Maggie's Farm

1958. The guy was a damn good crooner. When I look back on how kids dressed for a night out, or for college, through the early 60s, I realize that they aspired to adulthood. Now, everybody aspires to youth. Youth is wasted on the young.

I'll believe it's a crisis when the people who say it's a crisis start acting like it's a crisis.

Glenn Reynolds on global cooling global warming climate change.

The best test of your tolerance is whether you can tolerate my intolerance.

Dr. Joy Bliss, who is in Maine this month - a crusty old state where nobody tolerates anybody and where nobody ever says "Have a nice day." In Maine, the correct response to "Have a nice day" is "Don't tell me what kind of day to have."

h/t, Viking Pundit

Michael Yon. Great photos of Americans at work. A quote:

As the attack unfolded, about a thousand Iraqis fled their homes, and it was the job of C-52 to screen for al Qaeda. Some al Qaeda—who cross-dressed and tried to slip out as women—were caught when their disguises failed. Some Iraqis reported that homes in their areas had been destroyed, and I recall one saying that people were trapped in the rubble, though civilian deaths from our attacks were so low they were difficult to count. (I had free range and was specifically watching for civilian fatalities, yet did not see any civilians killed by us during the attack.)

The deliberate pace of the attack, the systematic and thorough process of clearing the city house by house, street by street, and block by block, were factors in this; but the civilian and military casualties were also kept low by the unexpected and overwhelming cooperation of ordinary Iraqi citizens, who pointed out the enemy and many of the bombs set to ambush troops.

There were interesting dynamics unfolding. For instance, our soldiers were much more reluctant to use force when civilians were helping. I saw numerous occasions where soldiers cleared out all the civilians in areas before attacking known targets that civilians had pointed out. For instance, in the more than two dozen houses and buildings rigged as giant bombs, civilians pointed out many of those bombs. Our soldiers and Iraqi soldiers simply stopped, cleared out the people, and then destroyed the buildings, but each time they worked harder to mitigate damage to surrounding houses, and paid people for the unavoidable damages when they occurred.

The quote is from Part 1. Here's Part ll.

This one is 16' with a 4 cylinder engine.

This is from the mid-80s. Domino's "I'm Walking" was the first song Nelson recorded.

I have always heard about the Series 7 exam, but never bothered to look into exactly what it tested until the pup told me that she has to pass it this month, after two months on the job.

It covers a lot of territory. I believe that she is studying hard for it, in the few hours in the day they don't keep her at work.

Wall Street is an exciting place this month: interesting things happening. As Warren Buffet says, when the tide goes out, you find out who is swimming nude.

We posted this well-known presentation by Michael Crichton a year ago, but I was recently reminded of it by the Assistant Village Idiot who cops to finding complexity to be complicated.

If you haven't read it, please do. It's an excellent discussion of how complicated nature is, and how readily our human good intentions can produce serious unintended consequences. Good graphics, too.

Yes, their numbers are rising, BUT THAT'S BECAUSE WE CAN COUNT THEM BETTER NOW.  How many Atlantic hurricanes that never touched land did we count in 1920?

It's as stupid as saying the number of Lyme Disease cases has gone up 10 gazillion percent since 1975. True - because it was not defined as a disease until 1975.

But this isn't stupidity - it's deliberate data-abuse to fool the statistically-ignorant and scientifically-unsophisticated. Or am I still paranoid and giving the Al Gores too much credit?

By the way, we love hurricanes. We don't like to see people's lives damaged, and would not be so foolish as to live in a place where such damage could be expected. But we do stand in awe of the power of nature.

A garden at Villa le Balze, Fiesole, a year and a half ago. The morning mist obscures the view of Florence spread out across the Arno valley below.

I noticed the similarity between Gen. Pacepa's examples of KGB psy-ops and John Kerry's testimony in Congress. So did Sissy Willis, but Gateway shows the real deal.

Gateway calls it "useful idiocy," but I think otherwise. "Useful," but not an idiot: I am not saying he was a spy, but perhaps a willing ally of the Soviets, and one who had clearly been handed a KGB script designed to undermine support for the war. I agree with Sen. Kerry about almost nothing political, but he isn't an idiot.

Kerry was reading from the KGB propaganda script, word for word. So am I insane when I sometimes wonder what Bill Clinton was doing on that trip to Moscow (also here) while be was at Oxford?

Yes, probably paranoid, but if I had told you a week ago that Kerry was reading a KGB script when he testified to Congress, you would have (rightly) called me crazy too.

