Maggie's Farm

A quote from Arthur Brooks in City Journal, "Free People are Happy People:"

Freedom and happiness are highly correlated, then; even more significant, several studies have shown that freedom causes happiness. In a famous 1976 experiment, psychologists in Connecticut gave residents on one floor of a nursing home the freedom to decide which night of the week would be “movie night,” as well as the freedom to choose and care for the plants on their floor. On another floor of the same nursing home, residents did not receive these choices and responsibilities. The first group of residents—no healthier or happier than the second when the experiment began—quickly showed greater alertness, more activity, and better mood. A year and a half later, they were still doing better, and even dying at half the rate of the residents on the other floor.

This chart from the article:

 Read the whole thing.

CS Lewis as quoted in an essay on evil at Belmont:

My argument against God was that the universe seemed so cruel and unjust. But how had I got this idea of just and unjust? A man does not call a line crooked unless he has some idea of a straight line. ... Of course I could have given up my idea of justice by saying it was nothing but a private idea of my own. But if I did that, then my argument against God collapsed too--for the argument depended on saying that the world was really unjust, not simply that it did not happen to please my fancies. Thus in the very act of trying to prove that God did not exist--in other words, that the whole of reality was senseless -I found I was forced to assume that one part of reality--namely my idea of justice--was full of sense. Consequently atheism turns out to be too simple. If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning: just as, if there were no light in the universe and therefore no creatures with eyes, we should never know it was dark. Dark would be a word without meaning.

Nike's relatively new line of Dri-Fit polo shirts, trousers, etc, is worth knowing about, especially in summertime.

This stuff is extremely comfortable for golf, light as a feather, and never gets sweaty. The polo shirts are good for tennis, and do not get heavy with sweat. Polyester, but nothing like what one thinks of as polyester.

Their Tour Pleat Golf Pants are also the most comfortable travel pants I have ever worn.

Good piece by neoneo on Keillor on Obama's silver tongue.

I thought TV had rendered old-fashioned oratory obsolete, and had been replaced by TV's Cool Charisma. Maybe not. After all, a passionate preacher is still a fine thing.

Remember when Biden said Obama was "articulate and clean"? OK, here's "articulate," without the teleprompter.

A colleague and I were recently talking about the nature of the modern American aristocracy - not an aristocracy of blood, refinement, family, or breeding but one of power, influence, money or access to it, and networks, combined with a dose of meritocracy and slick social climbing.

Unfortunately, due to the ever-growing power of the Federal government, the modern aristocracy is beginning to resemble a Washington-NYC version that of the London-based aristocracy (and that aristocracy was not stupid at all - consider Lord North) against which we rebelled.

For better or worse (for worse, IMO - but they are my people) in America, ye olde WASP dominance is history. But that is the American Way. Few know much about history today. We like "New."

Harvard's Greg Mankiw addresses the Yale-Harvard Presidential Duopoly.

An interview with Nassim Nicholas Taleb, the "prophet of doom and gloom." With a good video, too, of his ten rules for life at Times Online. 

One quote: "Don't mess with complex systems."

In most societies in the world, people aren't worried about the price of gas. They're worried about where their next meal is coming from.

Mark Levin, on the radio tonight. It's a good point: the whole world would love to have the worries that Americans have.

"In the Hegelian model, it's not enough to be the antithesis party."

Newt Gingrich (h/t, Evang. Outpost)

Klavan went to a NYC grade school to do Story Time. A quote:

The teacher told me that she once had to explain to the class why her last name was the same as her father’s. She dusted off the whole ancient ritual of legitimacy for them—marriages, maiden names, and so on. When she was done, there was a short silence. Then one child piped up softly: “Yeah . . . I’ve heard of that.”

I’ve heard of that. It would break a heart of stone.

Beating poverty in America nowadays is largely a matter of personal behavior. Get a high school diploma, don’t have kids until you’re married, don’t get married until you’re 21, and you probably won’t be poor. It also helps if you work hard, show up on time, act courteously, and avoid anything felonious.

But where are these kids going to learn such things?

Read the whole thing in City Journal.

