Thursday, September 6. 2007
It was interesting to see the various major linkers to that (surprisingly) controversial piece on Multiculturalism and Arabs we posted the other day because I had only been vaguely aware of one of the sites, and unaware of the others.  The most productive of blog visitors was reddit. That link- collector gets huge traffic, judging by the number of visit they sent over here: over 15 thousand. No comparison with what FARK can send, but powerful still.
We had thousands of visitors via linkswarm, another link-aggregator which seems to have a vast and loyal readership. We also had thousands from a site which our pure and chaste selves had never seen - Ernie's House of Whoopass. Ernie provides general links plus hard-core p*rn links which make visiting Theo feel like going to church. This photo is the most modest image I could find at Ernie's place. Also on the list is This Modern World, which posed an interesting, if sarcastic, contrast between the essay and the famous The America I Have Seen, by Sayyid Qutd (who I believe was the inspiration for Al Quaida and The Moslem Brotherhood). Clicked, an MSNBC blog, was late to the party but provided a few thousand visitors. Will Femia links stuff he finds interesting. A good gig. There have even been many hundreds of visitors via dirty.ru, a Russian blog (in Cyrillic). Cool. We hope we have gleaned a few new Maggie's fans from this spike in visitors. I do know that we made a lot of folks angry.
Wednesday, September 5. 2007
On loan from Theo: 
NYT claims Bush went to Iraq to divert attention... from Iraq. So why didn't he go to Pango-Pango instead? Or Pago-Pago, for that matter?
 More Brit health fascism: Dust my Broom, whence the image on the right. Our question at hand is whether they would plan to refuse treatment to those with lung cancer, AIDS, weight-related diabetes, sports injuries, elective abortions, and addictions -- all behavior-related problems.
Looking back at the journalistic malpractice of Katrina. Driscoll The EU is worried about the collective. Hey, I thought the Commies lost the Cold War. Maybe the fall of the hostile foreign Commies provided space for the home grown ones? Excellent review of current state of casualties in Iraq, at Back Talk. h/t Gateway, who has further comments. The purported reason you won't be seeing The Path to 9-11. Fear. George Soros: Enforcer and terrorist of Democrats Immigration and poverty stats: Opinion Journal. The real cause of global warming: Israel
If the real problem with Mother Earth is people, and if global warming will kill us all off, then why aren't the Greenies in favor of some global warming for a while to effect that worthy goal?
 From the review of the above-titled book at WSJ Online:
Veteran Boston political reporter Jon Keller also invites us to behold his native state . . . and shudder in dismay. In "The Bluest State," he argues that, although Massachusetts does not suffer alone from its notorious affection for liberalism, it is the incubator for "Massachusetts viruses" that infect the national Democratic Party. The viruses come in many forms: "addiction to tax revenues and a raging edifice complex couched in disrespect to wage earners; phony identity politics without real results for women and minorities; reflexive anti-Americanism in foreign affairs; vain indulgence in obnoxious political correctness; self-serving featherbedding; NIMBYism; authoritarian distortion of the balance of governmental power, all simmered in a broth of hypocritical paternalism."
We have acres of Wild Thyme in the fields on the Farm, and some parts of the front lawn have more thyme than grass, making mowing a pleasant olfactory experience. We have too much really, because it prospers in areas where the soil is poor, dry, and gravelly, and where there is full sun. When you walk across it on a hot day it fills the air with fragrance and annoys the bees on its purple flowers. No need at all to grow thyme in the garden. You can drive over it occasionally and it doesn't seem to mind. Here's one of our smaller patches, carpeting the entrance to an old rickety shed: 
 Is America losing its work ethic? Am Thinker
Why I quit teaching. Pajamas Surrender. How societies commit suicide. Dalrymple in City Journal. I missed that one. Stuff like this keeps happening. One nation, under therapy. SC&A on ambulance-chasing trauma counselors. Sounds like a scam to me. Similarly, from Dr. X: Are our kids over-diagnosed and over-medicated yet? Emotional. Some big-time emotional reaction to our Multiculturalism link about Middle-Eastern culture. A simple essay from Rants and Raves from a year ago - some reaction! Our apologies to R&R - we didn't know where the essay was from until late in the day. Creeps me out. The proposed Brit DNA registry - and for tourists too? Gender and the workplace. Econlog. Statistically, men work harder and longer.
