RattlerGator Blog

2014 11.19 Africa Review

Courtesy of the Africa Center for Strategic Studies, the U.S. National Defense University, and the United States Department of Defense, here are a representative sample of articles on African matters, either from around the African continent or about Africa-related activities: 

The 'Caliphate's' Colonies: Islamic State's Gradual Expansion into North Africa
The caliphate has a beach. It is located on the Mediterranean Sea around 300 kilometers (186 miles) south of Crete in Darna. The eastern Libya city has a population of around 80,000, a beautiful old town and an 18th century mosque, from which the black flag of the Islamic State flies. The port city is equipped with Sharia courts and an "Islamic Police" force which patrols the streets in all-terrain vehicles. A wall has been built in the university to separate female students from their male counterparts and the disciplines of law, natural sciences and languages have all been abolished. Those who would question the city's new societal order risk death. Darna has become a colony of terror, and it is the first Islamic State enclave in North Africa. The conditions in Libya are perfect for the radical Islamists: a disintegrating state, a location that is strategically well situated and home to the largest oil reserves on the continent. Should Islamic State (IS) manage to establish control over a significant portion of Libya, it could trigger the destabilization of the entire Arab world. Der Spiegle

Al Qaeda branch releases video of French, Dutch hostages
Al Qaeda's North African branch, al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), released a video Monday purporting to show a French and a Dutch hostage who have been held in the Sahara since being kidnapped separately in Mali in November 2011. In an online video identified by the private SITE jihadist monitoring group, French national Serge Lazarevic and a man identifying himself as Sjaak Rijke appeal to their governments to negotiate their release from the AQIM militants. There is nothing in the footage of Lazarevic to suggest when it was shot, but Rijke says he is speaking on September 26 this year and refers to a US-Taliban prisoner exchange conducted in May. France 24

Mali: Last Chance in Algiers
As northern Mali experiences renewed violence, peace negotiations in Algiers offer a unique opportunity to resolve the crisis. But after almost two months of negotiations, peace remains a distant hope. The Malian government and participating armed groups have struggled to find common ground. Influential radical groups that are absent from the negotiating table are tempted to resort to violence to derail the process. Conflict resolution will require reconciliation of competing interests regarding security in the Sahara, organisation of the Malian state structure and local balance of power between divided communities in the north. In the face of armed clashes, it is tempting for mediators to move quickly to achieve a deal that would only guarantee security in the short term. But rushing the process will not help. Time is needed to build the foundations of sustainable peace. After months of deadlock, Algeria arranged international mediation that had long been handicapped by institutional rivalries. The mediation team led by Algeria should maintain this momentum and take the time necessary to build broad consensus for a future agreement. International Crisis Group

Islamic State Allegiance Could Cost Egypt's Sinai Jihadis Popular Support
Last week, the Egyptian militant group Ansar Beit al-Maqdis (ABM), which operates primarily in the Sinai Peninsula, pledged its loyalty to the so-called Islamic State (IS). In an email interview, Zack Gold, a visiting fellow at the Institute for National Security Studies in Tel Aviv, discussed the implications for Egypt.WPR: What are the major armed groups operating in Sinai, to what degree do they coordinate activities and do they have any foreign support? Zack Gold:Egypt's Sinai Peninsula has been a base of armed activity, both militancy and smuggling, for many years. Following the uprising of 2011, however, the remnants of smaller jihadi groups amalgamated into Ansar Beit al-Maqdis, the "Supporters of Jerusalem." World Politic Review

Sinai caught in the middle of Egypt's 'war on terror'
With soldiers firing warning shots to herald the nightly curfew and jihadist militants beheading informants, Sinai's residents find themselves caught in the middle of Egypt's "war on terror". The Sinai Peninsula has become a hotbed of Islamist militancy after decades of neglect under former president Hosni Mubarak, and amid a security vacuum triggered by the army's ouster last year of his successor Mohamed Morsi. Militant attacks remain commonplace almost two years since the military launched its "war on terrorism" in northern Sinai bordering Israel and the Palestinian Gaza Strip. A brazen suicide bombing on 24 October killed 30 soldiers near the North Sinai capital El-Arish, sparking a state of emergency and a curfew being slapped on several areas of the province. News 24

