Webdiary - Founded and Inspired by Margo Kingston

It was all based on a confused mixture of imperialism and delusion.  The Taliban are a creation of the United States whose objective was to destroy the secular society established by a socialist or communist government with the support of the USSR.

China has illegitimately, purely because vastly more powerful, taken possession of Tibet and oppressed the Tibetan race and almost extinguished Tibetan culture for the bogus reason that both Tibet and China were conquests of the Mongol empire.  When Marco Polo visited China it was to the court of Kublai Khan that he gravitated, because China was perhaps the most important part of the Khan's empire and he spent a lot of time there.

As a matter of simple logic (something I think I'm a bit better at, despite the last sentence), the reactions of the Australian political class to those few deaths, whether or not those reactions are genuine, are in their own way spectacular and instructive.  And edifying.

By dipping into that credit the United States could finance the means to force recovery, and obtain massive side benefits. I realise the U.S. has lost heart, doesn't have the will for anything of the kind, but let's fantasize.

The state can't employ police to play games with their own lives.  If a policeman is confronted by a man armed with a knife and within lunging distance we have the only situation in which new disabling technology such as Tasers or capsicum spray might have a place. Without them the policeman must fire his pistol and shoot to kill.  If he has a Taser or capsicum spray perhaps there is an alternative, We now have an ambiguous situation. 

Look at what the good guys, the Russians, are doing.  They seem ready to help Assad work though the problems besetting the country and put such reforms in place as will allow all citizens to enjoy similar human rights, but do it realistically, doing what is feasible in the social and historical context.