Sunday Roast: The Death of a Butterfly

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by Chris Streich

The New York Times

There was a suicide bombing in Afghanistan the other day.  So far away…the other side of the world.  It means so little in our daily lives.  What does it have to do with us anyway…?

At 8 years old, with freckles and a penchant for frilly dresses and soccer cleats, Parwana was just as I was at that age: equal parts tomboy and little princess. In the last few weeks, she had begun to wear a head scarf, but she clearly was not willing to grow up completely just yet. She was the undisputed ringleader of the little girls, and enough of a spitfire to give the bigger boys as good as she got.

She could belong to any one of us, really.  But she doesn’t.  She doesn’t belong to anyone now…except maybe our consciences.  We hear of another suicide bombing on the other side of the world, and think “Not again,” for about 10 seconds, and then it’s gone.

But this time, we see a face.  We can’t un-see her.  Because sometimes in this world, heroes come in the form of an eight year old child and her friends, who, beside skateboarding, loved nothing more than standing up to a big “bad boy.”

Her name was Parwana, which means “Butterfly” in Dari.  She gave all she had to give, and it has everything to do with us.

This is our daily open thread.

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145 thoughts on “Sunday Roast: The Death of a Butterfly”

  1. I really wish we could build schools and hope over there instead of building resentment. I will never understand man’s inhumanity to man…makes me wonder why people aren’t promised “72 virgins” if they help their fellow man to be more peaceful instead of fighting them…

  4. Every American is responsible for this but since most don’t know where this place is at or give a shit anyway there will be more and more pieces like this.

    • And the question was…What is Willard’s Secret Service handle?

      As to the real question I can’t say because I don’t think I have ever listened to a whole Beatles album.

  10. Note for any Greg Palast fans. His new book, “Billionaires and Ballot Bandits” is out. If it is half as interesting as his talk yesterday, it is a must read. Also Phil Donahue was great. I’m looking for his latest documentary “Body of War”.

          • One of his funniest and best yesterday was how Americans could check out his website to acquire a ballot condom. Seems the Repubs were mailing out absentee ballots with a return envelope that was an unacceptable size so it was shit canned.

  12. Can anybody tell me if there’s a key combination that reverses the sequence of windows you have open on the taskbar? I always have The Zoo on the left side, with other windows opened later to the right, all in Chrome. Now The Zoo has moved to the right end of the queue, so to speak. I didn’t do it on purpose, so how did that happen?

      • Yes, on my taskbar it moved rightward, so you all have a stake in helping me figure this out.!

        • Drag it back. Are we talking Firefox? You can simply drag the tabs where you want them. If this is a question of what and where when you open the browser, move them and then go into options to choose “current pages” for your home page.

          I’ve taken to using the pin app feature so that my most-frequent pages are always available over on the left of the bar. Check it out. I also use an add-on called site launcher; when I use Ctrl-spacebar a window opens up in the middle of the screen with my favorite pages (based on a deliberate choice rather than how often I access them).

          • I keep documents, IE and Chrome ‘pinned’ on the Taskbar. This concerns three Chrome windows that inverted their order left to right. Dragging moves all three together and they won’t change order without closing and reopening.

    • Not long ago I figured out by accident that hitting Alt-Control and an arrow key turns your display sideways. I like to never got the thing back vertical again!

  14. via Cultura Inquieta

    River House

    ..on river Drina near the place called Bajina Basta, on the border between Serbia and Bosnia and Herzegovinain. Photo by Irene Becker

  15. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) says the partisan gridlock in Washington won’t change if President Barack Obama gets reelected and the House and Senate retain their current party majorities.

    “You’ll see more of the same,” Pelosi said during an appearance on CNN’s “State of the Union.” “It’s really important for the public to know that the Republican obstruction of President Obama’s jobs bills and whatever he was advancing, is their — obstruction is their agenda.”

    – Good thinking, Madame Speaker. Now every independent, waffling or disinterested voter will think, “gosh, why would I vote for Obama if nothing will change in Washington? At least Romney won’t be obstructed by his own party.”

    • There are some possibilities. If the make up of Congress remains after the election with a Dem majority, Reid has to modify the filibuster. It has to be returned to its original state where a filibuster is an active component where those who call a filibuster actually have to take to the Senate floor and filibuster. The Senate shuts down while it listens to the filibuster. No more a threat is as good as a deed shit.

  16. David Gregory is twice a tool today. In this case he should have mentioned that:

    a. The withdrawal from Iraq was negotiated by Bushco.
    b. The end of our occupation of Iraq is very, very, unlikely to have caused violence in other countries. (Though, of course, all them Muslims are the same to Pete King.)

    http://thinkprogress.org/security/2012/09/16/855991/peter-king-iraq-withdrawal-embassy-attacks/

    I would have preferred something more like “get the Hell off my show until you learn how to tell the truth” but we all know that will never happen.

    • The best part is that the US has some sort of right or duty (supposedly God given) to tell certain countries how they need to be run. And no one ever seems to notice that this right is always directed at countries that have oil reserves or no possible capacity to tell us to go fuck ourselves.

    • He is a brave and interesting man… he stood up for people being blacklisted in Hollywood during the McCarthy Era…

  18. Zooey – I just ordered one of the seatbelt covers. You must be reading my thoughts. Just the other day I was thinking, damn, I need a something to cover this seatbelt that keeps jabbing me in the neck and there is was, right in Z Bag.