Our friend Nathan interviewed a group of Israeli citizen-soldiers and assembled their experiences in Reluctant Warriors, The book deserves a look by those who might be interested in Israel's army and in the minds of soldiers in a nation which seems to be in a permanently self-protective stance, and in which almost everyone serves. (Nathan is a child psychiatrist and a psychoanalyst, and is the Wallerstein Research Fellow in Psychoanalysis. He moved from San Francisco to become an Israeli citizen last year. As regular Maggie's readers know, Nathan is the guest author of our Aliyah Diary series.) This is a selection from his chapter on "Yossi": Yossi’s elite unit jumps in to protect the Jewish people where others might hestitate. I begin with him so that the reader can feel, in the moment of battle, how difficult is the tension between being a fine soldier and being a fine man. Listen and place yourself in this boy’s post-midnight position. We have met many times during the Intifada, when he has a free weekend, or recuperating after injuries in action. One of six children, he has a rapid-fire delivery, especially of jokes, and can recite film dialogue by heart in two languages: he does Topol and Marx Brothers. His smile is winning. This conversation takes place from midnight to three a.m. before he has to return to three-week duty, and just before a national crisis: an Israeli soldier, Gilad Shalit, is kidnapped; the army re-enters Gaza, re-enters Lebanon. As I write this, I am worried about Yossi, as he is the type of soldier who will be the first to jump in to save a life. His story tells of courage that Aristotle did not describe. We meet at midnight, as my schedule did not permit us to meet the one day he was home, and he politely offers to meet with me instead of sleeping his last night at home. He has until six a.m. before returning to base. At three a.m., after three hours walking, I am tired; he offers that he is free until six, but looks at me, and says that perhaps he should get the three hours of sleep. My sense is that he could have continued for the next three hours. He begins with a question. As is often true, the first question leads to more central, troubling questions, in this case about his rapid, momentary decision to capture a terrorist alive whom they had been sent to kill, putting Yossi and his unit at greater risk. He once told me how upset he was that in order to capture a suspect alive, Yossi has to kill an attacking guard dog in midair; uses a silencer. That week, he returns home with a puppy for his family to raise.
Continue reading "A book: Reluctant Warriors"
Tuesday, September 4. 2007
A truck driver used to amuse himself by running over lawyers, swerving to hit every one he saw walking along the road. One day, the truck driver saw a priest hitchhiking. He thought he would do a good turn and pulled the truck over. He asked the priest, "Where are you going, Father?". "I'm going to the church 5 miles down the road," replied the priest. "No problem, Father! I`ll give you a lift." The happy priest climbed in and the truck driver continued down the road. Then the truck driver saw a lawyer walking down the road and instinctively he swerved to hit him. But then he remembered there was a priest in the truck with him, so at the last minute he swerved back to the road. Although he was certain he missed the lawyer, he still heard a loud "THUD." Not understanding where the noise came from he glanced in his mirrors and when he didn't see anything, he turned to the priest and said, "I'm sorry Father. I almost hit that lawyer." "That’s okay," replied the priest. "I got him with the door."
A Love Letter to Southern Football, by ESPN's Wright Thompson - h/t, reader. It begins: OXFORD, Miss. -- Two friends, both unhinged football fans, got married earlier this year. During the wedding reception, the bride's father somehow got the Ole Miss band to march into the room, a blaring chorus of starched uniforms and shining brass. The groom conducted. The crowd stomped and cheered. You'd have thought folks were celebrating a 12-play scoring drive, not holy matrimony. Soon after the wedding, I watched video of this event. Immediately, I recognized the feeling deep down in my gut. It's something I've felt in so many cathedral-like stadiums. I closed my eyes, and the familiar notes sent me rushing months into the future, longing for a tailgate that escalates from simmer to burn, for the chill bumps that always come in the moments before kickoff, for the evening breezes rustling the white oaks when the game is done. My body sat in front of a computer screen. My mind was in a stadium. It was only April, and I longed for September. I missed football season.
This oldie is out of Cold Spring Harbor, Long Island 
 How the hell would I know what's going on in Iraq?
