Maggie's Farm

Here's the story from the strange accident of 1980.

From the review of the above-titled book at WSJ Online:

Veteran Boston political reporter Jon Keller also invites us to behold his native state . . . and shudder in dismay. In "The Bluest State," he argues that, although Massachusetts does not suffer alone from its notorious affection for liberalism, it is the incubator for "Massachusetts viruses" that infect the national Democratic Party. The viruses come in many forms: "addiction to tax revenues and a raging edifice complex couched in disrespect to wage earners; phony identity politics without real results for women and minorities; reflexive anti-Americanism in foreign affairs; vain indulgence in obnoxious political correctness; self-serving featherbedding; NIMBYism; authoritarian distortion of the balance of governmental power, all simmered in a broth of hypocritical paternalism."

A truck driver used to amuse himself by running over lawyers, swerving to hit every one he saw walking along the road.

 One day, the truck driver saw a priest hitchhiking.  He thought he would do a good turn and pulled the truck over.  He asked the priest, "Where are you going, Father?".

 "I'm going to the church  5 miles down the road," replied the priest.

"No problem, Father! I`ll give you a lift."  The happy priest climbed in and the truck driver continued down the road.

Then the truck driver saw a lawyer walking down the road and instinctively he swerved to hit him. But then he remembered there was a priest in the truck with him, so at the last minute he swerved back to the road.

 Although he was certain he missed the lawyer, he still heard a loud "THUD." Not understanding where the noise came from he glanced in his mirrors and when he didn't see anything, he turned to the priest and said,

"I'm sorry Father. I almost hit that lawyer."

 "That’s okay," replied the priest. "I got him with the door."

This oldie is out of Cold Spring Harbor, Long Island

To new visitors: Thanks for stopping by, and check us out if you have a minute. You might enjoy our uniquely eclectic (or so we claim) and generally friendly site - even when there is disagreement. In fact, we welcome disagreement and lively but civil debate.

Re the topic of multicultural understanding, this commentary which we erroneously attributed to William Haynes, but which is actually from Rants and Raves in 2006 (thanks for the correction, readers). Please read it, friends, and discuss politely:

Observations on Arabs

Since the beginning of the Iraq phase of this conflict of civilizations, I've experienced the teeth-grinding frustration of watching both pro- and anti- Iraq sides make the exact same mistake - that of supposing that these people are basically Americans in funny costumes.  In this respect, George Bush and Michael Moore are equally clueless.

I went to live and work in Saudi Arabia in 1998, and I "made my year" as expats there put it.  That phrase means that I actually stuck out the whole year, instead of "running" from my contract, an occurrence so common that you only have to say "he did a runner" to explain why someone isn't showing up for work anymore.   

 In Eastern Europe and the South Balkans, whenever I have gone to live in a place about which I had formed opinions, the actual experience of living there always radically changed those opinions, sometimes into completely contradictory ones.  Most often, my academic research led me to form a beautifully coherent model, which experience turned into a semi-coherent collection of observations and tentative conclusions.

 In the case of the Kingdom, I went there with a certain sympathy for Arab grievances, a belief that America had earned a lot of hostility from "blowback" from our ham-handed interventionist foreign policy and support for Israel etc.

 I came back with the gloomy opinion that over the long run we are going to have to hammer these people hard to get them to quit messing with Western Civilization.  And by the way, among "rational, fair-minded" non-interventionist libertarians, not a damn one of them has asked me, "What in your experience caused you to change your mind?"  Instead what I get are gratuitous insults followed by insufferably condescending lectures about how wrong I am.

 So, with the caveat that one of the first things I learned was that the term "Arab" covers a lot of territory, here are some observations and some tentative conclusions about Arabs, more specifically about Arabs from the oil states and why we have misunderstood each other to the point that we are fighting a war with some of them and are pissing off the rest of them.  I suspect that many of these observations also apply to Iranian Islamists, but I have never been there and note that Iranians are not Arabs and have a different cultural history.

Got home Monday night. This is the terrain we hunt on the 45 square-mile ranch I visit every year for the deer cull. We only do head shots, because a wounded deer in this terrain means trouble: I would much prefer a clean miss than to track a deer across this lovely but gully-ridden countryside.

The talk in the back of my mind, from a piece in Provocations:

I was struck by the revelation that I have an unceasing inner voice that chatters a non-stop monologue in the back of my mind. Now some of you may be thinking, “I don’t know what you are talking about; I don’t have an unceasing inner voice.” That’s it—that’s the voice. At night we call it dreaming. In the day we can recognize it as worry, or the sub-vocalization of a frenzied and ever-changing personal focus. But what Lawrence learned to do was to move that voice from a monologue to a dialogue with God.

"In the first place, we should insist that if the immigrant who comes here in good faith becomes an American and assimilates himself to us, he shall be treated on an exact equality with everyone else, for it is an outrage to discriminate against any such man because of creed, or birthplace, or origin. But this is predicated upon the person's becoming in every facet an American, and nothing but an American...There can be no divided allegiance here. Any man who says he is an American, but something else also, isn't an American at all. We have room for but one flag, the American flag... We have room for but one language here, and that is the English language... and we have room for but one sole loyalty and that is a loyalty to the American people."

Theodore Roosevelt, 1907

Ardent Greenies find fault with every power source except solar panels, which are trivial. In the end, I think they want us to live in the stone age. On Maggie's Farm, of course, we have our own mini-fusion reactor in the basement which provides all of our power needs along with an endless source of truly hot water. It is entirely safe, designed by Arnie, our brilliant tractor-repair guy, constructed from old cast-iron tractor parts, and any dangerous radiation is fully contained by solid hardwood planks. The cracks are secured with duct tape, and all is painted with a coat of lead paint, just to be extra-safe.

