Maggie's Farm

Several men are in the locker room of a golf club. A cell phone on a bench rings and a man engages the hands-free speaker function and begins to talk. Everyone else in the room stops to listen.

MAN: "Hello"

WOMAN: "Honey, it's me. Are you at the club?"

MAN: "Yes"

WOMAN: "I am at the mall now and found this beautiful leather coat. It's only $2,500. Is it OK if I buy it?"

MAN: "Sure, go ahead if you like it that much."

WOMAN: "I also stopped by the Mercedes dealership and saw the new 2007 models. I saw one I really liked."

MAN: "How much?"

WOMAN: "$92,000"

MAN: "OK, but for that price try to get it with all the options."

WOMAN: "Great! Oh, and one more thing...the house I wanted last year is back on the market. They're asking $3,500,000"

MAN: "Well, then go ahead and give them an offer of $3,000,000., in cash. They will probably take it. If not, we can go a few extra 100 thousands if it's really a pretty good price."

WOMAN: "OK. I'll see you later! I love you so much!"

MAN: "Bye! I love you, too."

The man hangs up. The other men in the locker room are staring at him in astonishment, mouths agape.

MAN (turns and asks):  "Anyone know who this phone belongs to?"

The Religio-Fascists are coming! The Religio-Fascists are coming!

Dunn at American Thinker considers ex-NYT reporter Hedge's new book.

Last Sunday, The New York Times featured a review of American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America, in which author Chris Hedges makes the argument that millions of Americans are about to fall on their fellow citizens and punish them in the name of a righteous Lord. This is the latest of a series of such volumes - also mentioned is Michelle Goldberg's Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism. We could add as well the recent "militant atheist" volumes by Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris, which are intended to serve the same readership for the same purpose.

While reviewer Rick Perlstein doesn't particularly approve of the book in question, he does buy into the thesis. "Of course there are Christian fascists in America", he insists, followed by several anecdotes that demonstrate no such thing.

"...they want dominion - for the Lord to make an America where other values are impossible to hold", he concludes.

And that, in a nutshell, is the latest left-wing horror story. The fascists are coming. They're waving crucifixes this time.

We haven't shown a nice gun in a while. This is the ArmaLite AR-10 in .308 caliber - a good caliber. Mr. Free Market wants two - one for him and one for his lad. And I know Buddy would like one for popping the bunnies in his garden. Useful also for creating peace in the Middle East.

Front Page takes a look at some the union-perpetuated myths. Quote:

Few people are aware that our education spending per pupil has been growing steadily for 50 years. At the end of World War II, public schools in the United States spent a total of $1,214 per student in inflation-adjusted 2002 dollars. By the middle of the 1950s that figure had roughly doubled to $2,345. By 1972 it had almost doubled again, reaching $4,479. And since then, it has doubled a third time, climbing to $8,745 in 2002.

Since the early 1970s, when the federal government launched a standardized exam called the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), it has been possible to measure student outcomes in a reliable, objective way. Over that period, inflation-adjusted spending per pupil doubled. So if more money produces better results in schools, we would expect to see significant improvements in test scores during this period. That didn't happen. For twelfth-grade students, who represent the end product of the education system, NAEP scores in math, science, and reading have all remained flat over the past 30 years. And the high school graduation rate hasn't budged. Increased spending did not yield more learning.

Whole thing here.

Middlebrow has a good piece on the subject. I too have noticed how unsophisticated the thinking is about religion for those who haven't been adequately exposed/educated. I never see the sneering in my personal life, but maybe folks are being polite. I hate to be presumed stupid: at least give me a chance to prove it. A quote:

Lately, secularists have taken to sneering rather than arguing. They simply assume all thoughtful people agree . . . and move on.

When is a “silly” belief disqualifying? Very great men have believed very odd things . . . I would love to be tutored by Socrates (!) whatever his views on government.

But the new secularism has no time for nuance or self-doubt. If a man is religious, then secularists know him to be a fool, an idiot, or a cad. If a secular writer is bright enough, then he might get away with calling a believer all three!

To such folk there are good religious, folk like Cornel West, whose religious views are secularism with God-talk added.

and 

Secularists who are fools, idiots, or cads (the dear leader of North Korea, the Hollywood secularist of the moment, and Stalin in no particular order) are merely misguided . . . or not true secularists to the modern writer of such rot.

Christianity may have helped invent modern science, the University, and produced much of the world’s great cultural treasures, but living Christianity is only to be despised, though to be fair any other religious group is hated just as heartily by these thoughtless secularists.