P.J. O'Rourke rips the Field Museum's new function as purveyor of dumbed-down, mealy-mouthed pomo platitudes. One quote:

You escape the pity parlor of When Worlds Collide and traverse a space of video screen talking heads and interactive displays with all their buttons being pounded by toddlers. This is "Living Descendants." The ancient Americans' modern relations are regular folks, as well as their ancestors were, and with clothes on, too, the same as you and me. Of course, if they're the same as you and me, why do they need a room in a museum any more than we do? Well, "despite centuries of injustice and oppression, today's "Indigenous peoples strive to sustain their cultural traditions."

You could say the same of the Irish. Being one, I looked for the exit to go find a drink.

June 14th is Flag Day. Got your bright shiny new one?

I love our flag, but remain quite fond of the old Gadsden flag.

Hillary wants VP slot.

I guess anything is possible, but if I were BHO, I'd stay clear of the toxic Clintons and look for a fresher face. On the other hand, if I were BHO, maybe I might use her to help get elected, then throw her under the bus with all the other inconvenient people. It's getting a bit crowded under that bus.

Good grief: Senate votes to begin global warming debate.

I have a much better idea for those guys and gals: Begin your summer vacations now. Leave Washington. Enjoy America - it's really a nice place full of tons of good people, even if it is a bit warm in the summertime.

Delicious, packed with flavor, and inexpensive: the Bolivar Suntuoso. I like to have some tasty everyday cigars, some moderately good cigars, and some fancy cigars (absolutely never any Habanos - no, no, no. They are quite illegal here.) on hand at all times.  (Just the same as with with wines - some cheap everyday table wines, some nice wines, and then the really good special stuff for occasions.)

I am also enjoying the Partagas Black Label mini Prontos these days. Quite a punchy cigar, and a quicker smoke.

A Back to Basics education with 24 students in one room, and a teacher salary of $240,000. This is great. It would entail a meaningful pay cut for me, but I'd do it in a New York minute for the joy and challenge of it. Can I say whatever I want, and can I use my whip? 

I have always claimed that John Adams and Abe Lincoln got better educations than our public school kids get. Of course, they were not the average kids - and you don't "get" an education anyway - you "take" one. Or not.

It is no longer PC to acknowledge that relatively few are able, interested, motivated, or inspired to engage in a serious classical education. For good reason, too: it's not practical and it's difficult, and most jobs do not require calculus or music theory. Result? Watered-down non-rigorous gruel and As and degrees for all, accompanied by a dose of leftist propaganda and multicultural BS. And that's OK, because you cannot get wisdom in school (except maybe a basis for historical wisdom, but that's easy to do on your own once your Mom teaches you to read).

Now back to do the bidding of She Who Must Be Obeyed in the gardens. Adding "organic material," ie our recent truckload of slightly aged manure (a sweetly odoriferous and oozing mountain in the back driveway) from my dairy farmer pal, to the new perennial beds. I will have to dig it in, 2' deep. I will dump some on top of my vegetable garden too, as mulch to be dug in next Spring. Then horseplay later, if it doesn't rain: I could use a sherry or two for courage and a vintage stogie this afternoon, followed by a good gallop over hill and dale with the Mrs. to let today's cool Yankee wind clear my head of the nonsense in life. If rain, maybe indoor horseplay with the same goal.

Editor note: Photo is an early 1800s one-room schoolhouse in Norwalk, CT

Mark Steyn and his book America Alone published by Maclean's face a Canadian Human Rights Tribunal next week. The issue is "hate speech" involving Moslems. This is all about defending Western values (eg free speech). Belmont reports on Steyn's speech in Vancouver - a quote:

Steyn's insight -- that the War on Terror is essentially the consequence of a Western disease (ed: multiculturalism) that manifests itself in the newly found power of medieval madmen -- is the key point. All September 11, Iraq, Afghanistan have done is focus attention on a silent struggle that has been going on within Western culture for last hundred years. It is the ideational counterpart of violent struggles of the 20th century. The men who we remember on Memorial Day only buried the physical corpus of totalitarianism. It remains for us, in the twenty first century, to lay its ghost to rest.

