Maggie's Farm

Excellent mini-marts. If you need your morning caffeine fix, and you're in New England but there's no Dunkin' Donuts nearby, there's always Cumby's. Trouble is, they usually don't open 'til 6 and that is way too late for us early-risers.

This is the Wellfleet, MA shop on Route 6, next to the liquor store. This one doesn't sell gas. The teen-aged gals who work there are from Bulgaria, while the American teens sleep until noon, when they decide where to surf or windsurf that day.

As you may know, not long ago a couple hundred thousand Berliners made a lot of noise for my opponent. I'll take the roar of 50,000 Harleys any day.

John McCain

Stanley Fish in The NYT. (h/t, Right Wing Prof). One quote:

Last week, I confessed to being a bad traveler. This week, I confess to something much worse. I resist and resent the demands made on me by environmental imperatives. I don’t want to save the planet. I just want to inhabit it as comfortably as possible for as long as I have.

Things reached something of a crisis point a few days ago when my wife asked me to read a communique from Greenpeace. (She thought, she told me, that if I read it rather than hearing about it from her, my unhappiness would be directed at the organization.) It said that Kimberly-Clark, the maker of the paper towels, facial tissue and toilet paper we buy, does not use recycled fiber and instead “gets its virgin wood fiber clear-cut from . . . the North American Boreal . . . one of the world’s most important forests.” And that meant, she told me, that we would have to give those items up and go in search of green alternatives. But we had already done that once before when it turned out that the manufacturer of the paper products we used to buy — Procter and Gamble — engaged in research on animals. That’s when we found Kimberly-Clark. So it seems that the pure were not so pure after all, and who’s to say that the next corporation won’t have an ecological skeleton in its closet, too? 

The Opinion Journal's piece on Solzhenitsyn begins like this:

"The hammer banged reveille on the rail outside camp HQ at five o'clock as always. Time to get up. The ragged noise was muffled by ice two fingers thick on the windows and soon died away. Too cold for the warder to go on hammering."

Thus did Alexander Solzhenitsyn begin "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich," his reveille for the world about totalitarianism. Published in 1962, in the brief post-Stalinist thaw under Khrushchev, the novel about a prisoner in a Soviet prison camp made Solzhenitsyn at first a Russian sensation and later the country's most famous dissident after the Kremlin reverted to brutal form.

And as quoted by Vanderleun,

"When all of the rest of the civilized world, as well as the Marxist world, was tossing God into the dustbin of history, Solzhenitsyn realized that only God really matters. He chided the West for embracing materialism and forgetting God, a lesson that is just as true today as thirty years ago." -

Back from my annual trip to family-friendly, glitz-free�Wellfleet on Cape Cod, whence no opportunities for fresh posting. You talk about Obama stickers - good grief. Never saw so many of 'em. Just a solitary NOBAMA bumper sticker, and�one Ron Paul sticker on a plumber's old F-150: the self-employed are an independent lot.

Only regret: no time to stop by and visit with our friend�Sipp on the way. With the vacation traffic, the drive took us 7 migraine-inducing stop-and-go traffic�hours.

Despite the drive, the Cape is where I need to go to clean my brain with (all-organic)�cold salt water and to refresh my innards with fresh Wellfleet oysters.�Here's where we stay:

�Here's the view of the harbor and our�home beach�from our deck, with its tiny boardwalk across the little�salt marsh:

More photos of the place on continuation page below -

by Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de La Brede et de Montesquieu, 1725. It begins:

The difference between great nations and savage peoples is that the former have applied themselves to the arts and sciences, while the latter have totally neglected them. Perhaps most nations owe their existence to the knowledge that the arts and sciences provide. If we had the mores of the American savages, two or three European nations would soon devour all the others; and then perhaps some people conquering our world would boast, like the Iroquois, of having devoured seventy nations.

But leaving aside savage peoples, if a Descartes had come to Mexico or Peru one hundred years before Cortez and Pizarro, and if he had taught these peoples that men, composed as they are, are not able to be immortal; that the springs of their machine, as those of all machines, wear out; that the effects of nature are only a consequence of the laws and communications of movement, then Cortez, with a handful of men, would never have destroyed the empire of Mexico, nor Pizarro that of Peru.

