Maggie's Farm

The GOP's woman problem. A friend of mine says it's because women expect their husbands to dump them for younger gals, and hope the gummint will fill in.

So sorry that I made a little joke.

Sambo brand? Bigotry of the Left

Father Cutie's story. What do you expect with a name like that?

Bad depression. Give me ECT, anytime, if it will help with the Obama Blues.

Semi-related: Politicians as shrinks. Gimme a break.

Pope walks out. Good Pope.

Kami is back.

Woops. Ocean warming (?) doesn't fit the computer models. But does it fit "the narrative"?

Carbon-free sugar? What's the point? All food is full of carbon, and so are we. We are what is termed a carbon-based life form. Carbon is a good foundation for tons of cool molecules, hence Organic Chemistry. It means carbon-based chemistry.

Semi-related: A boycott of US Treasury vehicles. I would not drive one.

A push-back at the O's college speeches

Big-time debt. What for? Oh, I almost forgot. It's not their money.

Whitestone Bridge to LaGuardia, Manhattan in the distance:

Nice early morning Tennessee thunderstorm with cheerful tornadoes buzzing around:

Nashville skyline, 6 AM:

Biscuits and sausage gravy: one of the reasons to fly south for brekkie. Nectar of the Gods:

 Wish we had this kind of delivery up here:

More Tennessee breakfast:

This is a smoking establishment. Smoke and drink and enjoy life and raise hell with live music in freedom from the nannies:

The Dylanologist has commented here that Nashville lost any hope of being a charming city when it bought into the urban renewal craze in the 60s and erased its history, replacing it with parking garages, car dealerships, strip malls, and other forms of true urban blight. When civil rights leaders in the 70s referred to urban renewal as "urban removal," they were correct: it eliminated residential neighborhoods from the downtowns (see Bridgeport, CT too and, by stark contrast, Savannah, GA and Manhattan - where gentrified old "slums" are some of the most desirable places to live in, eg Chelsea, aka Hell's Kitchen), leaving those renewed downtowns as dangerous ghost towns at night and forcing people into the suburbs and into their cars. (The replacement of streetcars with busses is a whole, interesting story in itself. Maybe the Dyl will take it on if he has some time.)

I think it's fun to find some of the few remaining reminders of how pleasant Nashville once was before genius government planners with their theories, bulldozers and wrecking balls got to work:

A close-up:

Isn't a popular definition of insanity that of repeating the same behavior while expecting a different result?

Boston plans a "little dig." Good grief.

Our brains are a cemetery of words. There is no way except with inner vision to explain how you feel. Thoughtless. Be careful or you will think with words. That's why I can do ballet. I can't write, I can't even spell. I am made in silence. As soon as I start speaking, I stop seeing.

George Balanchine

I know that Mother's Day was invented by Hallmark to sell greeting cards but, now that it exists, the child or husband who neglects it is in deep trouble. My wife (and my own Mom too, self excepted - believe myself to be the Black Sheep) produced some fairly OK kiddies.

Here's the new garden path you always wanted, wifey. Looped around my prize peach tree. Perhaps I did lead you down the garden path, but if you don't want my peaches, baby, don't shake my tree.

Yes, left front is a Harry Lauder's Walking Stick. Cool plant. A dwarfed, sterile, and contorted Hazel or Filbert, which looks most interesting in winter when you can see its strange shape.

Reposted -

The Jonathan Fairbanks house in Dedham, MA. 1636. Those are the bones of the basic center-hall Colonial. The slope of that roof is great for either snow or rain.

 Multiculturally-sensitive though he may be, Sippican Cottage is omitting pueblos and phony old houses in St. Augustine from his thorough research on the topic. He means real wood-framed houses.

It's easy to detect the core of the farmhouse, before all of the additions and extensions.

What a young nation we are.

1 John 4:7-21

⁷Dear friends, let us love one another, for love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God. ⁸Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love. ⁹This is how God showed his love among us: He sent his one and only Son into the world that we might live through him. ¹⁰This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins. ¹¹Dear friends, since God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. ¹²No one has ever seen God; but if we love one another, God lives in us and his love is made complete in us.

