Maggie's Farm

"When I get out of here, I am getting off the stage. I have had my time in the Klieg lights."

George Bush. God bless him. I still don't think he ever really wanted or enjoyed the job and the power and visibility all that much. I think he took it on as a duty while his personal core lay elsewhere - with God, family and pals, and his ranch - which I think is entirely to his credit. No grandiosity or narcissism at all in him, as befits his Yankee heritage, which is why he's always been a half-hearted pol: he is a man, not a political pimp. A kind, caring, self-deprecating man with a great sense of humor, plenty of humility and plenty of balls - and plenty of good AA under his belt. Some of us have met the guy, and agree. But go ahead and argue with that if you want to.

John Johansen's "Bridge House" in New Canaan, CT, is for sale.

New Canaan is famous for its collection of modern residential  architecture. The prosperous town changed from farmland to suburbia during the height of the modernist craze. John Johansen is the only living member of "The Harvard Five," of whom Philip Johnson is probably the best-known.

I like to look at these houses, but would not want to live in them. For life, I prefer rambling, drafty, random, cozy structures with plenty of fireplaces, and which were never really designed, but just kinda grew over time, like Topsy.

They are asking $5 million for this small but striking house. I am told it needs some "repairs." I like it, but I do not want it.

You can read about the Bridge House here.

Quoted from The Limits of Reaganism at Debatable Land (we need to add this site to our Anglosphere category)

...the Cult of Reagan actually helps explain the mess the Republican movement finds itself in. It used to be that it was the left that specialised in writing dissenters out of the movement; these days, in America at least, that's become a conservative trait. The RNC debate was illuminating in this respect: in addition to passing the Reagan litmus tests candidates were asked how many guns they own. And that was more or less it. Tick those boxes and you're a proper Republican; waver on either question and you're subject to suspicion.

It's this sort of blinkered thinking, this elevation of ideology above the messy business of winning elections that has helped condemn the GOP to minority status. A two party system in a nation of 300m people demands that each party be a broad church. Reagan recognised this; his successors seem to have forgotten it.

Read the whole thoughtful thing. You can get the other side of the argument from an emotional Michelle today. Debate is good. Certainty is never good.

Related: Could Obama's centrism drive the GOP out of business?

Soap and education are not as sudden as a massacre, but they are more deadly in the long run.

Mark Twain (via LGF)

Most Soulful Site: Sippican Cottage

Best New Personal Mom Blog: The Retriever

Best Vintage Photos At a Site With Which We Often Politically Disagree: Dr X

Favorite Aussie Blog: Tim Blair

Favorite Canadian Blog: A tie between Dust My Broom and Small Dead Pangolins

Attention Winners! See continuation page below the fold for your imitation parchment suitable-for-framing award, along with your prize money transfer details -

There are two ways. One is just to leave it in my house for a few months. The other is the professional way, like Sipp does it.

Article with video here. It's very distressing. Or you can just watch Sipp on TV here:

From Dylan's masterpiece Visions of Johanna:

The peddler now speaks to the countess who's pretending to care for him
Saying, "Name me someone that's not a parasite and I'll go out and say a prayer for him"
But like Louise always says
"Ya can't look at much, can ya man "
As she, herself prepares for him.

Our post on the letter to students about business careers and the thoughts about parasitism brought the tune to mind.

Here's the original recording of the astonishing tune. He's so clear you don't need the lyrics:

NB: There will be no awards to Major Blogs and Sites, mostly, in keeping with our redistributionist ideology. Additional winners will be announced through the end of this week. Here's today's batch:

Closest Cousins Across the Pond:  A tie between Mr. Free Market and The Englishman

In addition to the tax-free $1 million, and the distinguished and official-looking medal which is appropriate for wear at any formal occasion such as White House White Tie dinners, winners also receive the suitable-for-framing imitation parchment diploma-thingy below.

 Money transfer info below the fold -

Stolen from Driscoll:

In the interest of improving the bird interest among our readers, a reader took this photo this week of these hardy shorebirds on the CT coast, not yet in their breeding plumage. Can you name it?

We will post the daily winners as the votes from our staff, contributors, friends and family come in for each category and as the erroneous and uncountable votes are eliminated by our Editor in Chief. Here's the first:

Required Daily Read: American Thinker. It keeps getting better.

