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THE INDO-CHINA CON

Dr. Jack Wheeler June 2, 2005

These two Tibetan lamas blowing their tunchen horns, are calling the Buddhist faithful to prayer atop the Stok monastery in a remote Himalayan region called Ladakh. The river below is the Upper Indus. On the other side of the mountains in the distance is China – for Ladakh is in India, that part of Tibet that escaped seizure by the Communist Chinese. I took this picture in 1993.

The Chicoms’ courtship of India has been much in the news lately, with India usually portrayed as swooning over Beijing’s attention and flattery. Dire predictions are being made of India being suckered (more…)

NORTON GHOST

ttpn June 2, 2005

Norton Ghost is one of two backup programs I recommend. This program backs up entire hard drives. You are given several choices – to another local hard drive, to removable storage, or to a network hard drive. If you choose to back up to removable storage, you’ll have to use a number of DVDs.

I use Norton Ghost to back up my C drive to my D drive. I’m using about 60 GB of my 160GB C drive. This is compressed to approximately 50GB on my 160GB D drive.

You can restore individual files or folders. Or restore your whole (more…)

COMMENCEMENT

Dr. Jack Wheeler June 1, 2005

Mr. Chancellor, Members of the Board of Regents, Members of the Faculty, Honored Graduates, Families and Friends:

It’s funny that they call this ceremony a Commencement, for you’ve all reached the finish line: college, goodbye, we’re outta here. Yet of course, “commencement” means a beginning, not an end.

But one is supposed to at least start – commence – a talk such as this by saying funny things. So I’ll start by talking about Clark Gable movies. If you’ve heard of Clark Gable at all, you know he was the biggest movie star in Hollywood a long time ago. His (more…)

NO APOLOGY

Dr. Jack Wheeler June 1, 2005

The consensus of film critics is that three of the four best Western movies ever made were those starring John Wayne: Stagecoach (1939), Red River (1948), and The Searchers (1956). (The fourth is Gary Cooper’s 1952 High Noon.) Many critics consider The Searchers to be one of the greatest movies, period, and has been the subject of numerous academic seminars. It is a lesser known John Wayne Western, however, that contains an important lesson for our relations with the Moslem world.

Directed by John Ford, made in 1948, entitled She Wore A Yellow Ribbon, it stars Wayne as (more…)

OUR PATHOLOGICALLY ANTI-AMERICAN MEDIA

Guest Author May 27, 2005

The headline on the top of the front page of the New York Times yesterday, May 26, was: "FBI told of Koran abuses." The wording of the headline and the prominence of the display give the casual reader the impression the story — written by Neil Lewis — was new, and that the story was true. Neither is so.

Lewis’ story was based on reports of interrogations by FBI agents of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay in 2002 and 2003. He noted in his third paragraph that "they are accounts of unsubstantiated allegations made by the prisoners under interrogation."

Lewis didn’t (more…)

SITH PEACE

Dr. Jack Wheeler May 26, 2005

You know a movie is in trouble when during the most emotionally dramatic scenes, the kids are ROTFLMAO*. Star Wars III, for all its special effects eye candy, is pathetically written and acted. Even more pathetic are George Lucas’ values.

In 1977, the original Star Wars morality play of heroes fighting for freedom against the evil Galactic Empire resonated with millions of people struggling for their own freedom against the Evil Empire of the Soviet Union. Now Lucas wants folks to associate the Galactic Empire with America and the freedom-destroying dictator Palpatine with George Bush.

So it was gratifying to (more…)

MEXICAN NAZIS

Dr. Jack Wheeler May 26, 2005

Recognize this home?

You would if you ever watched the TV series Fantasy Island. It was the home of Mr. Roarke, played by Ricardo Montalban. Not a set but a real 19th century mansion, it’s on the grounds of the Los Angeles Arboretum next to the Santa Anita Race Track in Arcadia, an LA suburb. The home, the track, and the suburb were built, along with much else, by one of the more fascinating characters in California history, Elias J. “Lucky” Baldwin.

Starting out penniless (he crossed the West in a covered wagon), and having made multiple fortunes in (more…)

HOW JOHN WAYNE SAVED THE MARINES

Dr. Jack Wheeler May 26, 2005

Today is John Wayne’s 98th birthday. He was born on May 26, 1907 in Winterset, Iowa, weighing 13 pounds. His birthplace is a museum, and a few years ago I took my son Brandon to visit it. There was a guest book, opened to a page with the entry, in the entrant’s handwriting, Name: Ronald Reagan. Address: 1600 Pennsylvania Ave., Washington DC.

To celebrate the birthday of a truly great American, let me tell you how John Wayne saved the Marine Corps. In the aftermath of World War II, the psychological letdown after years of war and bloodshed, the huge (more…)

MORE WIRED THAN WIRED

Dr. Jack Wheeler May 24, 2005

The cutting-edge, ultra-tech, hyper-hip bible of the alpha geeks is Wired Magazine. If you want to be knowledgeable about the future of the Information Age, you have to subscribe to Wired.

