Maggie's Farm

 It's wedding anniversary season:

More on Palin and Feminism

The Spirit Of Walter Duranty

The truth about those atolls

Progressive Bloggers Are Money-Grubbing Corporatists

UVA’s Defense of Michael Mann: Back Off, He’s a Scientist! Like a priest or something?

Helen Thomas: The Jews should go back home

Taking a look at border security - video

Michelle: The long, hot Summer of Corruption

Time to change birth citizenship?

The Fastest Growing Class of U.S. Millionaires: Government Workers Making 2X Private Workers

Worse than a Depression

Krauthammer: Those troublesome Jews

Freshman orientation at Wesleyan. Sounds like re-orientation.

Will states come begging for a trillion? It's like Euroland.

Employers have gone on strike:

Imagine if Ms. Romer had instead promised in 2009 that Congress could spend nearly $1 trillion, and 16 months later the unemployment rate would be nearly 10% and that more than 2.5 million additional Americans would be without jobs. Would Congress have still spent the cash? Well, sure, Congress will always spend what it can get away with, but the American public would have turned against the stimulus even faster than it has.

Is the Turkish Military a Bulwark against Islamism?

Also,

Deputy Prime Minister Bulent Arinc said all deals with Israel are being evaluated.

"We are serious on this issue. New cooperation will not start and relations with Israel will be reduced," he said.

Energy Minister Taner Yildiz has said discussions about extending a Russian natural gas pipeline to Israel and providing fresh drinking water to Israel from the Manavgat river were being shelved.

The pro-Palestinian activists' deaths on the aid ship increased tensions in the Mideast, especially with Turkey, an important ally of Israel. On Thursday, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan called Israel's actions "a historic mistake."

 More sad stuff about Turkey, at Shrinkwrapped, who is interested in Islamic use of language. - especially hyperbole.

Also related, from Mead: Terrible Twins: Turkey, Brazil and the Future of American Foreign Policy

To His Coy Mistress

Had we but world enough, and time,
This coyness, lady, were no crime.
We would sit down and think which way
To walk, and pass our long love's day;
Thou by the Indian Ganges' side
Shouldst rubies find; I by the tide
Of Humber would complain. I would
Love you ten years before the Flood;
And you should, if you please, refuse
Till the conversion of the Jews.
My vegetable love should grow
Vaster than empires, and more slow.
An hundred years should go to praise
Thine eyes, and on thy forehead gaze;
Two hundred to adore each breast,
But thirty thousand to the rest;
An age at least to every part,
And the last age should show your heart.
For, lady, you deserve this state,
Nor would I love at lower rate.

        But at my back I always hear
Time's winged chariot hurrying near;
And yonder all before us lie
Deserts of vast eternity.
Thy beauty shall no more be found,
Nor, in thy marble vault, shall sound
My echoing song; then worms shall try
That long preserv'd virginity,
And your quaint honour turn to dust,
And into ashes all my lust.
The grave's a fine and private place,
But none I think do there embrace.

        Now therefore, while the youthful hue
Sits on thy skin like morning dew,
And while thy willing soul transpires
At every pore with instant fires,
Now let us sport us while we may;
And now, like am'rous birds of prey,
Rather at once our time devour,
Than languish in his slow-chapp'd power.
Let us roll all our strength, and all
Our sweetness, up into one ball;
And tear our pleasures with rough strife
Thorough the iron gates of life.
Thus, though we cannot make our sun
Stand still, yet we will make him run.

This is from yesterday, and has been widely linked:

Hereabouts, it's time to yank out the Spring pansies. Many people have the nurseries fill their planters right about now, but people like Mrs. BD like to do them herself.

She says all you need to know is that a planter needs one thriller, a few spillers, and filler - with interesting foliage contrast and compatible color. It's a form of flower arranging. In a couple of weeks, these pots will be looking good:

One Too Many Mornings, with Johnny Cash (1969)

Jeff Jarvis in the NYPost: How not to save news - Bad government ideas for journalism. He begins:

The Federal Trade Commission says it wants to save journalism. I'm not sure who asked it to.

So far, 54 theaters around the country have signed up to show "The Lottery", and more are signing up daily. Take a moment to see if "The Lottery" is playing in a theater near you and buy tickets by clicking http://www.screenvision.com/s/showing/TheLottery/.

The Lottery" will be playing for some single showings and week-long runs: In New York for one night, June 3, a free showing at the Apollo Theater followed by a reception, 253 W 125th St., in New York from June 11-18 at the Big Theater, 239 East 59th Street (near 2nd Avenue). In Los Angeles from June 18-25 at Laemmle's Music Hall 3, 9036 Wilshire Blvd., Beverly Hills. Additional runs in Denver and other cities are being planned.

Recent reviews:

An already heated national debate over charter schools gets a few degrees hotter tonight with the premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival of "The Lottery," a powerful documentary about the Harlem Success Academy charters launched by former City Councilwoman Eva Moskowitz. The film is designed to knock ambivalent people off the fence when it comes to the benefits of charter schools, and it does. In the same way that "An Inconvenient Truth" mobilized a vast constituency to take action on climate change, "The Lottery" will create and energize charter supporters by the thousands.
-   New York Daily News


For this lottery, the stakes couldn't be higher. The nerve-racking bid by parents to land their 5-year-old kid a coveted seat in a high-performing Harlem charter school is detailed in a documentary set to screen tomorrow at the Tribeca Film Festival.
-   New York Post

Here's our request to our regular and/or irregular readers:

As summer begins in the northern hemisphere, people tend to find better things to do than to read websites. That is good. However, here at Maggie's the steadily-growing readership is our only compensation for our (enjoyable and self-educating and sometimes simply therapeutic) effort and time.

