I bow to Eric B.'s knowledge of G. I. Joe action figures. Apparently I'm nominated to serve as "Wildman," which appears to be rather appropriate:
Originally a soft-spoken history teacher, Private Shapiro had a tendency to go off when pushed to the limit, earning him the nickname "Wildman" amongst his teammates.I'm not sure if "soft-spoken" is an adjective that has often been used to describe me, but the rest of it more or less fits.
What I wan to know is, where did he find a soldier action figure with a full beard?
The London Spectator has an interview with Lieutenant Colonel Jim Stockmoe, the senior Military Intelligence officer in Tikrit. He's a jolly fellow:
"Here's a funny story. There were three brothers down in Baghdad who had a mortar tube and were firing into the Green Zone. They didn't have a baseplate so they were storing the mortar rounds in the car engine compartment and the rounds got overheated. Two of these clowns dropped them in the tube and they exploded, blowing their legs off."With a few more examples of 'an increasingly hapless insurgency,' the article explains the reason:
Abandoning the lifeless carcasses and smouldering wreckage of the car, the third brother sought refuge in a nearby house. The occupants were less than impressed, related Stockmoe, slapping his thigh. "So they proceeded to beat the crap out of him and then turned him over to the Iraqi police. It was like the movie Dumb and Dumber."
There have been so many examples of such incompetence that Stockmoe, who leaves Iraq this week after a year as the US army's 1st Infantry Division's senior military intelligence officer, has been doling out unofficial Darwin Awards in honour of the most side-splittingly useless insurgents.
Created in 1993 by a Stanford University student, the official Darwin Awards commemorate those who "contribute to the improvement of our gene pool by removing themselves from it in a really stupid way". According to Stockmoe, Iraq's gene pool is in better shape each day.
Stockmoe has a serious point, and a close look at insurgent attacks since the Fallujah offensive in November reveals that while the numbers might have increased, they are becoming less effective. The nine election-day suicide bombers averaged about three victims each, a strike-rate so bad that Allah might soon start rationing the virgins to show his displeasure.... The gap between the rhetoric and the actions of Abu Musab al-Zarkawi, the Jordanian Salafist who leads the most brutal strand of the insurgency, has grown ever wider since he lost his base in Fallujah and was largely restricted to the Sunni corridor that runs from Mosul to north Babil.Fallujah not only deprived Zarqawi of his base, but broke the alliance that Newsweek is reporting in this week's edition.
There was bitter dissent when Zarkawi and other insurgent leaders fled Fallujah and left their underlings to fight. Fear of betrayal has led to smaller cells operating ever more independently, preventing an overall insurgent strategy from developing.Remember the dissent to the invasion of Fallujah? "So what if we attack the city and kill a few local boys. The leaders will just escape."
Crimson the roadside, the prison wall, the cave,Not so tribal braves, who expect their heroes to fight from the front -- or, at least, not to abandon their soldiers to die. Zarqawi's flight places him, not in the Legion of the Rearguard, but in the league of General John Cope.
Proof of their valour! Go sleep in peace ye brave!
Comrade tread lightly, you're near a hero's grave,
Proud die the soldiers of the Rearguard.
Cope sent a challenge frae Dunbar,What the Redcoats may have thought of this, the Highlanders were not impressed. They would have thought less yet, should one of their own have done the same. When Charlie left the field, it was because his army had been shattered at Culloden. The leaders' flight before the storm wins no hearts in old Fallujah.
Sayin "Charlie meet me an' ye daur;
An' I'll learn ye the airt o' war,
If ye'll meet me in the morning."
When Charlie looked the letter upon,
He drew his sword and scabbard from,
Come, follow me, my merry men,
And we'll meet Johnnie Cope in the morning....
When Johnnie Cope he heard o' this,
He thocht it wouldna be amiss,
Tae hae a horse in readiness,
Tae flee awa in the morning.
Fye now, Johnnie, get up an' rin,
The Highland bagpipes mak' a din,
It's better tae sleep in a hale skin,
For it will be a bluidie morning.
When Johnnie Cope tae Dunbar cam,
They speired at him, "Where's all your men?"
"The de'il confound me gin I ken,
For I left them all in the morning."
Now Johnnie, troth ye werena blate,
Tae come wi' news o' your ain defeat,
And leave your men in sic a strait,
Sae early in the morning.
Sometimes, even the London Guardian gets it right:
At the start of the 21st century, we can see what went wrong more clearly. What went wrong was western European modernism.Just so. And not only on this particular topic.
