Maggie's Farm

Luke 5:1-11

5:1 Once while Jesus was standing beside the lake of Gennesaret, and the crowd was pressing in on him to hear the word of God,

5:2 he saw two boats there at the shore of the lake; the fishermen had gone out of them and were washing their nets.

5:3 He got into one of the boats, the one belonging to Simon, and asked him to put out a little way from the shore. Then he sat down and taught the crowds from the boat.

5:4 When he had finished speaking, he said to Simon, "Put out into the deep water and let down your nets for a catch."

5:5 Simon answered, "Master, we have worked all night long but have caught nothing. Yet if you say so, I will let down the nets."

5:6 When they had done this, they caught so many fish that their nets were beginning to break.

5:7 So they signaled their partners in the other boat to come and help them. And they came and filled both boats, so that they began to sink.

5:8 But when Simon Peter saw it, he fell down at Jesus' knees, saying, "Go away from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man!"

5:9 For he and all who were with him were amazed at the catch of fish that they had taken;

5:10 and so also were James and John, sons of Zebedee, who are partners with Simon. Then Jesus said to Simon, "Do not be afraid; from now on you will be catching people."

5:11 When they had brought their boats to shore, they left everything and followed him.

In the (now, sadly, defunct) New York Sun:

Given the nearly total absence of fanfare, you could be excused for not knowing that this was the quincentenary of Andrea Palladio's birth. Generally it is a kind of condescension to treat the great cultural figures of the past as though, in some sense, they were, or needed to be, our contemporaries. And yet a respectable case could be made that, of all the architects who lived before the 20th century, few were as influential as Palladio (1508-80) or came closer, in the arc of their reputation, to being what we would now call a "starchitect."

Read the whole thing.

Here's Wiki on Palladio. Below is a photo of Villa Capra, aka Villa Rotunda, in Vicenza.

Story by Alexander in the WaPo. One quote:

...even with Democratic fortunes on the wane, leading liberals insist that they have almost nothing to learn from conservatives. Many Democrats describe their troubles simply as a PR challenge, a combination of conservative misinformation -- as when Obama charges that critics of health-care reform are peddling fake fears of a "Bolshevik plot" -- and the country's failure to grasp great liberal accomplishments. "We were so busy just getting stuff done . . . that I think we lost some of that sense of speaking directly to the American people about what their core values are," the president told ABC's George Stephanopoulos in a recent interview. The benighted public is either uncomprehending or deliberately misinformed (by conservatives).

This condescension is part of a liberal tradition that for generations has impoverished American debates over the economy, society and the functions of government -- and threatens to do so again today, when dialogue would be more valuable than ever.

Liberals have dismissed conservative thinking for decades, a tendency encapsulated by Lionel Trilling's 1950 remark that conservatives do not "express themselves in ideas but only in action or in irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas." During the 1950s and '60s, liberals trivialized the nascent conservative movement. Prominent studies and journalistic accounts of right-wing politics at the time stressed paranoia, intolerance and insecurity, rendering conservative thought more a psychiatric disorder than a rival.

Read the whole thing. For many, we think, Liberalism is a matter of social fashion; conformist, self-congratulatory, conspicuously virtuous and "open-minded" (not that I think it is virtuous or open-minded at all - how many Liberals check out Maggie's for fresh views on things?). It says that they aren't rubes, but rather "caring," sophisticated, and bien pensant. Part of the crowd, acceptable. Nice. 

I don't think that we Maggie's Farmers are morons or uncaring even though we do like our guns and our Bibles and our Constitution and our ceegars...and lots of other things.

I also think that the condescension often passes over into raw hate, as Dr. Bliss discussed recently. Related, see Liberal Hate Speech at Am. Thinker.

Photo is Lionel Trilling, a neurotic Liberal who also had interesting things to say about literature.

It's not what you think it is.

I have never been disappointed in The Teaching Company, but I have never enjoyed a series as much as Prof. Sutherland's Classics of British Literature. It is college as it should be.

As with any excellent humanities prof, you learn as much about thinking about life as you do about the topic at hand. His soft brogue is pleasant too.

Today, I am listening to his Chaucer lectures. Time flies by on ye olde elliptical machine.

The American is the Englishman left to himself.

Alexis de Tocqueville, in a piece about de Tocqueville at Chicago Boyz

"Pleasing your enemies does not turn them into friends."

Who knows who first stated this ancient truism, but I snipped it from Kate.

Droll Yankees produces many good, squirrel-defeating bird feeders. They have the Whipper, the Dipper, the Flipper and the Tipper. I am trying the Tipper because it doesn't need batteries.