But Greenies hate nuclear, and I don't know why - France gets 70% of their power from nuke plants. Greenies don't like windmills. They hate oil, gas, and coal - and wood. They make laws (Belgium) that you cannot cook on a grill. In today's article in the WSJ, they want to tear down the Klamath River hydroelectric dams. Fine - but propose a non-frivolous  alternative and don't play childish fantasy games like telling me to change my lightbulbs or to plant a tree. A quote from the article:

Al Gore has been hectoring Americans to pare back their lifestyles to fight global warming. But if Mr. Gore wants us to rethink our priorities in the face of this mother of all environmental threats, surely he has convinced his fellow greens to rethink theirs, right?

Wrong. If their opposition to the Klamath hydroelectric dams in the Pacific Northwest is any indication, the greens, it appears, are just as unwilling to sacrifice their pet causes as a Texas rancher is to sacrifice his pickup truck. If anything, the radicalization of the environmental movement is the bigger obstacle to addressing global warming than the allegedly gluttonous American way of life.

Once regarded as the symbol of national greatness, hydroelectric dams have now fallen into disrepute for many legitimate reasons. They are enormously expensive undertakings that would never have taken off but for hefty government subsidies. Worse, they typically involve changing the natural course of rivers, causing painful disruptions for towns and tribes.

But tearing down the Klamath dams, the last of which was completed in 1962, will do more harm than good at this stage. These dams provide cheap, renewable energy to 70,000 homes in Oregon and California. Replacing this energy with natural gas -- the cleanest fossil-fuel source -- would still pump 473,000 tons of additional carbon dioxide into the atmosphere every year. This is roughly equal to the annual emissions of 102,000 cars.

Given this alternative, one would think that environmentalists would form a human shield around the dams to protect them. Instead, they have been fighting tooth-and-nail to tear them down because the dams stand in the way of migrating salmon. Environmentalists don't even let many states, including California, count hydro as renewable.

They have rejected all attempts by PacifiCorp, the company that owns the dams, to take mitigation steps such as installing $350 million fish ladders to create a salmon pathway. Klamath Riverkeeper, a group that is part of an environmental alliance headed by Robert Kennedy Jr., has sued a fish hatchery that the California Department of Fish and Wildlife runs -- and PacifiCorp is required to fund -- on grounds that it releases too many algae and toxic discharges. The hatchery produces at least 25% of the chinook salmon catch every year. Closing it will cause fish populations to drop further, making the demolition of the dams even more likely.

But the end of the Klamath won't mean the end of the dam saga -- it is the big prize that environmentalists are coveting to take their antidam crusade to the next level. "This would represent the largest and most ambitious dam removal project in the country, if not the world," exults Steve Rothert of American Rivers. The other dams on the hit list include the O'Shaughnessy Dam in Yosemite's Hetch Hetchy Valley that services San Francisco, Elwha River dam in Washington and the Matilija Dam in Southern California.

Large hydro dams supply about 20% of California's power (and 10% of America's). If they are destroyed, California won't just have to find some other way to fulfill its energy needs. It will have to do so while reducing its carbon footprint to meet the ambitious CO2 emission-reduction targets that Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has set. Mr. Schwarzenegger has committed the Golden State to cutting greenhouse gas emissions 80% below 1990 levels by 2050 -- a more stringent requirement than even in the Kyoto Protocol.

Hey, Arnold - 80%? Pretty to think so, but it will never happen. The whole piece is subscription-only in the WSJ.

Bird Dog made an error when he posted that Bobcat photo this week. That was not our place in the mountains, which is still entirely snowed in, no doubt because of global warming. It was the ranch of friends, outside San Francisco, which we visit every year and where we ordinarily shoot wild pigs (but we failed to find any this trip). Here's a shot I took of their typical ranch landscape, last week.

Michael Scheuer, Former Chief, Bin Laden Unit, CIA, reported to Congress on April 17.

His statement is an interesting read. One quote:

The Rendition Program was initiated because President Clinton, and Messrs. Lake, Berger, and Clarke requested that the CIA begin to attack and dismantle AQ.  These men made it clear that they did not want to bring those captured to the U.S. and hold them in U.S. custody.

President Clinton and his national security team directed the CIA to take each captured al-Qaeda leader to the country which had an outstanding legal process for him.  This was a hard-and-fast rule which greatly restricted CIA’s ability to confront al-Qaeda because we could only focus on al-Qaeda leaders who were wanted somewhere.  As a result many al-Qaeda fighters we knew were dangerous to America could not be captured.

Read the whole thing. I guess they never considered using Gitmo.

Walking can add minutes to your life for each day you walk. This enables you, at 85 years old, to spend an additional 5 months in a nursing home at $5000 per month.

My grandmother started walking five miles a day when she was 60. Now she's 97 years old and we don't know where the hell she is.

The only reason I would take up exercising is so that I could hear heavy breathing again.

I joined a health club last year, spent about 400 bucks. Haven't lost a pound. Apparently you have to go there.

I have to exercise early in the morning before my brain figures out what I'm doing.

I like long walks, especially when they are taken by people who annoy me.

I have flabby thighs, but fortunately my stomach covers them.

The advantage of exercising every day is that you die healthier.

If you are going to try cross-country skiing, start with a small country.