Via the NRA's ILA news service, I see this article from the Savannah Morning News:
Senate Republicans on Tuesday introduced a proposed change to the Georgia Constitution that would protect hunting and fishing from being outlawed, a move some Democrats say is a political ploy to win the GOP votes in the 2006 elections.Back when I lived in Savannah, Eric Johnson was my Senator (or maybe he was a representative in those days -- it's been a little while). I worked on a campaign for an opponent of his -- longtime readers of the Hall will remember that Grim is a Southern Democrat of the Zell Miller school -- but I always respected the man.
Senate President Pro Tem Eric Johnson, R-Savannah, said the constitutional amendment is needed to prevent Georgians from losing a way of life that is essential to those who hail from outside urban areas.
"As Georgia gets more and more urbanized and Atlanta gets bigger and bigger, I think you've got more and more people that don't understand hunting and don't understand the birthright that Georgians feel about it," Johnson said. "We want to make sure that animal-rights activists or liberals in the General Assembly can never take away Georgians' rights to hunting and fishing."
Sen. Regina Thomas, D-Savannah, on Tuesday called the amendment unneeded and suggested Republicans are angling to give a boost to GOP candidates in 2006, when voters will cast ballots for all statewide officers including governor, lieutenant governor and the commissioners of agriculture, insurance and labor.It may very well be true that this is, in part, a ploy to win votes. Certainly it is likely to win them.
"They are determined they are going to take every constitutional officer in the state," Thomas said of the GOP. "I don't think we need a constitutional amendment on (hunting). I think there are more important things that affect and adversely impact the lives of the people of this state."
Johnson rejected such criticism, saying his resolution isn't about winning votes.
Beth Brown, spokeswoman for the Wildlife Resources Division of the Georgia Department of Natural Resources, said she was not aware of any existing state proposal to outlaw hunting or fishing in Georgia. And while the department supports the amendment, it doesn't intend to lobby for its passage.
Here's a story hot off the wires. No link yet.
LIMA, Peru (AP) A key witness against a man U.S. drug authorities say is Peru's most notorious drug trafficker was shot to death in prison, officials said Wednesday.There are a lot of questions about this story. The answer to all of them is, "Because it's South America."
Jose Maria Aguilar, known as "Shushupe'' a type of deadly snake in Peru was shot to death Tuesday in his prison cell in the jungle city of Pucallapa, 305 miles (490 kilometers) northeast of Lima.
Aguilar had told authorities that Fernando Zevallos, the founder of the country's now defunct national airline, Aero Continente, used his company's planes to smuggle drugs into Colombia, El Comercio newspaper reported.
Aguilar was shot twice in the face allegedly by a prisoner already serving time for murder, said officials with the National Institute of Prisons. The inmate was not identified.
Peru's director of prisons, Wilfredo Pedraza, said Wednesday investigators do not believe this was simply a fight between inmates.
"This was a planned act, organized from outside, premeditated and executed by a person who already had a record of committing murder for hire,'' Pedraza told reporters in Pucallapa. "Aguilar's murder was planned by a third party ... (whose identity) the police investigation will have to determine.''
In a television interview on Peru's Canal 2, Zevallos denied any involvement in Aguilar's death.
"It would be very stupid to do that,'' said Zevallos.
Zevallos, 47, is currently on trial for drug trafficking. In his interview, he again denied the charges against him.
"I'm a businessman,'' he said. ``I'm not a criminal. I'm not a drug trafficker.''
Zevallos has been the subject of more than 30 investigations by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration and has been tried in Peru on charges of murder-for-hire, trafficking in cocaine and money laundering. But he has never been convicted of a crime.
The Bush Administration added Zevallos to Washington's international "drug kingpin'' list in June, freezing his U.S. assets and prohibiting U.S. citizens from commercial dealing with him or any of his businesses.
Nepal's government is dissovled by its king, who cuts off the nation's communications with the rest of the world. The Economist explains why this could sow chaos throughout South Asia.
But it is bigger even than that. The Maoist rebels in Nepal have expanded their operations across China's borders. A collapse of order in Nepal could bring two nuclear powers -- India and China -- into conflict at the roof of the world.
Keep watch.
When news of the Indian Ocean tsunami filtered through to Africa the day after Christmas, Gladstone Robinson was playing Bob Marley's 'Natural Mystic'.Uh-oh. All that Rapture talk was one thing, but when Bob Marley turns on you...
''It's the prophecy!'' shouted the 75-year-old Rastafarian, shaking his knotted stringy beard and grey dreadlocks, over the din of the CD player.
