perfidy

The OpinionJournal has an interesting piece up on the possible fate of Cuba once the murderous ratfink dictator Castro finally claims gets his ticket punched. The article is based on the conclusions of Mark Falcoff of the American Enterprise Institute, in his book Cuba, the Morning After.

Falcoff concludes that post-Castro Cuba will have a hard time recovering from more than four decades of communist dictatorship. "Failed states typically become--like Haiti--platforms for the export of illicit substances, centers of international criminality, and vessels leaking illegal immigrants," he says. "Perhaps, indeed, the island will somehow avoid this fate, but present indicators do not offer much encouragement."

The article continues, "Other obstacles abound, Mr. Falcoff argues, even if the dictatorship topples like the Berlin Wall. Cuba, once prosperous, is now desperately poor, and one of Castro's legacies is the destruction of the whole framework of civil society. Gone are the entrepreneurs of Spanish-immigrant culture. Gone are the vibrant business groups, labor federations and professional societies. Gone are the engines of wealth, like a profitable sugar industry. The regime has trashed the island's environment and badly damaged its human capital. Cuba now ranks among the world's top five nations in suicides per capita. Even psychologically healthy Cubans are burdened by years of indoctrination, with its bias against individual responsibility and risk-taking.

About the only thing that might avert this rather grim scenario is the return of Cuban-Americans who have combined Cuban culture with American entrepreneurial skills and respect for civil soceity. Cuba was once the richest country in Latin America in per capita income. Now it is by far the poorest. Hopefully, this can change back.

Michael Ledeen has some thoughts on the letter that Johno mentioned in the previous post. This is the best part:

According to the Times — whose correspondent, Dexter Filkins, saw both the Arabic original and a military translation, and "wrote down large parts of the translation" — the letter is a sort of jihadist primal scream. It says that the jihad against the Americans in Iraq is going badly. The Iraqis are not signing up for martyrdom or jihad, they do not even permit the jihadis to organize their terrorist attacks from local houses, and, worst of all, the Americans are not afraid of the terrorists. With that charming neglect of logic that seems to define much of the radical terrorist "mind," Zarkawi says both that the Americans "are the biggest cowards that God has created," and that "America...has no intention of leaving, no matter how many wounded nor how bloody it becomes."

And he adds, "we can pack up and leave and look for another land, just like what has happened in so many lands of jihad. Our enemy is growing stronger day after day, and its intelligence information increases."

If we had a government capable of advancing its case to the world at large, those phrases would be broadcast around the world, because they constitute an admission of defeat by a man in the forefront of the campaign against us in Iraq.

This is it, right there. One of the signal failures of the Bush administration has not been its judgment in the conduct of the war on terror; but rather its perverse inability to make a case for its actions. While I have been doing so on a ( very ) small scale along with numerous other bloggers and journalists, the unconvinced need to hear it from the man at the top. Bush should be screaming this news from the rooftops.

And Ledeen also gives us some news from Iran:

Nonetheless, demonstrations continue all over the country. Demonstrations in Kerman a couple of weeks ago were so large that the regime was forced to bring in helicopter gunships to mow down the protesters, and the usual thugs were unleashed on student demonstrators in Tehran and Shiraz in the last few days. Despite the calls for appeasement from the State Department and a handful of our elected representatives, the Iranian people can see what is going on in Iraq, and they must take a measure of comfort from it. And the regime was so upset by President Bush's passing reference to Middle Eastern tyrants who feel threatened by the liberation of Iraq (this weekend), that on Monday the official news service reported that Bush had threatened Iran with the same treatment he had delivered to Iraq. I can hear the Iranians sighing, "oh, if only it is true."

It would be wonderful if the Iranians were able to free themselves. But it is foolish for us to stand by and not help what is clearly a growing movement, and one that hates everything that we hate - religious fundamentalism, thuggery and terrorism. Surely we can spare a couple billion dollars, some special forces troops and some loud support from the oval office to help the Iranian democracy movement.

