Maggie's Farm

This urgent item came in over the transom:

Most of you have read the scare-mail about the person whose kidneys were stolen while he was passed out. While the kidney story was an urban legend, this one is not. It's happening every day in America.

My thighs were stolen from me during the night a few years ago. It was just that quick. I went to sleep in my body and woke up with someone else's thighs. The new ones had the texture of cooked oatmeal. Who would have done such a cruel thing to legs that had been mine for years? Whose thighs were these and what happened to mine? I spent the entire summer looking for my thighs. Finally, hurt and angry, I resigned myself to living out my life in jeans and Sheer Energy pantyhose. Then, just when my guard was down, the thieves struck again.

My ass was next. I knew it was the same gang, because they took pains to match my new rear end to the thighs they stuck me with earlier. I couldn't believe that my new ass was attached at least three inches lower than my original. Now, my rear complemented my legs, lump for lump. Frantic, I prayed that long skirts would stay in fashion.

It was two years ago when I realized my arms had been switched. One morning I was fixing my hair and I watched horrified but fascinated as the flesh of my upper arms swung to and fro with the motion of the hairbrush. This was really getting scary. My body was being replaced one section at a time. How clever and fiendish.

Age? Age had nothing to do with it. Age is supposed to creep up, unnoticed, something like maturity. No, I was being attacked repeatedly and without warning. In despair, I gave up my T-shirts. What could they do to me next?

My poor neck suddenly disappeared faster than the Thanksgiving turkey it now resembled.

That's why I decided to tell my story. I can't take on the medical profession by myself. Women of the world, wake up and smell the coffee. That really isn't plastic that those surgeons are using. You KNOW where they are getting those replacement parts, don't you? The next time you suspect someone has had a face "lifted," look again. Was it lifted from you?

This is not a hoax. This is happening to women in every town every night.

WARN YOUR FRIENDS!

P.S. I must say that last year I thought someone had stolen my breasts. I was lying in bed and they were gone! As I jumped out of bed, I was relieved to see that they had just been hiding in my armpits as I slept.

Now I keep them hidden in my waistband where no-one can find the,.

Image: Photo of the author of the above warning, prior to theft of body parts.

Depending on how you count it, Maggie's Farm is either one or two years old today. Our first year was under the radar - no sitemeter, no stats, etc. - invisible, in the womb.

So we could call this our First Official Birthday. All of us farm slaves spend all of the time we are not busy plowing and pruning fruit trees and milking the chickens and feeding the cows and sucking the sap out of Sugar Maples and popping rats at the dump, chained to our PCs in the Maggie's Farm unheated basement amidst squealing mice, flaking asbestos, toxic molds of all sorts, an oil-soaked dirt floor, and dripping pipes, illuminated only by smoking lamps fueled with old recycled tractor oil, required to either Think or Link for our daily allottments of gruel. Yep, "Think or Link." That's what the sign says that hangs from the creaking, termite-infested rafters. Consider that setting when you read us. Those are not tear stains on these pages - they are spots from leaks from the water pipes overhead. Well, most of them.

The best present we could receive: Call the SWAT Team and get us out of here Let all your friends, enemies, neighbors, bosses, underlings, kids, colleagues, etc. know about Maggie's. A shame for them to miss out on this pretty good thing. And if you are a blogger, throw us a blogroll. It's a vanity thing. If you are a reader, please leave comments. Sometimes our comment threads contain certain glimmers of humor, and indications - if not proof - of human intelligence. Thanks to our current regular commenters (all highly bribed paid for their work). Other readers: don't be shy. If you have a minute, pitch in. We will pay you equally well.

Our mission is simple: To provide a steady stream of stuff that interests or amuses or enrages or delights us, with no ads, with complete free speech and total indifference to the political correctness of the moment, with total independence, with irreverence towards all, with a dose of skepticism towards everything except the US Constitution, and with a deep gratitude for the founders, the traditions, the foundations, and the blessed but shrinking freedom from state power in the USA - and most of all for the God of our Fathers. The official Maggie's Farm hymn (midi music file on link) was written for the Centennial celebration of July 4th:

Thanks for visiting us, and thanks to Green Mountain Boy Chris for keeping us up and running. Onward and upward.

Note that we post pieces on climate under Politics, not Conservation and Natural History. We place it where it belongs.

MIT Climate scientist calls warming fears "silly," in debate with Bill Nye. h/t, Junk Science. Bill Nye cannot stand up to an MIT Climatologist. Nye drank the Kool-Aid, but has no facts.

From November, Lord Monckton wrote Apocalypse Cancelled for The Telegraph. He goes over the issues in detail. h/t, Small Dead Polar Bears.

And, speaking of Polar Bears, they seem to be thriving in all of the sweltering heat. Also, about those famous bears on the ice floe: that's what Polar Bears do. They hang out on ice floes. They aren't stranded - it's normal for them. Althouse

From stem-cell harvesting, to abortion on demand, to triage (as in the UK: "too expensive to bother treating"), to physician-assisted suicide for the terminally-ill, we see the steady march of a soul-less scientific rationalism.

I believe it is fear of that march which energizes the "crazy fundamentalists" who are not comfortable with treating human life as a disposable object.

Now we see the practical Swiss planning to add mental illness to the list of diseases which will have physician-assisted suicide available. "Suicidally depressed? Hey - we can help!" Who's next on their list? Diabetics? Drug addicts? The unemployed?

