Maggie's Farm

I heard the NYT's Frank Rich interviewed on 770 radio this morning, by Mark Simone, about Rich's new best-seller, The Greatest Story Ever Sold.

Rich is no dummy, but he is a knee-jerk partisan. For example, when Simone pointed out that the Clinton administration viewed Iraq in the same way - as a global threat and as a threat to the US, Rich dismisses that as irrelevant.

Rich's main point seems to be that the war was "sold" on the basis of flawed intel because the neos wanted the war. Of course the war was "sold" - leaders always have to "sell" wars because civilized people hate war. FDR was one of the great Music Men of world history. He could sell almost anything, but even he needed Pearl Harbor to "sell" the US on the war that he had long wanted us in, in Europe.

Bush couldn't sell water in a desert.

But Rich wants to talk about the flawed intel about Iraq's threat. Fine - it was flawed. But intel is always flawed. In life, we always act on incomplete information. This flawed intel was believed by the UN, the US, Britain, France, Germany, and Russia. You have to go on what you have, and you have make a decision. The buck stops somewhere. And the risks of inaction, in life, are usually comparable to the risks of action, even though passively-inclined folks are reluctant to accept that fact about life.

Odd, is it not, that so many are prepared to take us back to the stone age because of highly speculative and politically-driven ideas about man-made global warming - but those same folks don't want to see the danger of the Moslem imperialism which is on the front pages every day?

Were the neos biased towards nation-building in the Middle East? You bet. They still see it as the best path towards peace and long-term stability in the Middle East. Is it a fantasy? I don't know. But I still think Clinton would have gone into Iraq if he had had the stomach for it (and, if he had, I have no doubt that Rich would have defended that decision).

Based on the interview, the most important flaw in Rich's case against the war in Iraq is that he does not put it in context of global Moslem imperialism, of which Jihad is one particularly malignant piece. Rich does not want to talk about Afghanistan, or Iran, or the whole "circle of fire" -from Chechnya to the Balkans to Lebanon to Somalia to Indonesia to Thailand - that Bernard Lewis talks about all the time. Not relevant. What? It has even reached France, now. And gee, I almost forgot - New York City and London too. It's getting to be a big circle.

Iraq, like all wars, was/is debatable - especially with 20-20 hindsight. Saddam foolishly called the UN's and Bush's bluff, and discovered that it was no bluff. "Don't mess with Texas."

Thus in the spirit of Dr. Sanity and others, and borrowing the idiom of Al Gore, I will use the term "Jihad Deniers." Is Islamic imperialism a serious danger to us or not? That is what it all comes down to. Clearly Rich, in his current positioning, thinks it isn't. Many will wish to agree with him - until the next catastrophic attack brings the truth home again that it's not all about oil, and that it's too big for the police.

But if you think it's all about oil, then don't be a hypocrite - quit driving and flying. And if you believe it's all about the Jews - then dump Israel overboard (down the well?). But, IMO, neither of those would help one bit. Oil wealth is what funds Jihad - especially from the Saudis: it ain't about poverty - it's about wealth, power, and religion. A war of cultures, as they say. But the world will not give up their Texas tea until it runs out, and that will not be for a few centuries, at least.

I think it is a danger. Not a threat to get hysterical about, and yet a threat to be forceful about and to use force to address. Every detail may be debatable - as was regime change in Iraq - but the guesstimation of threat is the bottom line.

Jihad will continue to be a danger to the world, long after Iraq is finished. Our debates will continue, as they should, but shameful partisan sniping - gotcha games - is not honest and serious debate. Our governments and our military will be facing these issues for many years: our protection is the main reason we have hired them (the Left seems to always want to forget that is what national governments are for - we could do everything else we might want to do locally), but we cannot expect perfection from them.

Clinton and Albright tried the limp-wristed approach, and it didn't work out well. Bush is having trouble too, by trying to wage a "limited, compassionate" war. Who has a better idea, other than dhimmitude?

Dr. Sanity gets it. Please read her piece: it's a classic. You go, girl.

And, by the way, Christ did not say that money is the root of evil. He did probably express the idea that love of money is the root of evil. The point being that love of anything more than love of God was a path to hell and a path to a rotten life. Indeed, in Christianity, loving anything or anyone more than God is sin. Luke 9:

57 As they were going along the road, someone said to Him, "I will follow You wherever You go."

58 And Jesus said to him, "The foxes have holes and the birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay His head."

