Maggie's Farm

What a bunch of mind-numbed morons. Michelle. No wonder the hedgies prefer Dartmouth kids: we think more normal, and we reject PC.

More stuff later today, but the Missus and I are going for a morning ride on this lovely spring day to try to tire these winter-weary horses. We plan to do a Pony Express-style morning, to try to remind all of our dumb beasts about what we expect from them. A morning grapefruit and a Bloody Mary or two, and then canter or gallop the piss out of them on the trails, fallen-tree jumps, deep mud, and all, until they listen and obey. 

You have to deal with them with an "attitude," at this time of the year: I have been known to jump off and slug a horse in the face, a useful technique that I learned long ago from an Irish trainer. It makes an impression, if you don't break your wrist. 

There is nothing as fine as a Saturday morning ride on pea-brained, wacked-out Hunters in the early spring in Yankeeland. Battle them back into submission and obedience, if you have the heart. We will bring some of the pups to follow us, and wear them out too.

A goal for a Saturday: tired horses, tired dogs, and a tired wifie taking a nap. Then light a fire in the library, gather the pups around, pour a double Scotch, and catch up on the blog readin' and writin,' and find the Dutch Courage to approach the paperwork mountain.

A late casual dinner with pals, I see on the calendar. Perfect. And then Nirvana: a nightcap, beddie and bookie.

I call it a balanced life. You have to build it the way you want it. In America, you can. Church tomorrow morning.

Photo: the Missus in our ring, on Ben.

"A great many of those who debunk traditional values have in the background values of their own which they believe to be immune from the debunking process."

C.S. Lewis

"Benign" Authoritarian Populism. Many in America would like to take the same path as Britain's, but not us at Maggie's Farm: we do not believe in the virtue of government. In fact, we believe that governments tend to serve their own purposes, like any other organizations filled with ambitious people who want steady work without heavy lifting.

A quote from "The Virtue of Freedom" by our hero, Dr. Ted Dalrymple, in New English Journal:

The murder capital of the US. A quote from a piece by Gelinas in City Journal:

When New Orleans began slowly to come back to life after Katrina, it enjoyed a respite from violent crime, one that residents and their elected leaders thought would continue indefinitely. New Orleanians had a “sense of euphoria about the city being a new city, that the violent crimes just weren’t there,” says U.S. Attorney Jim Letten, who handles federal cases for Louisiana’s eastern district. But after roughly ten weeks of peace, murders—many drug-related and acquaintance-based—started to appear in the headlines again. Then, as the city’s population began returning in greater numbers last spring, violent crime roared back “with a vengeance,” as Letten puts it. The highly publicized shooting death in March 2006 of 28-year-old Michael Frey at the hands of a street robber in the Faubourg Marigny, a funky neighborhood on the outskirts of the French Quarter, seemed to trigger in many New Orleans residents the realization that things were now back to “normal.”

Read the whole thing.

From Iraq the Model:

Instead of telling us to stop fighting back, I'd like to see some people stand up and protest the crimes of the terrorists and tell them to stop the killing and destruction…turn the stop-the-war campaign against the terrorists, is that too much to ask for?
Tell the criminals to stop killing us and stop attacking the people who are risking their lives fighting for liberty and equality.
We're not asking the media and the stop-the-war crowd to carry arms and shoot the terrorists; we just want them to stop shooting at us.

I don't bother checking to see what the Leftist blogosphere is talking about anymore, because it has become so hatefully emotional and juvenile that you cannot learn anything from it.

To find out what the grown-ups of the Left are thinking, you have to go to dreary places like The Nation, which is a magazine, not a blog.

In The Nation, Lawrence Goodwyn has The Coming Party Realignment. Life is terrible, he feels. He is certain that we are in the 1930s again. He hates globalization of markets, he hates Bush, and I think he wants to tax financially successful people down to the mean. Well, it was the best example of Lefty thinking I could find today, but I found little fact or truth in it. Very disappointing. (BTW, he uses the word "democracy" for "socialism.")

Where is the Leftist Powerline and the Leftist American Thinker? And the Leftist Maggie's Farm? Leftist blogs that are interesting, rational, informative, and fun? I'd read 'em.

There is more violent crime in Europe than in the US. Piece by James Q. Wilson, via Instapundit.

Distorted data from the Brady Campaign. Reason

Everyone's heard about John Edwards' $400 haircuts. Edwards is a walking argument for sticking with the $15 haircuts, unless you want to look like a pretty-boy pedophile TV huckster-preacher.

But what does Hillary pay for her's? I am waiting to hear.

Besides the endlessly annoying and murderous Jihadists, America's biggest problem is this, as described in the CSM: 1 in 2 Americans now receive income from government programs.

Getting past that magic 50% has been the goal of Leftists since the 1930s. Why? Because the recipients vote. And if you add up the numbers who receive program money, the number of govt employees, and the number receiving major non-income benefits (like Medicare), you have a heck a a big number getting at least part of their living from the government teat - meaning from their neighbors' labor.

Incrementally, inch by inch, the American habits of self-sufficiency, resourcefulness, and independence have been whittled away to the point that many people are no longer ashamed to take the money of strangers. Indeed, to the point that they feel "entitled" to it, which I suspect is a psychological maneuver to deny the humbling reality that they are receiving charity. Social Security made it seem OK to older folk by concealing the fact that it was their kids who were paying them the money.

Fortunately, there are still large islands of folks who do their best to pursue the American ideals. The problem is that they are getting stuck paying the bills for the other half. As the population ages and people breed less, that ratio will get worse, and the "two Americas" will begin feeling like the givers and the takers.

That is not a good foundation for a culture or a civilization.

Editor's Note:

I see that our friend Coyote was thinking along the same lines, but mainly from the standpoint of taxation. As he notes in his piece A Nation of Slaveholders:

Meanwhile, Ari Fleischer writes in today’s WSJ (sub req) that the top 1% of income earners pay 37% of total income taxes, the top 10% of income earners pay 71% of total income taxes, and the top 40% of income earners pay 99% of total income taxes.

and

The second greatest failing of the Constitution as originally drafted (the first being legality of slavery) is the lack of clear protections for property and commerce.  As a result, the only protection we have against full confiscation of everything we own is the whim of the electorate.  Now that a clear majority of voters are on the receiving end of money confiscated from a minority of voters, how good is this last protection? 

We have become a nation of slaveholders, with the majority holding the productive minority in bondage.  Inserting government in the middle of this process as an agent, so the recipients of this slave labor don't have to get their own hands dirty, does not change the nature of the relationship one bit.  It just pretties things up for our conscience.

A further comment from The Barrister:

I am sure that Coyote's metaphor was intentionally hyperbolic, but his point is correct. Furthermore, I believe that the only way to eliminate the division between the donors and the recipients is a flat tax, so that  everyone can be a full participant in the American enterprise: all in the same boat.

A "Department of Peace" sounds Orwellian, but the concept is quite the opposite.

You just can't make this stuff up. These folks are living in a Kindergarten world. That's fine for Kindergarten, but the Big World is not always benign, nor is the pursuit of "niceness" a prime driver in human nature. It would be a very dull world if that were the case.

And, by the way, don't we already have a State Department? What's their job?

A thought-provoking essay by George Friedman, CEO of Stratfor. A quote:

On a pretty arbitrary scale -- between Korea (1950-53), Cuba (1960-63), Vietnam (1963-75), Iran (1979-1981) and Iraq (2003-present) -- the United States has spent about 27 of the last 55 years engaged in politico-military maneuvers that, at the very least, did not bring obvious success, and frequently brought disaster. Yet, in spite of these disasters, the long-term tendency of American power relative to the rest of the world has been favorable to the United States. This general paradox must be explained. And in the course of explanation, some understandings of the Iraq campaign, seen in a broader context, might emerge.

He makes the point that these "minor" (without national mobilization, and pursued with economy of force) wars generally achieved their geopolitical objectives without a WW ll-style victory. Read the whole thing.

Neither Al Sharpton nor Jesse Jackson ever graduated from a seminary, nor have either been ordained. "Reverend"?

Race hustlers, with phony religious garb. I should have known, but I am not predisposed to doubting the credentials of "Reverends."  One tends to take such things at face value. There is no such thing as "self-ordination."

There are millions of honorable black folks in the USA. Why are these two slick and slippery con-men the "spokesmen"? Probably because the others are busy, working hard at real jobs like everybody else.

Update to the piece below: Imus has been fired by CBS. Another scalp for the race hustlers - and just in time to cover up the Duke case.

We don't even like the guy much, but he has been railroaded. Imus is no racist. The message is: Be Very Afraid, and don't call anyone a "nappy-head ho," even as an ironic quote, unless you are black - in which case it is just fine.

The Imus Case is a surely a smokescreen as we said earlier this week, effectively covering up the Duke Case outcome. The Imus Case is equally foolish. Imus is an old-time shock jock, and an equal-opportunity insulter from way back - but a guy who regularly offers real substance of value, albeit with a lefty slant.

So you just have to ask "Why now?" Whimsical racial slurs towards all colors have been part of his shtick forever. Imus is just the scapegoat du jour. It could be Rush, or you, or me, tomorrow: anything to stay in the limelight and to keep the money coming in.

Editor's Note: In defence of the goofball Don Imus, to whom I rarely listen, here's a quote - not that I agree with it all - from Cynopsis:

Imus is in the crosshairs.  He put himself there; his producer and colleagues enabled him.  Thoughtless and sophomoric, he made a damaging remark.  Damaging to the stellar young women of Rutgers basketball, and damaging to a long career in radio and on cable TV.  Until Wednesday night, some of his bosses also enabled him.  

What mystifies me is what took me from the broadcast network morning shows to Imus In The Morning on MSNBC. For the longest time, Good Morning America and the Today Show brought me morning news and information.  Unthinking, I tuned into those channels on the low end of the dial.  But, when their soundtrack became disturbingly frivolous and forced, I started searching, sampling. 

I sampled Imus, occasionally at first, eventually adopting an unexplainable habit.  It made no sense. I am decidedly not in the Imus demographic.  The reasons not not to tune in to Imus are considerable:

• The adolescent male locker room humor
• "Comic" routines that center on genitalia, sexist and ethnic slurs
• The Bickersons … Mr. & Mrs. Imus'  sniping at each other, lately echoed on-air by their 8-year old child
• Bo Dietl & Sid Rosenberg
• Endless plugs for products and services benefiting the Imus Inner Circle

And yet….

Imus served up the most refreshing, enlightening, provocative and spontaneous interviews with journos, politicos, and I-want-to-knows anywhere on morning tv.  Interviews lasted 15-20 minutes uninterrupted, without deference to title or status.  Imus' shameless on-air campaigns to fix broken parts of America were astonishing, whether for sick kids or wounded soldiers.  The music acts … spectacular!  Well chosen and superbly produced.  And I love curmudgeonliness.

So I weigh the plusses and minuses of the Imuses.  Is the intellectual content so strong that it outweighs the stupidity?  Is this the tradeoff:  tune out "Rev. Falwell", "Brian Wilson", and "Mayor Ray Nagin"  in exchange for Jon Meacham,  Anna Quindlan, and Harold Ford?  There are days when it's the All White Guy Chorus, and that needs to be fixed, as with most broadcasts that pretend to reflect American thought. 

The term "shock jock" is dated and inaccurate.  Imus' claim that it's a comedy show is equally inaccurate.  In 3 years, I tolerated the "comedy" to get to the substance, and the substance was solid.  It's a testament to what we're able to tune out when we tune in. 

With the final outcome of the Duke rape idiocy, it is finally and fully apparent that the Duke faculty and administration have made fools of themselves. And so did the race-monger shake-down artists, who, like the vultures that they are, smelled fresh meat. And so did the MSM with their rush to judgement.

Indeed, the "America is Satan" crowd gets so fired up by rare examples of blatant racism - real, contrived, or imaginary - mainly because they are so rare. And they want it to be true so badly, to support their view of the world and their raison d'etre, that facts and truth go out the window. (Abu Ghraib is another example: The exception that proves the rule.) We usually term such distortions of reality "propaganda."

(The total lack of interest in last week's college rape story proves my point. Who is rushing to support these girls? Where are the feminists? Where's Jesse? Where are the pomos? All AWOL, because the story doesn't fit "the narrative." And "narrative," of course, is a term applied to fiction (and a concept applied to legal case-building).)

It was obvious to normal people without an agenda a year ago that there was something fishy about the Duke story.

As a loving grandparent, I would not contribute one penny for one of those kids to attend such a loony, misguided place - regardless of the quality of Duke's basketball (or lacrosse) teams.

Eat your heart out, Duke.

An addendum by Editor "Bird Dog":

In a piece this week entitled PoMo Contradictions, David Thompson concludes:

If one’s ‘work’ is based on being oppositional – or being seen to be oppositional - against capitalism, racism, sexism, imperialism (real or imagined), white male patriarchy, etc, then liberties can, and probably will, be taken. Attempts to fathom truth, or to be consistent, meaningful and accurate, can, and probably will, be dispensed with in order to advance The Great Cause. (Or The Great Oppositional Posture, depending on one’s scepticism.) And it’s worth noting that in Criticism and Social Change, the left-wing theorist, Frank Lentricchia, announced that the postmodern movement “seeks not to find the foundation and conditions of truth, but to exercise power for the purpose of social change.”

Achieved, one might suppose, even at the cost of truth.

That says it all.

I'd also add that I believe the villain of the story to be Mike Nifong, who sold his soul to get elected. By her reported behavior, the accusing woman appears to be mentally unstable, not very bright, and sounds alcoholic and/or drug addicted and, despite the unbelieveable destructiveness of her actions, deserves some pity. If she sobers up, and if she has a conscience, she will never get over the wrongs she has done.

And about "Pomo".  Isn't it always the most humble and curious kid in the class who asks the dumb question nobody else wants to ask? They are the best. Got an email asking "What is Pomo"? Abbreviation for "post-modern," usually applied to people with a political or world-view agenda for which truth is irrelevant. No, I would go further: for which truth is considered a reactionary maneuver - and they gladly admit it. Pomo is as old as the Appalachian Mountains: it's also called "political lying."

At the feeder today, between church and a late brunch on this chilly Easter:

Cardinal, Blue Jay, BC Chickadee, Song Sparrow, Chipping Sparrow, WT Sparrow, Mourning Dove, Downy Woodpecker, Red-Bellied Woodpecker, Tufted Titmouse, Purple Grackle, SC Junco, Goldfinch (half-moulted), BH Cowbird, House Finch, WB Nuthatch. Not to mention the fat Red-Tailed Hawk eyeing the squirrels at the feeder.

Image: Moulting male American Goldfinch. Our males are not this far along with the moult into breeding plumage.

Right now, in Hartford, CT, it is snowing. Fairly heavily, too. What's up, Al?

And here's news to me: Al Gore gets paid $125,000 for showing up to speak about the warming crisis. Small Dead Polar Bears. Good gig for a huckster. Somebody call me. I'll do it for half of his fee - and I will explain to you why mankind should pray for a return to warming to fend off the next ice age.

And, whoa. Al Gore's offset company spends only 25% of the money on offsets. The debate is over on Al Gore. Guess what? This guy is a greedy capitalist pig!

Somebody remind me how he got all of that pre-IPO Google stock. I forget. I tried, but I could not get any from my stockbroker. The VIPs hogged it all, and made out like bandits. Al Gore is into the real Green now, I suspect. What is his net worth, without ever holding a real job?

A comparison of proposed taxes over the next five years, stolen from a good piece at the King of Graphs, Willisms. The Dem leadership graph (yellow) would constitute the largest tax increase in American history, exceeding Clinton's.

May I ask what this new tax money is supposed to be for? No matter - they'll find some way to spend it, and the very rich will find some way not to pay it.

First, at a roast of NYC's WABC talk radio host and Guardian Angel founder Curtis Sliwa. Sports guy Warner Wolf said:

"Curtis gets so busy and distracted that he forgot his anniversary. His wife was crying and distraught. So he says "Mary, tomorrow morning in the garage there will be something new and shiny waiting for you, and it will go from zero to 140 in under six seconds."

Next morning she goes out to the garage, and there it was - a scale.

Second, also on WABC. Monica Crowley was talking with Tom Tancredo, and Tancredo says (I paraphrase): "People like to say today that 'diversity is our strength.' It's almost like a State Religion. But diversity isn't our strength: freedom is our strength. Uncontrolled cultural diversity is the story of the Tower of Babel."

In a surprise announcement yesterday, Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks held a press conference at Spielberg's office to urge Fred Thompson to run for president.

"We in Hollywood need to support our own," Spielberg said, to the surprise of assembled reporters. "Fred's screen resume is one anyone could be proud of. Fred may be a traditional, uptight American with bourgeois values, so we may not always agree with him on political matters, but loyalty comes first. We supported Schwartzenegger too, remember?"

"Admiral Joshua Painter is our man."

Spielberg's comments were taken as a message of permission, from the heart of Hollywood, for the influential entertainment industry to step outside the confines of the Democratic Party. Should Thompson decide to run, he will find the checkbooks of Hollywood opening for him.

Hanks commented "Running is good. Now you wouldn't believe me if I told you, but I could run like the wind blows. From that day on, if I was ever going somewhere, I was running!!"

While we were unable to reach actor Sean Penn for a reaction, we were able to reach his agent who told us that Mr. Penn was in Darfur distributing funds and arms to the oppressed Janjaweed freedom fighters. He predicted that "Sean will follow the fashion - that's what he's all about." He added "I'd be amazed if Sean wouldn't courageously follow our very, very dear close friends Stevie and Tommy's lead on this."

The Feinstein Scandal is the biggest we've seen in a long time. We are looking at billions in an obvious conflict-of-interest case - and all that has happened is that she resigned from a subcommittee after she got caught.

Will the magic "D" after her name protect her? If she were an "R", how big would this story be?

It is substantially true, that virtue or morality is a necessary spring of popular government. The rule, indeed, extends with more or less force to every species of free government. Who, that is a sincere friend to it, can look with indifference upon attempts to shake the foundation of the fabric?

George Washington, Farewell Address

Poverty, "relative poverty", and opportunity. Clearly as long as you define poverty as the lowest 10% of income, you will always have darn close to 10% poverty, right?

Stumbling and Mumbling points out that the above logic is in error. Providing benefits to bring everyone up to 61% of the median income would solve that statistical issue by eliminating the bottom. Of course, the disincentives to work provided by those benefits, and the disincentives to work which would be required via taxes, would make everyone far poorer in the end.

Take a look at his piece, and read the comments. The problem, of course, lies in not defining poverty by standard of living.