Maggie's Farm

A CT salt pond yesterday, on Long Island Sound. Thanks, reader.

His Inaugural Address, in two parts:

I have many thoughts about this speech, but no time now to write them down coherently.

Overcoming Bias discusses biases in the system. A quote:

In this recent entry, Eliezer discussed what might be called the "pork-barrel paradox" in politics, that even when there is public support for reducing the size of government, the political constituency for individual programs can be strong enough to keep them all going.  He also points out that the occupations represented in Congress don't match the country at large, and maybe don't match what we really need.  (To briefly quote myself, I'm willing to believe that the country's 890,000 lawyers are being overrepresented, but what about the 114,000 biologists? A few of these in Congress might advance the understanding of public health. And then there are the 290,000 civil engineers--I'd like to have a few of them around also. I'd also like some of the 280,000 child care workers and 620,000 pre-K and kindegarten teachers to give their insight on deliberations on family policy. And the 1.1 million police officers and 340,000 prison guards will have their own perspectives on justice issues.)

Read the whole thing.

La Montagne Ste. Victoire (1900). Cezanne painted this mountain, near his home in Aix-en-Provence, over 60 times.

Readers know that Obama's politics are about as far from ours as anyone's (plus I think he is naive as hell) and that we would therefore never consider voting for him, but one must admit that he is not only an appealing fellow - he is good at this game. He has it all over the seemingly soul-less, cagey, condescending and contrived Hillary Clinton personality-du-jour in natural sales and marketing talent.

Ambitious as he is, he displays more heart than raw ambition and calculation. A tough opponent, I think, and a potential winner if his lively spirit can defeat the grim Clinton Machine. If I worked for the Clintons today, I would be worried. Here's his impressive (yet mostly empty) "Thank you Iowa" speech:

Brit blogger Lionheart says he is a wanted man. h/t, Gates. More comments from Tangled Web.

If this story is true, I would suggest to the Brit police that they reconsider who the enemies of their society might really be.

Got your Racks Calendar for 2008 yet? h/t, Holy Taco

This is an example of why, when we need a giggle or two to cheer ourselves up, we visit The Peoples' Cube, where you can find the whole story:

From Radosh's glowing NY Sun review of Goldberg's Liberal Fascism:

Readers will learn that the very term "liberal fascism" came from the pen of H.G. Wells, the famed socialist author who delivered a speech at Oxford University in 1932 that included hosannas to both Stalin's Russia and Hitler's Germany. "I am asking," Wells told the students, "for a Liberal Fascisti, for enlightened Nazis." Democracy, he argued, had to be replaced with new forms of government that would save mankind, producing a "'Phoenix Rebirth' of liberalism" that would be called "Liberal Fascism." Like the activism, experimentation, and discipline that made the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany new dynamic societies, the West too could reach such a plateau by adopting the new soft fascism that suited it best.

And all of it run by him and his friends, no doubt.

"The start of this election is a little scary and has started with two populist, eloquent demagogues. They talk about hope when half the world hopes to be in America."

An Insty reader

In my opinion, the most important result is that a black guy can run for president and hold his own with anybody else. This pleases me but does not surprise me in the least, even in as white-bread a state as Iowa.

I'd now call this the Post-Obama Era for race relations in the US - an era in which victimhood has definitively lost whatever remaining persuasiveness it had. Obama did not run as a black man: he ran as a man.

From a new review of the film:

Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck's The Lives of Others, now available on DVD, is the best feature film debut by a director since Orson Welles's Citizen Kane. Coming it seemed out of nowhere and defying all the conventional wisdom of the motion picture industry, Donnersmarck achieved a remarkable commercial and critical success with his first full-length film, culminating when it won the Oscar for Best Foreign Picture of 2006.

The Lives of Others fully deserves all the awards it garnered. Evidently a perfectionist, Donnersmarck created a film that is near perfect in every respect. It deals seriously and profoundly with an important but sadly neglected subject—communist tyranny in East Germany—and the screenplay Donnersmarck carefully crafted over several years does full justice to his central theme of injustice.