[alsø wik] Here is another article, by Amir Taheri, commemorating the 25th Anniversary of the Islamic Revolution in Iran which happens tomorrow.

The anal-retentive types over here have taken the fine art and enjoyable pastime of criticizing movies for their departures from the known laws of physics to ridiculous lengths. I complain about movie physics sins during movies, after movies and sometimes even before movies if the trailer is bad enough. But I've got nothing on these guys, especially when they go after Armageddon and what they judge to be the worst physics movie ever, The Core.

Not the ass of the world, which is Steubenville, OH. (Nitro WV being a close runner-up.) But the bottom of the world, which is to say the South Pole.

Sophie got to take a day trip to the new base being constructed at the pole, and took time to get her picture took. For more information on the South Pole, you can start here. 

A recent comment has caused me to rethink my goals, values and position in life.

RegretsYou | 02/09/04 7:55 AM | Email:worthless@pos.org | IP 216.127.72.7

Please take your hateful, talentless, war-loving, trailer-trash family back to rural Ohio, where your kind belongs. Oh, that's right, they only have real jobs there, not shameful, government-waste, meaningless, busywork jobs like yours. And may God help your hapless son.

And you know, he's exactly right. It was, oddly enough, a kind of road to Damascus, scales falling from the eyes kind of experience. There I was, sitting in my flannel pajamas and checking the blog before getting ready for work, and bam! There it was! I don't belong here in this cosmopolitan DC milieu. My attempts to move beyond my heritage have failed utterly. I just can't get past my upbringing. So I called my dad, and told him. And we've decided to move the family back to Ohio. Advanced degrees and high paying jobs are just poor camouflage for our trailer trash roots.

Dad's thinking he's gonna buy a Ford F150, but then he always knew more about cars than I did. I'll just get something that'll look nice in front of a double wide. We'll fit in there, with our kind. We can get real jobs like pulling up concrete, or maybe even digging ditches. That would be the nes plus ultra of authentic, proletarian vocations, don't you think? And we could hang out in the local bars, and talk with the other xenophobic, jingoistic, back-country rubes. Although we'd have to be careful not to let it out that we went to college. Hicks don't take kindly to condescending, college educated folk telling them what's what.

It will be a relief to leave government contracting behind. It's been so frustrating trying to get government workers to adapt to commercial sector timetables. I can just relax and swing a 20lb sledge; and think about going home to my son, and how I'll teach him about the mendacity of the French, creationism, and how it's good for honest Americans to blow up the little brown people. Of course, I'll have to be careful not to overdo it. He might rebel and go to college! JC might pick all manner of noxious habits, and learn to hate everyone he knows. Of course, he's hapless – just like his talentless Dad and Granddad, so I won't have much to fear, I think.

I'll call the wife right now and tell her to start packing. And maybe God will help us along with a million dollar buyout.

RegretsYou, please leave your real email address in the comments, as I'd like to thank you personally for the insights you've given me and my family. I followed the ip address the blog software logged, but it only led here. You have nothing to fear! Talentless hacks can't afford lawyers.

It's time for my semi-regular, always belated and apologetic link to BTD's Sunday Comics feature. The crew over at Begging to Differ has had a recent lineup change - they've assimilated three new bloggers, but have also lost a regular, BTD Mike. I am happy and sad for them.

Scott Elliott, who maintains the Election Projection (which is interesting in its own right, and well worth a look) has come up with 21 reasons that Bush will be reelected in November.

Several of these are fairly compelling, and at the very least it's a good starting point for trying to put your own spin on how things will turn out.

Space.com reports that the memory surgery performed on the Mars Rover Spirit was a complete success. Spirit will now set about trundling through the Martian countryside, molesting rocks with its RAT and otherwise pestering the locals. (RAT: Rock Abrasion Tool)

You are all pretentious twats. Every last one of you. You're all latte-sipping, iMac-using, suburban-living tertiary-industry-working WASPs who offer absolutely no new insights on anything whatsoever apart from maybe one specialist field if we're lucky.

