Maggie's Farm

From scholar Richard Rubenstein's The Religion of Sacrifice and Abraham, Isaac and Jesus:

Judaism never entirely rejected the idea that God demands the sacrifice of the first-born son. However we evaluate the existence of child sacrifice in ancient Judah, Israel, Canaan, and the colonies of Canaan-Phoenicia, it is evident that we are dealing with a God who demands the death of children. In reflecting on the issue of child sacrifice in Judaism and Christianity, Levenson comments, “…the mythic-ritual complex that I have been calling ‘child sacrifice’ was never eradicated; it was only transformed."

A prime example of that transformation is the pidyon ha-ben ritual in fulfillment of the commandment already noted: “You shall redeem all the firstborn of your sons. None shall appear before Me empty-handed.” (Exodus 34:20) In this ceremony, the father presents his first-born son to a cohen or hereditary priest on the thirtieth day after his birth whereupon the priest asks the father, "Which do you prefer, your son or your money?" The father declares that he prefers his son and presents the cohen with five silver dollars, the symbolic equivalent of five biblical shekels, in order to "redeem" his son. The priest accepts the coins with the ritual formula, "This (the coins) in place of that (the child). This in exchange for that."

Read the whole thing. We Christians often refer to Christ as "the lamb of God;" "Lamb" because a "spotless lamb" was one of the ritual Jewish sacrifices of the time, used as a symbolic substitute for human sacrifice like Abraham's ram in the thicket.

Christians view the sacrifice of Christ - God's "son" - as the final and essential sacrifice needed to redeem a fallen mankind. Thus the ancient themes of blood and human sacrifice endure and give deadly serious substance to our worship today.

My August photo of the stone urns in Carthage which contained the ashes of firstborns sacrificed to Baal:

You may have seen these photos of Hitler and the Nazi era when first published by LIFE.com, but I missed them.

I think seeing these photos in color makes them more ominously ordinary - the banality of evil and all that. In other ways, they look more like a WW2 movie. What's your view?

Here's the story of the photos, from LIFE:

Between 1936 and 1943, German photographer Hugo Jaeger was granted unprecedented access to Adolf Hitler, traveling and chronicling, in color, the Fuhrer and his confidants at small gatherings, public events, and, quite often, in private moments. Here, and in several other galleries on LIFE, we present never-before-published photographs from Jaeger's astonishing -- and chilling -- collection.

... in 1945, when the Allies were making their final push toward Munich, Jaeger found himself face to face with six American soldiers in a small town west of the city. During a search of the house where Jaeger was staying, the Americans found the leather suitcase in which Jaeger had hidden thousands of his color negatives. He knew he would be arrested (or worse) if the Americans discovered his film and his close connection to Hitler. But what happened next astonished him.

Inside the suitcase that held the Hitler images, Jaeger had also placed a bottle of cognac. Happy with their find, the soldiers proceeded to shared the bottle with Jaeger and the owner of the house. The suitcase was forgotten.

After the Americans left, Jaeger packed the slides into 12 glass jars and buried them on the outskirts of town. In the years following the war, Jaeger occasionally returned to his multiple caches, digging them up, repacking, and reburying them. He finally retrieved the colllection for good--2,000 transparencies, all of them, amazingly, still in good shape -- and in 1965 sold them to LIFE.

Many of the photos can be seen at LIFE.com. 

We have a few more below the fold - more of LIFE's stash can be found at various places online.

That's King Buck on the 1959 Federal Duck Stamp. A great champion, and the prize of avid sportsman John Olin's Nilo Kennels.

In 1931 the Olin chemical and ammo company bought the bankrupt Winchester Repeating Arms company, and still owns the trademark for the firearms and makes the ammo.

The story of Winchester is the sad story of manufacturing and unions in the Northeast. From the Wiki:

By the 60's the cost of skilled labor was making it increasingly difficult profitably to produce Winchester's classic designs, incorporating as they did considerable hand-work. In particular, Winchester's flagship Model 12 pump shotgun and Model 70 bolt-action rifle with their machined forgings could no longer compete in price with Remington's cast-and-stamped 870 and 721. Accordingly S. K. Janson formed a new Winchester design group to advance the use of "modern" engineering design methods and manufacturing principles in gun design. The result was a new line of guns which replaced most of the older products in 1963-64. Unfortunately the reaction of the shooting press and public was overwhelmingly negative: the popular verdict was that Winchester had sacrificed quality to the "cheapness experts,"^[1] and market share continued to decline as Winchester was no longer considered to be a prestige brand. Gun collectors consider "post-64" Winchesters to be both less desirable and less valuable than their predecessors.

Labor costs continued to rise, and a prolonged and bitter strike in 1979-80 convinced Olin that firearms could no longer be produced profitably in New Haven. Therefore in December 1980 the plant was sold to its employees, incorporated as the U.S. Repeating Arms Company, together with a licence to make Winchester arms. Olin retained the Winchester ammunition business.

