Maggie's Farm

So convenient a thing it is to be a reasonable Creature, since it enables one to find or make a Reason for everything one has a mind to do.

Benjamin Franklin

A gentleman diner asked a waiter to take a bottle of Merlot to an attractive woman sitting alone at another table. 

The waiter took the Merlot to the woman and said, "This is from the gentleman seated over there," indicating the sender.

She regarded the wine coolly for a second, not looking at the man, and decided to send a reply note to the man. The waiter, who was lingering for a response, took the note from her and conveyed it to the gentleman.

The note read:

"For me to accept this bottle, you need to have a Mercedes in your garage, a million dollars in the bank, and 7 inches in your pants."

After reading the note, the man decided to compose one of his own in return. He folded the note, handed it to the waiter and instructed him to return this to the woman.

It read:

"For your information, I have a Ferrari 360 Spyder, an Aston Martin DB9, a Mercedes SL600 and a Porsche Turbo in my garages. I have over twenty million dollars in my bank account, but, not even for a woman as beautiful as you, would I cut two inches off.
Just send the bottle back."

Casual sex is a feminist con, says ex-groupie. I always found it amusing that the feminist con was so compatible with the time-honored male con. One quote:

Whatever Greer and her ilk might say I’ve tried their philosophy — that a woman can shag like a man — and it doesn’t work. We’re not built like that. Women are built for bonding. We are vessels and we seek to be filled. For that reason, however much we try and convince ourselves that it isn’t so, sex will always leave us feeling empty unless we are certain that we are loved, that the act is part of a bigger picture that we are loved for our whole selves not just our bodies.

It took me a long time to realise this. My earliest attitudes about sex were shaped from what I saw in the lives of my older sister and my mother — especially my mother, a free spirit who was desperately trying to make up missing out on the hippie era.

Whole pitiful story at Times Online

A basic summary piece on Jonathan Edwards' view of free will, with a comment about Pilgrims and sex, as quoted:

Puritans had a dim view of extramarital relations, but that was because they had a very high view of sexuality in marriage. Love, like the will, needs boundaries and channels; it needs a trusting and trustworthy context. The scholar Edmund Leites has studied hundreds of Puritan sermons about love and sex (there are many), and he has documented how much they preached about the duties to desire and how they saw the marriage bed as the "other altar of love." But they also knew that love, if it is to be sacred, needs a deep set of moral rudders. It needs to be modeled on the way God loves us. For nurturing awareness of the love of God, a vibrant community of faith is needed. For nurturing the love between persons, a faithful marriage is the context.

This fireplace grate comes highly recommended: Wall of Fire.

The spirit of a warrior is not geared to indulging and complaining, nor is it geared to winning or losing. The spirit of a warrior is geared only to struggle, and every struggle is a warrior’s last battle on earth. Thus the outcome matters very little to him. In his last battle on earth a warrior lets his spirit flow free and clear. And as he wages his battle, knowing that his intent is impeccable, a warrior laughs and laughs.

Carlos Casteneda (Thanks, Readers!)

This 1927 22' Chris Craft Cadet, with its original 6 cylinder Chrysler engine, can be had for $52,000. Having beauty in life is one good reason to make money. What's not to like about this boat?

And hey, blog brother Right Wing Nation - you need to get over your water phobia. Shrinks sometimes think it's a fear of one's own unconscious: the strange and unknown depths, etc. Dr. Bliss could cure it in one day with her "total immersion" technique in blue water. What doesn't kill you makes you stronger.

 

Reposted from Feb, 2005

This excellent, personal essay by Rogert Scruton appeared in The New Criterion in 2005. A classic, and one to which many of us recovering liberals can relate. One quote:

By 1971, when I moved from Cambridge to a permanent lectureship at Birkbeck College, London, I had become a conservative. So far as I could discover there was only one other conservative at Birkbeck, and that was Nunzia—Maria Annunziata—the Neapolitan lady who served meals in the Senior Common Room and who cocked a snook at the lecturers by plastering her counter with kitschy photos of the Pope.

One of those lecturers, towards whom Nunzia conceived a particular antipathy, was Eric Hobsbawm, the lionized historian of the Industrial Revolution, whose Marxist vision of our country is now the orthodoxy taught in British schools. Hobsbawm came as a refugee to Britain, bringing with him the Marxist commitment and Communist Party membership that he retained until he could retain it no longer—the Party, to his chagrin, having dissolved itself in embarrassment at the lies that could no longer be repeated. No doubt in recognition of this heroic career, Hobsbawm was rewarded, at Mr. Blair’s behest, with the second highest award that the Queen can bestow—that of “Companion of Honour.” This little story is of enormous significance to a British conservative. For it is a symptom and a symbol of what has happened to our intellectual life since the Sixties. We should ponder the extraordinary fact that Oxford University, which granted an honorary degree to Bill Clinton on the grounds that he had once hung around its precincts, refused the same honor to Margaret Thatcher, its most distinguished post-war graduate and Britain’s first woman Prime Minister.

Please read it, if you haven't. We like Scruton.

Image: Scruton receiving an honorary doctorate in 1998.

Is passivity always the best response to aggression? Dr. Helen discusses

Ace claims Dems will trade deaths for votes.

Will the US Survive until 2022? Derbyshire at New English Review. Among other things, he discusses multi-ethnic nations, and central govt incompetence. A quote:

Certainly our federal government inspires little confidence.  I have a sheaf of credit cards in my wallet, any one of which my local merchants can validate with a quick swipe.  Why cannot a prospective employee’s social security card similarly be validated?  Because private corporations are approximately 100,000 times better—more efficient, more capable—of doing anything than is the government. 

