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L i k e U s ! ! !

KAFKA IN MANAGUA: Ollie North Is Helping A Communist Win In Nicaragua

Franz Kafka couldn't make this up.  Ollie North is doing his best to see that his Sandinista foe, Daniel Ortega, responsible for the Communist tyranny in the 1980s that took so many lives of his (and my) Contra friends, will be elected president of Nicaragua this Sunday, November 5th.

He's not doing it on purpose.  Just like Democrats who are so filled with Bush-hatred they will support anything that hurts Bush even if it hurts America, Ollie is so filled with State Department-hatred that it is blinding him to what he is doing.

I know it's hard to believe – (more…)

WILL NOVEMBER 7 BE A CAPITULATION TO MASOCHISM?

If they were honest, liberal scientists who fanatically believe in the religion of anti-missile defense should band together and call themselves SFADA:  Scientists For A Defenseless America.

No matter what breakthroughs are achieved by the Pentagon in missile defense, you can depend on these guys to lie about them and claim they won't work.

Last week, the Pentagon's Missile Defense Agency reached an extraordinary milestone:  putting a "death-ray" high-energy laser aboard an airplane that can destroy at the speed of light an enemy nuclear missile aimed at the Unites States shortly after its launch.

If you read the detailed (more…)

CHINESE SIBERIA

Notice any difference between these two maps?

siberia_1845
siberia_1900
    
As you can see, Russia gobbled up a huge chunk of northern China, wrapping all the way around it to Korea, such that northern China remains landlocked with no access to the Sea of Japan to this day:
 
nk-russia_border_map

How did China lose all this territory, which it once called its Maritime Provinces?  It was thanks to a sociopathic lunatic named Hong Xiuquang (1814-1864). 

In 1843, Hong read a Bible tract by a Chinese Christian missionary, and decided that he was the younger brother of Jesus Christ, and as the New (more…)

REVOLT IN THE AMAZON

Think you could be friends with these fellows?

  xicrin2-sm

Or this guy?

-xicrin1-sm 

Sure you could.  My son Jackson had no problem…

xicrin3sm 

…when we visited their village in the Amazon in 2002.  They live in the deepest heart of the Amazon, along a tributary of the Xingu (ching-goo) River.  They call themselves the Xicrin (chick-reen), a branch of the Kayapo tribe.  They made newspaper headlines around the world this week.

During our visit four years ago, the Xicrin asked for our help.  In the middle of a pristine rain forest next to a beautiful river, (more…)

FORWARD AWAY!

We are happy to announce a new feature for To The Point.

A lot of you have expressed frustration that they could not easily forward a Members Only article to their friends.  There is an email function, but to access an emailed article, you had to be a TTP member yourself.  The only other way was to copy and paste an article into the text body of an email message.

Our problem was that an emailed link to one article in To The Point would open up access to the entire site.  We solved this with software providing a "one-time (more…)

ARAB TRANSPARENCY

Indonesia, as per Will Indonesia Save Islam?, is not the only place in the Moslem world struggling against Jihadi Islamism.  It turns out that there are hosts of folks in the Arab world who oppose the Jihadis, the Saudi Wahhabis, the Salafists who want a Dark Ages Islam.

Now they have a voice.

It’s an independent Arabic website called Middle East Transparent.  There are English and French versions (click on “English” in the top banner), but many of these articles are by Westerners.  It is articles by Arabs written in Arabic that make this site so influential.

“Metransparent” gets (more…)

MICROSOFT ONENOTE: The Best Personal Organizer

Many programs have been written over the years to help computer users organize their contacts, to-do lists, notes and progress, to link Web sites to certain topics, and to offer a variety of other activities.

These programs include Microsoft Outlook itself.

In recent years, however, the demands on such programs have become increasingly severe, including video, audio, sharing content and allowing others to revise content with all the revision capabilities of Microsoft Word.

It is unusual for Microsoft to get something right the first time, but the program I use very successfully is Microsoft OneNote, an add-on to Microsoft Office.  (more…)

WHY IS MOOKIE STILL ALIVE?

Why is the Moqtada al Sadr – nicknamed "Mookie" by our troops – still alive?

That this question can still be asked illustrates why things are going south for the U.S. in Iraq.
 
On Wednesday (10/25), Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad and General George Casey, the commander of U.S. troops in Iraq, held a news conference.  That afternoon, so did President Bush.

