Maggie's Farm

Via Coyote, who links to more of them.

Your math courses are one long IQ test. We use math courses to figure out who is really smart.

Prof. Mankiw

Bob and Willie: Pancho and Lefty, at Nelson's 60th Birthday Party

Sunday is the bicentenary of the death of our beloved Joseph Haydn. There is a good appreciation of him at Brussels Journal.

It's a good weekend to spend some time with him.

A planted space (aka "a garden") isn't a "space" without the sense of, a suggestion of, or the reality of, enclosure - regardless of scale; whether the scale is a 20X20' herb or rose garden or a 50-100 acre meadow bounded by woods or windbreaks. Just like a picture wants a frame.

I think that comfortable feeling is deeply embedded in the human soul, and it is the reason garden designers speak of outdoor "rooms." I kinda prefer designing or thinking about outdoor "hallways" - the paths which lead from space to space. Hallways, though, must lead to rooms or they have no meaning and no purpose.

Andrew Jackson: American Lion by Newsweek editor Jon Meacham.

An imperfect but absorbing book about the Presidency of an interesting American during interesting times.

The Tennessean Andrew Jackson was a tough guy, but a loving, emotionally sensitive and volatile guy. A General and a hard-nosed pol - not a philosopher.

“If you want to succeed, double your failure rate.”

Tom Watson, via our link last weekend

The national fusion facility will be dedicated this week. Nobody knows whether it will work. I hope it does. Endless fountains of clean energy sounds good to me, as does any free lunch.

This should be a huge scandal, if true.

It's all about me! Kristol on Obama's character and the presidency.

Related: Obama and the I word. Roger Simon

Princeton reinstates tough grading standards. Let's hope it's a trend.

MIT panics despite global cooling. Al Gore continues to panic about his investments in indulgences. Meanwhile, the Greenies are becoming subjects of humor on TV.

Seven bad ideas for medical reform: Cato

Krugman: Blame Repubs for California's mess. Huh?

Did you read the hilarious story of the Europeans who went to join the Taliban in Paki?

The tyranny of our FICO scores is just a measure of our addiction to credit.

Jules on the O:

...power hates a vacuum.

Put another way, geopolitics hates a wienie. So does history.

OK, so is Obama another Jimmy Carter? We get to watch this history unfold before our eyes, and it seems to unfold a quicker these days. My quick take. Not exactly. What we’re seeing is really a more aggressive Carterism.

Indeed, the O's manhood is being tested all over right now. Norks threaten military strike on S. Korea

Rotterdam update: It's a Muslim city now.

Phony grassroots for Health Care

The death of literary studies. Protein:

To return to my original point, where has the pleasure of the text gone? It’s been sublimated into pleasure at one’s own superior ability to wrest unauthorized meaning out of the text by passing it through an ideological meatgrinder. Congratulations! You’re now ready to deliver papers to at any number of conferences with clever titles about “firing the canon.”

What if Bush had...

Related: Media bias, golf edition:

Imagine what the media would be saying if John McCain were president and he didn’t cancel his golf game on the day North Korea launched missiles and tested a nuclear bomb.  They’d roast him. 

The attempt to link the recession with medical costs was everywhere last week. Makes no sense.

Quoted at Thompson:

Those who prize social unity and order will tend to believe that people’s deepest feelings and beliefs should be accorded respect. But respect for ideas is never an entitlement. It depends on their intellectual resilience in public debate. No free society can treat people’s deepest beliefs as sacrosanct. They are fair game for hostile and derisive criticism. That is how knowledge advances. […]

No one has a right to the protection of feelings. If politics concerns itself with mental states, there is no limit to how far legislation can intrude on people’s lives. The task of progressive politics is to protect liberty, not least by attacking the accumulation of bad ideas. Yet to many on the Left, the individual, inquiring mind is of far less importance than the representation of designated groups.

 50 F last night, with cold rain. Not beach weather yet. But it's always beach weather at Theo's place.

In an essay of the above title, Will Wilkinson compares David Brooks with Glenn Beck, and wonders what "Conservative" means in actual policy terms.

I think it's well-worth thinking about, if only for fun. One quote:

... individualism works. As Brooks himself notes, individualistic societies tend to be wealthier than collectivist ones. And studies show that individualistic societies, which emphasize choice and personal fulfillment, tend to produce happier people than do collectivist societies, which are anchored by conformity, honor, and inherited obligations. By almost any measure, individualism is a success.