In the 1990s I had a job which required me to make occasional phone calls to banks and investment houses, and also to the offices of federal regulatory agencies like the FDIC in Washington.  To call a private company with a request, then to call a government agency, was to step through a horological time warp.  A business would deal with me more or less well (sometimes less well, to be sure), usually in a single call.  To get the equivalent response from a government agency needed a whole week of calls.  If anyone picked up the phone at all, I would hear a slow, indifferent voice, irked at having its game of Solitaire interrupted, saying:  “She ain’t here today…  Oh, he left early…”  Would my contact be in the office next day?  “Hard to say…  I guess…”

Are humans becoming smarter and more moral? Kling thinks so. I'm a skeptic, but he makes the case at TCS. A quote:

But perhaps the focus on scientific ideas still misses a key component of economic growth: improvements in the human species. As we get wealthier, we also become enhanced physically, cognitively, and morally, leading to a virtuous cycle of improvements to the standard of living. As the economy improves, human cognitive ability and moral reasoning improves, which helps markets to work better and makes the process of innovation more productive, leading to greater wealth, more mental and moral development, and so on.

I submit to you that if a man hasn't discovered something that he will die for, he isn't fit to live.

Martin Luther King Jr.

Excellent online magazine.

Fuller Seminary's new worship center. Wow. But didn't we used to call these churches, or chapels? Worship Centers? h/t, Smart Christian

The argument against government negotiating drug prices. WaPo (h/t Bruce Kesler)

The Moslem "bitchslap culture"  No Pasaran

The urbanization of the world continues apace.

Eliminate disgusting "farmer's tan." Dust my Broom

You will not believe this Duke Prof. Durham in Wonderland. What she says sounds psychotic to me, both in structure and content.

Vietnam loves America. Not your father's Vietnam

From G. K. Chesterton's Orthodoxy, as posted in Dr. Bob's good recent piece on Faith and Reason:

… [T]he materialist philosophy (whether true or not) is certainly much more limiting than any religion. In one sense, of course, all intelligent ideas are narrow. They cannot be broader than themselves. A Christian is only restricted in the same sense that an atheist is restricted. He cannot think Christianity false and continue to be a Christian; and the atheist cannot think atheism false and continue to be an atheist. But as it happens, there is a very special sense in which materialism has more restrictions than spiritualism. … The Christian is quite free to believe that there is a considerable amount of settled order and inevitable development in the universe. But the materialist is not allowed to admit into his spotless machine the slightest speck of spiritualism or miracle. … The Christian admits that the universe is manifold and even miscellaneous, just as a sane man knows that he is complex. The sane man knows that he has a touch of the beast, a touch of the devil, a touch of the saint, a touch of the citizen. Nay, the really sane man knows that he has a touch of the madman. But the materialist’s world is quite simple and solid, just as the madman is quite sure he is sane. The materialist is sure that history has been simply and solely a chain of causation, just as the interesting person before mentioned is quite sure that he is simply and solely a chicken. Materialists and madmen never have doubts.

The problem with government-controlled health care is that it tips a fundamental balance, and an important psychological balance, between individual citizen and the state by transforming everyone into a client/supplicant/dependent in relation to the state in one of the most important areas of their life.

This is a paraphrase of something I read or heard in the past week. Wish I could remember who said it. Whatever. What it captures, I believe, is the reason the Left wants government health care. Power over your heart - literally. One step closer to that bowl of lentils - and serfdom. Guess what - your doctor won't work for you anymore. They will work for "the greater good." How about if your plumber worked like that? Or your lawyer? They are all just technicians, right?

We have been very boat-oriented this week. Is Spring coming?

1. A father's life advice to his 21 year-old son: "You only need to know two things: you can marry more money in a minute than you can make in a lifetime, and always have friends who own boats."

2. "A boat is a hole in the water that you pour money into."

A reporter can create controversy, and thus a story, almost effortlessly. All you do is ask enough people a suggestive question until you find someone who disagrees with whatever it is. Then you have your story.

Whether they're a nut, or uninformed, matters not.

Apparently some people do not care for coyote hunt contests. We did a piece on the eastern Coyote last year. We would welcome such contests in New England.

"Trying" is lying.

A reader's mom.

Do, or do not. There is no try.

Yoda

From Tim Blair: If you ever feel deeply annoyed by a person sitting next to you on an airplane, bus, subway, or train, you can open your laptop and push this button, and see if things settle down.

Among various other business interests, my Gramps had the Elco dealership for New England in the 30s. Although he was mainly a sailor, he loved all sorts of boats, and the dealership made it possible for him to have a new Elco every year. I still think of the Elco as the classic yacht. You can still buy them, if you want to can afford to mess with wooden hulls. The history of Elco here. (BTW, PT 109 was built by Elco.) He donated his last Elco to the war effort. It was shipped to Britain, and used at Dunkirk.

Here's a 1925 57' Flat Top Motor Yacht ($195,000):

Here's a 1938 34' Sedan Cruiser ($137,000):

A sight for sore eyes, especially considering the vulgar, non-nautical appearance of most modern motor yachts. You can look at other old Elcos for sale here.

Dracula's castle for sale. BBC. Cheap, but can you afford to heat it?

17 cool and unusual buildings.

It's not a Hinckley, but the Fortier 26 seems like a fine boat, for less than half the price of the Hinckley Picnic Boat. You can find one used between $60-90,000. Certainly enough boat to handle the blue water off Block and the Islands, or Maine.

 

Michelle is in Baghdad. With photos. Bravo.

Sensible Mom has a round-up of reactions to Bush's speech.

A man who has nothing in particular to recommend him discusses all sorts of subjects at random as though he knew everything.

Sei Shonagon, Hateful Things, 900 AD (h/t, Sippican). Somehow, the quote reminded me of Maggie's Farm.