 Subcommittee Hearing: Fighting Ebola: A Ground-Level View (video)
Witnesses: Mr. Rabih Torbay, Senior Vice President for International Operations International Medical Corps - Mr. Brett Sedgewick, Technical Advisor for Food Security and Livelihoods Global Communities - Darius Mans, Ph.D. President Africare. House Comittee on Foreign Affairs, Subcommittee on Africa, Global Health, Global Human Rights, and International Organizations

Obama on Ebola in West Africa: 'We are nowhere out of the woods'
President Obama said Tuesday that despite progress, West Africa is "nowhere near out of the woods" on Ebola. "It underscores how important it is to continue to push forward until we stamp out this disease entirely in that region," Obama said before a meeting on the virus with national security and public health officials. "Until we do, there are threats if additional outbreaks, and given the nature of international travel, it means that everybody has some measure of risk." White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest said later that the president was referring to the country of Mali, which was declared free of the virus, only to see it come back. Obama said that attention on the virus in the United States has ebbed in the past week, "the challenge remains." The Washington Post

Guarding The Ebola Border
On a map, a border is a solid black line. On the ground, it can feel like a fiction. I'm standing on the edge of a shallow stream through the forest that separates two West African countries: Ivory Coast and Liberia. Here there is no fence. No sign. No border guard to prevent my crossing. On either side of this stream, people speak the same local language, Yokuba, a language incomprehensible to most of their countrymen. They share the same currency, the West African CFA franc, as well as a currency of trust built up over generations of intermarriage and communal life. There's even one tribal king who can settle disputes on both sides. Ebola changed all that. NPR

Army names new units that will deploy to Africa
The Minnesota National Guard's 34th Infantry Division headquarters and soldiers from 11 other states will deploy this spring to support U.S. Ebola response operations in West Africa, officials announced Sunday. In all, about 2,100 soldiers from the National Guard and Army Reserve are expected to deploy to Liberia and Senegal to relieve troops who deployed to the region in September and October as part of Operation United Assistance. The deployment of the Guard and Reserve soldiers was announced Friday. Army officials released the list of specific units tapped for the deployment on Sunday after notifying soldiers and their families. The soldiers, as well as those already in country, are expected to be deployed for six months. About 1,200 Guard soldiers are expected to deploy from these units. ArmyTimes

Algeria opposition calls for new elections
A coalition of Algerian opposition parties and political figures has called for new presidential elections because of the continued hospitalizations of the country's leader. President Abdelaziz Bouteflika, 77, was elected to a fourth term in April, but he has rarely appeared in public since suffering from a stroke in 2013. He was briefly hospitalized in France last weekend. Tuesday's opposition statement said the leader's absence is a sign of the "serious crisis in the country." The coalition, which includes Islamist and secular opposition parties, and former government ministers, also called for an independent commission to oversee elections. AP on Yahoo News

Tunisia: Political comeback of Ben Ali's cohort a setback to democracy 
The political party Nidaa Tounes has won 85 seats in the newly-elected 217-member Tunisian parliament. This compares with the 69 seats won by the Islamist party Ennahdha, which after the last election in 2011 held the majority in the Constituent Assembly. The elections on October 26th were welcomed by most Arab, African and international media observers who saw in them a model of democracy for a region torn by strife and dictatorship. Lebanese columnist Rami Khouri described the elections as "the most significant domestic and national political development in the modern history of the Arab world". Despite social unrest and severe economic challenges, Tunisia's political factions were able to agree and compromise for the sake of national unity, "in sharp contrast with the hysteria and hallucinatory emotional excesses" in Egypt where the army overthrew the elected Islamist president to great popular acclaim, Khouri wrote in the Daily Star. African Arguments

Tunisia 2.0 - from revolution to republic
For someone who has not been sleeping much, and working punishing hours for months, 27-year old Anis Smaali is in an extraordinarily good mood. He is running a team of 5,000 election observers for Mourakiboun - a group that monitored Tunisia's parliamentary elections in October and on Sunday will be observing the first freely contested presidential election in the country's history. "These are the most important elections in the history of Tunisia," he says with a broad smile. "After this we will have a real government with a five-year mandate. Tunisia is showing that a real and sustainable democracy is possible in the Arab world." Less than four years ago, Mr Smaali was among hundreds of thousands demonstrating outside the Interior Ministry, calling for an end to dictatorship. BBC

