Maggie's Farm

Eleanor Powell and Fred Astaire, 1940. The film is a bit washed out, but it's worth it.

Lies are stubborn things.

The News Junkie of Maggie's Farm

From the NYT review of Anthony Pagden's Worlds at War: The 2500-year Struggle Between East and West (meaning the West and Islam), a quote:

The real value of “Worlds at War” may lie in a secondary theme: the West’s long, tragicomic history of trying to civilize and modernize the East. In the first century B.C., Octavian’s defeat of Antony and Egypt was portrayed by the Romans as the triumph of “a free and virtuous West” over “a tyrannical and corrupt East.” Almost 2,000 years later, in 1920, Shiites and Sunnis were killing each other in Mesopotamia, British officers were dying, and The Times of London wrote, “How much longer are valuable lives to be sacrificed in the vain endeavor to impose upon the Arab population an elaborate and expensive administration which they never asked for and do not want?”

Whole review here.

"I'm a Lonely Man"

Mark Twain

A few samples, from a list at S,C&A:

Weinberg’s Law: If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker that came along would destroy civilization. (Gerald M Weinberg)

The piece in the National Post begins:

They drift along in the worlds' oceans at a depth of 2,000 metres -- more than a mile deep -- constantly monitoring the temperature, salinity, pressure and velocity of the upper oceans.

Then, about once every 10 days, a bladder on the outside of these buoys inflates and raises them slowly to the surface gathering data about each strata of seawater they pass through. After an upward journey of nearly six hours, the Argo monitors bob on the waves while an onboard transmitter sends their information to a satellite that in turn retransmits it to several land-based research computers where it may be accessed by anyone who wishes to see it.

These 3,000 yellow sentinels --about the size and shape of a large fence post -- free-float the world's oceans, season in and season out, surfacing between 30 and 40 times a year, disgorging their findings, then submerging again for another fact-finding voyage.

Read the whole thing and find out what they are telling us.

Most people are bothered by those passages of Scripture they do not understand, but the passages that bother me are those I do understand.

Mark Twain

Bob Brinker says the equities market "looks very, very attractive right now, if you can handle some short-term risk." He says these sorts of buying opportunities do not pass by often. Bob, like Bogle, does not believe in buying individual stocks. "We'll be out of this eventually."

He likes the munis too. I have never gone wrong following his advice. Now back to yard chores to mourn my CIT.

The snow and ice are melting fast. Spring must be here!

It's the time of year when the rich and famous seek riches from alarmism. 

My friends and I were starting up a company to sell palm trees to the Eskimos, but unfortunately recent satellite data indicate that warming stopped a decade ago. Dang! Our investment is OK though - we shorted Palm Tree Futures as a hedge, and might get filthy rich with those. Plus the government will pay us handsomely not to grow Palms on our experimental Massachusetts Palm farm. (No problem - all of our seedlings died this winter under three feet of snow.)

But even if the earth isn't warming anymore, no warming jokes please - it still isn't funny to those who really care.

I am doing my part to save the planet: I will alternate between paper and plastic bags until the experts reach a consensus and the science is settled.

Neurophilosophy reports:

The Visible Body is a small application created by the Massachusetts-based company Argosy Publishing. The software can be downloaded for free, and includes computer graphic models of more than 1,700 anatomical structures, which can be rotated in a three-dimensional 360 degree view:

The Visible Body consists of highly detailed, anatomically accurate, 3D models of all human body systems. The models were developed by an extensively trained team with decades of experience in medical illustration and biomedical visualization. All anatomical content has been reviewed for accuracy by our panel of experts, including physicians and anatomists. The beta release includes content covered in an undergraduate-level Anatomy and Physiology course. Years of modeling and enhancement make it the most sophisticated and complete 3D model of the human body available.

An amazing resource. I know our readers can locate Ethiopia on a map, but it's one o'clock - do you know where your own Pineal Gland is at?

Good ol' Tom Lehrer. (h/t, Wizbang)

Even Sir Harry Flashman never forgot her, and that is saying something. 

Our friend Dr. Merc invited us to address his piece on the Heller gun control case, titled The Roots of Fear. He believes that the purpose of the 2nd was to balance federal power with state power, including the states' power to raise armies of their own - and that the NRA has instilled unnecessary fear in gun users for their own institutional purposes.

