Maggie's Farm

Newdow Marches Onward

His next goal is to remove "In God We Trust" from currency.

We used to call irritable and intolerant people like this "cranks." (See today's reference to the guy who pulled his daughter out of the school choir because of "Pick a Bale of Cotton.") Nowadays, cranks are taken seriously. Is this "progress"? Or is it letting the lunatics run the asylum?

Dr. Sanity on BDS

Dr. Sanity drew quite a bit of attention with her piece on BDS (Bush Derangement Syndrome), with comments and links that I have seen to Powerline and neoneocon, and perhaps more.

But I'd say that this is nothing new: there were equivalent Nixon, Ford, Reagan, and Bush Sr. Derangement Syndromes which were comparable in their vitriol, distortion, and apparent hatred. Remember? I just call it the hateful, smug, dark, paranoid, intolerant and fascistic side of Liberalism.

But I want to point out another piece by the good shrink on Jimmy Carter. One quote:

Jimmy Carter is a very very dangerous human being. He is the very worse sort of pacifist; the kind that gives people who truly desire peace an extremely bad taste in their mouth. Because the foundation of his pacifism is a determined and incalculably cruel passivity and tolerance toward genuine evil in all its manifestations.

Read entire.

No, it's not from a grocery store tabloid. Warmflash and Weiss in Scientific American:

"Most scientists have long assumed that life on Earth is a homegrown phenomenon. According to the conventional hypothesis, the earliest living cells emerged as a result of chemical evolution on our planet billions of years ago in a process called abiogenesis. The alternative possibility--that living cells or their precursors arrived from space--strikes many people as science fiction. Developments over the past decade, however, have given new credibility to the idea that Earth's biosphere could have arisen from an extraterrestrial seed."

Read entire.

Foot Fetish

No, I do not have one of those. But these folks have good shoes.

Our editor asked me to do a little piece on wellies, as wellie season has arrived, or is arriving - snow, slush, mud and muck. I have gone through many pairs from many makers, and I own many pairs now - more than I will ever need. They will probably bury me in one of those pairs, but not soon. 

Wellies are, of course, Wellingtons, named after the Duke of Wellington who was copying Hessian military boots. Only later did the term refer to rubber, rather than leather, muck boots. History of wellies here.

Different sorts of wellies are made for gardening, walking in the rain, European hunting, and American hunting. Ladies look great in them. I am mainly interested in the rugged, uglier varieties which are suitable to northern climes where mud, snow, slush, muck, streams, and marshy areas abound.

Much as I may admire the LL Bean Maine Hunting boot, I tend to return to my rubber boots for all-purpose hunting, wet hiking, snow, marsh work, bird watching, and barn-work: they make you feel that you can go through almost anything. Over the years, the material has improved, and so has the design, so that they are more comfortable, and grip your heel much better so they don't pull off in muck and leave you waving a socked foot helplessly in the air like an idiot.

There are several considerations with rubber boots. First, you may want to be able to tuck your trousers into the tops (to keep them dry and to prevent the fraying which happens quickly in raspberry brambles), in which case you need spacious uppers on them. Second, assuming we are talking about uninsulated or lightly insulated wellies, you need a size that can handle liner socks and heavy socks. I keep different sized boots for both warm and cold weather. Third, you need to decide what height. I like the maximum height for fording streams, for deep snow, for dew-laden fields, and for bramble protection. Fourth, tread: I like a forceful tread for mud and snow, but the European boots tend to have minimal tread. They aren't used to snow, and their style of hunting does not typically include brush-busting in swamps - they let the beaters do that. So you have to check the tread. Fifth, lining: for versatile outdoor activity, you want some kind of lining or light insulation. Lastly, color: Color hardly matters, but black and green are classic. Many brands come in camo these days, which I feel is unnecessary since they end up covered with mud anyway if you are going anywhere interesting.

I do not like Le Chameau too much - you cannot tuck your pants in them very well, because most seem to be designed for breeks which Americans rarely wear. Plus they are too expensive, too fashionable, and most have a lousy tread. Still, they are probably the best-made wellies and they have a following - I own some. I am sorry to say that I do not love my LL Bean boots because the leather uppers get wet, tend to collapse and chafe your ankles, and they are not made for tucking in trousers. I like Aigle and LaCrosse. Here is one Brit source for some unfamiliar brands, and here is another. You can find very inexpensive versions of wellies, and they are probably just fine but might wear out faster, but who cares? Worn-out wellies means you are living.

Heavily insulated wellies for standing around in the snow in Vermont, sitting in a duck blind on rocks on a Maine island, studying Polar Bears on Hudson's Bay, or for ice-fishing in Minnesota, is another topic for later, perhaps, because standing-around, extreme-cold boots do not need a close fit. Work boots for chain sawing, etc., and plain dry-weather hiking boots are also another subject of interest to me. It's all about "happy feet." And, on the subject of happy feet, never wear boots for 6-8 hours without using foot powder - it works.

Photo is one of a number of styles of LaCrosse hunting boots, in camo.

The Precautionary Principle is turning out to be one more nail in Europe's economic coffin because, in an effort to reduce life risk, it adds paralyzing legal risk to everything. The Commons follows the theme because of its impact on environmental issues.

Evolution and Religion

51 percent of Americans do not accept the theory of evolution, and believe that God simply made man. Only 15 percent believe that God played no role in the evolution of man. New CBS poll here.

I find those numbers startling, but not disturbing. People think whatever they want, but I have never experienced any conflict between science and religion, and I assume we have been given a brain to use the darn thing.

Robert Pollock, a molecular biologist at Columbia and a re-born Jew, if one can use that term, wrote an excellent essay on how his faith and his science come together:

Why do we ask what is right? How do we know which answer to believe? What difference can any answer make, in the span of a necessarily mortal life? Those non-scientific questions did not then appear, nor do they now appear, to be mysteries that may yet be resolved by molecular biology. Rather, they seem to emerge in most of us in what is a wholly unscientific but necessary way; in their absence a person will be freed from the necessity to ponder them, at great risk to one and all. Molecular biology must nevertheless continue to ignore these matters of moral norms, which leaves science with a gap that bothers many molecular biologists and others who cannot see why these questions of norms are not being acknowledged.

Any current issue of molecular biology or any other science, placed in the context of moral norms, is therefore no longer simply a problem in science, but rather, it becomes a problem in science and religion. There are two ways for this to happen: either it becomes a problem in religious science, or in scientific religion. The latter seems to me much less interesting than the former. A good example of scientific religion would be the futile attempt to pin religious meaning and purpose on the facts and evidence of natural selection, even though the mechanism of natural selection is demonstrably devoid of moral content.

Religious science on the other hand is simply what happens when one introduces the notion of moral norms to any current scientific agenda, and sees how that agenda might change. Neither compulsion nor certainty are embedded in the choice to expand the agenda in this way. One may turn away from one's science for guidance, not because molecular biology still knows too little, nor because of religious dogma, but simply because molecular biology cannot approach these questions at all, even to ask them. And in turning elsewhere one might reasonably be interested in the remarkable emergence in all cultures at all times of systems of thought and insight that address precisely these questions, systems we call religions.

Read entire in Crosscurrents.

Scary Federal Prosecutors

What can be terrifying about Federal prosecutors is that, having spent time and money trying to build a case, but failing to do so, they will look to indict on something else - something peripheral - anything, really, in order to justify their effort. The measure of the success of prosecutors is their ratio of indictments, not justice and fairness. They really cannot stand to let anyone out of their clutches - it makes them feel like they have failed.

Eg Martha Stewart: No underlying crime, but a problem with her ill-advised testimony which she innocently delivered without benefit of counsel. I've seen this sort of thing all too many times, and people's lives destroyed by it. Giuliani was a master of this when he was a prosecutor, and who remembers how many of his famous Wall Street arrests were followed by dropped charges, or Wall Street convictions were reversed, leaving a swath of human destruction behind? Yes, he had few reversals, but his reversals were the front-page arrests. Watch Fitzgerald try to do this with Rove and Libby now that they will not be charged with violating national security laws. They could get indicted for jaywalking while crossing the street to the courthouse. No-one's life can withstand the kind of scrutiny these guys can put someone under, and they do not think twice about sacrificing some poor soul when their careers are at stake.

