Maggie's Farm

Of course, Jimmy Reed does it best.

"It appears we have appointed our worst generals to command forces, and our most gifted and brilliant to edit newspapers. In fact, I discovered by reading newspapers that these editor-geniuses plainly saw all my strategic defects from the start, yet failed to inform me until it was too late. Accordingly, I am readily willing to yield my command to these obviously superior intellects, and I will, in turn, do my best for the Cause by writing editorials - after the fact."

General Robert E. Lee, 1863

A quote from Rick Moran's OBL, Thompson, and the Long War:

We are at war. We have been at war for 30 years. If the netroots want to parse the definition of war or even try and pretend that this is not so, it hardly matters. Radical Islamists believe they are at war with us. They believed it before there were netroots, before there was an internet. And they will continue to believe it no matter who is president, no matter what foreign policy we espouse, and no matter what their apologists and appeasers here and abroad would have you believe.

This then, is The Long War – a struggle against an ideology that threatens more than our complacency, more than our sense of security, and more than the illusions we have of our invincibility. It is a war against the secular, nebulous, undefinable freedoms we enjoy in the west versus the dogmatic holy writ of the Koran and those who warp and twist its teachings for their own murderous ends.

How big a threat is the global jihad being waged against the United States and the west? I agree with the left that the threat should be kept in perspective. I do not agree with the left when they attempt to minimize it.

Fred Thompson’s take on OBL and The Long War is just about right:

“Bin Laden being in the mountains of Pakistan or Afghanistan is not as important as there are probably al-Qaida operatives inside the United States of America,” Thompson said.

Bin Laden is considered the man behind the attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people. The former Tennessee senator and actor argued that “bin Laden is more symbolism than anything else. I think it demonstrates to people once again that we’re in a global war.”

Thompson said the al-Qaida leader and the Iraq war must be seen as part of the larger war on terrorism.

“It’s one that bin Laden and people like him are heading up and we need to catch him and we surely need to deal with him, but if he disappeared tomorrow we still have this problem. If Iraq disappeared tomorrow, we’d still have this problem,” Thompson said.

We were going to write about this, but our friend Oxford Medievalist did it first. It's about the Iraq report, and undermining Petraeus' credibility.

With Soros (via MoveOn) and the Dems, who is the puppet and who is the puppeteer?

Stratfor, via Tigerhawk, considers the Dem strategery in all of this.

Opie sent us this one:

A man and his dog were walking along a road. The man was enjoying the scenery, when it occurred to him that he was dead.

He remembered dying, and that the dog walking beside him had been dead for years. He wondered where the road was leading them. After a while, they came to a high, white stone wall along one side of the road. It looked like fine marble. At the top of a long hill, it was broken by a tall arch that glowed in the sunlight.

When he was standing before it he saw a magnificent gate in the arch that looked like mother-of-pearl, and the street that led to the gate looked like pure gold. He and the dog walked toward the gate, and as he got closer, he saw a man at a desk to one side.

When he was close enough, he called out, "Excuse me, where are we?"
"This is Heaven, sir," the man answered.
"Wow! Would you happen to have some water?" the man asked.
"Of course, sir. Come right in, and I'll have some ice water brought right up."

The man gestured, and the gate began to open.

"Can my friend," gesturing toward his dog, "come in, too?" the traveler asked.
"I'm sorry, sir, but we don't accept pets."

The man thought a moment and then turned back toward the road and
continued the way he had been going with his dog. After another long walk, and at the top of another long hill, he came to a dirt road leading through a farm gate that looked as if it had never been closed. There was no fence.

As he approached the gate, he saw a man inside, leaning against a tree and reading a book.

"Excuse me!" he called to the man. "Do you have any water?"
"Yeah, sure, there's a pump over there, come on in."
"How about my friend here?" the traveler gestured to the dog.
"There should be a bowl by the pump."

They went through the gate, and sure enough, there was an old-fashioned hand pump with a bowl beside it. The traveler filled the water bowl and took a long drink himself, then he gave some to the dog. When they were full, he and the dog walked back toward the man who was standing by the tree.

"What do you call this place?" the traveler asked.
"This is Heaven," he answered.
"Well, that's confusing," the traveler said. "The man down the road said that was Heaven, too."
"Oh, you mean the place with the gold street and pearly gates? Nope. That's hell."
"Doesn't it make you mad for them to use your name like that?"

"No, we're just happy that they screen out the folks who would leave their best friends behind."

