Thursday, July 24. 2008
A re-post from our archives: Excellent piece in the CS Monitor on the condition of religion in Europe by Peter Ford. In it he quotes Grace Davies, who notes that the Enlightenment led in different directions in the US and Europe - here, we tend to view, as did the Founding Fathers, religious belief and practice as something that needed protection from State power, while in Europe they tended to see the State as protecting the people from powerful religious institutions. It's an interesting difference in the role of the State in relation to religion, and I wonder whether it reflects a larger difference in the view of individual rights in general - whether they are seen as being provided by the State, as if from a King, or whether they belong to the individual by virtue of being human, in other words, granted by God or by Natural Law rather than by the State. I wonder whether different expectations of the State derive from this. If the State is seen as the provider of rights, then why not a provider of everything? After all, you can contort the concept of freedom rights and label anything a "right" if you want to, including a right to watch TV in jail, a right to a driver's license, or a right to a stress-free life. But if the State is an organization we have created to protect the freedoms we own anyway, will we not be less inclined to view the State as a benevolent, loving, parental provider in general? The liberals/progressives have already transferred their dreams and hopes and faith to the State. Their fascistic/statist undercurrent has been apparent for a long time - there will never be enough government to satisfy them. The piece is a good update on European attitudes towards God, with some surprising findings: What place for God in Europe? | csmonitor.com
 Image borrowed from Anchoress in "President of the World?" That flyer creeps me out.
And this quote from Obama, at American Thinker, also creeps me out with its implication that the State's job is to provide my life with meaning: "They want a sense of purpose, a narrative arc to their lives, something that will relieve a chronic loneliness or lift them above the exhausting, relentless toll of daily life. They need an assurance that somebody out there cares about them, is listening to them -- that they are not just destined to travel down a long highway toward nothingness."
The last person in the world I'd want to discuss the meaning of life with is a politician. There is an immature grandiosity operating here, and I find it disturbing. What is fascinating about the tingly-leg press is that they are exhibiting the very symptoms of arrested development and star-struck immaturity that they always accuse America in toto of suffering. The usual critique of the elite media is that we are a nation of mindless followers, who go from one fad to another, and value looks, youth, and pizzazz over substance.
But the current spectacle suggests something worse — that the press who claims they know better and are more sophisticated are, in fact, far more infantile than most Americans, and essentially Access Hollywood, People Magazine, and the National Enquirer dressed up with network logos and NY-DC bylines.
Wednesday, July 23. 2008
 Before my brain's hard drive deteriorates, a few more random thoughts about our northern Italy trip a few weeks ago, a trip which has been more-than-amply photo-documented here.
1. An ottica in Verbania fixed my glasses, for free. The nose-thingy fell off, and she put two new ones on. She was young, blonde, and lovely, and wore high black leather boots and a short-short skirt under her lab coat. My thanks to her. 2. Each morning from my balcony in Baveno I watched two families of Grebes, with their young'uns, paddling around the edge of Lago Maggiore. About the size of our Western Grebe. The chicks were just beginning to learn to dive. Sometimes, one would try to climb on Mom's back the way young grebes too, but they were really too big to fit. The Dad hunted for minnows to feed the chicks, and the Moms herded them so they wouldn't wander too far. 3. Wherever you go in Italy - city, town, country village, or farmland - you are being watched. There will be an old lady peeking from behind a curtain watching you go by. Just stop for a moment to admire somebody's tomatoes, and you will see the curtain move and an old face peer out. It never fails. Italians have a paranoid streak to them. Some old lady is always watching you. She thinks I might steal her zucchini. 4. The church choir rehearsal in Baveno. Pure magic. 5. Gelato? An overrated item, in my opinion, although the hazelnut is very nice indeed. Any dessert is always welcome. I have visited Italy several times, and keep hoping that I will discover the specialness of gelato, but Haagen Dazs is better. The local wines are more fun to sample.
Tuesday, July 22. 2008
 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.
Continue reading "Isola di San Giulio"
Our post on Richard Gatling and his Gun prompted a reader to inform us about two other hand-driven machine guns of the 19th Century: The Nordenfelt Gun and the Gardner Gun. Here's a clip of the Nordenfelt gun in operation:
Monday, July 21. 2008
Dr. Helen mentioned a new book, Evil Genes: Why Rome Fell, Hitler Rose, Enron Failed and My Sister Stole My Mother's Boyfriend. Cute titles sell books.  There are indeed evil, destructive, and unimaginably self-interested people out there in the world who behave with "shocking disregard for the people around" them. It's important to be aware, because they look just like ordinary people, and act like them until the chips are down. They only show their true exploitative colors at calculated moments.