Yes, I always throw a few handfulls of seed on the ground each morning for the squirrels and the ground-feeders.

I visited Venice for a few days many years ago, and do not feel driven to return - it's a giant tourist trap with a pickpocket team on every block - except that I wouldn't mind catching the Venice Regatta in August:

On further thought, I wouldn't mind getting a little more experience with Venetian cooking. All I know about it is Risi e Bisi, which doesn't look like much but which is killer delicious when Mrs. BD makes it.

Here's When I Paint My Masterpiece live with The Band in 1971:

A new documentary, coming out in May. It's about applying to charter schools. Looks good.

The website of the producers has The Education Constitution.

Email from a friend:

One of our institutional equity market strategists reacted to Pres O's proposal to tax banks to recover TARP money. Everyone knows the the gov't is net ahead on its bank investments, but here are the actual returns (costs or benefits to taxpayers)  as calculated by my colleague:

            Bank bailouts:                + 16.9 billion profit to date

            AIG bailout:                  - $30.4 billion projected loss

            Automaker bailout:         - $30.5 billion projected loss

            Homeowner bailouts:      - $50 billion projected subsidy

Looks to me that the logic leads us to tax homeowners.  Ooooooooops!  I just realized that he is proposing that, too.

Thinking creatively about medical insurance. He says:

It was pretty crazy for Congress to decide under McCarran-Ferguson that the insurance business should be balkanized into 50 state markets.

Nowhere is the craziness more severe than in New England, where state insurance pools are tiny and health-insurance and health-care costs are the highest in the nation. Even a medium-sized state, say North Carolina (population 9.2 million), would largely escape this problem.

At Minding the Campus. One quote:

In his first and longest chapter, "The Problem of General Education," Menand takes us through the historical evolution of Columbia University's core curriculum, one that he and most fans of rigorous, highly structured general education take as America's finest model of the genre. But then he goes on to document how his own campus, Harvard, and most other elite universities disdain such a highly specified approach in favor of "distribution requirements" which leave the selection of general education content largely to the student. One senses that Menand favors (or at least approves of) a Columbia-style core curriculum but seems to be resigned to it being an anachronistic outlier: "the problem with general education is that it is perceived as an attempt to impose on general education a mission - call it 'preparation for life' - whose rationale liberal education has traditionally defined itself in opposition to. This is why ....liberal arts faculty want to own general education and to have little to do with it at the same time."

Two books recently recommended by readers:

The Proper Care and Feeding of Husbands

The Giver

Considering a trip to the Dolomites and the Veneto this August, with visits to Venice (not again!), Padua, Verona, Castelrotto (Kastelruth), etc. Apparently the people in the Dolomites do not really think of themselves as Italian (they had been part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire until WW1, and Mussolini Italianized the names).

Found out there are many villages up there in the Dolomites where the people mostly speak Ladin (not to be confused with Ladino). Several million people in the Veneto speak Venetian, too. People in Castelrotto speak German.

Photos below of Castelrotto, which looks more alpine-German or Swiss than Italian. It's the south Tyrol:

An education is like exhibiting good manners. If you pretend to have them, it's the same as having them.

Sippican

At Drudge:

Backdoor taxes to hit middle class...
Largest-ever federal payroll to hit 2.15 million employees!

It's been a sad 15 years without Calvin and Hobbes.

Found a Wooly Bear caterpillar curled up cozy in the wood pile the other day. I carefully placed him under a hunk of bark in the woods. I have loved these critters since I used to find them with my Mom as a young kid.

They contain a cryoprotectant that keeps them vital during their winter hibernation. When it warms up, they will wake up and eat like crazy, pupate, and become a tiger moth - the Isabella Moth.

Miss Megyn Kelly. Indeed she does. And brains, too.

During the 1700s and 1800s the Brits scoured the planet to find cool places to visit (or to make money). Amelia Edwards was one of them, and she wrote about it. It was the era when, if you saw a couple of ladies riding side-saddle in the desert or the mountains, the natives would think "They must be English."

From Amazon:

British writer and Egyptologist AMELIA EDWARDS (1831-1892) was a published writer by age seven. Among her books most beloved by readers past and present are the novels Barbara's History (1864) and Lord Brackenbury (1880), and the travelogue A Thousand Miles Up the Nile (1877).

She wrote mysteries too.

We have in hand her book about her trip to the Dolomites: Untrodden Peaks and Unfrequented Valleys. 

Her other books here.