Jeremiah 18: 1-11

The word that came to Jeremiah from the Lord: ²“Come, go down to the potter’s house, and there I will let you hear my words.” ³So I went down to the potter’s house, and there he was working at his wheel. ⁴The vessel he was making of clay was spoiled in the potter’s hand, and he reworked it into another vessel, as seemed good to him. ⁵Then the word of the Lord came to me: ⁶Can I not do with you, O house of Israel, just as this potter has done? says the Lord. Just like the clay in the potter’s hand, so are you in my hand, O house of Israel. ⁷At one moment I may declare concerning a nation or a kingdom, that I will pluck up and break down and destroy it, ⁸but if that nation, concerning which I have spoken, turns from its evil, I will change my mind about the disaster that I intended to bring on it. ⁹And at another moment I may declare concerning a nation or a kingdom that I will build and plant it, ¹⁰but if it does evil in my sight, not listening to my voice, then I will change my mind about the good that I had intended to do to it.

¹¹Now, therefore, say to the people of Judah and the inhabitants of Jerusalem: Thus says the Lord: Look, I am a potter shaping evil against you and devising a plan against you. Turn now, all of you from your evil way, and amend your ways and your doings.

Image: Jeremiah, approx 1311. Museo dell'Opera del Duomo, Siena. From Web Gallery of Art: "...the Slaughter of the Innocents (which also portrays Herod in the act of ordering the slaughter) is fully explained in the scroll of the prophet Jeremiah, where one can read: "Vox in Rama audita est, ploratus et ululatus multus: Rachel plorans filios suos" (Jeremiah 31, 15: A cry is heard in Rama, a groaning and bitter lamentation: Rachel is weeping for her sons).

Vienna State Opera, 1984

And tomorrow is Super Sunday. Here is Federer playing Roddick in the quarter-finals, from the US Open site. Roger does what I never remember to do: GLUE YOUR EYES TO THE DANG BALL! A miracle of tennis is that when you stare at the ball, the ball seems to slow down, and gives you time to move your lazy-ass feet.

Japanese Watermelons. They pack compactly.

A quote from a Sept. 6 piece by Iraq The Model:

The war is going to be long because it's a war of ideas—the conflict is not going to be a localized one and will have different forms because I believe the whole world is concerned and will take part in one way or another.

Identifying and supporting the true moderates would be a fair weapon to use in this war and I think American and the rest of the free world will keep trying to support positive reforms towards a better life to defeat the ideology of death.

More news from Iraq the Model: Omar has moved to NYC.

We were alive during one of the handful of milestones of human history. Sippican

What does 1+1=2 mean? Evangelical Outpost

NY Sun opinion: Fred Thompson can win.

Medical care in the US is already half-socialized. TCS (h/t, Insty)

Some Swedes now insist that the Swedish flag is racist. Gates. And, via that link, Muslim Ambassadors say "Sweden must change its laws." The money quote from the Algerian Ambassador after meeting with Swedish diplomats:

the meeting "was an excellent initiative taken in a spirit of appeasement."

Indeed. These European struggles are not about racism. They are about nations desiring to preserve their cultural identities and traditions and values, codes of behavior, and ways of life - to preserve their societies - and about those in those nations who are happy to see those things disappear. The charge of racism is a phony, designed to put people on the defensive and to shut them up. It usually is.

Yes, as we have said and as Buddy said today in a comment, the long-time strategy of the Left is to undermine the foundations of a society, with the fantasy that a utopia - run by them - will ensue. It is nihilistic; it is heartless, and it is a form of grandiose insanity.

Ted Dalrymple is becoming more interested in good than in evil as he ages, he says. A quote from his short essay in New English Review (h/t, reader):

...I have spent a great deal of my life among the utmost ugliness, both physical and moral. Moreover, I must confess that the problem of evil has preoccupied me.   

One of the reasons for this, perhaps, has been literary ambition. It is far easier to make evil interesting than good. Depictions of good people are inclined very soon to decline into mawkishness, and make their objects as dull as they are unbelievable. Too much good repels us; we long for the feet of clay to be revealed. As Oscar Wilde said, only a man with a heart of stone could read of the death of Little Nell without laughing.

 

A fascination with evil is pretty widespread. When, at social gatherings, I tell people what I once did for a living, namely that I was a doctor in a large prison, it isn’t usually very long before someone asks me, slightly shamefacedly, who the worst, most evil man I ever met was. They also want to know what he did in as much detail as possible, of course. No story is so horrifying that it ever bores people; and even the most demure cannot for long entirely resist the thrill of the barbarous.

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.

On loan from Theo:

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:

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. 

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.

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: