Posts

"This Is Mine": Braves Battery Beats the Dodgers

The Atlanta Braves battery beat the Los Angeles Dodgers last night and made history. Some of the history is crazy baseball stat stuff. Some was legit. Drake Baldwin became the only catcher since 1900 to lead off the game with a home run, on the first pitch even, that ended up being the only run scored the whole game. The Braves rookie hit the first pitch he saw last night 402 feet into the Chop House in right field. A leadoff home run providing the only run in a 1-0 game has happened only 33 times in MLB history. Never by a catcher. Catchers, you know, rarely lead off. But that was it offensively. The Braves beat the World Champion Dodgers 1-0 before a packed house in Atlanta. Then Chris Sale, the other half of the battery, took the mound to make a little history of his own. When the season started I half-jokingly asked my baseball friend Jerry if he thought the Braves could win the NL East with one starting pitcher. That was all we seemed to have. Sale and a bunch of unproven or quest...
Post a Comment
Read more

What Epic Fury Stimulated: Part Two

[ Read all my Iran stuff. ] Since late last year, I’ve been enjoying David Stahel’s outstanding series of books on the German operations against Soviet Russia in 1941. I hope to review his body of work in the future. Back in May I quoted Stahel and it bears repeating: “It is important to remember that battlefield victories are not ends in themselves. Their worth is calculated from the strategic possibilities, military or political, that these stimulate.” Although the quote is universally applicable, Stahel was writing about Barbarossa, one of the most extraordinary military campaigns ever. The Germans captured millions Soviet troops, destroyed multiple armies while advancing hundreds of miles into the Soviet Union. They were winning everywhere. Yet, Stahel argues that somewhere in the middle of all that success Germany was already losing the war strategically. The victories stimulated things Germany could not control. Soviet mobilization. Longer supply lines. Constant German losses. Br...
Post a Comment
Read more

Reading Faulkner: Intruder in the Dust

Image
The novel begins... I first started reading Faulkner in the 1980's. There was a long stretch of about 25 years or so where I didn't touch him at all. But, beginning with The Unvanquished , the past several summers I've returned to his remarkable works. I've written multiple essays out of that return, mostly pertaining to Absalom! Absalom! and  As I Lay Dying . Somehow, I never read Intruder in the Dust . I knew its reputation. They made a movie out of it which I’ve never seen. It has been quoted or referenced here and there in my wanderings. So this summer I finally fixed that little omission. Summertime is the best time to read Faulkner. For me, katydids sounding lazily in my woods sets the proper tone. It is a book I wrestled with, like I often wrestle with Faulkner. Not as complicated as attempting The Sound and Fury for the first time, but it took some focus to get into the stream of consciousness style. I was wrestling with it too much to enjoy it at first, tryi...
Post a Comment
Read more

The IRGC Takes Charge

[ Read all my Iran Stuff ] As long-time readers know, I have spent the last five months trying to figure out what Operation Epic Fury stimulated inside Iran. Some of that necessarily involved speculation. Still, the trajectory has turned out to be fairly clear. I wrote in April that Epic Fury had shattered the governing structure and that "the IRGC arose out of the smoldering remains, probably with more weight than it had before." Later I wrote that "the hardliners assaulted the vacuum." By May my conclusion was simpler. "The IRGC has been bombed into greater importance." Epic Fury stimulated that. Today I don't have to speculate as much. Things are clearer now and not in a good way. Iran has announced a sweeping reorganization of its senior military and security leadership. Six major military appointments were issued together. They followed immediately after the appointment of Mohsen Rezaei, one of the most important figures in the history of t...
Post a Comment
Read more

Trump Is Winning a War in His Head

[ See all my Iran stuff. ] Donald Trump announced yesterday that the people leaking information about depleted American munitions are "being hunted down." Treasonous statements, he called them. Long prison sentences for whoever is responsible. This would be more impressive if the depletion of American munitions had been a secret. It wasn't. The Washington Post reported on March 4, less than a week after Operation Epic Fury began, that the Pentagon was already burning through thousands of expensive precision weapons and air-defense interceptors at an alarming rate. Two days of fighting cost an estimated $5.6 billion in munitions. By April, the Center for Strategic and International Studies was publicly estimating huge reductions in Patriot, THAAD, Tomahawk, and other inventories. I wrote about the depleted American magazine on June 1. Now it's August, and Trump is hunting the leakers. Apparently somebody just told him. I blogged about this June 1. So everybody knew...
Post a Comment
Read more