Time to stop the hand-wringing about Russia's re-igniting the Cold War by invading Georgia.  Time to start thinking of what a golden opportunity this presents.

First the reality.  Russia, before, during, and after the Soviet Union was and remains a brutal imperialist dictatorship.  The Soviet Union was simply the same old Czarist Russian imperialism with Marxism-Leninism as an ideological rationale.  The fall of the USSR only meant the fall of the rationale.

So Russia is back to where it has always been, with the Russian compulsion for brute force bullying as its way of dealing with the world.  It is no accident, comrades, that  Russians were the Soviets, and it is no surprise whatever that they are behaving like Soviets in Georgia today.

Thus the fundamental reality of how to conduct foreign policy with Russia, however distasteful it may be to the squishes at the State Department chronically afflicted with terminal testicular atrophy:

The only thing Russians in the Kremlin understand and respect is superior force and the willingness to use it against them.  If you don't give them a punch in the mouth and a bloody nose the moment they start to bully you, they will keep bullying you until you start fighting back hard - or you capitulate and obey their orders.

It's either-or, win-lose.  Those are their rules.  The golden opportunity Putin is giving us by invading Georgia is that it gives us the perfect excuse to play by his rules. 

There was a shooting two days ago (9/16) in DC. The details are still sketchy as I write this, but it appears that a deranged man decided to kill other people for some reason. In response, the usual talking heads will be debating whether this is actual Terror or merely something like it. But the T-word will be spoken in the same grave way we speak of cancer - a thing to be dreaded above all else.

Certainly this shooting was a horrible, tragic thing - especially for the families involved. But that said, any talk about an "age of terror" is utter drivel.

Terror is NOT worse now than it was before 9/11 - it's just that we've been bombarded with fear for more than a decade, creating a culture-wide residue that poisons every mind it touches. In actual fact, you are eight times more likely to be killed by a SWAT Team cop than a terrorist. Does that mean that we should all have a collective panic attack and beg for anti-SWAT SWAT Teams?

Now here's the truth they don't want you to know: You are taught to fear because fear makes you easy to manipulate. If someone is making you afraid, they're also making you into an easy mark - a sucker.  Our government wants us to live in fear.

Think of how many things people have accepted from governments just because they were afraid. Things like complete online surveillance, crotch searches at airports, random searches on the highways, and so on. Do you think those would have been accepted in 1920? Of course they wouldn't, because people hadn't been sufficiently frightened at that time.

[This was originally in To The Point for July 4, 2004. This is the version for 2008.  We at To The Point wish all of you an exceedingly happy Fourth of July.]

July 4th is Freedom's Birthday. My suggestion is, amidst the fireworks and barbeques and flag-waving fun - all of which are great - that you take the time to feel good about America.

Put aside your worries and concerns, your frustrations and fears about what's wrong with America. For one day, forget the negative - put it all in a zip-lock bag, hide it in the back of the freezer, and pretend it doesn't exist.

You travel around the world and you see the remnants of history's great civilizations. You walk through the preserved wreckage of Rome's Imperial Forum or the Acropolis of Ancient Athens and you wonder -- what was it really like to be here when these civilizations were at their peak? You can do that today in Washington DC -- or your hometown.

We Americans are privileged to live in one of history's supreme moments. We Americans are participants in one of history's greatest civilizations in its prime.

Someday in some future epoch, history will have moved on, and there will be distant centuries between that time and the American Era. People will then look upon America as we do upon ancient Egypt or Greece, and will do so with same wonder and awe.

I suggest you look upon America with that wonder and awe now.

Fall, winter, spring, we at To The Point endeavor to have the TTP Weekly Report issued like clockwork - every Friday by noon.  (So it's always pretty crazy Thursdays and Friday mornings!) 

Summers are different, this summer especially.  By the time you get this, I'll be off to run a safari in the Serengeti, then to various remote islands in the Indian Ocean.

The good news about this is that you'll learn all kinds of fascinating things about some of the world's weirder places.  The not-so-good news is that many of these places don't have an internet connection.  Which means there's no way to have a regular Weekly Report schedule.

So here's what we'll do:  post articles and columns whenever and as soon as we can throughout each week.  I normally edit every single item posted on TTP - but in my absence, our back-up editors will step up to the plate.

I'll also launch a new feature for To The Point called The Potpourri.