The Jade Steps Chapter Twenty-Six:  Cleansing The Temple Much of the royal household was transferred to the Palace of Axayacatl.  Montezuma's chefs set up the royal kitchens, attendants the royal baths, servants the royal wardrobe, so that he was fed, bathed, and clothed as before.  Suitable quarters were arranged for his wives and concubines, which he frequently visited.  His retinue of courtiers and counselors was with him throughout the day.  Petitioners and ambassadors from various parts of the empire came to plea with him or present him with tribute.  All seemed normal - with one difference.  The only guards, of which there were many, were Spanish.  There wasn't a jaguar warrior in sight. Yet to everyone who came to him with concern, to ask about his obvious imprisonment, Montezuma assured them he was happy and under no restraint.  He told them not to disturb themselves or the city, and commanded them not to be distressed, for his "visit" with the strangers was the will of Huitzilopochtli.

For at least a quarter-century now, I've been hearing the same mantra from soccer enthusiasts:  "Every little kid in America plays soccer.  When they grow up, soccer will be more popular than football or baseball." This hasn't happened and never will happen.  Kids love to run around and kick a ball.  Watching grown-ups do it has all the drama of watching paint dry.  A majority of Americans will not pay much attention to the World Cup this month while the rest of the world goes bananas about it because "soccer" should really be named "bograkab" - bunch-of-guys-running-around-kicking-a-ball. Here's a synopsis of most every period of most every professional soccer game ever played: Run around kick a ball, run around kick a ball, run around kick a ball, run around kick a ball, run around kick a ball - never score.  Run around kick a ball, run around kick a ball, run around kick a ball, run around kick a ball, run around kick a ball - never score.  It doesn't get more exciting in sports than this.  Except for curling. So - now that I have all soccer fans totally enraged (something that's very easy to do, by the way), let's talk for real about why soccer will never be a competitor to football or baseball or basketball for the hearts of American sports fans.

You've heard of the Darwin Awards, right?  They're awarded to idiots who kill themselves doing something astoundingly dumb, thereby contributing to human evolution by removing themselves from the gene pool.  Awardees are individuals, but I am nominating an entire inhabited region of the world:  Palestinian Gaza.  Gaza should, in fact, be re-named Darwin City.  Consider this news bulletin from Gulf Daily News of Bahrain, dated May 27, 2006:

GAZA CITY: Four Palestinians were killed in northern Gaza yesterday as Israel fired dozens of artillery shells into the territory. Three men died and five other were wounded in a house when a family member brought in and accidentally set off an unexploded Israeli shell that landed near the area, Palestinian security sources said.

Things have not been going well for Ahmadinejad the Persian Midget and his sour band of terrorist mullahs this week.  This is thanks to Porter Goss giving Michael Hayden a lesson in how to run psy-ops at the CIA before his departure tomorrow (Friday, 5/26).

Take the riots in Tabriz and other Azeri-populated cities in northwest Iran.  On May 23, a government newspaper in Tehran published a cartoon depicting an Azeri-speaking cockroach.  Oops.

That very day, Azeri demonstrators marched on government offices in Tabriz, riots broke out in a number of Azeri towns, the Tabriz main bazaar was shut down with shopkeepers joining the demonstrators, who had to be dispersed with teargas.

The irony of the mullahs having cartoon riots directed at them is just too delicious.  I wonder how such a cartoon slipped into a government newspaper?  "No comment" from Porter.

No snide comments how "rational Frenchman" is an oxymoron.  There are plenty of them, albeit not enough.  I had lunch with one of them here in DC yesterday.  He's Pierre Lellouche, who represents Paris (4th district) in the National Assembly (France's Parliament) and is President of the NATO Parliamentary Assembly.

If you had been there with me, you'd have come away wishing he were Bush's National Security Advisor for Europe.  Even better, though, is that after Nicolas Sarkozy is elected President of France next April (see Sarko vs. Eurabia, January 2005), M. Lellouche may be France's Defense Minister.

So if you had joined me for lunch, here's how you would have heard him describe France and the world.

Get a few conservative Congressmen together over a few beers and a favorite conversational topic will be, Who's the worst president in modern memory?

No, it's not George Bush.  But a number of them can make out a good case that it's his father.

Worse even than Jimmy Carter? will come the astounded response.  Yes, they say.  Carter inherited a lousy economy and the Soviets on the imperial march.  He was a disaster because the little wimp made a bad situation so much worse.   

Bush the Elder, on the other hand, inherited a revitalized America, a surging economy, and a collapsing Soviet Union.  He did everything to reverse all three.  Then he rescued Red China.