The first review of the book at the Amazon link above gives a good sense of what the book is about. I am not recommending the book, just noting that it is an interesting topic. These usually pleasant - if not charming and seductive - folks build careers and lives by preying on the innocent, the naive, and the gullible. They cannot help it, because they are deranged in a certain sort of inhuman way (which often works effectively in this world). They talk a good game, plenty of them go to church, do good deeds, and get by by wearing a "mask of sanity." These folks cannot be truthful to themselves or to others, do not give a damn about anybody except themselves, and inhabit a guilt-free zone. Even their intimate confessions are calculated. Only God can help them. We shrinks do not have the power.
 Washington is teeing up "the rich" for a big tax hike next year, as a way to make them "pay their fair share." Well, the latest IRS data have arrived on who paid what share of income taxes in 2006, and it's going to be hard for the rich to pay any more than they already do. The data show that the 2003 Bush tax cuts caused what may be the biggest increase in tax payments by the rich in American history.
Whole thing in the WSJ. My advice to Dems: No matter how hungry you are, never kill the geese that lay the golden eggs. When peoples' tax rates start hitting 60% (as predicted in NY State under Obama's tax plan), only the ultra-income folks still feel motivated to work hard, to take risks, and to be entrepreneurial and create new jobs. People want disposable income, and they want to save money their own way, for their own personal goals. Otherwise, they just work less, and some elect to enter the already-huge American "cash economy" - something I hate but which is growing fast. I do hear this more and more often: "$400 for the job for cash, $800 for check or credit card." Extreme taxation has already driven the work ethic out of Europe, while Asia relaxes taxes and regulation -and grows like a weed. The goal for America should be that every family can and should be wealthy, remain that way via inheritance, and never be forced to rely on the government (ie, their neighbor's income) for anything they need. Dependency on "government programs" ain't independence. It's forced charity. Wealth is not a zero-sum game. Wealth is created out of thin air by work, creativity, investment, and risk-taking.
Sunday, July 20. 2008
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.
Saturday, July 19. 2008
 Good things interfere with good things, and bad things interfere with good things.
Tonight, we were able to manage to attend a nice cocktail party, and then to get out to dinner with dear friends we haven't spent time with in a while. There are only so many weekends in a year, and only so many years in a lifetime. Keeping up with friends, and doing the things you want to do, fills the calendar. This summer, for example, I realize that I cannot golf, work in the gardens, work on my tennis game and play a match or two, go fishing or sailing on the coast with friends, help the Mrs. pick out new ceiling lighting for the hallways, go riding with the Mrs. on Saturday and Sunday afternoon, get to church, and sit by the pool and read with a cigar and a scotch which often ends up as a little siesta. Not to mention evening social engagements and the occasional invitations for sporting clays and skeet. Don't even mention wanting time to spend messing with these internets. There are fewer conflicts in the fall and winter up here. For one thing, no yard and garden chores other than wood-splitting and cleaning up fallen limbs and trees in the pastures. Still, I like to go for ducks or goose or grouse or pheasants, but I have a Saturday morning men's tennis group, and you cannot hunt in CT on Sunday. Plus we like to ski in New Hampshire and sometimes Vermont, and I usually have some weekend jobs for work that are needed on Monday. Nothing I do is particularly expensive (other than keeping the horses, maintaining the pool, and keeping a stock of Cuban Dominican smokes). It's all about time - and making choices. I think I am going to give up the golf this year. If I ever retire - which I do not intend to ever do willingly - maybe I can take it up again. And I am going to hire people to do the mowing even though I enjoy it. I make this promise to myself. We are always told that accepting limits is the biggest part of maturity but, when it comes to my plan-to-do list, that aspect of maturity still is tough for me. Friends tell me that I have too many interests.
 Nice weather equipment - WeatherPeddler
Slainte! - Check out Malts.com. Wonderful. You can read Smithsonian Magazine online Cabela's sells floor mats for most cars and trucks. Travel -See America.org Cost-effective travel - Club ABC Vacation Home Rentals by Owner - VRBO. For example, this nice weekly rental on Nantucket: 
or this one in Bellaggio on Lake Como: 
And, of course, there are always good pin-ups at Theo
A re-post:  Both the majestic American Elm and the Chestnut fell victim to blights imported from overseas. With their deaths, the New England landscape was altered, for the worse. No more village blacksmith "under the spreading chestnut tree," and no more village greens and churches graced by rows of giant vase-shaped Elms - the hallmark of old New England.
