Of all the tsunami pictures I have seen, this one, a wall of water 20 feet high sweeping into Patong Bay, Thailand, best visualizes its horrendous destructive power. What we need now is one like this targeting Turtle Bay, Manhattan to sweep away the United Nations.
The word Iraq seems to derange the minds of almost all who contemplate it. Like other famous vexations in history - Carthage for the Romans, Germany for the French, the Irish for the English (and, of course, the English for the Irish) - Iraq induces in the current American mind the full range of mentalities except reason.
Come September, not only Gen. David Petraeus, but many other designated experts, will deliver their report cards on Iraqi progress - or lack of it. Now, two months out, serious huffing and puffing is already building up inside Washington.
Let me save you the bother of waiting for the September deluge of reports from the four corners of our government. Come September it will be the received wisdom of Washington that we need to figure a way to weasel out of Iraq.
That is fine, if losing in Iraq doesn't matter much. But if losing in Iraq does matter a lot, then it is mad to use diagnoses of our current shortcomings as a death sentence, rather than as a guide to better treatment methods.
It's like this conversation. Doctor: "You have a high fever and infection. You're going to die." Patient: "How about giving me some penicillin?" Doctor: "I don't have any." Patient: "Could you get some?" Doctor: "It would be quite a bother." Patient: "Oh, in that case you are right to let me die."
What a great year. I think, all up and all in, 2004 was a fabulous year for freedom and America. It started out with the Rose Revolution in Georgia, throwing out the Soviet apparatchiks to elect a free market pro-America government, and ended with the Orange Revolution doing the same thing in Ukraine. In between, liberated Afghanistan successfully held its first-ever democratic elections.
We got to memorialize for history the greatest American of the 20th century, Ronald Reagan. We re-elected George Bush and inflicted an utterly demoralizing defeat on the George Soros-Michael Moore Democrats. Inflation and unemployment are low, stocks are higher, the economy is humming. We didn’t suffer a single terrorist attack on American soil, took the fight to the terrorists and are close to winning in Iraq. And on top of all of this, Yasser Arafat gave to the world the best possible gift he could give: he died. Frank Sinatra himself couldn’t ask more from a year like 2004.
Right, very interesting, thanks Jack for yesterday’s news - what about 2005? That’s what you’re asking, yes?
Michael Moore's new docutribe Sicko is set to unleash a torrent of disinformation about the U.S. health care system that will play into the hands of those who wish to turn our entire health care industry over to government bureaucrats.
However, we're firing back with a new internet movie that attacks one of the central premises of his propaganda: that 45 million Americans have no health insurance - and no access to health care. Uninsured in America is a new 9-minute film which examines the facts behind the oft-repeated cries of an "uninsured crisis".
The coldest night of my life was spent in the Buddhist temple on top of this mountain: 7,360 foot-high Sri Pada in Ceylon. It’s named for the Sacred Footprint of Buddha, a depression in the rock of the summit around which the temple is built. Pilgrims come to watch the sunset and most have the foresight to bring a blanket. Having climbed up from the torrid jungle in only a t-shirt the afternoon before and lacking such foresight, I froze all the way to dawn.
Ceylon - or the official name of Sri Lanka, if you prefer - is one of the most entrancing lands on our planet. That such a place of gentle beauty should be visited by such horror as we have seen this week is an undiluted tragedy. For the people of Ceylon and their Indian Ocean neighbors who suffered the monumental horror of a tidal wave coming out of nowhere and washing away their lives, there is no silver lining. Life has the capacity to be utterly tragic with nothing to balance or outweigh it.
To argue otherwise would be to demean the suffering of the tsunami’s victims. Yet while there is no silver lining for them, there may be one for us. This numbing event may be humbling enough to teach the egomaniacs of the left that nature is a vastly greater destroyer and alterer of nature than the puny activities of man.
The Left is possessed with a peculiarly pathological form of egomania: We human beings are so immensely powerful and so immensely evil that we can threaten the entire earth! It is this nut-case egomania that fuels the religion of environmentalism.
