HALF-FULL REPORT: 2/22/08

I have been saving a very special bottle of wine – a 1992 Chateau Vieux French Bordeaux – for a very specific occasion:  to celebrate the death of Fidel Castro.  Looks like I'll be opening it soon – for the best news of the week is Castro's announcing he has one foot in the grave by ending his 49-year run as Cuba's El Jefe Maximo.

I chose the vintage not just because 1992 was a great year for French reds, but because I went to Cuba that year.  I told the story a couple of years ago in Cuba Libré.  A meeting with Castro had been set up, at which I intended to tell him the Cuban people would some day urinate on his grave.  He got wind of it and canceled the meeting.  My wife was very relieved.

Dagny D'Anconia explained the dictator's slow and awful descent towards demise some time ago in The Partial Assassination of Fidel Castro.  Drawn-out lingering nightmare agony – just the sort of hell a piece of murderous human garbage deserves.

What's hilarious is the lib media's portrayal of Raul Castro as a Cuban Mikhail Gorbachev reformer.  Raul is a 76-year old alcoholic who hasn't much longer to go himself.  The army and secret police still run everything, but with Fidel gone the regime has no legitimacy.  Odds will increase for a really bloody revolution.

**

Is the glass half full for Pakistan after its elections Monday (2/18)?  Yes, but just barely.  The Islamist pro-Taliban parties controlling Pakistan's Apache Country (the Pushtun ethnic area along the border with Afghanistan) lost big to the explicitly anti-fundamentalist pro-secular National Awami Party.  Radical Islam and its threat to take over Pakistan really took a hit with these elections. 

Yet this nuclear-armed country of 160 million Moslems remains more dangerously corrupt than ever.  The parliament will now be run by a crook who bumped off his own wife to gain power – Asif Zardari arranged for the assassination of his wife Benazir Bhutto – and a brainless stooge of the ISI spy agency, Nawaz Sharif, who wants to replace Pervez Musharraf with A. Q. Khan (the scientist who sold nuclear weapons to North Korea) as president of Pakistan.

**

The most inspiring news from Europe came this week from the Netherlands.  The country's most courageous Member of Parliament – arguably the most courageous individual in the entire European continent – Geert Wilders, announced the completion of a short film showing the "real face of Islam."

Using quotes from the Koran, he shows how Islam's Holy Book is similar to Hitler's Mein Kampf.  He argues that the Koran is a "fascist" book which should be outlawed in Holland as is Hitler's.  He is proposing legislation to do just that, plus outlawing any further immigration from Moslem countries, and paying Moslem immigrants already in Holland to emigrate elsewhere.

"Islam is not a religion, it is an ideology," he concludes, "an ideology of a retarded culture."

Geert Wilders' film – short enough to be on the Internet – will enrage Islamic crazies, terrify Euroweenies, and just may start the process of Europe's de-Islamization.

**

Here in the motherland, the most totally cool news is our military's shoot-down of a wayward satellite.  It was a first-shot bull's eye success, a true technological triumph demonstrating that we have the capacity to blow up satellites in space – such as those of the Chinese and Russians.  Which is why the commies in Moscow and Beijing have their undies in a twist about it.  Neither have this ability, so they are reduced to whining about the "militarization of space" like some Code Pink leftie invertebrate.

It's also a significant advance for US missile defense, and consequently a stunning defeat for Democrats in Congress who don't want America defended from it enemies.  This will make their efforts to defund missile defense much harder.

**

As I write this, it's well below freezing with hardly anybody driving on the streets of DC as they are covered with ice.  It's good news as it's yet another reminder of the Great Freeze of 2008 and the fraud of global warming.

US satellite data for January shows snow cover in the northern hemisphere to be the highest since 1966, and temperature levels lower than the average for the entire 20^th century.  They also show that winter ice around Antarctica is the greatest ever measured, 30% above average.

The world is getting colder, not warmer, with CO2 levels rising not falling.  So much for the earth's climate being the fault of our carbon footprints.  Finally, the media has begun to take notice.  Check out this week's story on Global Cooling in the London Daily Mail.

The evidence against global warming is getting to be so hard to ignore that maybe even John McCain might rethink his thinking on the matter.

That would be something we could really raise a more than half-full glass to.