Dave Brubeck's group with Paul Desmond, 1959

From Freedom, Morality, and New Year Revolutions at One Cosmos:

You will notice that when you pick up most any "new age" type book -- in fact, unfortunately, many conventional religious books as well -- the language conveniently goes "wobbly" just at that critical juncture when you most need it. These frauds use language in such a way that they make you feel as if the fault is within you, not them. Philosophers and academics pull the same thing all the time. But if you truly understand something, then it shouldn't be difficult to find the words to convey that understanding to another, at least assuming adequate communication skills, along with good will in the reader. (I might add that where the new agers use fuzzy language to conceal their ignorance, the conventionally religious often fall back on overly rigid and saturated formulas to cover over their lack of understanding.)

It's a good observation, and I have noticed that too. And mea culpa, Gagdad Bob: I have done the same sometimes.

We are adding to our blogroll:

- Dr. Mercury's The Conundrum. Long overdue.

- WallStreetFighter

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My take-home message from these data is that we have become a solid and steadily-growing small-to-medium-sized "boutique" site - a bit obscure but but surprisingly more often-read than many of the wonderful sites we read, admire, look up to, and depend upon for good stuff and interesting thinking. With millions of sites out there, we are grateful for our readership and for its steady growth as folks find us.

If we did not have fun with this, learn things, and receive some appreciation from our readers, we would quit. For 99.99% of "blogs," it's a hobby and closer to vanity publishing than to anything else. (If we could take in $1 per visit, we'd be more than delighted! But we decided not to do ads, etc., because of the hassle, the messiness, and the reality of the de minimus after-tax income from it.) That is why we have not chosen to be a an official member of the excellent Pajamas Media site, despite being on their blogroll: we would have to take the ads.

Our recurrent question is whether we have any slight impact on "the world" at all. In some ways, we would like to: in others ways, we would not like to, because we suspect that people who want to save the world might be a bit insane. (Still, we would love to have 100,000,000 readers across the globe, of all political stripes and colors.)

So we forge onward into a new year with the hope of adding something fun, stimulating, informative and provocative to the life of each individual reader in 2008, and with full awareness that what matters most is our own integrity and intellectual integrity, clarity of thought, our bred-in-the-bone Yankee skepticism and distrust of politicians and experts, our various random interests, the joy we are able to take in life, and the firmness of our foundational ideas and beliefs about "man and God and law," as the Dylan line goes. Trust us to question these all the time: we do.

We have had many comments about the amount of totty on Maggie's - some positive and some negative. It's really never been all that much, but it has led to some awkward situations at work or school for some of our readers. We will deal with that issue, somehow. Perhaps we need to control our inner 13 year-old.

Also, we have had frequent suggestions that we create a place for comment threads, because they become diluted among all of our daily posts. Well, we have been determined to reduce the amount of daily "product," but it never seems to happen. I cannot think of a solution to that. Furthermore, is reducing productivity a worthy goal anyway?

Finally, another response to a repeated question: Why the anonymity of our writers? For a variety of personal and professional reasons, we want to keep it that way for now. We are sorry if you disapprove of our modestly hiding behind the cybercurtain, but it is our choice because, as RR would say: We paid for this microphone.

Happy New Year, and stick with us! And tell your friends about us, if you haven't yet. They might get a kick out of Maggie's Farm.

Image: Ingres' depiction of the Maggie's Farm newsroom. (We felt obliged to photoshop out all the the Coors Lite empties and the bottles of Wild Turkey from his artistic effort, to protect the children.)

There'll be no change in strategy. There'll be no change in message. There'll be no change in Fred.

Fred Thompson

If you haven't seen this elsewhere already, give it a try. It's 17 minutes, and gives a good sense of who Fred is.

Photo from Sippican, who has all the words to the song

Here's Chris Muir's website.