That is to say, I've seen the cooter of every trashy teenage "singer" getting out of car and going to a party. I've seen all I need to see of Brangelina and the football team of children they're trying to purchase wholesale instead of doing it retail like we all do. I've seen drivel and piffle and nonsense; I know that Anna Nicole Smith's "anus is unremarkable," since I've read her autopsy. WTF is going on in Iraq? Are there any paparazzi there? Don't get me wrong. The media has not fallen asleep or anything. I know, for instance, that Bush is Hitler. I know every permutation of his brownshirt perfidy. I've seen and read and heard eleventy billion soliloquies, with photoshopped picture learning aids, exquisitely detailing his crimes against humanity, nature, and God-- except there isn't a god, of course. Silly me. And I'm beginning to supect Helen Thomas doesn't like him much, either. And yes, I understand that Bushitler had a ninja army of mercenary big tobacco executives and Enron jacklegs and someone named Scooter precisely plant explosives during lunchtime when the buildings are empty to blow up the World Trade Center to start his illegal war for oil. I get all that. My bad. Let's not exaggerate. When you report these things, the hair farmer at the network desk always says: "Some say" George Bush had a ninja army of big tobacco executives and Enron jacklegs and someone named Scooter ... Finally, Katie Couric went to Iraq. Now we're getting somewhere. I read with studied interest her dispatch, because her Ernie Pyle style would doubtless clue me in to whole situation there. The Intertoob thingie must have had a kind of interstellar binary paper jam, as I read some sort of note apparently written by a teenage girl describing how grim life at summer camp is because the compressor on the ice cream refrigerator is busted and now we don't have any ice cream. And boy, it's hot and there's no ice cream. The end. You'll have to expend a lot of effort, it seems, to have any idea what the hell is going on in Iraq. If you Google "unreported Iraq," for instance, there's plenty about Haditha, which was plenty reported. It was so very reported, for a while. The last report I got about it was that it made John Murtha get an unlisted phone number. But since pictures of flag draped coffins are not allowed by the fascist regime we've got going, there really is nothing to report until Nancy Pelosi puts on a scarf again. Perhaps I'll try the Intergoogle again, and see if I can find out anything about what it's like to be a soldier in Iraq. I guess since everyone on TV and radio and the newspapers are going to talk only about themselves, we should let the soldiers do likewise. The Iraq Unreported Pool
 I am sure that the Maggie's Farm gang is relieved that I am back from vacation, so they can ease up on the links. It has been boats, boats and more boats. Plus a year's worth of beer, lobster, cod, clams and oysters in one week: I eat little else when I am on the coast, starting with cod-cakes for breakfast. It's the best: one day ketchup on them, the next day tartar sauce: cannot decide which I prefer.
Fish-cakes, broiled cod, fried cod, baked cod with Portuguese sauce...now I sound like Ishmael on Nantucket, where the milk tasted like codfish from the fishheads the cows ate. Time to come home to the woods and to dig back into work. I don't mind that at all. Variety is the key, or the tartar sauce, to something. I enjoyed that Yankee Attitude post from Barrister. Right on! Bush stopped by Anbar yesterday. Right thing to do. Should the government rescue fools? Attack machine Sweden has unlimited charter schools. Interesting. Even lefty Cameron is thinking. Worstall. C.S. Lewis and Tolkien: Asst Village Idiot Let's play "Who's The Victim?" One Cosmos More fun kicking Calderon around. RWNH Is anti-Americanism through in Europe? Neoneo Have you read Cato #6 lately? h/t, Dumb Still Looks Free. Or Federal Farmer or Agrippa? "Gun addiction" fears in Australia. Alphecca. Another disease I didn't know I had along with ADD, Asperger's, Beer Deficiency Disorder, and a few others. Charter Schools blooming in New Orleans. CSM The NYT just won't quit with the Haditha non-story. Democracy Project. After all, if the USA is not really the Evil Empire, they would have to re-think their entire view of the world - and that would be a hassle.
Monday, September 3. 2007
Spent the afternoon fishing on Long Island Sound with Maggie's Farm contributor Gwynnie. We managed to boat (and release) just one schoolie Striper - but we were using lures, not bait. There were large schools of Snapper Blues flipping around, but we were looking for dinner. We much admired the master fisherman below (the story of the return of our New England Ospreys is close to a miracle), who was using a nesting platform as a dining room table for his or her sushi: 
Lyrics here. My Godmother, who was from Chattanooga and a transplant up to Yankee-land, used to love to play the piano (banging chords - what they used to call "whorehouse pianny") and sing this one with verve. I can hear her now. She was a piece of work, always with designer clothes and a big hat, and an accent that could melt butter.
