Maggie's Farm

We at Maggie's Farm would never publicly admit to aspirations to grandeur. Life's harsh schoolmistress teaches us humility daily.

We know we are destined to be a boutique blog, with a certain sensibility and many shortcomings which will prevent us from becoming mass market. Plus we do not have the time, or, really, the motivation, for fresh reporting. Furthermore, we do not bother with ads which would only compllcate our taxes for little gain, while compressing our space.

It is encouraging, though, for us to view our growth in an international blogosphere which is overloaded with interesting things to read. And yes, I know we post too much, too often. That is one of our many flaws.

According to our internal stats, we are running an average of about 4000 visits/weekday. In September, 145,000 visits and over a half-million page views. (Multiple visits do not count - and we get happily get plenty of 'em.)  We quit looking at our millions of hits per month, which mean little. We are small, but not invisible. Our average length of stay is 3-4 minutes, which is very long for any blog or website: it either means that we are interesting... or that our visitors are slow readers.

The less-accurate Sitemeter shows a lower number, but nonetheless shows a steady pattern of growth: we have never had a month without readership growth since we began keeping stats in March, 2006 - unless you count the occasional months following mega-links. The graph looks good, and tells us that the market for Maggie's Farm is not yet saturated.

And don't even ask about those old Truth Laid Bare rankings. That site hasn't updated us since 2006, despite several emails to them, so I think they are non-functional as a source of blog data. Let's just say that we are the Eastern Box Turtle of the Blogosphere.

If you like us, and know folks who might also enjoy us - even if they do not agree with our politics - send us around. We know there are plenty of people out there who might like Maggie's, but have never stumbled upon us. We welcome civil, informed debate, disagreement, and genteel correction, and, in fact, we are never truly certain about most of our bold assertions.

One more thought: Leave a comment on a post if you have a thought to share. Don't be shy. We read most of 'em, sooner or later. Our commenting is easy: no illegible letters to type in for security. Our high-tech anti-spam takes care of that for us.

Photo: The mascot of Maggie's Farm: A very young Eastern Box Turtle, a cheerful, slow and steady critter who likes rainy days and eats almost anything. At this time of year, they are fattening up for a long hibernation. Around here, they spend half of their life cozily buried in restful hibernation - October to April or May.

Interesting and unusual elevators at Deputy Dog (h/t, Grow a Brain)

Time to pull in the decoys and head the boat back to the barn.

 

Celestial Junk defines it. h/t, SDA

Regulating hedge funds is an oxymoron, and moronic. Markets do crazy things, regularly, and as long as the Fed keeps its God-like eye on things, we do not need politicians trying to control deliberately-high risk markets. These markets are not for sissies, and everybody knows that.

Sally Morgenthaler, author of the book Worship Evangelism, has given up on the notion.  In this article she despairs that her thoughtful book became an excuse for churches to develop an "if you build it they will come approach" to evangelism that has both failed in developing proper worship and truly effective authentic evangelism. Today, instead, she challenges leaders to separate worship from evangelism so that we can honor God in the first and live with and love our neighbors as the means to the second.

Read the whole thing at It Takes a Church.

Paul at Powerline presents a heck of a min-opus from Douglas Kmiec of the Romney campaign on habeas as it applies to foreigners and terrorists.

From the Free Online Dictionary:

1. Specious or excessively subtle reasoning intended to rationalize or mislead.

2. The determination of right and wrong in questions of conduct or conscience by analyzing cases that illustrate general ethical rules.

Hey, Michael Moore - check out these photos taken with a cell phone camera in three Havana hospitals. h/t, Jawa

Wesley Clark proposes regulating free speech. How often do we have to point out the totalitarian impulse at the core of the Left? If it weren't for that, we wouldn't care so much...although we do like Capitalism too: wealth is a darn good motivator for effort and achievement, but it's about freedom, too, to pursue whatever your dreams might be. Gen. Clark seems to have forgotten why he was in the military.

In the UK, Moslem youth advised to use violence against the Infidel. h/t, Insty. That, my Brit cousins, is called an "insurgency."

All the love and sensitivity in the world will not fix it any more than they can cure cancer - because people want to erase you not for what you do, but for what you are.

And just a brief question off-topic: Does Glenn Reynolds really have a day job? If he does, even if it's teaching at the law school, how does he find time to find - and to post - so much interesting stuff, day after day?

Israeli astronaut Ilan Ramon died in the blow-up of the Columbia. Among his gear was a drawing of the earth, from beyond the moon, by Petr Ginz, a Czech author, pamphleteer (he would be a blogger today), and drawer of pictures who was killed in Auschwitz in 1942 at the age of 16.

Petr never ceased believing that he and his young friends would be rescued. His sister survived the Holocaust. The story of Petr is in The Diary of Petr Ginz.

RWNH. I think this sort of thing just makes life more interesting for Rush. He is beyond intimidation by the Hillary-Soros Media Matters. Nobody who ever listened to him for ten minutes would imagine that he would insult a soldier. This pure BS "story" will be gone in two days.

What the story is really about is about Media Matters and MoveOn flexing their muscles at the beach.

Crittendon on Obama. He is an easy target, though.

We are troubled by overfishing in the Atlantic. It's a "tragedy of the commons."