1. Loyal Reader: Thanks for the tip on the Big Damn Book of Sheer Manliness. Somebody should have given me that one when I was 15, but I see it didn't come out until '98. I done gess I jes gotta get me one for my own dam sef.

2. Another extraordinary "manspace" I have seen is an aquaintance who put a two-story cathedral-ceilinged addition on his house for his gun collection. No windows (for security), and a steel door to the rest of the house. Huge fieldstone fireplace with a Cape Buffalo headmount over the mantle, leather couches, antique oriental rugs, and balcony all around the second level with built-in mahogany gun racks for his collection of one example of every Winchester ever made. Plus enough other guns to fully stock a high-end gun shop. Room loaded with game heads - Africa and N. America - and mounted birds. A heavy glass door to the stairway to the stone-lined underground wine cellar. Wow.

3.  Re the whole question of moderate Moslems  towelheads, click continuation page for the really good kind of towelhead (almost, but not quite, work-safe):

Do most men need a place to go to be alone, or to be with the guys, where they can feel undomesticated among their own stuff? I think so.

The barn, the garage, the workshop, the tack room, the gun room, and, in big houses, maybe the library or the study. A "family room" does not fit the bill - it defeats the purpose.

Villainous Company takes a look at a new book, Manspace. 

Also, Dust my Broom shows you his.

Gwynnie and I have a friend who has the best "manspace" I have ever seen. It's his boathouse, with a deck over the water. Inside, cabinets for his boating and fishing stuff, racks for fishing poles, racks suspended from the ceiling for masts, a pool table, a refrigerator filled with beer, a well-stocked humidor, a cooktop, a bar, TV, music and good speakers, etc etc. Decorated with hunting and fishing art. There's a big old wood stove, but he had the place heated and insulated.

Today is Christmas in some of the various denominations of the Eastern church.

Image is the Hagia Sophia, built in 537 - one of the architectural wonders of the world, but not a Christian basilica since 1453, when Moslem invaders conquered Constantinople and slaughtered the Christians - men, women and children.

Speaking of which, here's a great time-line of what sorts of things prompted the Crusades. The Crusades were a reaction to Moslem imperialism, and Moslem imperialism never quit. It's part of their religion. As in Europe today, they will conquer without guns - when they can get away with it...but there is always a threat in the background.

And yes, the image of Hagia Sophia has been photoshopped to reveal its original grandeur. Across the inlet lie some of the fancy Istanbul neighborhoods overlooking the Bosporus - some of the most expensive real estate in the world.

You know about PEBD, right? (h/t, Jules C):

Recovering PEBD victims vividly confirm Leveran's description of the disease. "I found myself completely paralyzed by joy," said Malcolm Renner, whose website recently sold for 1.2 billion dollars. "I could tell--foggily--that my Maserati teetered on the edge of a mountain road in Tuscany," he recalled, "but if the supermodels in my back seat had been an ounce lighter, I wouldn't be here today."

Whole heart-breaking article here. I think we need a Federal program to help these people. Teams of counselors and social workers, ready to go at a moment's notice. Maybe involve FEMA, too.

Definitely unusual - but life is strange. Here. Piece at Ace.

Ace, predictably, wondered about their future sex life, but we wondered about motor control. Whose brain does the walking? It seems to me that the one on the right just kinda goes along for the ride. Anyway, the whole thing is fascinating, and they are remarkable in their "normalcy."

A clever reader coined the term "evangelical atheists" the other day. Yesterday, an opinion piece by Tobias Jones in The Guardian on "secular totalitarianism." A quote:

That is why these (secular) fundamentalists are so in evidence. They're not only needled by their own hypocrisy; they are also furious that believers have broken the old pact to stay out of public debate. Witness, for example, Mary Riddell's astonishing sentence in the Observer last month (try replacing "religion" with "homosexuality" to get the point): "secularists do not wish to harm religion or deny its great cultural influence. They simply want it to know its place." In other words: get back in the closet.

Christians feel particularly aggrieved because we believe that Jesus invented secularism. Jesus's teachings desacralised the state: no authority, not even Caesar's, was comparable to God's. As Nick Spencer writes in Doing God, "the secular was Christianity's gift to the world, denoting a public space in which authorities should be respected, but could be legitimately challenged and could never accord to themselves absolute or ultimate significance". Christianity, far from creating an absolutist state, initiated dissent from state absolutism.

Right. Whole thing here.

