Maggie's Farm

I feel badly about the climbers, and their families...but...if you want to climb Mt. Hood in December, get rescue insurance and have a rescue plan in place in case it is needed.

Either that, or sign something comparable to a DNR note: "We accept the risk, and we're on our own." Along with generous life insurance which covers it, to take care of your kids' educations.

Mt. Hood has no guardrails, and no McDonalds. It is a dead-serious deal, and everyone knows that. The danger is the appeal.

Why should the citizens of Oregon subsidize macho stunts like these with their hard-earned taxes? Isn't the whole point of climbing to risk life and limb? To encounter mortal danger when life is otherwise so soft, safe and protected? To find a trail without guardrails? To find a place where you cannot be rescued, and cannot find a McDonalds or a mall, and must face nature's harsh face?

I have had just two friends who "climb." One saw his mother fall to her death on the Matterhorn (photo). The other saw his best friend fall to his death in a snow-covered crevasse in Alaska, and roped down to pull up the mangled body. Neither of them "climb" anymore: unpleasant memories.

Death, when voluntarily courting mortal danger, is not a tragedy. It might be heroic, as in war, or an accepted risk, but not tragic: in our cozy, modern American life, you have to go well out of your way, and spend serious money, to find serious risk - unless you do something stupid and emotional like stepping on thin ice, or trying to outsmart the stock market. There is no tragic flaw involved.

On Everest, you are on your own, and it is strewn with freeze-dried bodies as memento mori. I admire folks who take on such adventures. I do not care for heights, however. If you want a safe, comfy vacation, go to Tinsley World instead of Mt. Hood, or take a walk around the neighborhood with the pup and the camera.

If you die on a mountain, we will remember you as someone with cojones, but not as tragic. People die on mountains all the time, but it only makes the news during slow news weeks. Hope the last two are OK, and that they can find another hobby.

It is painful for many old-time ornery New Hampshire Yankees to watch their state change.

But there are less of those folks now, relatively speaking. Two-thirds of NH residents were born outside of the state, and arrive with different values, and different politics.

It's a sad thing for other Yankees, too, who have counted on NH to hold the fort for traditional Yankee values of endurance, thrift, honor, independence, grumpiness, and the Live Free or Die spirit which basically wants to tell the govt to f-off.

Story about it in the CSM.

Image is Robert Frost's farmhouse.

Britain's clever triangulator, who learned how to do it at the feet of the master, Bill Clinton, delivered a much-appreciated speech on immigration. Excerpts, plus the whole thing, on video at Flopping Aces (h/t, Sisu).

But was it really a speech which abandoned the notion of multiculturalism? Auster doubts it, as do I. I think he is trying to straddle the fence. Nevertheless, the speech was right. But like all talented politicians, you never know what they believe - if anything: everything they say is part of a game.

Addendum. Our commenter says:

We now have more evidence of global warming on Mars than we do on the earth. As the ice melts, it is causing harmful erosion, and soon the beautiful natural deserts may be under ten feet of water, thus destroying potential happy habitats for camels and Arabs. (Nice for the Dutch, though, who prefer to live in swamps, below sea level.)

There may be a risk that Martian craters, now in their pristine natural form, may fill with water and be destroyed like Crater Lake in the image. Water vapor will doubtless add to the heat-trapping of Martian warming, and erosion will release more CO2 from the soil and rocks, creating a true crisis for Martian planetary stability. An atmosphere means weather, and weather means bad weather, like Katrina.

Thus the policy of environmental destruction continues unabated under Bush. But what can we, as individuals, do to save the Martian environment from further degradation? More recycling and more car-pooling are fun places to start.

Another good idea is to have a neighborhood "Save the Martian Environment Party." Serve Mars-friendly hors doeuvres and snacks, and exchange ideas about what we all can do to save the Martian environment. Remember: No idea is wrong! It's fun, and Mars-friendly!

(Editor's Note: "Neighborhood Save the Martian Environment Party" is a UN trademark. Used with permission. "No idea is wrong" is a trademark of the US Department of Education. Also a shared international trademark of the EU Department of The People's Education, Sub-Directorate of Empathy, Pity and Condescension, Sub-sub Division of Cheerful Slogans For the Ignorant Masses. Used with permission, of course.)

(Editor's Second Note: Our most humble apologies to the Dutch, and all those of Dutch extraction and to the entire Dutch community, who might have been offended, or felt insulted, by any unintentional negative connotations regarding flooding of Martian land. We know the Dutch would know how to deal with Martian flooding, and supportively and admiringly invite them to give it a try - you go straight up in the air, then take a hard left at the Moon. That will take you right there. It's the big red thing on the right, just before the Asteroid Belt.)

