Maggie's Farm

...whenever Christians actually dare to make political choices on the basis of those beliefs, then the enlightened gatekeepers of American secularism in the academy and in the media rise up in righteous wrath and rush to the barricades to defend us against the barbarian hordes of true believers who if unchecked will transform our republic into a "theocracy" and impose their intolerant bigotry on everybody else. And when the President himself is one of these religious fanatics, then the prospects for the republic and the Constitution are dark indeed—even the usually rational New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman whined after the election that he was depressed "because Bush's base is pushing so hard to legislate social issues and extend the boundaries of religion that it felt as if we were rewriting the Constitution, not electing a president." 

Back by popular demand!

This funny but handsome hodge-podge of a place�is called Morning Glory, now undergoing long-delayed major renovation and necessary graffiti:

�I like this simple�look very much. It could use a garden, though. Or maybe not.

More on continuation page below -

From Bowyer's Teddy Roosevelt vs. the Noisy Environmentalists at TCS, one quote:

TR and his Director of Forestry Services, Gifford Pinchot created a system of 'wildlife Reserves'. They argued that it would not be fair for one generation to do all the logging and all the digging and to leave nothing behind for future generations. They didn't think of these reserves as something pristine, which would be rendered somehow ceremonially unclean by the signs of human development. They just wanted to share natural resources and beauty with future generations, like ours. In fact the shift in language from 'resources' to 'the environment' signals the shift in world-view from conservation to preservation. A resource, by its very nature, is to be used, sparingly, perhaps, but nonetheless, used.

This is why the Roosevelt-Pinchot philosophy is known to historians as the 'wise-use' movement. It's why the administration's forestry handbook contained explicit instructions for how to extract lumber and minerals from the protected lands. That's why the memorial lauds 'development', which contemporary environmentalists forbid in places like ANWR.

The preservationists of the time, like Sierra Club founder, John Muir, fought against them. While Roosevelt/Pinchot sought to make nature useful to humanity, by opening it to efficient use, and protecting it from destruction, Muir claimed that nature was to be useful to nature itself, not to man. For Roosevelt earth is for us, for people. For Muir man and land were equals. It wasn't the conservationist Roosevelt who put ANWR's oil out of our reach, but the environmentalist Carter.

The Opinion Journal's piece on Solzhenitsyn begins like this:

"The hammer banged reveille on the rail outside camp HQ at five o'clock as always. Time to get up. The ragged noise was muffled by ice two fingers thick on the windows and soon died away. Too cold for the warder to go on hammering."

Thus did Alexander Solzhenitsyn begin "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich," his reveille for the world about totalitarianism. Published in 1962, in the brief post-Stalinist thaw under Khrushchev, the novel about a prisoner in a Soviet prison camp made Solzhenitsyn at first a Russian sensation and later the country's most famous dissident after the Kremlin reverted to brutal form.

And as quoted by Vanderleun,

"When all of the rest of the civilized world, as well as the Marxist world, was tossing God into the dustbin of history, Solzhenitsyn realized that only God really matters. He chided the West for embracing materialism and forgetting God, a lesson that is just as true today as thirty years ago." -

by Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de La Brede et de Montesquieu, 1725. It begins:

The difference between great nations and savage peoples is that the former have applied themselves to the arts and sciences, while the latter have totally neglected them. Perhaps most nations owe their existence to the knowledge that the arts and sciences provide. If we had the mores of the American savages, two or three European nations would soon devour all the others; and then perhaps some people conquering our world would boast, like the Iroquois, of having devoured seventy nations.

But leaving aside savage peoples, if a Descartes had come to Mexico or Peru one hundred years before Cortez and Pizarro, and if he had taught these peoples that men, composed as they are, are not able to be immortal; that the springs of their machine, as those of all machines, wear out; that the effects of nature are only a consequence of the laws and communications of movement, then Cortez, with a handful of men, would never have destroyed the empire of Mexico, nor Pizarro that of Peru.

His whole piece at New Atlantis.

