Maggie's Farm

Wymeswold Airfield

There is something hauntingly appealing about abandoned military sites, like bare ruined choirs. At the old English airfields of WW2, you can almost hear the sound of the engines warming up, almost see that recent past among the slowly crumbling buildings and the weedy landing strips. Wymsewold has its own website.

Pepsi Gives the US The Finger: The Final Episode

What an embarassing episode. The speech sounds remarkably naive, oblivious to the sophistication and IQ of the audience, unintelligent, condescending, anti-American in its undertones, sophomorically full of mixed metaphors that don't add up, and plain painful to read, much less to have heard. I entirely agree with Scott in that assesment. She needs a speechwriter - fast. PepsiCo can afford it with their profits from the trash they peddle around the world. Powerline is all over the story, in a balanced way, and has posted the text. One can only feel badly for Nooryi - she isn't quite ready for prime time, and no doubt she has learned this by today. If it were a guy, you would throw tomatoes, or at least nicely give her the old hook and yank her offstage for her own good. But who is ready for prime time, except for Krauthammer? Just one question - How does Great Scott at Powerline find time for all of this? And forget boycotting PepsiCo in indignation - who eats or drinks their junk anyway? I will promise one thing: If the MSM covers the story, I will eat a (small) bag of Fritos.

By this time of year, the fairly common Goldfinch has undergone the spring
molt and the canary-yellow males become much more evident. In the winter, they are a drab shade of olive. They are usually seen in small flocks in weedy fields and edges. If you don't think you have Goldfinches in your area, put out a thistle feeder for a few weeks.

Read more about the American Goldfinch.

A worried man with a worried mind
No one in front of me and nothing behind
There's a woman on my lap and she's drinking champagne
Got white skin, got assassin's eyes
I'm looking up into the sapphire-tinted skies
I'm well dressed, waiting on the last train

Bob Dylan, from Things Have Changed

Why Kim du Toit Moved to Texas

Quite an amusing account of how our favorite gun-loving blogger made his mind up about what state to move to. I am not sure why "work" never entered into his calculations - but Kim has more important considerations:

I’m just one guy, and we should be careful about using a sample of one to make any kind of judgement; but when we decided that Chicago was too much of a totalitarian state for us (even though we loved the place, and leaving it would cause us severe financial hardship, not to mention emotional stress), we didn’t move to Michigan (our first choice), because Michigan requires that its citizens register their handguns. Not gonna do that.

We didn’t move to Vermont, because the state required us to register as homeschoolers; we didn’t move to Pennsylvania because their state taxes were too high; and we went on and on through the states, checking to see which one incorporated the best mix of gun laws, homeschooling-friendliness, low taxes and low government involvement in its citizens’ lives generally.

Needless to say, New Jersey, California, Massachusetts, and New York were never considered at all.

Ultimately, we were left with Arizona, New Hampshire, Oklahoma, Idaho and Texas. New Hampshire and Idaho were too far from the Son&Heir (flights to DFW being both infrequent/inconvenient and expensive), and Arizona and Oklahoma were too desolate for our taste.

I'm afraid that, except for NH, many of Kim's "evil states" are clustered in our Northeast. Well, and in the Northwest too - for sure. I think perhaps political attitudes influenced his final selection, but Kim writes in a very nuanced fashion:

Of course I think that the politicians in the Evil States are a bunch of scum; of course I think that what they’re doing is reprehensible; and of course I think that they should be hanged from utility poles en masse, this prick Louis Manzo having the first place in line.

But they were elected, and if the people of the Evil States keep electing them, then there’s not a whole lot I can say that will change that.

So, to all my Readers in the Evil States (and you know who you are), I have only one thing to say, even though I’ve said it time and time before:

Leave.

Fidelito, Hollywood's Favorite Politician

Humberto Fontova, author of the definitive and detailed Fidel: Hollywood's Favorite Tyrant, is interviewed in Front Page:

HF: Let's start with its dimensions: Castro's gulag held more political prisoners, as a percentage of population, than pre-war Hitler's and --yes--even Stalin's. Also, the longest serving political prisoners OF THE CENTURY spent their hell in Castro's Gulag. Senores  Mario Chanes de Armas, Angel de Fana and Eusebio Penalver all served thirty years in Castro's dungeons.  To put this in proper perspective, Alexander Solzhenitsyn served 8 years in Stalin's Gulag.  So here's men who served over THREE times as long-- and who's heard of them? They all live in Miami today. So where's the PBS documentary on them? Where's the 60 Minutes interview with them? Where were the rallies (outside of Miami's little Havana) for their release? Where were the U.N declarations for their release? (Instead their jailer's regime is appointed to the UN's Human Rights Commission!)

Read entire, link above.

