This week I want to go into more depth about emotions. If you can master them, you will more fully own your own life. The quality of personality that this grows is conscientiousness, and it happens to be one of the most important qualities for your overall health and longevity.

Sometimes our emotions make life worth living: love, joy, ecstasy, delight, curiosity... Our emotions bring us these experiences and fill us with the meaning and motivation of life.

Sometimes our emotions can throw us into the worst that humanity can endure: pain, sadness, horror, grief, anger, fear, terror, depression... When this is what we feel, life can become overwhelming and, conversely, when life feels overwhelming, sometimes these are the feelings that come to dominate.

There are tools that can help us master our emotions, even when times are very, very hard.  Here are some of those tools.

Istanbul.  There was a full moon last night that turned the Bosphorus - the strait that connects the Black Sea to the Mediterranean upon which Istanbul resides - into a sheet of moonlight. 

It is a memorable sight, and I had time for a glimpse of it on my way to Central Asia.  So I only have a moment to provide a glimpse of what is happening here in Turkey.  For the history of what is now called Turkey, see Asia Minor (Part One) and Asia Minor (Part Two) from May 2007.

Turkey is now run by the Justice and Development Party (AKP) led by Recip Tayyip Erdogan (air-do-wan).  This is a very dangerous man.  He is a radical Islamist clothed in "Islamic moderation."  He is purging the Turkish military of officers devoted to the secularism of modern Turkey's founder, Kemal Attaturk, and replacing them with Islamists.  His goal is to recreate the Ottoman Caliphate, where the ruler of Turkey (the Ottoman Empire) was recognized as the Caliph or ruler of all Moslems.

This first week of October in 2008, we launch a new feature in To The Point.  It is entitled How We Won The Cold War: A Personal Account of the Greatest Adventure of Modern Times.  "Winning Cold War" for short in the left side bar. This calls for an explanation, and a confession.

The confession first.  I have absolutely no excuse whatever for not completing The Jade Steps.  After completing 33 chapters, I have only the concluding last chapter and the epilogue to go, and I haven't done it.

So I hope that by starting another book, it will force and embarrass me enough to finish the historical novel.

How We Won The Cold War, however, is no novel.  It's the way things really happened.  It's the book my literary agent (and avid TTP'er) Theron Raines has said what I must write, the book I owe to history.

The situation is this.  I have completed the first six chapters, which I'll be posting for the next successive six weeks.  They are setting-the-scene chapters which give me time to get back from my travels and get back to work (yes, this means finishing The Jade Steps as well!).

Hopefully, so many of you will bug me so much to keep posting the next chapter in the series that I will actually get the book written to completion.

So here we go with an Introductory Note and Chapter One, 1989: Serious Peace.  Wish me luck.

The Jade Steps
Chapter Twenty-Nine: The Night of Tears

Malinali looked at each of the men standing silently around her.  Several of them were weeping.  She caught Bernal's eye.  "We mourn for him, Doña Marina," he said quietly to her, "and not just those of us who were unable to protect him from his own people today.  All of us are in sorrow, for he showed such kindness to us."

That she would be holding the hand of an Aztec Emperor as he died, that the Aztecs themselves would murder their King, that these mysterious men from another world who had come to conquer his kingdom would weep openly over his death - these were thoughts she found overwhelming.  She crossed herself and prayed silently to the Virgin Mary for comfort and understanding.

It was Cortez who broke the silence.  "Doña Marina, please select a noble from Montezuma's entourage and have him deliver a message to the people of this city:  He is to tell them that their Lord is dead at their hands, that they have killed their king.  They must now give him the funeral and burial rites he deserves, and after that they must allow us to leave the city in peace."

History is full of instances where a rising power, aggrieved and dissatisfied, acts aggressively to obtain new borders or other international concessions. In Russia today we see a much more unusual case: This increasingly menacing and ambitious geopolitical actor is a state in decline.

Notwithstanding Russia's nuclear arsenal and its vast territories, the distinguishing feature of the country today is its striking economic underdevelopment and weakness.

For all Russia's oil and gas, the country's international sales of goods and services last year only barely edged out Belgium's - and were positively dwarfed by the Netherlands'.

While Russia's childbearing patterns today look entirely European, its mortality patterns look Third World - and in some ways worse. According to estimates by the World Health Organization, a 15-year-old youth has worse survival chances today in Russia than in 33 of the 48 places the United Nations designates as "least developed countries," including such impoverished locales as Mali, Yemen and even Afghanistan.

Russia's "high education, low human capital" paradox also shows up in Russia's extreme "knowledge production" deficit. Long-term economic progress depends on improving productivity through new knowledge - but this is something Russia appears mysteriously unable to do.

In the modern era, the ultimate source of national wealth and power is not natural resources: It is human resources. And unfortunately for Russia, its human-resource situation is almost unrelievedly dismal - with worse likely in the years to come.