Maggie's Farm

The Englishman's simple Mincemeat recipe

Cornbread stuffing

Dalrymple: A version of conversion - to Islam

See the Blue Moon last night?

We did. A very nice moon indeed.

Louis Zamperini endures

Labash: R U Lovin’ Sarah’s Alaska?

It's hilarious, even if you love Sarah

Also good for a giggle: The SNL pat-down sketch

Clarice's Pieces: God Bless Barack Obama

Is he really taking anxiety meds like the rumors say?

China's billions reap rewards in Cambodia

Chicago Boyz:

Political correctness has never been about helping the downtrodden. It has been about turning people’s compassion and courtesy into a weapon against them. Political correctness has always been the bully’s cudgel. At long last, it has been pushed to its breaking point of absurdity.

Alexander Hamilton was an illegal immigrant?

From one Brit colony to another. Legal.

Senate Approves $4.6 Billion for Claims by Black Farmers, American Indians

Buffett Tells ABC Rich Americans Should Be Paying `A Lot' More in Taxes

If their financial success is bothering them, they can send a check any time they want

Insty:

I’m not saying don’t go to law school, but don’t go into big debt in the expectation that big bucks will pay it off easily.

George Will on the TSA:

When Buckley was asked how he came up with topics for three columns a week, he jauntily replied that the world annoyed him that frequently.

Neo's Prez preferences

I'm sorta on the same page

SDA: Don't Mock Greens - They do a perfectly good job of it themselves:

Baehr: Immigration: A Modest Proposal

Importing oranges to Cuba?

Let them eat cake

Lots of good stuff at Gateway

I have a retired friend who spends around 6 weeks each year at Mepkin Abbey in South Carolina. Quite a few people do this sort of thing. It's a Trappist monastery (Cistercian, with strict rules) with guest houses for retreatants. (They do take in married couples as retreatants and you probably need to be Roman Catholic, but I'm not sure.)

He does whatever labor is assigned to him - from baling hay to cleaning toilets, observes the rules of silence, and makes it to all of the Masses (beginning after the morning bells at 3 AM).

He returns home "cleansed and refreshed by the Spirit." The guy was a drop-out seminarian, USMC in Vietnam, and, as he describes himself, a "kick-ass businessman." He is, indeed, a tough SOB who loves the Lord.

The Abbey is an old plantation on the Cooper River, north of Charleston, donated to the order by the Luce family.

I think I could direct Carmen myself, every tuneful note is so familiar to me. Bizet is the Elton John of opera.

The story is just a vehicle for the tunes. Naive soldier falls in love with hot gypsy babe, deserts the army and joins the gypsy criminal band. Fickle, promiscuous gypsy babe changes her mind and runs off with studly matador. Naive guy is distraught and kills gypsy lady. Too bad - he has now destroyed his life. A cautionary tale about hot gypsy babes. 

It's in French but set in Spain for the fun of it, and so Bizet could use that cool Toreador song he had in his drawer.

The opera is too long to tell such a simple tale, but Bizet was full of tunes.

I thought Galanca was excellent, but Cabell as Micaela stole the show. The sets were an amazing blend of neo and traditional, with lighting that Robert Wilson would envy. Dinner in the Grand Tier was excellent, of course. We had the Gateau Opera at intermission. What else would you have?

A fine birthday for our friend.

I have a pal who is in the hospital, being treated for a serious case of Babesiosis. I visited him at the hospital yesterday, and determined that he would survive because I was able to elicit a few laughs - but it can be a very nasty and life-threatening disease (or a mild and insignificant one). He was on two or three IV antibiotics, and a morphine pump for the headache.

It's a bug like Malaria, and its vector is the tiny Deer Tick, same bugger as Lyme Disease. Dog ticks are annoying, but we woodsy and doggy people get those on us all the time. No big deal. Those Deer Ticks (actually, they are mouse ticks more than deer ticks) are the real problem for people who spend time outdoors.

Not to make light of a serious topic, but I can't resist re-posting "I'd Like to Check You For Ticks." It's a guy song, but the gals seem eager for Brad to check them. It must be lots of fun to be a country star:

Somebody informed Insty about this book: The Blame Game: The Complete Guide to Blaming: How to Play and How to Quit

But blame is essential for self-esteem

Sol Stern tells the story of Tel Aviv

Stefani Germanotta is buying a Scottish castle

You needed to know that.

