Tuesday, August 11. 2009
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).
Many fun photos below the fold. All of these buildings are in town -
Continue reading "Woodstock, Vermont info and architecture, with some thoughts about old-time New England, Part 1"
Saturday, August 1. 2009
Is the era of the small town over in America? Bookslut thinks so.
I'm not sure how "small" is defined. As readers know, I work in a city (Hartford), sleep in exurbia. Everybody needs places to be a bit anonymous - but not too anonymous.
At the least, you want your regular shopkeepers, bartenders, and maitre d's to know your name - but you can do that in both city and country when you find the places you like.
Photo: A small town in NH, c. 1890. Note the large scale elimination of trees from the hillsides, typical of the 1800s in New England. Firewood, charcoal, and lumbering, thus creating hillside pastures and driving the bear and moose up to Maine. Also note the fine streetside Elm trees, now all gone due to the Elm Tree Blight.
No CVS or Dunkin Donuts in evidence: how did people survive?
Wednesday, July 29. 2009
 Teddy Roosevelt rightly fascinates biographers.
I am not ready for a new one after having read Edmund Morris' multi-volume bio, but Douglas Brinkley's new one looks to be a big seller: The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America.
Our pet theory is that Americans snap up history books because they get no serious history in school.
Monday, July 27. 2009
My friend and fellow Vietnam veteran, Bob Caldwell, served for decades as a journalist in major newspapers, retiring recently as member of its editorial board and editor of the San Diego Union-Tribune’s Sunday opinion section. Today, Bob returns to print, in the Washington Examiner, to remind us that’s the way it wasn’t despite Walter Cronkite’s media-pack-panic after Tet ’68.
Nationally syndicated columnist Diana West, also, examines Cronkite’s “offensive history.” West says, admittedly harshly, “No, the Cronkite post-mortem that's needed is for the zombies who conjured up the hollow rapture and the living dead who fell for it.”
If you really don't remember, and before you start arguing from ignorance, you might refresh your knowledge of the facts with reading the comprehensive The Big Story by the Washington Post's Chief of the Saigon bureau during Tet '68, Peter Braestrup. Braestrup doesn't ignore media bias but emphasizes structural, staffing and experiential limitations of the mainstream media of that time, and that these problems "persist to this day." No kidding!
P.S.: Another old friend, Cliff Kincaid of Accuracy In Media delves deeper into the wider range of Cronkite illusions, such as the Soviet threat being exaggerated and that President Carter was the brightest president Cronkite knew.
Dino's reminder of the Newsweek comment that the O "is sort of a god" reminded us of this post from one year ago:
 I love hope and change, don't you? That's why I buy Powerball tickets on occasion -and why I work out. Nevertheless, my life is pretty darn good, even if I have to work long hours.
Obama's got the Big Con going. Beran at City Journal gets it. One quote:
The danger of Obama’s charismatic healer-redeemer fable lies in the hubris it encourages, the belief that gifted politicians can engender a selfless communitarian solidarity. Such a renovation of our national life would require not only a change in constitutional structure—the current system having been geared to conflict by the Founders, who believed that the clash of private interests helps preserve liberty—but also a change in human nature. Obama’s conviction that it is possible to create a beautiful politics, one in which Americans will selflessly pursue a shared vision of the common good, recalls the belief that Dostoyevsky attributed to the nineteenth-century Russian revolutionists: that, come the revolution, “all men will become righteous in one instant.” The perfection would begin.
In rejecting the Anglo-American politics of limits, Obama revives a political tradition that derives ultimately from Niccolò Machiavelli. In the Discourses on Livy and The Art of War, Machiavelli argued that it is possible to create a communitarian republic like the one whose outlines he glimpsed in Livy’s (highly romanticized) version of Roman history—a polity in which citizens, forsaking their own swinish pursuits, would become happy in the pursuit of a common good. Wise laws, he maintained, would “make citizens love one another.” The virtuous res publica of the Romans could be conjured anew.
Monday, July 13. 2009
 The Englishman reminds us that yesterday was the anniversary of the Glorious Revolution.
We Americans do not think much about that 1688 event, but his link explains why we should. It was a precursor, of sorts, to the American Revolution.
The Columbia Encyclopedia says:
The Declaration of Rights and the Bill of Rights (1689) redefined the relationship between monarch and subjects and barred any future Catholic succession to the throne. The royal power to suspend and dispense with law was abolished, and the crown was forbidden to levy taxation or maintain a standing army in peacetime without parliamentary consent. The provisions of the Bill of Rights were, in effect, the conditions upon which the throne was offered to and accepted by William and Mary. These events were a milestone in the gradual process by which practical power shifted from the monarch to Parliament. The theoretical ascendancy of Parliament was never thereafter successfully challenged.
