Maggie's Farm

I am not kidding. A Dad explains Obamacare to a little kid.

Well, no problem. I am not "offended." Maybe a bit hurt, but that's OK too.

Christians are used to this sort of thing. Worldly powers are never too comfortable with the Christian message.

I like Franklin Graham very much.

Am Thinker: San Francisco Tea Party Out-Alinskys the Left

Maybe Chris Christie has learned from Alinsky too. Quote:

In the state that has the nation’s fourth-highest percentage (66) of public employees who are unionized, he has joined the struggle that will dominate the nation’s domestic policymaking in this decade — to break the ruinous collaboration between elected officials and unionized state and local workers whose affections the officials purchase with taxpayers’ money.

No wonder labor leaders are going berserk.

Christie is doing what Arnold never had the cojones to do - to go after the unholy alliance of pols and government unions.

Watching the River Flow, live, 2006

Do something brainless, useless, and ignorant today to make yourself feel good! Like this gal.

After all, appreciating ourselves and finding our own redeeming "meaning" for our pointless lives are the most important things, aren't they?

"Is democratic behavior that which democracies like to engage in, or is it behavior that will preserve a democracy?"

Aristotle. Discussed at Reb

Here. A few comments:

1. Watch that Speed Dating video
2. Don't get the wrong idea from the comments - Merc and I do not watch this show together - it just turns out we both watch it. Merc and I never watch TV together.
3. House's character is Sherlock Holmes (get it? House - Holmes). Holmes, you will recall, was an addict too, who did not tolerate fools gladly and who had his own sidekick, Dr. Watson (Dr. Wilson-Dr. Watson).
4. Hugh Laurie does a pretty good American accent, doesn't he?
5. There are plenty of Docs with brains and arrogant, prickly personalities like House (minus the addiction). Rarely in private practice, though. House's bedside manner, or lack thereof, would not work. He is not Dr. Marcus Welby.

I dedicate this post on the great names in music to our music-loving pal Sippican:

Human culture developed during the past 50,000 years, despite homo sapiens being around for much longer (300-400,000 years).

One theory is that certain rapid climate changes during the most recent glaciation phase, known as the Dansgaard-Oeschger events, are what prompted the development of complex cultures.

Adaptability is a human strength. The Bug Community seems pretty good at that too.

Blowback to the NYT's Charles Blow (h/t, Insty):

One Cosmos comments in On Recovering the Point of Your Filmography Before it's Too Late:

"I once abided in the infinite, and all I got was this lousy belly button."

Our umbilicus, he says, is our reminder that we have already passed from one mode of being to another. One quote:

...just as our physical body bears the scar of its incompleteness and separation, so too does our soul bear its own version of this. For it also has a "hole" at its center that we may spend our lives trying to deny or fill in inappropriate and ultimately fruitless ways. But the hole is there for a reason. It is actually a theomorphic and theocentric hole, and there is no way to fill it unless one is properly oriented to the source of one's being. We are connected to the source of our being by a vertical channel, or OMbilicus, through which energies pass up and down, in and out -- we call these energies aspiration (?) and grace (?) (the latter of which must be in-spired to become operative).

He does not mention the term "re-birth," but that's part of what his post is about. I know that some of our readers think Gagdad Bob is an annoying nut, but I have found plenty of his transcendental imagery to be useful to me (including his metaphor of "verticality").

It is an affliction of middle age, especially if one has spent much time and effort in life preoccupied with the daily, practical, dutiful, material, and mundane - as what Gagdad calls a "Flatlander" - to find oneself asking "Is that all there is?" ...and to do all sorts of wacky and reckless things to deal with that question and with that emptiness, which things, indeed, bear no soul-nourishing fruit but are only empty distractions of the "How many holes does it take to fill the Albert Hall" sort.

Yet what a crazy question that is for me or anybody to ask - "Is that all there is?" - in the midst of this buzzing, blooming miraculous and frightening cosmos which is packed with road signs of all sorts (including our humble belly buttons), pointing to God.