59 And He said to another, " Follow Me." But he said, "Lord, permit me first to go and bury my father."

60 But He said to him, "Allow the dead to bury their own dead; but as for you, go and proclaim everywhere the kingdom of God."

61 Another also said, "I will follow You, Lord; but first permit me to say good-bye to those at home."

62 But Jesus said to him, " No one, after putting his hand to the plow and looking back, is fit for the kingdom of God."

A very demanding fellow, Jesus. Christianity invites us to be "in the world, but not of it."

I think money, especially spare money, is a wonderful thing and the route to personal power, autonomy, freedom, and choice. Like guns, the money we have and the wealth we have represent our personal independence. The creation of wealth in capitalism is a remarkable phenomenon - like alchemy, we can create wealth out of nothing but using our brains.

In the piece, she quotes Atlas Shrugged:

"So you think that money is the root of all evil?" said Francisco d'Anconia. "Have you ever asked what is the root of money? Money is a tool of exchange, which can't exist unless there are goods produced and men able to produce them. Money is the material shape of the principle that men who wish to deal with one another must deal by trade and give value for value. Money is not the tool of the moochers, who claim your product by tears, or of the looters, who take it from you by force. Money is made possible only by the men who produce. Is this what you consider evil?

HER DIARY:

Tonight, I thought my husband was acting weird. We had made plans to meet at a bar to have a drink. I was shopping with my friends all day long, so I thought he was upset at the fact that I was a bit late, but he made no comment on it.

Conversation wasn't flowing, so I suggested that we go somewhere quiet so we could talk. He agreed, but he didn't say much.

I asked him what was wrong; he said, "Nothing." I asked him if it was my fault that he was upset. He said he wasn't upset, that it had nothing to do with me, and not to worry about it.

On the way home, I told him that I loved him. He smiled slightly, and kept driving. I can't explain his behavior. I don't know why he didn't say, "I love you, too."

When we got home, I felt as if I had lost him completely, as if he wanted nothing to do with me anymore. He just sat there quietly, and watched TV. He continued to seem distant and absent.

Finally, with silence all around us, I decided to go to bed. About 15 minutes later, he came to bed. To my surprise, he responded to my caress, and we made love. But I still felt that he was distracted, and his thoughts were somewhere else.

He fell asleep - I cried. I don't know what to do. I'm almost sure that his thoughts are with someone else. My life is a disaster.

HIS DIARY:

Missed a big buck this morning. Bummer, but at least I got laid.

This photo was taken near Marenisco, MI. The only thing rarer than an albino moose is two albino moosies.

 

LaShawn, on Duke again.

Althouse on the Duke fiasco. They are making the old "fake but accurate" case. She quotes the NYT here:

Critical race theorists, who are on the faculty at almost every major law school and are producing an ever-growing body of scholarly work, have drawn from an idea made popular by postmodernist scholars of all races, that there is no objective reality. Instead, the critical race theorists say, there are competing racial versions of reality that may never be reconciled.

Oh, I see. Stealing Pontius Pilate's line. Quite original.

Indeed, as News Junkie says, universities have become sanitaria. And Duke is the Harvard of the South, right? Or is it Harvard is the Duke of the North? I forget. They have good roundball though (Duke) - also good lacrosse, I have heard. Sports may be the only areas of sanity in these places.

Final comment: How come everyone preaching about the racial divide is white? If black Americans are incomprehensible, why are whites talking so much about them? Or this that a "white" question?

That much-discussed NYT piece on marriage in the US: they cooked the books and made it up - even to the point of including 15 year olds. Why do we keep taking them at face value when we know darn well that they are a propaganda organ for the Left? Driscoll explains.

It is semi-amusing that Castro is going down the tubes because of Cuban medicine - that much-vaunted glory of the world.

Piecing together the details, it sounds like he had GI surgery for some intestinal ailment, whether cancer or diverticultis or whatever, but, for some idiot reason, they never gave him an ostomy.

Ostomies allow the guts to heal post surgery, and prevent surgical infection. They are not fun, but much preferable to unnecessary death.