Sometimes a slippery slope is a slippery slope. How soon until Denmark and Holland have suicide teams roaming the hospitals (now often called "Death Services"), urging ill people to unburden society of their expensive and inconvenient problems? I can even see the ads: "Do it for the greater good", with some sort of happy, serene image of a smiling middle-aged lady floating on a fluffy cloud. Harp music, of course.

As a low moves up from the south into New England this afternoon, promising to bring a bit of snow and ice with it, the birds out my window are getting ready before darkness falls. I have rarely seen so much activity.

A small flock of around 10 robins are hitting the holly berries and the rose hips hard, and tossing leaves in a leaf pile around like crazy, looking for bugs. Juncos all around, and white-throated sparrows are scratching little pits in the garden mulch. A fat and handsome flicker came within two feet of my window, trying to get his beak into the half-frozen garden soil next to the foundation. Best of all, a Hermit Thrush. He was eating some of the holly berries, and generally poking around.

Except for robins, the Hermit is our hardiest thrush. His rusty tail diagnoses him and, in summer, his song.

Read about the Hermit Thrush here, (CLO) from which the image is borrowed.

Just got off the phone with our Webmeister Chris. Here's what I learned about the Denial of Service (DOS) "attack" which we have been dealing with on and off since Thursday, and which has made access for our readers intermittently difficult or, today, impossible.

We have been subjected to what is termed a DOS Botnet Attack, consisting mainly of lengthy black market drug advertisements, containing multiple links, directed to our trackback system and to our commenting system (which is why they are shut down at the moment). A "bot" is, of course, a robotic software program.

Chris determined that this attack is coming from China, India, Japan, and Korea, simultaneously. It is probably a criminal consortium of some sort - and a large one. DOS attacks are not designed to damage specific sites, and they are not designed to result in a DOS - after all, that would defeat the purpose, which is advertising. Like any parasite, a bot is not intended to kill its host - just to feed off it. Just like the Welfare State.

It might be a bit chewy for a Monday morning, but Bob at One Cosmos has the answer. You know you want it, as the beer man says at Yankee Stadium.

He does get into Schopenhauer a bit:

"If I take away the thinking subject, the whole material world must vanish, as this world is nothing but the phenomenal appearance in the sensibility of our own subject, and is a species of the subject's representations."

I think I exist to drink wine and to wonder why I exist, after work. After a few wines, one wonders whether one does exist at all, and whether "I" is an illusion. Sometimes, I wonder why other things, like ham sandwiches, exist. The cosmos itself just gives me vertigo.

Image: From the Hubbell scope

The Duke humanities faculty have everything figured out, don't they? Allen in The Weekly Standard:

"The faculty enabled Nifong," Baldwin said in an interview. "He could say, 'Here's a significant portion of the arts and sciences faculty who feel this way, so I can go after these kids because these faculty agree with me.' It was a mutual attitude."

Indeed, it was the Duke faculty that could be said to have cooked up the ambient language that came to clothe virtually all media descriptions of the assault case--that boilerplate about "race, gender, and class" (or maybe "race, gender, sexuality, and class") and "privileged white males" that you could not read a news story about the assault case without encountering, whether in the New York Times, the Washington Post, or Newsweek for example. The journalists channeled the academics.

Although outsiders know Duke mostly as an expensive preppie enclave that fields Division I athletic teams, the university's humanities and social sciences departments--literature, anthropology, and especially women's studies and African-American studies--foster exactly the opposite kind of culture. Those departments (and especially Duke's robustly "postmodern" English department, put in place by postmodernist celebrity Stanley Fish before his departure in 1998) are famous throughout academia as repositories of all that is trendy and hyper-politicized in today's ivy halls: angry feminism, ethnic victimology, dense, jargon-laden analyses of capitalism and "patriarchy," and "new historicism"--a kind of upgraded Marxism that analyzes art and literature in terms of efforts by powerful social elites to brainwash everybody else.

The Duke University Press is the laughingstock of the publishing world, offering such titles as Appropriating Blackness: Performance and the Politics of Authenticity and An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality and Lesbian Public Cultures. Phrases such as "race, gender, and class" and "privileged white males" come as second nature to the academics who do this kind of writing, which analyzes nearly all social phenomena in terms of race, gender, class, and white male privilege. A couple of months after the lacrosse party, Karla F.C. Holloway, a professor of English and African-American studies at Duke, published a reflection on the incident titled "Coda: Bodies of Evidence" in an online feminist journal sponsored by Barnard College. "Judgments about the issues of race and gender that the lacrosse team's sleazy conduct exposed cannot be left to the courtroom," Holloway wrote. "Despite the damaging logic that associates the credibility of a socio-cultural context to the outcome of the legal process, we will find that even as the accusations that might be legally processed are confined to a courtroom, the cultural and social issues excavated in this upheaval linger."

There was a fascinating irony in this. Postmodern theorists pride themselves in discerning what they call "metanarratives." They argue that such concepts as, say, Christianity or patriotism or the American legal system are no more than socially constructed tall tales that the postmodernists can then "deconstruct" to unmask the real purpose behind them, which is (say the postmodernists) to prop up societal structures of--yes, you guessed it--race, gender, class, and white male privilege.

Read the whole thing. And wonder, like me, how long it will take for this sort of academic to be "unmasked" as no more than cynical, bitter, and ignorant careerists, with interest in neither truth nor beauty.

Are there two Dukes? Because one does not encounter such soul-less people in the stands at Cameron Indoor Stadium.