SUMMER 2008
In a few hours from now (6/12 noon), I'm off to Iraqi Kurdistan, then Jordan and Israel. In July, I'll be retracing Cortez's route from Vera Cruz to Tenochtitlan (Mexico City) launching his conquest of Mexico in 1519. In August, there's our To The Point Revolutionary Rendezvous in Boston. So this is to let you all know we're switching to our summer schedule for To The Point starting next week. There will be pretty much the same number of articles per week, but we'll be posting them as they come in - rather than compiling them in the TTP Weekly Report on Friday afternoon. Because other TTP authors also will be traveling a lot as well. Right now, for example, Joel Wade is in the wilds of the Australian Outback with his family. Thus instead of a Weekly Report, we'll be sending you a TTP Article Alert whenever a new article is up. Now let's talk about the Revolutionary Rendezvous. The place: Boston. The dates: August 22-24. The schedule:
THE VAPID MESSIAH
Sen. Barack Hussein Obama celebrated clinching the Democratic nomination with a speech from the convention center in St. Paul. Future generations, he told his adoring audience, will look back upon that night and say: "this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal..." Canute the Great (995-1035), the Viking king of England, Denmark and Norway, is reputed to have waded into the ocean and ordered the waves to recede. Canute, who was actually a pretty modest guy for a king, didn't really expect the water to obey. He staged the scene to teach a lesson about the limits of a king's powers to sycophantic courtiers. But Sen. Obama apparently wasn't kidding. It'd be hard enough for a President Obama to bring peace to the Middle East and carbon free energy independence to the United States without regulating sea levels too.
IPHONES AND WIKIS
Apple announced Monday June 9th at the World Wide Developer Conference that the new iPhone would be released for sale on July11th, 2008. While the original iPhone release was slick and had a great touch interface, it missed the business niche market. The new device should fill those missing elements nicely. Here is why. The new phone has GPS, which is a big plus for the business traveler. It also will provide metadata to an image captured with its built-in camera to provide your exact location where the image was taken. Lets talk 3G. The iPhone with 2.0 software will cruise nicely on 3G networks which the rest of the world has been doing for a while. AT&T, the iPhone's exclusive carrier in the US has bumped up their networks to 3G levels in all major markets. The effect of this is downloading files, watching UTube videos, and email attachments will now be quicker.
CONFIRMED: BUSH IS NO RONALD REAGAN – AND NEITHER IS MCCAIN
On February 11, 1985, President Ronald Reagan hosted a State Dinner for Saudi King Fahd at the White House. It was earlier in the day at a private meeting between the two that history was made. With oil at sky high prices and the Soviet Union producing more oil than the Saudis, the oil revenues provided Moscow with a cash cow financing an incredibly aggressive expansion of its imperialist empire. The Soviets had added 14 colonies to their empire in recent years, and with Nicaragua and the El Salvador insurgency as its bases, were ready to make a move on Mexico. The largest Soviet embassy in the world was in Mexico City. With this in mind, Reagan told Fahd what he wanted the Saudi king to do: quadruple oil production and crash world oil prices. Fahd was stunned. "Why should I ever want to do that? " was his response.
COMMENCEMENT 2008
[This commencement address was originally published three years ago. We 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:
OBAMA THE ZAVUA
The half life of a Barack Hussein Obama campaign pledge is getting shorter. Last Wednesday (6/04), Sen. Obama spoke before the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. Though the group is predominantly Democrat, Sen. Obama wanted to reassure it, because many AIPAC members know he has chosen as his foreign policy advisers and spiritual mentors people who have said unkind things about Israel. Reassure them he did. "Jerusalem will remain the capital of Israel, and it must remain undivided," Sen. Obama told AIPAC. The next day, however, after receiving criticism from, among others, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, Sen. Obama's campaign issued a "clarification." And that is just the start of his hypocrisy regarding Israel.
HALF-FULL REPORT 06/06/08
It's pretty obvious what most needs to be celebrated this week: that unless she manages to have Obambi rubbed out in the next few months, the nightmare of President Pantsuit has been postponed to at least 2012... ... We need to celebrate something else that crashed and burned like the Clintons this week: the greatest piece of fascist legislation since the 16th Amendment, the Lieberman-Warner Climate Security Act... ... We need to follow this victory up now with a Pro-CO2 Movement, extolling the extraordinary benefits of more CO2 in our atmosphere - such as wiping out hunger. As we discussed in Solar Warming back in September 2005... ... The best way to produce more CO2 is to produce more of what we need more of most: oil, oil and gas, oil and gas and coal. Thus the HFR is grateful to the US Geological Survey and the Minerals Management Service (USGS/MMS) of the Interior Department for releasing its current assessment of our country's oil and gas resources... ... One thing the world needs a lot more of is Moslems converting to Christianity. Which is why a shocked HFR hoists an amazed glass to the Church of England, which announced it is launching a campaign specifically targeting Moslem for conversion... ... and the HFR has lots more this week.
Have you heard of the service on the web called Twitter? It's a service for you, your friends, and co-workers to stay connected by exchanging quick frequent answers to one simple question, such as WHAT are you doing? It's marketed as social networking and "micro-blogging," but is also useful for other communications. It is usually limited to 140 characters per string of communication, which keeps it short and simple. Let's say that you and group of colleagues are working on a project that has you scattered over the continent. With Twitter it's possible to update everyone or request a quick answer, pertinent to all with a "tweet." To find out more or actually use Twitter go here: Twitter
DOING BUSINESS WITH THE FRENCH
Traveling to Paris in search of business for a Belgian steel mill, after trying 14 days to find the responsible person in the ministry of energy, I sent a telex to the "Director General of the ministry of Energy, department Coal Mines", even though I hadn't a clue what his name was. Arriving unannounced the next morning at the ministry I bluntly show my telex to a clerk with a pretentious uniform, and, miracle of miracles, he calls somebody who calls somebody and another uniformed clerk appears who guides me through the portals of heaven. I am ushered in a palatial office, compared to which the Oval Office is a cubicle, and I am introduced to a rotund gentleman behind a massive desk: Director General Vautran of the French Coal Mines. My telex had specified why I wanted to see this Emperor of the French Mines. He looks at me and my young face, asks me my age and: "Do you drink wine?" I admit that I like a glass from time to time and let slip that my father-in-law is a wine merchant. He ducks behind his imperial desk and hauls a 5 liter (1½ gallon) belly bottle of wine, fills two glasses, hands me one, says "santé" and gulps his down. It is not quite 9 o'clock in the morning.
O = ZERO
To The Point is proud to present its candidate for Best Bumper Sticker of 2008: 
The O-man, Barack Hussein Obama, is an eloquently tailored empty suit. No résumé, no accomplishments, no experience, no original ideas, no understanding of how the economy works, no understanding of how the world works, no balls, nothing but abstract empty rhetoric devoid of real substance. He has no real identity. He is half-white, which he rejects. The rest of him is mostly Arab, which he hides but is disclosed by his non-African Arabic surname and his Arabic first and middle names as a way to triply proclaim his Arabic parentage to people in Kenya. Only a small part of him is African Black from his Luo grandmother, which he pretends he is exclusively. What he isn't, not a genetic drop of, is "African-American," the descendant of enslaved Africans brought to America chained in slave ships. He hasn't a single ancestor who was a slave. Instead, his Arab ancestors were slave owners. Slave-trading was the main Arab business in East Africa for centuries until the British ended it. Let that sink in: Obambi is not the descendant of slaves, he is the descendant of slave owners. Thus he makes the perfect Liberal Messiah.