At both, the U.S. officials announced the Iraqi government has agreed to a series of "benchmarks" for progress in Iraq, and a timetable for accomplishing them.  Chief among them is disarming the sectarian militias that currently are responsible for (more…)

WILL INDONESIA SAVE ISLAM?

indonesia_map

There are 245 million folks in Indonesia.  88% of them, or 215 million, are Moslem, comprising the largest Moslem population on earth.  Just 8% of Indonesians are Christian, 2% are Hindu, and only 1% are Buddhist.

Yet the most famous landmark of Indonesia – the archaeological wonder of Borobudur – is Buddhist.  In fact, it is the world’s largest Buddhist monument.  Indonesia’s most famous tourist destination and most famous culture is the island of Bali.  The people of Bali are not Moslem.  They are Hindu.

Indonesia used to be Buddhist and Hindu, and is a long ways from Arabia.  How (more…)

BORIS. BILL, AND MONICA: TROUBLE FOR HILLARY?

Will the saga of the world's most famous fellatrice return to haunt Hillary in 2008?  There's this fascinating whisper making the Washington rounds that says yes.

While convoluted and circumstantial, a number of plugged-in Washingtonians believe it.  The story starts with Boris Yeltsin.

Yeltsin was President of Russia from its emergence after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 to 1999.  In October of 2000, part three of his autobiography was published, Midnight Diaries.  In it, there was an astounding revelation:

That in "late 1996," after Bill Clinton's re-election in November, he (Yeltsin) received a highly classified report (more…)

NORTH KOREA: THE NEXT CHRISTIAN NATION IN ASIA

2008.  That's the number that dooms North Korea's lunatic tyrant Kim Jong-il. 

If there's one thing the Chicoms in Beijing are not going to let anyone screw up, it's their coming-out party to the world, the 2008 Olympics.  They are not about to tolerate some nuclear fruitcake causing a million-death war on their doorstep.  That's why they are studying Romanian history, circa 1989.

That was the year that communist generals in the Securitatae (secret police) staged a putsch and seized power after executing Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu and his wife Elena.  Their death by machine-gun was videotaped.  Baby Kim has (more…)

THE FUTURE OF ONLINE PRIVACY

The coming years will make you more vulnerable than ever

What are the dangers of storing ever more e-mail, documents, photos and financial account information online? I first read interviews with experts and then designed several scenarios that depict what could happen in the next few years if technological innovation and public policy trends in three categories – online storage, location tracking and biometrics – remain on their current course.

Online Storage

The scenario: You receive a series of e-mail notes. The first attaches a compromising photo from your college days. The second excerpts an interoffice e-mail message containing confidential (more…)

THE DEATH OF THE ARGUMENT FOR MAN-MADE GLOBAL WARMING

One year ago, in September 2005, you learned what is actually causing whatever global warming the earth is experiencing. 

Solar Warming explained the specific mechanism involved:  the sun's increased magnetic activity deflecting the rain of cosmic rays upon the atmosphere, resulting in fewer clouds reflecting sunlight back into space and thus a warmer earth.

There is no better correlation to the earth's climate than the sun's magnetic activity, denoted by sunspots.  When this activity is high the earth warms;  when it is low, the earth cools.  (See the chart in Solar Warming.)

Another long-known correlation is that between the (more…)

WHY SHOULD WE RESPECT OUR ENEMIES?

Freeman Dyson, who is a famous physicist and Professor Emeritus at the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton University, argues in the current issue of  The New York Review of Books that the 9/11 Moslem terrorists are deserving of "respect" :

"Yes, I wrote that we should respect our enemies as human beings in order to understand them. I do not tract or apologize for this statement. I would like only to add a more general statement, that our lack of respect for our enemies made it harder for us to deal with them effectively." 

Yet it needs to asked:  (more…)

WHY IS NORTH KOREA OUR PROBLEM?

As the U.S. takes the lead in formulating the international response to North Korea's (apparently fizzled) nuclear test, there is a question which ought to be asked:

Why is this our problem?

In 1950, this was easy to answer.  The fledgling democracy in South Korea was too weak to protect itself.  North Korea was then an agent of an international Communist conspiracy.  We intervened in Korea less to protect the South Koreans than to protect Japan. 

But that was more than half a century ago.  The Soviet Union has collapsed.  The Communists who run China these days seem more interested (more…)