Maggie's Farm

Steve of Hog on Ice wants to publicize his writing. We like him. We'll help. A sample:

GOD: Adam! It is I, your creator!

ADAM: Hi, Lord! You’re just in time for lunch!

GOD: What’s cooking? Smells great!

ADAM: [Turning a spit over an open fire.] That thing you gave me. The one that kept making that awful squeaking noise.

GOD: What are you talking about?

ADAM: You know. It looked sort of like me, but it was short and had a big rear end, and it stood around with its hands on its hips, squeaking at me from daylight to dusk. It kept telling me what to do, so I hit it with this big rock.

GOD: Adam! You have slain the helper I gave you! I am mightily displeased!

ADAM: Sorry! Was I supposed to keep it? It ate all my food, and it blamed me for everything, and when I lay down to rest, it lay down next to me and put its big cold feet on me. It was really annoying. And I noticed it had a lot of nice meat on it.

GOD: What have you done to her?

ADAM: I started with a nice cider vinegar and cayenne brine, and then I used a cumin-and-pepper dry rub, and now I’m slow-cooking her over mesquite coals.

GOD: That’s not what I meant! And why are you eating meat? I gave you every fruit and every herb-bearing seed!

ADAM: I got that covered, too. I’m roasting corn on the cob.

GOD: I love corn on the cob!

ADAM: And I found that if you take the leaves from a certain plant and dry them and put them in hot water with honey, you get this stuff. I call it “sweet tea.”

GOD: I haven’t eaten a thing since breakfast.

ADAM: Pull up a rock and sit down. There’s plenty.

GOD: I really shouldn’t. My weight.

ADAM: Go on! You look fabulous.

GOD: I feel puffy.

ADAM: Never! You’re fishing.

GOD: Look, if I give you another one of these things, you have to promise not to eat it.

ADAM: Why would I want another one? What is it good for?

GOD: [Whispers]

ADAM: [slaps God on the arm] Get out of here! That’s the craziest thing I ever heard.

GOD: It’s more fun than it sounds.

ADAM: Can you make one that doesn’t squeak all the time?

GOD: No, that’s part of its nature. But if it starts to drive you crazy, light one of these and it will leave you alone. [hands Adam a box of cigars]

ADAM: [holding a corona] Okay. Won’t be much of a fire.

Moonbattery summarized Saturday's anti-war march in DC, as well as the much larger counter-protest - which received far less news attention. Here.

The NYT also noted than many of the marchers were puzzled by what the march was really about. Blue Crab. Most of the earnest anti-war folks were unaware that they were allied with communist revolutionaries with larger agendas. Lenin's "useful idiots."

Also, related to the links above and the piece below, Barone on the Blame America First crowd. A quote:

"They always blame America first." That was Jeane Kirkpatrick, describing the "San Francisco Democrats" in 1984. But it could be said about a lot of Americans, especially highly educated Americans, today.

In their assessment of what is going on in the world, they seem to start off with a default assumption that we are in the wrong. The "we" can take different forms: the United States government, the vast mass of middle-class Americans, white people, affluent people, churchgoing people or the advanced English-speaking countries. Such people are seen as privileged and selfish, greedy and bigoted, rash and violent. If something bad happens, the default assumption is that it's their fault. They always blame America -- or the parts of America they don't like -- first.

Read the whole fine essay. (thanks, Buddy). And read today's preceding piece: The Gospel of John and Yoko.

Image from Michelle's piece on the protests. She has lots of photos.

"From the Babylon of Gilgamesh to the post-Eden of Noah, every age has viewed climate change cataclysmically, as retribution for human greed and sinfulness."

Philip Stott, in a piece at ABC News. Yes, the Flood is engraved in our consciousness, isn't it? Not only in the Bible, but in every fourth old blues song.

That's a Maggie's Farm pal fishing in Patagonia recently. (The Mrs. is quite handy with a camera.) With all of the snow we have up here in the northeast, and a driveway with two inches of ice, it's hard to imagine that our trout season opens soon. Over the next week or two, we will post some fishing items.

This is a re-post from 2005

Hawthorne, from Anchor Rising blog, with a piece on public policy decision-making entitled: A Call to Action: Responding to Government Being Neither Well-Meaning nor Focused on the Public Interest. Quote:

...the question arises regarding whether American citizens should continue to assume the actions of government are well-meaning and focused primarily on the public interest. The answer is no.

Why this claim? Just think about it. Most American citizens have personal stories about how various public sector players (politicians, bureaucrats, lobbyists, and other parties with an economic stake in government actions like corporations and unions) act in their own self interest and not in the public interest. In fact, the bottom of this posting contains numerous previous postings which provide examples of such behavior.

The balance of this posting will elaborate on public choice theory, which explains why we cannot assume government is either well-meaning or focused primarily on the public interest. The posting then concludes with specific recommendations in a Call to Action.

