Maggie's Farm

We try not to worry too much about keeping up with day-to-day news, but the House vote today was shameful.

With 20-20 hindsight, we can all have our own opinions on Iraq, but turning one's back on one's country in a time of war is contemptible. I don't think this has ever happened in American history - with or without peanut storage and spinach farmer subsidies and the whatever billions of vote-buying (with your hard-earned money and mine) required to produce a plan for defeat.

Why not put the energy into helping figure out how to be successful? 

It makes me sad. I can't imagine how soldiers and their families must feel to have half of their government rooting for their failure. No wonder people hate politics and politicians.

And, to be a bit self-revealing, the idea that Osama and Al Quaida in Iraq are popping champagne tonight with the Dems sickens me.

There is something non-serious and high-school-ish about all of this. 

h/t, No Pasaran:

Our blog friend and Physics Prof Lubos Motl on Al Gore:

This Gentleman is a mad megalomaniac and it is surprising to see what kind of a special treatment such an insane person can get in the Parliament of the most powerful and advanced country in the world.

Read the whole thing. I agree with Lubos. In the clips I saw of his testimony to Congress, his tone had that eerily calm, certain tone you hear from psychotics about their alien abductions. The absence of any self-doubt or humility is the tell.

What happened to this guy?

From the always-interesting Edward Luttwak in Harper's. It begins:

Modern armed forces continue to be structured for large-scale war, but advanced societies whose small families lack expendable children have a very low tolerance for casualties. Even supposedly warlike Americans gravely count casualties in Iraq that in three years have yet to reach 3,000—fewer than were lost in many a single day of battle in past wars. Fortunately, this refusal to spill the blood needed to fuel battles diminishes the likelihood that advanced societies will deliberately set out to fight one another (pas des enfants, pas des Suisses, pas de guerre) unless they are somehow able to convince themselves that a war could be entirely or very largely aerial and naval. Such wars, however, are difficult to imagine, except when islands are involved, as in a China-Taiwan war, which is very improbable for its own reasons. Air and naval forces can certainly be employed advantageously against any less advanced enemy incautious enough to rely on a conventional defense, conducted by regular forces, but in that context as well there must be severe doubts about the continued usefulness of the ground forces of advanced countries that are intolerant of casualties. It is easy enough to blockade the enemy, to successfully bomb all the right nodal points and shut down electrical, transportation, and communications networks. Air strikes can disable runways and destroy both sheltered and unsheltered aircraft, ballistic missiles, and nuclear installations. Air power can also sink warships, or rout any mechanized forces deployed in the open, as the United States did with Iraq in 1991 and partly in 2003, and as it could do with Iran. No real role would remain for ground forces except to dislodge the enemy from any territory he had occupied, or to occupy his own territory. That, however, is bound to cost casualties that might not be tolerated; it is also bound to provoke an insurgency.

Insurgencies understand this very well. A thoughtful piece. Read the whole thing. As we always say at Maggie's Farm, "Hope is not a plan." Neither is hopelessness, of course.

"That's the problem with moralistic, messianic crusading - people expect you to live up to it."

Glenn Reynolds, re Al Gore's refusal to reduce his energy use

We received a nice email from Olivier Martin at CaliEagle of Aigle Boots, regarding our piece on Wellies. We like their stuff, and own some. He said this:

We are great admirers of Bernard Lewis. A quote from his speech this week:

I mentioned earlier the important difference in what one means by religion. For Muslims, it covers a whole range of different things–marriage, divorce, and inheritance are the most obvious examples. Since antiquity in the Western world, the Christian world, these have been secular matters. The distinction of church and state, spiritual and temporal, lay and ecclesiastical is a Christian distinction which has no place in Islamic history and therefore is difficult to explain to Muslims, even in the present day. Until very recently they did not even have a vocabulary to express it. They have one now.

What are the European responses to this situation? In Europe, as in the United States, a frequent response is what is variously known as multiculturalism and political correctness. In the Muslim world there are no such inhibitions. They are very conscious of their identity. They know who they are and what they are and what they want, a quality which we seem to have lost to a very large extent. This is a source of strength in the one, of weakness in the other…

More of his speech at Dinocrat.

The difference between science and the fuzzy subjects is that science requires reasoning while those other subjects merely require scholarship.

Robert A. Heinlein

by our friend:

Re the war and the protesters, from Vanderleun (h/t, Flares). It begins:

Four years in. An inch of time. Four years in and the foolish and credulous among us yearn to get out. Their feelings require it. The power of their Holy Gospel of "Imagine" compels them. Their overflowing pools of compassion for the enslavers of women, the killers of homosexuals, the beheaders of reporters, and the incinerators of men and women working quietly at their desks, rise and flood their minds until their eyes flow with crocodile tears while their mouths emit slogans made of cardboard. They believe the world is run on wishes and that they will always have three more.

Like savages shambling about some campfire where all there is to eat are a few singed tubers, they paint their faces with the tatterdemalion symbols of a summer long sent down to riot with the worms. They clasp hands and sing songs whose lyrics are ash. "We shall... over... come." Overcome what, overcome who? Overcome their nation? Is that their dream? It is the lifelong dream of those that lead them that much is certain.

Read the whole thing. Would someone please give this guy a columnist job?

Image: Photo of this slim young exhibitionist and deep thinker about international affairs borrowed from Ace.

Don't handicap your children by making their lives easy.

Robert A. Heinlein

From our Maggie's Farm photographer friend. In case you wondered, she does not use a point-and-shoot.

