Maggie's Farm

October has been a very good month for new Maggie's readers. A fine harvest of new friends, whether you agree with us about things or not.

A hearty welcome to all of you in the US, Canada, the UK, Australia, and the rest of the world. We are pleased and honored to have you all as visitors.

Please sample some of our "recent essays" on the upper left column - we only post "thought pieces" there - not that we are really capable of orderly thought: we do our best, with limited time, limited IQ, not to mention our neanderthal lack of intellectual sophistication. We are simple country bumpkins, recently fallen off the turnip wagon, who aspire only to Common Sense - and a few other things.

And don't forget to send us around to all of your friends and enemies. They should not feel left out.

Image: Autumn, by Currier and Ives, 1871

Where the heck did this idea of a noose being a symbol for racism come from? To me, nooses always made me think of horse thieves and cattle rustlers, and hangin' judges out West. Frontier justice. Well, also of Nathan Hale, who gave his life for the cause of freedom.

I fully agree with the piece at Never Yet Melted that it is a newly-minted pseudo-symbol in the wake of the Jena scam, which he also discusses, as we did earlier today. A diversion from that embarassment, and a wholly disingenuous one.

Does anyone really believe "the offended" anymore? Nowadays, everybody wants to pose as "offended" or "abused." It's pitiful to proclaim that one sits on a pity pot, but society seems to give you more points for being pitiful than for being cheerful, resilient, and relatively productive in life. Cry-babies are emotional blackmailers.

I am deeply offended by "the offended" and by the semi-professionally offended, but, despite my offended status, nobody is pandering to me, giving me free stuff, or offering me a pass on my sins. Boo hoo.

Disregarding the truth, people are now going nuts about nooses: Free Speech Left Hanging - NY Post.

Let's keep nooses around, without inventing one more phony subject that everybody is supposed to try to look virtuous and sensitive about, and to tiptoe around. The noose worked just fine on Saddam, and Osama would look very handsome in one.

I wonder whether all of this just pre-Halloween, Haunted House craziness. (And, speaking of crazy, how many other blogs have "noose" and moose in their front page post titles at the same time? Not to mention Techno-Viking.)

Reposted from August, 2005

The Search for Alec Guiness

What are your favorite roles? The Horse's Mouth, Kind Hearts and Coronets, and of course, George Smiley (Tinker, Tailor is the best made for TV movie ever made, bar none - a masterpiece), are mine. Oh, also, Bridge Over the River Kwai. But who was he?

Piers Paul Reid's authorized biography is out, and it doesn't seem to answer the question. From the Boston Globe's review:

Piers Paul Read, a friend of Guinness's, was asked by the actor's widow to write this book, which is, in part, an assiduous record of the signal events and experiences in Guinness's life and career. There is the drunken, mendacious, cadging mother -- the great scourge of his life; the putative, though not positive, father paying for his support and education; the cruel stepfather; acting lessons with a stage legend who believed him to be one of the real Guinnesses; his debt to John Gielgud as a patron; courtship and marriage; wartime in the Royal Navy; and a recounting of his subsequent stage, movie, and TV career. All this is embedded in a stifling quantity of routine business on the lines of guest lists and restaurant expenses. Here we feel the authorized biographer's weary duty to comprehensiveness and his reluctance or inability to apply a shaping hand.

Read entire.

Reposted from 2005

A dog's view: It's seared - seared in my cultural-bio-psycho-social memory, just like Jung meant. Remember the George Papoon campaign? As I lie here on the kitchen floor, hoping some cherrries will fall off the plate, I am remembering that glorious "One Organism - One Vote"  campaign.

"Papoon for President - Not Insane"

We animals and other organisms lost that election, but it was a wonderful time back in 1970. The voting machines were designed to exclude and to discourage one-celled animals from voting. Gosh, Uncle Steve Post and those guys on WBAI....great stuff. A Revolution that failed. You human gods would be lying on the kitchen floor, being fed dry cardboard kibbles for supper, and we dogs would be going to work all dressed-up like dandies - wow - I mean bow-wow - and running the country. We figured that Papoon would get the massive bacteria and amoeba votes and that would turn the whole country into Greenish-Brown-Pond-Scum-colored states. Plus, if we were short a few votes, they could all just divide, and double their vote.

It's all from The Firesign Theater.

(By the way, can you name that breed in the photo?)

From Malanga in City Journal, a quote:

The new Religious Left is in one sense not new at all. It draws its inspiration from the Christian social-justice movement that formed in the mid-nineteenth century as a response to the emerging industrial economy, which many religious leaders viewed—with some justification—as brutal and unfair to workers. In America, the movement gained traction thanks largely to the efforts of Baptist minister Walter Rauschenbusch, who served New York City’s poor. Unlike nineteenth-century reformers who sought to help the poor by teaching them the bourgeois virtues of hard work, thrift, and diligence, Rauschenbusch believed that the best way to uplift the downtrodden was to redistribute society’s wealth and forge an egalitarian society. In Christ’s name, capitalism had to fall. “The Kingdom of God is a collective conception,” Rauschenbusch wrote in Christianity and the Social Crisis, politicizing the Gospel’s message. “It is not a matter of getting individuals to heaven, but of transforming the life on earth into the harmony of heaven.”