Getting Ahead In Today’s Mad Max Real Estate Market - Why the end game of this housing bust is going to be unlike any other in my lifetime. He says:

I've been through quite a few housing booms and busts. I’ve renovated houses so old they still showed visible damage from King Philip’s War, so I’ve been exposed to every housing bust since wigwams, one way or the other. The early nineties were pretty bad, as I recall. The late seventies/early eighties were Armageddon. But they all mostly had discrete causes and effects, and in fairly short order Metacomet or Jimmy Carter or whoever was mucking up the landscape got run out of town, and something like normalcy returned.

This time I'm not so sure. 

Mona Charen: Why Sarah Palin Shouldn't Run

Like I say, I love her but she ain't my candidate. She is good at what she's doing - she should keep it up and enjoy life.

Strangling innovation with red tape

START: Another Phony Crisis, Another Rush To Vote

Via Betsy:

Charles Krauthammer sees the statement "Don't touch my junk," as a metaphor for how Americans are thinking about their government today.

And at Powerline:

Krauthammer explains: "The junk man's revolt marks the point at which a docile public declares that it will tolerate only so much idiocy.

Secretary of State Clinton Lashes Out at Europe; Demands That They Appease Muslims

Design

I found a dimpled spider, fat and white,
On a white heal-all, holding up a moth
Like a white piece of rigid satin cloth -
Assorted characters of death and blight
Mixed ready to begin the morning right,
Like the ingredients of a witches' broth -
A snow-drop spider, a flower like a froth,
And dead wings carried like a paper kite.

What had that flower to do with being white,
The wayside blue and innocent heal-all?
What brought the kindred spider to that height,
Then steered the white moth thither in the night?
What but design of darkness to appall? -
If design govern in a thing so small.

I usually let poems stand on their own, but I cannot resist commenting that this little poem is itself design personified, as complex and intricate as a watch or a cobweb. I think he spent a lot of time working this poem. BTW, as the poem discusses, Heal-All, or Self-Heal (Prunella) is blue (as in photo).

If you are around NYC in the next couple of months, you might get a kick out of the Train Show at the NY Botanical Garden. I've seen it. Magical. The whole thing, other than the trains, is organic...or, should I say, "sustainable."

Gwynnie iPhoned me a pic from the preview of the show this afternoon. That is Gracie Mansion - the old farmhouse overlooking the East River which is the official residence of the Mayor of New York. (Bloomberg doesn't live in it, though. He can afford fancier digs.)

Show opens to the public tomorrow:

"Community is more important in life than food."

A friend's 84 year-old Mom

Get your eggs frozen?

100 leaked body scans (h/t Thompson)

Exhibitionists must love this

Protein:

The idea that America might inadvertently and incrementally fall into socialism is a great deal closer to the strategies of “actual existing socialists” than textbook definitions of economies nationalized at a single revolutionary blow. The reason Americans don’t understand this is that the universe of post-sixties socialism has remained largely hidden from public view. Yet this is Obama’s world. It’s time we got to know it.

Larry Elder: Clinton, Gore, and Kerry lost the white vote too

Woah!… Soros Group Says Obama Can Use Armed Forces to Push “Progressive” Agenda 

Ah, exposing the totalitarism of the Left

Sen. Rockefeller: FCC Should Take FOX News, MSNBC Off Airwaves

Ah, exposing the totalitarism of the Left

Coyote: I am thinking about renaming the Chevy Volt the Chevy Bastiat.

Meet the 'New' Donald Berwick

This guy just can't wait to run your medical care. Yeah, more totalitarianism - for your own good. Isn't it comforting to know that some people know what is best for you?

 Marginal Rev: Who again is supposed to cut the rate of growth of Medicare spending?

Condoms in Elementary School

For the pedophiles?

Where are the jobs? See below -

When Sipp and I exchanged emails about the charming house on the blog this morning, he decided to find out a bit about Moodus (where that house is). Here's the Moodus Wiki. (Moodus is a village in East Haddam, with a pop c. 1200 - depending on who is in jail or court-required rehab at a given moment).

What he discovered that was interesting to me was that Moodus was the smallest town in the US to receive federal urban renewal money in the 1960s. The old town center (pic below) was demolished.

