North America

Who Needs Infrastructure?

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Last month I went to Haiti to help out with an IT project in Petit-Goâve, a medium-sized town about seventy kilometers west-southwest of Port-au-Prince, on the northern shore of the Tiburon Peninsula, opposite Île de la Gonâve on the Canal de Sud. The project’s objective is to create, or rather restore, a computer lab at “College” Harry Brakeman (actually a primary and secondary school, hereafter “CHB”), and provide greatly improved internet access, via wireless links, at five sites (including CHB) in Petit-Goâve owned by L’Eglise Methodiste d’Haiti (EMH). The epicenter of one of the larger aftershocks of the January 2010 earthquake was directly beneath Petit-Goâve.

Numerous ongoing projects for the EMH throughout Haiti are being funded by United Methodist Committee on Relief (UMCOR) and staffed by United Methodist Volunteers in Mission (UMVIM), but my personal involvement is not occurring as a result of direct involvement with any of those organizations. I have for many years been attending an informal Friday lunch group that for the past decade or so has included Clif Guy, who is the CIO of United Methodist Church of the Resurrection in Leawood, Kansas, generally known as “COR” throughout the Kansas City metropolitan area, in which it is by several measures the largest single church – big enough to have its own IT department (larger than most church staffs altogether) and a CIO.

In mid-January I returned from a solitary and somewhat monastic sojourn in New Mexico and the trans-Pecos region of Texas to 1) get back to work at Sprint; 2) bury my just-deceased 18-year-old cat; and 3) talk to Clif about opportunities in Haiti, which he had mentioned several times over the previous year. Two months of frantic preparation later, which included among many other tasks the filling out of a “Mission Trip Notification of Death” to specify the disposition of my corpse, I was landing at Toussaint Louverture International Airport.

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The “Wag the Dog” Government Shutdown

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The Obama administration cannot change the horrid realities that are tubing its polling numbers with its most committed supporters, but it can change the subject by using the federal government shutdown as a political gimmick straight out of the 1997 black comedy “Wag The Dog.”

Like Wag The Dog, the objective is to get the Obama administration out of its current quick sand of bad headlines about any of the following: the Libyan “Kinetic Military Action,” the budget deficit, historically high unemployment, high gasoline prices, Khalid Sheik Mohammed’s Guantanamo trial flip flop, etc.

The Obama administration can count on the Journo-List 2.0 Main Stream Media (MSM) to do its part in presenting the Democratic Party line on these events as the gospel truth, up to and including stating the Obama administration’s acceptance of the GOP terms is a huge victory for President Obama over the evil GOP. Exhibit A — ABC NEWS’s Jake Tapper is already bragging of giving Obama talking points against Congressional Republicans.

The upshot is that there is nothing anyone, especially Congressional Republicans, can do to divert a shut down, or the upcoming “Republicans are Evil” media campaign. The best Congressional Republicans can do is ignore the MSM, attend to their own political interests and work to get their message out on alternate media — Fox, talk radio, Internet bloggers, social media — trusting to the hard economic realities to inform the American voter. After all, this just worked in Wisconsin.

If the Obama administration wants a government shutdown, it can get it, simply by changing the terms of negotiation. If the Republicans cave on spending cuts and social issues, Obama will demand more spending and immigration amnesty. The MSM will report “Republicans are Evil” no matter how the federal government gets shut down. And nothing will have changed, except for the headlines…and the consequences from the decision to close and reopen the federal government.

Egypt: tear gas and hotels

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[ cross-posted from Brainstormers on the Web ]

Here are two data-points to drop into the mind-pool as we think about current events in Egypt, the Middle East in general, and the way the world turns.

DoubleQuotes is my name for the format I’m using here, which I came up with a few years back on Brainstorms. The idea is simply to generate fresh insights by juxtaposing two thoughts – be they images, quotes, or even equations (I don’t have the technical chops for music or film clips yet) — in condensed, haiku-like form.

Think of them as pebbles dropped in a pond, watch the ripples…

[ note to ChicagoBoyz readers: I’ll say more about Brainstorms and Brainstormers on the Web in a week or two, once the “on the Web” blog gets under way ]

Quote of the Day

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The war of Independence was virtually a second English civil war. The ruin of the American cause would have been also the ruin of the constitutional cause in England; and a patriotic Englishman may revere the memory of Patrick Henry and George Washington not less justly than the patriotic American. Burke’s attitude in this great contest is that part of his history about the majestic and noble wisdom of which there can be least dispute.

John Morley‘s life of Edmund Burke (1879)

Religions of the Chaos Lords

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Pamela L. Bunker and Dr. Robert J. Bunker at SWJ Blog

The Spiritual Significance of ¿Plata O Plomo?

Conventional wisdom holds that narco gang and drug cartel violence in Mexico is primarily secular in nature. This viewpoint has been recently challenged by the activities of the La Familia cartel and some Los Zetas, Gulfo, and other cartel adherents of the cult of Santa Muerte (Saint Death) by means of religious tenets of ‘divine justice’ and instances of tortured victims and ritual human sacrifice offered up to a dark deity, respectively. Severed heads thrown onto a disco floor in Michoacan in 2005 and burnt skull imprints in a clearing in a ranch in the Yucatán Peninsula in 2008 only serve to highlight the number of such incidents which have now taken place. Whereas the infamous ‘black cauldron’ incident in Matamoros in 1989, where American college student Mark Kilroy’s brain was found in a ritual nganga belonging to a local narco gang, was the rare exception, such spiritual-like activities have now become far more frequent.

These activities only serve to further elaborate concerns amongst scholars, including Sullivan, Elkus, Brands, Manwaring, and the authors, over societal warfare breaking out across the Americas. This warfare- manifesting itself in ‘criminal insurgencies’ derived from groups of gang, cartel, and mercenary networks- promotes new forms of state organization drawn from criminally based social and political norms and behaviors. These include a value system derived from illicit narcotics use, killing for sport and pleasure, human trafficking and slavery, dysfunctional perspectives on women and family life, and a habitual orientation to violence and total disregard for modern civil society and democratic freedoms. This harkens back to Peter’s thoughts concerning the emergence of a ‘new warrior class’ and, before that, van Creveld’s ‘non-trinitarian warfare’ projections.

Cultural evolution in action, accelerated by extreme violence. More on the cult of Santa Muerte here ( hat tip to HistoryGuy99)

Cross-posted at Zenpundit.com