Maggie's Farm

With creamed spinach: recipe and Video.

Individuals have rights. Government has no rights, only powers. Tyler Cowen asserts that, most of the time, governments do not have the right to tell us what to do. He wants unpasteurized cheese (and so do I).

Two books:

Big Babies, or Why Can't We Just Grow Up by Michael Bywater

Nanny State: How Food Fascists, Teetotaling Do-Gooders, Priggish Moralists, and other Bonehead Bureaucrats are Turning America into a Nation of Children by David Harsanyi 

I'm goin' to Jackson. Good deals on ammo. h/t, Right Wing Prof

American kids refuse to grow up. Jon Swift. Many will refuse to if they have the choice not to.

Are taxes fair? No. The prosperous pay more than their fair share. Willisms

Dems turn protectionist. I don't see why this is "left." Clinton was a free-trader. I think it's populist - and irrational.

Are Americans fed up with "over there"?

A security leak has damaged US intel on Al Qaida. I hope someone is in deep trouble.

Islamo-fascism Awareness Week at GW creates a stir.

Scapegoat time. Mugabe blames the West. Nice try, moron.

Is the death penality constitutional? Wizbang says yes.

Who trusts the media? Dems and Repubs polled. Also at TigerHawk

Bashing Woodrow Wilson. Linknzona.

Reality is not optional. Medical care, at Cafe Hayek

The need for "narrative." Assitant Village Idiot

Chavez is going to create the New Man. Good luck, pal. Stalin tried that already.

Don't let the food Nazis bother you. From Insty:

JOHN TIERNEY: Diet and Fat: A Severe Case of Mistaken Consensus. "The notion that fatty foods shorten your life began as a hypothesis based on dubious assumptions and data; when scientists tried to confirm it they failed repeatedly. The evidence against Häagen-Dazs was nothing like the evidence against Marlboros."

Now finish all your ice cream like good boys and girls.

171 indictments thus far for New Orleans post-Katrina pols, of no identified political party. (h/t Surber.) I think Katrina was very good for the bank accounts of New Orleans.

Maybe it's time for a good hurricane in western Mass, so we can all cash in. But no mighty hurricanes this year, despite Al Gore's pleading. Could he be wrong?

Quote:

So executive vice-presidents' families are now the new new poor? I support lower taxes for the Frosts, increased child credits for the Frosts, an end to the "death tax" and other encroachments on transgenerational wealth transfer, and even severe catastrophic medical-emergency aid of one form or other. But there is no reason to put more and more middle-class families on the government teat, and doing so is deeply corrosive of liberty.

And, if the Democrats don't like me saying that, next time put up someone in long pants to make your case.

Read the whole entertaining thing. (h/t, Buddy) People do love to pretend that government programs are something other than their next-door neighbor's hard-earned money.

Attack Machine can generally be counted on to independently post many of the same topics and the same links that we do. Our blog instincts are almost identical. Great minds, etc.

Case in point, a piece at One Cosmos which sits quite close to our metaphysics, skating past pure solipsism by positing and accepting God's existence. A quote:

There is nothing you can say about anything that isn’t laden with implicit or explicit metaphors, which is one of the reasons why it is so absurd for the materialist to object to spirituality, since the idea of solid matter is itself a sort of airy metaphor, just a fanciful concept based upon the illusions of our nervous system, illusions like “solidity” or unambiguous “place.” Scientists often conflate the abstract and the concrete, and essentially extend the concretions of the nervous system into an abstract worldview. Which is fine, so long as you don’t confuse them with metaphysical truth, or with the Ultimate Real.

For their part, so-called fundamentalist religionists often do the reverse, which is to say, concretize the abstract. But only God can really do that, since the cosmos itself is none other than a concretion in a small corner of the Divine Mind. As mentioned a couple of days ago, one of the purposes of scripture — which employs countless metaphors and other seemingly concrete images — is to follow it back upstream to its hidden source, the “place” from which revelation perpetually flows like a spring from the ground. Indeed, the place from which language itself flows.

Photo: A girlfriend of Theo, studying one of Gagdad Bob's books and wondering whether her existence is what it seems.

Here. Why can't we get this quality of reporting from the MSM? The QQQ:

...my feeling that those in Iraq are the moral upper-crust of our society is not cheap moralizing or patronizing, but the simple truth—as hard as that is for some to accept.

Here. (h/t, Doug Powers) An example:

"To those people who say, `My father is alive because of animal experimentation,' I say `Yeah, well, good for you. This dog died so your father could live.' Sorry, but I am just not behind that kind of trade off."
-Bill Maher, PETA celebrity spokesman

(BTW, every medicine and every surgical procedure is tried on animals before people. Would anyone want it to be otherwise?)

Newts have unusual life-cycles. Actually, this is a photo of a Red Eft I took yesterday. Red Efts are the land-dwelling intermediate form of our Eastern Red Spotted Newt.

They go from egg to gilled young newt to Red Eft on land and then, after a few years, back to adult air-breathing, breeding water newt.

Saw many of them yesterday in our Hemlock groves up above the beaver marsh, poking around the leaf litter on the balmy October day. They are surely only days away from hibernation deep in the leaf litter. 

Although they look like Gummy Salamanders, their orange color announces their toxicity to predators. Cute little critters that provide instant good cheer when seen.