Sounds like Obama. The whole thing, The Religious Left, is here. 

I suspect this is a vocal, but not sizeable, group of people who will be given good media access despite their "theocratic" inclinations. The "Social Gospel," it seems to me, has very little to do with Christianity, which concerns itself with matters of the spirit and saving souls, and thus largely rejects earthly concerns about things like power as vain  distractions and temptations. I would steer clear of churches that do politics, and I believe that Dr. Dobson (who is truly wise on the subject of Christian child-rearing) is similarly foolish to get involved in political matters. It should be beneath their dignity.

Some further thoughts about The Barrister's fine post Freedom? No Thanks, and a word about Erich Fromm:

Freedom is about the relationship of the individual to the State. I think of freedom as being a zero-sum game: either freedom, and the heavy responsibilities that go with it, belong to the individual or the power belongs to the State (but that may be a bit too black-and-white).

Even in democracies, the State is not "the people" and is not "the nation." Institutions have a power-seeking dynamic of their own. Our Founders knew that - and rightly feared that.

Does "security from the vicissitudes of life," when provided by the State, result in a diminution of individual freedom? Our Libertarian-minded Barrister often speaks dramatically about "selling our birthright of liberty for a bowl of lentils."

Ed Driscoll quotes a piece by Orin Judd. A snippet:

...the importance of the responses to the Depression by both Hoover and Roosevelt lay in their decision to elevate a negative idea of Freedom, freedom from want, from hunger, from "the vicissitudes of life" above, and against, the traditional American ideal of republican Liberty. This shift from a government aimed at protecting Freedom to one designed to provide Security is the single most important thing that happened in 20th Century America.

This is why we sometimes refer to FDR, except for his role as a wartime leader, as the worst President of the US. In his noblesse oblige socialist fashion, he shifted the psychology of the nation to one in which people were encouraged to look to a government as parent (while grossly mis-managing the economy, and while viewing the Depression as a "market failure" rather than partly the consequence of mis-management).

I understand very well the human desire for security: emotional, material, physical, spiritual, etc. These are things most of us strive for. However, the psychological shift from "Uncle Sam" to "Mom and Dad" government has been momentous and has, I believe, weakened the American spirit by appealing to the dependent child inside all of us and the notion that somebody else can do it for us. Naturally, many politicians jump on this opportunity to win votes by the transfer of money from neighbor to neighbor.

We are ambivalent about freedom and autonomy, and our ambivalence is exploited by politicians. Even those who do not chose lives of wealth-seeking unashamedly covet the wealth of others through government programs and benefits - from corporate farmers to single moms to those on Social Security and Medicaid and Medicare and SCHIP to those on government pensions, etc. etc.

That is why we find ourselves in a place where people can complain, with a straight face, that "Bush doesn't care about the health of our children" - as if the care and feeding of our kids were the job of the federal government, instead of ours. The thought contains an infantile assumption and an infantile wish. The trend leads to a royal, if not god-like, view of the State, as if reality no longer counted, and as if the State had the power to immanentize the eschaton. As Robert Parker would say, "Pretty to think so."

The conservative JFK tried to reverse this trend. "Ask not..." was an appeal to the best in the country, an effort to right the ship, to redefine the country as something that depended on us, the people, rather than something we looked to for care and parenting. He was trying to say that "the country" is not "the government." He was saying that the duties of citizens of a free republic and large, and serious. But then we had Johnson.

Neoneo reminds me of her piece from Passover, 2006, In Celebration of Freedom. She quotes the immortal Dostoevsky in The Grand Inquisitor chapter of Brothers:

Oh, never, never can [people] feed themselves without us [the Inquisitors and controllers]! No science will give them bread so long as they remain free. In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet, and say to us, “Make us your slaves, but feed us.” They will understand themselves, at last, that freedom and bread enough for all are inconceivable together, for never, never will they be able to share between them! They will be convinced, too, that they can never be free, for they are weak, vicious, worthless, and rebellious. Thou didst promise them the bread of Heaven, but, I repeat again, can it compare with earthly bread in the eyes of the weak, ever sinful and ignoble race of man?

Addendum: Our blog pal Shrinkwrapped happily picked up on the theme with a thoughtful piece which focuses on the psychology of freedom - On Autonomy and Regression.

Late Addendum from Dr. Bliss:  Lest this post, with which I entirely agree, sound too heartless, we are entirely in favor of a safety net for the unlucky, the feckless, the mentally ill, and for those who, for whatever good reason, cannot make it in the modern world. We are not in favor of policies which put every able-bodied soul on the dole, and reduce them to political and literal serfdom. We resist anything which causes or tempts the able-bodied towards dependency in some way: that is not the American spirit nor does it do justice to the human spirit. Plus, if we do that, who will be motivated to take the risks and to create the wealth to pay those bills? That has been tried, and it failed, because of human nature. Governments cannot create wealth: they can only help create conditions under which people can create it. On the whole, humans will rise to challenge, but will take what they can get, if their pride and conscience permit.