Nigeria: Policing the Police
[...] The population of the police is about 370,000, a minuscule fraction of Nigeria's 167m. If the police are unable to manage police affairs, how do we expect them to protect millions of Nigerians? How many other cases, like Banor's, are in police's files? Could Banor have acted alone? We are wondering if the police realise the implications of what they are telling the public. Are they confirming stories about dismissed police officers making their way back to service? Could it be that the police take finger prints of criminals, but do not have finger prints of their personnel? Why is the police pay roll not computerised as has been the case with the Nigeria Immigration Service since 2006? How are the police using the technologies that are available to them? How did Banor's matter get to the stage of the allegations against him? Is his case common in the police? Vanguard on allAfrica

Cameroon under pressure from Boko Haram
Cameroon's military are battling cross-border raids by Nigeria's militant Islamist group Boko Haram, as the BBC's Thomas Fessy found out when he joined soldiers on a patrol. A soldier is standing on the back of a flatbed pick-up truck leading the convoy. His high-powered twin-barrelled gun is turned towards Nigeria. In reality, though, the weapon is aimed at what Boko Haram call their "caliphate", or Islamic state. The border village of Amchide is mostly deserted. Only a handful of people can be seen as we drive through. They are hastily throwing a few belongings on a cart as they prepare to leave. They probably did not have time to take anything when they fled during an attack, and came back to recover their possessions. BBC

Zambia to hold presidential by-election January 20
Zambia's interim leader announced a presidential by-election on Jan. 20 and called for calm and tolerance amid concerns about a tense contest to succeed President Michael Sata, who died in office last month. Interim president Guy Scott, who became the continent's first white leader since the 1994 end of apartheid in South Africa, said he hoped all contestants, both from the ruling Patriotic Front (PF) and opposition parties, would desist from violence. "It is my prayer that peace continues during the campaigning and the presidential by-elections," he told a news conference. Questions about the stability of Africa's second-biggest copper producer arose when Scott fired a presidential front-runner, Edgar Lungu, as PF secretary-general on Nov. 3, without explaining why. Reuters

The real value of the Zimbabwe torture ruling
The South African Police Service (SAPS) really doesn't want to investigate torture in Zimbabwe. When the Southern Africa Litigation Centre (SALC) and the Zimbabwean Exiles Forum (ZEF) first asked it to do so in 2008, even giving detectives a dossier of evidence to get them started, the police took no action. When a court action (brought by SALC) forced it to do so, it appealed. When it lost that appeal, it appealed again. All to no avail. In late October, the Constitutional Court - the highest court in the land - ruled that SAPS must investigate the complaint. Failure to do so would violate South Africa's obligations under both domestic and international law. For SALC and international justice campaigners, the verdict was vindication after a long and difficult fight. ISS

'White Widow alive and well' in Somalia: report
Dubbed the "White Widow," Samantha Lewthwaite - a British convert to Islam who is said to have been involved in the Kenya mall attack last year - is reportedly living in Somalia with her jihadist husband, Marco Costa, a wanted Al-Qaeda suspect, the Daily Mail quoted Kenyan sources as saying. The sources said Lewthwaite was 'alive and well' and living in the south Somalia, the daily reported. The paper said it had obtained a forged Mozambican passport bearing Costa's picture. The document clearly identifies him as Jamal Salim, who the paper said was on the run from Kenyan police since he shot and killed two police officers in Nairobi in 2011. Lewthwaite has previously used a false South African passport and alias. The couple, according to the Daily Mail, also appears in a selfie taken at their home, adding that police are using these and pictures of their two children as part of a countrywide manhunt for the suspects. Al Arabiya

Ivory Coast tells soldiers to return to barracks 
The Ivory Coast government is calling on disgruntled soldiers to return to their barracks after they protested in the streets over their benefits. The Defense Ministry said it would make concessions the soldiers, whose complaints earlierTuesday had raised the specter of widespread unrest. The demands of the soldiers - dominated by former rebels who brought the current president to power - include increased health care benefits and improved opportunities for career advancement in the military. Defense Minister Paul Koffi Koffi said the government will address those issues. Ivory Coast is still recovering from a bitter political standoff that left about 3,000 people dead after a disputed December 2010 election. AP on Stars and Stripes