The quaint village center, dubbed "Downtown Moodus", formerly located at the intersection of routes CT 151 and CT 149, was a popular destination for guests. However most of the village was razed after the citizens of East Haddam controversially voted in 1967 to accept Urban Renewal funding to rebuild Moodus commercial district a quarter mile east along CT 149.

The citizens immediately regretted their decision, but it was too late for the Dem-controlled Feds with their bulldozers and their developer allies.

The genius central planners had something more modern in mind (ie up-to-date strip malls), to be built 1/4 mile up the road. The soul of the village was killed. It's just one example of why we at Maggie's are so distrustful of genius government planners of anything. This ex-farming village, ex-middle-class resort village, is now a frequent hangout of ex-cons and cons-in-training, young gals without cars with too many tatts walking down the road to the minmart for chips, cigs, and beer, scruffy immigrants whose language one cannot identify, people on various dubious disabilities (as in nearby Middletown, CT), and abandoned or tumbling-down once-gracious homes with rooms for rent. Nobody goes to Moodus anymore, except to fill their gas tank.

Well, those "modern" renewal government-subsidized strips malls are now emptying, shabby, and falling down. Like, as I imagine it, "Pearly Nails" - boarded up. "Uncle Tsao's Quickee Chinee Takeout" - boarded up. "PIZZA POUR VOIS" - boarded up. (I'm sure there must be something good about Moodus still, but it's just a place on a map now, and not my sort of Yankee village anymore).

Thanks a lot, Uncle Sam, for modernizing Moodus. And thanks to you expert geniuses in DC who think you know better than us. See Detroit. And shame on the Connecticut Yankees who bought into such government baloney. The Feds rarely get anything right except through their military - thankfully, their main responsibility.

This site has some good posts on the topic of Moodus' destruction, including:

Pt 1. Legacy of "Progress" Gone Sour

Pt 2. Urban Renewal Flops in Moodus

Pt 3. Could Moodus Have Been Saved?

A quote:

Once the town opted for urban renewal funds, fixing up the town was no longer a viable solution. "With the influx of federal dollars, you had to play their game," explains Jim Gibbons, an urban planner with the UConn Extension Service in Haddam. "In order to accomplish smaller goals, you had to follow federal regulations and guidelines and at the time of the Moodus project urban renewal was oriented to demolition. To many critics of the program at the time, the correct title was ‘urban disruption.’ As an outsider, I think this was part of the problem with the Moodus project: It disrupted the neighborhood."

Here's a pic I took last weekend of an abandoned and boarded up church in (once) central Moodus.

Great. Another 50,000- member government union, this time literally designed to get into our pockets. That's a lot of new big gummint voters.

Story at Surber.

A Brief History of Republicans and Democrats

That is cruel

Driscoll: The China Syndrome, Starring Tom Friedman as Jane Fonda

Tiger:

Is there any more graphic measure of the incompetence of our federal government than that it is the second half of November and nobody has the first clue what their tax rates will be for 2011?

Harvard MBAs Are Rushing to Wall Street Again. Yikes!

Via Althouse: In Defense of Going to Law School: A Prudential Perspective

Single, Childless Women Now Earn MORE Than Men: Do We Really Need MORE Federal Legislation?

Redistricting: Low-tax states will gain seats, high-tax states will lose them

Congress Getting Rich as It Bleeds Us Into Poverty

 My thought about Palin too: High floor, low ceiling.

But I do like the lady. Related: It's Sarah's happiness that drives Libs nuts.

Roger Ailes Lets Rip

California Suggests Suicide; Texas Asks: Can I Lend You a Knife?

Idiot's guide to public sector that produces no wealth (h/t, Fausta):

This place had a For Sale sign and a No Trespassing sign in a sad old farming town in rural Connecticut. It has a couple of barns, sits on around 8 acres. Probably needs a little work.

Had an outage for 8 hrs this morning. All it seems to take around here is a stiff breeze.

Re power outages, I just bought a few of these for stocking stuffers. Got one for Gwynnie's car, too. Sorry I got them right before the 2 for 1 deal began. 

Brian Aitken's Mistake - A New Jersey man gets seven years for being a responsible gun owner.

Wilson Sonsini and Silicon Law

Use Wiki? Send them a few bucks.

