Month: April 2004

What’s your pimp name?

(thanks to Diamondtrim A. Valentine for the tip; now where’s my money, bitch?)

The news about U.S. soldiers torturing Iraqi prisoners fills me with revulsion and horror. The perpetrators should face severe punishment.

I’m glad our freedom of the press allows the media to expose such horrific acts.

Kofi Annan, feeling the heat: “If you read the reports, it looks as if the Saddam regime had nothing to do with it. They did nothing wrong–it was all the U.N.”

Nah, it wasn’t all the U.N., Kofi. If the reports are true, it was also a French minister of the interior (who opposed the war), a Labour MP in the UK (who opposed the war), the Russian “office of the president” (which opposed the war), and possibly your own son (no idea where he stood on the war).

Of course, we may never find out the truth, since the U.N.’s files on the oil-for-food scam seem to be woefully incomplete and inaccurate.

Thanks to Instapundit for linking to this DoD briefing, where Donald Rumsfeld offers a comment on the practice of using mosques as firebases:

There are two ways, I suppose, one could inform readers of the Geneva Convention stipulation against using places of worship to conduct military attacks. One might be to headline saying that Terrorists Attack Coalition Forces From Mosques. That would be one way to present the information.

Another might be to say: Mosques Targeted in Fallujah. That was the Los Angeles Times headline this morning.

Instapundit also links to this neat article about how the Iraqi army managed to keep its bunkers insect-free . . .

According to this article, a pair of masked, armed Palestinians tried to stop a pair of suicide bombers, one of whom elected to blow himself up, also killing the people who were trying to stop him.

Under normal circumstances, I wouldn’t consider gunmen in masks to represent moderation, but I do take a story like this as a good sign that Hamas isn’t the only force in action among the Palestinians. I hope I’m making the correct reading of this event, and that it presages a popular uprising against Hamas.

Update: An article in the Scotsman explains that the masked men were . . . street criminals! And they were trying to mug the bombers! I know I shouldn’t laugh about this, but I am. Probably because I so politicize everything, it never occurred to me that something like this would happen. Sue me, alright?

Oh, I wish I would’ve been the one to come up with that title. Unfortunately, I can’t take credit.

In the early 1990s, I remember reading about how portable ultrasound units were enabling Chinese villagers to find out if pregnant women were carrying male or female babies. Then, typically, they’d abort the female babies. According to the article I was reading, it was reaching a point where some regions had a birth-rate of 32 boys to every 1 girl.

There’s a new book on the subject, and it predicts that China will engage in a massive, bloody conflict by 2020, presumably because of the pent-up frustrations of all those grown boys. The book is Bare Branches: Security Implications of Asia’s Surplus Male Population, by Valerie M. Hudson and Andrea M. den Boer, and the Chronicle of Higher Education just ran a neat article on it.

Pat Tillman used to be a defensive back for the Arizona Cardinals. Entering his prime earning years (with a 3-year, $3.6 million contract offer on the table), he elected to quit football and join the U.S. Army. His brother also enlisted, and the two went through Rangers training.

An ESPN article about Tillman a year ago included the following quotes:

“A professional athlete’s career is self-indulgent almost by definition,” said Alan Klein, professor of sociology and anthropology at Northeastern University. “Risking your career and your life is not an easy decision. They’re content to wear a patch on the uniform for solidarity, but that’s the easy way out. Really, we’re all taking the easy way out.

“My parents were in [Nazi concentration camp] Auschwitz. All my life, I’ve heard about the acts of bravery and sacrifice. We would all like to think of ourselves as people who would do the right thing. But, deep down, how many of us would give up everything we have? Certainly, it’s not a lock.”

No, it�s not a lock. Pat Tillman got killed in an ambush/firefight in Afghanistan yesterday. I want to write something more about this, but I’m having a tough time parsing my feelings, between this and the debate about the photos of coffins of dead soldiers.

I forget. Is this

a sign of the Apocalypse?

Because she sends me links like this one.

Feel free, in the comments section, to let us know how many of these things you’ve accomplished . . .

Yeah, withdrawing troops from Iraq is going to prevent terrorism in Spain. Till then, do you mind if we drag policemen’s bodies from their tombs and light them on fire?

Talk about barbarians at the motherfucking gate…