Can we do it without restarting the violence of the last hundred years? Perhaps. But can we do it without a mental and legal struggle. Definitely not. And so Mark Steyn continues in defiance of the thought police. Because that's the kind of guy he is.

In an opinion piece in Maclean's last month, Steyn attacked the "totalitarianism" of the Human Rights Commissions, noting:

It's true that "hurtful actions that undermine freedom" and lead to "unspeakable crimes" usually have some fig leaf of intellectual justification. For example, the ideology first articulated by Karl Marx has led to the deaths of millions of people around the planet on an unprecedented scale. Yet oddly enough, no matter how many folks are murdered in the name of Marxism-Leninism, you're still free to propound its principles at every college in Canada.

He goes on to say:

Ah, but that's the Good Totalitarianism. What about the Bad Totalitarianism? You know, the one everybody disapproves of: Nazism. Isn't it obvious that in the case of Adolf Hitler, "hateful words" led to "unspeakable crimes"? This argument is offered routinely: if only there'd been "reasonable limits on the expression of hatred" 70 years ago, the Holocaust might have been prevented.

There's just one teensy-weensy problem with it: pre-Nazi Germany had such "reasonable limits." Indeed, the Weimar Republic was a veritable proto-Trudeaupia. As Alan Borovoy, Canada's leading civil libertarian, put it:

"Remarkably, pre-Hitler Germany had laws very much like the Canadian anti-hate law. Moreover, those laws were enforced with some vigour. During the 15 years before Hitler came to power, there were more than 200 prosecutions based on anti-Semitic speech. And, in the opinion of the leading Jewish organization of that era, no more than 10 per cent of the cases were mishandled by the authorities. As subsequent history so painfully testifies, this type of legislation proved ineffectual on the one occasion when there was a real argument for it."

My humble opinion? Hate speech is in the eye of the beholder. Steyn's book contained none that I am aware of, but he did present unpleasant truths about the Islamization of the West. Regardless, I am in favor of protecting speech, even hateful and insulting speech: poor manners are not a matter for law, and it's difficult to have any opinion without offending somebody, just as Canada's hate speech laws deeply offend me. Cliche: The solution to speech is more speech.

Photo on top: A young librarian searching the stacks for Steyn's dangerous book. (Theo)

Barry Goldwater's journals, reviewed at Reason. (h/t, Insty.) One quote:

Goldwater was for liberty, as he conceived of it. “Our country, of course, was born on the very simple idea that freedom is our only cause,” he wrote in his journal, “and that freedom was not given to us by government.” In another entry, he declared, “The American economic system could only work well, and at its best, when it was unhampered by government and was allowed to be controlled only by the marketplace.… Thus, the core of my economic philosophy is the free market system—when it is working as it should.”

Re Obama's Liberalism (I would say Leftism), from Beston at TCS as quoted in a piece by Ed Driscoll:

In arguing that "labels don't apply anymore," Obama is making the same claim, nearly verbatim, that Michael Dukakis, John Kerry, and other Democrats have made over the years, stretching back over a generation. What these candidates found out the hard way was that labels mean plenty, especially when they refer to something that people understand--like liberalism.

Americans learned over several decades what liberalism, at least modern liberalism, was all about. Contrary to some claims that conservatives, in a sinister plot, defamed the word, liberalism did a pretty good job defaming itself: from the anything-goes ethos of the 1960s to radical war protestors, from tax-and-spend government and welfare policies to lax criminal justice, pacifism abroad, and a wide-ranging contempt for the institutions and values of American life, liberals took what had been the dominant political current in American politics and made it into a pejorative term. Today, while centrist American voters may blanch at some of the Republican Party's positions, they have no wish to go back to governmental progressivism.

If they did, Obama-never one to miss a rhetorical trick--would be resurrecting the word "liberal" as change we can believe in.

Old Gorilla v. Young Gorilla: Viacom is suing YouTube owner Google for copyright infringements. (Thanks, reader.)

I know nothing about copyright law, but it would seem to me that different sorts of internet ISPs and sites present different sorts of legal complications, eg whether commercial or non-commercial, whether a site is a billboard, or whether the use is innocent or educational. For example, the Liquid Kelp image posted earlier today may be a copyrighted image (I have no idea whether it is), but its appearance here consists of an unpaid advertisement for which the company would surely be grateful.