Read entire.

^{2 Corinthians 5, 16-24}

¹⁶From now on, therefore, we regard no one from a human point of view; even though we once knew Christ from a human point of view, we know him no longer in that way. ¹⁷So if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new! ¹⁸All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ, and has given us the ministry of reconciliation; ¹⁹that is, in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting the message of reconciliation to us. ²⁰So we are ambassadors for Christ, since God is making his appeal through us; we entreat you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God. ²¹For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.

In the snow, today: Fox Sparrow, Tree Sparrow, Song Sparrow, White Throated Sparrow, Tufted Titmouse, Cardinal, Blue Jay, Mourning Dove, Goldfinch, Slate-Colored Junco. Plus a very cold-looking Robin taking the last few holly berries.

Not too exciting, but it's good to see them all enjoying the free lunch. And you never know when you might see something unusual.

Image: Fox Sparrow. Our eastern version of this large sparrow is rusty red, and likes to scratch on the ground.

We aren't into cat blogging (or cats), but we'll make an exception this time. This pussy cat was haunting someone's back deck in the snow in Mason, Texas recently, trying to get a better look at two young kids playing on the floor inside. (Thanks, BL.) Read this, if you like to hang out in Mountain Lion territory.

In New England it is traditional to put your peas in on St. Patrick's Day. I like to grow Snow Peas and Sugar Snap peas.

To do that enjoyable task today would entail literally planting the Snow Peas in the snow. They'll have to be late this year.

The bogeyman Christian is gonna getcha. A quote from Sam Harris in the LA Times piece, titled God's Dupes (h/t, Villainous):

Ordinary fundamentalist Christians, by maintaining that the Bible is the perfect word of God, inadvertently support the Dominionists — men and women who, by the millions, are quietly working to turn our country into a totalitarian theocracy reminiscent of John Calvin's Geneva. Christian moderates, by their lingering attachment to the unique divinity of Jesus, protect the faith of fundamentalists from public scorn. Christian liberals — who aren't sure what they believe but just love the experience of going to church occasionally — deny the moderates a proper collision with scientific rationality. And in this way centuries have come and gone without an honest word being spoken about God in our society.

Dang. That clever Sam Harris figured out that we Christians really want a theocracy, and want nothing more than to behead all those who will not kneel to Christ and his right-wing mission in America.

It is astonishing how much he understands about the covert machinations of the Christian faith, and our intentions for America. Who spilled the beans? Who was the leaker? Armitage? Rove? Bush himself?

We do indeed hide behind nominal Christians like wolves in sheep's clothing - that is how diabolically sneaky we are. And Bush is our secret Dear leader, but shhhh - don't tell anybody about our ultra, ultra Secret Plan to sneak sharia God's law into the US, like hanging all gays and banning abortion and stoning for adulterers and all that other cool stuff.

Read Sam's brilliantly penetrating, earth-shaking, Pulitzer-worthy expose of the dastardly Christian plot against good, old-fashioned, pagan, communitarian America here. 

My questions: Why doesn't he wonder what we evil ones are waiting for to institute the theocracy we desire? And why haven't we done it already, since we already have Bush as a dictator? And, third, what planet does this dude live on? Is Pluto still a planet? No, I guess not anymore.

Tell me, Dr. Sanity, or Dr. Bliss - does this guy qualify as paranoid? Or just plain ignorant? His lack of tolerance for others seems positively hostile...

The snow and ice show no signs of quitting. Just great. Gives me an excuse to spend a few moments creating another new blogroll category - Media Watchers.

Besides moving some existing sites to it, I will add Biased BBC and Buzzmachine.

“After two years in Washington, I often long for the realism and sincerity of Hollywood."

Fred Thompson, early in his Senate career. (H/t, Dinocrat)

Live, right this moment, from our corner of Yankeeland. That's one of the dwindling woodpiles. The lousy camera doesn't pick it up, but it's snowing heavily and accumulating rapidly.

Schools closed because the amateur bus drivers can't handle 7" of fresh snow: they don't use chains anymore (on the tires, not on the kids - we still use chains up here on the kids, when appropriate). Avoiding litigation, no doubt.

To readers who don't get this white stuff where you live: eat your hearts out! It is a beautiful thing. Now it's time to add a log or two to the fire and worsen global warming or cooling or malaria or whatever.

"Post-normal science" of climate change. Environmental scientist says: "Self-evidently dangerous climate change will not emerge from a normal scientific process of truth seeking,..." Piece at Melanie Phillips   

I'd call it "post-modern" science. This is creepy. Help me send her piece around, friends, because I think it exposes an important undercurrent of what is going on in the climate discussion: the idea that the ends justify the means (which Al Gore defended here).