Note: All 2008 75th Annual MFBA winners will receive a tax-free, tax-exempt wire transfer of $1,000,000 US to their personal accounts in Grand Cayman from our new friend Hugh Katanga-Smythe, Esq., Asst. Deputy Commissioner of Virtual Funds in Nigeria. Hugh has some money he wants me to help him get rid of. It's the least we can do to help him out. Winners - check your Cayman accounts daily - or just go out and spend the money in advance on some guns and trips and wide-screen flat TVs and Gucci bags and stuff. Spending the money immediately will help the world economy, and help Obama become successful. If we do not have your Grand Cayman account number, password, and security code on file, please email the required information to our Cayman office to Carmella.Giambone@blogprofitscayman.com.

From our guest poster Bruce Kesler:

If conditions and challenges weren’t ominous enough for the new Obama administration, his strong-willed mother-in-law is moving into the White House.  If that alone isn’t enough for most, imagine yourself facing a relocation to very difficult new job, almost every one with power affecting you having differing wants and confronting you with demands often at odds with your own, literally not enough money in the world to satisfy everyone’s desires and the demands increasingly undercutting even necessities, and gangs of lethal thugs roaming the streets around you. Even your formerly most staunch supporters begin to report that most of your previous smooth talk is empty that got you the job and that you’re in over your head.  Like vultures expecting a fat carcass but facing a rotting pigeon of a meal, they squabble and fight each other.  Almost all your mentors expose they haven’t really much clue what to do. Well, here’s a piece of advice: Don’t just do something, stand there.  Most of the challenging conditions will sort themselves out.  Running around like a chicken without a head, or doing for the sake of doing, will not only likely have little positive effect but will probably have worse consequences.

Let’s go through a brief list:

The Economy:  Not every one, but in aggregate, individuals are better deciders of what is worth working for and spending on than any Delphic group in Washington.  Money is the motivation to work and risk.  The only economic measure by Washington with a track-record of supporting and increasing this motivation is low taxes.  Federal spending, on anything, is inefficient and tends to favor means and ends that reduce individual incentives.  Further, in excess -- and multi-trillion dollar printing of dollars is certainly excess, it has been proven, sadly repeatedly, to lead to lasting inflation that is even more impoverishing and destructive of incentives.

Healthcare:  As we’ve become wealthier, compared to any other nation, the portion of our personal and national incomes that need be devoted to food, clothing and shelter has declined.  That has unleashed the means for medical technologies and treatments that, although often overused, we decide we can afford and deem worthwhile to our better living.  Every scheme for “reforming” healthcare is based on forcing us, against our better judgment and self-caring, to have less healthcare, through reduced access and innovation.  Bureaucrats’ choices of what they think “cost-effective” for spending our own earnings and taxes are not our choices.  The only ones to benefit are government-employment and government-employee unions.

Education:  Surely, a well-educated workforce, allowed incentives to be productive, enriches most.  Major portions of our enormous spending on education, however, are wasted or siphoned off to non-enriching ends.  In higher education, we have lavish campuses failing to serve quality or practical degrees.  In primary education, we have multiplying programs that shortchange the basics, while teacher unions expend their huge political war chests to battle reforms.  Allowing the influx of uneducated illegal immigrants has diverted a large percentage of education spending to their remedial teaching, reducing standards and programs for excellence among the rest.  Border and employer enforcement in motion has and will reduce illegal immigration.  Budget restraints are directed by those in power to punish the customers.  With the necessity of budget restraints evident, those ideologic and self-serving pedagogues will lose some of their influence to undermine core, productive education. 

National Defense:  From the pains of combat, we’ve learned that a larger professional armed forces is critical.  At the same time, sophisticated, expensive major weapons systems cannot be avoided if we are to have deterring diplomacy with major adversaries, or soundly defeat them if diplomacy fails.  The ‘90’s, Clinton path of virtually ignoring the emergence of such threats only leads to larger, more dangerous crises.  Cutting defense spending to fuel wasteful domestic spending by Washington is proven suicidal behavior.  An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.  Cutting the ounce is deceptively self-destructive.