A big h/t to Vanderleun, who is supposedly on vacation but isn't, quite. He found this piece at the Independent by an Irish journalist who had covered Africa, Writing what I should have written so many years ago. One quote:

The people of Ireland remained in ignorance of the reality of Africa because of cowardly journalists like me. When I went to Ethiopia just over 20 years ago, I saw many things I never reported -- such as the menacing effect of gangs of young men with Kalashnikovs everywhere, while women did all the work. In the very middle of starvation and death, men spent their time drinking the local hooch in the boonabate shebeens. Alongside the boonabates were shanty-brothels, to which drinkers would casually repair, to briefly relieve themselves in the scarred orifice of some wretched prostitute (whom God preserve and protect). I saw all this and did not report it, nor the anger of the Irish aid workers at the sexual incontinence and fecklessness of Ethiopian men. Why? Because I wanted to write much-acclaimed, tear-jerkingly purple prose about wide-eyed, fly-infested children -- not cold, unpopular and even "racist" accusations about African male culpability.

Am I able to rebut good and honourable people like John O'Shea, who are now warning us that once again, we must feed the starving Ethiopian children? No, of course I'm not. But I am lost in awe at the dreadful options open to us. This is the greatest moral quandary facing the world. We cannot allow the starving children of Ethiopia to die.

Yet the wide-eyed children of 1984-86, who were saved by western medicines and foodstuffs, helped begin the greatest population explosion in human history, which will bring Ethiopia's population to 170 million by 2050. By that time, Nigeria's population will be 340 million, (up from just 19 million in 1930). The same is true over much of Africa.

Thus we are heading towards a demographic holocaust, with a potential premature loss of life far exceeding that of all the wars of the 20th Century. This terrible truth cannot be ignored.

But back in Ireland, there are sanctimonious ginger-groups, which yearn to prevent discussion, and even to imprison those of us who try, however imperfectly, to expose the truth about Africa. And of that saccharine, sickly shower, more tomorrow.

What might have been, by Fred Siegel in City Journal. I always thought that the impeachment was insane overreach, and dumb politics. The Repubs were rabid.

Rabid is never a good idea.

It's a quick water taxi ride from Orta San Giulio to Isola di San Giulio. The basilica on the tiny island was first built in 926 but has had many revisions and renovations since then. It's part of an active Benedictine monastery.

Here's a brief history of the island.

Most interesting to me were the frescoes, which ranged in age from early medieval to Renaissance. This one, on a pillar, looked Byzantine in influence. I was sure I took more fresco photos, but I don't find them on my camera. Maybe I spaced out.

Here's a site with more photos of the frescoes.

A few more of my photos from the island on continuation page.

A quote from Kristof's essay in the NYT about Asia (h/t, Jungle Trader):

For most of the last several thousand years, it would have seemed far likelier that Chinese or Indians, not Europeans, would dominate the world by the year 2000, and that America and Australia would be settled by Chinese rather than by the inhabitants of a backward island called Britain. The reversal of fortunes of East and West strikes me as the biggest news story of the millennium, and one of its most unexpected as well.

and

A half-century before Columbus, Zheng He had reached East Africa and learned about Europe from Arab traders. The Chinese could easily have continued around the Cape of Good Hope and established direct trade with Europe. But as they saw it, Europe was a backward region, and China had little interest in the wool, beads and wine Europe had to trade. Africa had what China wanted -- ivory, medicines, spices, exotic woods, even specimens of native wildlife.

In Zheng He's time, China and India together accounted for more than half of the world's gross national product, as they have for most of human history. Even as recently as 1820, China accounted for 29 percent of the global economy and India another 16 percent, according to the calculations of Angus Maddison, a leading British economic historian.

Asia's retreat into relative isolation after the expeditions of Zheng He amounted to a catastrophic missed opportunity, one that laid the groundwork for the rise of Europe and, eventually, America. Westerners often attribute their economic advantage today to the intelligence, democratic habits or hard work of their forebears, but a more important reason may well have been the folly of 15th-century Chinese rulers.

Yes, the problem was that they didn't appreciate good claret. There's a lesson in that. Read the whole fascinating thing. The link is above.

The Dylanologist noted to me that almost every town in Italy has a Via Gramsci or a Piazza Gramsci. No wonder Italy's politics and economics are so messed up.

Readers know what we think about Gramsci (and his latter-day followers on the Left) from this and this.

Here's two I noticed in Italy a few weeks ago. Gramsci Street in Baveno, next to the train station:

 And here's Piazza Gramsci in Verbania, not far from the ferry dock:

If Gramsci is your hero, you are in trouble. He's the guy who invented the notion of incremental socialist fascism, which is the unspoken long-term plan of the American Left, I believe. Stepwise and slowly, so as not to scare people until we finally wake up one day and find our lives boxed in by communitarian goals as determined by elitist masters who "care so much" about us poor schmucks and suckers that they want to run every detail of our pitiful, ignorant lives.