Inflation = taxation. the stealth $600 billion tax increase

McGowan on the Blindness of the Times

I would read his book, but I already know what he is saying.

Advice on giving advice.

Related to advice, Gingrich: Obama should take off most of the rest of the year

Happy 5th Birthday to Pajamas.

Can these things make $?

Obama Whines: American - Journalists 'Never Say Thank You'

Show a little masculine dignity.

Prager: Fairy tales, and people aren't all good

Religion of Peace holds religious Death To America rally

Why the hate? Why the "hate speech"?

Waiver-mania! The ever-expanding Obamacare escapee list

We want a waiver for Maggie's Farm - staff and readers

 Soros: China has better functioning government than U.S.

It's called a "dictatorship," shmuck. Move there, and tell them how to do their job better. Bring Friedman with you.

Is this an antique Colonial or a reproduction? Defend your judgement with details.

The grand White Oak of eastern North America.

For the past 40 years, as farming has declined in the Northeast, it is not unusual to see one of these gnarly monsters among a woodland filled with younger trees. Sometimes in the midst of the stands of White Pines which often quickly fill abandoned pastures. The old White Oak is the sign that you are walking through an old cow pasture. Squint your eyes in the woods to eliminate all of the younger trees, and imagine dairy cattle chewing their cud in the shade of that old oak.

This is Frederic Church's View Near Stockbridge, MA, 1847:

I was good friends with one of these giants as a boy. Its lower branches reached almost to the ground, so that you could monkey up to 15' or 20' into the tree by going up those low limbs. Getting higher was difficult going - and slippery going from all of the moss growing on those big limbs.

New England is filled with second-growth forests, not too much climax forest yet. It's difficult to realize now, but in the late 1800s there was hardly a tree standing in rural New England other than in farmers' woodlots - and sugarbush.

My pic doesn't capture it, but this one has about a 5' diameter. We were hunting for Woodcock.

All worship was to him sacred, since he believed that in its most degraded forms, among the most ignorant and foolish of worshippers, there has yet been some true seeking after the Divine, and that between these and the most glorious ritual or the highest philosophic certainty, there lies so small a space that we may believe the Saints in Paradise regard it with a smile.

Via Potemra, who says "It’s from Elizabeth Waterhouse’s Thoughts of a Tertiary, and it was used by Evelyn Underhill as one of the epigraphs to her classic book Worship"

At Maggie's, we love the charms of both town and country - when they get it right. The decline of industrial urbanization and the (government-subsidized) rise of the suburbs - with the move of industry and corporate offices to the suburbs, have left many cities as hollow cores of their former selves.

Lively people like to live in cities if they are vibrant, safe, interesting, attractive - and if there is work. For example, much of Manhattan is so appealing that few can afford to live there.

Malanga at City Journal: The Next Wave of Urban Reform - Mayors Cory Booker and Dave Bing fight to save two of America’s most distressed cities. One quote:

Since the mid-1960s, many big-city mayors and Washington policymakers had argued that the problems plaguing America’s cities—rising crime, deteriorating schools, sluggish economies, and social dysfunction—resulted from national and global economic forces that urban politicians were powerless to resist. Out of that period came an array of ambitious federal programs to aid city residents and revitalize struggling urban neighborhoods. Even though the programs—many of them carried out under the banner of the War on Poverty—did little to boost cities’ fortunes, the refrain that urban woes were Washington’s responsibility became commonplace among mayors and remained so for nearly three decades.

But just a few years after the summit, America witnessed the rise of a new group of mayors who rejected the notion that the federal government—or anyone else—should be their savior.

Read the whole thing. Malanga tells the story well. Link above.

From DiscoverTheNetworks, Organizations Funded Directly by George Soros and his Open Society Institute.

Related, Soros is targeting your state.

I've got to keep an eye on this guy, because his view of America and the world is so far from my own.

Is that a pistol in your pocket, or are you just glad to see the TSA agent? With all the fuss about the TSA groping everybody's "junk," I think it's about time the TSA gave a waiver to Moslems so they aren't offended. No waiver for nuns, though. You never know what those sneaky nuns might be up to.

Anger is not a mental illness. Except when it is part of one.

Let's face facts: it can be fun to be pissed off.