So does Glenn Beck win this round by a knockout? That would be funny—but also a misreading of the Right’s populist persuaders.

Why? Because the “individualism” of latter-day disciples of Goldwater and Reagan has a strange way of disappearing as soon as they stop arguing about marginal tax rates. Glenn Beck is no different. Scratch him and you’ll find a vehement nationalist whose fiery cable gospel breathes populist life into David Brooks’ abstract collectivist theology.

Read the whole thing. What we're talking about here is where abstract ideology and abstract terms and abstract rallying cries like "individualism" and "freedom" meet reality in the form of politics.

Me? I am a small-scale collectivist (family, church, village, charities), and decreasingly collectivist as power and money move further away from my personal experience and purview, and into the hands of people who pursue personal (mainly careerist) goals and games with money and power they have taken from me.

Barrister comment:  I had read that Brooks piece. Wilkinson rightly notes "... Brooks goes wrong when he leaps from the biological facts of life to the “illusion” of individual agency and the desirability of a more communitarian culture." In fact, we view Individualism with its Judeo-Christian-Greek underpinnings as one of the, if not the most remarkable, contribution to Western civilization, and a giant advance for the human spirit on the external control cultures which preceded them. That revolutionary individualism said that a man can be his own master, that he need not be mastered or be a serf, and that the sacred spark in everyone requires this. Socialists, Communists, Liberal Communitarians, Totalitarians, Dictators, Mussolini-style Fascists, Kings of the Jungle and Kings of France are all communitarians who place the individual second to the whole.

Editor reply to The B: Thanks for that, B. By coincidence, but I was working yesterday on an entirely non-political post about ant colonies, and your comment seems relevant to that. 

Yesterday:

Journalism: From profession (?) to commodity

CSI and friends with benefits. Bad news.

WalMart Auntie of the Year

Waxman: I know nothing. I rely on the scientists. Maggie's readers understand the issues better than he does.

California voters may be forcing their pols to act like adults. Wow. In 8 hours I could reduce their budget 25% with a Sharpie pen and have no meaningful impact on life in that gigantic and pleasant state. Related: The press was totally on board with the failed scare campaign.

Brit banks rebel against Obama tax plans. Why should foreign tax collection be their job?

What nations are the worst polluters? More on PT Obarnum at Dino

Kevin Jackson:

I received an email from a black man who was attempting to convince me that, though I am completely black, I have no experience growing up black in America.  The bulk of his theory on my ‘blackness' was based on the fact that I constantly lampoon Obama in my blog. He counseled me to embrace Obama, as Obama could help me to "rediscover the black experience."  He warned that "whites would never see me, as I see me."

Touting Obama as the poster child for blackness is a ridiculous notion.  Further, the idea that Obama can teach me "blackness" is equally ridiculous.

Steele says MSM didn't vet Obama because of race. I disagree. They didn't want to vet a Lefty. They do colonoscopies on black conservatives.

Parents objecting to having gay propaganda shoved down their kids' throats at age 5

I knew nothing about Gypsy culture and Marime. h/t, AVI

Youtube: A very brief History of Weed. h/t, Thompson. Pot is America's #1 cash crop. Sheesh. I never figgered out what was so great about it, compared to beer.

Ths brief ad by CatholicVote gave Kim goosebumps

Powerline: Obama's incoherence on detainees:

Perhaps the solution is to release the dangerous detainees and then follow and kill them.

Great idea. Could make for good fun at the local rifle range, but that would be mean, and Honi soit qui mal y pense.

Dr. Sanity is not impressed by the O:

Understand that I listen to people for a living. I hear various degrees of honesty, sincerity, and real emotional pain being expressed on a regular basis. I also hear some of the most self-serving, dishonest and completely irresponsible utterings that it is possible to imagine. Yet, in my professional career, I have to freely admit that I have heard nothing like the deceitful and self-aggrandizing utterings of Barack Obama, which seem to get more and more pathological with every speech he gives. His most recent scam, in the National Archives in front of a fake copy of the U.S. Constitution just about takes the cake. This is not irony, so much as it is the grandiosity of tyranny.

Besides his smarmy condescension, what bugs me most about listening to the O is how self-referential he is. He never just talks about a thing: he always talks about himself and the thing. Perhaps he believes his hype.