''Marley's song says it all: 'Many people would die, many would have to suffer and many more would have to cry','' said Robinson in his husky voice. 'Brother, I'll tell you Babylon is going to fall.''
Those of you with access to such things can see Friends of Democracy on C-SPAN from 2-4 PM, EST. Grim's Hall is not wired for television, so if any of you do watch, let me know how it goes.
The Adventures of Chester has a roundup of some Iraqi responses to the vote.
Ali's thoughts at Free Iraqi:From Friends of Democracy:
This was my way to stand against those who humiliated me, my family and my friends. It was my way of saying," You're history and you don't scare me anymore". It was my way to scream in the face of all tyrants, not just Saddam and his Ba'athists and tell them, "I don't want to be your, or anyone's slave. You have kept me in your jail all my life but you never owned my soul". It was my way of finally facing my fears and finding my courage and my humanity again.
...
Iraqi blogger Hammorabi has this to say:
Today is the day in which the souls of our martyrs comforted!
Today those who were killed in Iraq or wounded among our friends from the USA and other allies, who helped us to reach this day, are with us again to inscribe their names with Gold for ever!
Q: Ms. Alaa Rabih, what is your feeling on elections?Not for the first time, the "Friends of Democracy" remind me of another band, with a similar name. But they are not the only revolutionaries in Iraq. "The Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution," once feared as a link to Iranian militancy, also has a statement:
A: My feeling is a feeling of nationalism and revolution. For the first time, we feel secure and stable, we will have a new constitution and live in a peaceful Iraq.
Q: Mr. Ahmad Salman, what is your feeling on Election Day?
A: A good feeling, a feeling of a revolution happening.
Mr. Sadr Ad din al Qabanji... said, "The elections are the battle for freedom against despotism and independence against occupation,” and on those viewing the Iraqi scene as being a secular-Islamic, Shiite-Sunni, Arab-Kurdish competition, well their reading is marginal and imprecise. As Al Qabaji says, “The real competition is that between peace and terrorism. All the Iraqis are in the peace and law trench."Today's Washington Post has an article which asks, "Is Democracy Un-Islamic?" They might have simply waited a day.
Reports on negativity about the Iraq elections appear at Belmont Club and a blog called "Think Things Through" (I often use a variant of that phrase when speaking to my son). The usual suspects are involved. There is an irony here.
Both Robert Fisk and Juan Cole are regular participants in the "Americans are culturally illiterate about Arabs" school of foreign policy studies. Among other places, Cole has lamented alleged American illiteracy here and here. Fisk needs no introduction to any reader of blogs.
The irony is that both of these writers, and all of their ilk, have completely misunderstood the Iraqi cultural reaction to the elections. American soldiers and Marines, whose warrior culture is far closer to the Arabs' than is any academic or journalistic one, understood the truth from the beginning. The problem for soldiers has only been learning to think about how they would feel if the circumstances were reversed. The problem for these proud intellectuals has been something more arcane, like demonology, trying to grasp drives whose rules they have written down, but which remain totally alien and finally not understood.
In the debate -- I have had it a dozen times in as many places, and read variants of it in far more -- this school has held that the threat of violence over the elections would make them illegitimate because it would depress turnout, and even among those who came to vote, would through intimidation influence them to make false choices. Until security was certain, there could be no free election.
The thing these debaters never understood was this: in an "honor and shame society" (to use the intellectual term for it), there is great honor to be gained when there is a threat hanging over your actions. It is the same power which drove warriors of the Algonquin Nations to count coup on the enemy.
Far from depressing turnout, the insurgents inspired it.
Wretchard wrote:
[Cole]'s appreciation was totally wrong. Think of what it means for anyone to dare vote in Fallujah at all, despite the penalties prescribed by terrorists, some of whom are certain to be kinsmen. And when was the time, at any Faculty meeting, that the halt and the blind tramped in to vote (cars are banned from approaching the polling precincts for security reasons) at the risk of death?This is correct. And if it is to be understood in its cultural context, one must recognize what a personal act of heroism means in a warrior culture. These people -- including the young and the old, the men and the women, "the halt and the blind" -- have counted coup, to bring honor to themselves and to their project. Anyone who speaks of that project, or writes about it, must show it the honor that the Iraqi people have won for it.
One of the primary tools of the guerrilla is the ruse of appearing more dangerous than he really is.The guerrilla, because he chooses the place and time of combat, can appear to be everywhere at once -- and therefore a universal feature of the landscape, even when his numbers are limited. But the election, if you know what to look for, showed that tactic for what it is: an illusion.
