Interesting Combinations

Last night we watched A World Without Thieves, a Chinese modern movie about getting on in a world with a lot of thieves. The story centers on two of them, a man and a woman connected not only by their profession but also by their love for each other (and the babe to be born sometime after the end of the movie...). They are trying to protect an acquaintance from being robbed silly by fellow thieves as he returns to his home town with all the money he has saved over the last several years to get married, buy a house and maybe a tv as well. He is named Dumbo because of his innocence and his trust in the goodness of his fellow humans. In the end, the thieves are foiled, the innocence is intact, and the mother-to-be ponders the future as she tries to satisfy the unceasing hunger brought on by her pregnancy. Diane was pleasantly surprised by the modernity of the movie and even requested more by the same director and actors. A good one.

And within the last hour, with the cool temps and the high winds of the day stopping any idea of a senior game of golf or two, I finished Licensed to Kill, Hired Guns in the War on Terror, by Robert Young Pelton. Took me awhile to get into this book as the first part seems to be filled with soldier of fortune types who love the idea of bulking up with muscles and armor and end up being security guards, not for your local Walmart but rather for kings and paschas and large corporations involved in the raiding of backward countries' wealth around the world. But the book finally came alive for me when the author connected the recent history of the contractors/mercenaries with the long history of the hired gun, the hired army. Think Crusaders; think Sir Francis Drake; think our own Revolutionary War. The private armies have been with us for a long time. And then he went on to tell some of the things that have gone wrong in the past ten years, like the failed coup of a small (tiny) country along the west coast of Africa that is rich in oil and gas, a coup put together by a group of investors intent on getting rich off the oil and gas royalties that they would capture once a puppet ruler was installed. (One such investor was none other than the son of Margaret Thatcher, once and former PM of Great Britain.) He ends up with a words of caution as to where our recent mass hiring of hired guns will lead and what will all these 'desperados' do once the gold mine of Iraq is over (he mentions the Afghani war against the Soviets during the '80's that spawned the likes of Osama bin Laden and Al-Qaeda). A good read and now I'm much more up to date on the likes of soldiers of fortune, retired Seals and Delta Force members, Blackwater (big, brash, maximum force kind of company) and other outfits in the business of putting together an army to do whatever but for money rather than love of country.

So it goes...