A review of Louann Brizendine's The Female Brain, in The Daily Male Mail. A few quotes:

Many men find post-menopausal spouses suddenly cool, selfish and impatient - like completely different people. Pharmaceutically, we do become completely different people.

As for menopause, here's what really depressed me: Between the ages of 42 and 52, 50pc of women lose interest in sex altogether. That's primarily because by 50, women lose up to 70pc of their testosterone, the driver of sexual desire for both genders.

and

In the professional sphere, you often can't be both - perhaps that's why so few major companies have women at their helm. A woman's instinct to seek approval puts her at a disadvantage in a position of power. Women are driven to achieve consensus, and to keep social bonds intact at all costs. Thus, they always try to get their way through 'agreement', without telling people directly what to do.

Brizendine points out that women assert themselves in the form of questions, which made me laugh out loud. Since reading this passage, I've started to notice how I compulsively email my editor with constructions such as "Why don't we do that?", or "Might it be better if we didn't do X, but Y?" I constantly round off a potentially harsh demand with a timid, solicitous 'OK?'

and

Men want to be respected. Women want to be liked.

Read the whole review here. Funny how, if you say outloud the things that everyone's Mom and Grandma knew, you could get fired as President of Harvard. I think this book runs up against Cultural Marxism. Our Dr. Bliss wrote on this subject a while back: Cowboys and Cowgirls

Image: William Blake's Adam and Eve

Betsy makes a good point when she asks why the Dems are not pushing for the US signing Kyoto, now that they control congress. Is it possible that they don't really believe it? Or that they know it's a political loser?

Bjorn Lomborg, who is clearly an anthropogenic warming believer, notes in the Daily Star re the EU emission goals:

But nobody sees fit to reveal the agreement's dirty little secret: It will do next to no good - and again at very high cost. According to one well-established and peer-reviewed model, the effect of the EU cutting emissions by 20 percent will postpone warming in the 21st century by just two years, yet the cost will be about $90 billion annually. It will be costly, because Europe is a costly place to cut carbon-dioxide, and it will be inconsequential, because the EU will account for only about 6 percent of all emissions in the 21st century. So the new treaty will be an even less efficient use of our resources than the old Kyoto Protocol.

His whole piece here. Indeed, even if there is real climate change, and even if it is partly man-made, nothing that is done will do anything more than raise taxes, raise prices, and raise government control over people and the economy. But effect the earth's climate? Not possible.

Disturbing photos of the Portland peace marchers. Who are all of these people?

They do not seem to understand anything about America. I ask myself how hard I want to work my brain to try to understand how they view the world. I am more inclined to let Dr. Sanity do that dirty job.

Addendum from The Barrister: Some folks are beyond persuasion, and some folks are willing to listen to logical argument and disputation. We all like to think that we are in the latter category, but I do not think I would get too far with that 1960s holdover geezer in the photo. He hates America, and you cannot argue with hatred.

Re-posted from March, 2006

April is the beginning of trout season around here,
but it is also turkey season.

Non-hunters may not know that April is Spring Turkey season in many states in the US. Last April, early morning, Gwynnie and I were warming up our fly casting on a pond when a proud  acquaintance stopped by with his heavy gobbler in one tired hand and his shotgun in the other. Surf 'n Turf?

If you have never eaten a wild turkey, you have never eaten turkey. The farm-raised birds are as bland as cardboard. Our past piece on the Wild Turkey here.

At Maggie's Farm, we are grateful for the work of organizations like the National Wild turkey Federation, plus all of the non-profit and governmental agencies which have restored the magnificent wild turkey around the US. We even saw some in Maine last fall.

Turkey hunting has more in common with deer-hunting than bird-hunting. In other words - boring... until the last moment - if the bird shows up. It's like they say about Obstetrics: 99% pure boredom, 1% terror. But in this case, 1% thrills.

Some folks get a kick out of turkey-calling, but I think it's for the birds. Decoys are fine.

Image from the NWTF website. Those are males, displaying for a hen's attention.

This comment came in over Buddy's transom:

The population of this country is 300 million.

160 million are retired. That leaves 140 million to do the work. There are 85 million in school. Which leaves 55 million to do the work. Of this there are 35 million employed by the federal government. Leaving 15 million to do the work.

2.8 million are in the armed forces Which leaves 12.2 million to do the work. Take from that total the 10.8 million people who work for state and city governments. And that leaves 1.4 million to do the work. At any given time there are 188,000 people in hospitals. Leaving 1,212,000 to do the work. Now, there are 1,211,998 people in prisons. That leaves just two people to do the work.

You and me...

and there you are, sitting on your ass, at your computer, reading jokes.

Nice. Real nice. 

"The uncontested absurdities of today are the accepted slogans of tomorrow. They come to be accepted by degrees, by precedent, by implication, by erosion, by default, by dint of constant pressure on one side and constant retreat on the other - until the day when they are suddenly declared to be the country’s official ideology.” 

 Ayn Rand, as quoted in Atbashian's piece posted yesterday

He challenges Al Gore to a debate. Bravo to the Viscount. Al would be a fool to agree to it.

It's good to see that neither Viscounts nor gauntlets are entirely obsolete.

On the radio last night, Drudge read the list of questions that he would like to pose to Al. One question that I would like to ask him would be this: If we are simply in a natural cyclical variation, as has happened forever, would it make any difference to him?

"They have not wanted peace at all; they have wanted to be spared war- as though the absence of war was the same as peace."

Dorothy Thompson (h/t, Flopping Aces)