If the terrorists are as cabalistic as it seems (the eerie fact that the terror attack in Madrid on March 11 arrived exactly 911 days after 9/11 has been noted, and should be underlined), then one possible target date is 6/11 — six being an inverted nine — which comes a couple of days before the Italian vote for the European parliament. Probably a good day to visit Baghdad -- or anywhere but Italy.
[To The Point is exceedingly happy to announce a new feature: a column on computers, science, and technology by Dennis Turner. As my friend for almost 40 years, Dennis is almost impossibly smart with a stratospheric IQ and a deep understanding of the welter of technology that can so easily baffle and infuriate the rest of us.
I suggested to him that he write a TTP column with advice we could really use to make life with computers, science, and hi-tech easier. Here’s his first. Among his many talents, Dennis is a world-class professional computer programmer. If you or your company has any serious and difficult-to-solve programming needs, you can contact him at dennist@zahav.net.il. As you can tell by the “il” country code, Dennis resides in Israel. -JW]
Half the world economy is one accident away from a deflation trap. The emerging market bloc makes up half the world economy, far higher than in any previous crisis. Roughly $4 trillion of foreign funds swept into emerging markets after the Lehman crisis, much of it by then "momentum money" late to the party.
One country after another is now having to tighten into weakness. Neil Shearing from Capital Economics says Brazil, India and Russia are all suffering from the 1970s curse of "stagflation," unable to stimulate their economies to revive growth.
Mr. Shearing said the BRICS bloc (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) are in worse shape than many of the other emerging market states, but the strains are spreading.
While every story is different, the common theme for the BRICS is that they have exhausted their catch-up growth models, let credit booms get out of hand and failed to push through reforms while the going was good. Productivity rates have plummeted almost everywhere. That most certainly includes China.
Which country will serve as the trigger for the next financial crisis? Given the continuing rise in debt-to-gross domestic product (GDP) ratios in many countries, it is apparent that a new financial crisis will occur. Most of the speculation has been about when, rather than where. The most likely candidates are heavily indebted countries with a large growth deficit.
The growth deficit is the difference between expected GDP growth and the expected government spending deficit as a percentage of GDP. The way to eliminate the growth deficit is by either increasing economic growth or reducing government spending.
Almost all economists understand that economic growth can be increased by (1) reducing taxes on labor and capital, (2) eliminating counterproductive regulations, and (3) putting an end to monetary uncertainty.
But what government understands this? Massive deficit spending has not worked as advertised, for a number of years in the countries listed in the accompanying table. All of them are at risk of even more financial shocks and stresses, and none of them seems politically able to make the degree of necessary change to solve the mess.
Joe "The Smirker" Biden's off-the-wall non-stop rudeness to Paul Ryan in their debate last week was repulsive to all Americans who value plain decency and courtesy.
His boss, Mr. Obama, by contrast announced that he "could not be prouder" of his vice-president, deeming his debate performance and his treatment of Mr. Ryan as "terrific."
This presents Mitt Romney with a marvelous opportunity, in the second presidential debate tonight (10/16), to ask his opponent if he really is proud of his El Segundo interrupting Mr. Ryan 85 times and laughing about the prospect of Iran nuking Israel.
Mr. Romney has an even greater opportunity, however, to ask his opponent if he agrees with Mr. Biden's incredible lies and distortions during his "terrific" debate.
It's hard to fathom why John Roberts would murder the Constitution today, but his mental contortions don't matter. The reality is that America no longer has a Constitution, thanks to his vote and that of the four other loony-left libs on the No Longer Supreme Court.
Without a Constitution providing a coherent rule of law, America is now a thoroughly lawless nation. There are many consequences to this, and among them is that no one is obligated to obey the law because the law no longer exists. What exists now in place of law are threats - hundreds of thousands of threats issued by federal bureaucrats who call them "regulations," and enforced by gun-toting federal goons.
The threats of a federal agent are not morally different now than those of a mugger in an alley. When either one sticks a gun in your face and yells, "Your money or your life!", it is a purely pragmatic decision to give the thief your wallet - but you are under no moral obligation whatsoever to do so.
What happened today in the No Longer Supreme Court's 5-4 upholding of ZeroCare is an ultimate expression of Airhead America.
Ever dream of going on a classic private-tented safari in Africa, to witness the world's greatest wildlife spectacle - the Great Migration of over a million animals across the Serengeti Plains - by day, and enjoy fine wines and gourmet food by a campfire at night with lions coughing in the distance?
Ever dream of standing on the sea-ice of the frozen Arctic Ocean right at the North Pole, the very axis of the earth, while the entire planet revolves underneath you and the sun circles around you in constant daylight - and celebrating the moment with Dom Perignon champagne and beluga caviar?
Ever dream of going to a place so remote and mysterious that few people have ever heard of it, a place that has been closed to outsiders for years and still needs a special permit to visit, a place tucked into a hidden corner of Asia with Tibetan monasteries, incredibly colorful primitive tribes who have never seen a Westerner, and white-water rafting through jungles full of tigers and cloudy leopards?
Ever dream of standing on a glacier at the most scenic spot on planet earth surrounded by mountains over 26,000 feet high including K2 (28,250'), helicoptering to a tiny kingdom inhabited by the world's longest-lived people, driving by jeep track to villages peopled by descendants of the troops of Alexander the Great, then reaching the fabled Khyber Pass securely protected by Afridi tribesmen who have pledged their lives to you?
Each one of these dreams can come true for you next year, 2007.
When I was an undergraduate at UCLA, my favorite professor was Dr. H. L. Kostanick. He taught political geography. He never used a lectern or notes. Always dressed impeccably in a coat, tie, and sweater vest, he would stand before us, hands in his pockets, and explain the world to us.