Hit and run attacks, sniper attacks, bombings and the like give the appearance of a foe who is everywhere, when in fact his numbers are limited.
There are several things I might blog about today. All of them pale in comparison to the importance of the Iraqi election.
I therefore request you take whatever time you might have spent here, and visit the Friends of Democracy. They are the only group covering the elections from the Iraqi grassroots.
I hope for all the best for Iraq.
Arts & Letters Daily links to a feud between Matthew Parris of London and Victor Hanson of California. The topic? Whether America is about to collapse, or whether she's just getting started.
I won't try to summarize the arguments, which are well constructed and worth hearing. I do have some context to provide, however. I would like to point out that the feud takes precisely the form of the claims of Marx and Joseph Schumpeter. Marx outlined what he saw as structural problems with capitalism, and projected its inevitable demise. Schumpeter, while agreeing that capitalism was doomed in the long term, explained that Marx failed to grasp the robust nature of the beast.
Marx thought that the trends of capitalism he observed in his day were not reversable. The trend toward monopolization, for example: the growing powers in each industry would continue to eat up smaller businesses until they had swallowed them all, and then the giants would clash. Projecting from that clash of giants, he saw the ruin of titans of industry, cast down into the proleteriat, where they would become disaffected leaders of rebellion...
Schumpeter explained that the situation was more complex. There are external factors that prevent the Gotterdammerung that Marx believed he foresaw. The main one, Schumpeter explained, was new ideas. Big corporations have trouble enacting them, as they are tied to existing products and ways of doing things. In the largest, there are whole wings staffed by people whose continued success depends on doing things just as they are now done. The institutional resistance to change makes them vunerable to smaller, faster, young companies, who can -- in the fashion of a barracuda -- strip chunks of the flesh off the giants, perhaps until there is nothing left. It is this ability to assimilate change that is the deciding factor.
Parris and Hanson occupy the same positions. Parris is attempting to demonstrate that American power can grow no further, and that rising powers are approaching the ability to strike at the United States' economic structure. Hanson points out that there are external factors Parris fails to consider:
China and India are the new tigers, but their rapid industrialization and urbanization have created enormous social and civic problems long ago dealt with by the United States. Each must soon confront environmentalism, unionism, minority rights, free expression, community activism, and social entitlements that are the wages of any citizenry that begins to taste leisure and affluence. China is fueled by industrious laborers who toil at cut-rate wages for 14 hours per day, but that will begin to moderate once an empowered citizenry worries about dirty air, back backs, inadequate housing, and poor health care. The infrastructure of generations–bridges, roads, airports, universities, power grids–are well established and being constantly improved in the United States, and so there is a reason why a European would prefer to drink the water, get his appendix out, or drive in San Francisco rather than in Bombay, Beijing, Istanbul–or Paris or Rome.America, like capitalism, is more robust than the straight-line projections would suggest. It is robust because it has a system unusually well develpoed for absorbing and reacting to change in the world. The statist EU, China, and the rest are tied into formal decision making processes that, like the corporations of Marx's day, place decision making power in the hands of vested bureaucracies. Not so in America.
Schumpeter believed that capitalism would be destroyed by its successes. Capitalism would spawn, he believed, a large intellectual class that made its living by attacking the very bourgeois system of private property and freedom so necessary for the intellectual class's existence.These people are the enemy of us all. Literally enough: they not only work against the underpinnings of the world, as Schumpeter warned, but they even wish us ill.
An interesting blog called Testosterhome, run by a mother of four sons, was brought to my attention by The Corner. I enjoyed this story, which I think conveys a useful lesson society would do well to learn:
The thing about boys, I'm discovering, is that the fight is usually over by the time I hear about it. Our home is more or less tattle-free, but the lack of narking is compensated by random moans and wails off in the distance.Trial by combat: an idea whose time has come again.When someone fills me in on 'what is this all about?,' the affected parties are generally back to work building their lego ship, or amassing an arsenal of tinker-toy weapons.
I told my mom the other day that I sometimes feel obligated to make a random comment, force an apology, because that's my job. But it seems that more often than not, the boys seem to handle it in the age-old spirit of hand-to-hand combat. I'd like to train them to quietly shake hands or hug, but am realizing that would just be dragging something out that they already take care of quickly and with no strings attached.
It's so touching. A genuine, good and kind article about the United States military, from the French news service AFP.
