Maggie's Farm

We missed this one: Global warming causes kittens. No doubt predicted by Climate Models. Related, from Al Gore to the Brits:

As your parliament moves forward to debate legislation this session, it is essential that you imagine this not solely as a scientific discussion or even a political dialogue, but as a moral moment where we decide who we are as human beings, and what obligation to the future we feel is appropriate for us to accept as part of our responsibility in this generation. At stake is nothing less than the survival of human civilisation and the habitability of the earth for our species.

Good grief. He wanted to be the Messiah, but Obama one-upped him in that department. Now, he's just a regular crank again.

Why it's so hard to teach students these days. h/t, Minding the Campus

I have felt this way about power tools many times.

AP stunningly acknowledges that the surge has worked spectacularly. Ace

They went down fighting hard. Villainous. Sons and warriors.

The NEA is our Taliban. Moonbattery

Maybe appointing his transition team was a bit premature. Related, via Classical Values:

The New Republic has a pretty good article up explaining European misconceptions of America. The article especially looks at Obama's recent German rallies and how those rallies feed European misconceptions.

Europe's favorite dream: a post-Bush America cut down to size and chastened, a meeker and more modest America, a more "European" (that is, a more social-democratic) America, which at last casts off some of its nastier capitalist habits. An America that is a lot more like us Europeans who have forgone power politics and sovereignty in favor of communitarian politics and integration.

From Insty:

MICHAEL BARONE: "Sometimes public opinion doesn't flow smoothly; it shifts sharply when a tipping point is reached. Case in point: gas prices. $3 a gallon gas didn't change anybody's mind about energy issues. $4 a gallon gas did. . . . In a country with less in the way of checks and balances, which can be gamed by adroit lobbyists and litigators, we would be building more nuclear plants, and would be drilling offshore and in ANWR. We would be phasing out the corn ethanol subsidies that are enriching Iowa farmers and impoverishing Mexican tortilla eaters, and we would be repealing the 54-cent tariff on Brazilian sugar ethanol (the sugar for which would be produced not in defoliated Amazon rainforests but in the desolate and currently unused certao)."

Why would Maliki vote for Obama? Krauthammer

What Dr. Roy Spencer said to the Senate

Still life, 1883. You can read about this piece here.

McCain hits hard: Powerline

Media misses the big story: Pajamas

The only place the Dems want to drill: Michelle

Our blogmeister Chris is a sailboat man himself, but he knows nice powerboats when he sees them. In response to our Hinckley powerboat post a couple of weeks ago, Chris offered the opinion that they were too "common." He attached this photo from his yacht club as proof:

I happen to think that the Hinckley jet drive is cool as hell, but Chris prefers the Shelter Island Runabouts made by CH Marine. They built Billy Joel's commuter boat. Here's one of their Runabouts:

I always found the Shaker hymn "Simple Gifts" to be devoid of content despite the loveliness of the tune.

 For simple lyrics which have depth, here are three. First,

 Wow. How can so much be said about life in so few words?

Also:

Twinkle, twinkle, little star,
How I wonder what you are!
Up above the world so high,
Like a diamond in the sky!

The rest of that song is here. 

And one more, the verse that some claim captures everything about Christian faith:

Jesus loves me! This I know,

For the Bible tells me so.

Little ones to Him belong;

They are weak, but He is strong.

The rest of that song is here.

Via Theo:

What might have been, by Fred Siegel in City Journal. I always thought that the impeachment was insane overreach, and dumb politics. The Repubs were rabid.

Rabid is never a good idea.

The Green Fad is done. Nobody is listening anymore and it doesn't sell: Moonbattery, whence the image.

That's what happens when you hysterically oversell something. This video we posted from 50 years ago tells the whole story.

And the earth is cooling. That is really scary.

We stuck with the Piedmont's local Barbera wines during our Italy trip. Barbera d'Asti and Barbera d'Alba. That same grape has been grown up there at least since the 13th century.

I did not realize that the Barbera grape is the most abundantly-grown grape in Italy. These are basically good table wines, nothing too complicated or fancy, and far down on the wine totem pole from the great Northern Italian wines like Amarone and the Nebbiolo grape-based Barbaresco and Barolo.

About Barbera d'Alba, this site says:

In the hilly area around Alba, only vineyards in the hills with suitable slopes and orientations are considered adequate for production. The terrains must be primarily clayey-calcareous or sandy-calcareous in character. DOC recognition is excluded for terrains with northern exposures and the bottoms of valleys that are flat or semi-flat. The colour of the wine is intense ruby red when young with a tendency to garnet after ageing.