DR Congo's Katanga 'catastrophic' as 71,000 flee homes: UN
The UN refugee agency said it was "deeply concerned about the catastrophic humanitarian situation in Katanga". Rampant violence in the mineral-rich southern region has uprooted about 400,000 people since 2012, and brought the total number of people internally displaced to nearly 600,000, UNHCR said. In October alone, the agency said it had registered 1,737 "incidents" in the territories of Kalemie and the so-called "triangle of death" comprising Manono, Mitwaba and Pweto in northern Katanga. The violence is mainly attributed to the Mai Mai rebel group which is fighting for a better distribution between the north and south of the wealth from the province's immense natural resources. Times Live

Food on Hold, Ex-Rebels in Bangui Face Bleak Future 
Ex-rebels in the Central African Republic have been threatening to blow themselves up to protest a government attempt to relocate them from camps in the capital, Bangui. The rebels are under pressure to move - an international aid agency says their food supply has been put on hold while talks about their relocation continue. Tensions are running high in the streets of Bangui around two camps containing ex-rebels, as negotiations over their future drag on. Peacekeepers from the United Nations mission MINUSCA have deployed to the area to prevent clashes between the ex-Seleka rebels inside the camps and anti-Balaka militia outside. VOA

Traffickers turn to teenagers to drive migrant boats across Mediterranean 
Traffickers in Egypt and Libya are increasingly using children to drive boats of migrants to Italy. Many of these teenagers are then detained and imprisoned by the Italian authorities, facing up to 15 years in jail and fines of hundreds of thousands of euros. This year, 18 children have been sent to jail in Catania, Sicily, on trafficking charges. Others are being held in juvenile detention centres in Agrigento, Palermo, Siracusa and Reggio Calabria. Lawyers in Sicily say more and more minors are being charged with offences as traffickers attempt to evade Italian authorities by sending children in their place. Said, now 19, was only 15 when he was jailed in Italy on charges of aiding and abetting illegal immigration and criminal association. The Guardian

Habyarimana case: the new Rwandan witness disappeared 
The new witness in the case of the attack against the plane of former Rwandan President Juvenal Habyarimana - April 6, 1994 on the eve of the genocide - has been missing since Thursday, November 13. He was to be heard soon by the judges Nathalie Poux and Marc Trévidic. According to testimonies collected by RFI, Emile Gafirita was abducted in Nairobi, Kenya, outside his home shortly before midnight. He was stopped by two men who handcuffed him and forced him into their vehicle. No news since. Kenyan police ensures not have arrested him and they are investigating this matter. Emmanuel Mughisa had moved there two months ago, in the district of Dagoretti, Nairobi.Rwandan " without history, rather friendly and open , "according to nearby residents. [...] According to his French lawyer, Maître François Cantier Emile Gafirita had just received his call when he was removed on Thursday, but his name as a witness was known for several weeks by all parties, including the Rwandan regime figures charged in this case. The ProxyLake

 Global report says 36 million people enslaved: Mauritania is biggest offender 
[...] "From the Thai fisherman trawling fishmeal, to the Congolese boy mining diamonds, from the Uzbek child picking cotton, to the Indian girl stitching footballs ... their forced labour is what we consume," read the report. The biggest offender, with the highest proportion of its population enslaved, remains the west African nation Mauritania, where slavery of black Moors by Berber Arabs is an entrenched part of society. Mauritania has anti-slavery legislation but it is rarely enforced and a special tribunal set up in March has yet to prosecute any cases, the report said. In second place was Uzbekistan where, every autumn, the government forces over one million people, including children, to harvest cotton. Countries like Qatar in the Middle East were a major destination for men and women from Africa and Asia who are lured with promises of well-paid jobs only to find themselves exploited as domestic workers or in the construction industry, the report found. Al Jazeera

America: forging partnerships for Africa's future.

 

Memorial Day 2014

General John Logan

Commanding General

Grand Army of the Republic

General Orders No. 11, Washington, D.C., May 5, 1868

(which read, in part, as follows)

We should guard their graves with sacred vigilance.

All that the consecrated wealth and taste of the nation can add to their adornment and security is but a fitting tribute to the memory of her slain defenders.