There are Americans out there who truly hate America enough to ally themselves with America's enemies. That sad and unsettling fact opens the door to all sorts of suspicious thoughts which are unpleasant to entertain. That is what happens when one's reality is shaken. I thought Kerry was disloyal, but not a man who would read a KGB script in Congress.

Coulter on poverty. It's a simple fact that poverty in America correlates with terrible decisions in life about having babies (h/t, Vanderleun):

"Democrats resolutely refuse to tell the poor the secret to not being poor: Keep your knees together until marriage.

"That's it. Not class size, not preschool, not even vouchers, though vouchers would obviously improve the education of all students. You could have lunatics running the schools -- and often do -- and if the kids live with married parents, they will end up at good colleges and will lead happy, productive lives 99 percent of the time.

"But Democrats don't care about the poor. They don't care about the children. They care about government teachers and other government bureaucrats -- grimy, dowdy women who "woo" at political debates. Or as CNN calls them, the "young," "hip" crowd."

We are interested in IQ at Maggie's Farm. I suspect that most of our readers  are among the 10% that measures over 120.

If yours is over 120, Charles Murray believes you need Special Education.

(Sorry those links on the archived piece didn't work.)

We should be grateful for the free heat, since we pay plenty for heat from October through May. Thought this photo from last winter might help us cool off.

Definitely Fred country, says Beth at My Vast Right Wing Conspiracy, who posted the above relevant Lynyrd. Much as we are open to Fred, we don't really know where he is coming from yet, or what sort of candidate he can really be.

h/t Ace

It is my honor today to announce the MFBA winners for the blogs with the most interesting images and photography. Our editor and staff have voted unanimously this year.

Best Totty on a Non-Porn Blog: Theo Spark

Best Historic Photographs of Real Life: Sippican Cottage

Best Old Photos, General Category: Dr. X

Best Images of British Military History: Free Market Fair Tales

Congratulations to our winners, who we expect will wear their readily-recognizable MFBA medal proudly if and when they ever leave the house.

For the fine arts to revive, they must recover their spiritual center. Profaning the iconography of other people's faiths is boring and adolescent.

Thus comments atheist Camille Paglia in her excellent essay. She makes the case, with which I agree, that art without a spiritual center quickly degenerates into narcissism, commercialism, propagandizing, or adolescent shock-art. Another quote:

A primary arena for the conservative-liberal wars has been the arts. While leading conservative voices defend the traditional Anglo-American literary canon, which has been under challenge and in flux for forty years, American conservatives on the whole, outside of the New Criterion magazine, have shown little interest in the arts, except to promulgate a didactic theory of art as moral improvement that was discarded with the Victorian era at the birth of modernism. Liberals, on the other hand, have been too content with the high visibility of the arts in metropolitan centers, which comprise only a fraction of America. Furthermore, liberals have been complacent about the viability of secular humanism as a sustaining creed for the young. And liberals have done little to reverse the scandalous decline in urban public education or to protest the crazed system of our grotesquely overpriced, cafeteria-style higher education, which for thirty years was infested by sterile and now fading poststructuralism and postmodernism. The state of the humanities in the US can be measured by present achievement: would anyone seriously argue that the fine arts or even popular culture is enjoying a period of high originality and creativity? American genius currently resides in technology and design. The younger generation, with its mastery of video games and its facility for ever-evolving gadgetry like video cell phones and iPods, has massively shifted to the Web for information and entertainment.

I would argue that the route to a renaissance of the American fine arts lies through religion.

Read the whole thing in Arion. h/t, reader.

Image: One of Andy Warhol's Tomato Soup images, to my mind just one example of "art" lacking in a center - unless his idea was to mock the very idea of artistry. He made himself fabulously wealthy with this sort of stuff, but his Hollywood-style celebrity was at the core of it all.

Read the Amazon reviews of Piper's Desiring God: Meditations of a Christian Hedonist.

I ordered it yesterday. I am grateful to a Brit friend for letting me know about Piper, whose church in Minnesota he attended last week while on a cross-country road trip. The high points of his trip? Meeting Piper, and camping in Glacier National Park.

Two excellent links from readers:

US Forest fires, mapped and updated. You can click on each fire and learn the details. I wonder how that map compares with past summers. Montana and Idaho look rough.

Mark Steyn implies that the media covers up for Saudi jihad-supporters.

From ONN, h/t, Evangelical Outpost

I won’t meddle any more than Arthur Sulzberger does.

Rupert Murdoch, on his purchase of Dow Jones and the WSJ