Maggie's Farm

When I get older, losing my hair, many years from now,
Will you still be sending me a Valentine,birthday greetings, bottle of wine?
If I'd been out 'till quarter to three,would you lock the door?
Will you still need me, will you still feed me,
When I'm sixty-four?

McCartney update here at BBC. The full lyrics here.

^{1I love the Lord, because he has heard my voice and my supplications.
2Because he inclined his ear to me, therefore I will call on him as long as I live.
3The snares of death encompassed me; the pangs of Sheol laid hold on me; I suffered distress and anguish.
4Then I called on the name of the Lord: “O Lord, I pray, save my life!” 5Gracious is the Lord, and righteous; our God is merciful.
6The Lord protects the simple; when I was brought low, he saved me. 7Return, O my soul, to your rest, for the Lord has dealt bountifully with you.
8For you have delivered my soul from death, my eyes from tears, my feet from stumbling.
9I walk before the Lord in the land of the living.
10I kept my faith, even when I said, “I am greatly afflicted”;
11I said in my consternation, “Everyone is a liar.”
12What shall I return to the Lord for all his bounty to me?
13I will lift up the cup of salvation and call on the name of the Lord,
14I will pay my vows to the Lord in the presence of all his people. 15Precious in the sight of the Lord is the death of his faithful ones.
16O Lord, I am your servant; I am your servant, the child of your serving girl. You have loosed my bonds.
17I will offer to you a thanksgiving sacrifice and call on the name of the Lord.
18I will pay my vows to the Lord in the presence of all his people,
19in the courts of the house of the Lord, in your midst, O Jerusalem. Praise the Lord!}

Image: Rembrandt, David singing for King Saul

Everybody has been at the golf Open at Winged Foot this week. No-one in New England or New York has been working. Boring, if you ask me, but it's not my game.

But the Newport-Bermuda Race began yesterday. Your editor Bird Dog has always wanted to be asked to crew, but has never been asked, doubtless for good reason. He is blessed with a good feel for the sea, including a certain kind of comfort, or even joy, with very nasty and scary seas, but is cursed with some sort of ineptitude when it comes to practical mechanisms and instant decision-making. And a race in which things do not break is a bore - but something always does break on boats.

You can follow the race here. I only know one skipper in the race this year. Is it highly physical? You bet, unless it is one of those dull races with no wind from start to glorious finish, with drinks and abundant hot showers, at the Royal Bermuda Yacht Club in wonderful Bermuda. This 635 mile race is so long that a good start doesn't matter, but you have to keep your crew focused, energized, and on the ball. Why not try for a good start?  Photo from just before the starting gun in Newport, RI, below:

 

Sometimes I wonder whether Gaghdad Bob is just putting us on, or crazy, or (which I usually think), a good translator of logos-centered metaphysics for the metaphysically-impaired masses (such as me).

So before we can even say anything else whatsoever about the cosmos, we have to concede that it is the kind of cosmos in which some things can symbolize and stand for other things--almost as if the cosmos were having some kind of complex conversation with itself even before we got here. When they study creation, scientific Adams are simply eavesdropping on the conversation. If that weren’t true, there would be nothing we could say or know about the cosmos.

Normally, when we think of information, we think of communication. The purpose of language, for example, is to communicate. But the cosmos was full of information before there were any sentient beings to unpack the message. Now that we’re here, we can do that.

If you want to read a short essay I very much enjoyed, with those paragraphs in it, here it is. 

Image: Why the photo of Dr. Bliss waking up on a sunny morning? The photo is a mere symbol, plus a good, succinct piece of communication from the cosmos, plus I owe a photo to our reader Santay.

Metaphysics? Can we please discuss something useful, like waterfowl ammo in the post-lead era? This is supposed to be a "grounding" blog. Re this cartoon: ducks see color. Deer cannot. This cartoonist never hunted ducks, or the guy wouldn't be wearing a blaze orange hat:

 

Besides worrying deeply and seriously and with the most sincere sense of urgency about obesity (see this mornings links), our dear cousins in Olde Englande have been busy worrying themselves silly about "this knife and gun culture we have."  Notice that they used to just say "this gun culture," but, with less guns, people are offing each-other with knives instead. When knives are gone - so you cannot cut meat and all they can eat is chopped liver and obesity-inducing fish-and-chips, they will kill each-other with cricket bats, and can refer to "this batty culture."  Better yet, they can use forks to kill each-other, thus neatly permitting themselves to appropriately complain about "this stupid forking culture." Atlas picked up the story, but I had previously read about it at Right for Scotland.

As we pointed out earlier today, perhaps they have bigger problems than trying to be nannies to a nation of proud adults from proud Anglo-Saxon/Celtic warrior stock. You just knew it was all over when Blair banned fox hunting: their foxy Moslems got the message loud and clear: the Brit government has no spine, no pride, and no sense of history whatsoever.

Your American cousins could not care less about the hopeless French, but we are worried about you all - because we love ya: you are us, but caught in a web.

Just like in jail, they are all innocent. The NYT buys the story, and pretends they don't know what they have already written about the guy: Gateway. Apparently the NYT doesn't think anyone lies (except George Bush).

Princes and governments are far more dangerous than other elements within society.

Niccolo Machiavelli

So far from engaging in a war to
perpetuate slavery, I am
rejoiced that Slavery is
abolished. I believe it will be greatly for the interest of the South. So fully am I satisfied of this that I would have cheerfully lost all that I have lost by the war, and have suffered all that I have suffered to have this object attained.

Gen. Robert E. Lee

What Bird Dog wants for Father's Day is a good Pogo collection.

Much as we love Calvin and Hobbes at Maggie's Farm (with well-worn collections all over the house, and with frequent apt uses of quotes from them), the gentle irony and the humble, loving satire of Pogo cannot be beat. Not a marauding marsupial, Pogo was a kind, rationalist, wry possum.

"I Go Pogo" was Pogo's campaign theme when he ran for president.

Bridgeport, CT's Walt Kelly was the cartoonist's cartoonist. Like poets, cartoonists can capture big chunks of life in a few words and images - and we verbose normal people must envy that skill.

Sadly, good collections of Pogo are not easy to find these days. Got any ideas? Email us with 'em. This is all we could find.

Since this is angleworm week at the blog, here's a sample:

 

Middle-East expert Amir Taheri revisits Iraq. A quote from his piece in Commentary:

Spending time in the United States after a tour of Iraq can be a disorienting experience these days. Within hours of arriving here, as I can attest from a recent visit, one is confronted with an image of Iraq that is unrecognizable. It is created in several overlapping ways: through television footage showing the charred remains of vehicles used in suicide attacks, surrounded by wailing women in black and grim-looking men carrying coffins; by armchair strategists and political gurus predicting further doom or pontificating about how the war should have been fought in the first place; by authors of instant-history books making their rounds to dissect the various “fundamental mistakes” committed by the Bush administration; and by reporters, cocooned in hotels in Baghdad, explaining the “carnage” and “chaos” in the streets as signs of the country’s “impending” or “undeclared” civil war. Add to all this the day’s alleged scandal or revelation—an outed CIA operative, a reportedly doctored intelligence report, a leaked pessimistic assessment—and it is no wonder the American public registers disillusion with Iraq and everyone who embroiled the U.S. in its troubles.

It would be hard indeed for the average interested citizen to find out on his own just how grossly this image distorts the realities of present-day Iraq. Part of the problem, faced by even the most well-meaning news organizations, is the difficulty of covering so large and complex a subject; naturally, in such circumstances, sensational items rise to the top. But even ostensibly more objective efforts, like the Brookings Institution’s much-cited Iraq Index with its constantly updated array of security, economic, and public-opinion indicators, tell us little about the actual feel of the country on the ground.

Read the whole thing in Commentary.

What I say is that, if a fellow really likes potatoes, he must be a pretty decent sort of fellow.

A.A. Milne

Your devoted editor will be too busy today to review any entries, so we won't have much new. But I have a stash for such days, if I can find it.

An email from a reader and fellow blogger: "We read you daily, as our daily dose of grounding sanity."  Aw, shucks! Ain't that nice? That is our goal, here at Maggie's Farm - solid ground. Dirt, rocks, and stubborn roots - good old terra firma: nothing fancy, and we try to be devilish to BS, in the sceptical, plain, unadorned, rock-ribbed, cantankerous Yankee manner, mixed with a dose of joy in God's creation (along with the recognition that He never meant to make it easy for us).

Exodus 3, 1-15

Moses was keeping the flock of his father-in-law Jethro, the priest of Midian; he led his flock beyond the wilderness, and came to Horeb, the mountain of God. ²There the angel of the Lord appeared to him in a flame of fire out of a bush; he looked, and the bush was blazing, yet it was not consumed. ³Then Moses said, “I must turn aside and look at this great sight, and see why the bush is not burned up.” ⁴When the Lord saw that he had turned aside to see, God called to him out of the bush, “Moses, Moses!” And he said, “Here I am.” ⁵Then he said, “Come no closer! Remove the sandals from your feet, for the place on which you are standing is holy ground.” ⁶He said further, “I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.” And Moses hid his face, for he was afraid to look at God.

⁷Then the Lord said, “I have observed the misery of my people who are in Egypt; I have heard their cry on account of their taskmasters. Indeed, I know their sufferings, ⁸and I have come down to deliver them from the Egyptians, and to bring them up out of that land to a good and broad land, a land flowing with milk and honey, to the country of the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Amorites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites. ⁹The cry of the Israelites has now come to me; I have also seen how the Egyptians oppress them. ¹⁰So come, I will send you to Pharaoh to bring my people, the Israelites, out of Egypt.”

¹¹But Moses said to God, “Who am I that I should go to Pharaoh, and bring the Israelites out of Egypt?” ¹²He said, “I will be with you; and this shall be the sign for you that it is I who sent you: when you have brought the people out of Egypt, you shall worship God on this mountain.” ¹³But Moses said to God, “If I come to the Israelites and say to them, ‘The God of your ancestors has sent me to you,’ and they ask me, ‘What is his name?’ what shall I say to them?” ¹⁴God said to Moses, “I AM WHO I AM.” He said further, “Thus you shall say to the Israelites, ‘I AM has sent me to you.’“ ¹⁵God also said to Moses, “Thus you shall say to the Israelites, ‘The Lord, the God of your ancestors, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, has sent me to you’: This is my name forever, and this my title for all generations.

Image: An part of a triptych (a good spelling bee word) by Nicholas Froment entitled The Burning Bush (1475). Consistent with the "cult of the Virgin," the Virgin and Christ child appear to Moses in his vision, rather than the voice of God, which I think is a bit odd. It is better seen in the larger image, with the child holding a mirror in which he and his mother are reflected: this cool picture has symbols coming out of its ears.

Maggie's Farm remains a "Marauding Marsupial" in the Truth Laid Bear ecosystem. We'd love to move to the next step up to reinforce our fragile egos, but I am not certain that we deserve to. Maybe we are destined to be an elite, boutique blog for our discriminating high IQ, irony-minded six few readers, but there is a mass-market dream hidden deep inside of us.

The Wombat can be a marauding marsupial at times, but he tends to be fairly agreeable unless he feels attacked or happens to be in a grumpy mood. A charging wombat can knock over a man and tear a big hole in him. Maybe Maggie's Farm is a Wombat.

I hear a song in my head: "Wombats in the Snow," to the tune of "Strangers in the Night."

Anyway - do us a favor. Send our blog to all of your friends, relatives, colleagues and enemies. We want - and deserve, 100,000 readers per day - visitors, not hits. We have tons of "hits," and do not need more "hits" looking for Farm P*rn: we are a clean-cut blog and not one of us has ever had a mean, ugly, dirty, angry, perverted, lascivious, schadenfreudenous, illegal, adulterous, covetous, larcenous, or mean-spirited thought - ever. We are as pure as the driven snow upon which the Wombat poops in the Australian winter which, perversely, arrives in the summer. (What a mixed-up country they are, down on the bottom of the planet, where their floors are roofs and vice versa. How can they think, standing upside-down? And how come they don't fall off? Do they wear magnets in their shoes? Keep those magnets on your boots, Aussies! You are the only sane friends left in this crazy world.)

We all learned about it in High School, but we can easily forget, when we see the amazing blooms of early June, that we are looking at the personal, private, and always fascinating sex organs of angiosperm plants. They do not hide them in shame or modesty, do they? Not at all: like lovely young women, they just want to be fertilized. Details here. (Every time I label something as "Farm P*rn", we get a ton of hits from perverts around the world. I find it amusing. No doubt I add to their frustration. On the downside, it gets us blocked by the Merrill Lynch censorship system, so our Merrill friends cannot catch up with Maggie's Farm at work.)

 

Quote from Owner's Manual:

Judge not, lest ye be judged judgmental. On and on it will go, until the humble vacation postcard reads: "The scenery is beautiful, wish you were here to help me end racism."

Dance - Or else... The EU wants everyone to celebrate 50 years of the EU. They really are like the Soviets: the peasants WILL dance joyfully and in gratitude. In my opinion, the EU governing body lives on its own planet, in its own time zone, and is a legend in its own mind. Not to mention the fact that it is an Evil Empire.  Gates of V.

Is anti-Zionism anti-Semitism? Augean Stables says Yes.

Smart love, and Philippians, from Middlebrow.

Savvy judge throws out lawsuit by customer who found shells in her mussels marinara. Overlawyered. Finally, a judge who knows his shellfish.

Egypt's Sandmonkey blogger has a small bone to pick with Nicholas Berg's father.

# 76 of Why hasn't the idea of socialism died yet? Can't they pull those tubes out, like they did with Schiavo? Alpha Patriot. How long on life-support?

For 100 years, New Jersey was a promised land for middle class New Yorkers, fleeing New York taxes and pursuing the American dream of a little cottage with a yard.

What went wrong? Now it is a state with net outflow of population and business, decaying, dangerous cities, state and property taxes which crush the middle class, routine corruption, unions which seem to have more power than both the government and the voters, and Tony Soprano.

Malanga at City Journal gives the whole history. An excellent history of The Garden State, which typifies the "blue state blues".

I rely on the guys at Junk Science, who have no axes to grind, to detect the flaws in the ways in which scientific information is presented. Here are his conclusions in an excellent piece on climate and air chemistry:

What are the take-home messages:

• The temperature effect of atmospheric carbon dioxide is logarithmic, not exponential.
• The potential planetary warming from a doubling of atmospheric carbon dioxide from pre-Industrial Revolution levels of ~280ppmv to 560ppmv (possible some time later this century - perhaps) is generally estimated at less than 1 °C.
• The guesses of significantly larger warming are dependent on "feedback" (supplementary) mechanisms programmed into climate models. The existence of these "feedback" mechanisms is uncertain and the cumulative sign of which is unknown (they may add to warming from increased atmospheric carbon dioxide or, equally likely, might suppress it).
• The total warming since measurements have been attempted is thought to be about 0.6 degrees Centigrade. At least half of the estimated temperature increment occurred before 1950, prior to significant change in atmospheric carbon dioxide levels. Assuming the unlikely case that all the natural drivers of planetary temperature change ceased to operate at the time of measured atmospheric change then a 30% increment in atmospheric carbon dioxide caused about one-third of one degree temperature increment since and thus provides empirical support for less than one degree increment due to a doubling of atmospheric carbon dioxide.
• There is no linear relationship between atmospheric carbon dioxide change and global mean temperature or global mean temperature trend -- global mean temperature has both risen and fallen during the period atmospheric carbon dioxide has been rising.
• The natural world has tolerated greater than one-degree fluctuations in mean temperature during the relatively recent past and thus current changes are within the range of natural variation. (See, for example, ice core and sea surface temperature reconstructions.)
• Other anthropogenic effects are vastly more important, at least on local and regional scales.
• Fixation on atmospheric carbon dioxide is a distraction from these more important anthropogenic effects.
• Despite attempts to label atmospheric carbon dioxide a "pollutant" it is, in fact, an essential trace gas, the increasing abundance of which is a bonus for the bulk of the biosphere.
• There is no reason to believe that slightly lower temperatures are somehow preferable to slightly higher temperatures - there is no known "optimal" nor any known means of knowingly and predictably adjusting some sort of planetary thermostat.
• Fluctuations in atmospheric carbon dioxide are of little relevance in the short to medium term (although should levels fall too low it could prove problematic in the longer-term).
• Activists and zealots constantly shrilling over atmospheric carbon dioxide are misdirecting attention and effort from real and potentially addressable local, regional and planetary problems.

Read the whole thing: link above.

Just a few notes and links. First, at the press conference it was observed that the Iraqi press cheered and clapped and the American press were silent.

Second, Dr Sanity looks at the "reality-based" reaction to the news: they are clearly not pleased.

Third, Nicholas Berg's dad is "sad" Zarquawi had to die. Blames Bush for the beheading of his son. Glad that isn't my Dad.

Fourth, a statement by Al Quaida:

"We want to give you the joyous news of the martyrdom of the mujahed sheik Abu Musab al-Zarqawi," said the statement, signed by "Abu Abdel- Rahman al-Iraqi," identified as the deputy "emir" or leader of al- Qaida in Iraq.

Hmmm. For once, I see things the same way as them.

And finally, as some good blogger noted (I forget who), no words of sadness yet from Michael Moore on the loss of another heroic Minuteman.

A plane was taking off from Kennedy Airport. After it reached a
comfortable cruising altitude, the captain made an announcement over
the intercom, "Ladies and gentlemen, this is your captain speaking.
Welcome to Flight Number 293, nonstop from New York to Los Angeles.
The weather ahead is good and, therefore, we should have a smooth and
uneventful flight. Now sit back and relax... OH, MY GOD!" Silence
followed, and after a few minutes, the captain came back on the
intercom and said, "Ladies and Gentlemen, I am so sorry if I scared
you earlier. While I was talking to you, the flight attendant accidentally
spilled a cup of hot coffee in my lap. You should see the front of my
pants!" A passenger in Coach yelled, "That's nothing. You should see
the back of mine!"