Blogging the democratic revolution
Singapore arrested two bloggers for making offensive-to-Islam remarks on their blogs, with charges of contributing to religious hatred. The de-facto state-controlled Singapore tabloid, The Electric New Paper, breathily noted that this pair also even was ‘said to contain vulgarities.’ In Singapore they have laws against that kind of thing. I am an ex-Singapore resident who first learned how to use the Internet in Singapore. Prior to that, I had no idea what it was. I was a denizen of Singapore’s first Internet cafes, (since I didn’t have a very good home computer) and often I consider Singapore and cyber-Singapore my…
And now, Harry Hutton has come up with something totally different – teaching Colombia’s repulsive guerrillas – yeah, real ones – how to blog. No, I’m not making it up. He’s actually described how he’s taught these (update: ex-)contact killers and kidnappers how to go to www.blogger.com, set up a blogspot blog, and blog away. It’s quite a change from what they are used to doing, which, as Harry explains: At an age when I would ring on people????????s doorbells and run away sniggering, he was in the jungle picking off FARC guerrillas with a pistol. There’s one small problem,…
Japan’s politics, like its economics, has been sclerotic for ages. Bureaucrats, comfy pork barrel politicians and socialism have kept that economy on ice for a long long time. Until now. Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi, an authentic revolutionary who is taking untold radical steps to shake Japan from top to bottom, reforming the giant postal savings program, getting rid of bureaucrats, setting the markets free … has just won a MASSIVE unexpected electoral victory in Japan, way bigger than he thought he could get … after a ballsy move to call new elections, effectively telling Japan’s voters and legislative creatures that…
Have you ever heard of anything more macabre? Dozens of life-size , lovingly constructed cardboard skeletons have appeared all over Caracas, on overpasses, on lampposts, on bridges, over highways. Miguel has a photo of the freakish spectre here. The dozens of hanging skeletons are a protest, something from a mysterious youth group called Cambio, which says it is protesting Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez’s casual murders of young people without punishment across the country. It’s also a legacy of Chavez’s willingness to shoot demonstrators, something that has damped protest rallies, this knowledge that one execution by Chavez goons will be carried…
Here is a superb Bolivia update by someone who knows the real score going on in Bolivia. The short story is this: Evo Morales is winning as December’s election approaches but he can’t win except through Congress. If he does, he’s going to nationalize the energy and make Bolivia the third member of the Axis of Marxism, destabilizing every country in the region and giving the FARC a new home. If he doesn’t, he’s going to destabilize the country through street protests, same as he’s been doing, toppling presidente after presidente. This is clearly scary stuff. This guy needs to…
In Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez’s army, there is something called ‘military doctine’ and within that doctrine, is a weird fascination with ‘asymmetrical warfare.’ That asymmetrical warfare, of course, is block committees and ragtag guerrillas, all keeping their eyes on the barrios amid revolutionary vigilance in a strong bid to repress spontaneous groupings. It’s a real clown show. Alek Boyd has a scintillatingly detailed and interesting account of the strange innards of Chavez’s military here.
