Those of you who regularly read my column know I’ve been looking for the very best registry cleaner that doesn’t delete important or crucial entries. I’ve discussed this matter in various forums and found one I’m now certain to buy, after testing the trial version.
It can be found at Macecraft Software - http://www.jv16.org/ - and the name of the product is jv16 Power Tools. An odd name but a fine registry cleaner.
The United States has constructed a financial neutron bomb. For the past 12 years an elite cell at the US Treasury has been sharpening the tools of economic warfare, designing ways to bring almost any country to its knees without firing a shot.
The strategy relies on hegemonic control over the global banking system, buttressed by a network of allies and the reluctant acquiescence of neutral states. Let us call this the Manhattan Project of the early 21st century.
"It is a new kind of war, like a creeping financial insurgency, intended to constrict our enemies' financial lifeblood, unprecedented in its reach and effectiveness," says Juan Zarate, the Treasury and White House official who helped spearhead policy after 9/11.
"The new geo-economic game may be more efficient and subtle than past geopolitical competitions, but it is no less ruthless and destructive," he writes in his book Treasury's War: the Unleashing of a New Era of Financial Warfare.
Bear this in mind as Washington tightens the noose on Vladimir Putin's Russia, slowly shutting off market access for Russian banks, companies and state bodies with $714bn of dollar debt (Sberbank data). And be aware of the clear risk of an "asymmetric" riposte by the Kremlin.
Vienna, Austria. The problem of Internal Revenue Service misbehavior is not confined to its actions in the United States, but extends to its dealings with foreign individuals, institutions and countries.
All sovereign nations have just as much right to create their own tax laws and privacy protections as does the United States. So it is disappointing that the folks at the IRS and the Obama Treasury and Justice departments seem to have forgotten this basic principle. All are now engaged in a full-scale assault on the basic property and human rights of many non-Americans, as well as many Americans who live abroad or have assets in foreign countries.
Representatives of major European think tanks and taxpayer groups are attending the annual Resource Bank meeting here in Vienna, hosted by the Austrian Economics Center and the Hayek Institute. They are appalled by the actions of the IRS. So should we all.
To borrow the climactic line from Easy Rider, "We blew it." Or, to be fully accurate, President Obama blew an unprecedented chance to aid Syria's then-moderate opposition back in 2011.
We could have helped end the monstrous Assad regime, gaining good will and practical advantage in a hopeful new state.
Now it's too late. And Obama may be ready to act at last. The result could be disastrous.
Strategy isn't only about doing the right thing, but about doing the right thing at the right time. Doing what appears to be the "right thing" too late often makes things worse.
How did the window for aiding the Syrian rebels close?
[Note: From the world's craziest border, tomorrow I embark for the world's craziest country, in which there is no communication to the outside world. You may not hear from me for the next 16 days. TTP will be in good hands, however, with Miko and Jack Kelly.]
Tin Bigha Corridor, Dahagram-Angarpota Enclave, Bangladesh. For some time now, I've been preparing a research study for the Asia Subcommittee in Congress on India vs. her neighbors. Here is one key place to do so. What follows will be incorporated into the research study.
There are a lot of maps and pictures I took over the past few days. I think you'll find it all mind-blowingly informative.
[This commencement address was originally published two years ago. We will rerun it annually at college graduation time. Feel quite free to send this to any recent college graduate you may know.]
Mr. Chancellor, Members of the Board of Regents, Members of the Faculty, Honored Graduates, Families and Friends:
It's funny that they call this ceremony a Commencement, for you've all reached the finish line: college, goodbye, we're outta here. Yet of course, "commencement" means a beginning, not an end.
But one is supposed to at least start - commence - a talk such as this by saying funny things. So I'll start by talking about Clark Gable movies. If you've heard of Clark Gable at all, you know he was the biggest movie star in Hollywood a long time ago. His most famous movie was of course Gone With The Wind.
