Category Archives: Political Commentary

Happy Recovery

To Moe Lane. And this is also my response when some moron accuses me of “hate.”

I don’t know about the rest of you, but Jeffrey here of the Los Angeles branch of California State University has given me one Hell of a testimonial, thanks to his desire to see my wife made a widow and my children orphans. I’ll remember this the next time that I wonder – as all bloggers and writers do, honestly – whether I’m making a difference. Clearly, I am – because they hate me. They really, really hate me. This is such a pick-me-up I almost don’t need the next pain pill.

The funny part? I don’t hate them. Because hate makes you stupid.

Which actually explains much of the Left pretty well. It’s a chapter in the book I’m working on. And yes, I too am happy to be hated by the right (that is to say, the left) people.

What If?

Thoughts on Obama’s latest deficit-increasing blather from Jim Geraghty:

We’re a $14 trillion economy that makes everything from timber to jumbo jets to firearms to smart-phone apps to Hollywood movies to every food product under the sun. The notion that some grab bag of tax credits and federal grants is going to kick-start a hiring binge to put 14 million Americans back to work or that the economy is one tax credit for hiring veterans away from recovery is laughable.

The recession we’ve endured for the past three years is far from normal, and yet we keep getting the normal Keynesian responses. I realize I’m about to offer blasphemies and shockers on par with Rick Perry’s Ponzi-scheme comparison, but what if Obama was wrong last night, and a big issue is that some of the people of this country do not, in fact, work hard to meet their responsibilities? What if decades of a lousy education system have left us with a workforce that has too many members with no really useful skills for a globalized economy? What if way too many college students majored in liberal arts and are entering the workforce looking for jobs that will never exist? What if the massive housing bubble got Americans to condition themselves to work in an economy that’s never coming back? (How many realtors are unemployed right now?) What if we have good workers who can’t move to take new jobs because they’re underwater on their mortgages and can’t sell their house?

That’s just crazy talk. (No link because it’s from his morning email.)

And on a related note, is it the end, after decades, of the New Deal Order? I hope so, but it went on so long that the transition to sanity is going to be very painful, and perhaps very ugly, as we saw with the union thuggery in Washington state that is so far not only going completely unpunished, but its author sat in a box with the First Lady at the president’s speech.

Jane Fonda’s Crush

on Che:

In case you read Town Hall, Ms. Fonda, here’s some consolation, honey: “I used to call him El Gallo (the rooster)”recalled Carlos Figueroa who was Ernesto Guevara’s adolescent friend in Alta Gracia, Argentina. “I’d be visiting him and eating in his family’s dining room and whenever the poor servant girls would enter Ernesto would promptly grab her and force her to lay on the dining room table where he’d have rapid intercourse with her. Immediately afterwards he’d throw her out and continue eating as if nothing had happened.”

“Es un gallo—un gallo! (He’s a rooster!—rooster”) complained a scowling Berta Gonzalez a few years later upon emerging from her Mexico City bedroom summer of 1955. This was shortly after his Motorcycle Diary trip, when the hobo Ernesto Guevara was scribbling unreadable poetry and mooching off women in Mexico City, where he met Fidel and Raul Castro. Berta Gonzalez was a Cuban exile in Mexico at the time.

Gallo, as you might have guessed, is a common pejorative by Spanish-speaking women against men who terminate carnal encounters prematurely.

If only that were the least of his crimes. Here’s how Cuba treated real feminists:

They started by beating us with twisted coils of wire recalls former political prisoner Ezperanza Pena from exile today. “I remember Teresita on the ground with all her lower ribs broken. Gladys had both her arms broken. Doris had her face cut up so badly from the beatings that when she tried to drink, water would pour out of her lacerated cheeks.”

“On Mother’s Day they allowed family visits,” recalls, Manuela Calvo from exile today.” But as our mothers and sons and daughters were watching, we were beaten with rubber hoses and high-pressure hoses were turned on us, knocking all of us the ground floor and rolling us around as the guards laughed and our loved-ones screamed helplessly.”

“When female guards couldn’t handle us male guards were called in for more brutal beatings. I saw teen-aged girls beaten savagely their bones broken their mouths bleeding,” recalls prisoner Polita Grau.

The gallant regime co-founded by Che Guevara jailed 35,150 Cuban women for political crimes, a totalitarian horror utterly unknown—not only in Cuba — but in the Western Hemisphere until the regime so “magnetic” to Barbara Walters, Andrea Mitchell, Diane Sawyer, Jane Fonda, etc. Some of these Cuban ladies suffered twice as long in Castro’s Gulag as Alexander Solzhenitsyn suffered in Stalin’s.

Their prison conditions were described by former political prisoner Maritza Lugo. “The punishment cells measure 3 feet wide by 6 feet long. The toilet consists of an 8 inch hole in the ground through which cockroaches and rats enter, especially in cool temperatures the rat come inside to seek the warmth of our bodies and we were often bitten. The suicide rate among women prisoners was very high.”

But they got free health care.

My Talk With Alan Boyle

For those people who foolishly thought that the Republican debate was more important than my conversation with Alan Boyle tonight, the podcast is up now.

[Update]

It’s all ME, ME, ME, over at Cosmic Log tonight.

So if you’ve had enough of me, don’t go there.

[Thursday morning update]

Related thoughts from Rick Tumlinson.

[Update a few minutes later]

Man, many of the comments over at Cosmic Log are typical, in their rampant ignorance and straw men.

Space Interview Tonight

Alan Boyle of MSNBC will be interviewing me in Second Life tonight on Virtually Speaking Science at 6 PM SL time (PDT). Here’s the SLURL for SLers: http://slurl.com/secondlife/StellaNova/228/226/38

This is the promo:

Alan Boyle talks with Rand Simberg

As MSNBC.com’s science editor, Alan runs a virtual curiosity shop of the physical sciences and space exploration, paleontology, archaeology and other ologies that strike his fancy. Alan is the author of “The Case for Pluto,” a contributor to “A Field Guide for Science Writers,” and the blogger behind Cosmic Log, the 2008 recipient of the National Academies
Communication Award.

Rand Simberg describes himself as ‘just a recovering aerospace engineer.’ The Competitive Enterprise Institute describes him as ‘an expert on space technology and policy, particularly with regard to NASA and commercial human spaceflight.’ He writes widely about the politics and economics of space exploration. Read him in Popular Mechanics and Transterrestrial Musings – Biting Commentary about Infinity and Beyond! Watch him on YouTube. | Listen live and later on BTR

And yes, it will probably conflict with the Republican debate.