Are we going to the dogs? Our de-aspirational society; or, a society aiming for victimization and tawdriness

I love that sort of cranky post.

So afraid of skin cancer that they get rickets.

Via Drudge, In-state tuition for illegal immigrants is preserved with California Supreme Court ruling

That's no way to run a railroad.

The Intellectual Class: New Book Calls Obama a ‘Philosopher President’

Good grief. Is he a Spinone?

Clarice's Pieces: Restoring American Stature Abroad

The Bower-in-Chief ain't the guy to do that.

Sarah Palin's true reality: 'Free' Alaska is a welfare state that enjoys generous federal subsidies

Sad but true. With all their oil, they should be supporting me. Oh, wait. I forgot. They can't drill.

Genius marketing: Buy Truck, Get Free AK-47

Solar power in Canada?

It's a joke, right? Or are they preparing for the Palm Trees in Saskatoon?

Health Care Reform Group Gets Waiver from… Health Care Reform?

Where can I get me my waiver?

Related: Unreal. SEIU Local 25 and 12 Other Union Groups Receive Obamacare Waivers

The super-rich tend to be Libs. Jacobson: Frank Rich Knows The Answer, He Just Can't Say It

Good news for Gaia is bad news for Greenies: Sea Life Flourishes in the Gulf.

Oil is carbon. Carbon is life.

No Pasaran: Everything you ever Really Needed to Know about the European Left

They hate Jews

Neoneo: Bush derangement syndrome vs. Obama derangement syndrome? 

Coyote doesn't view voting as sacred. He'll take freedom anywhere he can find it.

Fan and Fred's New Boss is another 'affordable housing' advocate.

Brilliant!

Q&O: New York Times suddenly discovers governing as a priority for new GOP majority

Sometimes I confuse an Onion headline with a NYT headline.

Right Network video: Jackpot Justice: Lawyers Gone Wild

Left, Right agree: Obama’s G-20 performance worst ever

Is he a weenie, or a putz?

As Betsy considers, More evidence that Obama is in over his head in foreign policy

Sometimes I feel sorry for the guy - but not too often because I know he hates me.

Bridgeport's Missing Republican Votes

What happens in Bridgeport stays in Bridgeport.

Harry Reid wants more public employee unions.

They already own the federal government. What else do they need?

Gregory Kane: Nobody wants to talk about black America's gender crisis

It's racist to mention it.

The policy wreckage of the Chevy Volt. George Will.

It's a bad joke at the taxpayers' expense.

Get your John Galt t-shirts here. They're the in thing. Tiger wears one.

Rubin Museum: Sacred Symbols Across Two Cultures. Quote:

Almost every school kid know of his defense of the poor and slaying the dragon, a symbol of pagan Rome. Similarly, the Buddhist protector slays demons, but inner, psychological ones. He is depicted here as the six-armed Mahakala. In the Tibetan tradition his image is an object of meditation. As a "wrathful deity" his job is to quiet the mind or destroy the mind's chatter and help the person meditating reach a new level of awareness.

Aging brains and bloggers (h/t Insty)

Incoming Wisconsin, Ohio Governors Vow to Refuse Federal Money for High-Speed Rails

Reason: It's time to reform Social Security

Why the Fed Cannot Regulate ‘Systemic Risk’

Should there be a mortgage deduction? Should there be capital gains tax on sales of primary residences? NRO

Dino: Disputing the idea that “jobs won’t be coming back” is job one

Related at NY Post: Class dismissed: Why middle income jobs are not coming back

Lobbyists Upset About Demint Earmark Ban

Driscoll: Racist Nostalgia at the Village Voice

GOP Staking Claim to Obama's Coalition of Voters

Obama: ‘What About Compliments?’  Related at Powerline: American Narcissus

NPR switches story on tax money

Planned Parenthood Is Worried...and Should Be

32 degrees F at 5:30 AM. Perfect and balmy for morning coffee and cigar while strolling around outside and waking up. My snap did not capture the Vs of the Wood Ducks cruising in the small lake. Lots of Wood Ducks thereabouts.

Thanks again for the invite, dear friend. (If you wondered, it's gents only - and tobacco enjoyment is encouraged. Jacket and tie for dinner, of course. Traditional American, like Maggie's Farm.)

That's Harpoon UFO in the Growler. Their UFO is good stuff.