Let no wanton foot tread rudely on such hallowed grounds.

Let pleasant paths invite the coming and going of reverent visitors and fond mourners.

Let no vandalism of avarice or neglect, no ravages of time testify to the present or to the coming generations that we have forgotten as a people the cost of a free and undivided republic.

Army Sgt. Dontae Skywalker, 3rd U.S. Infantry Regiment (The Old Guard)

tomb sentinel assigned to the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier,

lays a rose at the foot of one of the crypts of the Unknowns

at Arlington National Cemetery in Arlington, Virginia.

The placing of a rose at the foot of each crypt signifies

a sentinel’s last and final honor before they leave

The Tomb of the Unknown.

Skywalker served at the Tomb

from September 2010 to September 2012.

On this Memorial Day, in the year 2014, we pray for the nation to never forget the cost of a free and undivided republic.

Hard Work, Work! Albany Down, Pittsburgh Up Next.

Florida defeated Albany today, 67-55. The win reminded me, as this season has reminded me, of a U.S. Army cadence -- check out the YouTube audio below. For however many games these Basketball Gators have remaining, that's my theme. Hard work, work!

As an already completely satisfied basketball Gator, I've resolved to enjoy the hell out of this tournament. Come. What. May.

What Billy Donovan has done to our program, and *for* our program, is a beautiful sight to behold. Incredible regular season in the finest all-major-sports conference in America. Football envy around the region and the nation relentlessly denigrates our individual basketball programs, but they match up nicely with any damn body and they prepare conference teams nicely for the grind and physicality that is the NCAA tournament.

Properly seen, the tournament is gravy. The regular season is the substance, the meat, and we've had our fill. We've beaten Tennessee and Kentucky, two damn good teams, three times in a row EACH! March madness? Hell, bring it on!

Survive and advance, baby, then eat some more gravy. That's gonna take some awfully hard work, however. Albany proved that today. But they have been safely dispatched. One team standing in our way is now down, and though the championship remains firmly in our sights, Pittsburgh was extremely impressive today. These Gators wouldn't have it any other way.

Hard work, that's what they sayyyyyyy!

Hard work, I do it for playyyyyyy!

Hard work, the engines are on!

Hard work, the mission is go!

All season, our team for the ages has been the epitome of hard work, work! Constantly grinding and probing and grinding and seeking and grinding and, ultimately, FINDING a way to win. Keep on keepin' on, fellas, just keep right on keepin' on - Gator stylin' and Gator profilin' all the way to that natty 'ship.

Come on Big Orange and Blue !!!

Veterans Day 2013

This image is always tremendously powerful to me, no matter the day, but particularly on days like this:

Here's to wishing you and yours a very good and very reflective day. And a special salute to my fellow Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen, Marines, and Coast Guardsmen.

Hooahh !!!

Van der Leun's "Name in the Stone"

Always a worthy and memorable read, Gerard Van der Leun has re-posted a piece well worth your time on this Veterans Day:

I tried to understand what such a sacrifice meant to my grandparents and parents, but I could not. I was a child of the long peace who had avoided his war and gone on to make a life that, in many ways, was spent taking-down the things that my namesake had given his life to preserve. I was thirty then and not yet a parent. That would come a few years later and, with the birth of my daughter, I would at last begin, but only begin, to understand.

Today it makes me feel cheap and contemptible to think of the things I did in my youth to point out all the ways in which this country fails to achieve some fantasied perfection. I was a small part of promulgating a great wrong and a large lie for a long time, and I'm sure there's no making up for that. My chance to be worthy of the man in the photograph, the name on the wall, has long since passed and all I can do is to try, in some way, to make what small amends I can.

I would say you've done a fantastic job, Gerard. A truly fantastic job.

Happy Memorial Day 2013; Lift Every Voice!

It's a beautiful, peaceful morning in creation for me on this Memorial Day 2013 and I'm of a mind to share a few generic photos that are representative of the day but also a song that's quite famous in the black community. It's a love song to the nation, arising out of the Christian tradition, from Black America; it's a song about gratitude, perseverance, faith and dignity generated by a people who made a way out of no way. A can-do people. A song, unfortunately, that is steadily being bastardized into a song of grievance, bitching and moaning.