A case might be made that posting major chunks of news or commentary from a newspaper, magazine or other website constitutes a copyright violation, even with attribution.  However, much interesting stuff, the provenance of which is unknown and indeterminable, rockets around the internet via email and websites and ends up on posts - jokes, images, stories, videos, hoaxes, lies, quotes, etc. Who knows who produces and sends out all that fun stuff into cyberspace? Nobody, except the first person who emailed it, created it, or posted it.

Blogs and other websites present interesting new areas for law to romp and play in. It's the wild West. Nobody violates a copyright malevolently, or without attribution if known. I did find the following quote at this interesting site for bloggers:

The Digital Millennium Copyright Act, 17 USC § 512, creates a "safe harbor" immunity from copyright liability for service providers who "respond expeditiously" to notices claiming that they are hosting or linking to infringing material. The DMCA does not make ISPs liable if they do not remove content, but gives them a strong incentive to take the content down. That in turn gives those who want your material removed from the Net a strong incentive to make claims of copyright infringement.

Editor's comment: Any original material clearly identifiable as being produced by us at Maggie's Farm is not copyrighted at all. Not even Creative Commons: our original stuff is free for the borrowing, stealing, or linking. However, we appreciate and expect attribution just as we offer attribution to others whenever we are able to: "Do unto others..."  "Fair use" and "public domain" get complicated when we are talking about email and websites. Our general disclaimer is that we are a non-commercial amateur site, and cannot always determine where some content or images originated. If asked, we will gladly and respectfully take down, link, or attribute any copyrighted material which we have innocently, educationally, or unknowingly posted or linked.

Re "assimilation," from Dalrymple in City Journal. It begins:

Acting recently as an expert witness in a murder trial, I became aware of a small legal problem caused by the increasingly multicultural nature of our society. According to English law, a man is guilty of murder if he kills someone with the intention either to kill or to injure seriously. But he is guilty of the lesser crime of manslaughter if he has been sufficiently provoked or if his state of mind at the time was abnormal enough to reduce his responsibility. The legal test here is a comparison with the supposedly ordinary man—the man on the Clapham omnibus, as the legal cliché has it. Would that ordinary person feel provoked under similar circumstances? Was the accused’s state of mind at the time of the killing very different from that of an average man?

But who is that ordinary man nowadays, now that he might come from any of a hundred countries? The accused in this instance was a foreign-born Sikh who had married, and killed, a native-born woman of the same minority. The defense argued—unsuccessfully—that an ordinary man of the defendant’s traditional culture would have found the wife’s repeated infidelity particularly wounding and would therefore have acted in the same way.

Read the whole thing.

Photo: "Ted Dalrymple"

J.S. Bach likely never wrote any music specifically for the piano, which was a newfangled instrument at the time. He did compose for the clavichord, the harpsichord, and, of course, the organ, and people term these compositions generally as "for the keyboard" - thus permitting them to sneak in the piano. Here's a good rant on the subject.  (If there are any musicologists out there, please correct me if I am in error.)

So when we heard Glenn Gould playing the Italian Concerto on the blog yesterday we were not hearing anything that Bach had in mind. The clavichord is incapable of making very much noise. For fun, here's the real sound of the Prelude in C Major of Bach's The Well-tempered Clavier, which means "The well-tuned clavichord":

Over the transom - no idea who wrote this piece (We have posted on this in the past, but I still find it remarkable that self-described Liberals, on average, make more money than self-described Conservatives, yet are far less charitable in their personal lives.):

These are results of a Syracuse University professor Arthur Brooks. Brooks, a (now-former) Democrat raised by leftist academic parents, describes himself as a "behavioral economist". He researched ten years of data and scientific surveys to get the true picture of giving in America, and in 2006 he published Who Gives, Who Doesn't, and Why It Matters.

The results of his research shocked him. He says, "I was in the usual box about heritability and compassion.... I figured conservatives were hardheaded, pragmatic, tough-minded but didn't care as much about others and wouldn't donate as much...I figured liberals were softhearted and cared more"

Wrong.

Here are some of the things he found: