Friday, November 7. 2008
Change? This is loony. When volunteering becomes compulsory, it's not volunteering any more, is it? Same difference between charity and taxes. Same as the draft. Plus, where I live, there are more volunteers than there are things to do. The chance to teach English to Hispanics has a long waiting list, and the Red Cross says "We'll call you if we need you." They have to form committees to try to "identify unmet needs." In other words, well-intentioned housewives and retired guys have to make up things to do because everybody who wants "help" already gets more than they can handle, and most New England folks seem too proud to accept help anyway. The old culture dies hard. Are people really so helpless in America that they need pimply high-schoolers or condescending do-gooder college kids - who know nothing at all about life - to "help" them? I very much doubt it. But I don't know anybody who isn't happy to cash a check or to take a freebie from the gummint to buy a new iPod. People are always happy to accept cash from "the gummint," because it doesn't feel so much like you're ripping off your neighbor. A Comment from our News Junkie: I have soured on do-gooderism. I have been to Katrina, to Appalachia, to NYC (where I now live), to Haiti and to Africa over the years with church groups, and every time I went the locals drank wine or moonshine or some kind of African hootch, and smoked in lawn chairs or lounging in the grass while telling jokes while we "helped." In Africa, the guys took occasional drinking breaks to visit the local whorehouse while we supposedly did stuff "for them." It's humiliating to all concerned, as if people were children; embarassing to the recipients and to the doers. Never saw anybody local ever offer to do so much as to pick up a hammer, a shovel, or a mop. I'm done with that approach to virtuousness. People have to want to help themselves, or there is not a damn thing you can do. "Wanting to help" is pure social imperialism of the most soft-headed sort. I once helped build a church building in Africa, and now feel foolish about it because a church is not a building - it's people. The building was insignificant except when it rained. They could have built a better one, better suited to their area, with poles and thatch (and much more cheaply) in a few days if they felt like it. What we built will no doubt be attacked by termites and fall down. Live and learn. What people want is cash to spend the way they want to.
Thursday, November 6. 2008
 From May of this year. h/t, Ed Driscoll:
I grew up in the 1950s, supposedly the heyday of conformity, but there was much more freedom of opinion back then. And as a result, you knew that your neighbors might hold different views from you on politics or religion. Today, the notion that men of good will can disagree has disappeared. Can you imagine! Today, if I disagree with you, you conclude there is something wrong with me. This is a childish, parochial view. And of course stupefyingly intolerant. It's truly anti-American. Much of it can be laid at the feet of the environmental movement, which has unfortunately frequently been led by ill-educated and intolerant spokespersons--often with no more than a high-school education, sometimes not even that. Or they are lawyers trained to win at any cost and to say anything about their opponents to win. But you find the same intolerant tone around considerations of defense, taxation, free markets, universal medical care, and so on. There's plenty of zealotry to go around. And it's hardly new in human history. The media might stand as a corrective, cool and a bit detached, showing by example how to approach information and controversy. Instead, the media has clearly caught the fever of our intolerant times. Formerly, news people would never openly state their allegiance; young reporters understood it was poor form, and a senior person would carry the caution born of the experience that at least some of what one believes in the course of one's life turns out to be wrong. But it's a new era. Now, media reporters are proud to pound the table and declare their advocacy. Since so few of them have any training in science, they don't really know what they are pounding about, when it comes to global warming. They couldn't tell you even in general terms how the global mean temperature is calculated, for example. But it doesn't matter anyway. They just want to declare they believe what "everyone" believes. Who values such a news source?
Wednesday, November 5. 2008
A quote from an essay on forgiveness in literature, Why Mephistopheles had to work overtime, by Michael Dirda: Perhaps the most striking musical expression of forgiveness occurs in Mozart’s opera The Marriage of Figaro. Caught pursuing a servant girl, Count Almaviva pleads for forgiveness for his duplicity and attempted infidelity. The countess, in a supreme moment of charity, grants him his tearful wish, even as she half-knows that he’s sure to betray her again. Mozart’s music at this point shifts its whole tonal character, and immediately achieves a kind of hushed holiness. It’s just breathtaking when heard. Similarly, Leonard Bernstein’s music to Candide concludes with a general forgiveness of sins and injuries. In a beautiful last chorus all the characters admit that they have been “neither pure, nor wise, nor good.” But from now, “We’ll do the best we know. We’ll build our house and chop our wood. And make our garden grow.”