Image: William of Orange (William lll)
Sunday, July 12. 2009
Above: Lower East Side of Manhattan, 1937, where many waves of immigrants found their first foothold in America. Those 1860s-1890s tenements are still standing, in what is now one of the hippest young neighborhoods of NYC.
Below: Mulberry St., NYC, c. 1900, packed with southern Italian and Sicilian immigrants. The misguided Progressives wanted to tear down these neighborhoods, from the time of Teddy Roosevelt to Lyndon Johnson.
What's a "slum"?
The Dylanologist and I have always been interested in the tragedies of urban planning, and fans of the organic, natural growth of urban areas designed by market forces and human desires, not by hubris-infected government experts.
One of his great-grandmothers, 1st generation Irish, raised 5 kids (with great success) in a NYC tenement, using bureau drawers as cribs. The Dyl said to me the other day:
"I lived in tenements for eight years. No elevators: two to three-story walk-ups, no a/c, shared bathrooms down the hall, unreliable heat, no cable, no phone, no wireless, with one tiny room with a dirty window and an old single bed with one thin, lumpy mattress. For the first four years, my parents paid around $30,000 per year for the privilege, and for the second four years, closer to $40,000."
Here's Jane Jacobs:
Friday, July 10. 2009
 It's John Calvin's 500th Birthday today (1509-1564). He was indeed one of the shapers of the Western world.
Marvin Olasky offers Three Cheers for John Calvin.
Here's a Calvin quote via Marginal Rev:
Whatever be the kind of tribulation with which we are afflicted, we should always consider the end of it to be, that we may be trained to despise the present, and thereby stimulated to aspire to the future life. For since God well knows how strongly we are inclined by nature to a slavish love of this world, in order to prevent us from clinging too strongly to it, he employs the fittest reason for calling us back, and shaking off our lethargy.
Tuesday, June 30. 2009
"Orwell was right. It was Wells who made it respectable, even before World War I, for liberals in England and America to demean their own native democratic culture in the name of an imagined antidemocratic World State. And it was Wells, with his stature as the prophet of the future, who taught upper-middle-class liberals that they were entitled to govern in the name of social evolution."
 Fred Siegel, writing on HG Wells, via Samiz.
Readers know that we proud gun-and-Bible-clinging redneck Northeast Yankees hate it when Chardonnay-sippers who see themselves as our betters try to tell us how to live. We ain't stupid neither - cuz we been government-eddicated! At great expense!
BTW, we do love chevre - to the point that our editor wants to keep some goats. The meat is quite tasty, too. What's the PC term for a she-goat? A goatess? Goatette? Help me out.
Friday, June 26. 2009
Blogger and frequent Maggie's commenter AVI mentioned historian David Hacket Fisher a while ago in a comment here. It reminded me of Fisher's fine book, which I once meant to read but never did: Historian's Fallacies: Toward a Logic of Historical Thought.
From a post on that book from this site:
Fischer, David Hackett, Historians’ Fallacies: Toward a Logic of Historical Thought (New York: Harper Collins, 1970). In only approximately 300 pages, Fischer surveys an immense amount of background historical literature to point out a comprehensive variety of analytical errors that many, if not most, historians commit. Fischer points out specific examples of faulty or sloppy reasoning in the work of even the most prominent historians, making it a useful book for beginning students of history. While this book presumably did not make Fischer popular with many of his peers, it should be noted that his contributions as a historian have not been limited simply to criticizing the work of others; since 1976, he has published a number of well-received books on other historical topics.
Wednesday, June 24. 2009
 From Smithsonian:
The first wheels were not used for transportation.
Evidence indicates they were created to serve as potter’s wheels around 3500 B.C. in Mesopotamia—300 years before someone figured out to use them for chariots.
The ancient Greeks invented Western philosophy…and the wheelbarrow.
Researchers believe that the wheelbarrow first appeared in classical Greece, sometime between the sixth and fourth centuries B.C., then sprung up in China four centuries later and ended up in medieval Europe, perhaps by way of Byzantium or the Islamic world. Although wheelbarrows were expensive to purchase, they could pay for themselves in just 3 or 4 days in terms of labor savings.
Tuesday, June 23. 2009
The Jewish-born Roman Catholic convert Czech composer Viktor Ullmann's Der Kaiser Von Atlantis was his last composition in the Terezin concentration camp outside Prague before he was shipped to Auschwitz in 1944 and gassed on arrival.
One of the remarkable stories of the era is about all of the music in the camps, and Terezin had more than its share of talent. The Nazis and even the SS loved music and thus encouraged camp musicianship. Mrs. BD recently heard a Terezin survivor speak about being in the choir there at age 11. (140,000 passed through Terezin: 20,000 were liberated at the end.)