Yes, we still have some elms, but the young ones don't make it to adulthood, and any remaining trees are slowly dying off. The good news is that there is a blight-resistant Elm available. You won't live long enough to see it in its glory, but planting some now in the right places will be a heck of a fine gift to the future. You can find them at Miller Nurseries.
Friday, July 18. 2008
 Readers know that I have a special attachment to Wellfleet on Cape Cod. I was a little kid in Hyannis when it was a sleepy village without malls, car dealerships, and retirement complexes, but my family soon fled up to Wellfleet for the summers.
By no means do we wish to encourage anyone to buy there, but most of the town is Cape Cod National Seashore so construction opportunities are limited. And the water, especially on the ocean side, is too darn cold for almost anybody except native New Englanders and kids. Besides, as the old joke goes: "Cape Cod Real Estate - going fast." That's because Cape Cod erodes at the average rate of about 3'/year on the ocean side. Thoreau was impressed by that fact. Over the years, we have seen many nice oceanfront cottages disappear over the winter. Wellfleet is not a fancy town (it's a glitz-free zone) and its waters produce the best oysters in the world. Wiki tells us: "Wellfleet was encountered by Europeans as early as 1606, when the French explorer Samuel de Champlain explored and named it "Port Aux Huitres" (Oyster Port) for the bountiful oyster population resident to the area." I thought our readers might be amused by this piece of Wellfleet real estate, for sale now. 
They are asking $1.8 million for that waterfront villa. It's probably the location on the harbor shore, not the structure - if you can call it that a structure. For something with a little more charm, but no waterfront, this is my idea of a real Cape Cod house: 
They are asking $3.625 million for this place. If you do the math, though (lot size 435600 at rule-of-thumb 44,000 sq ft/acre, that's a ten acre place. A solid foothold on the Cape. Worth every darn penny).
 An argument ex silentio claims "You respond with silence, thus I am proven right."
From Wiki: "In general, the claim that the absence of something demonstrates the proof of a proposition. An argumentum ex silentio ('argument from silence') is an argument based on the assumption that someone's silence on a matter suggests ('proves' when a logical fallacy) that person's ignorance of the matter or their inability to counterargue validly."
Of course, there are many reasons for silence besides an inability to make a counterpoint, including a simple lack of interest in pursuing a line of discussion or, as I have often found myself doing in debates with Liberals, reverting to silence out of a feeling of futility. In the blog world, the common expression "crickets chirping" is a cute way of implying an ex silentio argument. Sometimes it's right, sometimes an error. Augean Stables has a pretty good example of this fallacy in a debate he is engaged in about the al Durah affair.
Wednesday, July 16. 2008
Harvard psychologist Howard Gardner is known for his work on mutiple intelligences - the idea that there is not one kind of "intelligence," but up to seven of them. It's an interesting approach. IQ, which is an individually stable and inherited tendency, likely measures your linguistic and logical-mathematical "intelligences." His books are also on that link above. Neuroanthropology linked to a speech he gave in Bogota about his personal intellectual history and his views on science and life, Multiple Lenses on the Mind.
 This is, IMHO, Windows' best trick and the biggest time-saver of the bunch. In short, it makes it easy to load a file into a program that it's not normally associated with.
A quick example would be a Notepad document you want to spell-check. Notepad doesn't have a built-in spell-checker, so the usual routine would be to:
- Laboriously fire up a program with a spell-checker like MS Word
- Painstakingly open the load requester
- Achingly browse to the Notepad document
- Tiresomely load the file
- Troublesomely spell-check the document
- Backbreakingly save the file
- Exhaustedly close the program
But with the SendTo feature:
- Simply click on file's icon with the right mouse button and 'send' it to MS Word
- Simply spell-check the document and that's it!
For more of this unbiased, impartial review of the unbelievably fantastic SendTo feature, please...
Continue reading "Doc's Computin' Tips: The "SendTo" feature"
Tuesday, July 15. 2008
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.