Paul Berman on Daniel Bell

Berman recounts his travels through the campus travails of the 60s and the adolescent foolishnesses of the "New Left", under the mentorship of the wise sociologist and ex-socialist Daniel Bell:

Now all this was fairly idiotic. Nothing is more bovine than a student movement, with the uneducated leading the anti-educated and mooing all the way. I'm glad to recall, looking back at those times, that my own radical activities pretty much avoided the student custom of persecuting the professors. I was much too fascinated by them to want to rail against them, except now and then. Besides, the anti-intellectual atmosphere began to weigh a little heavy on the bookish students. Hofstadter, in his study of American anti-intellectualism, had already put his finger on these moods and fads, as if predicting the uprising at his own university. And so I can understand, in restrospect, why Bell chose to flee Morningside Heights. To be sure, though, the student uprisings spread to Cambridge, too. There was no escape.

Berman's pal Szymanski lost persepctive on what was going on, while Berman took his own path through ideological mazes:

My own response to the Columbia strike and its revolutionary offshoots differed from Szymanski's almost entirely. The fervor for Marxism-Leninism in its several variations dismayed me from the start. The conservative Bolshevik instinct on cultural matters struck me as absurd. And so I rebelled against the rebels, and I did this by veering off in anarchist and anti-Communist directions—which always seemed to me truer to the original spirit of the New Left. I mentioned this to Bell, and he told me that he too had come under an anarchist influence as a kid. He had known the New York group around the German emigré anarchist Rudolf Rocker, and because of those connections he had come across an early exposé of Soviet tyranny by Alexander Berkman. Berkman's pamphlet had inoculated Bell against any temptation to join so many others of his generation in venerating the Soviet revolution.

He quotes Bell's powerful observation:

"Among the radical, as among the religious minded," he wrote, "there are the once born and the twice born. The former is the enthusiast, the ‘sky-blue healthy-minded moralist' to whom sin and evil—the ‘soul's mumps and measles and whooping coughs,' in Emerson's phrase—are merely transient episodes to be glanced at and ignored in the cheerful saunter of life. To the twice born, the world is ‘a double-storied mystery' which shrouds the evil and renders false the good; and in order to find truth, one must lift the veil and look Medusa in the face."

Read the entire piece in BookForum - it's a piece of school-yard history which has attracted far more attention than it deserves, and Berman seems to agree.

"You know that children are growing up when they start asking questions that have answers."

John J. Plomp

Missionaries to the Islamic World

Blame Newsweek, or blame the rioters and their inciters? Interesting thoughts from The Shape of Days:

There's something wrong, dangerously wrong, in the Muslim world. When a society is so willing to commit widespread violence over such an inconsequential thing, it just makes me nervous about what they'd be willing to do with, say, a nuclear bomb.

How can we fix this? The only answer I can think of will get me branded as an Ann Coulter-loving fascist racist homophobe who dresses funny: missionaries. I'm serious. I'm not saying that the only way to fix the obvious and terrifying problem with the Muslim world is by wiping it out and replacing it with Christianity, though there are certainly those out there who subscribe to that point of view. I think the answer could be less drastic. I think the cross-polination of cultures could do wonders for the Muslim world. Their language, customs, faith … these things are their business, and they're welcome to them. But the idea that God wants them to kill people, that it's okay to murder women, that Jews are the descendants of swine and deserve to be wiped out, these are dangerous, harmful ideas. Saying "that's just part of their culture" is the worst possible thing we can do right now. It would legitimize the horrors that are being committed all over the world in the name of Islam today, from these most recent riots to holy wars to honor killings and everything in between.

Read entire (link above)

"You can fool too many of the people too much of the time."

James Thurber

Toiletgate

American Thinker has a great idea. Sue Newsweek!

Anchorman

An adolescent, slapstick, semi-lame movie starring Will Farrell which deserves to go down in history as one of the silliest movies made about TV news and reporting. It is so goofy that it is fun.

"Any fool can criticize, condemn, and complain - and most fools do."

Dale Carnegie

1950 Farmall C

With the classic short front axle - scarey on hills.

Another ribald tale of good times at Madame Lipsky's.
Giorgio Finogle had come in with an imitation of the latest Russian poet,
The one who wrote the great "Complaint about the Peanut Farm" which I read to
      you last year at Mrs. Riley's,
Do you remember? And then of course Giorgio had written this imitation
So he came in with it...Where was I and what was I saying?
The big beer parlor was filled with barmaids and men named Stuart
Who were all trying to buy a big red pitcher of beer for an artiste named Alma Stuart
Whom each claimed as his very own because of the similarity in names -
This in essence was Buddy's parody - O Giorgio, you idiot, Marion Stuart snapped,
It all has something to do with me! But no, Giorgio replied,
Biting in a melancholy way the edge off a cigar-colored paper patterned envelope
In which he had been keeping the Poem for many days
Waiting to show his friends. And actually it's not a parody at all,
I just claimed it was, out of embarassment. It's a poetic present for you all,
All of whom I love!

