Outis

“Every hour, this landmine destroyer can zap mines in areas ranging from 400 to 700 m2.”

At the group blog “Tapped,” Matthew Yglesias writes:

[T]he hawkish “domino theory” view of Vietnam proved to be largely correct in that lots of the bad consequences they thought would follow from losing the war really did happen. Pro-Soviet regimes took over not only South Vietnam, but Laos, Cambodia, and Burma. The Soviets were emboldened and sponsored a revolutionary movement in Central America that took over Nicaragua and seriously destabilized Guatemala and El Salvador. And while I forget the details, they also mucked about with no small degree of success in Angola, Mozambique, and Namibia. Anti-apartheid movements vaguely aligned with the Soviet Union gained strength in Zimbabwe and South Africa. The pro-Soviet governments of Syria and Egypt launched the Yom Kippur War and the Soviet-aligned PLO became a major player in Lebanese politics and launched a variety of audacious international terrorist attacks.

It’s not, in other words, that losing the war turned out to be fine and dandy. The 1970s and early 1980s proved to be a period of aggressive action by Soviet and Soviet-aligned forces; the United States was frequently on the defensive; our credibility as a great power came under question; and, generally speaking, there were all kinds of problems. But we coped. Richard Nixon went to China and reconfigured great power politics. The USSR badly overreached in Afghanistan and Jimmy Carter inaugurated support for anti-Soviet forces and a U.S. military buildup that Ronald Reagan continued, placing an enormous burden on Moscow.

But most fundamentally of all, the market liberal democracies of North America, Japan, and Western Europe simply continued to function better as politico-economic systems, a reformist government came to power in the USSR, Reagan took advantage of that to work with Mikhail Gorbachev, and eventually it all worked out to a happy ending except for the Afghans and all the dead people in Central America.

In fact, people — notably, women — are still dying in Central America because the consequences of the so-called “Cold” War have yet to be acknowledged and addressed.

We’ve moved on to a “clash of civilizations,” having lived through “the end of history,” and are now confirming whether or not there really is a “war on terror.”

But for many, many people unlucky enough to have been born in the Third World, the wars triggered by Soviet aggression and U.S. retaliation continue to this day.

How do you remove weapons already in circulation? How do you transform soldiers into civilians?

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Via the wonderfully almost-random Google News:

“ROBERTSON, CHAVEZ AND BUSH - An unholy trinity”

From the Jamaica Gleaner, which also has this rare profile of Spain’s ambassador to the island nation of Jamaica:

He related that as recently as 1981, Spain was still among the list of countries that qualified for United Nations aid. Now they are the ninth biggest donor country. The economy is booming and that means foreign investment. The catalyst for the economic boom was tourism and now they want to pass on some of the tips.

“We are receiving over 60 million tourists a year and we have only 40 million people so we’re hosting over 150 per cent of our population every year,” he declared.

As we wrote in 2000, in the lyrics to our song “SOS,” our future is tourism, for better or worse.

Update

Oh. My. God. Could this story get even more ridiculous?

Jackson offers support to Chavez — The Rev. Jesse Jackson offered support for Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez on Sunday, saying a recent call for his assassination was a criminal act and the United States and Venezuela should work out their differences through diplomacy.

About a month ago I wrote this personal reflection on what it was like to grow up without fear during the years of “V”, “The Day After”, and “Red Dawn.”

I have updated that post by shaking my head in utter disappointment and disgust at a recent editorial penned by none other than former Ronald Reagan speechwriter: Peggy Noonan.

Just a few days ago, the journalist and powerful conference organizer Steve Clemons wrote about a U.S. plan to oppose “a legal definition of terrorism.”

This news came from a leaked memo allegedly penned by the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, John Bolton — the same envoy who so impressed a Republican-controlled Congress that he had to be appointed during a summer recess.

Now, why would this administration fear a legal definition of terrorism?

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Do search terms wanna be free? I think they do.

Today, for work, I needed to search through the top 1,000 or so search terms for 2002-2005.

But I couldn’t. It appears none of the major search engine services have placed this basic data in the public domain.

Google’s Zeitgeist is cute, but it’s near useless as a research tool. Yahoo! Buzz tries even harder to amuse, but lacks even an archive of its own cuteness.

Perhaps, both companies do provide access to this valuable data — to private customers. Call me naive or call me a Child of the 90s, but, I feel this recording of our collective wants and curiosities should be readily available to anyone, be they a marketer or a pundit, a cogntive psychologist or an artist.

If who we are is what we Google, then anyone and everyone should be able to determine what a given people were searching for at a given time and in a given place.

The Oracle of Google may very well be around for the next 1,000 years. We should begin disseminating his/her/its cryptic wisdom now so there are plenty of copies around for the next civilization to inherit.

Over the course of at least two, maybe three years now, I’ve tried again and again to understand why on God’s Earth the 41st President of the United States is so set on wiping his ass with the U.S. Constitution, torturing prisoners of war, wasting power, both hard and soft, and otherwise neglecting serious threats to America’s peace and prosperity.

Via the very liberal but very smart blogger Digby I find the following rationale from Spencer Ackerman of The New Republic magazine:

The Bush administration has adopted this radical approach because it is defending the idea that the Constitution empowers the president to conduct war exclusively on his terms.

That’s it. Just reading that sentence felt like someone was taking the scales off my eyes.

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