Don Boudreaux quotes a letter which asks whether an infusion of property rights might solve the problem:

Fisheries are the classic tragedies of the commons and fishermen are behaving rationally when they overfish, for all of the benefits of each fish caught accrue to them while the costs are borne by the population as a whole. Fishermen are also behaving rationally when they “fish” for politicians in Brussels or national capitals, for if French fishermen do not, they will suffer when Italian fishermen do and vice versa.

Read the whole thing.

We all expect hardball and ugly politics when large amounts of power are in play, but there are tactics and methods which go beyond hardball. But the Dem attack machine, funded by Soros organizations, appears to have no conscience whatsoever - which is why I am so offended by it all. You can't really blame it all on Soros - they are working hand-in-hand. It's a war for them.

If everyone is going to get a bit ad hominem here, let's be reminded that Soros was a Nazi collaborator, despite being Jewish. OK, he was young, but it might say something about how he operates: he admits "that's when my character was formed."

When someone at MoveOn claimed to "own the Democratic Party," they weren't kidding. The Dems jump when Soros says jump. Tammy:

The purely fascist tactic of ritual defamation, condemning dissent, and attempts to silence voices that do not pledge allegiance to the Left, has now consumed local and federal Democrat lawmakers.

In one of the most remarkable and shameless displays of Thought Police tactics, Democrats now carry the water for the Soros Gestapos which exist to squelch public discussion of which they do not approve or does not confirm to their nihilistic leftist agenda.

Make no mistake--this is one of many volleys launched in an effort to revive the necessary and ultimate leftist grab for power--a return of the so-called Fairness Doctrine, which would kill the freedom of market and listener driven talk radio.

I don't know whether it's about the Fairness Doctrine or about shutting up opinion preparatory to the election, but I do think it is all about intimidation. After all, they already have Imus' head as a prize - and as a warning.  Read Tammy's whole rant.

The Taliban did not permit photos, or any images, and they sure did not permit homosexuality. However, these rules did not apply to them. Watch the video slideshow. h/t, Taliban Glam piece at Attack Machine.

Some of our readers might like to bookmark Classical Virtuoso, a blog which seeks out the best classical performances on YouTube. I wish I had a way to route through my good speakers.

Back in the days when I was involved with some research, I saw some iffy work done. The pressure to come up with some result was powerful, and people kinda sorta convinced themselves that it meant something.

Here's how it worked: You spent six or twelve months accumulating data to test an hypothesis. You ran some basic statistical tests on the data, and it turned out that there was no statistical correlation to support your hypothesis. (Negative results are wrongly and rarely published.) THEN, so as not to waste your pile of data and all of the time spent (and with computers this is easy to do), you would ask the computer to find some pattern in your pile of data. Often it would find one - and that would be your published paper. Data-mining. You just re-write your hypothesis after the fact, and nobody ever knows. It's a form of lying, really.

That ain't science - that's the Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy. Attack Machine has a nice example:

Sagittarians are 38% more likely to break a leg than people of other star signs.

You can read his entertaining piece on the subject at What's Good for you Is Now Bad.

In fact, clustering does occur on a random basis, to confound scientifically- and statistically-illiterate reporters and readers. Not to mention juries.

Dr. Ioannidis of Tufts Medical School says in the WSJ:

There is an increasing concern that in modern research, false findings may be the majority or even the vast majority of published research claims," Dr. Ioannidis said. "A new claim about a research finding is more likely to be false than true."

The hotter the field of research the more likely its published findings should be viewed skeptically, he determined.

That whole article is here.

A great example of a compelling linear relationship below, from Conspiracy proving, beyond doubt, that the gradual loss of pirates is the cause of globalistical warmening.

 

Kim du Toit. His ideal is a 16 ga., with details pretty much close to what I prefer, but I'd have a problem with his choices of choke. 

The VA State Climatologist, at Reference Frame

Shrinkwrapped takes on the NYT Editorial The Socialists are Coming! He is a physician with a daughter in medical school. He discusses the politics and realities of government medical care from the physician's perspective in an essay Health Care Conundrums. Key quote:

...I agree with the formulation that health care can be:

• Universal

• Affordable

• High Quality

Pick 2 out of 3

This YouTube sometimes seems to get stuck. Just push the button forward through the stuck place. That is Marcia Ball with her New Orleans band and her hot boogie-woogie pianny. I heard her live 2 years ago. She is not a shrinking violet.

iTNews claims Americans are giving up friends and sex for internet surfing.

I suspect that that is an exaggeration and that (except for p*rn junkies of whom there are millions) most regular internet users, such as the good sorts of folks who read Maggie's and the people we link to, have, over time, moved some of their TV, newspaper, and magazine time over to internet time.

So I hardly consider reading, getting information in a way that the reader can control and chose - plus the wonder of links and comments - to be a bad thing. It sure beats the boob tube.

In my experience, it's the internet writers and bloggers who need to watch their clocks, assuming they are not trying to make a living doing it. Writing and the gratification of instant publishing can eat up a lot of time that might be better spent weeding the garden, at the pub, watching Desperate Housewives - or nude surfing.

Photo: Nude surfing in Australia.

Daisys are the friendliest of garden flowers.

Our Montauk daisies (aka nipponicum) have come into bloom this week, which seems very late, but their blooms are welcome.

They have woody stems, succulent leaves which bugs leave alone, and perfect flowers.

I bought these at Home Depot on a whim, a few years ago. As a beachy plant, this type needs full sun, and seems to enjoy poor soil.