In the last two weeks I received several emails regarding web surfing anonymizers. These critters are portals through which you surf. They are reputed to prevent the sites you visit from identifying your personal computer.
In the words of one of the more prominent anonymizers, here’s what they claim:
Hi, fellow TTPers. You first heard from me last October when I told you about The Coming Capitalist Salvation of India.
It was a heads-up regarding the almost impossible-to-believe level of government venality and corruption in India today - and its impending cure: the election of India's Ronald Reagan, Narendra Modi. So I'd like to suggest you re-read it to get you back to speed before we discuss what's happening right now.
Ready? OK, here we go.
Since India's last general election in 2009, 100 million more voters have been added to the rolls, bringing India's electorate to 815 million. You can't have them vote all at once, so the 2014 election is taking place in 9 regional phases from April 7 to May 12. All 543 seats of India's Parliament, the Lok Sabha, will be chosen from a multitude of parties. The results will be announced on May 16.
The country has not witnessed this kind of excitement about an election since independence in 1947. There have been record voter turnouts across the country. I cannot emphasize the prominence of this election to India and the world. The result of this election will not just change but transform the country, either for good or worse.
San Cristobal, Galapagos Islands. It is odd to be on a small volcanic island on the equator in the Pacific Ocean, 600 miles west of Ecuador, for a meeting of economists and a few other academics and think-tank types.
One of the lesser purposes of the meeting is to discuss what we can learn from natural selection and animal behavior that might have relevance for the world economy and modern societies. And no, this is not a government boondoggle. We are a bunch of limited-government, free-market types, here on our own tab and not burdening any taxpayer with our eccentricities.
When Charles Darwin first landed here back in 1835, he was struck by the many indigenous animal and plant species, and specialization of the animals in order to best prosper. The variations in rainfall, from island to island and within an island, determine what plants grow where, which, in turn, determine which animals use them for food and shelter. Even the tortoises vary from one island to another, depending on the food source.
The animals have had hundreds, if not thousands, of generations to evolve and exploit the food and terrain available. Humans, more specifically Americans, have had only three generations to adapt to the Internal Revenue Service. We need to adapt evolutionary defenses against it.
The Arab Spring has unleashed the Arab Collapse. Everybody still standing in the region is picking the flesh of the helpless. The Islamist cancer proved more virulent than Arabs themselves expected, while dying regimes behave with unrestrained ruthlessness.
And our diplomats still think everyone can be cajoled into harmony.
We're witnessing a titanic event, the crack-up of a long-tottering civilization. Arab societies grew so corrupt and stagnant that violent upheaval became inevitable. That's what we're seeing in Syria and Iraq - two names, one struggle - and will find elsewhere tomorrow.
We can't stop it, we can't fix it, and we don't understand it. But we can stay out of it. Here's how we can and why we should.
Beijing. I've just come back from two weeks in a hermetically sealed land. No internet, no cell phones, no contact with the outside world. It is George Orwell's 1984 made real, where its inhabitants truly, deeply, passionately love and worship Big Brother.
These people were born on an isolated political island cut off from the world, and have lived all their lives surrounded by a sea of state-worship propaganda. The State makes every effort to prevent them from learning anything about their country or the world it doesn't want them to.
The word that summarizes being here is suffocation. You are constantly, ubiquitously, unrelentingly suffocated with the deification of the rulers. The films on television or in the theatres are propaganda productions without exception, with unending smiling, laughing, happy faces, everyone so joyously doing whatever their work is.
There is never, ever, the slightest hint of criticism, cynicism, or irony. All forms of art are suffocatingly saccharine, all the pictures, paintings, songs and singing are beautiful, smiling, and sugary sweet. This is the Land Without Irony, where Doubt is never permitted.
You'd think that this is the world's craziest country. But after returning from my second venture into it - I was here two years ago as well - I am convinced that it isn't. I'm now headed for one even crazier - much crazier, in fact. Where have I been and where am I going?
This is sad tidings. When I returned from the Serengeti, I learned that on Friday, June 22, Dennis Turner, my friend of over 40 years and author of TTP's Dennis The Wizard column, passed away.
Dennis had been in horrible pain and suffering for so long that his passing was likely a blessing. He never mentioned it in his columns, and how he wrote them in spite of it was heroic.
Some years ago, he contracted an infection in his spine which caused a progressive deterioration of his spinal nerves. He lost the use of his legs, and then all the functions of his digestive system.
Few of us can even imagine what it is to try and continue living like that. Yet Dennis did. He persevered, maintaining a wide range of interests and a dense network of friends. He never lost his intense intellectual curiosity and passion for life.
His was a mind apart. Not surprising -- for he was a six-foot-two, 280-pound Mongolian Jew with an IQ of 180.
There is an "intelligence website" emanating from Israel called Debka. This Monday (September 24), it breathlessly blared Iran and Turkey Prepare for War in Iraqi Kurdistan.
Debka's "exclusive military sources in Iraq" have revealed just to the website alone that "Turkish and Iranian air units as well as armored, paratroop, special operations and artillery forces are poised for an imminent coordinated invasion of the northern Iraqi autonomous province of Kurdistan."
Since I am in Iraqi Kurdistan meeting with Kurdish resistance movements operating in Iran, I showed them the story. They laughed their heads off.
A year ago, in Bye-Bye Bolivia, you learned that if Evo Morales were to take over Bolivia, the country would split in two. Sure enough, after less than four months in office, Morales is well on his way.
Morales, recall, leads the Quechua and Aymara ethnic majorities up in the Andean highlands, and got elected by focusing their resentment on the Spanish and other European ethnic minorities in the eastern lowlands. Yet the lowlands have all the oil and gas reserves.