To new visitors: Thanks for stopping by, and check us out if you have a minute. You might enjoy our uniquely eclectic (or so we claim) and generally friendly site - even when there is disagreement. In fact, we welcome disagreement and lively but civil debate. Re the topic of multicultural understanding, this commentary which we erroneously attributed to William Haynes, but which is actually from Rants and Raves in 2006 (thanks for the correction, readers). Please read it, friends, and discuss politely: Observations on Arabs Since the beginning of the Iraq phase of this conflict of civilizations, I've experienced the teeth-grinding frustration of watching both pro- and anti- Iraq sides make the exact same mistake - that of supposing that these people are basically Americans in funny costumes. In this respect, George Bush and Michael Moore are equally clueless. I went to live and work in Saudi Arabia in 1998, and I "made my year" as expats there put it. That phrase means that I actually stuck out the whole year, instead of "running" from my contract, an occurrence so common that you only have to say "he did a runner" to explain why someone isn't showing up for work anymore. In Eastern Europe and the South Balkans, whenever I have gone to live in a place about which I had formed opinions, the actual experience of living there always radically changed those opinions, sometimes into completely contradictory ones. Most often, my academic research led me to form a beautifully coherent model, which experience turned into a semi-coherent collection of observations and tentative conclusions. In the case of the Kingdom, I went there with a certain sympathy for Arab grievances, a belief that America had earned a lot of hostility from "blowback" from our ham-handed interventionist foreign policy and support for Israel etc. I came back with the gloomy opinion that over the long run we are going to have to hammer these people hard to get them to quit messing with Western Civilization. And by the way, among "rational, fair-minded" non-interventionist libertarians, not a damn one of them has asked me, "What in your experience caused you to change your mind?" Instead what I get are gratuitous insults followed by insufferably condescending lectures about how wrong I am. So, with the caveat that one of the first things I learned was that the term "Arab" covers a lot of territory, here are some observations and some tentative conclusions about Arabs, more specifically about Arabs from the oil states and why we have misunderstood each other to the point that we are fighting a war with some of them and are pissing off the rest of them. I suspect that many of these observations also apply to Iranian Islamists, but I have never been there and note that Iranians are not Arabs and have a different cultural history.
Continue reading "Multiculturalism: "Arabs don't think like us""
 Michelle. It's a damn shame that labor became so corrupt, but politics is about power and money, isn't it? Is there a union left in America that isn't connected to some racket?
I will now celebrate our American labor movement by going for a long, easy ride with She Who Must Be Obeyed, over the usual hills and dales and through the usual streams, on one of the finest days of this summer. A quick sherry or two first, for courage with the dang horse she wants me to "exercise": it is me who ends up getting exercised in both senses of the word. But first, and finally for the day for me, let me link Sippican on Labor. He's been there, and I have not. I don't do bosses, either union ones or the other kind, And now, Pip Pip, Old Bean, and Tally Ho.
Photo above: That is not our Dr. Joy Bliss. That must be Theo's assistant, hard at work. I think he gets the photos and she does the thinking. Death of a Phony: Arthur Miller. I never did quite get what was so great about him. Preachy, condescending - and humorless. Chosing the right college. Another view, via Dr. Helen When war was the answer. George Will at RCP. Unfortunately, war is often the answer. Remembering 9-11. Captain Ed. No holiday, please. Official grieving is disgusting grandstanding, and a holiday would be just one more day when government employees do not work, and everybody else does. If anybody doesn't know who the enemy is by now, they never will. How Shakespeare taught me to read financial news. Bowyer at TCS. Poverty in America. This might be a re-post, but it makes it very clear. Nobody is going hungry, or lacking in the crap on TV. Sweden: Truth about communism will confuse people. Moonbattery. At least they admit it. Switzerland wants to keep their country Swiss. h/t, Insty via reader. Yes, it sure does sound racially-tinged, but is that what it is really about, or is it about preserving their culture? From Leno (h/t, Conspiracy): Speaking at a forum organized by Lance Armstrong on cancer research, Hillary Clinton told Chris Matthews if she is elected president, she will declare war on cancer, and then she will support the war on cancer for two years, and then she will be against it for a year, and then she will back out of it all together.
Porn on the web: Some data in our comments - scroll past those lawyer jokes to comment by Pat Jones Calderon: "Mexico does not end at our borders." What? Is he demanding Lebensraum? Every once in a while, the totalitarian impulse, the grandiosity, and the contempt for people which underlies nanny-statism and socialism is spoken out loud. Was it Bill or Hillary who commented "What if people don't spend their money the right way?" John Edwards proposes telling people when to go to the doctor. Arthur St. Germaine: A Maine kid and his Guadalcanal memories. Scroll down to the final comment by Buddy
Grover Cleveland reluctantly supported the concept of a Labor Day during his re-election campaign. He lost anyway. It was meant to be a day off from work for union organizers to organize. I guess now it means the official end of summer, time to get engaged with work again, and hot dogs and watermelon. To me, it means two things: our peak tomato season, and time to start pulling out the hunting gear. I suppose it also means the official start date of the national campaign, but I am already bored with that. Brief history of the holiday here. (If your eyes are failing, that's Teddy Roosevelt somewhere in the photo.) We did a piece last year about the skilled trades. Done with Mirrors has some thoughts about America's love-hate relationship with work. And one more: Americans are the most productive workers in the world. Blue Crab. It's called the Protestant Work Ethic.
Sunday, September 2. 2007
Is Volokh more influential than legal journals? Prof. B.
A few stats at Surber. He correctly notes that it is hunters who have done the most for American conservation.
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