Maggie's Farm

Mark 10: 2-13

Some Pharisees came, and to test him they asked, “Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife?” ³He answered them, “What did Moses command you?” ⁴They said, “Moses allowed a man to write a certificate of dismissal and to divorce her.” ⁵But Jesus said to them, “Because of your hardness of heart he wrote this commandment for you. ⁶But from the beginning of creation, ‘God made them male and female.’ ⁷‘For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, ⁸and the two shall become one flesh.’ So they are no longer two, but one flesh. ⁹Therefore what God has joined together, let no one separate.”

¹⁰Then in the house the disciples asked him again about this matter. ¹¹He said to them, “Whoever divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery against her; ¹²and if she divorces her husband and marries another, she commits adultery.”

¹³People were bringing little children to him in order that he might touch them; and the disciples spoke sternly to them. ¹⁴But when Jesus saw this, he was indignant and said to them, “Let the little children come to me; do not stop them; for it is to such as these that the kingdom of God belongs. ¹⁵Truly I tell you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God as a little child will never enter it.” ¹⁶And he took them up in his arms, laid his hands on them, and blessed them.

A blog named Dust my Broom would have to have a good feel for the blues - and he does. Push the button. (How is that done, Chris? We ought to do that too.)

If ye love wealth greater than liberty, the tranquility of servitude greater than the animating contest for freedom, go home from us in peace. We seek not your counsel, nor your arms. Crouch down and lick the hand that feeds you; May your chains set lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that ye were our countrymen.

Sam Adams, Philadelphia, August 1, 1776 (h/t, Massbackwards)

Columbia College has the chance to stand up for diverse opinions, or to collapse ignominiously the way Grayson Kirk finally did so many years ago, when the lunatics ended up running the asylum.

Powerline wrote the story before we got to it, with the apt tagline "The whole world is watching."

In the meantime, someone should inform these kids that it isn't 1968 anymore. The college is highly competitive - so where are they finding these infantile idiots?

And will the college which prohibits a pussy reference for the hockey team recruiting (what a joke) stand up to these tantruming spoiled brat brownshirts-in-training?

It's time to find out what Columbia University stands for: the mature discourse of civil, educated adults, or delinquent mobs. I think a semester's suspension might be reasonable. A little time to grow up, just like a "time out" for 4 year-olds.  

Your move, Administration.

Update: More from Blue Crab here, and video from Michelle here.

Our contributor Gwynnie is up there this morning, on Lake Winnipegosis.

I wish for the gang far worse weather than in the photo (last October), when we had Bluebird weather five days straight, and the ducks were not flying.

For duck hunting, you want wind, fog, sleet, snow, rain. Things that make people uncomfortable make the ducks uncomfortable, and causes them to think about moving from place to place instead of staying put. My best hunts have been in snow. The expression "good weather for ducks" means good weather for duck hunting.

Otherwise, the ducks just sit in the sun and sleep in the middle of the lake. On such days, in time, the intrepid  hunter, who may or may not have had too much after-dinner port the night before, dozes off, too, leaving a silent lake, the pursuers and the pursued all peacefully dreaming in the October sunshine.

[American religions teach] honesty, truth, temperance, gratitude, and the love of man. . . . with all these blessings, what more is necessary to make us a happy and a prosperous people? Still one thing more, fellow-citizens -- a wise and frugal government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, which shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. This is the sum of good government, and this is necessary to close the circle of our felicities.

Thomas Jefferson, First Inaugural Address, March 4, 1801

But in Poland, where the state retains many of its old monarchical temptations as it does in most of Europe, a guy is being chased by police for farting in a reply to "How do you like our President?"  Dust my Broom.

Run, dude, run. Your irreverent impulses are welcome in America...except by Al Gore, who might be distressed by your immoral and reckless methane emissions. (He produces none, ya know - not counting the volume of CO2 that comes out of his mouth. He is carbon-neutral and elevator-safe, and his feces are lily-white and completely organic.)