Yet you won't get a debate out of them as to the worst Senate of modern times.  No question about it:  this one, with fellow Republicans in charge.

Do you think your taxes are too high or too low? Though I expect that well over 90 percent of you are thinking "too high," the liberal media and political class keep telling us taxes are too low.

The left-leaning intelligentsia, in their arrogant smugness, claim we just don't know what is good for us. Yet, they are the ones who ignore the empirical evidence and are unable to distinguish between variables and constants.

As a prime example, a May 7 editorial in The Washington Post, advocating higher tax rates on the rich, states: "Economics cannot predict how high taxes can be raised before they reach counterproductive levels."

The editorial then says an increase of "taxes on the top 1 percent by 5 percentage points would raise $85 billion annually or perhaps a bit less if it spurred some extra tax evasion."

Which country receives the most in total foreign aid from all donors? The official numbers show Iraq at the top with $3 to $18 billion in aid (depending on how you define "aid") and all the other recipient nations of the world at less than $3 billion per year.

However, if you look at which nation benefits most from foreign subsidies, the U.S. would come out on top by a very wide margin.

If you live in Washington and you're a guest on Fox News, the producers graciously send a car and driver to take you to the studio and back home after the show.  One of the Fox drivers is a colorful character everyone calls "Wolf."  He grew up in Yugoslavia (in what is now Bosnia), and he told me a very illuminating story.

Wolf had read The Natural Gas Solution (soon after we first met he became a TTP subscriber) and explained how he knew it was accurate.  "I drove a Yugo car when I lived in Sarajevo back in the 70s," he said.  "Gas was so expensive and it was rationed.  So I, like several of my friends, installed a CNG (compressed natural gas) tank in the trunk, hooked a line up to the carburetor, and ran the car on natural gas.  We got such great mileage and the car ran so well, that we could drive to Trieste (in Italy) on weekends."

Jack,An independent Ph.D. energy economist disagrees with your dismissal of LNG (liquefied natural gas).  He claims "it's economic to transport LNG at $3-3.50 mBTU [million British Thermal Units]," and that "if the world price is high enough, it will make economic sense for producers to liquefy it and send it to China."  In other words, natural gas (NG) is not "de-coupled" from the world market as you say.  He asserts that natural gas is "just as fungible as oil."

John M.

Reply:

John,Could this fellow be shilling for Chevron or some other outfit hyping LNG?

Well, not quite yet, but soon.  The funniest headline of the week was "South American Leaders Support Bolivia Gas Nationalization."  Yesterday (5/4), at Puerto Iguazo, Argentina, Brazil President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva and Argentine President Nestor Kirchner met with Venezuela's Hugo Chavez and Bolivia's Evo Morales and promised to "respect" Morales' nationalization of Bolivia's natural gas.

Only folks who are interested in buying bridges in Brooklyn are going to believe that.

A number of perceptive folks on Capitol Hill have noticed some very odd things about OBL's latest audio tape.  The principal eyebrow-raiser was his call to take the Jihad against the Crusader-Zionists away from Iraq and into Darfur, Sudan.

Normally it takes at least some time for the CIA to claim an OBL audio tape is authentic.  This time it was almost immediate:  "Yep, it's him, no doubt about it."

Putting the weirdness about Darfur-focus (aren't there a lot more "Crusader-Zionists" in Iraq than in the central Sahara Desert?) and Langley's over-eagerness to authenticate together, and you get the latest Capitol Hill buzz:

The voice on the tape wasn't Osama but an Arabic-speaking CIA impersonator.  Agents slipped the faked tape to al-Jazeera which cooperatively broadcast it, then the CIA authenticated its own tape.

While Neil Cavuto was very cordial when I was on his Fox news show recently, he was nonetheless startled to hear me claim that Mexico is the greatest national security threat to America, more than Iran, China, or Moslem terrorism.  He suggested my prediction of a possible Second Civil War could be "inflammatory."

How inflammatory, then, would he consider these public statements?

Excelsior, the national newspaper of Mexico: "The American Southwest seems to be slowly returning to the jurisdiction of Mexico without firing a single shot."

Jose Pescador Osuna, Mexican Consul General: "We are practicing 'La Reconquista' in California."

Augustin Cebada, Brown Berets:  "Go back to Boston!  Go back to Plymouth Rock, Pilgrims!  Get out!  We are the future.  You are old and tired.  Go on.  We have beaten you.  Leave like beaten rats. You old white people.  It is your duty to die . . Through love of having children, we are going to take over."

America is not in a struggle regarding "illegal immigration."  America is in a struggle for its physical existence.

Why do Mexicans only have one-third the per capita income (on a purchasing power parity basis) of Canadians and only one-fourth that of Americans?

The answer is that Mexicans are relatively poor because have been plagued by semidespotic regimes that have ignored the rule of law and often engaged in destructive economic policies.    

Mexicans have been free of their Spanish colonial masters for almost 200 years (almost as long as their American neighbors and far longer than Canadians have enjoyed independence).

Mexico has a better growing climate than Canada, and it is rich in natural resources -- oil, gas, and metals.

Ever so often, the America-hating depravity of liberals is exposed with breathtaking clarity.  Normally, they try to hide their embarrassment at being an American.  Or they'll get angrily defensive.  "Are you questioning my patriotism?" they'll intimidatingly ask.  To which the answer is:  "I would if you had any patriotism to question."

They fudge and smudge over the fact that they are always on the side of America's enemies.  They always blame America for any problem in the world, and root for America to lose in any conflict.

What they hide best is their secret admiration for Osama Bin Laden.  They know how many Americans would like to tar and feather them if they admitted they were thrilled that a guy in a beard and turban living in an Afghan cave destroyed the world's tallest buildings in America's greatest city, killed thousands on American soil, and humbled the Great Superpower in the eyes of the world.

So liberals keep this to themselves.  Once in a while, though, one of them exposes himself and reveals the ugliness of his soul. 

Like a fellow named Richard Marshall did in an email to me this week.

The myth of Birthright Citizenship is one of the more extraordinary frauds committed in America today.  Liberals insist that the "Citizenship Clause" of the 14th Amendment - which states "All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside" - means that children of illegal aliens born on US soil automatically are US citizens.

The 14th Amendment means no such thing.  When it was ratified in 1868 to protect the rights of native-born Black Americans, whose rights were being denied as recently-freed slaves, the Citizenship Clause's author, Senator Jacob Howard, made it explicitly clear that the clause did not apply to "persons born in the United States who are foreigners, aliens, who belong to the families of ambassadors or foreign ministers accredited to the Government of the United States."

Ufda.  That's Wow! in Swedish.  The reaction to the concept of a Radio Free Mexico has been amazing.  Yesterday (4/19), for example, I was interviewed on the Roger Hedgecock talk show in San Diego, and he was so excited about RFM he barraged me with questions:  Have you got your funding yet?  When will it be launched?  Do you have your programming lined up?

The Jade Steps

Chapter Twenty-Five:  Prisoner In His Palace 

As they were returning to their quarters in the Palace of Axayacatl, Cortez announced, "If we cannot yet say Mass and have a chapel upon that temple, then at least for now we must be able to do so where we are housed.  Doña Marina, please send a request to Montezuma asking that we be allowed to build this chapel in his father's palace."

When word came quickly back that the request was granted, Cortez assigned his best carpenter, Alonso Yañez, to the task.  Early the next morning, Yañez, escorted by Juan Velasquez de Leon and Francisco de Lugo, interrupted the morning meal of Cortez and Malinali.  "Captain, we have found something you should see," he said.

Yañez brought them into a small room.  "We thought that this room would be appropriate for our chapel," he explained.  He walked over to one of the room's walls.  "Then I noticed something strange.  You can see that there is fresh plaster and paint here, most likely covering up a door.  A door to what we think is a hidden room."

Without hesitation, Cortez responded, "Señor Yañez, you are to be congratulated for your sharp eyes.  Let us open this hidden door."

Cortez called for torches.  Bernal appeared with lit torches for all just as Yañez and his assistant broke through the plastered doorway.  Cortez was the first to step into the black entrance of the sealed room, followed by de Leon, de Lugo, Malinali, Yañez, and Bernal. 

The Pentagon takes the military and terrorist threat of Iran extremely seriously.  Yet the brass in Rummy's inner circle could not keep their faces straight with all the recent announcements from Tehran.

A week ago on April 7, the air force chief of Pasdaran, Iran's Revolutionary Guards, Gen. Hossein Salami, announced the successful firing of a stealth missile impossible to detect by radar, hailing the Fajr (Dawn) 3 as a "remarkable" achievement.

Turns out it was a primitive Shahab-2 copy of an unsophisticated Russian Scud-C.

Sunday April 9, the deputy naval commander of Pasdaran, Gen. Ali Fadavi announced the launching of "the world's fastest underwater missile," a torpedo so fast it was undetectable.

Turns out it's a poor copy of a Soviet-era rocket-powered torpedo, the Shkval.  It's range is less than four miles, has no target designation devices and is not self-homing.  It's huge wake makes it easy to spot and destroy.