When you cut out a length of gut, and just re-connect it immediately like a plumber, you are asking for big trouble. The doctors brought over from Spain might very well have suggested a new procedure to create an ostomy, but it might have been too late if everything is breaking down and he is leaking fecal matter into his belly. Like I care, in his case. Mind you, this is all speculation based on minimal news info.

The principal feature of American liberalism is sanctimoniousness. By loudly denouncing all bad things — war and hunger and date rape — liberals testify to their own terrific goodness. More important, they promote themselves to membership in a self-selecting elite of those who care deeply about such things.... It's a kind of natural aristocracy, and the wonderful thing about this aristocracy is that you don't have to be brave, smart, strong or even lucky to join it, you just have to be liberal.

P.J. O'Rourke (h/t, Viking)

Some hae meat and canna eat,
And some wad eat that want it;
But we hae meat and we can eat,
And sae the Lord be thankit.

Shapin reviews a new book on the history of vegetarianism in The New Yorker. One quote:

With few exceptions, European proponents of vegetarianism emerged from those who had meat. You can define vegetarianism in any number of ways, but the simple absence of meat from the diet isn’t an interesting way to do it. To be culturally significant, you need some sort of principled justification, and there has been no shortage of that. The arguments that Stuart assembles are part of an immensely tangled and resonant debate. There’s no demonstration of the wrongness of eating flesh that hasn’t been countered by equally powerful arguments for its rightness, and different justifications have a way of both supporting and interfering with one another. Broadly speaking, though, for many centuries the debate centered on three questions, each of which was reflected in Newton’s dietary choices and the objections raised to them: there was the religious question, concerning the implications of Scripture for human alimentation; there were medical questions about the effect of eating meat on human health and character; and there was a philosophical debate about the proper relationship between man and other animals. There was no distinct category you could call moral, because all of them were, as they remain, intensely moral. Vegetarianism has always been less about why you should eat plants than about why you shouldn’t eat animals. And so arguments about vegetarianism, by drawing attention to rights that we claim for ourselves but deny to other animals, inevitably involve basic questions about what it is to be human.

I am not convinced that it's about morality, but it's an interesting piece. At Maggie's Farm, we are all dedicated, guilt-free carnivores. Whole piece here.

This wood-hulled replica of a 1790-era New England schooner was built in 2000. 32' and an 8' beam. "Caledonian." Besides being used for fishing, schooners like this one transported everything up and down the East coast. Yes, she is for sale, too.

 

So convenient a thing it is to be a reasonable Creature, since it enables one to find or make a Reason for everything one has a mind to do.

Benjamin Franklin

A gentleman diner asked a waiter to take a bottle of Merlot to an attractive woman sitting alone at another table. 

The waiter took the Merlot to the woman and said, "This is from the gentleman seated over there," indicating the sender.

She regarded the wine coolly for a second, not looking at the man, and decided to send a reply note to the man. The waiter, who was lingering for a response, took the note from her and conveyed it to the gentleman.

The note read:

"For me to accept this bottle, you need to have a Mercedes in your garage, a million dollars in the bank, and 7 inches in your pants."

After reading the note, the man decided to compose one of his own in return. He folded the note, handed it to the waiter and instructed him to return this to the woman.

It read:

"For your information, I have a Ferrari 360 Spyder, an Aston Martin DB9, a Mercedes SL600 and a Porsche Turbo in my garages. I have over twenty million dollars in my bank account, but, not even for a woman as beautiful as you, would I cut two inches off.
Just send the bottle back."

Casual sex is a feminist con, says ex-groupie. I always found it amusing that the feminist con was so compatible with the time-honored male con. One quote:

Whatever Greer and her ilk might say I’ve tried their philosophy — that a woman can shag like a man — and it doesn’t work. We’re not built like that. Women are built for bonding. We are vessels and we seek to be filled. For that reason, however much we try and convince ourselves that it isn’t so, sex will always leave us feeling empty unless we are certain that we are loved, that the act is part of a bigger picture that we are loved for our whole selves not just our bodies.

It took me a long time to realise this. My earliest attitudes about sex were shaped from what I saw in the lives of my older sister and my mother — especially my mother, a free spirit who was desperately trying to make up missing out on the hippie era.

Whole pitiful story at Times Online