Pajama Pundits

Says a Clear Channel Billboard near Glasgow, Scotland.



AuntyPatience reminisces about some ads that Clear Channel refused to run vs. what they will. Supposedly this is a campaign for a UK television series and is supposed to be followed up by "Who says nothing good ever came out of America?"

As dear Aunty said, "Clear Channel, apparently."

...explained by Sortapundit, with a little help from a 70 year old Iraqi woman.

Or: Another one bites the dust.

From the 'couldn't happen to a nicer guy' files. Al Qaida #2 killed.

BAGHDAD, Iraq - U.S. and Iraqi authorities said Tuesday their forces had killed the No. 2 official in the al-Qaida in Iraq organization in a weekend raid in Baghdad, claiming to have struck a "painful blow" to the country's most feared insurgent group.

Now, I know this is the AP, so it's only 'claiming' right now, (unless, of course, it's AL Q doing the 'claiming, in which case 'we' take it as gospel) and I also know I probably shouldn't applaud the fact that a human being has lost his life, but you'll have to do a lot of work to convince me that the world isn't a better place for this.

Update: It seems the news is even better than a first glance showed. (that'll teach me to post before reading the whole article (suuuuure it will))

Abu Azzam's death was followed by two other successes against al-Qaida in Iraq's leadership, officials said — the group's leader in the northern city of Mosul surrendered to the Iraqi military, and its leader in the town of Karabila in the sensitive region near the Syrian border was killed.

You see, it's not just that progress is being made, significant to this bit is just who is making the progress. Despite the best efforts of the MSM to show otherwise, it would seem that Coalition training efforts are having a positive effect, and that Iraqi forces are actually taking on some of the burden themselves. It's a good day!

At this time four years ago, I sat, stood, paced the living room near the television set, trying to focus on the photos and read the scrolling updates through seemingly endless tears... tears which return uncontrollably at the memory.

The Jawa Report has a caption contest with no winners today. It's fitting, because remembering what we felt, what we thought that day is a testament to who we are and what is important to us.

I'd just returned from a vacation and I was asleep. Sometime before 10 am (CDT), the phone rang. It was my sister in the UK. She answered my hello with "What the hell's going on there?" I said tentatively, "um... nothing I know of." She told me to turn on the television.

How long we talked, I don't remember. We were on the phone when the first photos of the south tower getting hit were shown. We were still connected when the Pentagon was hit, when the news of the crash of Flight 93 was aired, when the towers collapsed.

We correctly surmised that Flight 93 was an intentional crash (sis is a pilot and air traffic controller). That day, today, and for the rest of my life, the Americans who fought back on that plane are my biggest heroes.

We decided that the President was likely headed for Barksdale AFB. I found it somewhat disturbing that we so easily narrowed his possible destinations down to three, with our first choice being the one he used. It shouldn't be that easy to figure out.

I was home alone, my husband working out of town and my children grown and on their own. I wanted to talk to them. I told my sister we'd talk more later. I could not control the tears... how many of you know that many women express anger with tears as well as sadness?

My youngest was in school at W&M. She reported that many of her classmates were from the DC area and worried about parents who worked in or near the Pentagon. My oldest, four months out of the Army was talking about re-enlisting, but anxious because she hadn't been able to contact her husband who was still active duty.

He was in his car in a part of the country where cell phones didn't work, listening to tapes, and, for a short time, blissfully unaware of how his country had changed.

My son in Michigan was, like me, glued to a television set.

My husband and his co-workers were getting sketchy reports from family members like me calling them with the news.

What I felt was a need to be close to my family and an ever increasing anger that anyone would... could do such horrible things. It was five days before I felt fear. Five days of silence. We live under the approach path for the regional airport. The silence was deafening.

On Sunday, I heard aircraft, but not the ones I was used to hearing. Not the ones I now realized I liked hearing. These weren't commercial. These weren't Barksdale's B52s, which are a fairly common sight. Fighters in the sky above my house? Despite all the talk on TV, it took seeing T38s to make me realize that my country was preparing to go to war and to shatter the surreal bubble of denial I'd been in.

