fat hobbit is always so polite.

So the U.S. Navy killed 3 pirates to rescue Captain Richard Phillips.

This was to be expected (seriously, can our military resolve anything without killing people? no), but it's still sort of startling.  On the trip to Montauk last Friday the girls in the back of the van were expressing disdain over the fact that the U.S. Navy was suddenly putting massive amounts of energy into rescuing one American, when pirates have been tilling the world's seas for years and, well, it's only one American.  My reaction to their disdain was, "well, what do you expect them to do?" and I maintain that stance.  It's actually the one thing I think the military should be kept around for: protecting citizens abroad.  I don't mean protecting citizens from their own mistakes - and believe me, the U.S. government doesn't give a shit about all the Americans "locked up abroad" (foreign service officers will visit them every once in a while, and that's about it) - but protecting citizens from criminals and psychos.  Of course, the military should cooperate with any foreign government involved, and that's what embassies are there for, and in less intense situations it should be a SWAT-team-like combo of the military and the FBI, not like, tanks rolling down the streets - but on international waters, who's going to help Captain Phillips?  No one but the U.S. Navy.  The number one duty of a state is protecting its citizens, after all.

The problem is overkill.  Americans do that a lot.  The problem is instead of spending our massive defense budget on making weapons that will secure the situation without killing anyone, we spend it on making weapons that will kill more precisely, more efficiently, more spectacularly, more mechanically, whatever.  The problem is we like to shoot first and ask questions later.  It's the "cowboy hero" in us, and it's a bad habit, ridiculously reactionary.  Now we're debating whether to arm ship crews - even though the crews say they don't really want more weapons on board, because that might just invite more pirates to come steal the weapons.  My God, it's so typical.  Just like the 9/11 debates we had with foreign countries about stepping up their counter-terrorism - we wanted more armed forces and police, they were afraid that would just spark a backlash.  But hell, you know, this is one of those Vietnam lessons we never learned - we really just want to march into countries and shoot the whole place up and love the smell of napalm in the morning cuz that'll put fear of God in the hearts of the Communists... consequences not really be damned, just ignored.  What do you mean we haven't won their hearts and minds?  What do you mean collateral damage?  We killed the bad guys!  The townsfolk should be happy!

So of course we killed three pirates, of course we now want to put weapons on ships.  We put weapons on planes after 9/11, didn't we?  Honestly I'm surprised we didn't decide to invade Somalia like we did Afghanistan.  

I mean, look.  Pancho Villa kills a few soldiers in Texas -> General Pershing tries to invade Mexico.  We have no idea how to solve problems without making them worse.

When Condoleeza Rice tried to get Indonesian President Yudhoyono to step up military and police counter-terrorism efforts, he gave the counter-suggestion of stepping up education to keep terrorism from forming in the first place.  He's absolutely right.  And given that Somali pirates became pirates because big corporations had over-fished and polluted the ocean and they could no longer be fishermen - so they turned to piracy - we should invest in a more constructive, proactive solution in this case too.  "Blowing pirates out of the water" as they approach commercial vessels is not proactive.  It's also yucky P.R.

I agree with this person: "While it is understandable that the crew of the Alabama would be relieved with the rescue of their captain, the picture of the crew with American flag and obvious gestures of thumbs up and “We’re number 1” is unfortunate.  What transpired is not a pretty picture with too much Hollywood fiction coming to life. While captain Richard Phillips captors deserve little sympathy, the devolution of this event into a triumph of patriotism and derring-do says more about our national impulse to celebrate the use of violence to solve problems than it does about any willingness, or dare I say capability, to reach a greater understanding about the world in which we live.  The President will call the captain a hero and we will forgo an opportunity to elevate our national character which must appear as crass, unthinking and immature as Somalian life is rife with desperation and poverty."

and russia's like, "AAAH MOTHERLAND."

Oh, jeebus:

Taras Bulba, the 15th-century Cossack immortalized in Nikolai Gogol’s novel by that name, disdains peace talks as “womanish” and awes his men with speeches about the Russian soul. When Polish soldiers finally burn him at the stake, he roars out his faith in the Russian czar even as flames lick at his mustache.

A lush $20 million film adaptation of the book was rolled out at a jam-packed premiere in Moscow on April 1, complete with rows of faux Cossacks on horseback. Vladimir V. Bortko’s movie, financed in part by the Russian Ministry of Culture, is a work of sword-rattling patriotism that moved some viewers in Moscow to tears.

At the heart of the film is great Russia. In the opening scene, Bulba, played by the extraordinary Ukrainian actor Bogdan Stupka, rallies his soldiers with a speech that was committed to memory by generations of Soviet schoolchildren: “No, brothers, to love as the Russian soul loves is to love not with the mind or anything else, but with all that God has given, all that is within you.”

Russians showed no such restraint. The premiere inspired viewers in Krasnodar to shave their heads into Cossack haircuts, and early this month Russian Fashion Week devoted an afternoon to a collection called Cossacks in the City.

At the film premiere in Moscow’s Kinoteatr Oktyabr, which seats 3,000, the audience applauded at Bulba’s “Russian soul” speech, and then again when the Cossacks thundered through western Ukraine, holding torches, to drive out the Poles. Among those who felt exaltation was an ultranationalist politician, Vladimir Zhirinovsky.

“It’s better than a hundred books and a hundred lessons,” he told Vesti-TV after the premiere. “Everyone who sees the film will understand that Russians and Ukrainians are one people — and that the enemy is from the West.”


 

All I can say to this is the obligatory "Personal Jesus"-North Korea video.

OMG, according to this guy the Russian trailer says this: "Coming April 22 to all the theaters of our undefeatable country."

I don't think this is that trailer, but the movie looks pretty bad in my opinion.

picture of the day

Firemen removed the marble statue of Madonna from the top of the church in Paganica, near L'Aquila. Some 40,000 people lost their homes in the 6.3-magnitude quake, which hit the Abruzzo region in the early hours of April 6, catching residents in their sleep.