Maggie's Farm

A quote from his speech about his life at Harvard:

Confidence in progress has now been replaced by postulation of change.
Progress is achieved and can be welcomed, but change just happens and
must be adjusted to. “Adjusting to change” is now the unofficial motto
of Harvard, mutabilitas instead of veritas. To adjust, the
new Harvard must avoid adherence to any principle that does not change,
even liberal principle. Yet in fact it has three principles: diversity,
choice, and equality. To respect change, diversity must serve to
overcome stereotypes, though stereotypes are necessary to diversity. How
else is a Midwesterner diverse if he is not a hayseed? And diversity of
opinion cannot be tolerated when it might hinder change.

He begins:

A year ago I moved into a row house in northeast Washington, D.C., two
miles from the Capitol. I paid $85,000, a price so low it’s a punch line
in a city where the average home sells for more than $600,000.

The hot water heater was missing, and the bathroom tub drained into a
downstairs closet. My house inspector, a dead ringer for the
gravel-voiced actor Sam Elliott, tramped silently from room to room,
occasionally pausing to pronounce, “It’s not proper.” The house was in
foreclosure and had been vacant for a couple of years, so when I found
crayons under the old carpet, I was spared the guilt of imagining them
in still-young fingers. But once, someone had loved this place. The
backyard bloomed with rosebushes staked with weathered shoelaces. With
an FHA-backed loan and a savvy contractor, I gutted the house and
renovated it. I found myself realizing a dream I’d assumed was miles out
of reach: I was a homeowner.

With Gas at $4 Per Gallon… Democrats Reject GOP Bill to Expand Drilling:

Because of current U.S. policy, U.S. companies are prohibited from developing oil fields that lie in Cuban waters and come within 50 miles of Florida. However, Cuba is exploring and developing these oil fields, estimated by the U.S. Geological Survey to possess more oil than the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge, and Cuba is partnering with China and other countries, such as Spain, France, and Canada.

The Castro Regime will begin drilling off the coast of Florida this year and will go deeper than the Deepwater Horizon rig that exploded in the Gulf of Mexico in April.

But, US companies are not so fortunate.

Nice paragraph at NYM:

...a tiny minority of Yale’s most obnoxious and neurotic females, members of a gender comprising a slight majority of humanity, already empowered by Nature with staggering powers of influence and control over members of the opposite gender, particularly during a period of life when the reproductive impulse and any young lady’s powers of personal attraction are at their height, have been persuaded by ideological influences hosted and specially cultivated by Yale to see themselves on the basis of myths, stereotypes, and crude historical misunderstandings as victims, and then encouraged to exploit that status for personal and group power and rewarded for doing exactly that with attention and applause.

Bulldog, Bulldog, bow wow wow, ladies.

As someone who lives adjacent to a river (a small one, but larger than a stream - around 30-40' wide in dry season), I know all about flooding. The prosperous farmer who built the core of my house in 1803 had the brains to build his house and barns above the level of flooding, even just barely above the level of 100-year floods.

Our new (c. 1890) barn was built on the old barn foundations. We have had water right up to the footings from the river 200 yards away.

Our land is flooded regularly, and it does wonders for the meadows but it fills my pool with silt, branches, dead fish, leaves, etc. Knocks down our fencing, too. Most of our land is on a flood plain, and only about 1/4 of it is above the plain.

If you live on a flood plain, whether salt or fresh, flooding must be part of your life plan. I think it makes good sense to have farmland, open space, natural preserves, etc on flood plains, but it drives me crazy that the Feds subsidize construction on flood plains via flood insurance. That is just plain stupid. If you live in a flood plain, you should live in a trailer that can be moved to higher ground with a pickup truck. I did live for a spell in one like that (but I did not really like it).

Levees and other Army Corps of Engineers devices only worsen the flooding that rivers regularly perform for the benefit of the richness of the flood plains. They attempt to turn rivers into drainage ditches instead of the ever-changing, meandering, shape-changing wild things that they are.

It's not nice to fool Mother Nature. Here's Powerline on More Flood Analysis.

Related: Mississippi flood control: Major changes urged

And this: What If They Flooded New Orleans To Save Cajun Country?

