Archive for January, 2005

I don’t seem to be getting any email. If you’ve emailed me today, I haven’t received it. Not sure what the problem is. Messages sent to myself from outside of SBCGlobal aren’t getting through.

If I don’t respond, try again later. Sorry.

UPDATE: Well, errrr…Everything’s fine now. I left Outlook open last night and everything was downloading at home before I could see it at work. Oops.

Everyone’s email made it through and I’ll ignore it as usual.

Mrs. Spoons retells a story told by Victor Davis Hanson on the National Review cruise a few months back:

He related that when he was a guest speaker at the University of Salonika in Greece recently, the assembled Greek students and professors gave Hanson all kinds of grief for the US’s invasion of Iraq and our support of “fascist” Jews in Israel. The decried America as a war-mongering destroyer of people, and they couldn’t imagine anyone supporting such actions.

Hanson paused, and then responded with what seemed to be a non-sequitur: “Do any of you know the history of this university, the University of Salonika?”

The group was a bit non-plussed, but had few replies. One or two knew it was built in the early fifties.

“Yes,” Hanson replied. “It was built entirely with American money, donated to the Greeks to help rebuild their shattered country after WWII, as part of the Marshall Plan. The very school you all attend was a gift from the country you’re reviling. But moreover, do you know why the land here in the middle of the city happened to be empty, and thus a perfect place to erect new buildings?”

His audience– upper-class, well educated Greeks, both young and old– had no idea.

“This area was empty,” Hanson explained, “because the citizens of Salonika bulldozed the Jewish cemetery that used to be here, right after they had shipped all their Greek Jews off to concentration camps to die.”

Silence from group. They had never been told this. They hadn’t known what their city had done during the German occupation. There was nothing anywhere to commemorate a Jewish cemetery, nor any sign that a whole community of Jewish Greeks had ever existed in the city, only sixty-odd years before.

Tsunami: NBC Telethon Numbers

5.7 million people watched the Concert of Hope. That’s not a lot. And they raised $18 million. That’s not really a lot, either.

Maybe most people inclinded to contribute had already done so through other channels?

There were no internet pledge drives in the month preceding Live Aid in the 80s. This time were dozens of them.

Meanwhile, Chuck Simmins’ Stingy List is over $721 million so far.

Al-Zarqawi lieutenant captured, Iraq says

The guy supposedly responsible for about 75% of the bombings in Baghdad was captured last week. As ACE notes

This might be the true story which spurred rumors Zarqawi himself had been captured.

Of course, it could also mean that we’ve had al-Zarqawi and got this guy’s location from him. (I hope we didn’t use the old “panties-on-the-head” trick if that’s the case. If we did, we’ll probably have to let this guy go.)

UPDATE: Via Expat Yank, a Sky report: ZARQAWI AIDES ARRESTED. Not sure if one of these two is the Baghdad bomber or not. But you’ve probably noted that we seem to be nabbing tons of al-Zarqawi’s lieutenants these days. (I saw somewhere earlier today the statement This guy must have more handlers than Oprah!)

UPDATE 2: One of the guys in the Sky report apparently is the Bagdhad bomber mentioned earlier.

Christian Tsunami Aid Groups Withholding ‘Best Stuff’

I knew they’d have to be blamed for something. If Americans aren’t after oil, they must be after the kids. Or the bridges. Something.

I took the unprecedented step of forwarding this to the pastor of the church I attend. That’s an MO first.

To protect convoys in Iraq, captain built a unit from scratch

An Army Reserve officer in Iraq was told to cobble together a unit within his transportation group to protect the convoys. On the web he found info on Vietnam gun trucks and created the 518th Transportation Company (Gun Truck Provisional):

He took the idea to his colonel. The colonel said OK – and told Landry that given his former service as a National Guard infantry officer, he’d be in charge.

Thus was born the 518th, a zero-sum operation. Every soldier had to come from one of the transportation group’s companies, which would get no replacements. Landry took pains to ensure that the companies didn’t dump their misfits into the 518th.

“I interviewed them all,” he says. “We got a lot of soldiers who had combat-arms backgrounds.”

