Anzac Day Parallels

Another Anzac Day and Australia is still at war. I can't understand how a nation with two separate holidays to commemorate war dead can continue to repeat the mistakes of the past.

Back in 1916 Australian troops under British command attacked the Ottoman Empire at Gallipoli. No one questioned whether it was appropriate for Australian troops to be involved in such a distant (and merely political) war, they simply went to defend the British motherland. No one questioned the ethics of attacking the Turks when the Ottoman Empire had not yet entered the war (they were only allied with the Triple Alliance). After nine months and hundreds of thousands dead the Turks managed to repel the invasion.

Then in 2003 Australia joined the USA's Coalition in invading Iraq. There had been no reason given for whether or why we should join the War on Terror, the troops were simply sent off to defend "freedom" (while at home civil liberties were being drastically curtailed). There were plenty of arguments over the ethics of pre-emptive strikes but that barely slowed the Howard government. Who knows how much longer it will go on. But in this war, unlike Gallipoli, the Iraqis who tried to defend their homeland have already lost.

Iraq

Well, Australia has lost her first soldier in Iraq. And it couldn't have been a more futile death -- he shot himself while cleaning his gun! Of course this hardly compares to the 2386 soldiers the US has lost since the start of the war.

But then I started wondering -- "How many civilians have died?" The answer is somewhere between 34 000 and 39 000! Why such a vague number? As Rumsfeld said, "We don't do body counts on other people." Hence the new chotchkie in the side bar (which I hope will keep updating itself automatically) gives totals of the upper and lower estimates reported by any two news sources. Sounds pretty reliable to me.

American Ethnic Geography

I found this cool site that has US demographic maps, "A Cultural Geography of the United States and Canada". (Link is now in the side bar.) The coolest one is the different religions by county:

And the political ones are good too.

Eostre

Tomorrow's Good Friday but I don't get the day off! Here in Indiana it's not a public holiday. I was a little surprised to hear that, America being such a religious country and all. I guess I'm just used to living in a country where there's no official separation of church and state but the people just behave secularly, as opposed to an officially secular country where people are extremely religious.

The other surprising thing is that they don't have Hot Cross Buns here. (Well, they're not popular at least. I did see one paltry six pack that had a nasty-looking icing cross.) Now I'm not a big sultana fan but the last couple of year I've really enjoyed the Australian innovation -- Chocolate Hot Cross Buns. So I decided to make a batch. Now, I knew yeast cookery would be tricky but my immodest estimation of my cooking skills always manages to outstrip my actual degree of success. That is to say, they are not as good as Woolie's or Baker's Delight but are edible. Was tossing up whether to put the cross on top but the website I got the recipe from told me that it was originally meant to symoblise the four seasons of the year, back when Easter was the Spring Exquinox festival of Eostre. So I crossed 'em. Besides which, they wouldn't have been Hot Cross Buns otherwise!