Found this thread on Twitter analyzing the targeting patterns of Israel in Southern Lebanon, and a couple places stand out- one of them an area/town named Rmaich (or Rmeish). It resonated with me as yet another story of indomitable hill people just wanting to be left alone. Fortunately, they've been successful keeping Hezbollah out, much to their benefit.
https://x.com/Saul_Sadka/status/1853204103825961360
Back in August, Ukraine pushed into Kursk to the great excitement of German armor commanders. We rarely discuss that war in this forum, but over at Dad29's place I suggested an analogy.
It's been difficult to make sense of this offensive, and the reporting on it is wildly inconsistent depending on the outlet and which side they support. (This is perfectly normal in a warzone: "fog of war" and all that.)
However, it did occur to me to wonder if this was the Gettysburg Campaign of the Ukraine war. Analogously, both were the first time the defending army went on the offensive and actually invaded the other's territory in the full scale; both of them were principally intended as raids, with psychological effects on the enemy populace a secondary target. Both intend to take pressure off a long-suffering defensive region (northern Virginia/Donbass).
Both are major commitments of remaining maneuver forces, which entail significant opportunity costs. By deploying these forces in the north, Ukraine is risking what might have been important reinforcements. The Confederate government had wanted Lee to reinforce Vicksburg, but he took his forces into the north instead and suffered a strategic loss instead. That allowed Grant to capture Vicksburg and sever the Confederacy, then assume command in the east and press Lee's remaining army for the rest of its days.
I don't claim to know what the facts on the ground are over there; the fog of war is too thick right now. If the historical analogy holds, though, a Ukrainian loss here could spell the beginning of the end.
This week, the Bismarck Cables suggests that, in spite of major new loans guaranteed by stolen repurposed interest payments on stolen frozen Russian wealth, Ukraine needs a major intervention because Russia is taking a lot of territory. Failing very significant escalation by Ukraine and its allies in the West, he says, Russia is likely to prevail.
I find this significant because the Bismarck Cables has always struck me as one of the more well-informed outlets writing on this topic, and also because it has always had a clear pro-Ukraine stance. Thus, this is an argument against interest rather than the cheerleading of one side or the other that makes up so much of the fog of war.
Escalations of the type he is advocating are unwise in the extreme. The war has been expensive enough that Russia is unlikely to repeat it. In my opinion we should pursue the peace that can be had. Putin after South Ossetia was likely to repeat his offense; after Crimea, even more so; but the Ukraine war has been ruinous on Russian manpower and war materiel. Letting them keep the majority-ethnic-Russian areas they have seized and held at such cost is not likely to encourage further aggression, but it could allow us to de-escalate in the Middle East especially as well as in Europe.
Ukraine got out of Kursk about what Lee got out of Pennsylvania, and ultimately expended resources that now can't be used to reinforce lines which are, similarly, starting to collapse. They are still in a happier position. Lee didn't have the option of negotiating a peace that would have allowed the Confederacy to survive in the unconquered territories because, after all, the whole point of the war was to refuse to accept the existence of the Confederacy or the legitimacy of any secession from the Union. Putin has not asked for a similar level of submission from Ukraine, and doesn't have the power to enforce one anyway.
Rather than run the hazard of escalating the war into a direct NATO-Russia force-on-force conflict that could even become a nuclear exchange, we could help offer a peace that while minimally acceptable to Russia also prevents further Ukrainian losses of men and territory. The Kursk gamble did not pay off, but collapse can still be avoided without the need for significant escalation of an already-bloody war.
Central to both Kilmer’s work and the prevailing disdain of it is his deep Catholicism, to which he converted after his daughter Rose contracted infantile paralysis. Most of his efforts fairly drip with piety... Every year it falls to me as “Avatar” of Philolexian to kick off the Kilmer event by presenting a biographical sketch of the man. By now, I have my routine down pat. After outlining Kilmer’s life and enumerating his poetic sins, I ask, “But was he really bad?” Invariably the audience shouts, “Yes!” And I roar back, “You’re wrong!”Kilmer, I inform the snarky undergrads, is what George Orwell in his essay on Kipling called a “good bad poet.” After dismissing most of Kipling’s verse as “horribly vulgar,” Orwell concedes it nonetheless is “capable of giving pleasure to people who know what poetry means.” Admit it, Orwell says. Unless you’re “merely a snob and a liar,” you get at least some enjoyment out of something like “Mandalay.” That’s because it’s a good bad poem, which Orwell defines as “a graceful monument to the obvious....That’s a fair take on much of Kilmer. Yes, he was proof of Oscar Wilde’s pronouncement that “all bad poetry springs from genuine feeling.” But he could still touch certain chords with crude, shameless offerings like “The House With Nobody in It”:I never have seen a haunted house, but I hear there are such things;That they hold the talk of spirits, their mirth and sorrowings.I know this house isn’t haunted, and I wish it were, I do;For it wouldn’t be so lonely if it had a ghost or two.If you insist on rejecting this admittedly hokey notion utterly, never musing that “only God can make a tree” upon beholding a particularly soaring oak . . . well, take your pick. Are you an Orwellian snob or an Orwellian liar?
I am reminded of our longtime companion Eric Blair (how strange to need to mention him so close to the invocation of Orwell) and his position on the First World War. Namely, he holds that war killed Western Civilization -- that it was a mortal wound to its soul, to which it is still slowly succumbing.
His position is plausible. You can see in the poetry of the era before the war a great civilizational confidence. All sides rode to war on horseback, with at least some of their more famous units dressed gaily in ancestral armor or bright uniforms that recalled the Napoleonic era. Four years later, the aristocracy of all their nations was broken and destroyed; we recall Tolkien, who fought at the Somme, noting that all of the friends of his youth were dead.
Another position on Kilmer is possible: that his poetry is simply good precisely because it manages to bring all things under the eye of the sacred and divine. If a young woman were writing poetry today under the influence of some Guru, it would be thought a mark of her talents if she could find the sacred in ordinary things -- so long as she did so in the light of an Eastern religion, perhaps after her daily yoga flow session. Given that limited change of context, I can imagine such a poet enjoying real popularity among LitCrit circles, perhaps appearing on Oprah or being invited to Goop.
It may be that Kilmer seems naive to those born after the great wound of World War I. Yet he was writing after suffering his own great wound, the paralysis and slow death of his beloved daughter. It was that context that brought him to devotion and daily prayer, to the determination to see all things -- yes, even New Jersey transit -- through eyes that reflected on their sacred nature.
We have discussed here in other contexts the argument from Augustine and Avicenna and Aquinas that, indeed, all things that exist must be at least somewhat good because their existence is sustained by a God who is perfectly so. They were greater thinkers than most, drawing on arguments from ancient thinkers at least as great as themselves, Plato and Aristotle and Plotinus. The position isn't obviously wrong: far from it. It is defended by rank upon rank of reason and argument marshalled by the finest minds in human history.
The disdain and mockery strike me, at last, as a septic corruption likely arising from the great psychic wound. They consider themselves to be sophisticated and not naive, because they can entertain the bitter fruits of despair. It may be the greater art to retain instead the awe, to remain capable of seeing the sacred, the true, and the beautiful.
Elfdalian is traditionally spoken in a small part of the region of Dalarna, known as Älvdalen in Swedish and Övdaln in Elfdalian. But using linguistic and archeological data, including runes, Elfdalian experts have tracked the language back to the last phase of ancient Nordic – spoken across Scandinavia between the sixth and eighth centuries...While runes had became obsolete in most of Sweden as early as the 14th century, there is evidence of runes being used in Älvdalen as late as 1909, making it the last place in the world where they were used.