All we want at Maggie's Farm are more links, more blogrolls, and more readers.

For readers, we have a fine cadre of congnoscenti, who are hip to our deal and down wid us. You all have a capacity for irony - which means a decent IQ.

But, for Christmas, we want a mass market, like Michelle and Glenn. No - we want to be bigger than them: we want to be Glenn and Michelle and Kos and Powerline combined, and invited to the White House for chats! But, sadly, we just aren't good enough for that dream. Delusions of grandeur!

We don't even want money...well, we do want money, but we expect none from Maggy. She is cheap: we work for free. Galley slaves! Rescue us!

Please, Santa! We will be a one year-old blog (or two, really, depending on whether you count it from when we signed up with Truth Laid Bear) in February. 

Blogroll us, and link us, for Christmas!

We are sorta, kinda unique. Email us to your million intelligent, skeptical, inquiring friends, who might be deprived of their Daily Maggie's - to their detriment.

Gift-wrapping included! And the price is right! What a fine gift!

I know you all have been waiting eagerly. We have promised this exam for many months, but today is a good day for it. All beasts have been featured on Maggie's Farm. Multiple choice!

Answers on continuation page, for you slackers. Here it is:

1. The animal below is a: Holstein, Texas Longhorn,  Auroch,  Swiss Angus

 2. The beast below is a: Shetland Shorthorn, Bison, Yak, Musk Ox

 3. The animal below is a: Jersey, Guernsey, Brown Swiss, Shorthorn

 4. The animals below are: Black Angus, Holstein, Jersey, Auroch

 5. The beast below is a: Holstein, Hereford, Shetland Pony, Gateway Logo

 6. The critter below is a: Big MF, Brown Swiss, Shorthorn, Polled Hereford

 7. The creature below is a: Holstein, Mottled Swiss, Guernsey, Holstein

8. The nasty creature below is a: Cow, Cat, Goat, Bird

 9. The giant beast below is a: Longhorn, Shorthorn, Spanish, Hereford Bull

 10. The milker below is a: Dark and Stormy, Brown Swiss, Shetland Shorthorn, Limousin

 11. The happy animals below are: Black Angus, Brown Swiss, Polled Herefords, Brown Swiss

 12. This gentle and friendly animal is a: Water Buffalo, European Bison, Cape Buffalo, Yak

 13. A hard one: This breed of beef cattle is: Hereford, Shorthorn. Limousin, Charolais

14.  An Ox is a(n): older bull, older steer, breed of cattle, word for a big cow

15. There are how many surviving species of wild bovines? 3, 7, 12, 17

16. "Polled" means: they grow large horns, they don't grow horns, they are born without testicles, their horns are cut off.

17. This is a:  Polled Hostein, Apache Ghost Cow, Limousin, Charolais

18. Wuzzat?

No fresh postings today, because your Editor Dog in Chief, along with most of the Maggie's Farm crew, are working on an annual fund-raising event for our Ducks Unlimited Sponsor's Dinner tonight, and setting-up takes all day.

By 6 pm, we will be ready to receive an onslaught of 180 well-dressed guys with an open bar, and a fine steak dinner later, with about 70 cool raffle items, 30 Live Auction items including stuff like a 10-day African Hunting Safari for four, and 9 days in Morocco for two with a full-time guide, and dove shooting in Argentina for three days. Even a wild boar hunt in Texas, and a traditional layout duck hunt on Long Island, and other equally cool stuff like his-and-her Rolexes, and lots of guns, too.

The place will be decorated for Christmas. Like modern-day Christmas, our event is a jolly, earthly, material festivity with a spiritual purpose.

For many people on the left and right coasts, DU is not as familiar as it is in the heartland of the US and Canada, but with over 11 million acres of wildlife habitat under protection, and over 800,000 members, it is a big organization, and does nothing but good works, with minimal lobbying, and no political action.

Contrary to the impression of some, DU isn't all about ducks - it's all about protection of fragile and threatened habitats which support all sorts of critters and birds. While probably most members of DU rarely hunt, DU does have a bit of a hunting flavor to it.

Why? Good hunters know the land, and have a feel for it, like the Indians did. The wise ones know the plants and trees and birds and the geography and the habitats. Hunters are the most serious conservationists, because they really get out there, off the beaten path and into the wild world. Your average "greeny" rarely loses their boot in a bog, or surprises a moose in a meadow, gets near-frostbite in a duckboat at 4 AM in a January snow, awaiting sunrise, or watches a red fox trotting home in the early morning from their tree stand, or even sees a Woodcock twitter through the birches. It isn't an abstraction when a subdivision destroys your favorite grouse cover, or fills in your favorite duck swamp "for the tax revenue".