Monday, July 14. 2008
Somehow, the Lefties have managed to make people feel a bit guilty about pursuing self-interest. (Lefties, however, tend to be very good at making money for themselves. Everybody is concerned with their own interests.) Nevertheless, they advise folks to vote on their self-interest: to vote themselves benefits from other peoples' labor, risk-taking, and creativity. That's the essential hypocrisy of Liberal-Leftism. I do believe in service and duty: to God, family, country, and one's fellow man - in that order. A quote from Self-interest is bad? at Weekly Standard: Oh, terrific. Now we have two of them--two presidential candidates, presumptive nominees of their respective parties, who insist they will not rest until they have inspired all of us stick-in-the-mud Americans to reach celestial heights of personal fulfillment by committing ourselves to a life of service. Service to what? Service to .??.??. something or other. The phrase that both John McCain and Barack Obama use is a "cause higher than yourself" or "greater than self" or alternatively a "cause greater than your own self-interest." Whatever the precise wording--for now, let's just use an unpronounceable acronym, CGTYOSI--we'll be hearing it a lot till November. McCain grabbed it first, years ago. CGTYOSI appears in his first memoir, Faith of My Fathers. In fact, it's the theme of the book, dramatized by the story arc: McCain begins as an impetuous young midshipman resisting the Navy's attempts to "bend [him] to a cause greater than self-interest," and then endures harrowing adversity, rejects the shallowness of his earlier life, and embraces a CGTYOSI. As a candidate, McCain has fastened on the phrase as one of those prefab word-clumps that politicians automatically release when answering a question about this or that. He uses it constantly. "If you've remembered anything I've said," he often tells audiences, "please remember there's nothing nobler than serving a cause greater than your own self-interest." As McCain tells it, that cause is found in AmeriCorps, the Peace Corps, and other government agencies that pay people to volunteer.
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I am sick of this kind of sanctimonious BS. I get paid to work towards justice. There is truth in all this stuff, but it becomes cloying quickly. After all, how many people really want your "help"? Very few. Plenty of folks want your money, though. Everybody wants that. If you don't take good care of yourself and your family, what good can you possibly be to anybody else?
 A provocative essay at Boston Review: Reentry: Reversing Mass Imprisonment.
I do not agree with many of the author's points, but all of the issues and debates are touched upon, and the author does make the correct point that not all criminals are incorrigible sociopaths. I also agree that we over-use jail time, which ought to be mainly for violent and comparably major offenses. Certainly not for drug addicts or financial offenders. Large fines. After all, many of our hard-earned tax dollars go to support those folks in jail. A year of jail time costs us more than a year of Ivy League "education" would. Everyone has broken a rule. As a rule of thumb, you have to break quite a few to get caught. My advice: teach and learn the rules, and do not break them. I think it's time to ask, again, what sorts of consequences we, as a society, want to impose for violations of the rules we make. And no weight-lifting equipment in our jails, please. One quote: As the social crisis of urban America supplied the masses for mass incarceration, the penal system itself became more punitive. The tough-on-crime message honed by the Republican Party in national politics since the Goldwater campaign of 1964 spoke to the racial anxieties of white voters discomfited by civil rights protests and summertime waves of civil unrest felt in cities through the decade. Conservatives charged that liberals coddled criminals and excused crime with phony root causes like poverty and unemployment. President Nixon launched a war on crime, only to be surpassed by President Reagan’s War on Drugs, which applied the resources of federal law enforcement to the problem of drug control. Policy experts abandoned rehabilitation, concluding that prisons could only deter and warehouse those who would otherwise commit crime in society. These politics produced a revolution in criminal sentencing. Mandatory minimum prison sentences, sentencing guidelines, parole abolition, and life sentences for third-time felons were widely adopted through the 1980s. The no-nonsense, tough-on-crime politics reached a bipartisan apotheosis with President Clinton’s 1994 crime bill, which launched the largest prison construction project in the nation’s history. As a result of these changes, prison time—as opposed to community supervision—became the main criminal sanction for felony offenders.
Read the whole thing. Link above. (By the way, I am a supporter of Prison Fellowship. I believe that Christ can save anybody's soul.)
Sunday, July 13. 2008
 Our regular readers know that I enjoy cooking meat in my smoker. For me, that is real barbecue. Not a grill - a smoker.
Mostly pork, sometimes beef. Unlike some of my pals, I do not believe in smoking game birds because their fine flavor is too subtle to hold up to smoke. I like to put on the hot rub du jour overnight, then start smoking it in the morning - or whenever I get to it. Pork loin, butt for pulled pork, ribs, beef tips, whatever. Sometimes I like to finish it off with a store-bought or home-made barbecue sauce on it while it finishes, sometimes during the entire cooking, sometimes on the side. For ribs, you have to cook with the sauce so they don't dry out. In Texas, it's on the side with the brisket - but I don't like brisket. What's your preference? Photo is my smoked pork loin. You need to have the sauce on the side for that.
