Maggie's Farm

I think that the religious faith of most average Christians waxes and wanes over time, sometimes even in the course of a day. I do know people whose faith seems to be 100% and rock solid. In the end, I don't find thinking about the topic of strength of faith particularly useful or productive. God is a mystery to me, as is existence itself (and most other things too), but I believe that in prayer and in practice one can come into relationship with God - or at least with Jesus.

Ron Rosenbaum speaks up for the Enlightenment agnostic in everyone: An Agnostic Manifesto - At least we know what we don't know. One quote:

Atheists have no evidence—and certainly no proof!—that science will ever solve the question of why there is something rather than nothing. Just because other difficult-seeming problems have been solved does not mean all difficult problems will always be solved. And so atheists really exist on the same superstitious plane as Thomas Aquinas, who tried to prove by logic the possibility of creation "ex nihilo" (from nothing). His eventual explanation entailed a Supreme Being standing outside of time and space somehow endowing it with existence (and interfering once in a while) without explaining what caused this source of "uncaused causation" to be created in the first place.

This is—or should be—grade-school stuff, but many of the New Atheists seemed to have stopped thinking since their early grade-school science-fair triumphs.

Right, sort-of (I don't think we even know what we don't know). Science is not a religion. It's just a formalized, rigorous mode of inquiry from which most of the data and facts and theories are inevitably replaced over time. It is incapable of handling the Big Questions and Big Truth, but it sure can be useful. For example, we currently believe that "gravity" doesn't exist as a "force," but it's a handy concept anyway. Someday, our talk of "forces" wil be viewed as little more than 18th century gods.

Chesterton: ""If there were no God, there would be no atheists."

For the second day in a row, our home-made mini-nuke plant in the basement, which provides the power to the Maggie's servers as well as to our milking machines and our a/c, went down due to mice. Today, I picked up a cat at the shelter to live in the basement. Nuclear power problem solved.

In apology, and since I am headed to Vienna soon, I offer something from the King of the Waltz, Johann Strauss Jr:

Not to be confused with his dad, Johann Strauss Sr., composer of the Radetzky March among much other music. Dad, famously, never forgave his son for going into music instead of banking.

Neither are related to the great German composer Richard Strauss:

h/t, Theo. This is off Cape Town. I think the whale is practicing for a Moby Dick re-make.

I want to go the the museum at the Belevedere Palace in Vienna more to see the Kokoshkas than to see the jazzy Klimts. Klimt is fine, but Kokoshka is one of the gnarly German Expressionists that I get a kick out of. Well, Austrian in this case.

I have a good Klimt quote though:

I have never painted a self-portrait. I am less interested in myself as a subject for a painting than I am in other people, above all women...There is nothing special about me. I am a painter who paints day after day from morning to night...Who ever wants to know something about me... ought to look carefully at my pictures.

Kokoshka's famous 1914 Bride of the Wind:

Not my fault. I blame Bush.

Meanwhile I learned about the Rhine-Main-Danube Canal, via which you can travel from Rotterdam to the Black Sea by water if you want to.

Could be sort of like America's Great Loop, without the loop.

The Viking/Normans, who explored the Danube from the Med, would have enjoyed that canal.

Rick Moran led us to the real meaning of Dog Days. Via Wiki:

For the ancient Egyptians, Sirius appeared just before the season of the Nile's flooding, so they used the star as a "watchdog" for that event. Since its rising also coincided with a time of extreme heat, the connection with hot, sultry weather was made for all time.

Sirius is the shiny dog collar tag in Canis Major:

Here. It was Edwardian: high-fashion with post-Victorian mores and plenty of mineral water. Edward Vll himself loved to hang out there and pick up chicks. Back then, being a bit pudgy was not a problem. We remain in his debt for making tweed respectable, and for replacing white tie and tails with the simple black tie of today.

"Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts."

