Maggie's Farm

It's a round ball and a round bat, and you got to hit it square.

Pete Rose

I have told my kids that one optimistic yet realistic way to look at life is that it is like standing in front of a conveyor belt upon which a stream of opportunities are passing by, but each one will never pass by again in the same form.

I am referring to every sort of opportunity: opportunities to make friends, to be kind, to find love, to have fun, to stand up for your beliefs, to show mercy, to develop interests, to develop good habits of character, to make money, to be forgiving, to practice strength, to find God, to learn, etc, etc.

Alas, that conveyor belt offers just as many opportunities to make mistakes and poor choices.

It is a tough part of maturity to accept the reality limitation, however, that any opportunity grabbed will reduce the number of opportunities passing by on the conveyor belt, because time is an arrow.

A friend reminds me of the old story:

The levee broke and the water is rising in the town. One guy gets on his knees and prays "God, save me from this flood." There is a knock at the door and a firetruck offering to evacuate him. "No thanks, God will rescue me."  He waits as the water fills the first floor.  A guy in a rowboat shows up.  "No thanks, God will save me."  Water fills the second floor and he goes to the attic and punches a hole in the roof.  A helicopter comes by.  "No thanks, God will rescue me."  The water rises further, and he starts treading water, but finally tires and drowns. Up in Heaven he berates God.  "Hey, you said you would help me when I was in need. Where the heck were you?" 

God replies "I sent you a firetruck, a rowboat, and finally a helicopter. You rejected every one..."

You can locate anyone's cell phone with this GPS mobile phone tracking system.

But, if my ringer is turned off, can it help me find my cell phone in my house?

With all of the exciting news about wildfires, I want to make a pitch in favor of wildfire. Wildfire is part of nature, and it's a good thing.

Fire suppression makes natural fires worse when they occur, because kindling builds up on the floor of the forests.

Why is wildfire good? Not just because it is "natural." I am not a pagan who believes that whatever is "natural" is good. But fire is nature's way of creating swaths of ash-fertilized space for plant succession on the land, and new habitats for the species that like newer growth. In fact, mature forests probably have the lowest biodiversity of any non-polar habitat. For one example, the Elk and songbird populations of Yellowstone took a huge jump after the big fires.

Smokey the Bear was wrong. Wildfire is part of the creative destruction of nature. Suppressing it is little more than sentimentalism combined with a subsidy to logging business. Whether millions of taxpayer's money should be spent, and lives risked and lost, to support that sentimentalism and that industry is a political question (to which my answer is "No").

We have written more about the virtues of wildfire and clear-cutting before. 

I am not one who was born in the possession of knowledge; I am one who is fond of antiquity, and earnest in seeking it there.

Confucius

Excellent cartoon about Truthers and Conspiratorialists. No Pasaran.

The arrogance of experts. Samizdata

A reader brought to mind a book to consider reading. The Death of Satan, by Columbia prof Andrew Delbanco. It's about how the idea of the Devil was replaced by a de-personified, impersonal "evil," and how the notion of "evil" is being replaced by social and psychological, rather than moral, concepts.

World's most powerful cordless drill. YouTube

A very nice hydrangea we bought yesterday at the nursery. Kardinal, It is said to tolerate more sun than most hydrangeas can.

A Ukrainian explains it (h/t, reader). One quote:

Anyone who had lived through the attempt by Soviet hardliners to take back the power and restore a Stalinist dictatorship would be astounded, just as I am, with allegations by today’s American “progressives” that George W. Bush is a dictator whose “junta” has usurped our freedoms and reversed decades of progress, turning America into a “fascistic autocracy.” Such people don’t even begin to know what “junta” really means nor what it feels like to live in a dictatorship. These pundits may think of themselves as enlightened “defenders of freedom,” but in reality they only expose their own moral blindness. By shooting in the wrong direction they are hurting the very cause they claim they fight for. Freedom cannot be attained by erasing the objective criteria of liberty and democracy. Dictatorship cannot be fought by misleading the nation about the true nature of tyranny and oppression.

Read the whole thing at Pajamas. The author of the piece is the creator of a humor site on our blogroll, People's Cube. Below is an image from Cube, and from the article:

Why are we getting repeated Google searches for "removing pachysandra"? We have never posted on that subject, although I guess we have posted on pachysandra.

Since there appears to be interest out there, here's my method.

(But first, even though I have some pachysandra beds adjacent to the house, I do not really approve of it near houses or buildings. It belongs at a distance, in full shade - if you must have it at all.)

I am an expert at pachysandra removal. You take a good sharp spade - not a shovel - and with it cut deep parallel lines in the pachysandra bed, about 14" apart. Then you use the spade to cut those stretches into 2-3' lengths. Use the spade to begin to undercut those strips a couple of inches deep, and then you can peel the whole thing up like a slice of carpet.

If you want to replant it somewhere else, just lay those lengths of carpet down, and, with some watering, they will grow in.

From a review in The National Interest of two books by Paul Hollander on the violence and oppression of Communist states during the 20th Century (h/t, reader):

Communist terror varied from one country or region to another, and at different times within any one geographic unit; nevertheless, the common elements, both theoretical and practical, are easy to discern. Political police forces (known as “state security” organs), charged with controlling “ideological” rather than ordinary crime, tended to dehumanize the “class enemy” as historically obsolete and “destined” to become extinct. Abuse of the “mentally ill” designation also cut across communism’s manifestations.