Middle East:  Our avoidance of domestic sources of energy and of transmission has increased our dependence upon and hefty self-impoverishing buying of oil from hostile and trouble-making countries.  Take that US financial underpinning out from under them and they are less of a global or regional threat, less capable of attacking  Israel as well.  A regional conflict is less of a threat to itself or the world.

Having, thus, freed up Obama from otherwise counter-productive activities outside the White House, he personally will benefit not only from things sorting themselves out better but will have more time to deal with his mother-in-law.

An unusual recording from Dylan, from his often-disparaged 1970 Self Portrait record. I cannot embed this YouTube, but it's here.

My guess is that he never got around to making up words for the tune.

Brings back poignant memories for me, but I won't tell you what they are other than that they involve a stunningly beautiful but erratic girl who had two Chessies.

Earth on brink of new Ice Age.

We are all screwed.

Finally back from South Pacific at the Beaumont. Slow, snowy, slippery, mind-rattling drive home through blinding snow on unplowed highways. What a wonderful performance, though, and well-worth the conditions. Ms. Kelli O'Hara is a doll. We saw her in her NYC debut in Light in the Piazza. I'd guess her future looks bright.

The Dyl would have loved this. And, I was thinking, so would the Sipp Clan. A real treat, thanks to Mrs. BD.

When you want the best of anything, or want to be the best in anything, you go to New York. Sinatra said it better. It ain't for everybody, nor should it be. Sure is mightly pleasant to visit, though.

We have many ex-NYC readers who like these sorts of photos, and I am happy to oblige despite my lousy camera skills.

NYC is at its most lovely in a snowstorm. It wasn't coming down heavily yet -

More of my NYC photos below the fold -

via theo:

This will make your day. Respighi's Ancient Airs and Dances, Suite 2, mvt 2:

We have been officially notified that Maggie's Farm has probably won the top blog award from the highly-respected ICEIE.

It's quite remarkable and deeply gratifying to us, especially since we think blog awards tend to be bogus and a bunch of baloney, and therefore have nothing to do with them.

But not this one. This one is a keeper. The Grand Pricks. We will treasure it always.

Remembering Antietam. Jules

What card check would do to the Sun Belt

In search of the just-right desk. Desk feng shui? Gimme a break.

via Jim Miller:

U.S. household debt, which has been growing steadily since the Federal Reserve began tracking it in 1952, declined for the first time in the third quarter of 2008.  In the same quarter, U.S. consumer spending growth declined for the first time in 17 years.

Bailing out one of the 20th Century's best business models. Quote from Reason:

Blaming the customer is the second-to-last refuge of any crappy industry, business, or organization (the last refuge being asking for a handout on Capitol Hill). As my ex-L.A. Times colleague and current Reason magazine Contributing Editor Tim Cavanaugh has noted in our pages, the paper we both short-timed for was filled with people making jokes about whether we could just "fire our readers." Over the recent holidays, an entire journalistic Festivus celebration of customer-blaming broke out over New Yorker finance columnist James Surowiecki's lament that, "The real problem for newspapers…isn't the Internet; it's us. We want access to everything, we want it now, and we want it for free." To extrapolate, if only us greedy human beings would realize that our very democracy was at stake, that we "are taking an active step in the formation of a country without a civic conscience," then we'd damned well volunteer to pay an unnecessary premium to keep our finest journalists in permanent six figures. Sounds precisely as convincing as the argument that enlightened voters will surely agree to pay extra taxes so that political campaigns can be financed through "clean" money.

Related: The Seattle P-I is dying.

Allah Akbar in Oslo. Oslo?

Where to put your money: Why mattress sales will take off. Warren Buffet:

“This should be bullish for Berkshire. With great foresight, I long ago entered the mattress business in a big way through our furniture operation. Now mattresses have become fully competitive as a place to put your money, and sales will soon take off.”

EZRA POUND, PISAN CANTOS, LXXXI

From Surber:

Let’s all sing.

Oh, the weather outside is frightful/ But the fire is delightful/ And since we’ve no place to go/ Let it uncommonly widespread conditions of instability, let it uncommonly widespread conditions of instability, let it uncommonly widespread conditions of instability.

Related, Zoroastrologicalclimatology. Everything explained.

Fact is, Baby, it's cold outside. Let's go skiing.

Good obit at the National Catholic Reporter. (thanks, RWN)

What an angelic face!