Weekend at Fidel's

Castro's tip: Clinton-Obama the winning ticket

Says the Ouija board.

You KNOW this guy is dead. If you're going to make his mouth move, make it say something useful, okay? Like his memoirs.

That said, the English translation of the essay reveals no such endorsement. This is his statement on the subject:

Today, talk is about the seemingly invincible ticket that might be created with Hillary for President and Obama for Vice President. Both of them feel the sacred duty of demanding “a democratic government in Cuba”. They are not making politics: they are playing a game of cards on a Sunday afternoon.

The media declares that this would be essential, unless Gore decides to run.

Could someone read the original and tell me if this is what he said? I think it is, but my college Spanish is rusty.

Hoy se habla de que un ticket al parecer invencible podría crearse con el binomio Hillary presidente y Obama vice. Ambos se sienten en el deber sagrado de exigir "un gobierno democrático en Cuba". No están haciendo política; están jugando a las barajas un domingo por la tarde.

Se afirma por los grandes medios que esto sería imprescindible, excepto si Gore se postula.

Sounds like he says they're dilettantes, not political powers. I guess that might be good for Cuba though. If it's true. It is by no stretch of the imagination an endorsement, however. Nice try, neocons.

Attention Webster's

(Non-word-geeks may skip this entry.)

"Jihadization". Did you know that was a word?

Until I find an instance of it that predates January 2007, we can blame Canada for it. (Don't blame Stephen Colbert. I altered the picture. Sounds like him, though, doesn't it?)

But this was the first time I had seen it:

Internet is "the new Afghanistan": NY police commissioner

The Internet is the new battleground against Islamist extremism because it provides ideology that could radicalize Westerners who might then initiate home-grown attacks, New York police commissioner Raymond Kelly said on Wednesday.
[...]
The report identified the four stages to radicalization as pre-radicalization, self-identification, indoctrination, and jihadization, and said the Internet drove and enabled the process.

(Pre-radicalization? Wasn't that that movement of weird-ass Victorian artists who used to meet in their parents' basement? No, wait, that was somebody else.)

I love a well-coined word as much as anyone. Unfortunately, "jihadization" doesn't make the cut.

For that matter, "Islamist" and "extremism" aren't among my favorites, either.

The process of inventing words is called neologism. According to Wikipedia, it is a symptom of schizophrenia or brain damage. Wikipedia, of course, is crammed full of truthiness.

Really, though, the recruitment of terrorist wannabes can be accomplished far more handily on any college campus. On the Internet, you have to build your bombs with one hand.

Darwin, Godwin, and...Ann Coulter?

Godwin's Law (applied variation):
"The first poster to bring up Hitler or the Nazis loses the thread."

New TV Special Connects Darwin to Hitler

Ann Coulter is stunned. How is it, she asks, that she could go through 12 years of public school, then college and law school, and still not know that it was Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution that fueled Hitler’s ovens.

Um...judicious, vertically heirarchical application of oral-genital contact in lieu of paying attention or studying? Just a guess. Since you ask.

“I never knew about the link between Darwin and Hitler until after reading Richard Weikart’s book,” said Coulter, a popular conservative columnist and a featured expert on the new Coral Ridge Hour documentary, Darwin’s Deadly Legacy, which airs August 26 and 27.

An expert on...what, exactly? Apparently not the subject in question, since she just admitted she didn't learn anything about it in school...

“To put it simply, no Darwin, no Hitler,” said Dr. Kennedy, the host of Darwin’s Deadly Legacy.

Well, yes, of course. And no big black rectangle, no violence and war. That covers the intelligent design theory pretty well. Now we have parity.

Ground Zero articles of interest:

The future limps forward

What we want:



What we get:



Never Waiting In Traffic Again

At a meeting in Munich in October, Mayor Yury Luzhkov gave Lipp the green light to test a system that would integrate buildings and roads. Roads for light vehicles would be built on top of commercial and residential buildings.

A raised road network would free up ground-level streets of 30 percent of traffic and cost at least $30 billion, Lipp said.

The project's viability rests on the results of a pilot: a 1.7-kilometer, four-lane highway atop a row of shopping complexes and residential buildings near Varshavskoye Shosse in southern Moscow.

'Cause those Soviet-constructed buildings are gonna hold that road RIGHT up. Strong and robust as Chernobyl, they are. No substandard materials and lowest-bidder contracts in Russia's construction history, no-sirree-Ivan.