 ¹³We know that we live in him and he in us, because he has given us of his Spirit. ¹⁴And we have seen and testify that the Father has sent his Son to be the Savior of the world. ¹⁵If anyone acknowledges that Jesus is the Son of God, God lives in him and he in God. ¹⁶And so we know and rely on the love God has for us.
      God is love. Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in him. ¹⁷In this way, love is made complete among us so that we will have confidence on the day of judgment, because in this world we are like him. ¹⁸There is no fear in love. But perfect love drives out fear, because fear has to do with punishment. The one who fears is not made perfect in love.

 ¹⁹We love because he first loved us. ²⁰If anyone says, "I love God," yet hates his brother, he is a liar. For anyone who does not love his brother, whom he has seen, cannot love God, whom he has not seen. ²¹And he has given us this command: Whoever loves God must also love his brother.

From a Vandy graduation yesterday. I saw no signs directing folks towards tofu and organic water -

The Law School:

 Tent, Lily Turf, and daisies -

If you have never been there, it's a nice leafy, parklike 300-acre campus in the city, but unfortunately it lacks a large open central gathering place: no landscape core like a town green, or like the Sheep Meadow in Central Park. Olmstead would have designed a serenely dramatic psychological center to it all.

and it has tons of gigantic Magnolias:

and plenty of other good scenery, as the South always has (view from the front was even better. She had that pouty but cool look that said "I doubt you are worthy of talking to me, but I know you want to and I know what you're thinking. F- off."):

 The newly-minted and doubtless rapacious young lawyers:

No skimping. Mountains of strawberries with accompanying mountains of confectioner's sugar - and too much champagne to keep up with the rate of serving. You just had to man up and do your best. As I said to the servers, "Can't let it go to waste. Think of all the thirsty people in Arabia."

Thanks to the good old New Yorker Commodore Vanderbilt, a very interesting fellow, for all he did to improve the world with the riches he just could not help but to accumulate due to his energy and his entrepreneurial and savvy spirit back in the days before income taxes:

As we enter graduation season, it's time to re-post P.J. O'Rourke's 2008 Commencement speech. His first piece of advice:

1. Go out and make a bunch of money!

Here we are living in the world's most prosperous country, surrounded by all the comforts, conveniences and security that money can provide. Yet no American political, intellectual or cultural leader ever says to young people, "Go out and make a bunch of money." Instead, they tell you that money can't buy happiness. Maybe, but money can rent it.

There's nothing the matter with honest moneymaking. Wealth is not a pizza, where if I have too many slices you have to eat the Domino's box. In a free society, with the rule of law and property rights, no one loses when someone else gets rich.

Read the whole thing.

Fire and Ice

Some say the world will end in fire;
Some say in ice.
From what I've tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To know that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.

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h/t, Chequerboard

The only reward of virtue is virtue.

Ralph Waldo Emerson (h/t, Vanderleun)

Stanley Fish reviews Terry Eagleton's Reason, Faith, and Revolution. A quote:

Progress, liberalism and enlightenment — these are the watchwords of those, like Hitchens, who believe that in a modern world, religion has nothing to offer us. Don’t we discover cures for diseases every day? Doesn’t technology continually extend our powers and offer the promise of mastering nature? Who needs an outmoded, left-over medieval superstition?

Eagleton punctures the complacency of these questions when he turns the tables and applies the label of “superstition” to the idea of progress. It is a superstition — an idol or “a belief not logically related to a course of events” (American Heritage Dictionary) — because it is blind to what is now done in its name: “The language of enlightenment has been hijacked in the name of corporate greed, the police state, a politically compromised science, and a permanent war economy,” all in the service, Eagleton contends, of an empty suburbanism that produces ever more things without any care as to whether or not the things produced have true value.

Kingston Farm, Concord, MA (h/t, And Rightly So). One heck of a fine barn/garage deal.

"I was the shadow of the waxwing slain
By the falls azure in the windowpane;
I was the smudge of ashen fluff -
and I lived on..." 

I read Nabokov's Pale Fire when it came out. I've read all of Nabokov, or almost all. None of his butterfly texts. 

From Mary McCarthy's 1962 review:

Pale Fire is a Jack-in-the-box, a Faberge gem, a clockwork toy, a chess problem, an infernal machine, a trap to catch reviewers, a cat-and-mouse game, a do-it-yourself novel. It consists of a 999-line poem of four cantos in heroic couplets together with an editor's preface, notes, index, and proof-corrections. When the separate parts are assembled, according to the manufacturer's directions, and fitted together with the help of clues and cross-references, which must be hunted down as in a paper-chase, a novel on several levels is revealed, and these "levels" are not the customary "levels of meaning" of modernist criticism but planes in a fictive space, rather like those houses of memory in medieval mnemonic science, where words, facts, and numbers were stored till wanted in various rooms and attics, or like the Houses of astrology into which the heavens are divided.

It's part of wisdom to know the limits of one's knowledge (and the limits of one's wisdom, if that is possible).

When I post a photo of a rug I like, aka a floor mat, my taste and lack of expertise are invariably corrected by one or another rug pro who likes Maggie's. And rightly so. I am the kind of person who welcomes correction and education even as it injures my fragile self-esteem and self-worth.

But this time I am determined to show something to wow the experts: this highly-collectible museum quality semi-antique 3X5 Barbie rug.

Now that is a special rug. It's the Barbie 50th Anniversary Rug! The sensitive rendering of Barbie permits the depth of her wonderful personality to shine through. The vibrant, sensual pink is very special, as are the beautifully stylized background flowers.

Any person of discriminating taste would be proud to have this carpet in their parlor.

The words of Blind Willie McTell begin:

Seen the arrow on the doorpost
Saying, "This land is condemned
All the way from New Orleans
To Jerusalem."
I traveled through East Texas
Where many martyrs fell
And I know no one can sing the blues
Like Blind Willie McTell.

Dylan on piano:

I just had to highlight Dr. Clouthier's site today. She must write fast, or have no time to take care of patients. From her today:

Who owns the Republican brand?

It begins:

It’s not Republicans. And it’s not Rush Limbaugh–much as Obama, his minions and the press would like to paint it so.

I’ve got bad news: The opposition owns the Republican brand. Oh yes, they do. Democrats define Republicans and the Republicans accept the definition by operating from their false premises.

How do I know Republicans are owned by the Left? Because the Republican message is consistently negative and defensive: “I’m not mean.” ” We don’t believe that.” “I’m not extremist like them“. And by them, Republicans are defining themselves against the press-Obama-grassroots caricature of Republicans. In doing so, the Republicans with a national voice diminish their own party.

All of her stuff is good.

The Slipstream Media: A New American Network. A quote from Vanderleun's essay:

This is the first in a series of articles on how to go about building a new American media; a media composed of newspapers, television, radio, film, music, publishing, and the multi-media capabilities of the Internet; an American media open to all and founded on the five bedrock principles of “Duty, Honor, Country, Truth, God.”

When dinosaurs die large opportunities for growth bloom within the ecosystem. The death of the old media is such an opportunity. It affords a wide range of possibilities to create a new media, a media that runs to the side of the mainstream media, but ultimately supplants it by slipping by it. For now I call it, The Slipstream Media.

A pipe dream?

h/t, Tiger -

Treasury Department Issues Emergency Recall Of All US Dollars

Populus Vult Decipi, Decipiatur.

h/t, AVI

Wizbang has a piece on the Osprey today. Can you name that fish?

As traditionalist/Centrists here at Maggie's, we tend to prefer Repub candidates because they at least pretend to sound like the word "freedom" matters to them.

Right now, the Repubs are searching the earth, looking for ideas. Wrong. Waste of time. Major national elections are won by appealing, likeable candidates who come across well on TV, have a bit of charisma and energy, and offer some inspiration, celebrity, and excitement to us benighted masses.

The wonkery and the ideology has little to do with it. Very few voted for Obama because he promised to nationalize (ie politicize) our major industries and businesses.

As Riehl rightly says,

The terrific irony here isn't that it's a Bush saying no more Reagan, it's that exit polls showed individual policies actually had little to do with Obama's win. National elections tend to be more thematic, than they are wonkish. All the Democrats really did was demonize Republicans, call for change and voice a lot of platitudes.

GOP turns to Bush aides for advice

Forget Reagan - be like Liberals

My final word on this: It's the candidate, stupid. Any reasonably smart person can make an issue out of anything, but it takes a powerfully convincing talker to reach over the head of the biased MSM and speak directly to people.

As Roger de H says, a party picks a figurehead to decorate their pirate ship.