Maggie's Farm

Scott Brown for Senator! Wasn't the O in CT a month ago to raise money for Dodd? Worked out well. Obama to Massachusetts to deliver the coup the grace?

Related: Martha Coakley says Devout Catholics 'Probably shouldn't work in the emergency room'. What a moron. How about Moslems?

Eureka! I am a Conservative (and I never realized it). Don't feel badly - it happened to many of us over the years.

Climate change! More China provinces plan power rationing -report

Heather: Chicago’s Real Crime Story - Why decades of community organizing haven’t stemmed the city’s youth violence

Not Ideas About The Thing But The Thing Itself

At the earliest ending of winter,
In March, a scrawny cry from outside
Seemed like a sound in his mind.

He knew that he heard it,
A bird's cry, at daylight or before,
In the early March wind.

The sun was rising at six,
No longer a battered panache above snow...
It would have been outside.

It was not from the vast ventriloquism
Of sleep's faded papier-mache...
The sun was coming from the outside.

That scrawny cry--It was
A chorister whose c preceded the choir.
It was part of the colossal sun,

Surrounded by its choral rings,
Still far away. It was like
A new knowledge of reality.

It takes a minimum of three legs to build a stool, and a minimum of three logs to build a good fire.

A BD daughter recently learned this basic Boy Scout fact after failing to start holiday fires. It requires a tent of wood to hold in enough heat to produce and ignite the heated gasses which create the rapid oxidation we call a flame. The flame is the burning gasses. The complex and mysterious chemistry of ignition is the key to flame.

The gasses, of course, are hydrocarbons. Wood is nothing but unripened oil or pre-coal. I explained to her (she does not seem to have a chemistry brain yet) that slow oxidation is called "rotting,"  slightly quicker oxygenation is called "smoldering," quick oxidation is called "fire," and extremely quick oxidation is called "explosion."  

Medium controlled oxidation is called "life," and why we exhale CO2 (hydrocarbons + oxygen = mostly CO2 + H20 + heat/energy), and why we are above room temperature most of the time. It's an exothermic chemical reaction. We animals are masterfully designed to control and harness these chemistries in our bodies.

The people of Haiti are difficult to help now, but they have always been difficult to help.

If you want to do something now, we recommend World Vision.

Part of an extraordinary long quote from A Woman in Berlin in a piece at Never Yet Melted:

...I long ago lost my childhood piety, so that God and the Beyond have become mere symbols and abstractions. Should I believe in progress? Yes, to biggger and better bombs. The happiness of the greater number? Yes, for Petka and his ilk. An idyll in a quiet corner? Sure, for people who comb the fringes of their rugs. Possessions, contentment?

I have to keep from laughing, homeless urban nomad that I am. Love? Lies trampled on the ground. And were it ever to rise again I would always be anxious, could never find true refuge, would never again dare hope for permanence.

Perhaps art, toiling away in the service of form? Yes, for those who have the calling, but I don’t. I’m just an ordinary laborer, I have to be satisfied with that. All I can do is touch my small circle and be a good friend. What’s left is just to wait for the end. Still the dark and amazing adventure of life is beckoning. I’ll stick around, out of curiosity and because I enjoy breathing and stretching my healthy limbs.

Ain't Talkin', from Modern Times. The dark, depressive lyrics here.

If you get to thinkin' you're a person of some influence, try orderin' somebody else's dog around.

Anon, via Theo

Park Avenue, Midtown, tonight. Plenty of lights on in those bankers' offices.

Remember that silence is sometimes the best answer.

Anon, from Theo's old farmer quotes. Ain't that the truth.

Like that word. Re the Met, at Classical:

I suppose if Christians want parity in respect, we should be recruiting our own brigades of ax-swingers and splodeydopes, but I did a little reading and apparently our founder's view on disrespecting our creed was some p***y-a** nonsense about "turning the other cheek" (like that's going to strike fear into the hearts of infidels). And as far as I can tell, none of our sects have any proviso for a bevy of pliant virgins on higher planes in the event of pious detonation. So Jihad For Jesus is going to be an uphill climb, to say the least. Meanwhile, I guess we'll have to settle for the smug moral superiority of suffering figurative slings and arrows in both cheeks.

Thompson's Remants of an Army. Story of the 1842 Afghanistan battle here.

Is the MSM beginning to get it? From Jack Cafferty via Watts:

As the debate continues about global warming, the month of December was the 14th coldest in 115 years in the United States… and some scientists insist the earth is entering a cooling trend.

• Wind chills brought temperatures in the Dakotas to 50 degrees below zero, while record cold in parts of Florida is damaging some of the orange crops, and South Carolina called an early end to shrimping season.

• Parts of Canada have seen actual temperatures of 30 below zero… And freezing temperatures and record snowfalls are pounding parts of Asia and Europe too.

• Britain has experienced the worst snowfalls in half a century.

• In India – it’s estimated at least 100 people have died due to the cold temperatures… with dozens more killed in Bangladesh.

• In China and South Korea, heavy snow and unusually cold weather have brought chaos to travelers – blocking roads and trains, canceling flights. After one recent blizzard in Beijing – officials had more than 300-thousand people clearing the streets.

Meanwhile some of the world’s top climate scientists suggest this winter is only the start of a worldwide trend toward cooler weather, which could last for 20 to 30 years. They base their predictions on changes in water temperatures in the oceans

Good judgment comes from experience, and a lotta that comes from bad judgment.

Anon., from Theo's Old Farmer quotes

How often have we heard complaints about the inappropriate cheesecake on Maggie's Farm? Countless times.

So here's some beefcake instead - Scott Brown, MA Senate candidate, as a law student (via a piece at Powerline). The photo should help with the gal vote, don't you think?

Betsy has a very good update on the MA race. Also today: Union plans major ad buy for Coakley. We also note the conspicuous absence of a major national politician to support the Dem in this campaign. The O not invited, apparently.

We support Scott Brown, even if we enviously resent his good looks:

h/t, Lucianne:

The Eclipse. A little too flashy, d'ya think?

The best sermons are lived, not preached.

Anon. (h/t, a collection of good farmer quotes at Theo)

Pow! "It's not Kennedy's seat, it's not the Democrats' seat, it's the peoples' seat." Scott Brown:

WSJ:

Among the astonishing things about the ObamaCare debate—or lack thereof—is that Washington is inundated with warnings about the destructiveness of this plan, and it doesn't matter. The agency that runs Medicare rung the latest alarm bell on Friday, and good luck finding any media mention.

Whole story here.

The crisisification of everything from weather to fatness to flu season trivializes real crises.

Just One Minute mocked the NYT's crisisification of the Atlantic Menhaden population. Fair enough. It's not a crisis, but it is a serious concern to all those concerned with ocean wildlife - and one which could be easily solved by limiting the helo-guided factory-fish harvest of these bottom-of-the-food-chain schooling fish.

Even as recently as 6 years ago, when fishing on Long Island Sound, you could catch your bait for Bluefish or Bass by tossing a bare hook into a school of Menhaden, aka Bunker, and just dragging the hook through the thick schools. Since the factory ships appeared, those giant schools have been harvested like the herds of Bison and the sky-darkening flocks of Passenger Pigeons.

Here's The Most Important Fish in the Sea

Here's Meet menhaden - before this ecologically critical fish vanishes

Images via links above

Magnifico: The Brilliant Life and Violent Times of Lorenzo de' Medici by Miles Unger.

What are y'all reading?