As a humble farmer and no lawyer, my take on the history of the 2nd is that it is a mere reaffirmation of ancient English common law which enshrined the right to self defence to all combined with an affirmation of the military power of each state. Since the Bill of Rights is all about being clear about the rights of the individual and the limits of the power of the Federal government, it makes no sense to me that the authors would have slipped anything in there with a different purpose.

We recall that the Bill of Rights was a bit of an afterthought. Many thought it was unnecessary, and that such rights of the people were assumed. In the end, NY and others refused to sign without those basic rights being made explicit.

At that time in America, no-one would have even considered taking away anybody's private weapons.

In any event, I think that the plantiff Mr. Heller made his case when he observed that he can carry a weapon on his job, to protect VIPs and politicians - but not to protect himself and his family. That makes him a second-class citizen in Washington, because I doubt that Mr. Heller could afford his own bodyguard.

Viking, who listened to the arguments on C-Span, says:

...my favorite moment was when Justice Scalia revealed his knowledge of firearms: "You mean you can't have more arms than you would need to take with you to the militia? You can't have...a turkey gun and a duck gun and a 30.06 and a 270..."

Lithwick at Slate reviews the oral arguments here, which makes Dellinger's position clear:

Dellinger asks the court to avoid turning every phrase of the Second Amendment into a "libertarian right." A well-regulated militia isn't about everyone owning a gun willy-nilly. The Constitution does not create some kind of sacred, fundamental right to guns. If there's a right here at all, he says, it's at the "penumbra of the periphery" of the Constitution: in a shack behind the river where the other unenumerated rights huddle.

Perhaps Liberty is not high on his agenda? Dellinger is walking proof for the necessity of the Bill of Rights, because that "penumbra" is where most of our rights exist (including the rights to privacy, abortion, etc etc). It seems to me that he comes from the position that, if an individual right isn't made crystal clear and specific, then it doesn't exist. He wants to always tip the balance towards government power, and I think that impulse is un-American and ignores Amendment Nine - which I think says it all:

The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.

The outcome will be interesting, but not as interesting as the case would be if some restaurateur would take NYC's trans-fat ban to the Supreme Court. That would be really fun.

White people like to throw dinner parties. Yes we do, and cocktail parties too.

College students are stressed? Wait 'til they try real life.

The fun part of war.

I want one. Olympus Stylus 1030 SW

Arthur C. Clarke's last message. Video

This Easter, use a well-maintained whip.

For Robocop fans.

Obama, Fairy Tales, and Failure at S,C&A. Thoughtful. Related: "Teplost" commenting on Roger Simon's "Barack, I didn't do it for this" poem:

How are people in this country going to face each other as human beings when white liberals won't stay in changing neighborhoods? We don't need Obama to bring us together, and all the high minded white folks espousing his rhetoric don't want it either. They want to PRETEND that's what they want. They want to believe that all they have to do is vote for a black candidate, and they are off the hook. Hey, if all those high-minded white liberals wanted us to come together, why did they move out of my neighborhood? All they ever had to do is stay. What a bunch of bull!

So true.

Roger Scruton's 2003 New Criterion essay on discovering Burke, which we re-post annually, begins thus:

I was brought up at a time when half the English people voted Conservative at national elections and almost all English intellectuals regarded the term “conservative” as a term of abuse. To be a conservative, I was told, was to be on the side of age against youth, the past against the future, authority against innovation, the “structures” against spontaneity and life. It was enough to understand this, to recognize that one had no choice, as a free-thinking intellectual, save to reject conservatism. The choice remaining was between reform and revolution. Do we improve society bit by bit, or do we rub it out and start again? On the whole my contemporaries favored the second option, and it was when witnessing what this meant, in May 1968 in Paris, that I discovered my vocation.

Read the whole thing.

The Spring fishing season is coming on fast. It's about time to exchange our Currier and Ives "Maple Sugaring" picture, up on top, for "The Trout Pool." That picture does look like our Berkshire Hills, but it could also be the Poconos or the Adirondacks.

Education without values, as useful as it is, seems rather to make man a more clever devil.

C.S. Lewis

Two fine posts on PC gleaned from Big Lizards' Weasel Watchers:

In a PC nation, how will the GOP run?

The economic impact of political correctness