A JURISPRUDENCE OF PREVENTION

Dr. Jack Wheeler February 24, 2006

Next week a vastly important book will be published: Preemption, A Knife That Cuts Both Ways by Alan Dershowitz. Yes, that Alan Dershowitz: the hyper-liberal Harvard Law School professor.

Yet it is only for the lack of his legal scholarship that there is nary a sentence in the book that I – a very conservative editor of The Washington Times and former press secretary to Newt Gingrich – couldn’t have written.

The premise of his book is that in this age of terror, there is a potential need for such devices as profiling, preventive detention, anticipatory mass inoculation, prior (more…)

PROGRAMMERS GET THEIR OWN SEARCH ENGINE

Dennis Turner February 24, 2006

Developers can use Google and other search engines to find source code, but it’s not easy.

A Silicon Valley startup claims to have come up with a better alternative — a search engine for source code and code-related information.

The tool, known as Krugle, is designed to deliver easy access to source code and other highly relevant technical information in a single, convenient, clean, easy-to-use interface, according to the company. Krugle works by crawling, parsing, and indexing code found in open source repositories and code that exists in archives, mailing lists, blogs, and Web pages.

It’s based on a combination (more…)

IS IT SMART TO ATTACK ALL MOSLEMS?

Dr. Jack Wheeler February 23, 2006

What do the arrests of three suspected Moslem terrorists in Ohio have to do with the purchase by an Arab company of the firm that manages facilities at six U.S. seaports?

Nothing…and everything.

The Justice Department indicted Tuesday Mohammad Zaki Amawi, 26, of Toledo; Marwan Othman al-Hindi, 42, of Toledo, and Wassim Mazloum, 24, of Cleveland, on charges of plotting to kill U.S. military personnel.

A fourth person is mentioned in the indictment. He is "the trainer," a U.S. military combat veteran and "respected member of the Moslem community" in Toledo from whom the plotters sought weapons training and bomb (more…)

DISRAELI IN DUBAI

Dr. Jack Wheeler February 23, 2006

The 19^th century British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli (1804-1881) once commented on accusations that a political opponent of his was lying regarding an important issue before Parliament: "It is worse than a lie – it is a blunder."

We can be sure that the Earl of Beaconsfield (the peerage awarded to Disraeli by Queen Victoria) would make the same observation today over the travails of George Bush and the port scandal.

There is no secret deal here. CFIUS, the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, that vets these things, ran it through 12 agencies including Defense, Treasury, (more…)

THE GREATEST ONE WEEK ADVENTURE IN THE WORLD

Dr. Jack Wheeler February 21, 2006

This is K2, the second highest mountain in the world at 28,741 feet (8762 meters), and harder to climb than Everest. It isn’t in the Himalayas, but an even remoter mountain range in Central Asia called the Karakorum.

In the center of the Karakorum range is a confluence of massive glaciers, a legendary uninhabited spot known to mountaineers as Concordia. Legendary because it is by consensus of professional mountaineers and adventurers to be the single most spectacularly scenic place on planet Earth.

At Concordia there are 41 peaks over 21,000 feet within a radius of nine miles. The highest mountains (more…)