Hey! It's Dead Che Day! Hooray!

It was forty years ago today
When they finally executed Che
His shirts have been the latest style
But the man was really very vile
So may I introduce to you
The beast you've known for all these years...
Che Guevara's bloated, stinking corpse!

Yes, forty years ago the planet became a better place as brutal, mass-murdering Stalinist t-shirt icon Ernesto "Spanky" Guevara was finally sent to hell. Despite being a failure as a revolutionary, Ernest had the good fortune of having a few pictures of him taken which made him seem to be a dashing figure, thereby guaranteeing that clueless teenagers and clueless Hollywood leftists would forever immortalize him (Now only $19.99 for this lovely Che shirt!).

The Cult of Che

The cult of Ernesto Che Guevara is an episode in the moral callousness of our time. Che was a totalitarian. He achieved nothing but disaster. Many of the early leaders of the Cuban Revolution favored a democratic or democratic-socialist direction for the new Cuba. But Che was a mainstay of the hardline pro-Soviet faction, and his faction won. Che presided over the Cuban Revolution's first firing squads. He founded Cuba's "labor camp" system—the system that was eventually employed to incarcerate gays, dissidents, and AIDS victims. To get himself killed, and to get a lot of other people killed, was central to Che's imagination. In the famous essay in which he issued his ringing call for "two, three, many Vietnams," he also spoke about martyrdom and managed to compose a number of chilling phrases: "Hatred as an element of struggle; unbending hatred for the enemy, which pushes a human being beyond his natural limitations, making him into an effective, violent, selective, and cold-blooded killing machine. This is what our soldiers must become …"— and so on. He was killed in Bolivia in 1967, leading a guerrilla movement that had failed to enlist a single Bolivian peasant. And yet he succeeded in inspiring tens of thousands of middle class Latin-Americans to exit the universities and organize guerrilla insurgencies of their own. And these insurgencies likewise accomplished nothing, except to bring about the death of hundreds of thousands, and to set back the cause of Latin-American democracy—a tragedy on the hugest scale.

The fact that this man, responsible for so much suffering and death could become an icon says a lot about the sickness of our society.

At Least I Have Chicken

Yeah, Good Luck With That

"Ah Vir, I have heard political naivete this complete only once, from Lord Jhano in a speech he made before the Centarum. We voted to have him sterilized as a favor to future generations, then we remembered that he was married to the Lady Ahrnos so really, there was no need." - Londo Molarri, Babylon 5

Obama urges eliminating nuclear weapons

Democrat Barack Obama called for ridding the world of nuclear weapons Tuesday and offered his early opposition to the Iraq war as evidence of sound judgment that trumps his lack of Washington experience.

Obama argued that U.S. policy is still focused on the defunct Soviet Union instead of combatting the nuclear threat from rogue nations and terrorists. The United States shouldn't unilaterally disarm, he said, but it must work with other nations to phase out weapons and control atomic material.

"Here's what I'll say as president: 'America seeks a world in which there are no nuclear weapons,'" Obama said.

"The best way to keep America safe is not to threaten terrorists with nuclear weapons — it's to keep nuclear weapons and nuclear materials away from terrorists," the Illinois senator said. Aides said the process Obama envisions would take many years, not just a a single presidency.

Wow.

Just wow.

Let me spell it out to you, Barack:

IT AIN'T GONNA HAPPEN.

Nuclear weapons are not going to go away. Ever. There are those for whom a nuclear weapon means power, influence, the ability to destroy their enemies with the push of a button. Y'see, Barack, there are bad people in the world. You can talk about "phasing out" nuclear weapons, but as long as there are maniacs like Kim Jong Il and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad trying to get them it's not even a remote possibility. Since you've shown no particular inclination for using force to stop those bad people from getting their hands on nasty weapons, well, they can safely ignore you. And let's not even discuss the odds of getting Russia and China to go along with this without cheating.

So we're left with this problem:

• Obama wants to get rid of nuclear weapons, but will not disarm unless everyone disarms.
• There is absolutely no chance that everyone everyone is going to disarm.
  
• Thus, nuclear weapons are not going to go away.
  

So why waste your time even talking about it? What you're proposing, Barack, is an impossibility. It may play well to the fringe nutcases of your party, but ordinary, everyday, non-fruitcake people are going to look at you and decide that you are dangerously naive. Once again, you're making Hillary Clinton look like the most mature, realistic Democrat running for office right now.

How sad is that?

(Link via Little Green Footballs)

It's a Small World After All

"Please stand clear of the doors. Por favor mantenganse alejado de las puertas..."

Today is the 36th anniversary of the opening of Walt Disney World here in central Florida, an event that turned this little cow-town of Orlando into a much, much larger cow-town. With rides. In 1971 WDW consisted of a few hotels, a monorail, golf courses, and the Magic Kingdom. Personally, I've always loved the place, overpriced churros and all. Back in 1970 my parents took me to the Preview Center, which showed what guests could expect when the park opened (presumably not mentioning the churros). My dad was excited, but financially the family wasn't able to swing a vacation there until the late 1970s. Since I moved to Orlando I've kept an annual pass about half the years I've been here.

Rides have come and gone over the years... Mr. Toad's Wild Ride is long-gone, replaced with a saccharine Winnie the Pooh ride. 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea has been replaced with... well, nothing. They filled in the lagoon and put yet another character meeting spot in its place where parents can take photos of screaming toddlers with six-foot-tall rodents, and more recently a Winnie the Pooh themed play area. As much as I miss the old rides, I understand that the only way to remain competitive is to constantly update, and it's not too bad as many of the classics (like the good old Haunted Mansion) are still there, often little changed. The Magic Kingdom is like a slice of old America, a less cynical time. The rides and attractions there have an endurance that is missing from almost every other non-Disney theme park... does anyone think people four decades from now will have nostalgic feelings for the Shrek 4-D ride at Universal? Of course not. Most won't even know it was ever there, it having been gutted decades ago and replaced by the next flavor-of-the-month ride based on a different, more recent film franchise. But the doom buggies will still be winding their way through the Haunted Mansion.

(For a fun look at the Disney World of the past, check out Widen Your World. I still miss the crappy hamburgers at the Adventureland Veranda. They put pineapple slices and teriyaki sauce on them, in what passed in the '70s for exotic theme-park food.)