James R. Rummel

I am a self defense instructor who lives in Columbus, Ohio.

This is What I Get for not Reading the Blogs Every Day

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Besides working for 10 hours every day, the classes I’m taking this quarter require me to read somewhere between 400 and 600 pages every week and spend about 5 hours a day on campus. It’s not like I’m digging ditches or anything, but I am short on sleep and pressed for time.

So I hope you’ll forgive me if I mention something that’s been discussed to death in the blogosphere. It seems that there are people who think that the US deliberately withheld warnings about the tsunami. They say that we wanted to do this because not only would thousands upon thousands of innocent people (mostly Muslim) die, but we could then gain valuable PR and foreign relation credibility by springing into action and providing aid for the survivors.

And, of course, there are those who think that the US is all powerful and that we somehow tripped the tsunami-causing earthquake off.

What is the “proof” for these allegations? Well, it would seem that our naval base at Diego Garcia escaped major damage from the tsunami. The fact that the tsunami hit Indonesia hours before reaching DG, so the Navy had plenty of time to prepare, is ignored.

I’m wondering why no one points out that the US could easily conquer the world and silence all critics if we had this kind of unstoppable power. (By “no one” I mean none of the conspiracy theorists, since I’ve just pointed it out myself.)

It’s easy to dismiss this as a bunch of slack-jawed fools with too much imagination. But blog goddess Natalie Solent goes one better. She’s discovered that the BBC, a news organization that enjoys a completely undeserved reputation, is considering these allegations of sinister plots to be an open question.

So the US military either has plans in place to take advantage of natural disasters in order to gain advantage, or else we can cause natural disasters at will in order to be seen as the savior after we give aid. And Europeans claim that Americans are unsophisticated and lacking nuance.

Mixed Signals

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Ralf posted a few days ago about anti-Americanism. Unless I’m completely off-target here, he claims that the stuff we read or see in the foreign media isn’t really how people feel, that the effect is superficial. He also states that it simply isn’t as bad as we perceive it. The comments to the post seem to bear this out.

That’s fair enough, and I thank him for his input. But then there’s things like this that keep cropping up. (Go ahead and click the link, read the post. I’ll wait.)

The question that pops into my mind when I see things like this isn’t why the people of France hate us, or even if the sentiments expressed so blatantly and repeatedly in French rags like Le Monde is actually how the average Gallic citizen really feels. Instead I wonder what they think will happen if they piss off enough of the American voting public.

The cartoon and article that Gregory so kindly points out to us makes it plain that the authors think America is a violent, war-mongering country just looking to invade and kill innocent people. If they were even half right then I know which country we’d invade next, which odious culture we’d wipe out.

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Diplomad is on Fire!

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The authors of group blog The Diplomad has been very critical of the United Nations in the past, but right now I figure they’d volunteer to drive the bulldozers if we kicked them out of New York and wanted to turn the complex into a parking lot for our SUV’s.

What got them so upset? The UN’s response to the tsunami disaster in Asia.

They got to grumbling a little bit when the UN started to claim that the US wasn’t doing enough. But then the authors, who have a man on the ground in one of the ravaged countries, started to wonder when the United Nations was actually going to show up.

But they really started to get up a head of steam when the United Nations started to take credit for the work that the American military was doing.

There’s lots more there, such as the tale of a UN team that arrived in one of the tsunami ravaged countries, set up shop in a 5 star hotel and demanded that the hotel staff provide 24 hour catering.

I can’t do justice to it. Just click on this link and keep scrolling down.

Credit Where Credit is Due

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My buddy Kathryn has another interesting post up. She points out that it costs real money to use military units for rescue and aid, money that no one gives us credit for when they start to complain about how stingy the US is when it comes to disaster relief.

So how much money are we talking about here? To figure that out would take a big pile of research, but she has found the daily costs for operating an aircraft carrier.

So we should get some credit for diverting our military in order to save lives. But there’s something else that’s being ignored, and that’s the money we spend to maintain this capability even when we’re not using it. In Europe, for example, they’ve made the choice to allow their military to dry up in order to fund Socialist welfare programs. They say that they’re more moral, more caring, for doing this.

So how come we don’t get credit for paying for assets that are desperately needed when things really go to hell?