Tuesday, May 31, 2011

Important post-Memorial Day reading.

Note the bit about how the defunding of the NGO development projects by the global recession and an Arab Spring-inspired collapse in jihadi funding has done more to knock the insurgency in the head than years of red-handed war. Especially note how we were funding both sides of the war by letting Taliban facilitators sleaze their way into subcontracting both NGO and military development projects, and then claiming the benefits as Talib-provided. So much for "soft power projection", eh?

Via the usual source.

Wednesday, May 11, 2011

I just asked the office manager what happened to the milk I had bought Monday morning before work & hadn't been able to take home until last night. She said she threw it out - "It expired May 22nd!"

Jodi, I said - it's May 11th.

Apparently she thought it had been sitting in there since *last* May.

Oh, well. ^_^

Monday, May 02, 2011

OK, I just had a conversation with a non-political co-worker who didn't believe that they actually killed bin Laden. This "burial at sea" BS is going to seriously bite us in the ass. When *I'm* the guy defending the current imbeciles against charges of conspiratorial fraud & "wag-the-dog"ism... that ain't good. And it started off with me laughing at some reporter doofus accidentally reporting the death of "Obama", in a typo that's bound to haunt that guy's career from here on out.
This, on the other hand, is shameful. Death, even of a devil or a monster, should never be celebrated.

Good weapons are instruments of fear; all creatures hate them.
Therefore followers of the Tao never used them.
The wise man prefers the left.
The man of war prefers the right.

Weapons are instruments of fear; they are not a wise man's tools.
He uses them only when he has no choice.
Peace and quiet are dear to his heart.
And victory no cause for rejoicing.
If you rejoice in victory, then you delight in killing;
If you delight in killing, you cannot fulfill yourself.

On happy occasions precedence is given to the left,
On sad occasions to the right.
In the army the general stands on the left,
The commander-in-chief on the right.
This means that war is conducted like a funeral.
When many people are being killed,
They should be mourned in heartfelt sorrow.
That is why a victory must be observed like a funeral.


Man, I haven't read the Dao De Jing in years.

h/t
I went out yesterday to see the "May flowers" our prolific April showers have foretold.

I got rained on.
Hmm. So they finally got him. And he wasn't in a brick border fortress in Waziristan or a cave in Nuristan, but a McMansion in an Islamabad suburb, living among the families of ISI bureaucrats.

Are we going to just pretend that our nation's greatest enemy wasn't being protected by the intelligence ministry of an alleged ally whom we've been giving billions yearly in military aid? We have the body. Next time you meet a Pakistani, ask them what their government would have done, if they were in our shoes.

I have difficulty expressing myself in an even and non-incendiary tone right now.