All of us Maggie's Farmers consider DU worthy of our effort and our giving. We consider it part of good stewardship - good citizenship, and it's good fun too.

You can read all about DU here.

The Vikings are returning in their ships to Ireland, reports Blue Crab. Very cool, but it's not really a very difficult passage, in good weather.

The Norsemen terrorized the British Isles during the dark ages, raping, burning, killing and pillaging...all the fun stuff Vikings liked to do, but also settling and colonizing, to some extent, until the French-speaking Norsemen of Normandy finally took the whole place over in 1066, more or less.

Monks huddled on top of inaccessible places like Skellig Michael to elude them, and dedicated their lives to prayer and the copying of the ancient classical writings.

We first learned about Skellig Michael on the old PBS Civilization series by Lord Kenneth Clark (that was good TV - every kid should see it). And then more in Thomas Cahill's wonderful How the Irish Saved Civilization. I like all of Cahill's stuff, especially Desire of the Everlasting Hills: The World Before and After Jesus.

I have been to Skellig Michael. Took the little fishing boat out there and climbed those endless narrow stone-cut, railing-less, acrophobia-inducing steps almost to the top, where their stone huts still sit in the wind and clouds. Would not recommend going to Ireland without going down there.

Image: A view from Skellig Michael.

The most interesting book I've read this year - George Marsden's recent biography of Jonathan Edwards. I am about halfway through it, but find it difficult to put down. (It won the Bancroft Prize.)

Marsden weaves late colonial history, theology, Edward's complex life (his struggles with faith, struggles with temptation, struggles with character flaws, his depressions, his never-resting intelligence), and the daily life of the times into a darn good tale. And Marsden does know his theology.

Connecticut's Edwards (1703-1758) is one of the most compelling and important figures in American history - probably more important than the Founding Fathers: he helped lay the cultural foundation on which the national institutions were constructed. I see him as the evolutionary link between the Puritan Pilgrims and the world of the Founders. His view of the world was far better known in the colonies in 1776 than were the works of John Locke - or of anyone else: sermons were best-sellers in those days. Isolated: not really.

Did Edwards read Locke? You bet. Locke was his great inspiration (except for scripture), at Yale (then a divinity school). Newton and Rousseau too: these New Englanders were plugged into the latest European thinking.

His life and preaching remain a part of America's national DNA. As theologian, theological logician, preacher, and the preeminant evangelist of the Great Awakening, he has been and remains the dominant figure in the history of American religious life - and a major international figure, too, because of his role in the worldwide movement that puritan Reform (Calvinism) represented.

So he is well worth reading about.

From the Booklist review:

In the first full critical biography of Edwards in 60 years, a distinguished Notre Dame scholar humanizes America's greatest colonial clergyman, a man highly esteemed in his own time but since singled out for decades of abuse by Puritan-bashers. To be sure, Edwards' brimstone pulpit rhetoric (most famously deployed in his 1741 sermon "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God") offends modern sensibilities. But Marsden--drawing heavily on recent scholarship--restores Edwards to an eighteenth-century New England where most shared his doctrines, though few could rival him in the power with which he preached them. Exceptional insight shines through a felicitous style as Marsden recounts how Edwards acquired that power, the intellectual rigor of his Yale studies gradually lending force to his intense spiritual vision. His rare gifts enabled Edwards to kindle the Great Awakening, emblazoning his name on the pages of American history.

A quote from Marsden's excellent Introduction:

Historians of the United States have been prone to give much more attention to Benjamin Franklin than to Edwards as a progenitor of modern America. That is understandable because Franklin seems so congenially to represent tendencies that triumph in mainstream American life and politics. Yet a good case can be made that stories of America are deficient if they do not at least temper emphasis on the Franklins of the heritage with a serious reckoning with its Edwardses. Most strikingly, the modern narratives fail to account for why levels of religious practice came to be so much higher in the United States than in other modernized nations. They also do little to explain why evangelical Christianity  flourished in America and why its revivalist style became one of America's leading exports.

So-called "nice weather" doesn't mean a thing to real Yankees.

We exult in challenging weather, and love to go out in it to do things. Indeed, we look down on the "soft,"  who want life to be easy, overly comfortable, over-heated, and overly safe.

We like hard stuff, and we like to teach ourselves discipline. We do not respect the soft, lazy, easy parts ourselves - and rightly so. But we do not disdain good sex or good wine or good company. Even mediocre wine. And neither did the Puritans, as they were disparagingly termed.