We know we are not to everyone's taste, but there are tons of folks out there who might enjoy our eclectic site if they knew we existed. If you have not done so already, do us a favor and introduce us to your friends, neighbors, relatives, colleagues, enemies, etc. (It used to be called "viral marketing," but before that it was called "word of mouth.")

Thanks, from the Maggie's Team.

PS: Dr. Merc reminds me to remind you to not be shy, and send us comments when you have them.

How do Americans spend their leisure time? Paul Bloom begins:

The answer might surprise you. The most common voluntary activity is not eating, drinking alcohol, or taking drugs. It is not socializing with friends, participating in sports, or relaxing with the family. While people sometimes describe sex as their most pleasurable act, time-management studies find that the average American adult devotes just four minutes per day to sex.

Our main leisure activity is, by a long shot, participating in experiences that we know are not real.

Fascinating article. However, that 4 mins per day seems dubious on many counts.

Warbler migration season has reached its end, but our readers need a tougher challenge. Here 'tis. It is cheating to go to the link (I'll thank him with a link for the photo later today).

Hint: It's a female. Another wonderfully charming female below the fold, mostly safe for work -

Five or six more months until duck season. A friend sent me these photos of a splendid, if surrealistically overblown, duck blind. It has to be in Arkansas.

Janet Greene, 1966 (h/t Tim Blair). As Sipp occasionally reminds us, da youts should not believe all they hear about the 60s.

Also known as Catmint (it is related to Catnip). It's a long-blooming front-of-the-border plant, and will re-bloom later if the exhausted blooms are cut off. It comes in a few cultivars of varying heights.

This was yesterday. Note the happy Digitalis on the left. Little Lamb's Ear Hydrangea in front.

Photo from Anchoress' God is not sophisticated enough

Shut up and dance: Margot Fonteyn’s merry dance through the farce of a failed coup d’état

Read this: FTC proposes federalizing newspapers, killing blogs 

Watts: About those melting ice sheets

Hennessey: Why do so many Americans pay no income tax?

The EU: Blame the Jews

Stem cells instead of implants? Sign me up

Hewitt: The collapsing Obama Presidency

Teachers Need A Teachable Moment About Their Unions

Sea mammals as guards. Cool. h/t, Linkiest

Thompson's idea of hell

Maher: Obama Not Acting Like A "Real Black" President

The elections:

It used to be said — the president before an election had to go to Ireland, Israel and Italy. Well, now it’s Jews, Hispanics, and gays if you are going into a midterm election...

The death of Democratic Socialism: Am Thinker

Refugees From Communism React With Horror to Moonbats

Pethokoukis: 5 reasons why “Son of Stimulus” is a bad seed

Am Thinker: Are Climate Alarmists losing the Mainstream Media?

Top counterterror guy just doesn't get it:

It should be further noted that this tendency to project one’s own cultural norms of right and wrong onto others is the height of arrogance and ethnocentrism — precisely what liberals always warn against. Yet the irony is that “open-minded” proponents of cultural relativism and respect for “the other” are also the ones most prone to westernizing Islam. When Brennan insists that jihadists are really not motivated by religion but rather are products of “political, economic and social forces,” is his position — that jihadists are just like us, they just don’t know it yet — not the height of cultural arrogance?

David Brooks wrote a much-linked piece on the two enlightenments last week. Far better and more amusing is this ripping apart of Brooks' essay. It's tough to get away with BS in the internet era.

That is quite correct that there was no "British Enlightenment." Here's our post, with a good link, on the Scottish Enlightenment.

And another good one: How The Scots Invented The Modern World

h/t, Sipp:

Mowing

There was never a sound beside the wood but one,
And that was my long scythe whispering to the ground.
What was it it whispered?  I knew not well myself;
Perhaps it was something about the heat of the sun,
Something, perhaps, about the lack of sound---
And that was why it whispered and did not speak.
It was no dream of the gift of idle hours,
Or easy gold at the hand of fay or elf:
Anything more than the truth would have seemed too weak
To the earnest love that laid the swale in rows,
Not without feeble-pointed spikes of flowers
(Pale orchises), and scared a bright green snake.
The fact is the sweetest dream that labor knows.
My long scythe whispered and left the hay to make.

h/t, Theo

At Oxford.

Maybe. I think the hardest exam in the world is working a job and keeping a job, but my pup says the hardest exams in the world are the (paperless) rapid-fire interviews at big NYC banks. "What's 18X17?" "What's the square root of 289?" "What's the annualized rate of whatever?" And the damn logic puzzles she told me about, which I have now forgotten. What's the one where they pour the salt and the pepper onto the table, and ask you to quickly separate the salt from the pepper?

Oh, now I remember that one...

I see that VDH is on a trip quite similar to the one we have planned for August. Too bad he didn't wait 'til August.

Photo is the Danube Canal in Austria.