With Morales promising to nationalize - a euphemism for "steal" - the lowland resources, the governor of the lowland province of Tarija, Mario Cossio, has met with government officials of neighboring Paraguay and Argentina, asking their support in declaring Tarija's secession from Bolivia.
He is being joined by the governors of the lowlands' other three provinces, Santa Cruz, Pando, and Beni. The new country could be called after its nickname of Media Luna, "Half Moon," from the provinces' collective shape.
Wow, more than 520 pages! As Dan Darling and I worked through it (and don't miss his more detailed analysis at www.windsofchange.net), we were constantly entertained by big blocks of "redacted" pages. Why don't they just put in ellipses instead of all those blacked-out paragraphs? Maybe the Government Printing Office gets paid by the page, and Congress wants the GPO to have more money?
The other great mystery is how the authors expect us to read the report. It's terribly written, and talks breathlessly about "trade craft" when "logic" or "common sense" would do better. It takes multiple sentences to say things that should be reduced to one or two. Are there no editors around?
In my first column I mentioned a powerful tool to protect and ‘clean’ your computer. It’s called System Mechanic Pro. I advised against using it because it was overzealous. Unless you really knew what you were doing, the tool could delete files and registry entries than could render your computer unusable.
The most terrifying aspect of the collapse of US power worldwide is the US's indifferent response to it.
In Europe, in Asia, in the Middle East and beyond, America's most dangerous foes are engaging in aggression and brinkmanship unseen in decades.
The US has responded to Chinese aggression with ever-escalating attempts to placate Beijing - while China has responded to these US overtures by demonstrating contempt for US power.
As for Europe, the Obama administration's responses to Russia's annexation of Crimea and to its acts of aggression against Ukraine bespeak a lack of seriousness and dangerous indifference to the fate of the US alliance structure in Eastern Europe.
In the Middle East, it is not only the US's obsessive approach to the Palestinian conflict with Israel that lies in shambles. The entire US alliance system and the Obama administration's other signature initiatives have also collapsed. The key examples are Iran and Syria.
Yet the problem is not limited to Obama and his advisers or even to the political Left. Their delusional view that the US will suffer no consequences for its consistent record of failure and defeat is shared by a growing chorus of conservatives.
There is an all-too-common tendency for humans (particularly members of the political class) to blame or scapegoat others when they bungle their jobs.
We are now being treated to the meeting of the Group of Eight that ended today (6/18) in Northern Ireland - where the "leaders" of eight major countries are looking for excuses for why they have made such a mess of their own economies.
Rather than acknowledge that the reason for such poor performance is excessive government spending, taxation and regulation, members of the G-8 are blaming their ills on lower-tax jurisdictions, which they pejoratively label "tax havens," and "the scourge of tax evasion."
If the G-8 had responsible leaders, the group's summit would have as an agenda item, "Ways to downsize government." Instead, their agenda includes how to increase tax revenue by going after jurisdictions with low tax rates. They disguise this scam by using the phrases "increasing tax-base harmonization," "tax information sharing," and "tax transparency."
It isn't often that an entire field of medical science gets turned on its head. But it is becoming clear that immunology is undergoing a big rethink thanks to the discovery that antibodies, which combat viruses, work not just outside cells but inside them as well. The star of this new view is a protein molecule called TRIM21.
Until recently, the conventional wisdom was that the body fights off infection in two separate ways. First is the adaptive immune system, which works outside the cell. It generates antibodies to intercept specific invaders, locking onto them like a tracking missile and preventing them from entering the cell. A second line of defense, the innate immune system, operates within the cell; it is like an expansive air-defense network, blasting away at all invaders.
Three years ago work by Leo James, William McEwan and their colleagues at the Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge revealed that this understanding was incomplete. They found that the neutralization of adenoviruses (common viruses causing colds and other infections) by antibodies was happening mainly inside the cell, not outside, and by an unexpected mechanism.
This mechanism opens a whole new path to curing viral infections, and autoimmune diseases like lupus.
I'm in a place so bizarre that one of the folks I'm with describes being here as an out-of-body experience. The internet is not allowed for anyone in the country (save for the ruling elite), and we are not allowed to have cell phones - so we are simply cut off from the rest of the world.
Yesterday (9/20), I ran into a British guy who had just arrived. Any news about the US? I asked. "This tremendous scandal of Romney's has exploded," he replied. I sighed. He explained: "He was caught on a secret video telling a group in Florida that 47% of voters think they are ‘victims' who the government has to take care of, so they will vote for Obama no matter what."
I was befuddled. "Why is that a scandal? That's the plain truth," I stammered. He shook his head. "Your press doesn't think so. All your papers and television are treating his words as so outrageous that his campaign may be dead, that Obama's reelection is now assured."
With that, I realized that my own country is on its way to becoming as crazy as the one I'm in. Call it an out-of-country experience. So I wrote this up, put it on a thumb drive, am giving it to a friend who's leaving today and will email it to Miko for posting on TTP. Hope this works, as I'll be here until the end of the month and you won't hear from me again until then.
This was written the day of the passing of President Ronald Reagan on June 5, 2004. We run it every year in honor of the greatest American of the 20th century.
In October of 1965, Ronald Reagan came to speak at UCLA. I was a senior, and it was a depressing time to be a College Republican. Barry Goldwater had been thrashed the previous year, and my professors were so left-wing that I took one to court because of her biased grading.
The UCLA Student Union was packed, SRO. There was a buzz that Reagan was considering running for governor against the entrenched Democrat, Pat Brown. My buddy and fellow CR Bill Anthony and I sat expectantly in the audience. As Reagan began to speak, he filled the room with an energy that was both exciting and soothing, and the thousand-plus students were entranced.
Then he caught us by surprise.