And what are those "ends"? As always (is it coincidence?) more government control of your behavior, your freedom, and your hard-earned cash - as if government were a fount of wisdom instead mostly a bunch of slippery, self-aggrandizing, smooth-talking sleazes who want easy jobs, with no heavy lifting, and with good pensions. (See "The government is endogenous" by Prof. B.)

Yes, in the heart of true Yankees, government is seen as a necessary evil. Dr. Frankenstein's monster - created by us, but then difficult to control, because these folks just want to keep their easy jobs. A big mistake not to put term limits in the American Constitution.

A quote from Melanie:

So the true battleground has now been illuminated for us. The real fight is between scientists who believe in empirical observation and the truth, and ‘post-normal’ scientists who believe in ideology and lies. It’s a battle between Enlightenment values of rationality and those who wish to return us to a pre-rational era where thought was controlled and truth was a heresy. The stakes could not have been delineated more clearly.

Are some things too important for truth? I doubt it. Here is Galileo recanting his heresy.

Image: Jacques Derrida, the now old-hat (and now dead from AIDS - or was that Foucault? Whatever) philospher who taught our young brains full of mush the fallacy that there is no truth but power. Sorry, Jacques, wherever you are, but that was high school bull session material before anyone ever heard of you. We moved past that rebellious fashion long ago.

OK, it's a cold, sleety, soon-to-be blizzardy night in Yankeeland. Stoke up the fireplace or the wood stove, and ask the wife or hubbie to bring a keg over to the computer because this piece by Lanza in American Scholar (to which I recommend subscribing ) - h/t, A&L Daily - will take a few minutes to untangle and absorb. It is either an exercise in solipcism, or else very cool and fun. Lanza is a Professor of Medicine.

It's about consciousness and the real world, which is a subject which tends to require a touch of alcohol - or should I say ethanol, these days? Is reality a biological epiphenomenon?

It begins with this quote from the great Loren Eisley:

While I was sitting one night with a poet friend watching a great opera performed in a tent under arc lights, the poet took my arm and pointed silently. Far up, blundering out of the night, a huge Cecropia moth swept past from light to light over the posturings of the actors. “He doesn’t know,” my friend whispered excitedly. “He’s passing through an alien universe brightly lit but invisible to him. He’s in another play; he doesn’t see us. He doesn’t know. Maybe it’s happening right now to us.”

and ends thus:

Physicists believe that the theory of everything is hovering right around the corner, and yet consciousness is still largely a mystery, and physicists have no idea how to explain its existence from physical laws. The questions physicists long to ask about nature are bound up with the problem of consciousness. Physics can furnish no answers for them. “Let man,” declared Emerson, “then learn the revelation of all nature and all thought to his heart; this, namely; that the Highest dwells with him; that the sources of nature are in his own mind.”

Space and time, not proteins and neurons, hold the answer to the problem of consciousness. When we consider the nerve impulses entering the brain, we realize that they are not woven together automatically, any more than the information is inside a computer. Our thoughts have an order, not of themselves, but because the mind generates the spatio-temporal relationships involved in every experience. We can never have any experience that does not conform to these relationships, for they are the modes of animal logic that mold sensations into objects. It would be erroneous, therefore, to conceive of the mind as existing in space and time before this process, as existing in the circuitry of the brain before the understanding posits in it a spatio-temporal order. The situation, as we have seen, is like playing a CD—the information leaps into three-dimensional sound, and in that way, and in that way only, does the music indeed exist.

Go ahead and read the whole thing.

I would never criticize an author, because producing a work of fiction that anyone will pay money to read is an astonishing achievement.

Cooper was prolific as hell, but all I have read is The Last of the Mohicans - a long time ago.

Mark Twain, of course, has the bona fides to critique a fellow author. I have heard of his famous humorous and devilish critique of Cooper ("Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses"), but never read it until Right Wing Nation posted it today.

It's a powerful manual on what not to do in fiction writing. Thanks, RWN.

I stepped outside to do some chores today, and a Killdeer flew over the house, calling his name loudly. It is the time of year when they are on the move north, but the snow and sleet we have coming today will slow the migrants down a bit.

Killdeer is found across the entire US and most of Canada. He is a large plover - technically a shorebird - but more often found in inland fields that at the shore. I have always enjoyed these birds, probably because they are so easy to identify. They are famous for their broken-wing deception - the original victimhood scam.

Read about Killdeer at CLO here.

Communism is idiocy. They want to divide up the property. Suppose they did it -- it requires brains to keep money as well as make it. . . . The division would have to be re-made every three years or it would do the communist no good.

They already block Maggie's Farm. God knows why.

OK, let's give them a good reason: their idiot, people-fearing, totalitarian government is terrified of free thought. Their people might get ideas - and then what? They might not want to be political slaves.

China contains a great many intelligent, energetic people.

What else do they want to block, besides little ol' us? via Drudge.