Maggie's Farm

Not from today's Lectionary, but the first reading for our upcoming Lenten study group. I find something new in this every time I read this foundational story of Judaism and Christianity. Genesis 2-3 (King James).

Genesis 2

1Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and all the host of them. 2And on the seventh day God ended his work which he had made; and he rested on the seventh day from all his work which he had made. 3And God blessed the seventh day, and sanctified it: because that in it he had rested from all his work which God created and made. 4These are the generations of the heavens and of the earth when they were created, in the day that the LORD God made the earth and the heavens, 5And every plant of the field before it was in the earth, and every herb of the field before it grew: for the LORD God had not caused it to rain upon the earth, and there was not a man to till the ground.

 6But there went up a mist from the earth, and watered the whole face of the ground. 7And the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul. 8And the LORD God planted a garden eastward in Eden; and there he put the man whom he had formed. 9And out of the ground made the LORD God to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight, and good for food; the tree of life also in the midst of the garden, and the tree of knowledge of good and evil.

 10And a river went out of Eden to water the garden; and from thence it was parted, and became into four heads. 11The name of the first is Pison: that is it which compasseth the whole land of Havilah, where there is gold; 12And the gold of that land is good: there is bdellium and the onyx stone. 13And the name of the second river is Gihon: the same is it that compasseth the whole land of Ethiopia. 14And the name of the third river is Hiddekel: that is it which goeth toward the east of Assyria. And the fourth river is Euphrates.

 15And the LORD God took the man, and put him into the garden of Eden to dress it and to keep it. 16And the LORD God commanded the man, saying, Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat: 17But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.

 18And the LORD God said, It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him an help meet for him. 19And out of the ground the LORD God formed every beast of the field, and every fowl of the air; and brought them unto Adam to see what he would call them: and whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof. 20And Adam gave names to all cattle, and to the fowl of the air, and to every beast of the field; but for Adam there was not found an help meet for him. 21And the LORD God caused a deep sleep to fall upon Adam, and he slept: and he took one of his ribs, and closed up the flesh instead thereof; 22And the rib, which the LORD God had taken from man, made he a woman, and brought her unto the man. 23And Adam said, This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh: she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man.

 24Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh. 25And they were both naked, the man and his wife, and were not ashamed.

Genesis 3 on continuation page below.

Image: Detail from Hieronymus Bosch's Garden of Earthly Delights

Photo by a friend, reposted from winter 2005:

A happy Harbor Seal in Long
Island Sound, off the CT shore, in January. Thanks for the nice photo.

These seals will start heading back down to Maine and other northern parts soon.

A Tom Brady Superbowl?

"In the end, more than they wanted freedom, they wanted security.  They wanted a comfortable life, and they lost it all - security, comfort, and freedom.  When ... the freedom they wished for was freedom from responsibility, then Athens ceased to be free."

Edward Gibbon (1737-1794)

h/t, Gateway. Hey, I thought the Dems were upset about high gas prices. So what's up with that gas tax? Can Mitt be a tough enough SOB to win a national election?

h/t, Jawa

From Gagdad's Erotic Tales of Metaphysical Ignorance - one of his best posts. It begins thus:

Obviously Man is intelligent. That's the problem. In fact, almost all his troubles are caused by his intelligence, through which he believes so many amazing things that can't be so. More often than not, the greater the intelligence, the more catastrophic the error, which is why it has been remarked that philosophy is "error on a grandiose scale."

after a bit, he gets to the heart of the art vs. porn issue, which he uses as an example of how things can be "despiritualized":

In Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Joyce's alter ego, Stephen Dedalus, discusses the criteria for great art. He says it is the task of the true artist to record "epiphanies," that is, the sudden ingression of spirit into matter, when something leaps through its outer appearance and reveals its true nature in a way that illuminates the soul.

Didactic art is the opposite of this -- in fact, it is not art at all. That is, it lowjacks the medium of an art form and tries to cram some merely worldly message into it. In other words, instead of transmitting radiance from another dimension -- from the higher -- it forces in a message or "lesson" from the lower, from this side of manifestation. This is why nazi or communist or leftist art is so tedious. It is also why so much contemporary art is so awful. It's not really art, but what Joyce called pornography.