The song, however, is so beautiful, so magnificent, it will surely survive this unfortunate descent which is endemic to our times.

First, the photos of Memorial Day. My U.S. Army pride wants to highlight the best of the best military honor guards -- the Army's Old Guard, forever on duty at Arlington National Cemetery:

The solemn entrance

The steady approach

Representative of all who served, the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier

Not just another holiday, it's a very special day.

Very.

Special.

Next, my Florida Boy pride wants to highlight Lift Every Voice and Sing -- not a separatist or black nationalist tune by any means. Properly understood, it's a love song to the nation. These are the words of the writer himself, James Weldon Johnson, of Jacksonville -- principal of the first black public high school in the State of Florida:

A group of young men in Jacksonville, Florida, arranged to celebrate Lincoln’s birthday in 1900. My brother, J. Rosamond Johnson, and I decided to write a song to be sung at the exercises. I wrote the words and he wrote the music. Our New York publisher, Edward B. Marks, made mimeographed copies for us, and the song was taught to and sung by a chorus of five hundred colored school children.
Shortly afterwards my brother and I moved away from Jacksonville to New York, and the song passed out of our minds. But the school children of Jacksonville kept singing it; they went off to other schools and sang it; they became teachers and taught it to other children. Within twenty years it was being sung over the South and in some other parts of the country. Today the song, popularly known as the Negro National Hymn, is quite generally used.

The lines of this song repay me in an elation, almost of exquisite anguish, whenever I hear them sung by Negro children.

Note that there wasn't an agenda beyond celebrating the birthday of the first Republican president. A president, by the way, representing a political party first organized around the political principle of eliminating slavery. Thus, the love song of affirmation to the nation. Thus, the generation of a song of perseverance, faith and dignity in the face of rigid segregation and discrimination.

But it most assuredly was not, and is not, a song of grievance, bitching and moaning. And I quite rightly revere it. Here are the words:

(song)
Lift every voice and sing,
Till earth and heaven ring,
Ring with the harmonies of Liberty;
Let our rejoicing rise,
High as the listening skies,
Let it resound loud as the rolling sea.
Sing a song full of the faith that the dark past has taught us,
Sing a song full of the hope that the present has brought us.
Facing the rising sun of our new day begun,
Let us march on till victory is won.

(song)
Stony the road we trod,
Bitter the chastening rod,
Felt in the days when hope unborn had died;
Yet with a steady beat,
Have not our weary feet,
Come to the place for which our fathers sighed?
We have come over a way that with tears has been watered,
We have come, treading our path through the blood of the slaughtered;
Out from the gloomy past,
Till now we stand at last,
Where the white gleam of our bright star is cast.

(prayer)
God of our weary years,
God of our silent tears,
Thou who hast brought us thus far on the way;
Thou who hast by Thy might,
Led us into the light,
Keep us forever in the path, we pray.
(song)
Lest our feet stray from the places, our God, where we met Thee,
Lest our hearts, drunk with the wine of the world, we forget Thee;
Shadowed beneath Thy hand,
May we forever stand.
True to our God,
True to our native land.

The poetry of the song, the heartfelt affirmation of it, the respect to God Almighty -- just beautiful! Our God is the Triune God and our native land is not Africa (that's our ancestral homeland), our native land is the United States of America.

Now, for a representative example of the gross bastardization of the historic tune, take a listen, and a look, at this:

Although not performed with my understanding of the old-school style (where the six lines of prayer are collectively read as a communal prayer, and not sung), it's still a beautiful rendition of the song. But quite obviously visually politicized in the extreme, correct? You couldn't miss, could you, the image of the man with whip marks all over his back just as the "harmonies of liberty" line was being sung.

Huh?

Did you see Abraham Lincoln at all? Curious, and historically ignorant. How many positive images of white people? Odd, and historically wrong. I see black troops from the Civil War but no white troops. Shameful. It has all the markings of too-clever-by-half academicians or political partisans of the left-wing.

A Balm in Gilead, indeed.

Well -- this too shall pass. I'm quite confident of that. So, in the spirit of the recently released America 3.0: Rebooting American Prosperity in the 21st Century-Why America's Greatest Days Are Yet to Come, I'd like to wish one and all Americans a very Happy Memorial Day. No matter how bleak, no matter how repressed -- I will never lose faith in this incredible nation.