That is why Statists hate religion: it competes in significance. Why else would they care so much - or even care at all?  Science is generally and properly humble about its offerings (the global warming scam excepted), but The State is never humble.

A new bio of the remarkable, irrepressible William James is out. Quote from review in the Boston Globe:

In "William James," Robert Richardson, whose previous subjects were Thoreau and Emerson, seeks to understand James's "life through his work, not the other way around." Richardson presents no new interpretations of James's theories of pragmatism and pluralism. Nor does he attempt to critique them. But he has a knack for explaining complex ideas clearly and elegantly and for bringing to life a fascinating character. Various William Jameses, Richardson suggests, lived inside the man: As he willed himself into optimism, he was often sad, irritable, and depressed. But the "central" or "essential" James was an apostle of activity, spontaneity, doubt, chance, and chaos, "astonishingly, even alarmingly open to new experiences," including a headlong plunge into the maelstrom of American modernism.

The whole thing is here.  Image: Henry and brother William (on right) James. Two brothers could hardly be more different in temperament. Henry was "an old lady," and William a wild and crazy, drug-abusing, skirt-chasing dude.

We do not really have a bleak one here, this year, with Palm Trees sprouting up in Yankee-land, and dinosaurs returning to latitudes in which they have not been seen for many years, but I love this song:

In the bleak midwinter, frosty wind made moan,
Earth stood hard as iron, water like a stone;
Snow had fallen, snow on snow, snow on snow,
In the bleak midwinter, long ago.

Our God, Heaven cannot hold Him, nor earth sustain;
Heaven and earth shall flee away when He comes to reign.
In the bleak midwinter a stable place sufficed
The Lord God Almighty, Jesus Christ.

Angels and archangels may have gathered there,
Cherubim and seraphim thronged the air;
But His mother only, in her maiden bliss,
Worshipped the beloved with a kiss.

What can I give Him, poor as I am?
If I were a shepherd, I would bring a lamb;
If I were a Wise Man, I would do my part;
Yet what I can I give Him: I can give my heart.

Christina Rossetti wrote these memorable lines. The music is perfect, too. The music Midi file here.

I guess this is a guy question: Laura Ingraham or Monica Crowley? Laura seems more my type - a Yankee gal, a Dartmouth gal, and less intense than Monica. But I do love listening to Monica on Saturday afternoon on 770 from NYC. Here's one of my favorite Laura (post-cancer surgery) photos, which captures her spirit if not her loveliness:

 and here's a toothsome Monica photo:

Who ever said you can't be in love with more than one person at once? That person had no imagination whatsoever. Probably a Calvinist party-pooper. I love them both, in different ways, I think. And, as a brand-new but closet Mormon, I'd be happy to take 'em both on, and their incomes would help quite a bit with the new gun budget. Yes, that Serbu looks good: a guy has to protect what belongs to him.

With pin-up calendars for hospitalized vets. (h/t, Iowahawk)

This healthy-lookin gal Gina has really nice hats.

And what could be more health-promoting than cute girls?

You can buy one for yourself too, if you want one - but it's not tax-deductible. If you go there, tell 'em Dave from Iowahawk sent ya. Dave deserves the credit.

Shamefully, furtively, guiltily stolen in full from YARGB:

The New York Review of Books: A Mission to Convert: "The reason Dawkins thinks he has something to say about God is, of course, clear: he is an evolutionary biologist. And as we all know, Darwinism had an early and noisy run-in with religion. What Dawkins never seems to consider is that this incident might have been, in an important way, local and contingent. It might, in other words, have turned out differently, at least in principle. Believers could, for instance, have uttered a collective 'So what?' to evolution. Indeed some did. The angry reaction of many religious leaders to Darwinism had complex causes, involving equal parts ignorance, fear, politics, and the sheer shock of the new. The point is that it's far from certain that there is an ineluctable conflict between the acceptance of evolutionary mechanism and the belief that, as William James put it, 'the visible world is part of a more spiritual universe.' Instead, we and Dawkins might simply be living through the reverberations of an interesting, but not especially fundamental, bit of Victorian history. If so, evolutionary biology would enjoy no particularly exalted pulpit from which to preach about religion.

There is no conflict, and the whole Dawkins thing is silly. From what I've heard, scientists are just as religious, or non-religious, as the rest of the population. Science and religion exist in entirely different spheres of experience.

Thinking about Tuscany today. This is the Franciscan cloister of Santa Croce, in Firenze, taken last year. Who is entombed in the basilica? Among others, Michelangelo, Galileo, Enrico Fermi, and Machiavelli. A true Hall of Fame.