Pornography has nothing to do with sex per se; from the Greek, it means "writing of whores," which pretty much summarizes my point. It occurs whenever we completely despiritualize anything and divest it of its otherworldly radiance and spiritual telos. Therefore, there is much that is pornographic that is not sexual at all. By this definition, most contemporary music is indeed pornographic, as is most TV, certainly MSM news. Most literature is pornographic. Even religion can easily be pornographic. And certainly most politics.)

Image: Raphael's Adam and Eve in the Vatican

Hillary claims she can control her husband. Which I doubt very much. (Are they really married anyway, except in name?) Meanwhile, from Bill: We must slow our economy to stop global warming. That's done. Next problem? However, that quote was unfairly taken out of context. And, from Betsy, Washington never liked the Clintons.

Germany's nude airline. No thank you.

Organic foods: A scam

Nacreous clouds. Cool, and a sign of a cold upper atmosphere. We have warned against global cooling many times here, and I think it is beginning...we're all gonna freeze.

Grim economic hardship in America

Production function and government-run anything. S&M

Safety helmets for rodeo cowboys?

Quote from Right Thinking:

Pew has some research about the issue that matter to Republicans and Democrats, highlighted by the 38 point gap in how important it is for the government to insure the uninsured.

What struck me about the poll was the stark difference in philosophy. The Democrats overwhelming (60% or more) think the government should deal with global warming, improve jobs, reduce health care costs, deal with poverty, protect the environment, secure medicare, improve education, reduce crime, reduce the deficit, secure social security, deal with energy, strengthen the economy and defend against terrorism. That’s quite a laundry list. I’m surprised they don’t wnat the government to advise them on fashion.

Never mind that not only has government proved inadequate to deal with most of these problems (apart from crime), it’s frequently made them worse.

By contrast, the majority of Republicans only think the government should strengthen the military, strengthen the economy, deal with immigration and secure social security. Slim majorities unfortunately also favor dealing with “moral breakdown”, energy problems, improving education and reducing health care costs. It’s not that I don’t care about those things as well. it’s just that the governments record on all those issues is so dreadful.

Quoted from Strata (h/t, Winds of Change):

... the American people are leading the surge away from the hyper-partisans and the muck-raking, purity wars. Not only were the parties raging against each other - they had turned on the moderate middle and attacked with visceral hate towards anyone who could ’sell out’ and reach compromise. And of course the support for both sides of the aisle tanked as each end of the spectrum tried to see who could denigrate the midstream voters the most.

Excellent advice for Romney, from View from the Right:

I saw most of the debate Wednesday evening. McCain’s meanness, egotism, and nastiness, so unsuited for a president (though perhaps some people see it as toughness), were again apparent, and Romney again showed himself an all-round better human being. But that’s not enough. If Romney is going to stage a major rally in the next week, which he must do to stay alive in this race, he has got to express two qualities he has so far not expressed. First, he has got to show the will to lead, and I don’t just mean generic executive abilities, which are manifest in Romney, but the will and toughness to be the leader of the U.S. Second, he has got to show a killer instinct, the ability to convey an attitude of (excuse the vulgarity) “ef you” to opponents and enemies. Bush demonstrated that quality against McCain in South Carolina in 2000, and it saved his candidacy. Romney hasn’t yet demonstrated it against McCain in 2008. Instead, he comes across as a nice businessman type, not as someone with the quality of controlled anger (Reagan had that quality), someone capable of coldly sticking in the knife when necessary.

Photo: John McCain, from Dr. X. Reader H reminds us that 40 years ago, McCain was enduring daily torture in the Hanoi Hilton.

How to get an egg into a small bottle. h/t, Grow a Brain

From Dr. Sanity's How Smart are Democrats? Personally, I do not think Democrats are stupid. Often in error about the realities of life, and often not viewing liberty as our most precious inheritance -but not stupid in an IQ sense.

We do like the NY Sun, but for the news a fellow really needs at 4:30 am before milking the cows and feeding the chickens, The Daily Mash is it.

For example, they explain why the French rogue trader really did what he did, and where he hid his losses. And they have another helpful sociological piece on The 40-somethings are a bunch of whining sh-ts.

Welcome, Daily Mash, to our blogroll. (h/t, Conspiracy)

At $5.39/lb at Costco, their Dubliner Irish Cheese is the best cheddar-type cheese I have ever had. It is a great cheese, and I don't even like cheddar (I prefer the stronger cheeses). This one has a strong flavor (tangy, very sharp, with a touch of sweetness), a graininess similar to Parmesan, and it is hard - unlike those rubbery and bland American cheddars which look, feel and taste like processed cheese and are only good for melting on top of a cheeseburger.

