Maggie's Farm

A reader recently reminded us that the Puritans had two kinds of "callings", the "general calling" to God and a secondary calling to labor.

Thus work was not seen as being about ethics, but as somewhat - or very much - sanctified. All honest work, after all, is a form of service.

The pop view of our Puritan ancestors is distorted, and a bit of a straw man. Grace Baptist has a good post on Puritans and work. He refers to what looks like an interesting book: Worldly Saints: The Puritans as They Really Were.

Egypt: THE DECLINING SITUATION OF THE COPTS

A fresh look at Four Dead in Ohio

The Dodd Bill:

So far we’ve learned that the Dodd bill doesn’t end taxpayer bailouts of big financial companies (something Democrats tacitly admitted with their first amendment to the bill), that it could drive derivatives markets offshore and provide less accountability, that it could adversely affect major employers across the country, and that small business owners like dentists could fall under its regulatory reach. This bill needs significant changes before it’s ready to be passed.

Not that I do not love boats with sails, but a basic recreational boat with the old Lobster Boat design pleases me.

A new Tom Lehrer DVD. The promo video with interview isn't embeddable, but it's here.

A new Cormac McCarthy, The Road. I didn't realize he had a new one (h/t, SDA). I read all of his stuff. Does he still live in a fleabag motel in New Mexico?

The champions of socialism call themselves progressives, but they recommend a system which is characterized by rigid observance of routine and by a resistance to every kind of improvement.  They call themselves liberals, but they are intent upon abolishing liberty.  They call themselves democrats, but they yearn for dictatorship.  They call themselves revolutionaries, but they want to make the government omnipotent.  They promise the blessings of the Garden of Eden, but they plan to transform the world into a gigantic post office. 

Ludwig von Mises, 1944, via Am Thinker

Male and female, Spring plumage:

A dear huntin and fishin pal of mine lucked out bowing a turkey this month. How happy does he look? I am impressed that he persuaded the Mrs. to take the photo. Blood and guts are not her thing. Not at all. She likes Gucci.

Ridley's Turtles, caught on the big hook of Cape Cod. If their numbers were healthier, a few lost turtles would not matter.

Recommended Revolutionary War Reading List

An example of why Rubio should be a senator.

Prager: Why Left Talks About 'White' Tea Parties

Good, demanding schools: Learning from the successful charter schools

Re Goldman: Berkshire Execs Blame Turmoil On Faulty Regulation. Exactly right. 

McArdle:

In answer to Andrew's question--"That auto restructuring last year was a disaster, wasn't it?"--well, yes, it was.  The Congressional Budget Office believes that it will ultimately cost the taxpayers $50 billion--as much or more than the rest of TARP put together.  For that, we saved less than 400,000 jobs at GM and Chrysler.  We could have given each of the autoworkers $100,000 to go start over somewhere else, and still saved money on the deal.

Government spending per household, 1965-present

They took this kid's sandwich

Does "audacity" mean doing things people don't want?

Moonbattery: Item #2: Why You Can't Have an Intelligent Discussion with a Progressive Leftist

Fishing photo via Theo

Everything is as green as can be, and my Wisteria is coming into bloom. Yes, the big bridge is washed out but I am fairly sure it is getting fixed.

Entropy rules, but we do the best we can.

After church yesterday, Mrs. BD and I decided to do an inspection tour of our church cemetery. We noticed that the columbarium was in bad shape, and that some good friends had bought a nice modest granite stone for their plot. I hope they do not need it anytime soon. We also noticed that the grass is getting high and the dandelions and weeds are everywhere, but that's as it should be in a New England graveyard.

When I got home, I learned that one of my good tennis buddies had dropped dead last week, where he would have wanted to do it, on the tennis court. He had a slick, tricksy game, wonderful tennis exhuberance, and near-perfect technique: no flash, but steady as a rock. He was a professional wordsmith too.

Too soon, my friend, but that is the right way to depart. Now, nobody is left who is willing to give me those special sarcastic critiques of my flubbed shots.

The real irony of the Hope and Change movement is how committed its sponsors are to the giant mortuary called Washington, D.C.

Washington Rebel. WR likes Aldo Leopold too, which makes him a Good Guy in our book.

Is Bob Dylan a musical thief? Of course he is, to some extent. So what?

Sheesh, most singers don't even write the songs they sing.