In this short (50+ min.) modernist opera, the Emperor of Atlantis (a thinly-disguised Hitler-type) declares total war on the world. (As one would expect from a prison camp opera, the "Loudspeaker" has a major role and, instruments being limited, it's like a cabaret band.) Death goes on strike out of resentment at the competition from the Emperor, but love reappears on the battlefield and, in the end, Death is persuaded to resume his merciful task of erasing pain from the world when the emperor himself agrees to die.
Here's a snippet of the opera on YouTube, the Emperor's farewell aria:
Friday, June 19. 2009
My grandmother, advocate of the turn of the century (that’s early 1900’s) democratic socialism based in defense of the little guy from rampant big business, taught me that the biggest myth in America is the efficiency of big business. So, government grew in regulations and programs, and so did unions, to counter big business and favor the little guy. ‘Till now it’s a truism that big government is inefficient and too little the friend of the little guy, and big unions are money founts for their leaders at the expense of labor having jobs. Meanwhile, big business has more and more become an ally of big government and unions to divide the spoils, and stifle competition and innovation. All that leaves to maneuver for the little guy against the increasing encroachments of the biggies is small business and individuals.
It’s time for more small businesspeople and individuals to defy the biggies with a chant of I am Spartacus, or I am an American.
(No, I didn’t purposely ignore big academia. It has made itself largely irrelevant via meaningless coursework enriching self-serving pedants.)
Consider a few datapoints:
Investigative journalist Tim Carney reminds us that in 1993 the biggest insurers supported Hillarycare, to shift liability risk onto taxpayers and profit from claims-processing contracts. Small insurers, brokers who work with small companies, and individuals revolted. Today, the big insurers are again cooperating with the government-dictated health care advocates, as long as the big insurers can profit from more premium payers steered their way.
The Canadian medical societies remind us not to go north for a model of government-dictated health care, as the waits are excessive by even long-wait standards approved by the government.
The former Chief Economist of the US Chamber of Commerce reminds us (sorry, a subscription only column) that when government as umpire controls a team, bad and self-serving calls are to be expected.
Michelle Malkin reminds us that Mrs. Obama and President Obama’s chief political operative worked to reduce care for the poor, to enrich her employer (and her compensation).
Mickey Kaus reminds us that unions are to be exempted from Obamacare, and further benefit from attracting members through higher benefits than the rest of us.
The CEO of the consumer highest-rated insurer in the US reminds us that he doesn’t so much fear government-plan competition but, “more about the federal government’s ability to do this at all, much less do it well. Merely coordinating basic demographic information between Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid - three big federal programs that millions of Americans belong to - can be a chore for beneficiaries, their children, and their health plans.”
Be Spartacus. Say "I am American. I refuse to be pushed around by the biggies, or under their thumb."
Write or call your congressional representatives to represent your views.
Ask your employer and your doctors to do so too.
Wednesday, June 10. 2009
Dr X labels this photo:
Caruthersville, Missouri (Russell Lee).
Farm Security Administration client who will become a farm owner-operator under the tenant purchase program.
Monday, June 8. 2009
 A Connecticut moral crusader and the YMCA.
I guess the Y has seen some changes over the years. A quote from the essay:
He might be grimly amused to see twenty-first-century social conservatives making their last stand over the odd issue of “same-sex marriage.”
And he would certainly conclude that he now stood in a very different country.
Saturday, June 6. 2009
 From S.L.A. Marshall's First Wave at Omaha Beach, in the November,1960 Atlantic:
Able Company has planned to wade ashore in three files from each boat, center file going first, then flank files peeling off to right and left. The first men out try to do it but are ripped apart before they can make five yards. Even the lightly wounded die by drowning, doomed by the waterlogging of their overloaded packs. From Boat No. 1, all hands jump off in water over their heads. Most of them are carried down. Ten or so survivors get around the boat and clutch at its sides in an attempt to stay afloat. The same thing happens to the section in Boat No. 4. Half of its people are lost to the fire or tide before anyone gets ashore. All order has vanished from Able Company before it has fired a shot.
Thursday, June 4. 2009
From the Oxford Libertarian Society, the remarkable Prof. Terence Kealey - author of Sex, Science, and Politics (h/t, Samiz). A wide-ranging and fascinating talk, with wonderful Q&A. The guy is a genius. Please watch:
Terence Kealey - 'The Myth of Science as a Public Good' from oxford libertarian on Vimeo.
Monday, June 1. 2009
The reporters of this series were never allowed back into Cuba. This is Part 1 of 6, in Spanish:
Sunday, May 31. 2009
 Via Aurelia: The Roman Empire's Lost Highway. A bit more interesting than Route 66.
Photo from the article.
Wednesday, May 27. 2009
 Andrew Jackson: American Lion by Newsweek editor Jon Meacham.
An imperfect but absorbing book about the Presidency of an interesting American during interesting times.
The Tennessean Andrew Jackson was a tough guy, but a loving, emotionally sensitive and volatile guy. A General and a hard-nosed pol - not a philosopher.
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