Read the whole thing. I forgive because I constantly need forgiveness - even though holding grudges is much more fun. However, I never forget. Here's "Contessa, perdono:"
Tuesday, November 4. 2008
Saturday, November 1. 2008
There is another Maggie's Farm site. This other Maggie farms in central New York State and she has a fine, personal blog about her farming, her teaching, and wool. Love those barns. They had snow this week, which is further proof of the crisis of global cooling and the urgent need for woolens: 
Thursday, October 30. 2008
Koshiro, 1954. From the Modern Japanese Print show at the Art Institute of Chicago: 
Wednesday, October 29. 2008
 Women are approaching equality with men in the rapidly swelling ranks of the unfaithful.
Indeed, it should not be difficult for women to exceed men in this critical metric of gender equality. All it takes is to give the guy a few beers to dissolve his noble conscience, a well-timed wink and smile, followed up by a gentle touch. Right? Just make him feel "special," and he's yours, ladies, because real, everyday life doesn't tend to make most guys feel very special. Why should it? Life owes us nothing. And you want to feel special too.
A quote from this excellent excerpt - a fine essay in itself - (h/t, Vanderleun) from James Kalb's new book The Tyranny of Liberalism: Understanding and Overcoming Administered Freedom, Inquisitorial Tolerance, and Equality by Command:  "The tyranny of liberalism” seems a paradox. Liberals say that they favor freedom, reason, and the well-being of ordinary people. Many people consider them high-minded and fair to a fault, “too broadminded to take their own side in a quarrel,” too soft to govern effectively. Even the word “liberal” suggests “liberty.” How can such an outlook and the social order it promotes be tyrannical?
The answer is that wanting freedom is not the same as having it. Political single-mindedness leads to oppression, and a tyranny of freedom and equality is no less possible than one of virtue or religion. We cannot be forced to be free or made equal by command, but since the French Revolution the attempt has become all too common and the results have often been tyrannical. Tyranny is not, of course, what liberals have intended. They want government to be based on equal freedom, which they see as the only possible goal of a just and rational public order. But the functioning of any form of political society is determined more by the logic of its principles than the intentions of its supporters. Liberals view themselves as idealistic and progressive, but such a self-image conceals dangers even if it is not wholly illusory. It leads liberals to ignore considerations, like human nature and fundamental social and religious traditions, that have normally been treated as limits on reform. Freedom and equality are abstract, open-ended, and ever-ramifying goals that can be taken to extremes. Liberals tend to view these goals as a simple matter of justice and rationality that prudential considerations may sometimes delay but no principle can legitimately override. In the absence of definite limiting principles, liberal demands become more and more far-reaching and the means used to advance them ever more comprehensive, detailed, and intrusive. The incremental style of liberalism obscures the radicalism of what it eventually demands and enables it always to present itself as moderate. What is called progress—in effect, movement to the left—is thought normal in present-day society, so to stand in its way, let alone to try to reverse accepted changes, is thought radical and divisive. We have come to accept that what was inconceivable last week is mainstream today and altogether basic tomorrow. The result is that the past is increasingly discredited, deviancy is defined up or down, and it becomes incredible that, for instance, until 1969 high school gun-club members took their guns to school on New York City subways, and that in 1944 there were only forty-four homicides by gunshot in the entire city.
Read the whole essay, which very much reflects the Maggie's Farm view of things.
Monday, October 27. 2008
Yesterday, near Lebanon, TN 
Sunday, October 26. 2008
 Spring Island, SC, is just a stone's throw from Savannah, GA, one of my favorite towns in the US.
