It was the summer of 1992.  Our youngest son, Jackson, had been born in May, and I was staying put, not traveling anywhere to remain at home to help take care of him.  A friend of mine named Ray Kline called.  Ray was a legendary intel guy in Washington, having been the Deputy Director of the CIA under John Kennedy, and later Director of the DIA (Defense Intelligence Agency at the Pentagon). It was Ray Kline who, in the fall of 1962, drove down the George Washington Parkway from Langley CIA headquarters to the White House, entered the Oval Office, and placed the satellite photos of the Soviet missile emplacements in Cuba on Kennedy's desk to personally explain them to the President of the United States. That's how the Cuban Missile Crisis began. Ray was calling to tell me about a 30th anniversary conference of the veterans of the Crisis he had just come back from.  The conference was in Havana, Cuba. "You went to Cuba, Ray?" I asked, amazed.  "Jack, the Soviet Union has vanished off the map [December 1991] and a lot of Castro's people are nervous" he replied.  "They are trying to convince him to make his peace with the US.  They even asked me if I knew of a conservative organization that would send a delegation to Havana and talk to them." Ray paused for effect.  "I suggested you and your Freedom Research Foundation." "You've got to be kidding, Ray," was all I could say. "Jack, Cuban intel knows all about how you instigated the Reagan Doctrine, which is why they no longer have their Soviet patron.  Who better than you to go and see if they are for real?" I told him I would think about it.  I decided to go and told my wife, Rebel, my reason:  "I want to look Fidel Castro in the eye and tell him that someday the Cuban people will urinate on his grave."  She decided to go with me - in order to prevent me from doing any such thing.

So, it finally comes out: There's a method to the madness of Google's super-generosity in supplying users with mega-gigabytes of free storage space for e-mail, photos, and even uploads and downloads. Why preserve users' search data not as an aggregate but as information derived from user accounts? The latest Internet scandal caught major search engine AOL committing a serious (from users' point of view) gaffe when it inadvertently released information from about 19 million search requests made by more than 658,000 AOL subscribers during the three months ended in May.

Watching the war in Lebanon and listening to the debate about it is just like watching the war in Iraq and Afghanistan and its attendant debate. Israelis are demanding the resignation of Olmert, just as Americans are demanding the head of Bush. Israeli military experts, real and self-proclaimed, are explaining how the Lebanon war could have been won if only the ground campaign had started earlier, or had been more ambitious. American strategists of varying competence are explaining how the Iraq war could have been won, if only there were more boots on the ground, or if only a different strategy had been employed, or if only the Baathist army had been kept intact. I think it's nonsense. Both campaigns and both debates suffer from the same narrow focus, the same failure of strategic vision, when the war itself - the real war - is far wider.

Reuters announced Sunday (August 6) it was suspending its relationship with Adnan Hajj, a freelance photographer in Lebanon who had worked for the British news service since 1993, because he doctored a photograph on the aftermath of an Israeli air strike in south Beirut. Mr. Hajj cloned the image of a plume of smoke rising from a bombed building, which made it appear the damage was more widespread than in fact it was. The doctoring was discovered by Web logger Charles Johnson (Little Green Footballs), the man who proved the memo then CBS anchor Dan Rather was relying on for his expose of President Bush's National Guard service had been typed on Microsoft Word, which did not exist at the time of the date on the memo.

My dish of crow went down easier after I read the hilarious editorial in the New York Times Wednesday celebrating zillionaire businessman Ned Lamont's victory over Sen. Joseph Lieberman in Connecticut's Democratic primary. (I'd predicted a Lieberman win in a July 16 column.) "The rebellion against Sen. Lieberman was actually an uprising by that rare phenomenon, irate moderates," the Times declared. Flanking Mr. Lamont when he gave his victory speech were those famous moderates, Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton.  Just the faces, I'm sure, Democrats in swing districts want representing their party in the fall.

For the past year, there has been a pest on the To The Point User Forums named Miriam Brownlee.  She enjoys driving To The Point members around the bend with her Buchananite anti-Bush anti-Israel conspiracy theories. I have tolerated  her until last week when she lost it and called TTP contributor Jack Kelly a Nazi for revealing the staged Hezbollah photos of the phony Qana "massacre." I am happy to report that Miriam's annual subscription expires this Saturday, August 12 and will not be renewed.  Due to the complete inappropriateness of her comments last week, she will not be allowed to post to the User Forum this week. So Miriam will have to find some other site to pester.  TTP Members can now enjoy the User Forums without having to be subjected to her any longer.  Adios, Miriam!

Miami. The skyline appears to have more cranes than buildings, as if the city were just one vast construction site, and that has been the good news. The bad news here in Miami, as well as most major U.S. cities, is that the real estate boom of the last few years is coming to an end. The villain in this drama is the U.S. Federal Reserve (the Fed), which fueled the boom and now is destroying it. The Fed, by its own admission, has been failing to keep inflation within its own targets. Yet, the Fed's main responsibility is to provide the U.S. with a sound currency; one that neither loses value (inflation), nor gains value (deflation). The Fed has a long history of reacting too late, then overreacting, to the inflation or deflation it causes. One reason the Fed keeps failing is its overreliance on lagging indicators of inflation, such as the well-known consumer price index (CPI).