Bilge & Twaddle: 2005-03-20

This is depressing. To give the black leadership a pass while doing things that would not be tolerated with white leadership is racist. We don't care if blacks mess up their own society as long as whites aren't doing it? It doesn't matter who is doing it, it matters what is being done. Dignity is defined by the recipient, not the giver.

The New York Times > Opinion > Op-Ed Columnist: A Morsel of Goat Meat: "Binga, Zimbabwe -- The hungry children and the families dying of AIDS here are gut-wrenching, but somehow what I find even more depressing is this: Many, many ordinary black Zimbabweans wish that they could get back the white racist government that oppressed them in the 1970's."

Lileks has a good one today about protecting our kids. I agree with his perspective. You don't realize that he is talking about the recent school shootings up north until near the ned. Good part here:

LILEKS (James) :: the Bleat Nowadays we trade freedom for experience – better that the kid have New Experiences under close safe supervision than they wander off into the world. For the world isn’t round, after all. It just looks that way from space. It’s square and it has edges and sometimes people fall off and that’s the last you hear from them. A million kids will run outside to play tomorrow and all but one will stay clear of the edge. Do you want to take that chance? You want to be the one parent today who looks up from the sink and sees the black and white in the driveway?

But there’s nothing you can about the kid who gets his heart kicked and shunned and stabbed from day one, grows up compressing his rage into a tight dense knot, gets a taste of evil – rolls it around on his tongue – likes the taste, and starts to drink it the way you drink Coke. There’s nothing you can do – the same circumstances might have produced a jackass who kicks the dog for sport but keeps his finger off the trigger, or a fellow dead to all emotion, or a man who takes the collar and preaches in the ghetto. Sometimes you get the killers. But these things are comets, as rare as the horrible days where some kid sees the sharp crease where the square edge of the world falls away. Dwell on these things and you’ll go mad yourself. Resign yourself to the fact that you can’t protect them in the end; they’ll go out in the world and get their ego bruised, their heart broken, their dreams sullied and tarnished. All you can do is teach them to remember: if bad news defined the world, it wouldn’t shock us when it happened. Face the sun; it’s there for a reason.

Any comparisons between our military and the terrorist (they both kill people!) fall into pitiful thoughtless ramblings after reading this. It is from a soldier currently in Iraq talking about being "on point" (the front guy) on a patrol.

Sic Vis Pacem, Para Bellum: TURNING POINTWhen we came to about the ¾ mark of houses that were on our patrol, we came up to a gate that was slightly ajar, so we decided to look inside. Slowly peaking through is not very accurate. Firstly when on a patrol wherever your eyes look your weapon is pointed there. For the obvious reason, that you can send bullets should you need to. This response is nearly automatic, but the weapon gets very heavy especially when your muscles are screaming to rest. As I entered what I thought to be a courtyard turned out to be the front yard of a family dwelling. I saw movement to my right and swung around to face 2 young boys. Who came running out to meet the “Mister Mister” w/chocolate. Almost as fast as I pointed my weapon at the movement, the Mother came rushing out to pull her sons back in, she was screaming; “La la la!!!” This is Arabic for No, no, no. She was genuinely afraid that I was going to shoot her children, I was so shocked I literally dropped my weapon, (it was attached to my armour so it fell to my side) as I let it go, I dropped to one knee and smiled at the children. They came up to me and shook my hand and were all smiles. The children in this country just love us. As I backed out me and Thunder6 repeatedly said thank you in Arabic, the mother reached out for and smothered her boys with hugs. The love a mother has for her children never ceases to amaze me, the look of fear and then relief in her eyes was amazing. Hell, I’m one of the good guys (at least I hope so), and I was scared for her children. What is of interest is exactly how little time you have to decide to shoot or not. Yet in a relatively small amount of time I think I aged a few weeks.

A War We Are Winning

From someone who was there...

A War We Are Winning - On Point Commentary by Austin Bay (StrategyPage.com): "It was a very early morning in July 2004, and after making myself a steamer-sized cup of hot tea at my desk in Corps Plans, I walked into the coalition military's Joint Operations Center (JOC) in Al Faw Palace, Baghdad.

Paul Bremer and the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) had left Baghdad a couple of weeks earlier, and Prime Minister Iyad Allawi's interim Iraqi government was --as the bad pun went -- an interim rocky government. But Allawi's government not only had popular support, it had spine. Day by day, Allawi emerged as a smart, adaptive and courageous leader. The Allawi government was rapidly building a democratic Iraqi future."

Chrenkoff: Good News part 5

Lots of good stuff. Especially read his caveat at the bottom.

Chrenkoff: "While throughout major cities of Western world crowds - albeit much diminished since three or two years ago - have turned up over the weekend for anti-democracy rallies to protest the second anniversary of the start of the liberation of Iraq, one region of the world remained strangely unaffected by the 'anti-war' and 'anti-occupation' fervor: the notorious 'Arab street' has failed to join the 'European street' and the 'American street' in condemning yet again Chimpy Bushhitler and his imperialist policies. The only significant exception throughout the Middle East was Turkey, where rallies in three major cities could only muster several hundred people between them."