… which didn’t stop a 12-year-old boy with no passport or ticket from getting on a plane.
Author Archives: bob harris
What Senator George Allen meant to say
No, of course Sen. George Allen didn’t mean to call that one not-quite-white audience member a macaca, a racial epithet meaning monkey. Twice.
Although it’s still not quite clear what Allen actually meant to say.
Was it alpaca?
Chewbacca?
Or Boom-Chaka-Laka?
Senator Akaka?
Baraka?
Or a New Zealand Haka?
I’m sure one of those also explains why he told the darker-skinned man, who was born in Virginia and is thus at least as much an American as Allen, "welcome to America."
Allen wants to be president in 2008, btw.
Me and the Stranger
From the Trebekistan page at Amazon.com:
So according to Amazon’s algorithm, more than half of the people who look at my book ultimately choose… The Stranger by Albert Camus.
How absurd.
Find whatever meaning in that you prefer.
Africans know how to take their medicine
One of the excuses sometimes used to skimp on AIDS treatments in Africa is the prejudiced notion (once even vocalized explicitly by the head of the Agency for International Development under the Bush administration) that Africans won’t stick to complicated medical regimens the way, say, we First Worlders will.
Debunked. Scoreboard: Africans 77%, North Americans 55%.
Of course, if people everywhere are really pretty similar
And now for something completely horrible
Declassified Pentagon documents confirm widespread atrocities by U.S. troops in Vietnam, confirmed by investigators but largely unprosecuted:
The documents detail 320 alleged incidents that were substantiated by Army investigators — not including the most notorious U.S. atrocity, the 1968 My Lai massacre.
[snip]
The records describe recurrent attacks on ordinary Vietnamese — families in their homes, farmers in rice paddies, teenagers out fishing. Hundreds of soldiers, in interviews with investigators and letters to commanders, described a violent minority who murdered, raped and tortured with impunity.
Abuses were not confined to a few rogue units, a Times review of the files found. They were uncovered in every Army division that operated in Vietnam. [Emphasis added.]
Words now fail.