A forceful response was necessary. Flowers, memorials, waving the flag, and mourning the dead would not suffice. Symbolism would not suffice.

It was suddenly obvious from the beginning that this was an attack on the world, on Western Civilization, on progress, on modernization, on capitalism. On Freedom.

Naively, because of the demonstrations of caring, support, and solidarity I was seeing on TV, I thought the rest of the world realized this too. After all, hadn't innocent citizens of almost every country in the world died that day?

Wouldn't the world react in large just like I was reacting individually? Wouldn't sadness, anger, and fear turn to steely resolve to rid the planet of this cultural pus?

In the past four years, my naivete has melted somewhat. I'm still an optimist. I still think good will triumph over evil in the end. The fear is gone, the sadness, anger, and resolve remain.

A Fragile Dawn of Empathy

In however partial, precarious, and imperiled a way, for a moment at least, the cycle has been broken.

I hope this lasts.

Wish AmbivaBlog a Happy 1st Birthday while you're there.

After reading this early review, I put off seeing The Great Raid. I had originally intended to go last week, but procrastinated because I feared being disappointed.

I wasn't.

The weakness of this film is that the story it tries to tell is too big for one film. In trying to condense three intriguing stories into one film, it ends up portraying them all a bit shallowly. (Or four stories, there's more to the contribution of the Alamo Scouts too.) It’s still a good film, not at all a waste of time or money. You won’t leave the theatre disappointed, but you might leave wanting more.

The film would have to be really horrible for it not to be a somewhat emotional experience for me. My uncle was one of the 11 survivors of the massacre at the Puerto Princesa Prison Camp on Palawan that is briefly depicted at the beginning of this film.

This scene left the impression there were no survivors. Perhaps a third of the prisoners escaped the fire, many making it to the beach where they were shot, and eleven managed to survive. They were rescued by Filipino civilians and guerillas. It was their report that added urgency to the rescue of the prisoners at Cabanatuan.

Given director John Dahl also has a personal connection with the subject of the film, it's not surprising that its overall effect is satisfying:

“My father was in World War II. He was in the Philippines, and so for me it was kind of a great opportunity to learn more about what my father had gone through and what he had experienced.

“My Dad would always tell me, ‘That's Ben Steele. He was in the Bataan Death March.’ As a kid I didn't really know what that was. Once I started working on the film and realized what Ben had gone through, it took on a little bit different meaning for me. I've shown it to Ben several times and ultimately we wanted to get as many things right as we could.” ...

“I guess that one of the things that I'm pleased with is that most of the veterans who've watched it are pleased with the way the Japanese are represented in the movie. We really didn't sugarcoat it too much.”

Complaints about the story being difficult to follow or the characters not being well-developed didn't appear warranted to me, except for the POW Major Gibson. That is perhaps because I had also read Ghost Soldiers, one of the two books on which the film is based. Since I already knew something of the characters’ backgrounds, I probably just didn’t notice. (I plan to read the other book, The Great Raid, which also provided material for the movie, though it got lousy reviews on Amazon.)

The initial scene of the Palawan massacre is not well-developed, though it is visually horrifying. I caught only one line of dialogue from those POWs - why are they making us get in the air raid shelters - or something to that effect. Audience members that missed that line did not understand the significance of the Cabanatuan prisoners being made to dig air raid shelters.

The POW's and their situation were not portrayed as well as they could have been in the movie. Though the brief portrayal of the Palawan massacre, the field of crosses outside Cabanatuan and POWs digging new graves certainly conveys how dire their situation was, what was lacking was the spirit and humanity of the men.

It was a poor choice, I think, to make the lead POW a fictional character when almost all the rest were real people. Trying to capture the the poignant combination of hopelessness and hopefulness, bravery, and humanity of the prisoners in one character resulted in a one-dimensional and sappy portrayal. Reviewers more knowledgeable than I of acting and film making say this is at least partly due to a mismatch of actor and role.