OK, that's enough preaching and platitudes for one day at Maggie's.

Here's a real question: Is God female?

The medical/spiritual image of a human belly button is h/t Theo. That "Nexus" shirt is right on the button, as it were, isn't it?

Lowry's Cynicism and Change: How did Democrats fall so fast, and take perceptions of government down with them? begins thus:

Barack Obama used to call himself a “hopemonger,” mocking skeptics who thought the young presidential candidate was entirely too hopeful. No one would accuse him of that anymore. President Obama has done more than anyone else during the past two years to destroy trust in Washington.

Related from Murchison's The Democrats' Big Disconnect:

I heard my first warbler of the Spring early this morning, the zee zee zee of a Black and White high in a budding Maple.

I went to All About Birds to double check my birdsong memory (which was correct this time), I found that they link a new feature for migrating birds: a monthly map called eBird. Click on the month, and see where they are. I checked it for the Black and White. 

Re climate, from our commenter here:

After aeons of huge changes and cycles, the earth has suddenly developed an instability, and at the precise moment in time when the means of cheap computation to issue urgent warnings about that same instability became available.

An incredible stroke of luck that these two improbable things not only happened, but happened at the same time.

I asked Sipp what living in Maine was like. He did not reply to my email, but offers us a Maine Update, as of yesterday (with music, global warming snow, and deep-snark commentary about Life and Mozart).

I like the street. It's what I call "American." Hope my pal Sipp has a few fireplaces.

Down in more southern New England, I spent the weekend gardening while he spent hours producing that video, smoking Cuban ceegars and good Maine weed as the snowflakes fell, and sipping an ancient cognac by his cozy fireplace while the scent of osso bucco wafted from the kitchen where his sexy barefoot Goddess Mrs. Sipp was lovingly cookin' up a storm on the olde wood stove with nary a "Get off that damn computer and come help me, you lazy cyber-Yankee-would-be-Mozart-redneck."

It's on the Maggie's list of Best Maine Home-Made Videos of 2010.

"Bathers"

A friend of Maggie's is interested in urbanism websites, and found a good one.

This fellow spent a few years driving through all of the neighborhoods of St. Louis with camera. Good for him. Some neighborhoods are as bad as Detroit: Built St. Louis.

In my view, government construction of endless highways destroyed the American city - and the railroads. Why? I never heard of a huge national pro-highway Movement. Unless it came from...Detroit.

Iceland photo via Thompson, who links to more photos

AVI on parachurches

It's in the top ten most dangerous cities on the planet. h/t, Tiger.

Palin: “Mr. President, is a strong America a problem?”

Obama mocks me. That is not a respectful thing to do. IBD: Thanks for what?

The Limited-Government Big Tent 

VDH: How Could We Be So Stupid?

How the Left views Conservatives

Bill Clinton to America: Shut up and lie down

Afghanistan round up: Jules 

Still impressed by Gov. Christie

Like we often say:

...I can’t understand how these same people who distrust the power of large corporations tend to throw all their trust and faith into government.  The government tends to have more power (it has police and jails after all, not to mention sovereign immunity), is way larger, and the control mechanisms and incentives that supposedly might check bad behavior in governments seldom work.

Photo below via Vanderleun -

Revelation 5:11-14

5:11 Then I looked, and I heard the voice of many angels surrounding the throne and the living creatures and the elders; they numbered myriads of myriads and thousands of thousands,

5:12 singing with full voice, "Worthy is the Lamb that was slaughtered to receive power and wealth and wisdom and might and honor and glory and blessing!"

5:13 Then I heard every creature in heaven and on earth and under the earth and in the sea, and all that is in them, singing, "To the one seated on the throne and to the Lamb be blessing and honor and glory and might forever and ever!"

5:14 And the four living creatures said, "Amen!" And the elders fell down and worshiped.