From 1981 until 2006, Winchester guns were made by the U.S. Repeating Arms Company. When U.S. Repeating Arms went bankrupt in 1989 it was acquired by a French holding company, then sold to an arms making cartel sponsored by the Belgian Herstal Group, which also owns gun makers Fabrique National (FN) and Browning.

On January 16, 2006 U.S. Repeating Arms announced it was closing the New Haven, Connecticut, plant where Winchester rifles and shotguns were produced for 140 years.^[1] Along with the closing of the plant, the Model 94 rifle (the descendant of the original Winchester rifle), Model 70 rifle and Model 1300 shotgun would be discontinued.

On August 15, 2006, Olin Corporation, owner of the Winchester trademarks, announced that it had entered into a new license agreement with Browning to make Winchester brand rifles and shotguns, though not at the closed Winchester plant in New Haven. Browning, based in Morgan, Utah, and the former licensee, U.S. Repeating Arms Company, are both subsidiaries of FN Herstal. In 2008 FN Herstal announced that it would produce Model 70 rifles at its plant in Columbia, SC.

It's interesting to read the histories of companies. Here's the history of the Olin Corp, which still makes Winchester ammo. I had the pleasure of meeting some good folks from the company recently.

Huge treasure trove of 1400 year-old Anglo-Saxon gold found in Staffordshire. Looks like things a king would have owned.

h/t, Synthstuff

Prehistoric sat-nav in England.

Gwynnie tells me that our western Indians did the same with petroglyphs, but I do not have the links.

Amost everybody likes to go places without getting lost. I got lost in Barcelona, but it's not like really being lost when there's a cafe and tapas joint nearby.

Managed to find my way to the delightful town of Lucca two weeks ago, the home of the beloved Jack Puccini and his illustrious musical ancestors. More than a tunesmith - but what a tunesmith. Here's his family church in which he first performed:

 and here's the house he grew up in (second one in from the right corner):

 More Lucca photos later...plus lunch, of course.

Why did we schlepp all the way down to Agrigento last week? To see the Valley of the Temples (and to get a good lunch).

Why they call it "valley" I do not know, because this assembly of Doric Greek temples were built along a ridge - an acropolis, as always - within view of the busy harbor. It must have been quite a sight.

These were built before the Parthenon, around 460 BC - by Carthaginian slaves. The Temple of Zeus was five times the size of the Parthenon. The old Greek-era town was large (200,000 in 500 BC) and prosperous. Empedocles (the four elements, etc) lived there.

Most of the temples are in ruins either from earthquakes or use of the stones for other building purposes. The so-called Temple of Concord is in good shape, and was in use as a Christian church until the 1700s:

That's limestone. No marble around. You cannot really make good sculptures with limestone. To make the temples white, they were covered with a layer of plaster - some of which remains. The proscenia were painted bright colors, as the Greeks always did.

More about Agrigento, and lunch, below:

Somewhere around 450 AD (according to the Venerable Bede), the Celtic warlord Vortigern, embattled by the northern Picts, made a decision that would change the world: He invited the Frisian brothers Horsa and Hengest to bring their warriors across the sea as mercenaries and help him defeat the Picts. After the fierce northern Germanic warriors ensured Vortigern’s victory, he tried to cheat them out of their payment, and they responded by founding a kingdom in southern England. Thus began the Anglo-Saxon migration, and soon, conquest.

The world went crazy after the fall of Rome. Read the rest. It's about the Olde.Anglosphere. As far as I know, basic English is still Frisian (except for the added Viking, Frenchy, Greek and Latinate stuff).

Most of Roman Carthage (which was the third largest Roman metropolis in the 200-400 era, after Rome and Alexandria - the population was around 300,000) is buried beneath the modern town of Carthage, but some that is accessible has been excavated.

After the Third Punic War in 146 BC, very little remained of the old Phoenician Carthage - except things like these boxes. The Phoenicians worshipped Baal, who required that everybody's first-born be sacrificed. The ashes of these kids were buried in these sad little stone boxes.

More of my photos of cool Roman Carthage ruins below -

A re-post -

In a comment on our piece about clear-cutting, a reader let us know about this book: 1491: New Revelations about the Americas Before Columbus, by Charles Mann.

Human fantasies about the Garden of Eden, like human utopian fantasies, just never give up. You might almost think we all wish we were back in the womb.

I ordered the book, but here's a quote from Charles Mann's 2002 essay in The Atlantic on the subject:

Before it became the New World, the Western Hemisphere was vastly more populous and sophisticated than has been thought—an altogether more salubrious place to live at the time than, say, Europe. New evidence of both the extent of the population and its agricultural advancement leads to a remarkable conjecture: the Amazon rain forest may be largely a human artifact.

It's a fascinating subject to me. Here's the whole essay.