My disappointment in the lack of depth in the portrayal of the POWs may also be due to my familiarity with their story. They did not resemble the men portrayed in Ghost Soldiers. Nor did they resemble the men in Last Man Out, the story of one survivor of the Palawan massacre.

And while the story of Margaret Utinsky and the Filipino underground smuggling medicine into the camp is also an amazing one, the relationship between her and the fictional Major Gibson was simply a distraction. The time spent on the romance would have been better used portraying Claire Phillips, lounge singer and spy. She had a correspondence with a POW (a chaplain) at Cabanatuan, and this may be where the idea of a romance came from.

The movie gets a good grade on historical accuracy - except for the fictional and annoying romance angle and the overly opulent prison quarters and wardrobes.

Though one of the few films to accurately portray the Filipino guerrillas, it didn't really do them justice. Captain Pajota's feat in holding back a 1000 Japanese soldiers with a small force should have had a few more feet of film.

The understated, almost too subtle, dialogue didn't quite make clear that the raid would have been an utter failure without the tactical brilliance of Captain Pajota and the participation of his men. Captain Joson - who might be missed entirely in the film if you're not paying close attention - was indeed overshadowed by Pajota, but still essential to the success of the operation.

The best performances in this film are by the Filipino actors. Cesar Montano portrays Captain Pajota with quiet strength and Natalie Mendoza as Mina, who helped smuggle medicine into the camp, is beautiful as well as talented.

The neatest bit of trivia about the actors is that Ebong Joson thought it merely coincidence that he shared the same name as his character. He did not find out until after accepting the role, that he would be portraying his grandfather.

Others on The Great Raid: Instapundit

Big Ten Extra - Great Raid, Great Movie?

Hoystory.com - The Great Raid

Power Line - Mass Murder One Atrocity at a Time

The Manifest - The "Great" Raid. Partially in English, enough to understand this Phillippine blogger thinks the Filipino role was understated too.

elpeezee - Bringin It Back- Randomly Thinking. Notes that the Japanese killed villagers as punishment for the raid.

Cindyfilms - Skip It

blackshama's blog - The Great Raid and War Movies in general

Nate's Daily News - The Weekend Movie Review. He gives it 8.5 out of 10.

marygraceguerra - guerra means war

ThoughtsOnline

UPDATE: Welcome Instapundit readers! (This makes MY day!)

UPDATE: Gaze Theory relates then to now.

UPDATE: Dave at Garfield Ridge thinks Fiennes' was the best performance in the film.

Yet another UPDATE: Professor Froward says "It's a movie, not a seminar."

From Sky News:

Bombers have again targeted London's transport system - with up to four explosions reported.

Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Ian Blair said the devices were set off across the city "almost simultaneously".

He added that the explosions were small and that police had the situation under control.

Instapundit notes behavior of "idiot" correspondents:

Some idiot correspondent asked Blair if the attacks were his fault because of the Iraq war. And others are taking an equally negative line -- one asks if the propaganda war against terror is being lost.

I do like his translation of John Howard's logical and polite answer:

Translation: You're idiots, cowards, and political hacks. Yes! The preening, point-scoring irresponsibility of the press, which is if anything worse in Britain than in America, is one of the most striking things about this war, and it will be decades before it recovers. If it does.

It's time to note (again) that a free press is no guarantee of an intelligent press. How many times has the 'blogosphere' been characterized by "professional" journalists as unworthy, supposedly because it's just a bunch of people with opinions and an agenda. Isn't it time they acknowledged that is exactly what they've been for decades? Their denigration of the blogosphere is properly called projection.

Austin Bay links to an essay in the Arizona Republic by Robert Robb that notes securing property rights is the key component to fighting poverty in Africa.

Robb discusses a "widely panned" Bush initiative, the Millennium Challenge Corporation, and its small grant to Madagascar.

In fact, the grant to Madagascar, made this April, was the first. And it was small potatoes, just around $110 million.