Related: A forensic lit expert asks Who wrote Dreams of my Father? Forensic lit sounds cool, sort of like handwriting analysis on a larger scale.

Reader LS took these photos in FL last week. Can you name them?

Caltech physicist Leonard Mlodinow wrote McGyver scripts. He discusses chance, risk, history and hindsight in an interview. One quote:

Some people take solace in an understanding of their environment, others don’t. For me, an understanding of the role played by chance has taught me that one important factor in success is under our control: the number of at-bats, the number of chances taken, the number of opportunities seized. As someone who has taken risks in life I find it a comfort to know that even a coin weighted toward failure will sometimes land on success. Or, as I.B.M. pioneer Thomas Watson said, “If you want to succeed, double your failure rate.”

Pentecost, marking the end of the Easter season, is next Sunday.

There isn't much Taize music on YouTube, but here is a bit of the Taize chant Bless The Lord, My Soul:

A reader took this photo in the West Village yesterday afternoon:

Surely all agree that Hunt for Red October is the best movie of the past 20 years.

The poll is "Who is your favorite character in this movie?"  (in which the casting is astonishingly good - Brit quality, and in which the detail and subtlety of the acting is endlessly interesting. Just the way the head of the Russian Navy drops his teacup, echoing the spilled tea when Ramius kills the KGB guy)

We aren't going to bother with that voting software. Just let us know whether you are able to decide.

Mrs. BD votes for Bart Mancuso, after agonizing over the cynically amusing pol Jeffrey Pelt, the Russian Ambassador, and, of course, Captain Ramius. I vote for Jonesie, but Alec Baldwin, one must admit, was fantastic as Jack Ryan. As was Fred Thompson as the Admiral, and James Earl Jones, and ... everybody else in this wonderfully engaging movie which holds up well after many, many viewings.

How to get your spouse to quit overspending. h/t, Marginal Rev

How to survive a job you hate. Many links.

If China, India and Russia don't care about CO2, what good can we do?

Dying malls and ghost town malls. Good riddance.

Roast baby Neanderthal? Why not?

You might not like ObamaCare

"The Germans could not kill Walter Gibson. But Britain’s National Health Service was up to the task."

Does Colin Powell belong in the Repub Party? Of course. All welcome, in my view. I am a Big Tenter. I think of us Conservative/Libertarians as just a part of that Party. Party factions come and go, rise and fall, over time. That's why it works.

America's Christless Christianity.

Krugman: Bush destroyed our food. Is he insane? I mean, of course Bush tried to destroy our food. That's what evil, sadistic Repubs do for fun, right?

What's with Jihad in the Bronx?

President Above-It-All. Rich Lowry. Yes, a figurehead. Riehl sees him as a weak man with a big image. Well, he has never done anything difficult yet, but he has his chances now.

Joe Biden: "I'm out of the loop." It's a life-long affliction. I feel sorry for the guy.

Jules was pretty amusing about the Great Debate.

Voters sick of bailouts.

Has America really turned Left? Neoneo

Let's legalize counterfeiting. Brilliant!

Stolen from Samiz:

"I think in the U.S. and in most of the world the public understanding of economics is abysmal. But it’s one thing not to understand something. I don’t understand brain surgery. It’s another to want to form policies on things on which you are ignorant. I hear the wonderful phrase “I want to make a difference” when it comes to policy. I would be horrified if I wanted to make a difference in brain surgery. The only difference is more people would die on the operating table. The only encouraging thing about public reaction to the crisis is that going by polls citizens seem to have more misgivings about some of these policies than politicians or the media. Still, though there have been studies that indicate the New Deal prolonged the Great Depression by years, what is also clear is it was enormously popular. FDR was elected four straight times, and more than once without ever having brought unemployment down to single digits. An economic disaster does not necessarily mean a political disaster. If we could raise the average level of understanding of economics to what Alfred Marshall had in 1890, the vast majority of politicians would be voted out of office."

Thomas Sowell

We have had some mischievous, or possibly malevolent, hobgoblins in our servers for the past couple of days. Our apologies.

In my view, we need to call Ghostbusters. However, we are too cheap to call them.

We will do our best to keep stuff coming, despite the goblins and despite the holiday weekend, with its holiday which is the most sacred secular holiday of the year.

Remember, you never know what you will find at Maggie's - even if it's nothing more than "Cannot connect to server."