This site says:

The high-in-acid Barbera Grape of north-western Italy is a chameleon-like grape which changes considerably according to yield. As an everyday variety, it is a juicy glugger but it can metamorphose into a concentrated, rich, plumy and cherryish wine with undertones of sweet vanilla and spice when aged in small new casks. In Argentina, it tends to the former style with a little less acidity thanks to plentiful Andean sunshine.

Photo: Barbera grapes

A re-post from our archives:

Excellent piece in the CS Monitor on the condition of religion in Europe by Peter Ford. In it he quotes Grace Davies, who notes that the Enlightenment led in different directions in the US and Europe - here, we tend to view, as did the Founding Fathers, religious belief and practice as something that needed protection from State power, while in Europe they tended to see the State as protecting the people from powerful religious institutions.

It's an interesting difference in the role of the State in relation to religion, and I wonder whether it reflects a larger difference in the view of individual rights in general - whether they are seen as being provided by the State, as if from a King, or whether they belong to the individual by virtue of being human, in other words, granted by God or by Natural Law rather than by the State.

I wonder whether different expectations of the State derive from this.  If the State is seen as the provider of rights, then why not a provider of everything? After all, you can contort the concept of freedom rights and label anything a "right" if you want to, including a right to watch TV in jail, a right to a driver's license, or a right to a stress-free life. But if the State is an organization we have created to protect the freedoms we own anyway, will we not be less inclined to view the State as a benevolent, loving, parental provider in general? 

The liberals/progressives have already transferred their dreams and hopes and faith to the State. Their fascistic/statist undercurrent has been apparent for a long time - there will never be enough government to satisfy them.

The piece is a good update on European attitudes towards God, with some surprising findings:  What place for God in Europe? | csmonitor.com

Before my brain's hard drive deteriorates, a few more random thoughts about our northern Italy trip a few weeks ago, a trip which has been more-than-amply photo-documented here.

1. An ottica in Verbania fixed my glasses, for free. The nose-thingy fell off, and she put two new ones on. She was young, blonde, and lovely, and wore high black leather boots and a short-short skirt under her lab coat. My thanks to her.

2. Each morning from my balcony in Baveno I watched two families of Grebes, with their young'uns, paddling around the edge of Lago Maggiore. About the size of our Western Grebe. The chicks were just beginning to learn to dive. Sometimes, one would try to climb on Mom's back the way young grebes too, but they were really too big to fit. The Dad hunted for minnows to feed the chicks, and the Moms herded them so they wouldn't wander too far.

3. Wherever you go in Italy - city, town, country village, or farmland - you are being watched. There will be an old lady peeking from behind a curtain watching you go by. Just stop for a moment to admire somebody's tomatoes, and you will see the curtain move and an old face peer out. It never fails. Italians have a paranoid streak to them. Some old lady is always watching you. She thinks I might steal her zucchini.

4. The church choir rehearsal in Baveno. Pure magic.

5. Gelato? An overrated item, in my opinion, although the hazelnut is very nice indeed. Any dessert is always welcome. I have visited Italy several times, and keep hoping that I will discover the specialness of gelato, but Haagen Dazs is better. The local wines are more fun to sample.

It's a quick water taxi ride from Orta San Giulio to Isola di San Giulio. The basilica on the tiny island was first built in 926 but has had many revisions and renovations since then. It's part of an active Benedictine monastery.

Here's a brief history of the island.

Most interesting to me were the frescoes, which ranged in age from early medieval to Renaissance. This one, on a pillar, looked Byzantine in influence. I was sure I took more fresco photos, but I don't find them on my camera. Maybe I spaced out.

Here's a site with more photos of the frescoes.

A few more of my photos from the island on continuation page.

Our post on Richard Gatling and his Gun prompted a reader to inform us about two other hand-driven machine guns of the 19th Century: The Nordenfelt Gun and the Gardner Gun.

Here's a clip of the Nordenfelt gun in operation:

A quote from Kristof's essay in the NYT about Asia (h/t, Jungle Trader):

For most of the last several thousand years, it would have seemed far likelier that Chinese or Indians, not Europeans, would dominate the world by the year 2000, and that America and Australia would be settled by Chinese rather than by the inhabitants of a backward island called Britain. The reversal of fortunes of East and West strikes me as the biggest news story of the millennium, and one of its most unexpected as well.

and

A half-century before Columbus, Zheng He had reached East Africa and learned about Europe from Arab traders. The Chinese could easily have continued around the Cape of Good Hope and established direct trade with Europe. But as they saw it, Europe was a backward region, and China had little interest in the wool, beads and wine Europe had to trade. Africa had what China wanted -- ivory, medicines, spices, exotic woods, even specimens of native wildlife.