This is a summer weekend re-post from our dusty archives:  "Progress," like environmentalism, is a secular religion.
I have always been suspicious of the concept of progress. For Chambers of Commerces, it has always seemed to mean more asphalt. For Leftists it has meant movement towards international socialism. In the world of morals, it has seemed to mean less morality and self-discipline. In art and design, it often seems vain and meaningless. In the world of religion, it has seemed to mean watering it down. In the Sciences though - medicine, technology, etc - advances have of course added much to quality and ease of life - but nothing to the meaning and purpose of our lives unless we are scientists. Wilfred McClay in Touchstone points out how the word has shaped our experience. Our words shape the way we think about things, sometimes in insidious ways and without our awareness, even as we use them: sometimes our words lead our thoughts instead of vice-versa. History has become for our secular age what “fate” was for the Greco-Roman ancients, and what “providence” was (and remains) for many Christians. This is the sense of History that Hegel and Marx promoted, and the sense that Supreme Court justice Anthony Kennedy recently appealed to in justifying an opinion by “evolving standards of decency.” It is the sense that moral innovators are appealing to in promoting homosexual and polyamorous “marriage,” artificial wombs, bioengineered enhancements, and all the other delights of “posthumanity.” The postmodernists who claim that we are beyond the sway of such metanarratives as History are speaking utter rubbish. (As usual.) “Progress” is the one article of faith that remains strong among us, the one torch in modernism’s darkening hall that still burns bright. To oppose it, even in the slightest, is to render oneself an “enemy of the future.” Which is why the possibility that such innovations might ultimately fail is, literally, inconceivable to so many true believers, as inconceivable to them as a sudden revocation of the laws of physics. You see, there are certain prevailing winds in this thing called History, and the Path of True Virtue can only be found in discerning those winds, and aligning one’s skiff with them. Or so the partisans of conventional wisdom would have it. And their confidence is oddly mirrored in the dejection of the orthodox, who feel themselves on the losing side of History. Yet both are wrong.
You can read the whole brief piece. It's a Christian view of time and of history. Update: AVI did a piece about cultural views of time last week.
Friday, July 11. 2008
At HuffPo, with good reason: The week that should have ended all of McCain's presidential hopes. That upsets me. I raised money for McCain. He has had months of an open field to run down like a rock star and a winner. (Of course, Obama has had plenty of campaign-killing weeks too.) Perhaps their plan is to let Obama blow himself up...or perhaps they are asleep at the switch. But all I can see from here is that Obama is dominating the press. As they used to say in Hollywood, "Bad press is better than no press." Does McCain want to win this election? He's the better man, and the media is (of course) trying to bury him, but why is he in hiding? He has disappeared since the primaries, and that was a long time ago. My friends are all afraid that he is trying to pull a Bob Dole election. Where's the Viagra? Where's the "hope"? Where's the promise? Where's the inspiration? Where's the America? Where is the darn campaign? This year, he should be running like an Eisenhower, as the calm, moderate, rational, calming, optimistic, stabilizing, patriotic and America-loving guy that you can trust not to take big risks, roll the dice, and make a mess. Sanity. That's tough, in a roll-the-dice and pray-for-the-best sort of year. Still, I believe that Obama's politics are his own worst enemy.
As our News Junkie has noted in a link to Ed Driscoll, the Left has been behaving in ways that seem oddly, well, conservative in recent years. This behavior has been especially pronounced in the area of agriculture, where the fanatical opposition to genetic engineering, antibiotic feed additives and modern methods of farming and animal husbandry seems bizarrely Luddite for a faction which likes to wear the badge of science on its chest when shouting down evangelicals.  Take Michael Pollan's recent book, The Omnivore's Dilemma, where the left-wing New Yorker, anti-corporate and anti-factory-farm Pollan finds his utopia not in some Berkeley commune or fetishized indigenous village, but on a Virginia farm - not too far from Monticello, incidentally - run by a right-wing Christian fellow. The anti-corporate and pro-animal welfare concerns of the left and the anti-government, pro-traditionalist views of the right approach each other and, for an instant, cross paths. In its hurried dash away from big agriculture, the Left does not run into Karl Marx, but into Thomas Jefferson and the image of the virtuous republican farmer, tending to his fields and animals without help from nitrogen fertilizer, tomatoes from Monsanto, or growth-promoting antibiotics.