  20. I am really getting tired of the idea that somehow the existence of man on this planet is tied to a piece of desert. That somehow the Western ideas of religion that think that a few acres of rock and sand are so freaking important to a deity that it means the destruction of humankind on the planet. Israel and Jerusalem, Mecca and Medina are somehow more important to the planet than anything else. They are fricking cat litter boxes that can barely sustain a society.

    If this God entity thinks Jerusalem is the end all and be all of human society it is retarded. The deserts of the Middle East are the weakest presentations a deity could have. I am so tired of the Western belief that they are the heart and soul of human development. Our ‘gift’ to the world is the destruction of civilization in the Americas.

      • About the same as I do about Israel. If there is some sort of holy place on the planet that is better or more important than any other I would vote for the Grand Tetons. Other than that I would ask why a deity would make a planet loaded with wondrous places and then decide to play favorites with a litter box. While there may be some existential reasoning that addresses the least as the best I would say, horseshit.

        • The whole planet is a sacred place. Occupying a tenuous orbit around a blazing inferno, with a thin band of elements protecting it from either freezing or incineration, all these cretins can worry about is what happened in the most recent brief blip in time.

      • Remembering Missouri makes me itch.
        I unwittingly walked through a nest of newly hatched ticks once upon a time near Table Rock Lake. They were microscopic, very pale, and covered my legs from ankles to the knees.
        Ahh, Paradise.

    • In my view, the hardscrabble wasteland of these centers of divine prominence are simply the outskirts of the Fertile Crescent, where a band of warlike marauding sheepherders sought to stake their claim to fame. Not having the wits to join a burgeoning agricultural civilization, instead they invented single angry vengeful god, who curiously was supposed to look just like them, and proceeded to become casualties of their own foolishness. What else would successful civilizations ( Egypt, Babylonia) do but subjugate the savages? Whereupon this tribe, or 12 of them as it were, become perpetual victims, eventually self fulfilling their own prophecies.

      • And 2,000 years later we are still playing that horseshit, trying so very hard to fulfill prophecies. And the worst part is, these are the fantasies of a group that doesn’t comprise even a third of the world population.

    • Didn’t it occur to Mr. Tapper to correct her? Didn’t it occur to him to ask her “how, specifically, has President Obama abandoned these countries?” I can’t see how he has “abandoned any of these countries. Even the ones that exist.

      The last time I checked we are still providing Israel with arms and guaranteeing their debt. Poland? All I can think of is the ABM system and neither the Polish nor Czech populations wanted them because they don’t want to piss off Russia. Plus, the ABM system would not have protected Poland or the Czech Republic. It would only have been effective against missiles that were overflying Eastern Europe. Sigh…

      Our “librul media” sucks!

    • I’m a little disappointed in Mr. Graves. Just like the others who have run against Batscat he wants to take the high road and avoid personal attacks. I think he should open every sentence with “my insane opponent” and every speech should be a recounting of her insane positions and complete lack of accomplishments for her district. The local “librul media” is going to call everything he says an “attack” so he should go for the knockout.

      • While I agree wholeheartedly; my experience is that severely unbalanced persons need to be handled delicately, lest they become completely unglued.
        That being said, let’s call a chunk of dung for what it is.

        • That’s the problem. She’s going to wail and gnash her teeth no matter what anyone else does and the local press/media will defend her because they are afraid of her. And she constantly whines about the “librul media” anyway. It would be a great public service to push her to the point, which is her normal state of mind, of being “completely unglued”. I want to see her throw a screaming fit on camera that even the fundiest fundies can’t pass off as just defending herself.

          • An underlying current in the “librul media” is the need for drama and controversy. Without a shrieking harpy such as Ms. Batty, saner voices may be more readily heard, and ad revenues would plummet.

            • That’s part of it. However, here in flyover land, the local media thinks that any Minnesotan getting face time makes us relevant. I’m sick and tired of only being relevant for sending the, arguably, craziest Representative in the country to Washington.

              Part of it is the sympathies of local editorial boards too. Most of them are very active in their churches and that’s where Batscat’s base comes from. One can almost hear them saying; “she’s nuts but she’s a good Christian”.

              I searched in vain to find any local coverage of Al Franken’s contributions in the Senate. There’s virtually nothing. One needs to read “librul” blogs to even find a mention of what he’s doing. Since Senator Franken is not getting national coverage they just don’t care.

  25. Yep. Liz Cheney is a lying bitch. Military aid to Israel and joint military programs with Israel reached their highest level to date in 2011. My guess is that it will be exceeded this year. I’ll say it again. Our “librul media” sucks! I was able to completely debunk her crap with a 30 second Google search but, apparently, the media no longer thinks that’s their job or they are just terrified of being singled out by FAUX”News”. Considering what happened to George Tiller I suppose that the fear is justified but it makes me very angry.

  29. Yesterday:
    Benjamin Netanyahu: Some Iran Containment Supporters ‘Set A New Standard For Human Stupidity’

    Today:
    Meir Dagan, Former Mossad Chief, Says Attack On Iran ‘Stupidest Idea’ He’s Ever Heard

    Looks like Dagam is a Bibi containment advocate.

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