Every lecture, no matter about what part of the world, was fascinating. But most memorable of all was his lecture on the Middle East. "Ladies and gentlemen, the most critical thing to understand about conflict in the Middle East," he told us, "is that it is not a conflict between Arab and Jew. It is a conflict between the 10th century and the 20th."
Dr. Kostanick (who was not Jewish - his family was from Macedonia in northern Greece) delivered that lecture in 1965. It was the first thing I thought of when I saw Dr. Wafa Sultan on Al-Jazeera TV.Due to time constraints, C-Span ended the broadcast of my speech last week, Why Liberals Are Incapable of Defending America , in the middle of my reply to a question about why most journalists are so liberal.
I was about to use the New York Times liberal columnist Maureen Dowd as an example when C-Span switched to another event. This is because in February 2000 during the presidential campaign, I wrote a letter to the New York Times commenting on a column of Miss Dowd which was such a perfect instance of why liberals, and liberal journalists like her, really don’t care about individual people.
So to complete the answer you couldn’t see on C-Span, here’s the letter:
On June 17, 2005 I wrote a column:
Generic Trojan/Adware Removal Procedure
I suggest you open that column in one window while you read this week’s column. I detail all the steps with screen shots there; there will be fewer here. I won’t describe again when to turn off and on SystemRestore, and how to boot in safe mode.
With newer, more clever and more vicious malware, even with protection, sooner or later you’re bound to get caught. I got caught recently. I was back up within a few hours. Here's how you can be as well.
The Iranian regime is in open battle with its own people.
Iran is now racing, literally hell-bent toward two dramatic confrontations: one within the country, between forces of tyranny and forces of democracy and/or reform. The other rages outside the country, a desperate war against the United States, its Coalition allies, and the Iraqis who support us. Both derive from the fundamental weakness of the fundamentalist regime, which has lost the support of the overwhelming majority of the Iranian people, and is increasingly defining itself a pariah state because of its support for terror and its brazen pursuit of atomic weapons.
The tragic death of an Indian minister's wife and the overdose of a French president's "wife" give a startling insight into the misery that infidelity causes in a monogamous society.
In cultures like India and France, it is just not possible now for men to reap the sexual rewards that usually attend arrival at the top of society. President Zuma of South Africa has four wives and 20 children, while one Nigerian preacher is said to have 86 wives. Chinese emperors used to complain of their relentless sexual duties. Why the difference?
Human monogamy is an enduring puzzle. Among mammals we are the exception: just 3 per cent of mammals form pair bonds. Our closest relatives, chimpanzees, bonobos, orangutans and gorillas, are promiscuous, very promiscuous, territorial-polygamous and harem-polygamous respectively.
Yet we are clearly monogamous by instinct as well as by tradition. Even in societies that allow polygamy, most people are in one-partner couples. Free-love communes always, without exception, collapse because people will insist on falling in love with particular individuals. This pairing tendency would baffle a bonobo, where sexual jealousy is apparently unknown.
So at some point in the distant past, we developed the habit of monogamous pair bonding. In human beings, monogamy probably goes back hundreds of thousands if not millions of years. (See Jack Wheeler's Marriage and the Missing Link, September 2009.)
The head of the Obama White House National Economic Council, Gene Sperling, who is a lawyer, has been claiming that "all economists" agree that sequestration will cost 750,000 jobs. I am an economist with a doctorate from Columbia University, and I don't agree.
The fact is that most classical and Austrian school economists also don't agree (including many Nobel laureates), because they understand that U.S. government spending is well above the optimum for economic growth and job creation, which means that less government spending will create more jobs, not fewer.
The Republicans should use the Continuing Resolution and the budget cap to force a further slowdown in the growth of government, and thus, less federal spending as a share of GDP. This should result in even more private-sector job creation, provided that there is restraint by the administration on all the new job-killing regulations.
It's not just that the Dems are going to lose the White House in November. Control of the Oval Office regularly flips back and forth between them and the Pubs over the years.
It's not just that the Dems are going to lose big ("rrreally big, rrreally big" as Ed Sullivan would say) in November. Zero will be lucky to carry 10 states in a Romney Landslide, while the Pubs will take the Senate and gain seats in the House. Yet the Reagan Landslides of 1980/1984 were far greater than anything Romney can hope for - and the Dems were back in the White House saddle four years after the Gipper.
No, what is going on is much - as in much - bigger than mere electoral loss. What the Dems are going to lose in November is about as big as it gets. They are going to lose their raison d'être - their "reason to be," the basic justification for their existence.
This is why they are panicking, why most everything they do now is doltish, for panic makes you stupid. This is why Zero is making moves of ever-increasing desperation - Amnesty EO's, Executive Privilege merely to protect his corrupt AG. This is why the Moonbat Media is in a state of foaming hysteria. For all of them, their fear and fury is existential.
This is K2, the highest mountain in the world next to Everest, at 28,250 feet. It is so inaccessibly remote in the Karakorum mountains behind the Himalayas on the border between Pakistan and China, that very few human beings have ever seen it.
Last week I was privileged to take a small group of Americans to the base of K2 by helicopter. It was the first helicopter expedition ever to K2, which otherwise takes 10 days of very high-altitude trekking to reach.
An enormous glacier flows from the south face of K2 called the Godwen-Austen glacier, which meets another huge glacier flowing from a mountain called Baltoro Tengri. The confluence of these glaciers is known to mountaineers as "Concordia."
It is the consensus of the world's professional mountaineering community that at Concordia is the single spot of greatest scenery on planet earth.
But Concordia could stand for so much more.