Cuban dictator Fidel Castro has loudly volunteered the services of 1,600 doctors to New Orleans, making a bet that if the U.S. doen’t take them, it’s his propaganda victory as the U.S. looks heartless on the world stage. But today’s Investor’s Business Daily makes an argument against it. Castro’s record on medical aid is a bad one. Wherever Castro’s Cuban doctors go, political havoc follows. This isn’t revolution, this is the weakening of political institutions and the damaging of free markets. There are a whole string of incidents from these Cuban “doctors.” It’s happening right now in Honduras and a…
It’s one or two days since my FARC news roundup and today I’ve noticed all the non-FARC Colombia news. Google Colombia, skip the FARC pieces, and notice what news is left. Notice how marvellous Colombia’s government is, what fine things it’s done to make Colombia the great wealthy country it’s meant to be, and take a look at the string the visionary measures Colombia’s taken to secure its long-term future. This is the quietest, most peaceful revolution in the world. And it is a real revolution – a great sudden change from 40 years of narcoterrorist warfare and institutional weakness.…
The Dominican Republic has just ratified entry into CAFTA. Wheeeee!!!!!!! This is great news! Dominican Republic was considered the weakest link in the CAFTA state lineup. I thought it wouldn’t happen. I read so much negative news in the local press about this factory layoff and that protest and that opinion poll that I didn’t think it could possibly be true. I was wrong. My embassy source, who insisted otherwise, was right – Dominican Republic is onboard bigtime. The legislature passed the treaty by a 118-4 margin, mopping the floor with the local anti-CAFTA crowd. Yep, 118-4. And that’s great…
The Zimbabwe effect is rolling in fast and thick in Venezuela. Confiscations of churches, land, businesses and bank accounts are accelerating. Each day brings news of new expropriations in ‘the name of the people.’ Never before has such an abuse of property rights been so bold. Today, we noted that a Church had been taken over on these dubious grounds with Alek Boyd’s story here. But that’s hardly all. Tomas Sancio shares his thoughts on the blatant theft of several grain silos belonging to a beer company in Venezuela. Supposedly they were ‘idle’ but Tomas asks, ‘what is the definition…
Three attacks on the Church from the hemisphere’s Marxist Axis in two days makes me think there may be a coordinated effort by Chavez-Castro & Friends to confront the Church. Given the weak state of the Church in most of the world, it’s hard to grasp why dictators should see it as such a threat but perhaps this is an region where the Church remains a robust force. It certainly was in Poland back in the 1980s. There may be a brewing showdown between the Church and communism, something not seen since Pope John Paul II verbally mauled Daniel Ortega…
The FARC’s massacre victims this past week. Source: Yahoo! The FARC makes my blood boil. There is no eviler organization in this hemisphere than these murderous Marxist narcoterrorists. Nothing good has anything to do with them. These monsters put necklace bombs around housewives in the mountains just to see what a blown-off head looks like. Today they pulled so much garbage in Colombia I thought it was worth a news and blog roundup. I would be so much happier if I could write ‘FARC Roundup’ instead. This is what the bastards did today: They called for the murder of all…
In the Chavista Revolution in Venezuela, no one is more neglected than the helpless. There are all kinds of soup-kitchen programs and money flying around, but they benefit only those who can help Chavez politically in return. That excludes many. Chavez’s revolution is Marxist, and as such, its philosophical foundation is materialism. For Chavez, the materialist fuel driving his revolution is U.S. dollars from Venezuelan oil revenue. This is an advantage no previous communist state has ever had, neither Eastern Europe, Russia, China, Vietnam, North Korea nor Cuba, making Venezuela’s descent into communism one virulent revolution that will be hard…
Miguel Buitrago at MABB in Bolivia has a truly marvellous election update complete with biographies of all the players in the upcoming election in December. That is going to be a BIG one – so it’s best to get up on these characters. Miguel has done a fantastic job well worth reading here.
What does 6,000 extrajudicial killings by police sound like? Oh, but you remind yourself that Argentina’s and Chile’s dirty wars have long been over, as dictators like Pinochet are brought to justice. Well, there is one part of South America where these dirty wars have not stopped – in fact, they have started. Venezuela, one of the few countries in South America with no history of a dirty war is resurging as the dirty war capital of the Americas, a horrific title as the bodies and mass graves turn up, a title that one had hoped had long passed for…
This blog post is difficult to write – it doesn’t really seem revolutionary, so I didn’t want to write anything. But it is relevant. We in the U.S. seem frozen in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. If it was just the winds, big deal, it would have a simple, if costly solution. But it’s so much worse than that. There’s the slow but total flooding of New Orleans, with some analysts saying the treasured city may be a total loss. There’s the unexpected destruction of the Gulf cities of Mississippi and Alabama – the damage of which is unknown due…
Today’s Wall Street Journal has an in-depth essay today on the Babes of Politics theory, developed in depth here at Publius Pundit, at WILLisms and at Gateway Pundit. It’s excellent. Read it here.
