Joan, my wife, comes home in the morning (0200) from five weeks away in London, Ireland, Scotland and bits of Europe. I’ve been washing, ironing, mopping, shopping (buying flowers – yeh, I know -snivelling, but I did miss her) and now I can really appreciate my father going those extra yards 50 odd years ago to find the Y-Chromosome to kick me off.
Both daughters have left London and are heading home, albeit slowly. All five kinder should be home for my birthday next month – on the periphery of terrorism rather than the centres.
I’ll be busy tomorrow – no blogging.
Over at Troppo Armadillo, Wayne Wood has a good piece on
Capital and how it is an answer to impoverished people. Go read, it’s good stuff.
I like it! Hat tip to
Glenn Slaven for the
source
The Australia as I grew up in:
The ant works hard in the withering heat all summer long, building his house and laying up supplies for the winter.
The grasshopper thinks he is a fool, and laughs and dances and plays the summer away.
Come winter, the ant is warm and well fed. The shivering grasshopper has no food or shelter, so he dies out in the cold.
The Australia I grow old in:
The ant works hard in the withering heat all summer long, building his house and laying up supplies for the winter.
The grasshopper thinks he is a fool, and laughs and dances and plays the summer away. Come winter, the ant is warm and well fed.
The shivering grasshopper calls a press conference and demands to know why the ant should be allowed to be warm and well fed while others less fortunate like him are cold and starving.
The ABC and Channel 9 show up to provide live coverage of the shivering grasshopper, with cuts to a video of the ant in his comfortable warm home with a table filled with food.
Australians are stunned that in a country of such wealth, this poor grasshopper is allowed to suffer so while others have plenty.
The Democrats, the Greens and the Coalition Against Poverty demonstrate in front of the ant’s house.
The ABC, interrupting an Aboriginal cultural festival special from North Queensland with breaking news, broadcasts them singing “We Shall Overcome.”
Bob Brown rants in an interview with Yana Went that the ant has gotten rich off the backs of grasshoppers, and calls for an immediate tax hike on the ant to make him pay his “fair share.”
In response to polls, the Liberal Government drafts the Economic Equity and Grasshopper Anti-Discrimination Act, retroactive to the beginning of the summer. And the ALP quickly passes it through the Senate.
The ant’s taxes are reassessed and he is also fined for failing to hire grasshoppers as helpers.
Without enough money to pay the fine and his newly imposed retroactive taxes, his home is confiscated by the government.
The ant moves to Asia, and starts a successful Agribiz company.
The TV stations later show the now fat grasshopper finishing up the last of the ant’s food though Spring is still months away, while the government owned house he is in, which just happens to be the ant’s old house, crumbles around him because he hadn’t maintained it.
Inadequate government funding is blamed, Kim Beasley now is appointed to head a commission of enquiry that will cost $10,000,000.
The grasshopper is soon dead of a drug overdose, the Sydney Morning Herald blames it on obvious failure of government to address the root causes of despair arising from social inequity.
The abandoned house is taken over by a gang of immigrant spiders, praised by the government for enriching Australia’s multicultural diversity, who promptly terrorize the community.
Who says we do not live in a democracy?
Announced by the
Jakarta Post at 2:20 pm local.
DENPASAR, Bali (Agencies): Imam Sumudra alias Abdul Azis, 33, was sentenced to death at the Denpasar district court at about 2.20 pm local time on Wednesday for masterminding the Bali bombings which killed 202 people last October.
Samudra was found guilty of plotting, organizing and committing the October 12, 2002, bombing of two popular Bali nightspots previously boasted that he would welcome a death sentence as it would allow him into die a martyr.
“We sentence the defendant…to the death penalty,” said chief judge Wayan Sugawa, saying Samudra had been proven guilty of all four charges against him.
“Allahu Akbar!” (God is greatest) a defiant Samudra shouted three times in response, shaking his fist in the air.
Good. One more on the way out.
Time to watch the BBC bias that costs each of us Ł116 a year says Charles Moore in the London Telegraph
The ABC with different names. Point by point except the Brit Ł116 is our $0.08 per day.
You will see this article quoted in several blogs over this week as we contemplate the terror that was 911. And well you should – it’s an inspirational story and well worth the time to read.
Have you seen the movie We were Soldiers?
A good one, in my opinion. Given just a couple hours to tell a tale I think all in all the folks involved did a commendable job.
Perhaps it’s hard to go wrong, given the source material. We Were Soldiers Once, And Young is an account of the battle at Ia Drang Valley, fought in the still early phases of the war in Viet Nam. The book was written by Hal Moore, who was then a Lt Col and commander of the American troops in the valley, and Joe Galloway, a reporter who was at the battle. Their collaboration is a truly human account of men at war- including the enemy viewpoint, as Galloway and Moore’s efforts at capturing the battle on paper were thorough enough to include interviews with survivors from the other side.
Take a look at the cover. The prominent figure is Rick Rescorla, described thusly on the LZ Xray web page:
No sleep for 48 hours.
Grimy, unshaven, filthy uniform.
Canteens loose, dogtags hanging out, pocket unbuttoned, helmet strap hanging.
No insignia of rank, sleeves up.
Dirty fingernails.
His bayonet is fixed; trigger finger alert and ready for action.
Lt. Rick Rescorla, Platoon Leader, B Co 2/7 Cav in Bayonet Attack on the morning of 16 Nov 1965
This is not a posed shot; this is a man moving forward into combat. Eyes forward. Ready.
Hat tip to ‘Texas Jack’ at
Streams. Continue reading about Rick Rescorla in the
Mudville Gazette
After years of burning coffee ‘place mats’ (CDs that failed to copy) Buena Vista Home Entertainment in the US is doing it for me. Now you can buy a movie on DVD, watch it and after 48 hours of exposure to Oxygen it turns into unreadable black.
>>more
Links are working!!! I’ll now run away and compose something worth linking to…back later.
Niall muses on September 11 and asks;
Must we, or rather should we need to be constantly reminded of these events? Surely, it’s better to be made aware of the probable reasons for the occurrence and try to ensure the circumstances don’t arise again
His last sentence is a given but I believe we
must be regularly reminded of how evil the bastards are. Human nature, being what it is, will see people move forward, as Niall points out. However, on this occassion ‘getting on with life’ will never work while we still have terrorists trying to snuff out that very life. The Holocast, the Killing Fields, USSRs Gulags, etc, can be placed in a ‘past obscenities’ file because the perpetrators are mostly dead and buried or have been neutralized. al Qeada still exists! We need to maintain the momentum.
This
article in the Washington Post atracts some interest in the blogosphere as Andrew Sullivan posts an article under
FLYPAPER – IT’S WORKING and a piece in todays
Australian.
Two years after the attacks on the United States, Osama bin Laden’s leadership cadre has been isolated and weakened and is increasingly reliant on the violent actions of local radicals around the world to maintain its profile. But the al Qaeda network is determined to open a new front in Iraq to sustain itself as the vanguard of radical Islamic groups fighting holy war, according to European, American and Arab intelligence sources.
Sounds good to me. If the US forces stay and sucker al Qaeda to fight in Iraq it places the battle where it should – out of reach of women, kids and other innocents. In
military speak it’s called fighting the battle on ground of your own choosing.
Update: President Bush agrees with me.
We have learned that terrorist attacks are not caused by the use of strength; they are invited by the perception of weakness. And the surest way to avoid attacks on our own people is to engage the enemy where he lives and plans. We are fighting that enemy in Iraq and Afghanistan today so that we do not meet him again on our own streets, in our own cities.
Read the full text of last nights address to the nation
here
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