Mrs. BD told me that Martha Graham said "If you're going to steal, steal from the best."

I remember flying home on Aer Lingus one time, listening to the Irish music. I thought to myself, "Damn. That's the tune of Boots of Spanish Leather. Where did Dylan hear that?" He's a human jukebox. Not the Second Coming, but a darned interesting jukebox, and he has gone the distance.

Smart, perceptive, and eccentric too, with or without a rhyming dictionary. He adds a "special sauce," as they say on Wall St.

Whiteside rips Dylan. (h/t, Driscoll)

Saw this tree in bloom today behind a very good fish store, growing out of a hole in the asphalt. Never seen this sort of tree before. The wisteria-colored, tubular 2" blooms hang down, and last year's nut-like seed pods are still on the branches. The trunk looks like the trunk of a fast-growing trash tree. Quite a wonderful small tree, with the elegant blooms before the leaves emerge:

Reader got the name for me on the first try. Thanks. I had no idea what it was: The Empress Tree, Paulownia tomentosa. AKA Foxglove Tree. The blossoms do resemble Digitalis.

For an "invasive" trash tree which will grow anywhere, it sure is mighty purty in early May. My other photos of it below -

I wondered about them, anyway:

The history of the guitar in America. The six-string guitar was considered so easy to play that every stableboy could play it.

The history of the banjo. For me, the Banjo has an ominous, menacing sound. But maybe that is just me.

Photo is an 1840 French guitar from this restorer's website

Who's Maurice Strong?

Deputy shot; illegal immigrants suspected. Am Thinker: Some truths about illegal immigrants. TimesWatch: Times Again Hails Grand Total of Four Illegal Immigrant Marchers

Also, Legal Immigrants Fed Up With Illegal Immigrants

Has the Obama deficit panel already failed?

McCotter is acerbic. He does good acerbic.

Chicago Mayor Begs World Court to Overturn Second Amendment

Anchoress: Secular Sex Abuse Gets a Look – Poll Added

Boehner: How does gaining 100 seats in November sound?

"We are fools for Christ's sake, but ye are wise in Christ; we are weak, but ye are strong; ye are honourable, but we are despised." (KJV).

"For the wisdom of this world is foolishness in God's sight. As it is written: "He catches the wise in their craftiness." (1 Corinthians 3:19)

"For the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God." (1 Corinthians 1:18)

"For since in the wisdom of God the world through its wisdom did not know him, God was pleased through the foolishness of what was preached to save those who believe." (1 Corinthians 1:21)

Oy, Oy, Oy. Yiddish, actually. Ale Brider by the Klezmatics. h/t, Norm:

Adjusting one's insides is a lot tougher than changing one's outsides. A good post on psychotherapy: Change. One quote:

...why see a therapist? Because it is very difficult to see yourself clearly. Just as a camera cannot photograph itself except in reflection, the kinds of changes that are the heart of therapy need someone to serve as a mirror, as someone who can see and hear you without having an agenda about or for you, someone who can be caring and brutal. I can't think of anyone I know who has done that without help, including myself.

Therapy isn't about being happy, it's about honestly knowing who you are, and then picking a suitable life.

Also, a Psychiatric Manifesto via blue to blue 

Noonan: The Big Alienation. A quote:

This is not the old, conservative and long-lampooned "I don't trust gummint" attitude of the 1950s, '60s and '70s. It's something new, or rather something so much more broadly and fully evolved that it constitutes something new. The right never trusted the government, but now the middle doesn't.

Goldberg: States' Rights and Wrongs

Do not hack into peoples' emails

Karl Rove still driving people crazy

The notion of offering Medicare to businesses

Oil spill as Obama's Katrina?

They ran crying to the Dean. Pathetic.

Via Dino:

As of 2008, the average federal salary was $119,982, compared with $59,909 for the average private sector employee. In other words, the average federal bureaucrat makes twice as much as the average working taxpayer. Add the value of benefits like health care and pensions, and the gap grows even bigger. The average federal employee’s benefits add $40,785 to his annual total compensation, whereas the average working taxpayer’s benefits increase his total compensation by only $9,881. In other words, federal workers are paid on average salaries that are twice as generous as those in the private sector, and they receive benefits that are four times greater.

