War and peace and rants

The Diplomad 2.0 remembers the Boxing Day Tsunami:

The USA, Australia, UK, and Canada led the pack in providing assistance to the battered Muslims of Sumatra....
The US and Australian military were absolutely superb in moving quickly and effectively to save thousands of lives in a massive relief operation. Let's give credit where credit is due: the Aussie C-130s were the first into Banda Aceh and did a great job throughout the relief effort.... The UN, despite receiving huge amounts of donations, was spectacularly ineffective, and had the people of Banda Aceh had to wait on the UN, tens-of-thousands more of them would have died.
The much-reviled George Bush and John Howard were the heroes of the day, leading the relief effort and challenging the UN and the rest of the world to meet the standard set by the US and Australia.

Yeah, it's Bush's (and Howard's) fault. But hey, let's ignore it because it doesn't fit the predetermined narrative of the MSM.
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Sanctions can be deadly, and are rarely effective (thanks to smugglers, and also because they tend to hit the innocent parties, i.e. civilians, not the big shots) while letting the big shots use the suffering for propaganda purposes, both to manipulate their enemies to stop the sanctions, and to encourage the local opposition to support the hated government.

So AlNofi's CIC column reminds us:

During the First World War, an estimated 500,000 to 700,000 German civilians died of complications from malnutrition.

Same thing today, where Dr. E, a member of the moderate Islamic opposition, notes:

In particular, heart-wrenching reports of ordinary Iranians dying due to a widespread shortage of pharmaceutical drugs call for immediate cessation of hostilities toward the Iranian people, caused by the sanctions. 

Yeah. When I worked in (then) Rhodesia, thanks to sanctions, sometimes we got only 10 new sterile gloves and 1000 tablets of Aspirin each month for our 120 bed hospital. Luckily, as missionaries our German nuns did get their families to send us medicine and in those days before HIV, some docs in the US sent us used unsterile gloves (usually opened but not used) and syringes that helped.

and the peaceniks? They sent aid to the opposition, who bought weapons with the money. Their "heroes" shot 30 of my friends the last month I was there (why? Because unlike the Protestants, the Catholics didn't carry guns). and of course, instead of the compromise candidates,(Muzarewa and Nkomo) they looked the other way when the Marxist Mugabe took over and destroyed the country.

But hey: Why let reality stand in the way of the party line?

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AlNofi also has this less serious factoid on his site today:

• Apprehended in Confederate uniforms near an army camp in Virginia during the Civil War, two women plying a trade easily as old as soldiering told military authorities that they were merely doing their bit for the cause, and that if all the women of the South were as patriotic as they, the war would soon have been over.

related item: Remembering Theodora.

Theodora was the orphaned daughter of a bear-keeper in the Hippodrome, the vast stadium that was the entertainment center of Constantinople.  She gained notoriety as a comic actress, in an era when it was assumed that entertainers moonlighted as prostitutes.

She probably died of cervical cancer (as did Evita) which is an occupational hazard of their original profession. And when you think the world is a mess, just remember this:

When Justinian became emperor on 1 August 527, the empire was a mess.  The Vandals, who had sacked Rome in 455, occupied North Africa.  The Ostrogoths occupied most of Italy.    At home, the Byzantines were bitterly polarized by theological disputes over the nature of Christ, to the point that street battles broke out between opposing sects.   And in 532 massive rioting afflicted the imperial city, which was partially burned, threatening  to topple the regime, had not Theodora convinced her husband to slaughter the rioting factions and restore order.  Finally, the Sassanian Persians, long at peace with Constantinople, resumed conflict on the Syrian frontier.

 Although I should note that the mentioned riots was a fan riot over chariot racing, not a theological dispute.

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Off the fiscal cliff? BBC tells the story with all the Democratic talking points.


and will some people pull the plug on grandmom to save money?