Marx and Engels’ oxymoronic “dialectical materialism”, juxtaposing the inevitability of revolution with the imperative of party leadership and predicated on a quasi-divine belief in history as progress, allowed zealous disciples to justify terror and murder by transforming “is” into “ought.” Lenin understood perfectly that the next stage of history must be right, hence any means to bring it about were justified. Therefore, expediting the proletarian nirvana requires “eliminating” those who doubt the omnipotence, omniscience and benevolence of history’s anointed force, the vanguard of the proletariat, the Communist Party.

Not unexpectedly, as nirvana became more elusive, the number of concentration camp inmates grew. Their crimes were often simply accusations—or having been arrested. As the gap between reality and promise increased, so did the need to eliminate those most likely to notice. Repressive measures, including imprisonment and torture, were most frequently taken not against declared ideological opponents, but against members of an inherently “counterrevolutionary class.”

I think we understand that the atrocities and mass murders of communist states have been given a pass in history due to the reflexive sympathy to the Left's "the ends justify the means" ethic, on the part of the intelligentsia. I hope Hollander will help to undo that deception. Read the whole thing.

Excerpt from The Waste Land (1922)

What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow
Out of this stony rubbish? Son of Man,
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,
And the dry stone no sound of water. Only
There is a shadow under this red rock,
(Come in under the shadow of this red rock),
And I will show you something different from either
Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at morning rising to meet you;
I will show you fear in a handful of dust.

Our truant contributor Gwynnie emailed this photo to us from her place in the California mountains south of Lake Tahoe. Took the photo this morning. Message: "This fellow was as interested in me as I was in him." (No word yet on how the pig hunt went, but I know Gwynnie will return to Yankeeland with a ton of wild pig sausage. Always does.)

There is a new magazine out there, Garden and Gun. It sounds like an ideal sort of Maggie's Farm magazine (h/t, Dr. Helen).

With a photo of Pat Conroy on the cover, how bad could it be? I'll give it a try, if only to find out whether it's more interesting than our Maggie's Farm blog. I am certain that it is better-written.

Re gun mags, I used to subscribe to Shooting Sportsman, but it has become too snooty for my taste. Informative, though, if you own $60,000 shotguns instead of Mossbergs and Brownings like regular folks.

If you think health care is expensive now, wait until you see what it costs when it's free.

P.J. O'Rourke

One of the puppies is graduating from college in two weeks, and will be moving to New York. She is a Math major with a Fine Arts minor, with plenty of street smarts - plus a Division 1 Varsity sport.

She sealed a deal with the job she wanted in back in November. Nice little "signing bonus," too. Yesterday she emailed me the website for the building in NYC into which she will be moving. Dang nice. This building has a doorman, a gym, and rooftop gardens. Plus she will have 6 pals from college and high school in the same building. Look out, New York, for the approaching tornado.

When I lived in NYC, I lived in hovels and basement apartments with slovenly roomates and cockroaches, had few friends - and no money to paint the town even if I had wanted to. In those days, there were no buildings with gyms, indoor pools, and rooftop gardens anyway.

Check out the details of the apartment building. I am jealous, but a professional curmudgeon like me should say "The kids today are so spoiled. They should be suffering and struggling, or in the Army, instead of romping around." She says she expects to work from 6:30 AM to 11 pm, so I guess it won't be all fun and games, and the pressure to be outstanding will be enormous...but that's Life in the Big City.

(Sometime I will have to get her to record all of her job interview questions. One guy gave her five seconds to answer "What's 19X17?" Fortunately, she had memorized her multiplication tables through 20 rather than the ordinary 10. They also wanted instant decimal conversions, and tested the depth of her knowledge of statistics, Shakespeare, Latin, Mozart's operas, Thomas Aquinas, and Duccio.  I take that as an effort to weed out the bullshit artists. A total of about eight hours of pressure interviews, spread over a few weeks, for each of the jobs she wanted. Most interviews included lunch or dinner at least once, which she rightly believes was an effort to check out her collegiality, sociability, manners, and poise under pressure.)

A government big enough to give you everything you want, is strong enough to take everything you have.

Thomas Jefferson 

It's not a classical logical fallacy, but the Zero-Sum fallacy, when applied to money and wealth, is one of the most common fallacies around. We mention it often at Maggie's Farm.

It is a delusion commonly held by the economically ignorant - a delusion which Lefty politicians are never in a hurry to disabuse them of. We are fortunate that it is fallacious, because it means everyone can potentially have whatever degree of wealth they want without detracting from anyone else's.

Coyote re-posts his annual Wealth Creation and the Zero-Sum Fallacy.

Both links via RCP:

Edmund Burke on Sarko's election. This is a revolution he likes. By the way, I read his new book this winter. Essential reading. I think I read it in college, but forgot all of it.

E.J. Dionne: The Left is Reeling. Dionne is a real person, but he always makes for a perfect straw man anyway.

And also, Chirac's Legacy, at Ace

In general, the art of government consists of taking as much money as possible from one part of the citizens to give to the other.

Voltaire

I contend that for a nation to try to tax itself into prosperity is like a man standing in a bucket trying to lift himself up by the handle.

Winston Churchill