The New York Times Keeps Fumbling the Ball

In WaPo, by, guess who? Tina Brown:

"You have to feel sorry for Sulzberger. Like every spirited young man who inherits a newspaper, he hankers after something more exciting than sitting in the front office fretting over the price of newsprint. He wants to feel as real in his role as valiant publisher as his reporters -- those driven, passionate, sometimes reckless seekers after truth -- feel in theirs. When he threw his support behind Miller's fight to protect her sources, he didn't think he was in a bad reality show. He thought it was an Oscar-winning movie -- "The Pentagon Papers 2.""

I'd say that is exactly right. Piece here.

Newspaper screw-ups

Washington Times (Nyhan) and Washington Post (LGF)

Bad Calls in baseball, and in life

From Cafe Hayek:

Perfect justice means an infinite number of cameras with an infinite number of umpires conferring for an infinite amount of time to get it right.  And you would have to examine every play not just dramatic ones.  That is not an ideal, it's a curse.  It is the same force that partly explains our litigiousness and regulatory zeal.  Every inequality must be redressed.  Taken to an extreme, such a worldview inevitably puts more power in the hands of the arbiters (lawyers and politicians and umpires) at the expense of the other participants, including the fans.  It also changes the incentives.  It encourages participants to put in effort at pleasing or avoiding the arbiters in ways that are unhealthy.

Read entire. He is right, of course, but do not ever discount the enjoyable righteous indignation in booing a bad call. That's part of the fun of the game.

Law Schools

Being well into middle-age, I am not entirely up to date with the latest scoop on law schools, and, when I was a young pup, it seemed like any gentleman with decent grades from a decent school could go on to Yale or Harvard Law, depending on their football-team preference.

Grad schools are all about maximizing your options, except in medicine where they all teach the same thing in the same way, all take the same exams, and all basically flunk out the same considerable numbers of students, despite the monumental obstacles to admission (straight As in the science and math requirements, etc). Or Divinity School, where it's an entirely different ball game and the final arbiter is a supernatural being. Otherwise, grad schools are trade schools, whose focus is on The Job - whatever it is one wants.

And The Job, or job choice, depends on the ranking of your school, and your rank in the class. There are plenty of Law School rankings, and all are based on varying criteria and vary somewhat, accordingly. If you want to be a local country lawyer with a shingle on the front door and doing simple wills and real estate, it doesn't matter where you go to school - and law isn't exactly rocket science except at the competitive levels. Anyone can learn the basics and the Latin lingo. And at law firms, one becomes basically an apprentice to learn the practical specialty trade, and where you either try to make Partner, or take your skills elsewhere.

I like the Princeton Review Rankings, which are more detailed that the others. Law School 100 has a ranking which is probably consistent with that of most lawyers. US News ranks everything, in their own way, but you cannot ignore their lists. Of course, there are critiques of their highly-promoted rankings. Personally, I like the University of Texas, but partly because Texas produces the most lovely women, with the most charming accents and the most intriguing feminine ways, in the world... except, well, there's Georgia, too. Anyway, the Yale Law gals are dogs, with attitudes.

The Thought Police

Please imagine what would happen if the kinds of enforced thought codes, which crop up endlessly in the educational institutions, were of the conservative rather than the Leftist variety.

Just for a few examples, what if schools required people to call illegal immigrants "illegal immigrants"?  What is they required unmarried mothers to be called "unwed mothers"? What if they required Islamic Jihadists to be called "Islamic Jihadists"?  What if they required "affirmative action" to be called "positive discrimination"? Or if radical Leftist organizations had to be labelled "radical Leftist organizations", specifying whether Trotskyite, Stalinist, or Maoist? How would the NYT react?