The newspaper I read regularly carried a story on June 20th, 2007, from Cox News Service, under the byline of a Bill Hendrick, reporting on a finding at Emory University's primate center that "the local customs that define human cultures also exist in the world of chimpanzees."
The story goes on to say, "That means that humans aren't the only animals with culture, said Frans de Waal...." The evidence for this is that when a couple of chimps began to use a new method for mutual cleansing, in a while the entire group adopted the method but chimps outside the group kept to the old ways.
The first question is, is the report itself accurate-
"Vladimir - I call him Vladimir", explained President George W. Bush, "you should not fear the missile defense system... the Cold War is over. Why don't you cooperate with us on the missile defense system? Why don't you participate with us?"
The answer is: because Cold War is over for some, but not for others. And because Russia does not trust the United States and feels psychologically more comfortable in confrontation with it.
When Jan Grzebski, the Polish rail worker, awoke on June 1st from being in a coma for 19 years, two things he noticed, which did not change since 1988. The name of the US President is still George Bush, and Russia is still talking Cold War.
It feels sometimes like Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin did not exist.
I’m writing this from a place called Mea Culpa City. It’s not a lot of fun being here, but it’s where I have to live until I finish this essay. It turns out that I have wronged a friend. The silver - well, pewter - lining is that in attempting to rectify it I learned how easy it has become for the Federales to turn any of us into criminals.
The Cato Institute in Washington has just published a book on this:
Go Directly To Jail: The Criminalization Of Almost Everything. It documents how the federal government now views its jurisdiction as limitless - which means almost anything you or your business does can be a federal crime. The Cato book paints a frightening picture - but the truth is, it’s much worse.
It’s worse because of the depraved collusion between politicians and their buddies in the media to demonize and criminalize someone on the front pages of newspapers. This of course is not exclusive to Washington. States are on to the game as well. New York’s Elliot Spitzer has turned the State Attorney General’s office into his private Gestapo. But he’s New York’s problem. Federal agents and federal politicians are a problem for all of us.
On June 5th the world will commemorate the fortieth anniversary of Israel's victory in the Six Day War. This was one of the most convincing conventional military accomplishments of the twentieth century, one which removed the threat of annihilation from the Jewish State for the following four decades.
During May 1967, Egypt's dictator Gamal Abdel Nasser and the leaders of Syria, apparently misled by carefully fed Soviet disinformation, mobilized their armies, and kicked out UN peacekeepers from Sinai. Nasser proclaimed that "the Jews would be thrown into the Mediterranean." "Our basic objective will be to destroy Israel," he vowed on May 26.
Against all odds, tiny Israel triumphed over the combined armed forces of Egypt, Syria, and Jordan.
The key to Israel's victory was recognition that the survival of the nation was at stake. This led to full mobilization of the state and the people; and creation of a government of national unity. Both the people and its leaders had no choice but to become heroes overnight.
Israel's continued existence depends on its leaders remembering and not forgetting the lessons of the Six Day War.
This is Takshang, the Tiger’s Nest Monastery in the Himalayan Kingdom of Bhutan. It is as close a place to the Shangri-La of James Hilton’s 1933 classic “Lost Horizon” as you’ll find on earth today. I took this picture in 1990.
About three-quarters the size of West Virginia, wedged between China (more accurately: Chinese-Occupied Tibet) and India, the crest of the Himalayas (highest peak: Kula Kangri at 24,773ft.) forming the northern border and steamy jungles the south, Bhutan is known as the Land of the Thunder Dragon. It is almost a mystical experience to drive and trek across Bhutan, to visit its temples and dzongs (castles), to come over the top of a pass and see a village in the valley below surrounded by brilliant green rice fields, the homes with bright red roofs as they are covered with peppers drying in the sun.
Bhutanese culture is a unique mix of the ancient Himalyan animism called Bon and Tibetan Lama Buddhism. All Bhutanese men wear a distinctive robe called a gho, while women wear a female version called a kira. There are few people on our planet more peaceful and gentle than the Bhutanese. They love their country and wish above all for it and their culture to be preserved. They are thus at a loss to comprehend a vicious international campaign to destroy it.