He made a movie in 1955 called The Tall Men with Jane Russell as his girlfriend and Robert Ryan as the heavy. It's a pretty ordinary Western flick with outlaws and cowboys and Indians - and at the end, Ryan, the bad guy, and his henchmen get the drop on Gable, the good guy, and all seems lost. Suddenly, surprise, Gable outfoxes Ryan and triumphs. Gable makes his exit, and after he does, Ryan delivers a line that I want you to never forget.
Serendipity is funny, a very funny thing, finding something where you least expect it. Out of the blue, out of a movie awash with pedestrian dialogue, comes a line so profound it detonates inside your brain. Ryan turns to his men and says:
It was the summer of 1992. Our youngest son, Jackson, had been born in May, and I was staying put, not traveling anywhere to remain at home to help take care of him. A friend of mine named Ray Kline called. Ray was a legendary intel guy in Washington, having been the Deputy Director of the CIA under John Kennedy, and later Director of the DIA (Defense Intelligence Agency at the Pentagon).
It was Ray Kline who, in the fall of 1962, drove down the George Washington Parkway from Langley CIA headquarters to the White House, entered the Oval Office, and placed the satellite photos of the Soviet missile emplacements in Cuba on Kennedy's desk to personally explain them to the President of the United States.
That's how the Cuban Missile Crisis began.
Ray was calling to tell me about a 30th anniversary conference of the veterans of the Crisis he had just come back from. The conference was in Havana, Cuba.
"You went to Cuba, Ray?" I asked, amazed. "Jack, the Soviet Union has vanished off the map [December 1991] and a lot of Castro's people are nervous" he replied. "They are trying to convince him to make his peace with the US. They even asked me if I knew of a conservative organization that would send a delegation to Havana and talk to them."
Ray paused for effect. "I suggested you and your Freedom Research Foundation."
"You've got to be kidding, Ray," was all I could say.
"Jack, Cuban intel knows all about how you instigated the Reagan Doctrine, which is why they no longer have their Soviet patron. Who better than you to go and see if they are for real?"
I told him I would think about it. I decided to go and told my wife, Rebel, my reason: "I want to look Fidel Castro in the eye and tell him that someday the Cuban people will urinate on his grave."
She decided to go with me - in order to prevent me from doing any such thing.
In Dubai, everyone refers to their ruler, Emir Mohammed Bin Rashid al-Maktoum, as "MBR." Just to give you an idea of how he is into tourism not terrorism, here's a quick story.
He has closed circuit television in his private office. And what are the cameras trained on? Immigration/passport control lines at the airport. If MBR sees the lines are getting too long, he picks up the phone and orders more personnel to reduce the lines. Again, his focus is tourism not terrorism.
The US Navy docks its ships at Dubai more often than at any other non-US port in the world. 25,000 Americans (and 100,000 Brits) live and work in the Emirates now.
The realization that Dubai and the UAE is the most pro-American Arab country on earth is sinking in to fevered Congressional brains as their spasm of knee-jerk xenophobia dissipates.
The shame in this is that Conservative Republicans in Congress, by allowing themselves to get suckered into Bush-bashing Democrat xenophobia, blew their chance to make a deal with GW.So the Iranians seized some British "warships" this week, and arrested eight British naval officers. That's what the Iranians announced in the morning, and that's all we've heard. The chatterers were agog. Why would the Iranians do such a crazy thing? Do they really want war (If that isn't a good old-fashioned causus belli, what is?)? Etc.
Yes, they're crazy, no doubt. But they're not stupid. And if an Iranian action seems stupid, you're probably misinterpreting it. There's a perfectly straightforward explanation for the whole episode: The Brits were laying down a network of sensors to detect the movement of ships toward major Iraqi oil terminals. The Iranians considered that a bit of a threat. So they attacked.
And why, you might ask, did the Iranians feel threatened?
Because they were planning to attack (or have their surrogates attack) the oil terminals, silly.
And why attack the oil terminals?
Because they want to defeat President Bush in November, and they figure if they can get the price of oil up to around $60 a barrel, he'll lose to Kerry.
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.