As Jesse Jackson visits Venezuela’s strongman Hugo Chavez at the presidential palace this weekend, with timing that suggests a plan to denounce what he calls the ‘Rumsfeld-Robertson connection’, outside in the streets – violent protests have engulfed Caracas in a sign of Chavez’s tightening grip on power. El Universal has the story in Spanish here and Globovision has the story in Spanish here. Miguel explains it in English for us here. Sources: El Universal, Globovision, Union Radio, Venevision, Reuters and El Nacional. Reuters has the story here. UPDATE: Aleksander Boyd points out media errors in some of the captioning in…
Larry Kudlow has an important essay on the one economic force stronger than oil and all the tyrants who ride in on it: The Federal Reserve. He warns that the Fed doesn’t quite get it on interest rates – it’s obsessing over mortgage prices and risk management instead of commodity prices and the yield curve as it should be. Will the Fed lower oil prices – by destroying everyone’s economy? I agree with Larry in that I don’t think destroying something in order to save it is the way do something. This isn’t way democratic revolutions are best made/ Read…
More thoughts on Pat Robertson’s public recommendation that Hugo Chavez be assassinated from Venezuelan bloggers: Tomas Sancio in Venezuela, in an open note to Robertson, notes Chavez’s many incompetences and says he’s incapable of being the ruthless dictator who could use assassination. (I strongly differ with Sancio here – all the dictatorships I have seen up close or studied are characterized by venal incompetence, including Nazis.) But its broader point about Chavez’s sloppiness is correct and it’s a well-argued essay full of interesting information. Aleksander Boyd takes a clear-eyed view of Robertson’s cheap inane statements and makes the point that…
Boli-Nica reports that Abimael Guzman, the chief of Peru’s Sendero Luminoso, the monstrous Shining Path terrorists who murdered nearly a hundred thousand people, mostly poor people, throughout Peru in the last quarter of the 20th century, is finally facing justice in a civil court. Boli has a picture of Peru’s freakish Pol Pot (an ex-philosophy professor, of course – remember that Pol Pot was educated at the Sorbonne) in his prison stripes, a satisfactory sight indeed, along with an appropriately cold-raged piece about just who the hell he was and why he belongs in prison forever. Democratic Peru is going…
Alexandra Beech has a fantastically insightful essay debunking a truly lousy piece by airheaded Washington Post columnist Marcela Sanchez, who claims Hugie Chavez is just a teddy bear in the region capable of stabilizing it. Well, yeah, the way graveyards tend to be stable places I guess. But Alex shows the reality much better – take a look at the depth of this: That Ms. Sanchez has been hood-winked into believing that Chavez has a Robin Hood side is not surprising. After all, she believes that ???????Latin America today is not in the midst of a Cold War where externally…
Oh man, this is really gross – Hugo Chavez is bed with Marc Rich, the most corrupt speculator of all, a guy who makes George Soros look like a sweet little daisy. Rich is the ultimate sleaze in the world of capitalism, in bed with every dictator and criminal out there. I know a lot of speculators myself but none, not one, ever wants anything to do with his tainted name. They back away from him like salt from pepper in a bowl of water not out of fear or shame, for they have none, but out of disgust. They…
Venezuela’s revolution is complex because it has two sides claiming to hold the revolutionary mantle. The reality is, only one does, the one that does the democratic housework, not the one that spends the night painting the town – with red graffiti. What do the real revolutionaries do? They build the case for democratic revolution. They hold the powerful accountable. They show where the problems are, and precisely. They don’t focus on personality (like the Chavistas do, and come to think of it, Pat Robertson, too). They focus on acts, deeds, facts. Tangible things. They act as voices in the…