The transportation group had plenty of Humvees, but little armor. So Landry went scrounging – trading, pleading, wheeling and dealing. He dug up enough to plate 35 Humvees (plus five 5-ton trucks and one tractor-trailer).

Landry’s infantry background told him that the lightweight machine guns on hand were too light. “I told the one-star general in charge of the transportation command that we needed 50 .50-cal. machine guns,” he says.

“I hoped to get 20. I got all 50.”

So Landry put his 518th on the road, typically one gun truck to every 10 supply trucks. Before he came home in October, his gun trucks racked up 300 missions and 600,000 miles.

Armed and armored gun trucks (and the training to use them properly) probably ought to become standard equipment in the US Army. (via FR)

U.S. plan in Mosul adjusts to violence

This story in the San Jose Mercury News is the EXACT SAME Knight Ridder story that I noted in the Kansas City Star a couple of days ago. (UPDATE: It is actually missing three very short paragraphs near the end about the lessened interaction with a local sheik.)

Same content. Same angle. Different headline.

“U.S. plan in Mosul adjusts to violence” vs. “Army’s most modern high-tech forces discover hard lesson”.

Am I simply over-sensitive? Does it matter?

It really, truly seems to me that the two headlines say something completely different. And I think that people who read the article in the SJ Mercury News will begin doing so in a different frame of mind than those that read the article in the KC Star did.

I happen to agree more with the angle that this headline uses: That our military has altered plans based upon the actions of the enemy. That’s how wars are fought. Winning wars, anyway.

For my reasoning why this headline is more accurate than the KC Star headline, see the post on the KC Star story.

Iraq refuses to say if Zarqawi detained

Hmmm. An Iraqi official won’t comment on whether or not that bastard al-Zarqawi is in custody.

“I wouldn’t like to comment for the time being,” Interior Minister Falah al-Naqib said when asked about rumors that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi had been arrested. “Let’s see. Maybe in the next few days we will make a comment about it.”

As in, just before election day.

This would be great news indeed.

An audiotape allegedly made by al-Zarqawi surfaced on Thursday. (via Rantburg)

Oscars for Jesus

Michael Williams has a quick post up about THE PASSION and the fuss some are making over the awards it isn’t going to win. I’ve written about it myself a few times, as well.

Michael wonders why some people care so much about the awards, and he points out that the film wasn’t made for the purpose of winning awards. I’m certain that he’s correct.

But few films are made for the express purpose of winning awards. The awards exist (ostensibly) to recognize those films that have gone above and beyond. I put a comment up that included:

Wouldn’t it be nice to see a major, cared-for production like THE LORD OF THE RINGS about a religious story? Or even some non-religious historical event?

Hollywood has waned in importance in our society, but they’re still a major player. Movies aren’t really good places to learn history, you and I know. But a lot of people don’t know any better, and even you and I probably think some things in movies are true when they aren’t. And even the truth is often spun in ways that I don’t appreciate. The fact is that movies just don’t really educate people. Wouldn’t it be nice if they did?

I’m not saying that good, true-to-life films aren’t made. But they’re the exception. And I’d like them to become more of the rule. I’d like the standards of the movie-going public to be higher.

I think this is why the snubbing of THE PASSION might matter. This isn’t sour grapes over losing, mind you. It’s the lack of quality nominations (shutting down a lot of the conversation before it even begins) that rubs me the wrong way.

Go read Michael’s post (and my whole comment) over at Master of None by following the link at the top of this post.

I’m slowly but surely working to update the site a little. Various little changes and fixes will occur over the next few weeks. Or months.

I may never officially declare the site ‘operational‘, though.

The latest fix concerns the ‘Remeber personal info’ setting in the comments window: It now works.

It had to do with the fact that my .net domain was registered elsewhere and the comments window was tied to the .com domain. I’ve transferred my .net domain from 1&1 (without a hitch, despite what some folks have experienced) to Verve Hosting (which I heartily recommend to MT bloggers) and finally fixed my comment setting.

Thanks for your patience. The ‘remember’ setting worked in the archive pages but not in the little window. Now you can comment away even more.

Any suggestions for changes or improvements? (I’m talking technical specs of the site not content, torcik.) Let me know if something’s been bugging you or if you’ve got a brilliant idea that will double my traffic.