From "The Pleasures of Peace" by Kenneth Koch, who also wrote two excellent books about teaching poetry to children (see link): Rose, How did you get so Red? and one of the best-titled books of all time: Wishes, Dreams, and Lies.

George Will asks Christians to  "practice the magnanimity of the strong rather than cultivate the grievances of the weak. But many Christians are joining today's scramble for the status of victims. There is much lamentation about various "assaults" on "people of faith." Christians are indeed experiencing some petty insults and indignities concerning things such as restrictions on school Christmas observances. But their persecution complex is unbecoming because it is unrealistic."
Read entire.

David Brooks feels religion is essential in public life: "On Sept. 22, 1862, Abraham Lincoln gathered his cabinet to tell them he was going to issue the Emancipation Proclamation. He said he had made a solemn vow to the Almighty that if God gave him victory at Antietam, Lincoln would issue the decree." Read entire.

Martin Marty asks for hospitality when faiths collide: "With good reason some are learning to adjust their visions and are beginning to determine how they will relate to the rest of the globe. In a world of 6.2 billion people, 2 billion are identified with Christianity, 1.25 billion with Islam, 836 million with Hinduism, 367 million with Buddhism, and 15 million with Judaism. These are but five of some 10,200 "distinct religions" known to today's mapmakers and chroniclers. Read entire: Click here: Religions Strangers as Menaces, by Martin E. Marty

Morals aren't facts. Bill Schardt and David Large examine the remarkable influence of Tolstoy's The Gospel in Brief on Wittgenstein's writings on ethics, esp Tractatus:

"...The above argument means that there cannot be ethical facts because the rightness or wrongness of an action cannot be determined by any examination of the world. Hence the truth or falsity of a statement such as 'it is wrong to murder people ', cannot be determined in this way. Ethical or moral statements are not propositions; they are not truth functional in the way that real propositions must be. As ethics is not propositional it cannot, therefore, be put into words. It is, instead, transcendental (Tractatus 6.421), and as such must be passed over in silence (Tractatus 7). Propositions can express nothing that is higher than themselves, i.e. nothing beyond states of affairs of the world (whether true or false), and so there can be no propositions of ethics."   Read entire.

Fr. Neuhaus on "America as a Religion": "That America is guided by Providence is a belief deeply entrenched in the seventeenth-century beginnings, the constitutional period, Lincoln’s ponderings on our greatest war, and Woodrow Wilson’s convictions about the inseparable connections between freedom and American destiny. The belief has never been absent from American public life and discourse, although in the last half century many, and not least religious thinkers, have tried to discredit or marginalize it. In recent years, however, the idea of a providentially guided America has been making a comeback."  Read entire at First Things.

The Cross

The history of the cross as a symbol, going back to the Egyptian ankh, symbolizing "the creative essence of life.".

"Any ship in port is safe, but that's not what ships are built for."

Grace Murray Hopper

Campus News, #2

The rebels seem to have won at Dartmouth. This bodes well for sanity in academia, since colleges take their cues from the Ivies just as the MSM take their cues from the NYT. Watch for petition candidates with websites and blogs to storm the barricades at other universities. Ain't it amazing what can happen when people have a real choice?

Email from a Friend in CT Yesterday

Bird Dog:

Sitting on my back deck this AM stuffing envelopes for Ducks Unlimited with my ears wide open. Here's what I am hearing: red-eyed vireo, black and white warbler, chestnut-sided warbler, baltimore oriole, cape may warbler, parula warbler. All singing just for me!

CF

Campus Update

Shame on Columbia and shame on Pres. Bollinger. Their ROTC decision is not only disappointing, but it makes no sense. Opinion Journal: In April 2003, Columbia held a student referendum on ROTC. Two-thirds voted to bring it back. This led the university senate to appoint a 10-member panel to examine the subject; it split down the middle on the question of readmitting ROTC "as soon as is practicable."

What are these people thinking? Are they stuck in the 60s?

But maybe we shouldn't be too bothered by this. Throughout America, schools such as the University of Missouri continue to graduate outstanding young men such as Lieutenant Edens. He may not have earned an Ivy League degree, but he did earn a nation's respect--which is more than most of Columbia's faculty can ever hope to get. Read entire.

But kudos to Dartmouth for their more mature decision-making. Removing politically-correct speech codes seems to be a new trend.

Parula Warbler

A common eastern tree-top migrant, more often identified by voice than by eye. Nice looking tiny bird, though. Northern variety likes to nest in dead man's beard, southern version in Spanish moss.

Read more about this warbler.

In the dime stores and bus stations
People talk of situations,
Read books, repeat quotations,
Draw conclusions on the wall.
Some speak of the future,
My love she speaks softly,
She knows there's no success like failure
And that failure's no success at all.

Dylan, from Love Minus Zero/No Limit. Lyrics here.