Maggie's Farm

“You can get much further with a kind word and a gun than you can with a kind word alone.”

Al Capone, quoted at My Vast Right Wing Conspiracy in a piece on CaponeCare

Nina Anasiashvilli in Giselle:

High Water (for Charlie Patton)

Prof Ian Plimer on Global Warming: The Missing Science. (h/t, Samiz) Interview, Parts 1-3:

Dr X labels this photo:

Caruthersville, Missouri (Russell Lee).
Farm Security Administration client who will become a farm owner-operator under the tenant purchase program.

We posted Klavan's Why are Conservatives so Mean? video last week, which was very much based on de Tocqueville.

Samuel Gregg in the Phila Bulletin notes that this is the 150th anniversary of de T's death. A quote from his piece Despotism - The Soft Way:

For all their love of liberty, de Tocqueville stated, “Americans are so enamored of equality that they would rather be equal in slavery than unequal in freedom.”

Democracy, de Tocqueville argued, encouraged this fixation with equality because it requires people to relate to each other through the medium of democratic equality. This encourages us first to ignore, then to dislike, and finally to seek to reduce all differences that contradict this equality — particularly wealth disparities.

This is key to what de Tocqueville considered democracy’s tendency to “soft despotism.” Democratic despotism, de Tocqueville thought, would rarely be violent. Instead, it would amount to a Faustian bargain between the political class and the citizens. He predicted that “an immense protective power” might assume all responsibility for everyone’s happiness — provided this power remained “sole agent and judge of it.” This power would “resemble parental authority” and attempt to keep people “in perpetual childhood” by relieving them “from all the trouble of thinking and all the cares of living.”

Is America on the road to comfortable servility? “The American Republic,” de Tocqueville wrote, “will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public’s money.” Since Roosevelt’s New Deal, America has slowly drifted toward a political economy of soft despotism. Despite the Reagan Revolution, the trend-lines of government-spending and intervention have been in the anti-liberty direction. Entire constituencies of people now exist who regularly support politicians who promise that, in return for their votes, their entitlements (corporate-welfare, bailouts for those “too big to fail,” the old-fashioned welfare state, etc.) will be maintained and increased.

The problem is that governments can only tax-and-spend so much before incentives to wealth-creation (as opposed to wealth-transfers) begin disappearing. 

These folks waste no space on lawn, and seem to plant every spare inch except for grassy paths. But who does the weeding?

Via Mr. Free Market:

A few easy-growing salad (and I hate salad - rabbit food) greens for the garden that even I enjoy. I would never use these things in a mixed green salad, because you lose the flavor and character of the individual thing.

These are greens that you can plant every two or three weeks during the spring and summer, and harvest small and tender. Some of them will grow back after harvesting the leaves. They are often commercially grown hydroponically these days.

My favorite is Mache (aka Corn Salad), a sweet, tender mayonnaise-tasting leaf

Frisee, a member of the Chickory family. Bitter, tangy, crunchy: good to precede a game meal, grilled lamb, or steak. Never salad with the main course, in our view, unless it's a buffet, because salad dressing messes up the flavors of the main course.

Garden Cress, a member of the Mustard family. Sort of like Watercress.

Dandelion. Spicey with a bit of crunch.

Arugula. The strange kerosene flavor grows on you. Just try to ignore the fact that Liberals like it.

Is dating for adults only? Dating may be obsolete for the horny, thoughtless kids who just want to get into bed right away to accommodate their raging hormones and to find their animal pleasures, but married people still date all the time to maintain their relationships. From the piece on modern "relationships" (h/t, Insty)

"Going out on a date is a sort of ironic, obsolete type of thing," says 25-year-old Elizabeth Welsh, who graduated from college in 2005 and now lives in Boston. She says that among her friends, dating is a joke. "Going out on a date to dinner and a movie? It's so cliche — isn't that funny?"

 

Short growing season up here. Ours are just getting going, but I already have some blossoms. Please do not tell me what you have in South Carolina, Tennessee, and Missouri. Fact is, I do like it here despite the high taxes and the short growing season.

We do not even bother with the Beefsteaks and Beefmasters. No point to it. Lucky to get a decent harvest of them before the first frost. Big Boys work, though, and they are OK. Each one of my plants is a different variety. I like the pear-shaped mini yellows, the orange ones, the sweet millions, the Big Boys and the Big Girls, etc etc.

Of course I remember.

AVI wants some help remembering old 'Gansett commercials.

'Gansett, Knickerbocker, Rheingold, Piel's - I do recall them all. We are now just left with watery old Rolling Rock and the delicious Ballantine Ale - if you can find it.

The Maggie's Farm cafeteria refuses to serve fancy beers for breakfast or lunch, because beer ain't sposta be fancy (good stuff like Guiness is different - it's a meal, not a beer - and even more so if you stir one or two raw eggs into a pint for breakfast like they do in Ireland).

Wine is another matter.

A fun theory says modern humans are all about the home-cooked meal.

Make mine barbecued short ribs with sides of cheese grits and cucumber slaw, and a few Rolling Rocks.

The right side of the blogosphere is playing checkers, and the Democrats are playing Kill the Man With the Ball.