UF Students Add Some Gator Flavor to the Harlem Shake

Maybe the buzz has faded but some UF students organized a pretty impressive flash mob at Turlington Plaza to add some Orange and Blue Gator flavoring to the Harlem Shake. Check it:

Yeah, baby. I know I'm extremely biased but that's the best one I've seen. Except for that effort by what appears to be some unit in the Norwegian Army.

Here 'tis:

The military uniforms, the snow, dude falling out the window with the flag -- good stuff. At the time of this posting, that thing has nearly 10 million views !!! That, ladies and gentlemen, is the best one I've seen. I'll give UF the win in the university competition. Go Gators !!!

Generating the Patriotic Christmas Spirit

As of the morning of this posting, the video below has nearly 2 million views so it's quite likely that you've seen or heard of it but I sure hadn't. A local family here in Tallahassee (the Derek and Courtney Whitis family) put on a dazzling Christmas display and it won a national award last year from ABC's Good Morning America program. Take a look:

Toujours Prêt !!!

Yep, that was beautiful! I'm gonna have to drive by and see it in person tonight.

Memorial Day 2012

A very happy Memorial Day to one and all. Tropical Storm Beryl is giving Northeast Florida and Southeast Georgia real wind and rain but here in Tallahassee it appears that we are just to the west of the edge of the storm. Bright sunshine is filtering through the windows of my home right now (while drafting this post, however, the clouds have moved in -- Jacksonville radar explains why -- and back out, and back in, etc.):

But hey, it's Memorial Day and I'm in the mood to offer this U.S. Army photo that captures (my personal political differences nothwithstanding) the majesty (and I mean that -- majesty!) that absolutely is America:

The President and Commander-in-Chief along with, I presume, the commanding general of the Military District of Washington. Moments like this never fail to move me.

I re-tweeted this morning this quote from an Army website: “A hero is someone who has given his or her life to something bigger than oneself.” - Joseph Campbell. It's in that spirit that I salute all of my fellow veterans who have worn the uniform of the United States of America but especially those who not only answered the call but gave their lives.

I'm going to close with some photos from Arlington National Cemetery and the Army's "Old Guard" -- for many, myself included (I have an older brother that served in the Public Affairs Office of the Old Guard), the perpetual public face of Memorial Day:

 

 

This we will defend.

Allen West on the Campaigner-in-Chief

Congressman Allen West released this statement yesterday on the news that Barack Obama was ending America's military campaign in Iraq:

(WASHINGTON)--- Congressman Allen West (FL-22) released this statement today:

“Today, the President announced the withdrawal of all combat forces from Iraq by the end of the year.

As a veteran of Operation Iraqi Freedom who served during the initial battles of this conflict, I am proud to be among the more than one million Americans who served in Iraq. What my fellow comrades in arms achieved in Iraq is nothing short of historic. Together, we defeated one of history’s most tyrannical dictatorships and replaced it with a free and democratic government. American Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen and Marines fought and defeated a radical Islamic insurgency, and helped create an ally and partner in freedom.

I will never forget those who I served with, and those who served after I left. I will never forget the sacrifice borne by so many of our service members and their families.

However, I must question the motives of President Barack Obama for this sudden announcement. Why now? Did the President consult with any of our American Generals on the ground before making this decision? What kind of message will this send to our allies, the Kurds, in the Northern part of Iraq, and will they feel abandoned? My fear is that political expediency drove this decision, not recommendations by the Military’s leadership.

Much is at stake and many questions are yet to be answered. I fear that our President is acting as “Campaigner in Chief” rather than “Commander in Chief,” thus putting the entire Middle East at risk.

Right now, the American people deserve answers.”

It has been a long engagement; it has also had historically low casualties -- something rarely reported. I would feel much better about this exit if this President wasn't driving the train but it is what it is. We've gained tremendous assets, both from a person-to-person contact perspective and from a culture-to-culture perspective, from this war. These contacts will serve us well as America moves forward in the 21st century.

Questions will be asked, as Congressman West has shown, and they should be. Vigorously. More important to me is how do we move forward in that region? How do we honor the sacrifice that America has made there? And the naive person who made an incredibly ignorant World Apology Tour as his presidency began a few short years ago had better not piss me the hell off this time around.