But about a third of the money is for a land titling project, and therein lies the hope.

Imagine there was no functional system in the U.S. for titling property. You'd be "renting" indefinitely. A third of the grant to Madagascar is for a land titling project, and as Robb writes, "therein lines the hope."

That the poor in Madagascar wanted, first and foremost, legally protected property rights illuminates the insight of Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto, most clearly explicated in his book, The Mystery of Capital. De Soto has inventoried the assets the poor in developing countries already control, and they are considerable. But, because the poor do not usually have legally protected property rights to what they possess, they are what he calls dead capital - they cannot be leveraged for economic improvement.

I read The Mystery of Capital last year, and highly recommend it. This is not a dry tome filled with graphs and charts and esoteric formulas. A short excerpt from page 107:

I have decided, therefore, to focus on the United States because, more than 150 years ago, it too was a Third World country. The governments and judiciary of the young states, not yet so legally united, were trying to cope with the law and disorder of migrants, squatters, gold diggers, armed gangs, illegal entrepreneurs, and the rest of the colorful characters who made the settling of the American West so wild and, if only in hindsight, so romantic. To a Third Worlder like me, this picture of the gringo past is astonishingly familiar. Although my colleagues and I have trouble relating to 11,000 on the Dow Jones, we feel quite at home among the squatters in Thomas Jefferson's Virginia or the log cabin settlements of Daniel Boone's Kentucky.

What we take for granted didn't magically appear and wasn't always here. Also, the mental picture we in the U.S. have of poverty outside our borders may not be totally accurate. For instance, De Soto documents that the poor in undeveloped countries have assets, savings of immense value, but they do not have access to the legal tools allowing them to turn these assets into wealth-generating capital.

Suicide Bomber Kills Children, U.S. Soldier

A suicide car bomber sped up to American soldiers distributing candy to children and detonated his explosives Wednesday, killing up to 27 other people, U.S. and Iraqi officials said. One U.S. soldier and about a dozen children were among the dead.

And don't tell me such people do not exist in Iraq, and that they were not as brutalized by Saddam as Afghanis were by the Taliban.

"... we won't give him up as long as there's a man or a woman left alive in our village."

How the Shepherd Saved the SEAL

A crackle in the brush. That's the sound the Afghan herder recalls hearing as he walked alone through a pine forest last month. When he looked up, he saw an American commando, his legs and shoulder bloodied. The commando pointed his gun at the Afghan. "Maybe he thought I was a Taliban," says the shepherd, Gulab. "I remembered hearing that if an American sticks up his thumb, it is a friendly gesture. So that's what I did." To make sure the message was clear, Gulab lifted his tunic to show the American he wasn't hiding a weapon. He then propped up the wounded commando, and together the pair hobbled down the steep mountain trail to Sabari-Minah, a cluster of adobe-and-wood homes--crossing, for the time being, to safety.

After taking the SEAL to Sabari-Minah, Gulab called a village council and explained that the American needed protection from Taliban hunters. It was the SEAL's good fortune that the villagers were Pashtun, who are honor-bound never to refuse sanctuary to a stranger. By then, said Gulab, "the American understood that we were trying to save him, and he relaxed a bit."

The Taliban was not so agreeable. That night the fighters sent a message to the villagers: "We want this infidel." A firm reply from the village chief, Shinah, shot back. "The American is our guest, and we won't give him up as long as there's a man or a woman left alive in our village."

(Thanks to Bill at INDC Journal)

...post a link to a page with 1000's of instances of a word my children have surely never heard or uttered, but just this once, I will: FUCK YEAH!

(Thanks to that hottie, Vodkapundit)

The Captain has it just about exactly right. We're all Britons

Thanks to Publius Pundit for the Union Jack graphic!

"A man full of bile is not fit to pronounce on food."

Perhaps he needs a digestive?

After celebrating our independence from the British yesterday, today I feel compelled to defend them.

For breakfast this morning, I think I'll have beans on toast.

UPDATE: London's bid for Olympics looking good.