Tips for lap dancers. Dust my Broom.

The founders never separated God from State - just "church". Cherry at Am. Thinker

We need to add Grow a Brain to our blogroll.

The average American gets 41 miles per gallon. Theo

What victim trumps the other victims? The Socialist Food Chain, at Dr. Sanity

FLARES' Photo of the Day. Cool.

What's the deal with science and Islam? Something went very wrong. Synthstuff

How the NYT has tried to wiggle out of its past Haditha pronouncements. Dem. Project

Hillary a socialist? Classical Values. Her famous quote, in which she sounds excited, rather than reluctant, to use your money:

"We're going to take things away from you on behalf of the common good," she told San Franciscans in June 2004. As first lady, she said: "We must stop thinking of the individual and start thinking about what is best for society."

Quite a revolutionary sort of statement from an American politician. What strikes me, again, is that she views such things as positives, rather than occasional necessary evils and impingements on freedom. I simply do not want her to do anything for me if the price is my autonomy. I'll let you unpack her statement yourself, word by word and phrase by phrase.

Luke 15, 1-10

Jesus said to his disciples: "Things that cause people to sin are bound to come, but woe to that person through whom they come. It would be better for him to be thrown into the sea with a millstone tied around his neck than for him to cause one of these little ones to sin. So watch yourselves.
      "If your brother sins, rebuke him, and if he repents, forgive him. If he sins against you seven times in a day, and seven times comes back to you and says, 'I repent,' forgive him."

The apostles said to the Lord, "Increase our faith!"

 He replied, "If you have faith as small as a mustard seed, you can say to this mulberry tree, 'Be uprooted and planted in the sea,' and it will obey you.

 "Suppose one of you had a servant plowing or looking after the sheep. Would he say to the servant when he comes in from the field, 'Come along now and sit down to eat'? Would he not rather say, 'Prepare my supper, get yourself ready and wait on me while I eat and drink; after that you may eat and drink'? Would he thank the servant because he did what he was told to do? So you also, when you have done everything you were told to do, should say, 'We are unworthy servants; we have only done our duty.' "

One more load yesterday morning. This is well-seasoned White Ash, the tree from which baseball bats are made. I see some log-splitting in my future. 

Yes, that squiggly green thing on the window is a Fisher's Island sticker, for those with sharp eyes. Very nice place, Fisher's - but no place for tourists. This truck can use the Fisher's Island dump.

Femme Fatale. It was never clear to me whether Nico was forced on the Velvet Underground by Warhol, or whether they wanted her. Nico, as many recall, died young of a stroke. (Those who say that she sounds like Lilly von Schtupp when she says "twue" are cruel-hearted.)

We at Maggie's Farm would never publicly admit to aspirations to grandeur. Life's harsh schoolmistress teaches us humility daily.

We know we are destined to be a boutique blog, with a certain sensibility and many shortcomings which will prevent us from becoming mass market. Plus we do not have the time, or, really, the motivation, for fresh reporting. Furthermore, we do not bother with ads which would only compllcate our taxes for little gain, while compressing our space.

It is encouraging, though, for us to view our growth in an international blogosphere which is overloaded with interesting things to read. And yes, I know we post too much, too often. That is one of our many flaws.

According to our internal stats, we are running an average of about 4000 visits/weekday. In September, 145,000 visits and over a half-million page views. (Multiple visits do not count - and we get happily get plenty of 'em.)  We quit looking at our millions of hits per month, which mean little. We are small, but not invisible. Our average length of stay is 3-4 minutes, which is very long for any blog or website: it either means that we are interesting... or that our visitors are slow readers.

The less-accurate Sitemeter shows a lower number, but nonetheless shows a steady pattern of growth: we have never had a month without readership growth since we began keeping stats in March, 2006 - unless you count the occasional months following mega-links. The graph looks good, and tells us that the market for Maggie's Farm is not yet saturated.

And don't even ask about those old Truth Laid Bare rankings. That site hasn't updated us since 2006, despite several emails to them, so I think they are non-functional as a source of blog data. Let's just say that we are the Eastern Box Turtle of the Blogosphere.

If you like us, and know folks who might also enjoy us - even if they do not agree with our politics - send us around. We know there are plenty of people out there who might like Maggie's, but have never stumbled upon us. We welcome civil, informed debate, disagreement, and genteel correction, and, in fact, we are never truly certain about most of our bold assertions.

One more thought: Leave a comment on a post if you have a thought to share. Don't be shy. We read most of 'em, sooner or later. Our commenting is easy: no illegible letters to type in for security. Our high-tech anti-spam takes care of that for us.

Photo: The mascot of Maggie's Farm: A very young Eastern Box Turtle, a cheerful, slow and steady critter who likes rainy days and eats almost anything. At this time of year, they are fattening up for a long hibernation. Around here, they spend half of their life cozily buried in restful hibernation - October to April or May.

Time to pull in the decoys and head the boat back to the barn.

Sally Morgenthaler, author of the book Worship Evangelism, has given up on the notion.  In this article she despairs that her thoughtful book became an excuse for churches to develop an "if you build it they will come approach" to evangelism that has both failed in developing proper worship and truly effective authentic evangelism. Today, instead, she challenges leaders to separate worship from evangelism so that we can honor God in the first and live with and love our neighbors as the means to the second.

Read the whole thing at It Takes a Church.