The Commissar drops a clue that perhaps James Joyce does not think highly of us.

Well, Mr. Joyce of Kuro5hin can kiss my ass. Even though this is a pMachine blog. I drink black coffee, and I no longer own a Mac. Well, I do, but I don't use it. It's a pre-PowerPC Quadra. Well, sometimes, I haul it out and play Escape Velocity. But I don't have an iMac. My Aunt does though! And she has an AOL account! I bet you hate her, too. But I digress. At least I'm not named after an opaque novelist no one reads.

Read.

Like Red States and Blue States, the books we read are separated by a unbridgeable cultural divide. Valdis Krebs, a man with entirely too much time on his hands, has taken some data from Amazon, and created a network map of books on current politics. Books are linked if they were purchased simultaneously. 

[ Bigger image here]

hat tip: Marginal Revolution, via The Volokh Conspiracy

[wik] While this phenomenon no doubt holds for explicitly political/current affairs books, it becomes a lot less true once you move away from that arena. I'm not sure about Ross, but I know that the difference between Johno's and my taste in, say history, lies solely in the areas of history we are interested in rather than the political labeling of the title. Where our interests overlap - we start running into the same titles.

TL Hines has begun what is sure to become legend in the annals of political reporting. In a selfless quest to increase our knowledge of the issues; and more importantly the people who will never have any impact upon them, TL is interviewing the Dark Horse presidential candidates. No not those candidates - the real Dark Horses. Like Kenneth Oliver Miller, Jedi candidate for the most powerful office in the free world.

TL, one question I have, and maybe you can forward it on to Mr. Miller - his stat sheet on Project Vote Smart lists his date of birth as 1/3/65. He will turn forty after the election. Is he even eligible to run for President?

The leader of Hezbollah, Hassan Nasrallah, had this to say in a rally back in August of last year:

"The resistance movement [against the U.S. in Iraq] may not be able to remove the U.S. from Iraq within a year, but it will be able to remove Bush, [Defense Secretary Donald] Rumsfeld and [National Security Adviser] Condoleezza Rice, together with their Zionist friends, from the White House," [editorial notes in the original Haaretz article]

The article has a lot of detail on the relationship between Hezbollah and Syria, and both groups activities in Lebanon, Iraq and elsewhere. Read the whole thing, as they say. But this quote is interesting. At least one terror group is convinced that a new administration in Washington would lead to a more salubrious climate for their activities. That is a strong argument for voting against whoever ends up the Democratic nominee.

hat tip: Insults Unpunished

As a sort of follow-on to my earlier post, we have this interesting article by Thomas Lifson in the American Thinker. (hat tip: Chris Hall's Spacecraft)

Ronald Reagan is 93 today. 

I shamelessly stole this graphic from Max Jacobs at Commonsense and Wonder. But then, he shamelessly stole the graphic from someone else, likely these people.

Rocket Jones links to Rocketman, who has a reader's guest post on how to get into space for cheap. It's a long one, but very informative and chock full of space goodness.

I've talked about the DCX here before - it was the one moment in my life when I thought real space travel was around the corner. Then NASA killed it and I went back to my normal, existential despair. Kelly does an excellent job of putting it all in perspective, and gives us his own ideas on getting to orbit. 
 

Or maybe not: 112,000 new jobs added to the economy, and the unemployment rate is down to 5.6 % - lowest in over two years.

[wik] A later version of the AP story adds this tidbit:

Some economists think hiring really is occurring in the economy, but it is not being reflected in the Labor Department's monthly survey of business payrolls. In the separate survey of households, employment jumped by 496,000 last month.

The household survey counts self-employed workers and contract workers, which are increasing. The survey of businesses does not.