Thus far, the Bird Dog clan has found it to be excellent eaten plain, on a cracker or baguette, in scrambled eggs, with slices of apples and pears, with cabernet and port, and in a cheese omelet.

Worth a trip to Costco just for that Dubliner cheese. (Speaking of Costco, we will someday offer a free Maggie's Farm t-shirt to the first person in history who can prove that they walked down every aisle and still got out of Costco without spending over $350.)

h/t, Theo, who continues to be a good finder of cool stuff.

Boris Berezovsky with 12 Transcendental Studies by Franz Liszt, Here are 1-3. The rest of them at Classical Virtuoso.

Many have commented on Kay Hymowitz' interesting but not overly-deep report in City Journal about the young single men of America - Child-Man in the Promised Land.  A quote:

Now meet the twenty-first-century you, also 26. You’ve finished college and work in a cubicle in a large Chicago financial-services firm. You live in an apartment with a few single guy friends. In your spare time, you play basketball with your buddies, download the latest indie songs from iTunes, have some fun with the Xbox 360, take a leisurely shower, massage some product into your hair and face—and then it’s off to bars and parties, where you meet, and often bed, girls of widely varied hues and sizes. They come from everywhere: California, Tokyo, Alaska, Australia. Wife? Kids? House? Are you kidding?

Not so long ago, the average mid-twentysomething had achieved most of adulthood’s milestones—high school degree, financial independence, marriage, and children. These days, he lingers—happily—in a new hybrid state of semi-hormonal adolescence and responsible self-reliance. Decades in unfolding, this limbo may not seem like news to many, but in fact it is to the early twenty-first century what adolescence was to the early twentieth: a momentous sociological development of profound economic and cultural import. Some call this new period “emerging adulthood,” others “extended adolescence”...

Of course it is a sort of extended adolescence - or at least of relative freedom from some of the big burdens of life. Shrinkwrapped finds the information to be as gloomy as does Hymowitz, but I am not so sure it really is. Our pediatrician used to say about our kids, "Don't worry. I can guarantee they will be out of diapers by age 18."

From a piece of the above name by Zinser and Hsieh in The Objective Standard:

Politicians from across the political spectrum, including Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton and Republican candidate Mitt Romney, have argued that the government should guarantee “universal coverage” to all Americans, making health care a “right.”9 And politicians are not alone; numerous businessmen, union leaders, and insurance executives are united in saying that this will solve our problems.10

It will not.

Contrary to claims that government-imposed “universal health care” would solve America’s health care problems, it would in fact destroy American medicine and countless lives along with it. The goal of “universal health care” (a euphemism for socialized medicine) is both immoral and impractical; it violates the rights of businessmen, doctors, and patients to act on their own judgment—which, in turn, throttles their ability to produce, administer, or purchase the goods and services in question. To show this, we will first examine the nature and history of government involvement in health insurance and medicine. Then we will consider attempts in other countries and various U.S. states to solve these problems through further government programs. Finally, we will show that the only viable long-term solution to the problems in question is to convert to a fully free market in health care and health insurance.

Read the whole thing. It's basically a thoughtful argument against socialist "solutions" to things in general.

42% of American dogs sleep on their owners' bed. Laura Ingraham says so. Hers does (a rescued dog), and mine does too, even though I think it's a bad habit and it's annoying as heck when you can't move your feet around freely.

He will choose you, disarm you with his words, and control you with his presence. He will delight you with his wit and his plans. He will show you a good time, but you will always get the bill. He will smile and deceive you, and he will scare you with his eyes. And when he is through with you, and he will be through with you, he will desert you and take with him your innocence and your pride. You will be left much sadder but not a lot wiser, and for a long time you will wonder what happened and what you did wrong. And his kind comes knocking at your door, will you open it? From an essay signed, "A psychopath in prison." Without Conscience: The Disturbing World of Psychopaths Among Us. -Dr. Hare

That is from a page which also lists Dr. Hare's checklist of Sociopathic traits. (h/t, reader H, in reference to yesterday's Clinton post.)

You don't need all of those items to be a sociopath - each one is a trait, and a warning sign.

Animator vs. Animation by *alanbecker on deviantART

Very cool. Theo found it: