Uneven Steven Has Been On Hiatus

Since late last year, I have been working on a project that did not afford me the time to blog, nor even to delve into pop culture or political debate.

I hope to resume blogging again soon on the following topics:

V - 1980s vs. 2010s - A more in depth examination of the original television story compared against that of the current one. I intend to focus on the difference of the Cold War cultural background of the original vs. the Global War or Terror cultural background of the current one. I also intend to contrast how the more recent Battle Star Galactica & V address the political and cultural events of the last decade. Finally, I would like to do a comparison of the

The Upcoming Congressional Midterm Elections

Some Intriguing Political Developments in Alabama - A Political Upset No One Saw Coming.

Get Your War On Gets Animated

Love it! One of the earliest dissenters against the Global War on Terror gets animated. Amazingly, the first episode translates the comic to its new medium with great verisimilitude. Check out the comic here, and the animation below:

Obama Owes McCain an Apology (and is just plain weak)

First of all John McCain simply repeated what Ahmed Yousef, chief political adviser to the Prime Minister said when he said that Hamas preferred an Obama Presidency. Here's the quote in its entirety:

"We like Mr. Obama and we hope he will win the election." This statement was made in an interview with Aaron Klein and John Batchelor interviewed on WABC.

Now we know why Obama was so sensitive to accusations that Hamas would prefer him as President - one of his advisors had been meeting with members of the radical terrorist group which wants to annilate Israel. The Washington Post piece on the meetings is here. Even Politifact.com - a non-partisan political fact checking website validates McCain's statement is "mostly true." You can find the entire analysis here.

Of course Chris Matthews and the liberal MSM won't discuss this on the Sunday morning shows - it would undermine their efforts to impose a liberal agenda on the nation. Anyone thinking Obama represents a restoration of Camelot misunderstands not only Obama's but also JFK's ideology. JFK was much more conservative than Nixon - an irony the left refuses to acknowledge and he aggressively fought Communism in every corner of the globe.

JFK confronted Communism throughout the Western Hemisphere, in Europe and in Asia. He backed at least one attempted coup against a Communist regime (Cuba) and a war to stop Communist insurgency in Southeast Asia (Vietnam). And he did these both without negotiating with our enemies.

Like it or not for the multi-culti left, Terrorism is the new Communism and the Global War on Terror is the new containment. Even Europe is beginning to wake up to the threats posed by the Iranian backed global terrorist movement (Hamas, Hezbollah and and has begun electing center-right governments which support taking the fight to the extremists before they bring it back here (again).

Modern Technology: Turning War into a Videogame

Will Saletan has an excellent article about this interesting topic in Slate on Feb. 12 called Joystick vs. Jihad. Below are a few choice quotes to give you the flavor of the article...

This is the future of warfare: hunting enemies abroad at little or no risk to ourselves. A year ago, at least 750 unmanned aerial vehicles were assisting American troops in Iraq and Afghanistan; by now, the number is probably closer to 1,000. The Pentagon's budget and its Quadrennial Defense Review, released last week, propose a near doubling of our arsenal; within two decades, "45% of the future long-range strike force will be unmanned." ...

... In the Cold War, we used satellites to spy and intercontinental ballistic missiles to deter. We could track the Red Army level Moscow in minutes. But those devices won't work in the age of terrorism. You can't see an army, because terrorist don't have one. You can't threaten cities, because terrorists don't own any and don't care how many people die. Our lame attempt to kill Osama Bin Laden with cruise missiles in 1998 exposed the obsolescence of satellites and missiles. We need machines that can hunt and kill closer to the enemy...

...Drones fit the bill. In Kosovo, we used them to spy. After Sept. 11, we armed them with missiles. We hunted and blew away one al-Qaida operative after another—at least 19 hits in the last four and a half years, according to U.S. officials. Whenever a commando assault in unfriendly territory risked too many casualties, we sent a drone to do the job. We couldn't match terrorists' love of death, their willingness to take their own lives in the course of taking ours. But we could counter their expendable human killers with expendable inhuman killers. The joystick answered the jihad....

...Reluctance to kill was a big problem in World War II. By one military estimate, fewer than one in four American riflemen in combat pulled the trigger, and "fear of killing rather than fear of being killed was the most common cause." The Army tried to solve this problem by making its training exercises feel more like real combat. But what if we could do the opposite? What if we could make combat seem unreal? What if we could turn it into a video game?

Very interesting article that is worth a look in Slate.