I suppose this is a companion piece to my post last week, Beauty and Transgressive Ugliness. From a review of John Armstrong's important new book, In Search of Civilization - Remaking a Tarnished Idea:

Greeks’ and theologians’ dour double disapproval of money has been the hideous inheritance of the West. Reinforced by aristocratic and would-be aristocratic disdain for work, hostility to wealth had, by the mid-19th century, torn free of its intellectual roots and become one of those ideas accepted without thought by a certain kind of intellectual, whatever his relationship to Greeks or theologians. Marx was heir to this prejudice, and the millions killed by Marx’s followers its victims. So pervasive was this idea that even 19th-century Utilitarianism, whose principle of “the greatest happiness for the greatest number” should have made its followers leading advocates of economic liberty (as, indeed, they began), evolved over time a hostility to getting and spending; John Stuart Mill ended his life a socialist.

The book review here.

Do people attempt mass murder because they want better schools and better sewers? From Dalrymple's Sewer Thing:

...to return to the question of intellectuals and their appreciation of human motivation. On the one hand they seem to want to deny the deeper currents that underlie the most extraordinary behaviour such as suicide bombing; on the other, they want to deny the quite ordinary or commonplace motivation for genuinely prosaic behaviour, such as spending too much. This is odd.

Perhaps they want to preserve the notion that man is by nature fundamentally good. In the Guardian article with which I started we are introduced to the concept of the altruistic suicide bomber, a concept derived from the fact that those who survived their attempted bombings claimed to be in pursuit of some altruistic end, when asked afterwards. It is surely very naïve to take this at face value: anyone caught in the middle of committing, and prevented from continuing, genocide would presumably argue the same thing. What the intellectual does not want to admit is that there is a joy in rage, and a joy in expressing that rage by evil deeds. And this is because we are constituted as we are: original sin, if that is how you want to put it.

Similarly, lust for easy gain is common enough. It is a human universal, not in the sense that it has always existed in all places and everywhere, but in the sense that it exists as soon as there is the opportunity for it to manifest itself. That is to say, there will be no final victory over such greed, and I have very little doubt that at some time in the not distant future there will be yet another epidemic of it, if we are not indeed in the midst of one already.

Read the whole good thing (link above). We have always contended here at Maggie's that a flaw in Leftist visions of paradise is an unrealistic view, or I could say fantasy, about the true nature of fallen mankind.

No sooner had the tin-foil hat world just begun to gin up conspiracy theories about Bin Laden than we get the new story about the "great man" (I had never heard of him before) Dominique Strauss-Kahn. Now we have to have a new slew of conspiracies about him, as if life were not interesting and confusing enough without them.

It is difficult to keep up with all of the conspiracy theories these days.

15 Ten-Second Health Tips!  (including eggs and bacon for breakfast). h/t, Insty.

I am always amused by health advice because it so often turns out to be wrong, and because popular writing on health so consistently confuses correlation with causation. Nevertheless, I do take a daily Vit D as one of my compromises with magical thinking. Lipitor too, for the same reason.

What do you want to die from?

It would be pretty darn bad.

Speaker Boehner's homily to the 2011 graduating class at Catholic U.

I found it touching.

From the Liberal and elite Mead, via NYM:

Here in the early years of the twenty-first century, the American elite is a walking disaster and is in every way less capable than its predecessors. It is less in touch with American history and culture, less personally honest, less productive, less forward looking, less effective at and less committed to child rearing, less freedom loving, less sacrificially patriotic and less entrepreneurial than predecessor generations. Its sense of entitlement and snobbery is greater than at any time since the American Revolution; its addiction to privilege is greater than during the Gilded Age and its ability to raise its young to be productive and courageous leaders of society has largely collapsed. ...

and

Many problems troubling America today are rooted in the poor performance
of our elite educational institutions, the moral and social collapse of
our ‘best’ families and the culture of narcissism and entitlement that
has transformed the American elite into a flabby minded, strategically
inept and morally confused parody of itself.  Probably the best
depiction of our elite in popular culture is the petulantly narcissistic
Prince Charming in Shrek 2;
our educational institutions are like the Fairy Godmother, weaving
shoddy, cheap, feel-good illusions into a gossamer tissue of flattering
lies.

