I’m sure most of you have heard of the Sasser worm by now. This vicious piece of code hit the Internet some ten days ago. It’s been on television, newspapers and magazines. Some of you have been infected. Hopefully many of you will have followed the advice of these broadcasts and articles, so won’t need this column. I fear that many of you haven’t.
Russia is at increasing risk of a full-blown financial crisis as the West tightens sanctions and Russian meddling in Ukraine pushes the region towards conflagration.
The country's private companies have been shut out of global capital markets almost entirely since the crisis erupted, causing a serious credit crunch and raising concerns that firms may not be able to refinance debt without Russian state support.
"No Eurobonds have been rolled over for six weeks. This cannot continue for long and is becoming a massive issue," said an official from a major Russian bank. "Companies have to roll over $10bn a month and nothing is moving. The markets have been remarkably relaxed about this, given how dangerous it is. Russia's greatest vulnerability is the bond market," he said.
The warnings came as EU foreign ministers agreed to draft plans for "Stage III" sanctions - this time hitting economic and financial targets - if Russian president Vladimir Putin sends troops into East Ukraine or tries to seize territory. Washington is forcing the pace in any case as is tightens the noose by other means, using regulatory "stealth" power to force banks across the world to pull back from Russia.
Vilnius, Lithuania. The capital of this Baltic state seems very much like a normal European city these days, as do those of other Eastern and Central European countries.
In retrospect, this simple fact is remarkable, because a mere quarter-century ago Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania were part of the Soviet Union, while Poland, the current Czech Republic and Slovakia, as well as Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria were still communist states controlled by the Soviets. Back in the mid-1980s, most people, including the establishment in the West, thought that these countries would remain communist dictatorships for the foreseeable future.
A few visionaries, such as Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, thought differently and were widely ridiculed. Others who also thought that the Soviet empire could be rolled back were mocked.
Once the communist yoke had been thrown off, few thought that the newly independent countries could evolve into functioning free-market democracies in a short period of time without major strife and loss of life. Yet it happened, and now the citizens of these countries enjoy both freedom and a much higher standard of living.
As can be seen in the chart below, real per-capita gross domestic product (GDP) has risen sharply in all of the Eastern and Central European countries over the past two decades.
Some three years ago, as a retired Texas State Trooper, I taught a high school Criminal Justice class entitled "Crime in America." This course covered the types and trends of crime in our nation, and illustrated what someone working in our criminal justice system would most likely encounter in a future career.
In this course I also identified future trends in crime, including terrorism and mass killings. Examples of the Chechen experience were utilized to explain how monstrous this could be, and was chosen due to the high likelihood of it coming to our nation. On April 15th, 2013, that calculation was proven true in Boston.
Authorities have learned those involved in this hideous act originated from Chechnya, in the Northern Caucasus region of Russia, which serves as a fertile breeding ground for violent Islamic extremist groups. What follows is a brief history that may illuminate the horrifically bloody nature of Moslem Chechen violence -- which has now been perpetrated on us.
[The original version of this ran in 2005]
Today, September 11, 2012, we commemorate the eleventh anniversary of a day of Islamic infamy. A day that will remain an indelible moral stain on the Islamic religion, and an acute moral embarrassment to all the world's Moslems.
The Atrocity of 9/11 was performed in their name, claimed by its perpetrators to be justified by Allah.
Imagine if a group of terrorist Christians committed a hideous atrocity of like magnitude upon a Moslem population in the name of Jesus Christ. The entire world Christian community would experience an explosion of revulsion. There would be no dancing in Christian streets, no attempts to excuse or justify it, nothing but a wholesale rejection of the disgusting claim that Jesus would sanction such an act.
Christians all over the world would join the hunt to find the Christian terrorists responsible and do all they could to bring them to justice.
The world Moslem community has done no such thing with regard to Al Qaeda. There are individual Moslems who have done so, and there are Moslem groups who pretend to, but there has been nothing remotely close in the Moslem world compared to what it would be in the Christian.
Yes, there are plenty of "moderate" Moslems. The questions they need to ask themselves are: Why should I participate in a faith that allows its followers such as Osama Bin Laden to disgrace, insult, and humiliate it? Is this a faith that is an impotent loser, or simply doesn't care about its worshippers? How can Islam today be a faith worthy of worship?
It needs to be made clear that as presently constituted, Islam no longer has a future. It is finished as a world force capable of challenging the West. That is why most Moslems dream of ancient Islamic glory centuries ago.
Last Friday (5/11), I had dinner with a friend. Ever hear of the expression, "Watch your six"? It's a fighter-jock term, meaning watch for enemies behind your back (directionally "six o'clock"). If there is anyone I would trust to watch America's Six, it would be my friend.
Good grief, I wish Duncan Hunter could get elected President of the United States.
I've known him for over 20 years. We still talk about the time we went quail hunting back in the 80s - he even remembers the location (near Mount Palomar north of San Diego). He was in his second term as a Congressman then. Now he's into his 14th, and last. In 2008, expect his son, Duncan D., a US Marine now on his third tour of active duty in Iraq, to succeed him.
Duncan is the real McCoy, a true man's man. He's the antithesis of the left's cartoon caricature of masculinity, as afraid of masculinity as the feminized left is. Talking with Duncan is always fun because he's quick and bright, street-smart shrewd, and never pulls a punch - he says what he thinks.
For the past year, there has been a pest on the To The Point User Forums named Miriam Brownlee. She enjoys driving To The Point members around the bend with her Buchananite anti-Bush anti-Israel conspiracy theories.
I have tolerated her until last week when she lost it and called TTP contributor Jack Kelly a Nazi for revealing the staged Hezbollah photos of the phony Qana "massacre."
I am happy to report that Miriam's annual subscription expires this Saturday, August 12 and will not be renewed. Due to the complete inappropriateness of her comments last week, she will not be allowed to post to the User Forum this week.
So Miriam will have to find some other site to pester. TTP Members can now enjoy the User Forums without having to be subjected to her any longer. Adios, Miriam!
Congressman Chris Smith (R-NJ), who chairs the House Subcommittee on Human Rights, is so mad at Google for capitulating to the Chicoms he is going to hold hearings next month on the operating procedures of US Internet companies in China.
He can expect to be getting a call from CIA Director Porter Goss politely requesting that he shut up.
He’ll tell Smith he can vent for a little while longer, enough to make Google execs sweat and be receptive to the call they’ll be getting from Langley. But as soon as the Google boys turn cooperative, Smith had better turn quiet.
Google’s Chicom Collaboration presents a marvelous intelligence opportunity.
The Bush administration has clearly decided to try to "manage" Iraq and "finesse" Iran, hoping to muddle through until the election and then, if victorious, consider its options in the broader theater. The president and his top advisers evidently want to avoid "new adventures" between now and November.
But this is a very dangerous strategy, because it leaves the initiative, in Iraq and elsewhere, entirely in the hands of people like Zarqawi and his longtime Iranian sponsors. Indeed, it seems to me that doing nothing is an open invitation to "new adventures" in the Middle East, in Europe, and in the United States.
You don't need classified information to see this; it's right in front of our noses. Yet we refuse to see it. This is what intelligence failures are really about: denial of the most obvious facts about the world. And it's what policy failures are about as well: refusal to take the obvious steps to protect our citizens, our allies, and our national interests.
All of you know of Google as a search engine; you probably use it. For a long while Google also has had a free toolbar for download. It appears as a toolbar on the top of your Internet Explorer page, along with Internet Explorer’s own toolbars.
The Google toolbar enables searches without having to navigate to www.google.com. While convenient and useful, I normally wouldn’t mention it in these columns, because it hadn’t until recently enhanced your computer’s security.
Google has come out with a second edition, and among several new features, it includes a pop-up killer.
On Tuesday (4/08), we learned that "crews searching for the missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 have failed to relocate the sounds previously heard deep in the Indian Ocean, raising fears that the batteries in the plane's black box may have died."
The tragic disappearance of all 239 people on board flight MH370 in the Indian Ocean has one really peculiar feature to it: none of the possible explanations is remotely plausible, yet one of them must be true.
The usual rule on these occasions - choose the simplest explanation or, as William of Ockham taught, make the fewest assumptions - simply does not work. There is no simple explanation. Whether the cause was an accidental decompression, a terrorist act or a suicide, all three require us to assume that an outlandish and bizarre sequence of events happened.