The Left learned from Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, and Mao, that if you control the language, you can manipulate thoughts, and Orwell pointed this out for us a long time ago in "Politics and the English Language" - a masterpiece of thought and of the essay form. Fortunately, most people are not stupid.

John Leo on the latest outrages against free thought and free speech. Town Hall.

George Carlin on New Orleans:

"Been sitting here with my ass in a wad, wanting to speak out about the
bullshit going on in New Orleans.  For the people of New Orleans...  First
we would like to say, Sorry for your loss.  With that said, Let' s go
through a few hurricane rules: (Unlike an earthquake, we know it's coming)

#1. A mandatory evacuation means just that...Get the hell out.  Don't blame
the Government after they tell you to go. If they hadn't said anything, I
can see the argument. But they said get out... so if you didn't, it's your
fault, not theirs.  (We don't want to hear it, even if you don't have a car,
you can get out.)

#2. If there is an impending emergency, stock up on water and
non-perishables. If you  didn't do this, it's not the Government's fault
you're unprepared and starving.

#2a. If you run out of food and water, find a store that has some.
(Remember, shoes, TV's, DVD's and CD's are not edible.  Leave them alone.)

#2b. If the local store has been looted of food and water, leave your
neighbor's TV and stereo alone.  (See #2a) They worked hard to get their
stuff.  Just because they were smart enough to leave during a mandatory
evacuation doesn't give you the right to take their stuff...it's theirs, not
yours.

#3. If someone comes in to help you, don't shoot at them and then complain
no one is helping you.  I'm not getting shot to help save some dumbass that
didn't leave when told to do so.

#4. If you are in your house that is completely under water, your belongings
are probably too far gone for anyone to want.  If someone does want them,
let them have them and hopefully they'll die in the filth.  Just leave!
It's New Orleans, for crying out loud - so find a voodoo warrior and put a
curse on them.)

#5. My tax money should not pay to rebuild a 2 million dollar house, a
sports stadium or a floating casino.  Also, my tax money shouldn't go to
rebuild a city that was built below sea level.  You wouldn't build your
house on quicksand would you?  If you want to live below sea-level, do your
country some good and join the Navy's submarine force.

#6. Regardless of what the Poverty Pimps Jessie Jackson and Al Sharpton want
you to believe, The US Government didn't create the Hurricane as a way to
eradicate the black people of New Orleans; (Neither did Russia as a way to
destroy America).  The US Government didn't cause the global warming that
allegedly caused the hurricane (We've been coming out of an ice age for over
a million years).

#7. The government isn't responsible for giving you anything. This is the
land of the free and the home of the brave, but you gotta work for what you
want.  McDonalds and Wal-Mart are always hiring, so get a damn job and stop
spooning off the people who are actually working for a living.  President
Kennedy said it best..."Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what
you can do for your country."

Rick Moran on the Pennant Race and the Series, here. Rick is a multi-talented fellow.

And two from neo-neocon. I am very fond of her, and believe she should have Maureen Dowd's job, but for some reason this good lady ignores our emails. But we must not be thin-skinned, and she has two recent pieces to recommend: first, her piece on how New England Yankees delay turning on the heat as winter approaches, here, and second, a wise piece on originalism and the Constitution, here. Re the first, my first fire in the fireplace will be tonight, but I'm not sure about turning on the heat just yet. Need a bit more time to appreciate and enjoy God's good air-conditioning blowing in through open windows. We have no A/C in our old Connecticut farmhouse and consider it decadent, so October is a delight. Too much comfort and ease soften the character and weaken the spirit, do they not? As does too much time.

(Photo is the fireplace at the hunting lodge in Canada. Yes, an old log cabin, but spacious.)

Kristol on the Miers nomination

"But the reaction of conservatives to this deeply disheartening move by a president they otherwise support and admire has been impressive. There has been an extraordinarily energetic and vigorous debate among conservatives as to what stance to take towards the Miers nomination, a debate that does the conservative movement proud. The stern critics of the nomination have, in my admittedly biased judgment, pretty much routed the half-hearted defenders. In the vigor of their arguments, and in their willingness to speak uncomfortable truths, conservatives have shown that they remain a morally serious and intellectually credible force in American politics."

Read entire.

"Beyond Parody at the Times"

"The truth is, deterioration at the Times is a rich subject, full of cautionary tales about how a great liberal institution can go rancid by making a caricature of its principles and adulterating its work. When a great newspaper’s front page is indistinguishable from its editorial page, and its editorial page is indistinguishable from a transcript of a Democratic Party rally, journalistic decay is a certainty. But if what’s happened to the Times’s news reporting and opinion pages is an outrage—think only of the repulsive way in which the paper attempted to generate anti-Bush capital from the Katrina disaster—its coverage of culture is somehow more depressing than infuriating. Here, too, one finds the triumph of ideology over principle and an unseemly race to the lowest common denominator. Yet in matters of culture and the arts, the Times adds another dimension of depredation—we mean the element, half preposterous, half nauseating—of unthinking modishness."

Read entire at New Criterion 

Imago Dei

Brian has some interesting thoughts about man being made in God's image, with some Egyptian texts too. Read Parts One and Two. Real Meal.

Those greedy trial lawyers at it again

Is Teflon teflon-coated? Are these guys vultures, or what? RA

Random Post

Enjoying a nice illegal Commie Cuban and a nice triple scotch tonight, windows open to the cool colonial Connecticut September evening and the wonderful cricket chorus and the occasional bullfrog croak from down in our marsh along the Farmington River, and checking out random blogs while the splendid she-who-must-be-obeyed is working on the elegant evening repast while watching dumb Fox news and sipping a few lady-like chardonnays in the kitchen. Stumbled onto a highly mediocre blog (not because of content - because of quality) and I found these assertions:

God forbid that we must endure another three and a half years of his Administration before anything can be changed. Are we going to sit around and keep our fingers crossed, hoping (incorrectly) that we've seen the worst, or are we going to FINALLY get off our fat, lazy butts and realize that we must begin turning this nation around now, because Bush and his band of thugs (in EVERY sense of the word) are not going to sit back and be satisfied with the destruction they have already wrought?

They are going to keep the neocon steamroller fueled and in overdrive until the final hour of his presidency. They are going to stay the course in Iraq, wasting thousands more young American (and Iraqi) lives. They are going to continue the relentless dismantling of our social and security programs/agencies. They are going to continue increasing taxes on the poor and middle classes in order to reduce the same for the wealthy and the corporations. They are going to spread marshall law throughout the nation (New Orleans is only the start, folks).

They are going to persist in ramming through new legislation that benefit petroleum/energy companies, allowing them to continue increasing their unbelievably obscene profits (and thus power). They are going to continue forcing our education system down the toilet by pushing increasingly unreachable standards onto the public school system. They are going to remain incessant in their ruthless attack on the air we breathe and the ground on which we live and from which we grow our food. And finally, they are going to accelerate the dismantling of the independent judicial system such that laws and rulings support only conservative ideology and christian evangelical theology. We are becoming a nazi state before our very own eyes. What's worse, we are all allowing it. We are the masters of our destiny, yet somehow we have decided, as a nation, that our destiny is Hell.

Yikes - Bush is attacking our very "ground." And aw, gee, not those dang "obscene profits" again. Try running a business sometime, cousin blogger, and ride a bike to work. The above is a quote from a blog in the Flappy Bird category, which means that it receives a fair amount of attention but is far from a star blog. Neither are we - yet. Up-and-coming, with a readership IQ I would be willing to put up against any other blog's. Notice the "marshall"? No, I will not make the effort to refute the statements. Too boring. Sounds kind of like a govt union employee of some sort, no? A teacher who cannot spell, angry about being evaluated? Feels entitled to a free lunch? I am not surprised that there are benighted humans out there who are so fearful and so distressed. I only want to tell them that it will be OK - no-one will take away your baby-bottle. Even the evil, evil Bush. Unemployment has never been this low in our lifetime, and the admin. doesn't even talk about it. Their PR stinks - right now, there is not a functional soul in American who wants to work who is not working at something. That is a wonderful thing - work is a blessing, and no honest work is ignoble. But I will offer one thought: Bush's legacy will be the Court. It is hard as hell to move the US govt. in any direction, and correcting our renegade courts may be all he can really do to make a lasting difference. (Is anything more important than our Constitution?)  Plus getting rid of a bunch of fascist jihadists whose religious mission is to kill us all. How bad is that? Go ahead, read the blog I quoted, just to get a sense of how some Americans feel, however irrational and unfounded and sad their emotion may be. I wish they would read us. They would feel much better. But they won't. Ahh, I hear the dinner bell. Pavlov's Dog cometh on four furry feet and with salivating jowls.