Richard Gatling believed that his rapid-fire gun would be a boon to mankind.

A quote from a review of the book on the right by Jonathan Yardley in the WaPo:

 'It occurred to me,' he wrote to a friend in 1877, 'that if I could invent a machine -- a gun -- which could by rapidity of fire, enable one man to do as much battle duty as a hundred, that it would, to a great extent, supersede the necessity of large armies, and consequently, exposure to battle and disease be greatly diminished.' As disingenuous and self-serving as that sentiment sounds, it ended up being quite correct: Innovations in arms steadily reduced the relative lethality of battles (not to mention the cost of waging war) throughout the twentieth century."

What did Manhattan, or Manahatta in the Lenapi language, look like in 1609 when Henry Hudson arrived? It is often forgotten that NY Harbor is where the Pilgrims were headed. November storms interfered with that.

A landscape ecologist is mapping it out. Slide show here. h/t, Neatorama

Photo: The gardens of Villa Pallavicini in Stresa, two weeks ago. If a garden space is like a room, they put a row of picture windows in it.

In A Tribute to Italy, The Fjordman posting at Gates of Vienna takes a look at the European sickness, and sees a ray of hope in Italy:

Italy is by no means immune to the problems affecting everybody else in the Western world, but her odds are better than those of several other countries. Through contact with Italians, I get the impression of a country whose national heart is still beating, a people still in touch with their roots and believing that their cultural survival is desirable, which is no mean feat given the suicidal state of our civilization in this age. When observing Italy, I see sickness but also life; and where there is life, there is hope. Something tells me that the story of Italy as a vibrant heartland of European civilization still contains more chapters to be written. If we are lucky, her struggle for survival and rebirth can inspire others far beyond her borders.

Gates speculates about Italy's resistance to PC and modern multiculturalism:

...commenters speculated that Italy’s innate regionalism might be one of the key factors that inoculates it against the most pernicious post-modern political diseases.

Our regular Italian commenter Ioshkafutz confirmed this viewpoint, and provided us with a comprehensive and engaging summary of Italian culture, which is reproduced below. It has been edited minimally for spelling, punctuation, and clarity:

Italy is many countries. A Milanese is closer to an Austrian than to a Sicilian, A Torinese to a Frenchman than a Calabrese. When I go to my Roman caffé / bar at night and Neapolitans truckdrivers enter, I don’t understand a word, or rather, just barely enough to know they are Italians. The rest could be Ancient Greek.

They — the Neapolitans — have their own musical genres, theater, and even cinema… all still thriving.

They’ll defend the legacy of the Borboni when Naples was a Capital city. They never really digested the Piedmontese invasion. The Romans instead have, also because when Rome became the Capital city and Mussolini brought cinema to Rome (he is responsible for cinecittà) Turin was marginalized.

Maybe Italy is already multicultural enough. Ever since Italy was a province of the Roman empire, it never became a political entity again until 1861.

From a letter from John Adams to Abigail on July 2, 1776:

The Second Day of July 1776, will be the most memorable Epocha, in the History of America.

I am apt to believe that it will be celebrated, by succeeding Generations, as the great anniversary Festival. It ought to be commemorated, as the Day of Deliverance by solemn Acts of Devotion to God Almighty. It ought to be solemnized with Pomp and Parade, with Shews, Games, Sports, Guns, Bells, Bonfires and Illuminations from one End of this Continent to the other from this Time forward forever more.

A quote from the piece in Smithsonian Magazine of the above title:

As a young man, Muir felt he was a student in what he called the ‘University of the Wilderness,'" Gisel said. "Yosemite was his graduate course. This is where he decided who he was, what he wanted to say and how he was going to say it."

When he first strode into Yosemite in the spring of 1868, Muir was a scruffy Midwestern vagabond wandering the wilderness fringes of post-bellum America, taking odd jobs where he could. In retrospect, visiting Yosemite might seem an inevitable stop on his life's journey. But his later recollections reveal a young man plagued with self-doubt and uncertainty, often lonely and confused about the future. "I was tormented with soul hunger," he wrote of his meandering youth. "I was on the world. But was I in it?"