If I planned to remove myself from Yankeeland when I get tired of working, I think I'd like Spring Island. However, I will never do that. I have roots where I am, and the idea of leaving real life behind for a WASP ghetto of prosperous aging golfers has only slight appeal. Might be nice for a getaway place, though. I wonder how the duck hunting is down there. The comfortably unpretentious Spring Island bungalow pictured is here. The two guest cottages are great additions. Here's the Spring Island website.
Friday, October 24. 2008
 Will Self visits the most remote and God-forsaken of the Shetland Islands.I would like to go, unless Dem taxes prevent me from ever going anywhere again. These islands were Scandinavian until relatively recently. Photo by Will Self of the Brough of Mousa, a remarkably well-preserved Iron Age dwelling. More like a fortress. I'd guess it had a thatched roof on top. It is especially interesting to me because I am halfway through Francis Pryor's Britain BC. Do not read Pryor's book unless you want a ton of detail about prehistoric Britain. My sense is that pre-Neolithic, ie pre-agricultural man lived pretty much the same way everywhere on the planet, digging roots and picking nuts and killing stuff - including each other. Likely eating each other too. During most of that late-glacial history, Britain was connected to the Continent, with what is now the southern part of the North Sea being a giant marshy plain full of reindeer, elk, horses, pig, auroch, moose, beaver, and deer. (There are tons of prehistoric artifacts sitting in the now-undersea peat.) The Neolithic history is more interesting, and everything post-Neolithic isn't too much different from today except technologically.
Thursday, October 23. 2008
Here's the world's most remarkable yacht, The Maltese Falcon, in San Francisco Bay with Angel Island on fire in the background. We tracked down the photographer: he is George Dapsevicius. Kudos to him. 
 I am told that Krauthammer made the interesting point on TV last night that the intensity of the hatred for Sarah Palin from women has little or nothing to do with her personality.
He said it's because she, as a lovely and feminine mid-40s woman with a litter of kids including one with Down, a cool masculine Eskimo hubby, and a stunningly-successful Governorship, stands as a reproach to the complaining and whining class of American women: a reproach to the cult of victimology and a reproach to the abortion fetishists. (Plus she's just too happy about life and her country, and intelligent, sophisticated folks aren't supposed to be happy about things.) A reasonable person might have expected her candidacy to be a source of pride and pleasure for those women. I promise you that, if she had a "D" after her name, she would be a MSM heroine. Colorful and exotic. The Dems would find a way to make her "Josephine Sixpack" - "The fresh voice of the American worker from the American Frontier." Anybody who criticized her would be slammed as "classist" or "intellectual snob" or "an elitist out of touch with real Americans." And they would, no doubt, remind you that she runs a $6 billion budget and 26,000 employees and plays hardball with the oil companies. Nobody else running has ever done anything like that. Something similar applies to Obama. Clearly his race (What is his race? I guess I mean his skin color) is a source of fascination to the MSM, Leftists, and black voters. However, black Repubs have had little success in elections with black voters, including Repub stars like Michael Steele in Maryland. That is why Obama is not detested by black Americans as a reproach to their victimology and resentment (although he was seen that way at first, most notably by Jesse Jackson who expressed the tolerant opinion that Obama "was too white" implying that his success served to discredit, and to alienate him from, grievance-seeking blacks). Had Obama been a celebrity "R" preaching freedom and opportunity, how far would he have gotten? Would he have given Chris Matthews a thrill up his thing thigh? I suppose my point is that, for the MSM and the left, race and gender are only a big deal when they are combined with that magic "D."
Wednesday, October 22. 2008
Dear Barack, I'm rich in income by your tax standards, although at your age of 45 working in government and community organizing you appear to have a greater net worth than I do. What did I do wrong? Maybe it's because I have the wrong sort of pals, and maybe it's because my wife didn't get a $350,000/year job because I'm in politics. What is "rich" is, of course, relative. It takes a lot more money to be rich in NYC or CT than it does in Montana or Louisiana. Anyway, here's my plan to adjust, if you get elected and your tax plan goes through: 1. I am going to cut back on my billable hours, and put my wife on our payroll as an expense. She'd be glad to do that to minimize our tax burden.