Update: Great dinner, of course. Just chatted with our vet on the phone. He and his wife have been in Louisiana for the past ten days, taking care of lost and abandoned animals. What a great country we live in, in which even the animals receive our concern and effort.

Glenn Reynolds on the Second Amendment and States Rights

In 1995, before he achieved renown as Instapundit, Glenn published this piece (Click here: THE SECOND AMENDMENT AND STATES' RIGHTS: A THOUGHT EXPERIMENT ) in the William and Mary Law Review to examine the Second Amendment from the states' rights (rather than from the individual rights) standpoint, and in the process is critical of casual Constitutional interpretation by talking heads.

He concludes the article:

The Constitution, and especially the Bill of Rights, is a package deal: It is all or nothing, and for each of us there are likely to be parts we dislike. Where such parts exist, the answer is either to live with them or to amend the Constitution, not to interpret pieces of it out of existence. There always will be a market for those who feel otherwise just as there always will be a market for "miracle" diets that purport to let people eat all they want and not exercise. But the Constitution, unlike the diet industry or the mass media, is not founded on giving the people what they want. We forget that at our peril, and as the mass-marketing of the states' right interpretation of the Second (p.1768)Amendment demonstrates, we appear perilously close to forgetting it now.

I think the right to bear arms is, or should be, an individual right, but the "thought experiment" was an interesting way to approach the issue of states' rights, and reveals Glenn to be a disciplined thinker.

What's a Steamfitter?

One of those trade terms I've heard all my life, and sounds antique, but wasn't too clear on. They started out as the construction trade that handled the furnaces boilers and piping for residential and industrial steam heating and other steam-powered equipment, but nowadays steamfitters are the guys who do installation and maintenance of heating, ventilation, and refrigeration equipment. It's an apprenticeship trade, whose unions are generally closely associated with pipelayers, plumbers, and pipefitters. Pipefitters? Not sure how different they are from steamfitters and plumbers, but all kinds of industrial piping. Pipes and welding. Good, honest, physical work, not like mine.

Photo of a nice steam boiler and spacious boiler room.

Brewton does State Power

Our neighbor blogger Tom takes no prisoners when it comes to defending the power of the individual in relation to the State, and, given human history, he is rightfully mindful that States, however well-intentioned or paternalistic, always absorb power from people :

In an earlier article the point was made that both German voters and American liberals have affirmed their allegiance to the National-State collectivism of socialism.  More than coincidence is involved.

It was in Germany that the world’s first welfare state was inaugurated.  The history of socialistic welfare systems makes clear that, while for public relations purposes intended to benefit the people, they are in fact merely power instruments for the collectivized National State.

The C of E is terminal

Not surprised, from what I have heard. I know they threw out the Ten Commandments years ago, I know they adopted secular, leftist values rather than religious ones, and I knew that the weighty theologian John Lennon convinced them that God was obsolete, and I knew no-one was going to church in England any more - why would they? You can get the secular propaganda from the newspaper and the telly (the C of E blames the West for 9-11, for example. For all you can tell, the Bishops are Moslem).

The C of E is going down the same dead-end path as the main-line US churches. The Protestants tried a revival in opposition to the C of E in the 1600s - and it was a great success in keeping Christ alive in the English-speaking world, even though they tried to kill my ancestors. Time for another revival in England, and let's just bury this useless corpse of a "church." God will surely not miss such a travesty of his will and his word.

Piece on the subject by Mullen, on Farewell, C of E.