Space.com is reporting that NASA plans to give $227.4 million to Kistler Aerospace for a test launch of the company's K-1 reusable launch vehicle. NASA is looking (finally) to the private sector to provide launch services for support of the ISS. Given that the Shuttle is out of service, they really don't have much choice - but this is still a positive development. Kistler originally began development of the K-1 to meet an anticipated large demand for satellite launches to low Earth Orbit. When that never quite happened, the company hit a bad stretch, and filed for Chapter 11 reorganization last summer. So, their lobbying efforts have probably paid off just in the nick of time.

The K-1 is designed to be a fully reusable, two-stage liquid-fueled rocket.
NASA expects to get flight data from the test launch for its money, and expects that if the K-1 pans out, it could have applications beyond Space Station resupply missions.

I'm not sure how much a vehicle like this will actually lower launch costs - much will depend on how expensive and difficult it is to prepare the vehicle for subsequant launches. (That's a major problem for the "reusable" shuttle orbiter, which costs millions of dollars to recondition after every flight.) There are two very good things about this news - it may set a precedent for going to private space companies for launch services; and it will give us good feedback for developing new launch vehicles. The United States has not introduced a new launch vehicle since the Shuttle, and we need to get moving.

Wretchard over at the Belmont Club draws an interesting analogy between the hunt for Columbian druglord Pablo Escobar and the hunt for Saddam and (hopefully) bin Laden. Our efforts to nab Escobar through traditional law enforcement methods were stymied by the thoroughly whipped Columbian government. Using Columbian intermediaries was equally futile. Then:

the Americans had a flash of inspiration. Since they could not get to Escobar because he stood atop a "mountain" of corrupt retainers, including many in the Colombian military, they would "tear down the mountain".

They retasked intelligence to build up a map of Escobar's empire: the lawyers he used, the identities of his key lieutenants, the location of his family, the names of his key enforcers. Armed with this information it is suggested, but it was never proved, that the US facilitated the formation of a paramilitary group called "Los Pepes" (Perseguidos por Pablo Escobar) which embarked on a program of tearing down the mountain. Escobar's retainers were killed at the clip of a half a dozen a day. His palatial villas were torched. His lawyers were liquidated until in desperation, some not only publicly resigned but took to living the life of beachcombers in isolated areas, the better to stay out of the line of fire. Burned out of every home, Escobar's family eventually sought quarters under Colombian government protection. Their phones were tapped. They attempted to flee to Germany, only to be turned back due to US diplomatic pressure, upon landing, and returned to their wired guesthouse in Colombia, spending nearly three days in an airplane. Eventually, Escobar, who once lived in villas with artificial lakes, serviced by harems of prostitutes and surrounded by hundreds of bodyguards, was reduced to camping out in mountain cabins with a village laundress for company. He was shuttled around, towards the end by a loyal bodyguard in a taxicab (presaging Saddam's fate), cornered at last in a small townhouse and summarily executed on its roof.

These methods worked again with Saddam, and administration officials seem ever more confident that the net is closing on bin Laden as well. For those who still think that traditional law enforcement methods are sufficient to fight the war on terror, this is one more slap to the head.

Six day old blog Siberian Light lets us know what those wacky Japanese are up to. Apparently, turning entire Chinese luxury hotels into giant orgies is not enough. The kinky Japs have taken this show on the road. (The soundtrack for the video would have to be Soul Coughing's Bus to Beelzebub.)

One would think that the police crackdown would have forced other orgy organizers in the metropolitan area to go underground, but that's apparently not the case. ...one organizer decided to go public, so to speak, by offering a completely new thrill: He chartered a bus, staffed it with hookers from the pink trade, solicited male participants, and then proceeded to run two-hour circuits of the city's while the male and female passengers emulated the same rush-hour crush they undergo on the morning commuter trains --- while completely naked and horizontal.

For his 30,000 yen [ $284.38 ] tour fee, the reporter claims he exhausted his supply of condoms, having made it with four different females during the two-hour tour. "A bargain," he remarks with a grin.

Indeed.