Richard Feynman, via The Difference between ‘True Science’ and ‘Cargo-Cult Science’ at Pajamas

I once booed Jewel at a performance. It was the year she toured with Bob Dylan, and I saw them in New Haven. (She once said that she thought Bob was gay because he didn't hit on her during the tour. Disappointed by that, it seems.) 

I booed because she had to bring some political snark into her chatter, assuming as such folks do that their audiences are all on the same page politically. Rude of me, but that sort of presumption bugs me. As usual, my friends were embarassed by my behavior. She was not really known, then.

Here's the whole song that was chopped up on Dr Merc's fun post:

h/t, SDA:

As I always do before trips, I am catching up on history. This trip will be Vienna and the Danube. I view these places historically as the hinterlands, but you cannot fault their production of music in recent centuries. Music, wars, and sort-of hideous baroque architecture.

Vienna had been a Roman frontier outpost, but surely had been a barbarian settlement before that.

I do recall that European History in high school made my head spin from the endless alliances and endless wars and the reconfigurations of empires, kingdoms, duchies, principalities, and nations. With my ADD, it's a wonder I did so well with it. Forgot most of it. The War of the Spanish Succession.

I did not forget some details of the devastating Franco-Prussian War, but I certainly had forgotten that "German Austria" wanted to be part of Germany after WW1, but the Treaty of Versailles and the League of Nations forbade it. German Austria reached down into the (still) German-speaking areas of northern Italy. The Austria of today is a relatively brand-new nation (1945 or 1955 - pick the date) although it was a Babenburg duchy in 1156 and later was roughly the core of the Hapsburg's power for 640 years.

The Hapsburgs are credited with keeping the Ottomans out of Europe in 1683, but the King of Poland, Jan Sobieski, deserves lots of credit. There were 300 years of resisting the Ottoman Empire's invasions. I have never understood why Middle-Easterners coveted Europe, but they still do.

I find it amusing to think of what was going on in the wilds of the American colonies at the same time. Only Spain really cared, because of the gold. Otherwise insignificant except as pawns in larger European power games.

In the early 1700s, the Hapsburgs counted among their imperial control Belgium, Sardinia, Corsica, the Duchy of Milan, Naples, and Sicily. Two hundred years earlier, HRE "Emperor" Charles V in 1516 also happened to be King of Spain, bringing Spanish America, for a while, into the bounds of the Holy Roman Empire - such as it was: A crown, a flag, a bunch of castles and palaces, a title, and some truly snazzy outfits with fancy medals on them to impress the gals. Being King of Spain, on the other hand, was probably a cool gig with plenty of perks and babes.

The modern European nations are all younger in their configurations and their governmental structures than the US (except for the post-Empire island core of Britain).

One thought this perspective gave me is that the EU may be little more than an expanded reconstitution of the Holy Roman Empire - combined with the old Roman Empire. In time, it will pass too.

Photo below, Palace Schoenbrunn, first constructed as a hunting lodge in the early 1700s. "Hey, honey, have you seen where I put my camo and my ammo?"

That's from a time when royal governments lived off the labor of the people. Not like now, right?

An email from a buddy:

I came across a Japanese Type 14 Nambu pistol.  These were reasonably well made Japanese semi-autos, used from mid-1920's until end of WWII.  The ammo is available for around $25/box of 50.  I had planned on using it for a project that didn't work out
 
If interested, I can email photos.  I'd like just what I paid for it - $300.

I don't need one and do not want one, but it's an interesting firearm from an historical point of view.

Everything about the Type 14 here.

While feasting on late after-dinner hazelnut gelati a little over a week ago in the relatively non-touristy lakefront village of Baveno, just up from the small piazza on the main drag, we were drawn to the sounds of a church choir, and sat on the stoop of the side door of the sanctuary for a half hour listening to them practice as darkness fell.

Nothing can make a 20-person choir sound like the Mormon Tabernacle Choir the way a small stone 900 year-old church can. Excellent group, too, with an exuberant organist.