"U.S. forces will be here through the relief effort and as long as the Indonesian government needs us to stay," USS Abraham Lincoln skipper Captain Kendall Card told reporters late Wednesday.Skipper! They've even learned a bit of the lingo. But it gets better.
He did not say when the mission would now end, adding the U.S. forces would be ready to help Indonesia even after the emergency phase was over.Catch that? The AFP added two words, to make clear that the US' intentions were honorable."I think the relief effort is coming to a close and now we're going towards the reconstruction phase. Our helicopters will be here to help the Indonesian government in the reconstruction phase (if asked)," he said.
A book review in today's Telegraph asks "What are we thinking of?" It concerns a new book warning of environmental collapse based on historic models:
Some of the case-histories make this point convincingly. The early Norse settlers in Iceland, for example, came close to rendering the island uninhabitable, but veered from the brink just in time. (It took them a while to discover that although the green and wooded landscape resembled that of Scandinavia, the soil on which it was based was something quite unlike their native earth: a layer of fine volcanic ash, held in place only by a thin web of vegetation, and easily blown away once that vegetation was cleared.)The facts about Norse Greenland are a bit different than the book presents. The environmental change that mattered most had nothing to do with human activity, but a mini Ice-Age:
Their counterparts in Greenland, on the other hand, never learned from their mistakes: they cut down whatever they could burn, dug up huge areas of turf to make insulating walls, over-grazed the scanty grassland, and fought against the local Eskimos (whose ingenious methods for surviving in this environment they never bothered to copy). After several hundred years of frost-bitten subsistence, the two Norse colonies on Greenland succumbed to fighting and starvation.
How seriously should we take the idea that the failures of Norse Greenland, Easter Island and other such societies constitute warnings for our societies today?
Sea ice off the coast of Iceland nearly vanished for three centuries. The effects seem to have spread to North America, where in AD 900 Eskimos settled Ellesmere Island at the usually frigid northwest corner of Greenland....There's a lesson here, yes. Just not the one the author intended.Then a chill set in. Slowly at first. People didn't want to believe it. Farmers were reluctant to give up their new fields. Settlers on Greenland held on for as long as possible. But the steadily expanding cold was irresistible by the 1200s. Unspeakable hardships began to take hold in much of the world. In Iceland, extensive grasslands that had supported sheep, goats, and cattle from AD 874 had receded by 1200. Farming became so difficult that Icelanders turned to fishing and the hunting of seals to support themselves. The population fell sharply....
By 1700, Iceland was surrounded with sea ice that made commerce with the rest of the world hazardous. And in faraway China, citrus groves that had survived for centuries froze in Jiangxi province.
Over at the Mudville Gazette, Mrs. Greyhawk -- whose continued hard work and devotion to her soldier husband are inspirational to observe -- has a couple of important roundups today. The first is on the upcoming elections. I would like to remind you also of the Friends of Democracy project, which is collecting grassroots-level news from the Iraqi provinces. Because FoD is staffed by Iraqis, the whole of the country is open to them: election-hating thugs may not like them any better than us, but they're harder to identify.
The other article at Mudville concerns the HEROS Act, which concerns aid for widows and orphans of servicemen. The bill is sponsored by Joe Lieberman and Jeff Sessions, making it a bipartisan effort to care for the families of the fallen. Should it pass, it will be retroactive to October 2001, so that all the families of men killed fighting in the terror war will be supported.
Via BlackFive, I see that Eric's favorite Milblogger, RedSix of ArmorGeddon, has been awarded the Silver Star.
Naturally, RedSix didn't mention it.
Read more here.
Jihad Watch has the latest statement from our self-described "virtuous" opponents in Iraq. This is from a leader of the Ansar al-Sunnah group, the ones who recently set off a suicide bomb inside a mess hall tent, coupled with a mortar attack from a civilian area that was timed to kill rescue and aid workers responding to the blast.
Along the way, he offers a description of how he sees us:
Cowboys, drowning in sin, corruption and pornography.This, naturally enough, put me in the mind of the famous (and probably, the only) musical starring Clint Eastwood, Paint Your Wagon. It details the rise and fall of a frontier settlement among gold miners. It's a rollicking and tongue-in-cheek portrayal, but it actually has a number of the details right: for example, women being so rare on the frontier. In one scene, men rush in droves to see one, and one of the miners offers fifty dollars in gold dust to hold her baby for a few minutes. In fact, I've seen an illustration from a newspaper of the day, which accompanied a story describing how men would offer gifts of up to a hundred dollars' worth of gold dust just out of gratitude for the sight of a woman.