2. I am going to fire the lawn guys, and do it all myself. Harming them. And I will mow the fields myself, eliminating money from the economy.
3. I will, of necessity, donate less to church and charities.
4. I will patronize restaurants less, harming their incomes and employees.
5. I will buy less stuff I want, harming retail and manufacturing.
6. I will do what I can to put my assets in tax-advantaged investments which do little or nothing to invest in economic growth.
7. I will call the handyman less often, harming his kids. I will do the jobs myself instead of reading by the fire.
8. I will skip a hunting trip, harming travel, guides, hotels, and etc.
9. I will keep our cars longer, harming our automotive industry.
10. I'll take a pass on my plan to replace the upstairs windows in the barn, thus harming Anderson Windows and their employees. Fact is, there are two kinds of redistribution of money. One is the type that we all do voluntarily to obtain things we want and need, and to invest in business growth, and the other is the kind governments do at gunpoint to buy votes. Taxes come out of my disposable income because I live within my means, on a budget - but at some point they start hitting bone. When it hits comforts, conveniences, and luxuries, I just get mightily annoyed, but if it hits bone (as Clinton's tax hikes did while I was paying tuitions), I get mad. And remember, the USA already has the highest corporate taxes in the world. That is not something for us to feel especially proud about either, because businesses taxes are simply indirect and invisible taxes on consumers and savers. With warmest personal regards, The Barrister
Tuesday, October 21. 2008
Another sunset from Lake Winnipegosis, taken from Gwynnie's duck boat last week. I term these sorts of day-glo sunsets "post-nuclear": 
Hurray for Captain Spaulding. ("Did someone call me shnorrer?"). It's my favorite Groucho bit, of which yesterday's Marx post reminded me:
 Our News Junkie noted the other day that ACORN and the Dems are playing for keeps. That is opposed to "playing for clearsies," which is the gentlemanly, softball, McCain approach.
Games with acorns and other nuts or rounded stones go back to the beginning of human time but, when I was a lad, marbles weren't a popular game. Games with marbles remain very popular in the Third World. Here are a few expressions from marbles: Playing for keeps
Knuckle down
Lost his marbles
Pick up one's marbles
Over the line I'm sure there are plenty of others. Help me out if you can, in Comments. I love the etymological and cultural derivations of expressions. Don't you?
Monday, October 20. 2008
 I had the pleasure of attending a small charity gathering last night for a good mental health cause at which Ashford and Simpson performed.
Ashford told the story of how the "dumbest, simplest song" he ever wrote (Let's Go Get Stoned) got picked up by Ray Charles, which set their songwriting career into high gear. He also talked about what it was like to present new songs to Berry Gordy with Smokey Robinson in front of you in the line. Daunting. They had a funky Motown-style band with a couple of back-up singers. They did "Solid," "High Rise," "Let's Go Get Stoned," "Ain't No Mountain High Enough," and a lot more. Nothing they didn't write. They have been married for 32 years and are humble, obviously grateful, and likeable folks. Their performance of Solid was much more powerful than this one.
The Manning Report. (He calls Obama "Senator Tarzan," but I call him "Senator Government.") h/t, Moonbattery:
Saturday, October 18. 2008
Thought I'd never see the day when our Comrade Sipp did Politics! Who knew that he was a closet pundit? I happen to drive over the Sippican River on the way to Cape Cod. Here's Leonard's Pond on the East Branch of the Sippican River: 
Here's Brigg's Marsh (looks good for ducks) near the outlet of the Sippican River. There is nothing on earth as lovely as a brackish salt marsh (except for a pretty girl and, in duck season, it's a toss-up): 
We already linked it, but I want to highlight this excellent essay in The Economist: A Short History of Modern Finance. It's a good clear intro for amateurs like me.
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