A guest on Neil Cavuto's Fox News TV program this week, claiming that every illegal immigrant will eventually impose a $2.2 million burden on US taxpayers, said that it is "immoral to make American taxpayers shoulder this burden."
True or not, it is important to understand that the immorality here is not putting illegal immigrants on the welfare rolls or transferring to them costly services at the expense of American citizens.
The immorality lies in the welfare state itself, in the government's policy of coercive wealth redistribution.
In fact, if there were any moral justification to such wealth redistribution, having the wealth go to illegal immigrants could be considered far more morally defensible than having it go to American citizens or legal immigrants.
Merry Christmas. If that offends you, why should I care? It’s your problem, not mine. Let me explain your problem a little more fully. America is a Christian country. It’s your job to deal with that, because you’re not going to change this fact. America has always been a Christian country, and - open wide now, because you’re going to have to swallow this - it will continue to be.
It will continue to be because most Americans aren’t Euroweenies. They haven’t lost the moral courage to be proud of their country and their civilization. Notice the “most” - which you are not a part of. You are anti-Christian because you are anti-American. You are anti-American because you are anti-Western Civilization. You are anti-Western Civilization because you are afraid of and intimidated by the envy of the world’s impotent. Fear of being envied defines your soul.
What was the motive behind 23-year-old Cho Seung-Hui's killing of 32 students and teachers at Virginia Tech? Why was he consumed with hate, resentment, and bitterness?
Cho was an English Department major and senior. As a frequent lecturer on college campuses, I have discovered that the English Departments are often the weirdest and/or the most leftwing.
A look at the websites of Virginia Tech's English Department and of its professors reveals their mindset. We don't yet know which courses Cho took, but it could have been any of these.
Did Cho get evil egotistical notions from Professor Shoshana Milgram Knapp's senior seminar called "The Self-Justifying Criminal in Literature?" Indeed, that could serve as his own self-portrait.
Did Cho take a course from Professor Paul Heilker, author of another peculiar piece called "Textual Androgyny, the Rhetoric of the Essay, and the Politics of Identity in Composition (or The Struggle to Be a Girly-Man in a World of Gladiator Pumpitude)?"
Or maybe Cho preferred the undiluted Marxism espoused by English instructor Allen Brizee, who wrote: "Everyday, the capitalist system exploits millions of people. ... Our role in the capitalist system makes us guilty of oppression!"
The Soviet Union was merely the Imperialist Empire of Czarist Russia with Marxism-Leninism as its religious justification. This is why the hope that Russians would embrace freedom and democracy once liberated from Communist tyranny in 1991 was delusional. Their egos, so dependent upon being imperialist masters, collapsed once their colonial subjects were free to stop taking their orders.
Yet, the frustrating yet, is that anyone who has spent time with individual Russians knows what wonderful people they can be, what good friends they can be. They can be an enigma wrapped in a riddle, as Churchill observed, but they are nonetheless a Western people, a Christian people belonging to Western Civilization. And for that reason, as well as for our own national security, we must now come to their rescue.
If we don’t, China will take over most of what is now Russia. A Chinese Siberia will face us across the Bering Straits.
A nosy, hectoring, busy-body, anti-smoking, anti-trans fat, social engineering, lifestyle blue-nosing, freedom-crushing, nanny-state enthusiast announced this week he's ready to spend a billion dollars of his vast wealth to run for president of our country.
Currently Michael Bloomberg is Mayor of New York.
The leading Democrat contender is Hillary Milhous Clinton, an anti-military radical feminist Euro-Socialist-cum-Trotskyite who is masquerading as a pro-military, pro-free-market, religious centrist.
But should Sen. Barack Hussein Obama, Jr. surprisingly get the Democratic nomination, then we would substitute for the secret leftist/publicly centrist Hillary Milhous a completely inexperienced African-American possibly former Moslem, partially Indonesian-raised, Harvard-trained ersatz Kennedyesque candidate.
This is turning into a freak show. And I haven't even started with the Republicans.
