Whistling Past the Gunyard

The revolt in Kenya has gone rural and low-tech:

In the Rift Valley, Kalenjin gangs stormed Kikuyu farms. Police officers seemed reluctant to intervene. Dozens of Kikuyus were massacred, including up to 50 women and children hiding in a church who were burned alive. What has kept the death toll from rising even higher is the fact that few people here have guns; most of the clashes have been fought with clubs, knives and stones.

That people are being clubbed, not shot, is what passes for good news in Kenya these days. The bad news: People in the Rift Valley can get AK's whenever they want. They can get them from the rebels in Sudan to the north, from the bandits in Uganda to the west, from Somali tradesmen who are willing to sell (or rent) an assault rifle anytime someone needs one.

The same guns make their way through the region, flowing to wherever the market is better. You can rest assured gun traders are headed back toward the Rift Valley right now.

Meanwhile, Kenya's leaders are acting with what's become their trademark urgency. President Kibaki and his challenger, Railia Odinga, agreed today (Monday) to meet and talk things out on Friday. I bet the 40 people who are likely going to be murdered by roving gangs in the meantime are thrilled to hear the news.

Russia sends elites into boxing, US sends asthmatics

Shannon Briggs is the Black Hope, apparently. He's the WBO champ and the only heavyweight contender these days who doesn't hail from a region of Europe where they manufacture AK-47s.

Here's how the Russians came to dominate the heavyweight division:

There’s no football to claim the hard-nosed big guys, no baseball, less basketball, a lot less money and a superior institutional apparatus for turning big men into competent boxers.

Briggs' route:

Asthma has dogged him all his life. “I missed a lot of school,” he says. “I was always sick. I was in the hospital a lot. Asthma kicked my butt.” But if it wasn’t for asthma, he might not be a boxer at all. How did a strapping specimen like him escape being recruited for football? “I couldn’t play, nothing aerobic. Nobody picked me.”

Briggs' work ethic shows in his medicine cabinet, which is filled with the drugs he takes to control/compensate for his asthma. They keep him up all night, they make him depressed. And he still apparently stinks after the 4th round.

Another example of how football sucks the talent out of every other sport in the country. Briggs is actually the American hope, too. Let's hope when he fights on June 2, he wears Carl Weathers' big Uncle Sam hat. And does better than Carl.

UPDATE: Holy crap are those Russians tougher than us. We'll all be talking like Malkovich by 2020.

Ugh.

Two more high profile murder-robberies in Nairobi:

Either there is more crime or more publicity about it, perhaps because many of the recent victims have been diplomats. In September, the American military attaché to Kenya was shot by carjackers just outside his Nairobi home. In August, the Russian ambassador to Kenya was attacked by machete-wielding thugs during a stop along a Kenyan road. That same month, a Danish envoy had an eye gouged out by thieves during a holdup at a Kenyan resort.

No reporter's ever going to get satisfactory confirmation on what the trends are here. Are thugs targeting diplomats? Are they getting their AK's from Kenya's security forces? These questions usually just dissolve into nothing.

But when this story appears in the Times, you can be sure the reporter who wrote it knows a number of Kenyan elites who feel under siege. Those elites are deconstructing everything they know about the recent crimes: trying to figure out what it all means, how the victims could have saved themselves, and what the living can do to protect themselves going forward.

If I were still in Nairobi, my two cents would be: I don't like the guns these guys are using. The fact that these guys were carrying AK-47s seems to indicate that they were looking for a high-value target. You can carjack someone just fine--it's much easier, actually--with a pistol. Why the assault rifle?

Reports indicate that when the carjackers are carrying AKs, they often have a specific plan they're carrying out. If you're in the Kenyan elite, that's a scary indicator.