Attack Machine can generally be counted on to independently post many of the same topics and the same links that we do. Our blog instincts are almost identical. Great minds, etc.

Case in point, a piece at One Cosmos which sits quite close to our metaphysics, skating past pure solipsism by positing and accepting God's existence. A quote:

There is nothing you can say about anything that isn’t laden with implicit or explicit metaphors, which is one of the reasons why it is so absurd for the materialist to object to spirituality, since the idea of solid matter is itself a sort of airy metaphor, just a fanciful concept based upon the illusions of our nervous system, illusions like “solidity” or unambiguous “place.” Scientists often conflate the abstract and the concrete, and essentially extend the concretions of the nervous system into an abstract worldview. Which is fine, so long as you don’t confuse them with metaphysical truth, or with the Ultimate Real.

For their part, so-called fundamentalist religionists often do the reverse, which is to say, concretize the abstract. But only God can really do that, since the cosmos itself is none other than a concretion in a small corner of the Divine Mind. As mentioned a couple of days ago, one of the purposes of scripture — which employs countless metaphors and other seemingly concrete images — is to follow it back upstream to its hidden source, the “place” from which revelation perpetually flows like a spring from the ground. Indeed, the place from which language itself flows.

Photo: A girlfriend of Theo, studying one of Gagdad Bob's books and wondering whether her existence is what it seems.

Newts have unusual life-cycles. Actually, this is a photo of a Red Eft I took yesterday. Red Efts are the land-dwelling intermediate form of our Eastern Red Spotted Newt.

They go from egg to gilled young newt to Red Eft on land and then, after a few years, back to adult air-breathing, breeding water newt.

Saw many of them yesterday in our Hemlock groves up above the beaver marsh, poking around the leaf litter on the balmy October day. They are surely only days away from hibernation deep in the leaf litter. 

Although they look like Gummy Salamanders, their orange color announces their toxicity to predators. Cute little critters that provide instant good cheer when seen.

We at Maggie's Farm would never publicly admit to aspirations to grandeur. Life's harsh schoolmistress teaches us humility daily.

We know we are destined to be a boutique blog, with a certain sensibility and many shortcomings which will prevent us from becoming mass market. Plus we do not have the time, or, really, the motivation, for fresh reporting. Furthermore, we do not bother with ads which would only compllcate our taxes for little gain, while compressing our space.

It is encouraging, though, for us to view our growth in an international blogosphere which is overloaded with interesting things to read. And yes, I know we post too much, too often. That is one of our many flaws.

According to our internal stats, we are running an average of about 4000 visits/weekday. In September, 145,000 visits and over a half-million page views. (Multiple visits do not count - and we get happily get plenty of 'em.)  We quit looking at our millions of hits per month, which mean little. We are small, but not invisible. Our average length of stay is 3-4 minutes, which is very long for any blog or website: it either means that we are interesting... or that our visitors are slow readers.

The less-accurate Sitemeter shows a lower number, but nonetheless shows a steady pattern of growth: we have never had a month without readership growth since we began keeping stats in March, 2006 - unless you count the occasional months following mega-links. The graph looks good, and tells us that the market for Maggie's Farm is not yet saturated.

And don't even ask about those old Truth Laid Bare rankings. That site hasn't updated us since 2006, despite several emails to them, so I think they are non-functional as a source of blog data. Let's just say that we are the Eastern Box Turtle of the Blogosphere.

If you like us, and know folks who might also enjoy us - even if they do not agree with our politics - send us around. We know there are plenty of people out there who might like Maggie's, but have never stumbled upon us. We welcome civil, informed debate, disagreement, and genteel correction, and, in fact, we are never truly certain about most of our bold assertions.

One more thought: Leave a comment on a post if you have a thought to share. Don't be shy. We read most of 'em, sooner or later. Our commenting is easy: no illegible letters to type in for security. Our high-tech anti-spam takes care of that for us.

Photo: The mascot of Maggie's Farm: A very young Eastern Box Turtle, a cheerful, slow and steady critter who likes rainy days and eats almost anything. At this time of year, they are fattening up for a long hibernation. Around here, they spend half of their life cozily buried in restful hibernation - October to April or May.

In the UK, Moslem youth advised to use violence against the Infidel. h/t, Insty. That, my Brit cousins, is called an "insurgency."

All the love and sensitivity in the world will not fix it any more than they can cure cancer - because people want to erase you not for what you do, but for what you are.

And just a brief question off-topic: Does Glenn Reynolds really have a day job? If he does, even if it's teaching at the law school, how does he find time to find - and to post - so much interesting stuff, day after day?

Israeli astronaut Ilan Ramon died in the blow-up of the Columbia. Among his gear was a drawing of the earth, from beyond the moon, by Petr Ginz, a Czech author, pamphleteer (he would be a blogger today), and drawer of pictures who was killed in Auschwitz in 1942 at the age of 16.

Petr never ceased believing that he and his young friends would be rescued. His sister survived the Holocaust. The story of Petr is in The Diary of Petr Ginz.