Roger de Hauteville, King of Sicily, at Maggie's Farm

For biographical reasons, this tune brings me back to the Kentucky Bluegrass. This is from 1991:

They say that fully healthy roses cannot be harmed by aphid infestations, and that may be true. However, we do not live in an ideal world, and it makes no sense to go out on strike until it appears.

We have abundant Rose Aphids this spring, but haven't seen them for the past few years.

We mix liquid dish soap at the rate of 1 tbsp/gallon in spray bottles, and spray the roses, especially their succulent tips, with it. Dead aphids by the thousands, without poisoning anything else. The surfactant suffocates the buggers. I brush off any Ladybugs first.

Mrs. BD claims that she is waterboarding them to death.

One treatment ought to do it. Best done before the first bloom. Had to do it today.

Psalm 139, a Psalm of David

¹ O LORD, you have searched me
       and you know me.

 ² You know when I sit and when I rise;
       you perceive my thoughts from afar.

 ³ You discern my going out and my lying down;
       you are familiar with all my ways.

 ⁴ Before a word is on my tongue
       you know it completely, O LORD.

 ⁵ You hem me in—behind and before;
       you have laid your hand upon me.

 ⁶ Such knowledge is too wonderful for me,
       too lofty for me to attain.

 ⁷ Where can I go from your Spirit?
       Where can I flee from your presence?

 ⁸ If I go up to the heavens, you are there;
       if I make my bed in the depths, ^[a] you are there.

 ⁹ If I rise on the wings of the dawn,
       if I settle on the far side of the sea,

 ¹⁰ even there your hand will guide me,
       your right hand will hold me fast.

 ¹¹ If I say, "Surely the darkness will hide me
       and the light become night around me,"

 ¹² even the darkness will not be dark to you;
       the night will shine like the day,
       for darkness is as light to you.

 ¹³ For you created my inmost being;
       you knit me together in my mother's womb.

 ¹⁴ I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made;
       your works are wonderful,
       I know that full well.

 ¹⁵ My frame was not hidden from you
       when I was made in the secret place.
       When I was woven together in the depths of the earth,

 ¹⁶ your eyes saw my unformed body.
       All the days ordained for me
       were written in your book
       before one of them came to be.

 ¹⁷ How precious to ^[b] me are your thoughts, O God!
       How vast is the sum of them!

 ¹⁸ Were I to count them,
       they would outnumber the grains of sand.
       When I awake,
       I am still with you.

 ¹⁹ If only you would slay the wicked, O God!
       Away from me, you bloodthirsty men!

 ²⁰ They speak of you with evil intent;
       your adversaries misuse your name.

 ²¹ Do I not hate those who hate you, O LORD,
       and abhor those who rise up against you?

 ²² I have nothing but hatred for them;
       I count them my enemies.

 ²³ Search me, O God, and know my heart;
       test me and know my anxious thoughts.

 ²⁴ See if there is any offensive way in me,
       and lead me in the way everlasting.

Another quote from the John Rawls book review we linked this week:

What makes belief in inviolable or natural rights reasonable? It is not enough to argue that each individual possesses an inalienable inviolability because all are, as Rawls holds in both A Theory of Justice and Political Liberalism, free and equal persons. Or that our inalienable inviolability flows from our moral capacity to form and act on rational life plans. Neither our natural freedom and equality nor our capacity to form, choose, and act on rational life plans rules out that conquest and dominion over others represents the best use of our freedom.
When all is said and done, the mature Rawls’s epic intellectual labors do not illuminate this fundamental perplexity. Indeed, those labors obscure the perplexity, even as the difficulties are diminished — though they are far from overcome — by the young Rawls’s theological doctrine. Inasmuch as it conceives of man as in but not entirely of the natural world, and possessing a spiritual dimension or soul for which he is not responsible but which is of ultimate worth and allows him to transcend determination by nature, the young Rawls’s doctrine fortifies a liberalism whose guiding thought is that of an inalienable inviolability possessed by all individuals.
Such considerations provide more than ample reason for scholars to vigorously open or reopen the question of Rawlsian liberalism’s — and the larger liberal tradition’s — religious roots. 

Minute Maid commercial (h/t, RW Nation)

Baboon encounter (h/t Ace). The cheerful laughter is the best part:

These Dartmouth kids had fun creating the Young Con anthem:

We linked this fine brief talk during the week, but here's the YouTube if you missed it:

It is anniversary season for many. I recommend some nice diamonds for the gal - especially if she hasn't let herself go because she is sick and tired of you and your dirty, stinky socks, your selfishness, your unromantic, piggish ways, your roving eyes, your cocktails and ceegars, your crappy personality, and your inadequate income.

It's a husband's duty and pleasure to remain manly, strong, productive and firm (even if it requires the humiliation of the little blue pills) and to never show physical or emotional frailty.

It's a wife's duty and pleasure to remain lovely, cheerful, supportive, feminine and desirable, and to never nag or complain (and to use that estrogen stuff if you're over the hill).

Anything less is a de facto rejection, and rejection is deeply hurtful and damaging to the soul.