In this ideological battle, the anti-agribusiness left has aspired to portray itself as latter day Jeffersonian faction, fighting the perceived intrusion of the Hamiltonian merchant and manufacturing class into the livelihood of the free and independent farmer. If it sounds too absurd to be true, consider Jefferson’s own articulation of the plight of the farmer versus that of the manufacturer: “Those who labour in the earth are the chosen people of God, if ever he had a chosen people, whose breasts he has made his peculiar deposit for substantial and genuine virtue. .... Corruption of morals in the mass of cultivators is a phaenomenon of which no age nor nation has furnished an example. It is the mark set on those, who not looking up to heaven, to their own soil and industry, as does the husbandman, for their subsistence, depend for it on casualties and caprice of customers. Dependance begets subservience and venality, suffocates the germ of virtue, and prepares fit tools for the designs of ambition.” –Notes on the State of Virginia, 1787
This statement seems hardly relevant at a time when less than two percent of Americans make their living through farming, and where those few remaining farmers are totally dependant on products designed by scientists and supplied by manufacturers. Even at the time Jefferson was writing it may have seemed more romantic wishfulness than sound economic reasoning. Today’s “Conservative Left,” however, seems determined not just to stop the clock, as Jefferson wished to do, but to grab hold of the hands and turn it back. Many technological advancements are spurned as being tools of corporate control, while the appeal to nature is invoked frequently to justify the adoption of traditional farming methods. The libertarian successor to Jefferson merely wishes to be able to run his family farm as he wishes without burdensome federal regulations which disadvantage small farms and traditional methods. He does not seek to impose his farming methods on others. The conservative leftist, on the other hand, like his forebears, tends to view things in revolutionary terms, with a creeping capitalism as the age-old enemy. Rarely discussed are the potentially catastrophic consequences of serious state tampering with modern agricultural methods. The rather poor record of the Left in implementing agricultural revolutions during the past century – comrade Mugabe, in Zimbabwe, being only the latest in an undistinguished chain – does not inspire much confidence. Where the two points of view do overlap, and the Conservative Leftist meets the nature-loving, self-sufficient Libertarian or Conservative, there are actually worthwhile insights. Michael Pollan’s work is an good starting point for these, and rather than continue, I will defer to his excellent book, linked above. For the moment, though, a few words from Joel Salatin, whose Staunton, VA farm was the object of Pollan's admiration: "I don’t ask for a dime of government money. I don’t ask for government accreditation. I don’t want to register my animals with a global positioning tattoo. I don’t want to tell officials the names of my constituents. And I sure as the dickens don’t intend to hand over my firearms. I can’t even use the “U” word. On every side, our paternalistic culture is tightening the noose around those of us who just want to opt out of the system — and it is the freedom to opt out that differentiates tyrannical and free societies.How a culture deals with its misfits reveals its strength. The stronger a culture, the less it fears the radical fringe. The more paranoid and precarious a culture, the less tolerance it offers." -Joel Salatin, Everything I Want to Do Is Illegal!, 2003.
Westport, Massachusetts is a lovely summertime seaside town on Buzzard's Bay. Lots of Boston people summer there. It has a Cape Coddy feel to it. Plenty of marshes and beaches, and a nice harbor (pictured above). This cute little Victorian farmouse on two acres is for sale. It has a boathouse and a cottage. Asking only $995,000. It looks cozy and perfect, to me. Home. (No, we are not in the real estate biz and no, we don't get a finder's fee!): 
Thursday, July 10. 2008
Aphrodite, a 77' "commuter yacht," was built in 1937 for Wall Streeter (and later Ambassador to Britain) Jock Whitney. Aphrodite has been restored. Here's the story, from the Brooklin (Maine) Boat Yard. Our blogmeister and noted water rat Chris recently took some photos of Aphrodite, on continuation page below.
Continue reading "Powerboat du jour: Aphrodite"
 Here's a short list of some of the books I recommend regularly:
Surviving Schizophrenia: A Manual for Families, Consumers, and Providers Surviving Manic Depression: A Manual on Bipolar Disorder for Patients, Families, and Providers An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness Understanding the Alcoholic's Mind: The Nature of Craving and How to Control It Stop Walking on Eggshells: Taking Your Life Back When Someone You Care about Has Borderline Personality Disorder People of the Lie. (by Scott Peck. It's about sociopaths.)
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