John Birmingham | The World According to Me…

…it’s raining again which would normally be a good excuse to spend the day inside modelling or exercising myself intellectually but the twins are overnighting so that’s meant putting everything breakable and valuable out of reach of little hands and then providing a one on one overwatch on both of them them all day as, man, they are fast now…

It’s also been a long day as I got up just before 4AM for a COIN Center online brief (we always get the short end of the time zone stick!) only to find that when Adobe says that Connect will work over a dial-up connection, they don’t really mean it and you will be lucky to get a second of sound over the whole hour. Josh also missed it after a few too many vinos before bedtime on Friday night but there was a still a good turn out of some 60 staff from across the community. I suppose I will have to resign myself to nighting over and logging in from work for future activities until such time that Telecom or some other ISP can give us affordable (i.e. not $250/month!!) broadband here…

I have been chipping away at the Trumpeter B-4 203mm cannon most nights since getting home and it is progressing nicely. One of the beauties of this kit is that most of the major subassemblies can be completed prior to painting so construction is a. simple and b. relatively fast – be nice, though, if they could do a barrel without a ditch of a seam running down each side…Carmen picked me up some paint in Taupo on Friday on her way back from getting Little Red panel-beaten after her little faux pas in the driveway last month so I’m all good to go there – once the bloody rain stops as the humidity levels are still too high for smooth airbrushing…

It’s been quite nice taking a break to day but will be back in to the Thursday/Friday War tomorrow once the twins depart…I’d like to be outside chopping the rest of the wood and getting it under cover but it’s looking like MORE rain again tomorrow which precludes the use of an electric saw outside (we use a drop saw for dicing firewood that is less than 5-6 inches thick – Carmen scored it at a garage sale in 2005 and it has delivered sterling service since)…

Two blog entries that I have noted over the weekend have been this great one from Steven Pressfield on Resistance and Self-talk; and John Birmingham’s commitment to end each week on Cheeseburger by writing on writing which will be both enlightening and useful for struggling wannabes like myself…

I also finished Jim Molan’s Running the War in Iraq tonight and there are some great general insights on COIN and conflict generally (no pun intended) that I will try to distil down into a single post in the next few days…

John Birmingham, the Australian author of World War 2.1, 2.2, and 2.3 (Axis of Time trilogy), and Without Warning (1st of the ‘The Wave’ series) has set up blog entry over at Cheeseburger Gothic for discussion on both series…if you haven’t read any of these you really want to give them a go…a secondary theme of the AoT trilogy is a prescient (probably because it agrees with me) glimpse of one version of the next decade of so of the 21st century….

I see on the COIN blog today that Canadian forces are advocating a new approach in Afghanistan but as discussed by a number of members on the blog, this appears to be a desperation-driven attempt to accelerate the course of the campaign and it probably hasn’t been all that well considered. Trying to make the people the new bad guys is probably one of the more innovative approachs to COIN I have seen but will it fly? Like a brick…

From the COIN blog:

“In Afghanistan one of my close friends (an Afghan that would die to save me and almost did) let me know the difference in “their ways” of thinking. “If you just give me something I may be thankful, but I am not grateful. I think – look what I was able to get from you, not thankful of what you gave me. If you attached a price to what you gave me in favors or later chips to be used when you needed something, now we are communicating and building our relationship.” At first that bothered me but I then began to see through his eyes. If we take that to winning the “hearts and minds” we have missed the boat. It does nothing to give to these people as it does to have their own countrymen give, help, and make choices for themselves. We need to be the facilitators and not the handout.”

Think about it….