Roger Scruton has always been a Maggie's intellectual hero. Beauty and Desecration - We must rescue art from the modern intoxication with ugliness. One quote:

Wherever beauty lies in wait for us, there arises a desire to preempt
its appeal, to smother it with scenes of destruction. Hence the many
works of contemporary art that rely on shocks administered to our
failing faith in human nature—such as the crucifix pickled in urine by
Andres Serrano. Hence the scenes of cannibalism, dismemberment, and
meaningless pain with which contemporary cinema abounds, with directors
like Quentin Tarantino having little else in their emotional
repertories. Hence the invasion of pop music by rap, whose words and
rhythms speak of unremitting violence, and which rejects melody,
harmony, and every other device that might make a bridge to the old
world of song. And hence the music video, which has become an art form
in itself and is often devoted to concentrating into the time span of a
pop song some startling new account of moral chaos. Those phenomena record a habit of desecration in which life is not
celebrated by art but targeted by it. Artists can now make their
reputations by constructing an original frame in which to display the
human face and throw dung at it. 

When I was an adolescent, we thought that "beauty" was old-fashioned, for the old fogies, and that rough and ugly was hip. Little did I know then about how beauty can be so elusive, temporary, and precious.

Show Your Thanks to World War II Vets by Watching This 2-min Video

# 10 Golfer "Think I'm going to drown myself in the lake."
Caddy "Think you can keep your head down that long?"

# 9 Golfer "I'd move heaven and earth to break 100 on this course."
Caddy "Try heaven, you've already moved most of the earth."

# 8 Golfer "Do you think my game is improving?"
Caddy "Yes sir, you miss the ball much closer now."

# 7 Golfer "Do you think I can get there with a 5 iron?"
Caddy "Eventually."

# 6 Golfer "You've got to be the worst caddy in the world."
Caddy "I don't think so sir. That would be too much of a coincidence."

# 5 Golfer "Please stop checking your watch all the time. It's too much of a distraction."
Caddy "It's not a watch - it's a compass."

# 4 Golfer "How do you like my game?"
Caddy "Very good sir, but personally, I prefer golf."

# 3 Golfer "Do you think it's a sin to play on Sunday?"
Caddy "The way you play, sir, it's a sin on any day."

# 2 Golfer "This is the worst course I've ever played on."
Caddy "This isn't the golf course. We left that an hour ago."

# 1 Best Caddy Comment ..

Golfer "That can't be my ball, it's too old."
Caddy "It's been a long time since we teed off, sir."

Via VDH:

“Tonight, I can report . . . And so shortly after taking office, I directed Leon Panetta . . . I was briefed on a possible lead to bin Laden . . . I met repeatedly with my national security team . . . I determined that we had enough intelligence to take action. . . . Today, at my direction . . . I’ve made clear . . . Over the years, I’ve repeatedly made clear . . . Tonight, I called President Zardari . . . and my team has also spoken. . .These efforts weigh on me every time I, as Commander-in-Chief . . . Finally, let me say to the families . . . I know that it has, at times, frayed. . . .”

If you listen to the Lefty pundits, you'd think he was a battlefield hero now. Right decision for sure, but also a no-brainer if there ever was one. "Let's send some guys to kill Bin Laden, OK?" "Well, let me sleep golf on that for a few days..."

Legal beagles at Volokh discuss legality of assassination.

Explaining College as Oversold and Underperforming.

Good interview with George Leef, who contends that half of the kids who go to college in the US these days do not benefit and should not bother. Higher ed has become a self-interested industry with a greater investment in sales than in product...the product often being an unaccomplished, ignorant person with a piece of fancy paper in hand.

When you think about it, it is rather remarkable that there is no exit exam of advanced intellectual achievement. I would offer to design one. Maybe I will design one, just for fun (there will be Math because, in my reality, there is no higher ed without Calculus and Statistics).

All sorts of stories are going around. Here's my conspiracy theory: After ten years of work, last summer the CIA believed that they tracked down bin Laden to an old ISI safe house in a city just north of Islamabad. After collecting all of the data they could, a SEAL team was trained for the killing job. When the government finally gave the OK, they secretly choppered in from Afghanistan in stealth choppers and shot up the place, while nabbing bin Laden's corpse and a pile of computer stuff. Then they left after 40 minutes without a scratch, but after blowing up one downed chopper.

But who could believe a crazy story like that? SEALs could believe it, because it's the sort of thing they do routinely. I think this turned out to be an easy job.

I happen to be a doughnut epicure. I only care for plain doughnuts (God forbid, not "whole wheat"), deep fried in fat to a dark crunchy crust. If somebody insists on a dash of confectioner's sugar on top, that's OK but I'd be just as happy without it.