New Sisyphus takes a look at a document from 1939 by the Reichspropagandaleitung. One excerpt from the piece:

And, then, as now, "good hearted" Americans believed this:

The response on the part of the American people to this New Year address shows us that they reject the plans of their president. He was told that he had no business interfering in the affairs of other countries, and Congress was told to think carefully before permitting the president to engage in foreign adventures. A national article asked if America was threatened by Hitler and if Roosevelt should force the Germans to democracy, something that has been attempted since 1917. The article concluded with these words: "Roosevelt is playing with fire."

and

Congressman Hamilton Fish gave an even clearer answer. He gave a radio speech that strongly attacked Roosevelt's policies and declared that attacks by the president and his cabinet on the so-called dictators could lead only to war. All the totalitarian states that the president was attacking were occupied with their own problems, and would be for years to come. They had no thought of waging war against the United States or Latin America (Central and South America). Representative Fish said he could not be silent when the life, freedom and happiness of his nation were at risk. The time had come to put a stop to the warmongers of the New Deal, behind whom stand the war profiteers, communists and hysterical internationalists who want America to shed its blood and waste its money as the world policeman. Roosevelt's policies, Fish said, would lead to American involvement in every crisis in the entire world.

His speech was supported by the entire American press. It is also an indication of what the American people really think. The speech must be emphasized because it puts in words what the greater part of the American people think.

Why did the Nazis hate us? Rational Americans no doubt took these points at face value and sat down to think hard about how America could shore up her image in Germany, how legitimate grievances of Germany could be met with a helpful response, how the misunderstandings here could be avoided.

A fool's errand. The document continues:

Why is Roosevelt doing all this?

The reason is clear. The American opposition party asked "Why this warmongering?," and gave the answer. It claimed that Roosevelt was using such methods to:

1) to conceal the embarrassing sale of the most modern American warplanes to France,

2) to divert the attention of the public from unsolved domestic problems, and

3) to provide a reason for his premature return (from the naval maneuvers), which might have some impact on Congress.

We would add a fourth point: Roosevelt is acting as the mouthpiece and puppet of international Jewry when he attacks the authoritarian states. They want to use every means to destroy the newly awakened nations.

Read the whole thing, at New Sisyphus

Borrowed from The People's Cube, with a link to Scare a Liberal.com

 

All 22 episodes to date of Bob Dylan's Theme Time Radio.  Good fun.

Not only impeccable taste in tunes, but ones you aren't used to hearing. Plus you get to hear Bob talk. h/t, Marginal Rev.

Some of the themes thus far: Coffee, Eyes, Bible, Cars, Dogs, Mothers, Jail, Baseball.

Pajamas Media's Roger Simon interviews Joe Lieberman. It is politically interesting. The Youtube is here.

 

How good is this? (our bold print)

Human beings are fallen creatures in a fallen world. This concept is thoroughly misunderstood by the secular mind. In fact, “misunderstood” is perhaps not strong enough a word, because it presumes that one may understand it from the outside. However, as is true of all important metaphysical ideas that are couched in religious language, they can only be comprehended from the inside. One must first be in a religious world to know the world from which religion arises. Otherwise you are somewhat like a music critic who happens to be deaf.

For similar reasons, many people believe that you must first somehow decide whether or not God exists before joining a religion, but the opposite is true. One becomes religious so as to make God present in one’s life. Whether or not God exists is a separate issue. The important point is to make him present and real, and thus inhabit the space where our true humanness emerges. Anything short of this makes you merely human, which is necessarily to say less than human, in the sense that a person who does not transcend himself sinks beneath himself (i.e., we are speaking vertically, not of wordly civil responsibilities and the rights that that derive from them).

Whole thing at One Cosmos.

When a man comes home from a difficult day at work, nothing brightens his spirits and makes him feel more appreciated than being greeted at the door by the smiling face of the woman he loves with an ice-cold beer in her hand!

(T-rated image below - right-click on continuation page)

A dead church?  Tod Bolsinger quotes Peterson on "dead institutions." It's the dead bark that protects the living word.

He is heavy - he's my brother. Joe has mixed feelings on the Values Voters meeting. And deals with it admirably - as usual. Better than I would. Evang. Outpost

Maggie's readers know that we love Mark Helprin. A recent interview with him in Doublethink, via Small Dead Animals. A quote:

And by the way, when I was a freshman at Harvard, the first demonstration that I saw was one guy who was carrying a sign protesting. So I stopped and I talked to him, and he told me about how awful America was and everything like that. His case was that his father had been one of the members of the Hollywood Ten, and he had been forced to relocate to the south of France and write his screenplays under a pseudonym. And he says, “Well, it wasn’t right. He was completely innocent.” But the parents lied to their children. They didn’t tell their children. And I said “Well actually, he was a Communist. It was legal to be a Communist. But he should have said so. Or, even if he shouldn’t have said so, your telling me that he was not a Communist does not change the fact that was a Communist.” So he looked at me like he had found a lunatic Red-baiter. Right? “How do you know?” I said, “Because my mother was in his cell.”

Lost on Feb. 12, 1935, the USS Macon has been found in 1000 feet of water in the Pacific. This was the last US military dirigible.

Photos and story at Live Science.

Image from Live Science.

If others do not respond to your love with love, look into your own benevolence; if others fail to respond to your own attempts to govern them with order, look into your own wisdom; if others do not return your courtesy, look into your own respect. In other words, look into yourself whenever you fail to achieve your purpose. When you are correct in your person, the Empire will turn to you.

Mencius (aka Meng Zi, Meng Ke) circa 400 BC

The CD of his Carnegie Hall Concert of 2005 is released this week.

Chinin of the NYT visited Jarrett and interviewed him. It is worth reading for Jarrett fans. A quote:

Mr. Jarrett is one of the most renowned pianists in the world, a virtuoso equally at home performing Bach or bebop. And though he had been a child prodigy and a member of Miles Davis’s best jazz-rock bands, it was his Herculean solo improvisations — full concerts seemingly conjured out of thin air — that brought him worldwide renown. His 1975 album “The Köln Concert” (ECM) is the all-time best-selling solo piano recording in any genre, with more than three million copies sold.

In a recent conversation at his home in northwest New Jersey, Mr. Jarrett shed some light on the discipline behind his creative process, which his more perceptive audiences valorize as much as his facility at the piano. And he took a rare clinical walk-through, like a coach reviewing game film, of the spontaneous opus that ECM is releasing on Tuesday as “The Carnegie Hall Concert.”

The album documents in its entirety a performance that surpassed even the hopes of the crowd, which clamored for, and got, five encores. “There was so much comfort exuding from his body into the instrument, and out to us in the audience, that you felt like there were no boundaries at all,” said the pianist Jason Moran. “It was a real reminder of what the possibilities of the instrument are, and what the possibilities of a solo concert are.”

The whole piece is here. Image from the NYT article from this past Sunday.

John and some other Maggie's Farm buddies, standing in front of Class Action at Bud 'n Mary's Marina on Islamorada last Saturday. The fish are mainly King Mackerel, plus a couple of snapper. They released the sharks they caught.

 

Wierd Al gets it. From YouTube.

This species of the Southern longleaf pine forests (which have been harvested almost to extinction and re-planted with faster-growing commercial pines) has been in the news recently (see Monday links below). It has been endangered since the 1970s because of habitat loss. I have never seen one, but haven't spent any time trying to.

They are one of a very few bird species which are found only in the US. As with other woodpecks like Downies and Hairies, the red cockade is usually not visible.

These birds have unusual breeding habits: they are "cooperative" breeders, and the males incubate the eggs. Read about them here at CLO, from which we borrowed the photo.

What can be learned from the news story? I think the message is that the Feds cannot expect American citizens to roll over every time a Federal bureaucracy decides they know what is best. However, it is one of the jobs of the Feds, for better or worse, to try to protect endangered species. These are Federal laws and, in this case, their enforcement  threatens individual property rights, which Americans feel as strongly about - or more so - than they do about the Second Amendment.

So if the Feds want to do their job effectively, they need to approach such issues in a humble, friendly, cooperative, compromising manner. In DC, far from the piney woods of North Carolina, it is all too easy to feel the power, and to forget who pays their salaries and for whom they work.

Mix and match. Do it yourself post-modern Leftist dialectics, at No Pasaran.

Was in Nashville for the long weekend - found the big Home Depot, and of course the Outdoor World of Bass Pro Shops and Redhead. Saw Music Row twelve times, and passed by the Opry on I-40 about the same, but heard none of the music except from the speakers at the gas station and the hotel lobby. Do they have music in Nashville?

Something about the South: the wives go to Outdoor World with their hubbies. Overheard: "Honey, don't you think you want that same thing in the waterproof version? You could get wet and miserable out there, sweetie. It's only a little bit more. We can put it on the Mastercard." Will some feminazi shoot me if I say "The women are women and the men are men  boys  men whatever."

And we, at Maggie's Farm, love the Southern mentality, and the accents, too. And biscuits 'n gravy. We like to believe that the gravy provides a nice, smooth, healthy, slippery coating to those major arteries.

This photo of the Nashville Outdoor World was early in the morning, before they open. But, as with Cabelas, you always wonder why there are so many people INSIDE on a weekend when it's about being OUTDOORS. The parking lot fills up fast.

I know the answer: Guys love gear the way women love shoes.

Did they have anything I needed? No. Did I buy a few things? Yes. It's the American Way.