His whole piece at New Atlantis.

Ronald Bailey at Reason calculates the cost of "re-powering America."

Cost is one thing, but I don't see the purpose anyway. We have centuries of good fossil fuel here, and VA, oddly enough, is full of uranium.

From Mary Eberstadt, at First Things. It begins:

That Humanae Vitae and related Catholic teachings about sexual morality are laughingstocks in all the best places is not exactly news. Even in the benighted precincts of believers, where information from the outside world is known to travel exceedingly slowly, everybody grasps that this is one doctrine the world loves to hate. During Benedict XVI’s April visit to the United States, hardly a story in the secular press failed to mention the teachings of Humanae Vitae, usually alongside adjectives like “divisive” and “controversial” and “outdated.” In fact, if there’s anything on earth that unites the Church’s adversaries—all of them except for the Muslims, anyway—the teaching against contraception is probably it.

To many people, both today and when the encyclical was promulgated on July 25, 1968, the notion simply defies understanding. Consenting adults, told not to use birth control? Preposterous. Third World parents deprived access to contraception and abortion? Positively criminal. A ban on condoms when there’s a risk of contracting AIDS? Beneath contempt.

Modern contraceptive practices had a huge impact, and yet sex was not invented in the 1960s, and the ancient Egyptians and Greeks used contraceptives. Does sexuality have anything to do with Judeo-Christian morality? Read the whole thing.

David Horowitz discusses his book:

Nope. It's a bathtub. Good grief. More here.

They went to Russia to build socialism.

Dems say they're OK with $10 gas.

Hey, John! You can be a celeb too. Moderate Voice

Why the growing Gulf dead zone?

What if Iraq works out? VDH

Monitoring the enemy's broadcasts. No Pasaran

Some real numbers on PC in education. h/t, David Thompson

They define them as those who seek to disrupt civil online discourse: The World of Web Trolling.

Just one more dumb hobby.

Definitely water on Mars.

And oil on Saturn's moon Titan. Lots of it. Well, it's close to oil. Is it possible that oil is not a fossil fuel?

Government bailouts are like potato chips: You can't stop with just one.

Tom Sowell, in his Random Thoughts this week

Some times I wonder whether we are electing a "Most Popular" or a High School Class President rather than a President of the USA. Even Maureen Dowd seems to wonder.

This toon via Theo:

It's Rush Week at Human Events, with many salutations to the big guy on his 20th anniversary.

I do not listen to Rush much these days, but back in '90-'93 I did every day, during my mid-day commute. I enjoy his humor, the apparent joy he takes in living, his self-mockery (eg "with half my brain tied behind my back, just to make it fair"), and his upbeat attitude, but it was his cheerful irreverence towards conventional views that engaged me. Plus his kindness and gentleness to all of his callers.

Whether you agree with him about everything or not, he is a brilliant entertainer.

Love this photo from our Kentucky friend at Slower Pace:

Via Vanderleun:

"Carbon control is what the West talks about. Carbon consumption is what the Non-Western Nations seek. Electricity efficiency and avoided generation is what the West talks about. Electricity supply is what nations big and small outside the West seek. Transportation efficiency is what the West talks about. Increased, greatly increased, mechanized mobility is what the nations of Asia, Africa, Eastern Europe and Latin America seek. The West wants to orate about wind, solar, geothermal and wave energy. The rest of the world wants more oil and natural gas, coal and uranium. The West worries about carbon control. The rest of the world, especially Asia, worries greatly about energy and food control. - Vinod K. Dar Earth Cools

Via No Looking Backwards:

Gateway found this Move On ad for Obama. Hope. It could happen to you.

Do they think I am 6 years old? I hope for a pretty pony, and $50 million in cash, unmarked bills.

This is a tale of minor woe, a "for the loss of a nail, the shoe was lost; for the loss of the shoe, the horse was lost..." story.

When a homeowner sees that ominous drip, drip, drip in the ceiling, coming out of some light fixture, his or her heart sinks. We all know that water and houses don't mix.

