Maggie's Farm

Re-posted from February 13, 2007

I stumbled into an online petition yesterday entitled "End Climate Change Now!" Such foolishness makes me laugh and cry. If every human on the planet were to sacrifice their lives on the altar of Gaia today, the climate would continue to change. Who do we think we are, anyway? Climate is always going either up, or down. It never stands still, but zigs and zags, like every natural phenomenon. But it led my thoughts to lovely, remote Greenland.

The population of Greenland is 56,000, about 85% Eskimo. As you recall, Denmark "owns" Greenland, but they are mostly self-governing. The imperialist Eskimos invaded pristine Greenland around the same time that the imperialist Erik "the Red" Thorwaldsson began to bring settlers to Greenland, in the late 900s.

At that time, Greenland had far less ice, was green, and was warm enough for farming. By the 1300s, Greenland had become too cold for the Norwegian Vikings, and they all returned home.

Earth has been in an Ice Age (mostly Pleistocene - previously the entire planet had been tropical for a long time) for 3 million years ("Ice Age" defined by ice on both poles), with repeated advances and retreats of the ice sheets, and repeated micro and macro fluctuations which are just trivial blips on a giant chart.

We only know a lot about a few of these blips, such as the "Little Ice Age" of 1000-1350s, and the "Medieval Warm Period" (1400-1900), when it was possible to grow all sorts of crops in England. 

Major "cool periods," or Ice Ages, occur about every 200 million years, and last several to tens of millions of years. The most recent advance of our current ice sheet peaked about 10,000 years ago (this one tends to advance and reteat every 15-18,000 years).  We, in our micro view, often term the most recent advance "The Ice Age" - the one with Wooly Mammoths etc. But we are, historically, in the middle of the big one now. Will another little ice advance occur and bury NYC? Definitely. We are in the longest cold period in the earth's history.

Stop climate change? Heck no. It's freezing out, sleeting and snowing, and we are, in fact, in the middle of a darn ice age. A bit of a warm spell should be welcomed as a blessing. No, I will sign no Stop Warming petition, but I'd sign one to stop tectonic plate movement. I do not want MA to reconnect itself to Africa just now, and only Halliburton could move those things.

Check out this site for historical climate changes. As you can see by the graph on the right from Scotese, we have been in a heavy duty cold spell for quite a while. When our climatologists look at climate, they tend to look at the micro picture, but that is like trying to predict the stock market by looking at one day's fluctuations. It's meaningless. And apparently most folks, other than the loonies, have figured that out. 

Problem is, we have another blip of a serious Ice Age coming on our path to our return to the normal Pleistocene tropical climate. Can we handle it?

We will survive; we can cope, but just as surely we will all die off, in time, in whatever apocalypse the future has in store for mankind - even if we last long enough to see the sun fade out. That is history's lesson, and the lesson of science.

Image of Mammoth: Moravec does excellent prehistoric paintings. Check out his cool website.

Ann Althouse posts her quote collection from 2007. Here's one, in which Bob Dylan reponds to the question of how he became a star:

"Carelessness. I lost my one true love. I started drinking. The first thing I know, I'm in a card game. Then I'm in a crap game. I wake up in a pool hall. Then this big Mexican lady drags me off the table, takes me to Philadelphia. She leaves me alone in her house, and it burns down. I wind up in Phoenix. I get a job as a Chinaman. I start working in a dime store, and move in with a 13-year-old girl. Then this big Mexican lady from Philadelphia comes in and burns the house down. I go down to Dallas. I get a job as a 'before' in a Charles Atlas 'before and after' ad. I move in with a delivery boy who can cook fantastic chili and hot dogs. Then this 13-year-old girl from Phoenix comes and burns the house down. The delivery boy — he ain't so mild: He gives her the knife, and the next thing I know I'm in Omaha. It's so cold there, by this time I'm robbing my own bicycles and frying my own fish. I stumble onto some luck and get a job as a carburetor out at the hot-rod races every Thursday night. I move in with a high school teacher who also does a little plumbing on the side, who ain't much to look at, but who's built a special kind of refrigerator that can turn newspaper into lettuce. Everything's going good until that delivery boy shows up and tries to knife me. Needless to say, he burned the house down, and I hit the road. The first guy that picked me up asked me if I wanted to be a star. What could I say?"

Photo taken yesterday. Thanks, reader for the timely image.

Patsy Cline might own this song, but the Duprees made it a hit in 1962. It's one of the best pop songs ever written (yes, the pyramid photos reminded me of it):

Superb photos of the pyramids here. h/t, Attack Machine. Photo below is from 1943:

We rarely link podcasts, but this Glenn and Helen interview with Jonah, about his new book Liberal Fascism, is fun to listen to, and all you have to do is click it.

It's a calm, thoughtful discussion of Fascism and its history. A quote: "It all boils down to Locke vs. Rousseau."

For a while, when Maggie's Farm was in its childhood and before we kept stats, we tried to post a Tractor of the Week. This was from May, 2005.

1976 Farmall Model 1496

I like the eager-to-work, funky Jetson styling. Eager masculine power.

I could use one of these big boys, but how do I get a real red neck sitting in the shaded cabin?

The words and lyrics of the spiritual Go tell it on the Mountain were written by John W. Work, Jr. (1872-1925). John Work Jr. is best known for his collection, the Folk Songs of the American Negro. He graduated from Fisk University in 1898 and became a teacher. He died in 1925 in Nashville, where he was born. Here's Dolly:

Matthew 2:13-24

When they had gone, an angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream. "Get up," he said, "take the child and his mother and escape to Egypt. Stay there until I tell you, for Herod is going to search for the child to kill him." So he got up, took the child and his mother during the night and left for Egypt, where he stayed until the death of Herod. And so was fulfilled what the Lord had said through the prophet: "Out of Egypt I called my son."