Saint Gervaso is the patron saint of Baveno. Like many old buldings in Italy, the church was built of stone previously used in Roman buildings, some still bearing Roman markings and lettering. Recycling. We noted that they never took stones from the Roman bridges or aqueducts, though. Smart - and a conservative message.

This is no famous church, just an ordinary village church. Clearly pre-Gothic. The church and tower were built in around 1100 (but the front of the sanctuary was expanded a bit since then), the Baptistery in 1628, and the open hall of the Stations of the Cross probably in the 1700s, when Baveno became wealthy from its quarries of pink marble (which are still in use).

Palm trees right up there near the Swiss border.

 More photos of this small, unknown parish church below -

Edge: Getting at the Neuroanthropology of Morality

Los Zetas drug cartel seizes 2 U.S. ranches in Texas. Is this story true? Possibly not.

Coming Soon: Tax Tsunami

Reid to Netroots: "We're Going To Have a Public Option"

Britain Plans to Decentralize National Health Care

More government intrusion into private sector pay

Race realist Jared Taylor declares the "civil rights struggle was won long ago"

A guy who doesn't want you to have a/c: The Big Chill: Giving AC the Cold Shoulder

Dino: What happened a year ago to permanently change public opinion?

Powerline: The case against Elena Kagan

Obama’s Solar Energy Fantasy

The Lottery Makes a Strong Statement About Charter Schools

From Insty: "THE YOUNG AND THE JOBLESS: New Evidence That The Minimum Wage Has Hurt Teenagers."

Climate and budgets from Coyote:

The climate modeling approach is so similar to that used by the CEA to score the stimulus that there is even a climate equivalent to the multiplier found in macro-economic models. In climate models, small amounts of warming from man-made CO2 are multiplied many-fold to catastrophic levels by hypothetical positive feedbacks, in the same way that the first-order effects of government spending are multiplied in Keynesian economic models. In both cases, while these multipliers are the single most important drivers of the models’ results, they also tend to be the most controversial assumptions. In an odd parallel, you can find both stimulus and climate debates arguing whether their multiplier is above or below one.

Luke 11:1-13

11:1 He was praying in a certain place, and after he had finished, one of his disciples said to him, "Lord, teach us to pray, as John taught his disciples."

11:2 He said to them, "When you pray, say: Father, hallowed be your name. Your kingdom come.

11:3 Give us each day our daily bread.

11:4 And forgive us our sins, for we ourselves forgive everyone indebted to us. And do not bring us to the time of trial."

11:5 And he said to them, "Suppose one of you has a friend, and you go to him at midnight and say to him, 'Friend, lend me three loaves of bread;

11:6 for a friend of mine has arrived, and I have nothing to set before him.'

11:7 And he answers from within, 'Do not bother me; the door has already been locked, and my children are with me in bed; I cannot get up and give you anything.'

11:8 I tell you, even though he will not get up and give him anything because he is his friend, at least because of his persistence he will get up and give him whatever he needs.

11:9 "So I say to you, Ask, and it will be given you; search, and you will find; knock, and the door will be opened for you.

11:10 For everyone who asks receives, and everyone who searches finds, and for everyone who knocks, the door will be opened.

11:11 Is there anyone among you who, if your child asks for a fish, will give a snake instead of a fish?

11:12 Or if the child asks for an egg, will give a scorpion?

11:13 If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will the heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him!"

Via Dallas News' aviation blog:

Mr. Anubis, in situ.

Can you imagine being a person who is scared of flying, and you do not know that there’s a three story tall statue of the Egyptian god of the dead nearby the runway easement, and you’re in your seat in the takeoff roll, and you look out the window – say it’s night time too – and all floodlit standing there staring at you as you’re going past at 150 mph is – Mr. Anubis ?

or, somewhere nearby also at the Denver International Airport, the Blue Mustang?

Joanie sings Bob's Farewell Angelina in 1966: