Maggie's Farm

Bird of a feather flock together,
and do will pigs and swine;
Rats and mice will have their choice,
And so will I have mine.

(Trad.)

Thanks to Catullus website. I like the metaphor of the watery island for a desired sexy girl. I won't vouch for the translation - will have Dylanologist translate the next Catullus - his choice. If you are deficient in knowledge about Catullus, the Roman aristocrat-soldier-poet-bohemian-skirtchaser who died about 50 years before Christ was born and was a family friend of Julius Caesar, check the website.

Why News Blogs are Necessary

For just two examples, what major mainstream outlets are reporting these stories?

1. The Air America scandal

2. The truth about those oppressed, peace-loving Palestinians

How to make us safe: Surrender. Yes, that has worked just great through history. Galloway - thanks LGF

Uncle Norm walks us through terror apologism, Part 2, including a quote from Primo Levi:

... to confuse them [the murderers] with their victims is a moral disease or an aesthetic affectation or a sinister sign of complicity; above all it is precious service rendered (intentionally or not) to the negators of truth.

Imams in Australia urge young to go to Iraq to kill Aussie solders, Jihad Watch

A blog we just found, which we like, from GRRRRLLL BLOGGER

A Request to our Readers from Bird Dog

We have been looking for serious Democratic or "progressive" blogs for the past month, (and have even tried to enlist some liberal writers that we know for Maggies, without success thus far). We do not want to be part of a giant echo chamber - we modestly want to be a small part of a discussion about America and the world, among other things. Here's the problem: Everything we find is either ranting, or tin-foil hat paranoids, or hyper-emotional angry, or old-fashioned 30s-era knee-jerk anti-American lefty pacifists (ie, pacifism for the US, while apologizing for the warlike inclinations of others), or Kool-Aid drinkers, or Christian-hating, or just plain fountains of predictably transparent partisan spin and calculated rhetoric. So if you know of any blogs which represent different viewpoints, but which are thoughtful, intellectually honest, substantial, not afraid of guns (Yikes! Scary! Guns go boom!), and serious, please let us know. Not kidding. Email or post comment. Thanks!

Dear Old and New Readers,

This is our seventh month of blogging, and we are realizing that our worry about running out of things to write about was way off. We are a centrist, rational, eclectic, and fearless blog but we very much enjoy covering non-political topics of interest to us because politics is fun escapist entertainment, like baseball, but it ain't what Life is about. But politics is like life insurance, too - you have to do it for your heirs.

There are at least two rewards from doing this blog: First, having to write forces you to clarify your thinking and, second, it gives us motivation to look into some topics, such as dog's vision last week, that we would ordinarily be too lazy to do.

So we try to keep a mix of stuff on our page, but much of it is not hot news - review our posts under The Analyst, or The Culture, or Medical, or Religion, or The Song and Dance Man (Dylan) to see what I mean.

Since we have been asked, we assume our readers check Powerline and Instapundit regularly, to stay informed, but we cannot help linking those guys anyway. As far as newspapers go, we read (online) the NY Sun and the Christian Science Monitor. Plus the Tues. NYT Science Times and the Sunday NYT in the driveway. We quit the daily because who wants to begin the day p-ed off at a pile of paper? Except maybe a puppy.

As promised, to the right is a photo of The Analyst on Cape Cod last week. (She has courage to be body-surfing in that outfit - likely to end up with the top around her waist, and the bottom around her knees. But if you've got it, flaunt it. Yes, she has had three kids.) If you like our blog (or like The Analyst), please forward it to your email list with a recommendation. We care about the quality of our readership, but we care about quantity too. It's vanity. 

Best Summer Wishes,

Big Chief Bird Dog

14 Million

Instapundit reports that there are 14 million blogs now, doubling every five months. Is this a fad, or something real?

My guess is that it's a fad, but more fun than hula-hoops and beanie babies.

Beer is living proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy.

Benjamin Franklin

Known as the Right Whale because it was the whale the whalers wanted most, this baleen whale (plankton-sieving, as opposed to toothed whales like the Sperm Whale) has been in hard times since the whaling era nearly wiped them out. Now it seems that their numbers are most influenced by collisions with shipping, and nothing can or will be done about that.

There are two populations of this mighty 50-foot creature, one in the southern hemisphere and one in the northern. The North Atlantic species is the one that is in trouble. I saw a mom and calf in the Gulf of Maine ten years ago - a special sight. Our New England Humpbacks seem to be doing OK, but the Rights are on a steep decline which only luck or nature can reverse.

Can honour set a leg? No. Or an arm? No. Or take away the grief of a wound? No. Honour hath no skill in surgery, then? No. What is honour? A word. What is that word, honour? Air.

Shakespeare, Henry lV, Part l

Tin Foil Protection for Mind, Brain and Soul

Right Wing Nation alerted us to the importance of personal AFDBS, and reminds us to always wear the shiny side out. Government psychotronics could be anywhere. Go to the AFDB website, and be sure to check their persuasive and scientific testimonials. Personally, I never leave home without one and I care not what anyone thinks or says, because I am protected. And my headgear makes the chicks look at me more than they ever used to - I guess they must be thinking that I am a hip, clued-in dude. Check out the site - you can make big ones for your whole house so your pets and kids and friends can take off their personal AFDBs when they are indoors. Be sure to check the MindGuard website too, for full software protection. Yep, that is yours truly, Bird Dog, modeling a stylish version, on the invaluable AFDB website. Wear yours with pride - let everyone know that you are a thinking, Red State conservative.

Men at some time are masters of their fates:
The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,
But in ourselves, that we are underlings.

Shakespeare, Julius Caesar

Hail, Britannia

Photo from Free Market Fairy Tales (UK) I like her steady, watchful gaze. God Save the Queen.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch,
the bobbies are rounding
up the bad guys. BBC. 

 Do your duty in all things. You cannot do more, you should never wish to do less.

Robert E. Lee

Someone's got it in for me, they're planting stories in the press.
Whoever it is they better cut it out, but when they will I can only guess.
They say I shot a man named Grey and took his wife to Italy.
She inherited a million bucks, and when she died it came to me.
I can't help it if I'm lucky.

Dylan, from Idiot Wind, on Blood on the Tracks

We made a great mistake in the beginning of our struggle, and I fear, in spite of all we can do, it will prove to be a fatal mistake. We appointed all our worst generals to command our armies, and all our best generals to edit the newspapers.

Robert E. Lee

Vacations

Opie, our reporter on misc. topics plus The Latin Beat, is on Nantucket. Gwynnie is at the family's ancestral mountain retreat (photo to right), trout fishing, dodging (mountain) lions and wasting time. So I will not expect to see much from them for a few weeks, except for this emailed photo, taken from the back porch of Gwynnie's 120 year-old stone main house. (Can you find the bear in the photo?)

Never do a wrong thing to make a friend, or to keep one.

Robert E. Lee

Brewton on Islam and the First Amendment

One of Tom's best essays, which precisely captures the dilemma of liberal democracies when facing a threat which is both internal and external. Samples:

This inherent conflict between sharia and the Constitution is compounded with resentment against the porosity of our borders that both floods us with illegal immigrants who impose huge welfare-state burdens upon tax-paying citizens, and provides undetected entrance for terrorists. 

Liberal-socialists cling to what amounts to a suicide pact.  They assert the illogicality of multi-cultural education, that the cultures of Muslims and other immigrants, are as good as, or probably better than, our 1776 Judeo-Christian traditions.  Without those 1776 traditions, however, the Constitution is mere words without meaning.

Liberals focus upon tolerance, meaning the absence of standards of right or wrong, which leads them to believe that Muslim jihadists hate us simply because we have hurt their feelings and failed to share our wealth equally with them.

Read the whole thing in Intell. Conservative: Click here: Islam and the First Amendment

New York, Bloomberg, and A Play

Spent the past two days banging around NYC, like a tourist, with visitors from California (who headed off last night to Brazil to tour that famous tourist trap, the Amazon River). All I can do is to offer kudos to Mayor Bloomberg. His polls indicate plenty of people agree (although his assertion that NY will not profile for terrorists is either ridiculous or disingenuous - I hope the latter). I thought Guiliani had done a good job with my favorite American city, but NY now looks and feels as wonderful as it did when I was a kid. NYC requires a world-class manager - not a politician - and that is what it has. There are millions of people on the streets til late at night, happy-looking cops walking their beats instead of prowling in cars, young familes and packed open-air restaurants everywhere, and a feeling of safety and festivity which is pure delight in a place that saw some bad times in recent history. The parks, large, medium, and small - are the most striking change. Rather than being filled with dog and human feces, drug addicts, criminals, winos, and the occasional dead person, with dead plantings and menacing vibes, they all look immaculate, with healthy lawns, musicians, tasteful plantings, great looking people, and a welcoming and civilized atmosphere. My poor shot of the eastern edge of Union Square Park here reminds me of what that park was like in the 1970s when I lived nearby on University Place, when you would cross the street to avoid getting near it. Now it is everything - and  more - than Olmstead could have imagined. Interestingly, four of New York's ten most popular restaurants are now in the recently-abandoned Union Square area.

Union Square is just a block from the Lee Strasberg Theater Institute, where on Sat night we saw the world premiere of Patrick Feigelson's one-act play "World Premiere." Patrick is pals with our California friends, and now Patrick and the French playwright David Valayre have just completed translating their "Edellstein" into English, a dark drama set in German-occupied Paris. We wish them good luck with that play.

Reason is always a kind of brute force; those who appeal to the head rather than the heart, however pallid and polite, are necessarily men of violence. We speak of 'touching' a man's heart, but we can do nothing to his head but hit it.

G.K. Chesterton

Be merciful to me, O God,
Be merciful to me,
for in Thee my soul takes refuge;
in the shadow of thy wings I shall take refuge,
til the storms of destruction pass by.

from Psalm 57

The three most enraging news items of today (thus far)

1. Big Pharoah has more details on the Egypt terrorism. Thanks, Instapundit. Our condolences to the Egyptian victims of the latest madness. But, to add to the tragedy is this comment:

Egyptian foreign ministry spokesman Hamid Reza Asefi as reported on Al Jazeera:

“The approach of the United States in the war on terror has made the world a less safe place. Every day we are seeing attacks around the world... it’s because of the incorrect and childish approach of the United States. “The United States must change its policy in the war against terror, give up its double standards and extend its hand to the international community, as the sole means of combating terrorism is through international cooperation.”

That is pure apologizing for terror, and the purest Grade A BS too. Surely he is well aware that he is spouting the latest Al Quaida talking-points - the latest propaganda excuse for the current Jihad, which he doubtless knows preceded the Iraq war.

2. Terrorists aimed shoulder-fired rocket at US military aircraft one month ago - in Oklahoma. Details as released by military in NIN.

3. 9-11 was intended to be much bigger, including the UK too. Jihad Watch