Cake doughnuts are revolting, like the ones at Bird Dog's favorite coffee joint or at the supermarket. You can feed them to kids and dogs, though, and they seem to thrive on them. Don't even talk about that Krispy Kreme gooey junk.

A real fried doughnut, and a cup of black coffee. Heaven. Then maybe a smoke to finish off the coffee. You do have to look around, though, to find places that make real doughnuts these days. Real doughnut-lovers know where they are.

Here's some history of the American doughnut.

A review of Stanley Fish's book of the above title. One quote:

For Fish a great sentence is like a great athletic performance. It is an example of something done supremely well, so well that it cannot be bettered. Other similar feats will come along, but only to stand alongside it. What exactly is done in such a performance? There is no single answer, indeed no finite answer since there is no limit to the things that can be done with words. But it is what Conrad called the “shape and ring” of sentences, the perfect adaptation of form to achievement, that Fish wants to share.

Somebody referred to the royal wedding as "chick crack." I think it was. I keep hearing about the hats, and I have learned over the years that hats and shoes are crack to females even though guys rarely notice them. Here are some good clips from the pageant.

Speaking of weddings, a horny Insty linked this piece on hot marital sex. Daily sounds pretty good to me. When I was younger, I was a twice-daily guy, or at least a would-be twice-daily guy. However, back then, one time did not mean just "once."

It doesn't take much to keep a guy happily married: lots of sex fun, decent and abundant meals made with love if not with expertise, letting him have his alone time, no nagging about his many flaws, some interesting conversation, no inquiring about his "feelings," and otherwise just generally appreciating his unique wonderfulness. Create a beautiful life for him to live in, and make home a soft, loving haven without the negativity and hassles of life out there. That's all we ask for, ladies. Without those things, our lives aren't very pleasant.

The problem is that the Mrs. is now imagining herself at age 24, marrying Prince William or Duke William or whoever he is. He's a military pilot, too, and most of us guys are neither prince nor military pilot. However, being a hard-working, honest, decent, horny, God-fearing, self-reliant American citizen ought to be enough for any lucky woman.

Christie at Harvard: Education Systems Need Revolutionary Change:

“We have an education system that is set up for the ease, comfort and security of those who operate it,” Christie said, urging his audience, many of whom may become leaders of schools, to be “disrupters.” He said they should disrupt “fat, rich and entitled unions” because that’s what’s needed to fix U.S. public schools.

“If you don’t do it we’ve got no hope,” the governor said. “If you’re unwilling to do it, we’re sunk, because you have less to lose than anybody. Take chances. Take a little risk.” Christie received a standing ovation.

Don't Mean To Be Rude, But The Economy Sucks.

It kind of sucks in my business, which is one which is not usually very optional. We have not hired for over two years and have laid off quite a few professionals and assistants. Do I see a re-do of Carter's stagflation?

"Mechanism" is a key word in Biology these days. Is life a mechanism?

Are you and I machines? Are we analyzable without remainder into a collection of mechanisms whose operation can be fully explained by the causal operation of physical and chemical laws, starting from the parts and proceeding to the whole? It might seem so, judging from the insistent testimony of those whose work is to understand life.

There is little doubt about the biologist’s declared obsession with mechanisms of every sort — “genetic mechanisms,” “epigenetic mechanisms,” “regulatory mechanisms,” “signaling mechanisms,” “oncogenic mechanisms,” “immune mechanisms,” “circadian clock mechanisms,” “DNA repair mechanisms,” “RNA splicing mechanisms,” and even “molecular mechanisms of plasticity.” The single phrase “genetic mechanism” now yields over 25,000 hits in Google Scholar and the count seems to be rising by hundreds per month. But no cellular entity or process is exempt; everything has been or will be baptized a “mechanism.” In an informal analysis of technical papers I’ve collected, I found an average of 7.5 uses of mechanism per article, with the number in a single article varying from 1 to 32. This is not even counting cognate forms such as mechanistic and machine.

Using mechanical metaphors probably sounded advanced, and scientifically anti-vitalistic 100 years ago, but now it seems quaint. The metaphors we use are important, because they tend to be reified by people outside a given field of expertise.

We easily forget that vitalism was a metaphor, like phlogiston. Our next batch of metaphors for everything will be systems-oriented, until the next new thing comes along.

Reason.tv: A Tipping Point for School Choice - Lisa Snell and Clare Mullin on the Voucher and Charter School Revolution

Americans like choices.