro. Here's the scoop on Freddie Frinton.

Obama reconsidering tax hikes. related, Obama irritating all the right people 

Times' Mark Halperin discusses "Extreme pro-Obama press bias"

Roast Brined Turkey. It works. I tried it last year.

If fat people get two seats, should skinny people get a 1/2 seat?

E=mc squared seems to be true. But why should that be?

NYT spins history

Palin's star power increases

In appreciation of Bush. Wizbang

Home on the Rangel. What other laws does this guy break?

Am I crazy, or is the world crazy? Look at this new NYC statue.

Surely the NYT is pulling our collective leg?

From Volokh:

Lessons from the Great Depression:

Tyler Cowen on the lessons for today from FDR and the Great Depression:

In short, expansionary monetary policy and wartime orders from Europe, not the well-known policies of the New Deal, did the most to make the American economy climb out of the Depression. Our current downturn will end as well someday, and, as in the ’30s, the recovery will probably come for reasons that have little to do with most policy initiatives.

Eric at Classical Values considers mens' room gay sex. I had to look up the meaning of "trade."

Social politics. Why do we care so much about things that don't directly affect us? Quote from a piece by AVI:

We care very deeply about these expressions of who we are as a society, locally or nationally. Some people don’t want to see strip malls. Some don’t want to see litter. Some don’t want to see sexual advocacy in the children’s section of the public library. Zoning, historical districts, wilderness areas, nude beaches, prayers before football games, public smoking, girlie magazines at the convenience store, transvestites, mosques, loud music next door, ORV’s, communications towers, homeless people, Wal-marts…We don’t want to see it! Or we do. It says something bad/good about us as a people. We want to feel that the place is ours, that it expresses us. I don’t want to live in a society that…

A flock of Brant ("Brent" in the UK) over Long Island Sound this weekend. Thanks, reader.

Here's Spirit on the Water (from Modern Times). Lyrics here.

Here's a partial clip of the song live in 2007. More interesting than the above, I think. Listen to the crowd when he sings the final verse:

You think I'm over the hill,
Think I'm past my prime,
Let me see what you got
We can have a whoppin good time.