It turned out that the vibrations from the Jacuzzi tub had screwed up the drain. On further inspection, the dripping had rotted the subfloor. And, on further inspection, the underfloor in front of the shower was wet and crumbling too, partly because Mr. Shower Door installed the door opening out, not in. And the shower stall wasn't adequately vented. And, and, and...

This means plumbers, demolition guys, tile guys, new fixtures, dumpsters and carpenters. A new subfloor and a new floor for the bathroom, hopefully something less slippery than the shiny Italian tile we had. I think a marble floor is the idea.

And, since that is being done, let's take the vanity out and repaint it, and put a new marble top on it.

And since we have a great carpenter/contractor here anyway, why not have him move the non-supporting walls around in the master bedroom to expand the closets and expand the room the way we have always talked about? Yeah, why not? Not a big deal, right? You can move all your hunting gear to the basement.

And, since they're already doing that, let's finally put the fireplace in the bedroom. It can link right up to an existing chimney, after all. Cozy.

And since they're doing that, let's get rid of all the old carpet and replace it with good oak flooring upstairs. Let's do it everywhere upstairs. After all, it's not much more expensive than high-quality wool carpet.

And since the electricians will be around, let's replace all of that terrible hallway lighting, and then re-paint everything.

I guess one of the consolations of home-ownership is to know, as you watch your life savings evaporate, that you are helping to keep the economy going in your neck of the woods.

Were I single and childless, I could live in a shack in the woods, as long as I had a broadband connection. And a girlfriend or three for company.

A quote from AVI:

I was a theater and literature major in the 70's, with a contempt for Southerners, fraternity guys, all things military, hunters, and business majors. No matter how smart any of them might be individually, those groups were known to be generally closed-minded, uncurious, and shallow.

Not like Me. I was deep, you see. And sensitive. I was a socialist, not because I actually thought through whether it fed more people, but because it seemed generous, and the free market seemed selfish. I was against The War, not because I had any clear foreign policy ideas, but because I was convinced that liberals wanted to understand different cultures and get along, while conservatives just wanted to shoot people they didn't like.

Yes, read the whole thing. It's short and to the point.

A big h/t to Vanderleun, who is supposedly on vacation but isn't, quite. He found this piece at the Independent by an Irish journalist who had covered Africa, Writing what I should have written so many years ago. One quote:

The people of Ireland remained in ignorance of the reality of Africa because of cowardly journalists like me. When I went to Ethiopia just over 20 years ago, I saw many things I never reported -- such as the menacing effect of gangs of young men with Kalashnikovs everywhere, while women did all the work. In the very middle of starvation and death, men spent their time drinking the local hooch in the boonabate shebeens. Alongside the boonabates were shanty-brothels, to which drinkers would casually repair, to briefly relieve themselves in the scarred orifice of some wretched prostitute (whom God preserve and protect). I saw all this and did not report it, nor the anger of the Irish aid workers at the sexual incontinence and fecklessness of Ethiopian men. Why? Because I wanted to write much-acclaimed, tear-jerkingly purple prose about wide-eyed, fly-infested children -- not cold, unpopular and even "racist" accusations about African male culpability.

Am I able to rebut good and honourable people like John O'Shea, who are now warning us that once again, we must feed the starving Ethiopian children? No, of course I'm not. But I am lost in awe at the dreadful options open to us. This is the greatest moral quandary facing the world. We cannot allow the starving children of Ethiopia to die.

Yet the wide-eyed children of 1984-86, who were saved by western medicines and foodstuffs, helped begin the greatest population explosion in human history, which will bring Ethiopia's population to 170 million by 2050. By that time, Nigeria's population will be 340 million, (up from just 19 million in 1930). The same is true over much of Africa.

Thus we are heading towards a demographic holocaust, with a potential premature loss of life far exceeding that of all the wars of the 20th Century. This terrible truth cannot be ignored.

But back in Ireland, there are sanctimonious ginger-groups, which yearn to prevent discussion, and even to imprison those of us who try, however imperfectly, to expose the truth about Africa. And of that saccharine, sickly shower, more tomorrow.