When Herod realized that he had been outwitted by the Magi, he was furious, and he gave orders to kill all the boys in Bethlehem and its vicinity who were two years old and under, in accordance with the time he had learned from the Magi. Then what was said through the prophet Jeremiah was fulfilled: "A voice is heard in Ramah, weeping and great mourning, Rachel weeping for her children and refusing to be comforted, because they are no more."

After Herod died, an angel of the Lord appeared in a dream to Joseph in Egypt and said, "Get up, take the child and his mother and go to the land of Israel, for those who were trying to take the child's life are dead."

So he got up, took the child and his mother and went to the land of Israel. But when he heard that Archelaus was reigning in Judea in place of his father Herod, he was afraid to go there. Having been warned in a dream, he withdrew to the district of Galilee, and he went and lived in a town called Nazareth. So was fulfilled what was said through the prophets: "He will be called a Nazarene."

h/t, The Mersey Beat at Grow a Brain

You are not paid to think,” is what my father said. “You are paid to sit there and do what you’re told.”

He was imparting his wisdom when I told him about the troubles I was having working in banking.

Whole piece here. h/t, Small Dead Titmice

50 excellent but non-cliche movie quotes. Samples:

Nick Smith: It's a tiny bit arrogant of people to go around worrying about those less fortunate.

Nick Smith: Rick Von Slonecker is tall, rich, good looking, stupid, dishonest, conceited, a bully, liar, drunk and thief, an egomaniac, and probably psychotic. In short, highly attractive to women.

Tom Platt: The environmental movement of our times was sparked by the rerelease of Bambi in the 1950s.

Read 'em all.

(Our News Junkie is away hunting this weekend.)

Capital punishment and New Jersey's misplaced priorities. Malanga in City Journal

"Does my bomb look big in this?" Mr. Free Market

Bill Kristol to the NYT?

Peggy Noonan only asks for a "reasonable person" in the White House. Same here.

Brit Islamists celebrate Bhutto assassination. Also, Bhutto death will stabilize Pakistan. Also, Bolton considers US role in the Pakistan mess. Also, was Bhutto a "splendid con" ?

Remind me: What's a principal-agent problem?

Getting repetitive here: Hillary lies about Bhutto

The Annual Nanny Awards. h/t, Alphapatriot

How to talk to your child about Jamie Lynn Spears

A non-grim milestone reached.

Warming crisis means more kittens in Toronto. How can that be? It hasn't happened yet. (h/t Small Dead Kittens) Maybe they can feed the cats to the Polar Bears.

Cowboy walks into a bar...Theo

Santa photo captured by our Brit cousin Mr. Free Market last week. Let Santa into your house and you never know what might happen because he is a jolly old elf.

h/t, Classical Virtuoso

An anti-nutritionist screed. Asst. Village Idiot

It's the Year of the Potato! For me, every year is the year of the potato.

Does Mrs. Clinton buck the spirit of the 22nd Amendment? Scrappleface has a take on that.

Oldest tavern in Britain. h/t, Samizdata

Study: FOX News most balanced

Whatever happened to separation of mosque and state?

Bhutto: Without the "pious nonsense"

The 10 climate myth-busters of 2007. Junk Science

Identity studies for everyone! Now it's Age Studies. Are these people for real?

A re-post from 2005

J.M. Coetzee reviews Jay Parini's Life of William Faulker:

"Now I realise for the first time," wrote William Faulkner to a woman friend, looking back from the vantage point of his mid-fifties, "what an amazing gift I had: uneducated in every formal sense, without even very literate, let alone literary, companions, yet to have made the things I made. I don't know where it came from. I don't know why God or gods or whoever it was, selected me to be the vessel."

A fascinating piece, even for non-Faulkner fans, which might tell you all you need to know about him. Click here: The New York Review of Books: The Making of William Faulkner

This is a recent re-post. Why it popped up today I cannot tell, but perhaps there is a reason.

Dr. Sanity did a good job with the pomo logical contradictions a little while ago. She quoted Stephen Hicks:

In postmodern discourse, truth is rejected explicitly and consistency can be a rare phenomenon. Consider the following pairs of claims. - On the one hand, all truth is relative; on the other hand, postmodernism tells it like it really is.
- On the one hand, all cultures are equally deserving of respect; on the other, Western culture is uniquely destructive and bad.
- Values are subjective--but sexism and racism are really evil
- Technology is bad and destructive--and it is unfair that some people have more technology than others.
- Tolerance is good and dominance is bad--but when postmodernists come to power, political correctness follows.

Read her whole piece. Many of us have made these points before, but it doesn't matter. It's about Stalinist politics, not reason. Stalin remains popular in Russia - a folk hero.

Our battles are first won or lost in the secret places of our will in God's presence, never in full view of the world.

Oswald Chambers

In an effort to one-up The Barrister today, how is this for foolishness?

He might be the Archbishop of Canterbury, and thus guardian of the Anglican faith. But every time I see Dr Rowan Williams’ smug face or hear his social-worker voice, I feel like breaking at least one of the Ten Commandments (I’ll leave it to readers’ febrile imaginations to guess which one).

Read O'Neill's whole piece at Spiked.

Our Iowa Editorial Committee has pondered long and deep, and decided that we will endorse, for the Repub nomination, Pogo. We Go Pogo!

Pogo has been running for Pres. since 1952, and it's time to give him a chance. He has the experience, and he won't play possum in the White House.

This decision is not to disparage George Papoon ("Not Insane!"), who is also an excellent mammalian candidate but one who promises to permit voting by all kinds of animals, including unicellular animals. We are told on good authority that each one of us has more bacteria in our GI tracts than there are American voters, and we believe this could dilute the opinion of us superior and more thoughtful multicellular animals.