News sources and wacky headlines about maintaining peace by the sword

One of the things that makes my favorite sites so good isn’t just the fact that the bloggers are really good thinkers, writers and analysts. What also makes them good is the breadth and volume of the stories about which they write. And that last fact is due to their popularity. As you’ll notice if you read a site such as Little Green Footballs, many of his fascinating posts come about because readers send him information. It makes sense. No one person can seek out that volume of information and still have a life — let alone blog about the things he’s found.

As my blog gets more traffic, I’m getting the pleasure of more tips from regular visitors. I’m not always able to use them — sometimes I’m not quite sure what to do with them, sometimes I get them too late in the day to be useful, and sometimes I keep them for my own private enjoyment. But I very much appreciate every one, and they all become a part of my intellectual landscape.

Today Zhombre, who regularly leaves wonderful comments here, sent me what may well be the best headline of the day: Monks Brawl at Peace Protest. If you follow the link, you’ll see that this all took place in Sri Lanka:

Protesters calling for an end to recent violence in Sri Lanka found themselves brawling with hardline Buddhist monks Thursday, after a rally dubbed a “peace protest” turned unexpectedly violent.

Organizers said there were around 1,000 people in a park in the capital, Colombo, listening to a range of speakers when hardline saffron-robed monks opposed to concessions to Tamil Tiger rebels mounted the stage and erected banners.

Some more moderate Buddhist monks, protesting for peace, were already on the stage when punches were thrown. Soon, monks’ robes and fists were flying, although no one was badly hurt, witnesses said.

“They were saying we should go to war,” said pro-peace monk Madampawe Assagee. “We like to listen to other opinions so we let them do that but then they started fighting and we couldn’t control some of our people. They tried to make it a big fight but we settled it in a few minutes.”

While the image of Buddhist monks with fists flying is funny, it’s worth remembering that this type of thing happens here all the time. Michelle Malkin writes regularly about “peace” protestors run amok in the most violent way. The Ghandi-esque notion of a true peaceful protest seems to be something that eludes many. Apparently the human propensity to violence, something that we carry in genentic seeds that go back to the dawn of time, regularly overrides those peaceful principles and often makes a complete mockery of their arguments.