I don't know about you, but I have had conversations about MH370 with many people recently, some of whom were fairly confident that they knew what had happened. Yet every story they told was baroque in its contrivance to the point of implausibility, requiring a chain of events that stretched my credulity. Yet, as I say, one such story will turn out to be right.
Consider the sequence of events.
Every few years, at least from the time of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, there is a scandal involving abuse of power at the Internal Revenue Service. We are again in the midst of one of these periodic abuse scandals, with many solemn promises that the problems will be corrected and will not happen again.
As always, the rhetoric is far from the reality for two basic reasons. The first is the nature of the income tax, which, by definition, is subjective in its interpretation of the definition of "income" and thus subject to abuse. The second is the type of person that the IRS attracts as an employee.
In the former, the agency is corrupt in the Orwellian sense. When the federal government's General Services Administration or the IRS takes a number of its employees to Las Vegas for a conference, is this a taxable benefit (income) or not? The answer is this case is "no" because this is the type of benefit the political class enjoys.
In the latter, because the IRS is feared, loathed and resented, it attracts all too many workers who are insensitive to the needs and problems of others, and some even enjoy being bullies.
These flaws of the IRS cannot be mended -- thus the only real solution is to put an end to the IRS itself.
Bandarban, Chittagong Hills, Bangladesh. It's an interesting geopolitical story what I'm doing here, but that will have to wait until next week. This is a very remote region where Bangladesh, India, and Burma come together, and my internet connection is very iffy, so I have to make this quick.
For a backgrounder (up to October 2004) on Bangladesh, see The World's Most Dangerous Cat Fight. Our future is not to be like here. This is the 8th most populous country on earth - over 140 million - squeezed into Iowa. The ubiquity of humanity is overwhelming - and nowhere more so than on the roads.
You can't imagine the insanity of it unless you've experienced it, exclaiming Sweet JC! in earnest supplication a thousand times with each time you are sure you'll be in a mangled death-wreck that somehow never happens. Hordes of people walking; rickshaw bikes pedaled by skinny kids carrying people, furniture, sacks of rice, logs, and bamboo poles 50 feet long; motorscooter rickshaws as numerous as ants; motorbikes, cars, huge trucks, and giant buses - all of them frantically trying to pass anything moving slower.
In the cities, villages, and towns, every street and alley is choked and clogged with traffic, from rickshaw bikes to buses, beyond belief. It is dystopian beyond any city or country in the world.
With one exception. And that exception is what should be - needs to be - in our future.
I've written often, such as in Rejecting The Evil Eye, about liberals' fear of envy. This fear is what makes them liberals. Thus the key insight:
Liberalism is not a political ideology or set of beliefs. It is an envy-deflection device, a psychological strategy to avoid being envied. It is the politicalization of envy-appeasement.Nothing more epitomizes liberals' fear of envy than their compulsion to apologize. Apologize to the world for the existence of exploitative America. Apologize to the Earth for the existence of polluting humanity. Last Sunday (2/25), the Democrat-controlled legislature of Virginia voted to "apologize" for the state's role in slavery.
Since we launched To The Point at the end of March, 2003, we have issued the TTP Weekly Report every single week for the last three+ years. I'm really proud of that and have every intention of continuing this record.
It's going to be challenging to do so this summer, so here we go with an experiment. I haven't been stuck in DC for these past three years straight, but wherever I wandered off to in the world during that time, it's been for a short while, like a couple of weeks or so here and there.
This summer is different, for I'll be out of the country for all of July and August. Sometimes I'll be in places where there will be an Internet connection, and sometimes not. Wherever I'm in the former, you'll hear from me - but there may be a gap or two when I'm in the latter.
The TTP staff will make sure that the Weekly Report gets out in time, and with our brilliant regulars like Joel Wade, Michael Ledeen, Jack Kelly, Neal Asbury, Dagny D'Anconia, and Dennis Turner.
As for me, I'll be providing at least a "sitrep" (situation report) on each country I'm in. As of now, that will be: Japan, Thailand, Cambodia, India, Pakistan, Turkey, Israel, Croatia, Montenegro, Austria, Switzerland, France, and Spain. Plus a surprise or two.
