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From an interesting Christian Science Monitor piece:
…”The insurgents are creative and have advantages,” says Maj. Jeffrey O’Neill, the Bravo Company commander from Novi, Mich. “If the Chinese invaded your [American] neighborhood, you would know where to hide, which dumpster behind the 7-11 to stash things. If we don’t catch them red-handed, they will probably be on the street again.”
However, would the Chinese worry about catching anyone “red-handed”? I ask that for a very specific reason, which will become clear shortly:
A few weeks ago, Commentary South Africa wrote:
In which direction do you think South Africa is heading? Is it heading for collapse and failure or set to be a shining beacon in your opinion? Truth be told it’s likely heading for neither, instead muddling along some vague path towards something that is neither oblivion nor utopia…
But muddling and vagaries do not make for particularly compelling reading, of course. However, interestingly, at about the same time Slate Money writer Daniel Gross was on a “study tour” of South Africa “sponsored by the German Marshall Fund of the United States“. What he learned he first shared with us about the country’s past and present in a “snazzy” discourse on oil, the Third Reich, the apartheid regime and Sasol . . . and the U.S.
Yet, in doing so, inexplicably he failed to include the required commentaries on V-2 developer Wernher von Braun later having helped the U.S. get to the Moon ahead of the Soviets and how Nazi jet planes are the forerunners of those the U.S. flies today over Iraq. Nor was there any mention of how Sasol sponsors South Africa’s national rugby team — an especially inexcusable oversight.
Still, we do understand those omissions; he probably just ran out of space. But hardly muddled or vague was his take on what he did include. And nor was his take muddled or vague also, when, in another piece a few days later, he put his funding to work even more dramatically in taking us to . . . a shopping area:
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