It's something new and different this year: a trip down the Danube. Vienna, Ravensberg, Linz, etc. with the entire Bird Dog family crew and my excellent and adventurous in-laws.

Linzer torte. Sacher torte.

I have always been amazed by how the crazy Norsemen (Roger de Hauteville's gang of Normans) circled around the Med, into the Black Sea and way up the Danube. Where else did Barbarossa get his red beard? I think they just liked getting away from their families and being on boats.

Dark blue is +10 or above, dark red is -10 or below. Details at Ace:

Excellent essay from Fred Siegel at Commentary, The Anti-American Fallacy. (h/t, Insty). It is about "Down with the people!"

Adam Bellow's disenchantment with the Zabar's Left

Is it kiddie pron if the exhibitionist kids photo themselves?

JC Phillips: God in Our Classrooms

Church bells are insensitive. h/t, Moonbattery

The 50 most stressful colleges. If they think college is stressful, they should try real life.

Gay or not? Who cares? She looks slightly butch, tho. Politics is amusing.

It is Small Business Vs. Big Government

Seattle Tea-Party Lukewarm

What's wrong with Sousa? Everybody loves Sousa.

Steyn is hilarious about Canada. (the post on the left side of his page)

Can't wait for climate change legislation. These jerks want us to freeze.

When you tax a business, who pays?

"Economics is not always intuitive – and that is what makes it such a fascinating and important discipline. Take what economists call “incidence” – the study of who actually bears the burden of a particular tax. It is obvious enough that employees pay income tax. But it is much harder to actually work out who really ends up paying for other taxes; voters are often fooled into thinking that somebody else, usually big business, is being hit by higher taxes while in fact it is them who are picking up the tab, albeit in a way that is impossible to detect."

Who pays taxes on business? The shareholders and the consumers. As of 2002, 49% of Americans owned equities.

It's never too late for an Easter poem. I found this, the first Walcott poem I have read, at Mead's site.

Easter
(From Collected Poems 1948-1984.)

Anna, my daughter,
you have a black dog
that noses your heel,
selfless as a shadow;
here is a fable
about a black dog:
On the last sunrise
the shadow dressed with Him,
it stretched itself also—
they were two big men
with one job to do.
But life had been lent to one
only for this life.
They strode in silence toward
uncontradicting night.
The rats at the Last Supper
shared crumbs with their shadows,
the shadow of the bread
was shared by the bread;
when the candles lowered,
the shadow felt larger,
so He ordered it to leave;
He said where He was going
it would not be needed,
for there there’d be either
radiance or nothing.
It stopped when He turned
and ordered it home,
then it resumed the scent;
it felt itself stretching
as the sun grew small
like the eyes of the soldiers
receding into holes
under the petrified
serpents on their helmets;
the narrowing pupils
glinted like nailheads,
so before He lay back
it crept between the wood
as if it were the pallet
they had always shared;
it crept between the wood
and the flesh nailed to the wood
and it rose like a black flag
as the crossbeam hoisted
itself and the eyes
closed very slowly
extinguishing the shadow—
everything was nothing.
Then the shadow slunk away,
crawling low on its belly,
and it left there knowing
that never again
would He ever need it;
it reentered the earth,
it didn’t eat for three days,
it didn’t go out,
then it peeped out carefully
like a mole from its hole,
like a wolf after winter,
like a surreptitious serpent,
looking for those forms
that could give back its shape;
then it ran out when the bells
began making wide rings
and rings of radiance;
it keeps nosing for His shape
and it finds it again, in
the white echo of a pigeon
with its wings extended
like a shirt on a clothesline,
like a white shirt on Monday
dripping from a clothesline,
like the greeting of a scarecrow
or a man yawning
at the end of a field.

This site has indoor and outdoor mushroom-growing kits. Given the prices of fancy mushrooms, it makes sense. Too bad you cannot grow my favorites at home: Chanterelles and Porcinis.

Here's Have you seen the mushroom man?