So it was with a great deal of satisfaction that I read a cover story in Wired’s current June, 2005 issue about a young physicist who was overthrowing Einstein and revolutionizing the concept of time. Satisfying, because To The Point subscribers learned about him almost two years ago, in September, 2003.

The Wired article is entitled Time’s Up, Einstein, on pages 124-126, describing how a high school dropout (more…)

DANGER IN THE HORN OF AFRICA, INDIFFERENCE IN FOGGY BOTTOM

Guest Author May 20, 2005

At her Senate confirmation hearing, Secretary Rice stated, “the time for diplomacy is now.” Particularly in the Horn of Africa, she could not be more correct. International news media have been slow to pick up on what Africa watchers in the defense and intelligence community agree could prove to be a humanitarian catastrophe and a setback in America’s global war on terror.

In his testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee earlier this year, CIA director Porter Goss highlighted the Horn of Africa as one of the current and projected national security threats to the United States. Goss pointed out that (more…)

DEMAGOGUERY DANGERS IN DEUTSCHLAND

Guest Author May 20, 2005

It is common for politicians in trouble to seek scapegoats for their own incompetence and wrong-headedness, but when this begins getting widespread popular support, both the people’s liberties and pocketbooks are in danger.

Given its history, one would think Germany’s people would be particularly resistant to demagogy. Unfortunately, that is not the case. Recently, Franz Muntefering, head of Germany’s left-wing Social Democratic Party (the SPD), which also is the lead party in the governing coalition, accused business leaders of being “anti-social” and like “swarms of locusts.” Rather than denounce him for attacking businesspeople and “international capital,” other SPD leaders joined (more…)

PREVENTING THE NIGHTMARE: Terrorists Attacking America with Russian Nukes

Guest Author May 20, 2005

Ever since the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, Americans have been lucky that there have not been more atrocities on U.S. soil. However, the enemy, while weakened, is far from destroyed. Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri continue to issue threats against America from their hideouts. Their strength and support base, while diminished, is not eliminated.

Other terrorist organizations inspired by radical Islamist ideology are still at large in Europe, the Middle East, the Caucasus, Central Asia, the Indian subcontinent, Southeast Asia, and presumably in the Americas. Some of them are willing to use weapons of mass destruction (WMD) (more…)

SAVE THE WOMEN, SAVE OURSELVES

Michael Ledeen May 20, 2005

Two summers ago, a middle-aged Iranian-Canadian journalist named Zahra Kazemi was arrested in Tehran while taking photographs of regime hoodlums beating up young people who were demonstrating for freedom. A few days later she turned up dead in a local military hospital.

The regime denied requests from the family and the Canadian government to examine the body, insisted that she had fallen in her prison cell and died of injuries to her head, denied that anyone had beaten her, and hastily buried her without any proper autopsy.

The Kazemi family never believed the regime’s story, but efforts to get at (more…)

CHAOS IN KWAREZM

Dr. Jack Wheeler May 19, 2005

The center of Central Asia is the Pamir Knot, a tortured jumble of gigantic mountains formed when the sub-continent of India began bulldozing underneath Asia over 50 million years ago.

Two rivers flow west out of the Pamirs, the Amu Darya or Oxus and the Syr Darya or Jaxartes, both crossing a vast desert steppe and into an inland ocean called the Aral Sea. The land between the two rivers is sprinkled with oases and is known as the Kwarezm.

These oases have been peopled for many millennia. When Alexander the Great crossed the Oxus in 329 BC to conquer (more…)

THE SILVER LINING OF THE KORAN IN THE TOILET

Dr. Jack Wheeler May 19, 2005

There’s been a lot of acute commentary on the Newsweek-in-the-media-toilet/Koran-in-the-Gitmo-toilet story. It makes the excellent point that rioting Moslems murderously freaking out over this cannot be looked upon with respect and seriousness.

Just imagine, goes one analogy, if upon hearing Al Jazeera published a story about Al Qaeda sympathizers in Pakistan desecrating the Bible, Southern Baptists in Alabama went berserk with rage, attacking a Birmingham mosque and killing everybody inside. How tolerant and forgiving would world and American media be towards their humiliation and bruised feelings?

But of course this would never happen, because Southern Baptists, like other Christians, are (more…)

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THE INDO-CHINA CON

NORTON GHOST

COMMENCEMENT

NO APOLOGY

OUR PATHOLOGICALLY ANTI-AMERICAN MEDIA

SITH PEACE

MEXICAN NAZIS

HOW JOHN WAYNE SAVED THE MARINES

MORE WIRED THAN WIRED

DANGER IN THE HORN OF AFRICA, INDIFFERENCE IN FOGGY BOTTOM

DEMAGOGUERY DANGERS IN DEUTSCHLAND

PREVENTING THE NIGHTMARE: Terrorists Attacking America with Russian Nukes

SAVE THE WOMEN, SAVE OURSELVES

CHAOS IN KWAREZM

THE SILVER LINING OF THE KORAN IN THE TOILET

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