Furthermore, we are raised to expect life to bang us up, draw some blood, break our hearts, make us shiver in the wet cold sleet, rust our guns, damage our faith, strain our capacities, get us lost in the financial, spiritual, metaphysical, or literal woods, disappoint our fondest hopes and dreams, make us hurt by friends and injured by enemies, drag us towards sin and pride, face us with risk, hand us loneliness and doubt, confront us with danger, add sorrow to our basket of sorrows, and even to kill some of us.

But we must give thanks for the chance to engage all of it, for better or worse, as best we can, with such gifts and such weaknesses as we are given. Can we take delight in the moments of joy and pleasure? Of course. But those are the exceptions: the dessert, the country pies of life.

No God promised us a rose garden: only politicans do that. God gave us mainly a chance for salvation of our souls - and interesting weather, and an interesting, complex, difficult life, to contend with, without all of the tools we really need....except the ablility to connect with God's love, if we want to. It's about Grace.

When ye olde brain is hungy for a completely new thought or piece of info, ye olde fingertips often click on One Cosmos or, in this case, on View From 1776 in which, in a discussion of social contracts, he quotes from FDR in 1944 asserting something that I did not know had ever been so clearly spoken:

We have accepted, so to speak, a second Bill of Rights under which a new basis of security and prosperity can be established for all – regardless of station, race, or creed.  Among these are: The right to a useful and remunerative job in the industries, or shops or farms or mines of the Nation; The right to earn enough to provide adequate food and clothing and recreation; The right of every farmer to raise and sell his products at a return which will give him and his family a decent living; The right of every businessman, large and small, to trade in an atmosphere of freedom from unfair competition and domination by monopolies at home or abroad; The right of every family to a decent home; The right to adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health; The right to adequate protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident, and unemployment; The right to a good education. 

This guy ran for President four times and tried to control the Supreme Court in ways no-one had before or has since, but I will not launch into an anti-FDR rant right now. It is just interesting to see how he invented a "second bill of rights" out of whole cloth and, in the process, undermined the entire independent, family-centered American way of life.

"We have accepted, so to speak..." Huh? What? This is noblesse oblige in its most insidious, malignant form, with the royal "we." I'm the prole, you are the Great Benefactor, right?

Another question: How come they never include free legal care on the lists? That would seem basic for a country with rule by law.

How many people still believe that this sort of stuff is actually in the Constitution?

It's criminal that we have neglected P.J. O'Rourke on Maggie's Farm. He deserves plenty of free advertising.

We have read every book he has written, with great amusement, and we have even publicly indicated a half-serious interest in hunting grouse and woodcock with him in New Brunswick.

The subject of P. J. comes up becomes Wizbang has been thinking about humorous conservatives, and those folks seem to enjoy New Hampshire's P.J. as much as we do.

And, to save us the trouble, Wizbang has an archived quote from All the Trouble in the World, which is good fun:

Back in London, I was having dinner in the Groucho Club -- this week's in-spot for what's left of Britain's lit gritz and nouveau rock riche -- when one person started in on the Stars And Stripes. Eventually he got, as the Europeans always do, to the part about "your country's never been invaded." (This fellow had been two during the Blitz, you see.) "You don't know the horror, the suffering. You think war is..."
I snapped.
"A John Wayne movie," I said. That's what you were going to say, wasn't it? We think war is a John Wayne movie. We think life is a John Wayne movie -- with good guys and bad guys, as simple as that. Well, you know something, Mister Limey Poofter? You're right. And let me tell you who those bad guys are. They're us. WE BE BAD.
We're the baddest-ass sons of bitches that ever jogged in Reeboks. We're three-quarters grizzly bear and two-thirds car wreck and descended from a stock market crash on our mother's side. You take your Germany, France and Spain, roll them all together and it wouldn't give us room to park our cars. We're the big boys, Jack, the original, giant, economy-sized, new and improved butt kickers of all time. When we snort coke in Houston, people lose their hats in Cap D'Antibes. And we've got an American Express card credit limit higher than your piss-ant metric numbers go.
"You say our country's never been invaded? You're right, little buddy. Because I'd like to see the needle-dicked foreigners who'd have the guts to try. We drink napalm to get our hearts started in the morning. A rape and a mugging is our way of saying 'Cheerio.' Hell can't hold our sock-hops. We walk taller, talk louder, spit further, fuck longer and buy more things than you know the names of. I'd rather be a junkie in a New York City jail than king, queen, and jack of all you Europeans. We eat little countries like this for breakfast and shit them out before lunch."
Of course, the guy should have punched me. But this was Europe. He just smiled his shabby, superior European smile. (God, don't these people have dentists?)

There's an entertaining interview with him here. And also in Cigar Afficionado.