In Zheng He's time, China and India together accounted for more than half of the world's gross national product, as they have for most of human history. Even as recently as 1820, China accounted for 29 percent of the global economy and India another 16 percent, according to the calculations of Angus Maddison, a leading British economic historian.

Asia's retreat into relative isolation after the expeditions of Zheng He amounted to a catastrophic missed opportunity, one that laid the groundwork for the rise of Europe and, eventually, America. Westerners often attribute their economic advantage today to the intelligence, democratic habits or hard work of their forebears, but a more important reason may well have been the folly of 15th-century Chinese rulers.

Yes, the problem was that they didn't appreciate good claret. There's a lesson in that. Read the whole fascinating thing. The link is above.

Triathlon: The Hoyts - Dad and his disabled son -

The Dylanologist noted to me that almost every town in Italy has a Via Gramsci or a Piazza Gramsci. No wonder Italy's politics and economics are so messed up.

Readers know what we think about Gramsci (and his latter-day followers on the Left) from this and this.

Here's two I noticed in Italy a few weeks ago. Gramsci Street in Baveno, next to the train station:

 And here's Piazza Gramsci in Verbania, not far from the ferry dock:

If Gramsci is your hero, you are in trouble. He's the guy who invented the notion of incremental socialist fascism, which is the unspoken long-term plan of the American Left, I believe. Stepwise and slowly, so as not to scare people until we finally wake up one day and find our lives boxed in by communitarian goals as determined by elitist masters who "care so much" about us poor schmucks and suckers that they want to run every detail of our pitiful, ignorant lives.

A re-post from 2005:

Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets by Nassin Nicholas Taleb

My favorite quote from the book: "If you're so rich, how come you ain't smart?" From an Amazon review - it's better than I could do:

If the prescriptions for getting rich that are outlined in books such as The Millionaire Next Door and Rich Dad Poor Dad are successful enough to make the books bestsellers, then one must ask, Why aren't there more millionaires? In Fooled by Randomness, Nassim Nicholas Taleb, a professional trader and mathematics professor, examines what randomness means in business and in life and why human beings are so prone to mistake dumb luck for consummate skill. This eccentric and highly personal exploration of the nature of randomness meanders from the court of Croesus and trading rooms in New York and London to Russian roulette, Monte Carlo engines, and the philosophy of Karl Popper. Part of what makes this book so good is Taleb's ability to make seemingly arcane mathematical concepts (at least to this reviewer) entirely relevant in evaluating and understanding everything from the stock market to the success of those millionaires cited in the aforementioned bestsellers. Here's an articulate, wise, and humorous meditation on the nature of success and failure that anyone who wants a little more of the former would do well to consider. Highly recommended. --Harry C. Edwards

Let me use disappointment as material for patience;
Let me use success as material for thankfulness;
Let me use suspense as material for perseverence;
Let me use danger as material for courage;
Let me use reproach as material for long-suffering;
Let me use praise as material for temperance;
Let me use pain as material for endurance.

- from a prayer by John Baillie

Nice weather equipment - WeatherPeddler

Slainte! - Check out Malts.com.

Wonderful. You can read Smithsonian Magazine online

Cabela's sells floor mats for most cars and trucks.

Travel -See America.org

Cost-effective travel - Club ABC

Vacation Home Rentals by Owner - VRBO. For example, this nice weekly rental on Nantucket:

or this one in Bellaggio on Lake Como:

And, of course, there are always good pin-ups at Theo

A re-post:

Both the majestic American Elm and the Chestnut fell victim to blights imported from overseas. With their deaths, the New England landscape was altered, for the worse. No more village blacksmith "under the spreading chestnut tree," and no more village greens and churches graced by rows of giant vase-shaped Elms - the hallmark of old New England.

Yes, we still have some elms, but the young ones don't make it to adulthood, and any remaining trees are slowly dying off.

The good news is that there is a blight-resistant Elm available. You won't live long enough to see it in its glory, but planting some now in the right places will be a heck of a fine gift to the future.

You can find them at Miller Nurseries.