In defence of Glenn Beck

On immigration at NRO:

Linda (Chavez) criticizes the “slow, steady harassment” of illegal aliens. “Slow, steady harassment” is a pretty good working definition of about 80 percent of American law enforcement. It mostly works. You want to change the law, then change the law. But people who believe the way Linda believes about immigration have had ample opportunity to change the law through the democratic process. They have lost. They will continue to lose.

We have generous legal immigration laws now. They can always be changed. A nation without borders, though, is not a nation. A nation is a community of law. As we often say, the whole world wants to come here for freedom and opportunity, and would if they would only have to ignore our laws and wade through the Rio Grande. One thing that ticks me off is that the illegals have taken the jobs high school kids like I used to get: laborers on construction, landscaping work, electrician helpers, etc. They pay the illegals cash and the high school kids get fat and lazy playing video games. I began working summers and part-time during the school year when I was 13. Can kids do that now? I enjoyed working, learned a lot about life, got in good physical shape, and made money too.

Lepanto (1915)

     White founts falling in the Courts of the sun,
     And the Soldan of Byzantium is smiling as they run;
     There is laughter like the fountains in that face of all men feared,
     It stirs the forest darkness, the darkness of his beard;
     It curls the blood-red crescent, the crescent of his lips;
     For the inmost sea of all the earth is shaken with his ships.
     They have dared the white republics up the capes of Italy,
     They have dashed the Adriatic round the Lion of the Sea,
     And the Pope has cast his arms abroad for agony and loss,
     And called the kings of Christendom for swords about the Cross.
     The cold queen of England is looking in the glass;
     The shadow of the Valois is yawning at the Mass;
     From evening isles fantastical rings faint the Spanish gun,
     And the Lord upon the Golden Horn is laughing in the sun.

(Read the rest on continuation page below. Image of the second-most famous naval battle in history (1571), familiar to every schoolchild, is by an unknown artist.)

"Cold and lonesome" is the gritty low-down heart of the blues. (That is not Jimmy Reed in the photo. I don't know who that guy is, but the music is Reed.)

I hope y'all have enjoyed hearing Jimmy this week.

A couple of birder friends and I took an early morning trip down to the Jamaica Bay Refuge  in Queens, NYC, for some early warbler-watching last Saturday.

Since we had already had a wave of warblers passing through further north, it seemed like a good time to get a head start on the May warbler-watching before all the leaves came out. Wrong. Not a single one. As with hunting or fishing, it is so often "You shoulda been here yesterday."

Our birds have not bought into the global warming hysteria. The Spring migrants were absent, and the winter birds had left already. I did not even see the usual flock of breeding Ruddy Ducks.

The Jamaica Bay Refuge is a unique oasis. Behind you is JFK with planes constantly overhead, out to the ocean side is Far Rockaway, and in front is Brooklyn with Manhattan rising in the distance. It's a special green and watery stopping-place for migrants on the Atlantic Flyway, but the refuge hosts plenty of breeding birds too. Mixed habitat: beaches, woods, vast bayberry fields, salt- and fresh-water marshes.

Plenty of Tree Swallows. Here's my pal walking up to one of them while fumbling with his fancy camera, Far Rockaway in the distance:

 More photos etc below the fold -

My men's study/confessional group has been reading the Letter to the Hebrews for a couple of months. One of the topics we stumbled into this week was a discussion of obedience to God, and dutifulness. (Here's a recent post on obedience via Vanderleun.)

While we guys all seem to acknowledge the need for discipline for spiritual growth, many of us confessed our tendency to lazily and self-congratulatingly replace a life in the spirit with "Christian" dutifulness and "doing good." We more or less ended up thinking of moral and religious dutifulness, if lacking the Holy Spirit and the direction of God, as clanging cymbals - empty noise. Of course, that was one of Christ's teachings.

From a Christian standpoint, pride in one's Christian dutifulness and righteousness is a devil's snare - as is pride in one's humility. From Screwtape's Letter #14 with his advice to his apprentice Wormwood:

Your patient has become humble; have you drawn his attention to the fact? All virtues are less formidable to us once the man is aware that he has them, but this is especially true of humility. Catch him at the moment when he is really poor in spirit and smuggle into his mind the gratifying reflection, “By jove! I’m being humble”, and almost immediately pride—pride at his own humility—will appear. If he awakes to the danger and tries to smother this new form of pride, make him proud of his attempt—and so on, through as many stages as you please.