Image: An early version of Edward Hicks' Peaceable Kingdom

Via View from 1776:

Confined recently to nights in a hotel room in a foreign city I had the luck to find the most exhilarating piece of popular history I had read in a long time. The book is How the Scots Invented the Modern World: The True Story of How Western Europe’s Poorest Nation Created Our World and Everything in It—a title which doubles as a summary. It is the latest by Arthur Herman, an American who is establishing a niche for himself as a gutsy revisionist and prime mover of the Western Heritage Programme within the Smithsonian in Washington DC. His book is “Scotch” as we would say in Canada by which we mean solid and not kidding. (Well a little droll but so is single malt.) ??The book unfolds the Scottish Enlightenment of the 18th century for the intelligent general reader—which for all its significance to the world we now inhabit is little studied or appreciated. It is almost the opposite of intellectually sexy, all achievement and no tragic pause. For the truth is wherever you look into “modernity” you find Scottish antecedents. From 1745 on they were Scots who altered our whole view of education and law who invented our modern economics and social studies; our medicine and engineering too; who shook down conceited practices in everything from history to theology—in each turning an inherited essentially mediaeval amalgam of prejudice and guesswork into a systematic study whose new focus would be the welfare of mankind.

The paradox is that this achievement was made in a thinly-populated country that had lost its political independence in the Act of Union of 1707 and which was a squalid backwater removed from the elegant royal courts of Europe.

Read the whole post. We have always been interested in the Scottish Enlightenment. See this old post,

A snap of the Billings Farm in Woodstock. Yes, it's a museum farm, but they do a good job with their Jersey cows. Are mixed farms museums now?

My pal and I stole a couple of apples off their trees from over the fence during a morning hike last weekend: very good Macintosh apples - cold and crisp and spicey at 7 am. (This free ad is our in-kind payment.)

That's their cornfield in the background, and some hayfields behind that.

I thought to myself that no real farmer and orchard-keeper would have such meticulous lawns around their apple trees:

If you missed Part 1, it's here (with a little bit of Vermont history).

In the early 1800s, few towns had architects. They did have builders. And they had Pattern Books.

Pattern books were like blueprints, produced by well-known or entrepreneurial archtects in the big cities, just the same as builders' development houses of today are built from patterns.

I like this one. People up there tend to their front gardens with loving care for their own pleasure and for the delight of passers-by:

 More fun photos below the fold - take a minute to feast yer eyeballs.

Vermont was settled later than most of New England, in the late 1700s by people from Connecticut,  Massachusetts, and Rhode Island. Pioneers, attracted by cheap land. You could cut down all the trees and raise sheep, and the rivers provided endless power for mills. Woolen mills, stone-cutting marble and granite mills, lumber mills, etc. You could transport stuff down the rivers to the big Connecticut River.

They did cut down all the trees: by 1850 most of Vermont was denuded of forest, whether for lumber, grazing, charcoal, or firewood. 

(In the 1700s, Vermont was considered part of the New York colony, but New Hampshire had claims on it. For a few decades, Vermont was the independent Republic of Vermont until they joined the union in 1792.)

After producing the woolen garments for World War 1, Vermont's mills slowly closed down, the Vermont wool biz (Big Wool moved west) dried up and was replaced by dairy for the distant cities when the trains came through. Now, with factory dairy, there isn't even much of that any more, and the trees have grown back (and so have the Moose, Black Bear, and White-Tailed Deer). The milk cows today spend all day in sheds until their productivity drops and they are turned into Mcdonalds burgers.

The wealth evident in the fine houses built in Woodstock from roughly 1800-1840 (replacing shacks, log cabins, and other humble dwellings) was a combination of its being a Shire town - a county seat with court and jail and lawyers - and the woolen mills. Those businesses attracted tradesmen and farmers, roads spread out, and the town thrived for a while. In 1830, this town of 3000 souls (then, and 3000 now!) had five newspapers.

Today, Woodstock is all about tourism, with endless interesting summer and winter events, and skiing, of course, in the winter. The village is preserved in amber by a fierce architectural review board and its designation as a National Historic District. Laurence Rockefeller had a lot to do with that (his Woodstock home is among the photos below the fold).

And, today, Vermont has the distinction of having the lowest per capita income in the US, having surpassed Mississippi a few years ago. The poorer they get, the further to the Left they move. It is not rational and it is utterly self-created (taxes and regs) and self-defeating, but it's a free country and, here at Maggie's Farm, we value the freedom of people to do stupid things if they want to. (I just hate it when people make obviously predictable mistakes on my nickel.)

The Wiki on Woodstock, VT here. Worth a visit. Bring camera.

I took the photos below early on Saturday morning. The temp was 48 degrees F at 5:30 when I typically go out to begin my exploring of a place (hence no people around in some of my photos). By mid-day, the temp got up to a balmy global warming crisis of 73 degrees.

I offer no architectural comments on the details of these structures. I don't have the time, and I lack the eye for detail that Mrs. BD has. My brain tends towards weight, balance, harmony, and emotional comfort - and only notices detail when it intrudes. However, I do know and believe that God is in the details. More on that later (maybe).