HALF-FULL REPORT 05/09/08
The HFR opens this week by celebrating Naqba - that glorious event the suicidal schmucks of the Arab world, the Palestinians, call "the Catastrophe." Yes, the creation of Israel 60 years ago in May of 1948 was a catastrophe for people filled with envy and hate. But for anyone who admires triumphs of the human spirit, the existence of Israel is not just something to celebrate on its 60th birthday, but every single day.... .... From one inspiring story to another. The HFR raises a glass of Chianti to a great Italian, Roberto Calderoli. The government of Libya had threatened (last Friday, 5/02) new Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi with "catastrophic consequences" should Calderoli be appointed to his Cabinet. That was because in February of 2006, Calderoli, a leader of Italy's Northern League Party, appeared in an interview on national television wearing a t-shirt with cartoons of Mohammed - in sympathy with the Danish cartoonists who drew them.... ... The HFR switches to Chablis to look down its nose at all the white wine liberals in such a tizzy over Hillary Clinton's channeling George Wallace by saying "hard working white Americans support me." Then her key advisor Paul Begala had the chutzpah to point out an obvious truth: that "Obama can't win with just the eggheads and African-Americans." So here is the HFR's prediction.... ... We close this week's HFR with two additional indications of why Obambi Hussein is going to lose.
HOW TO BE FREE OF FOREIGN OIL
In a speech last Friday (5/02), President Bush called for increased oil and gas production "in Alaska and our outer continental shelf." Nancy Pelosi actually had the Orwellian effrontery to respond: "Drilling is the failed energy policy of yesterday that has brought us record gas prices today." Producing more oil causes higher prices! How Orwellian doublethink can you get? She sneered at Bush's policy of increasing production and his promise to veto her party's attempt to demonize oil producers by calling it "drill and veto." If the Republicans from John McCain on down are too stupid to take the Dems to the electoral cleaners with that, they deserve to lose. If McCain & GOPco did have the brains, we could free of foreign oil, or well on our way, by the end of his first term. Unfortunately, they don't - especially McCain. He's so braindead he's opposed to drilling ANWR because it would be like drilling in the Grand Canyon. But if by chance, his economic advisor, former Senator from Texas Phil Gramm, can persuade him to put national security over a howling Alaska wilderness, and get him to somehow grasp that the way to be free of foreign oil is through increased domestic production, then here's how it can be done.
THE GREATEST ENEMY OF MOSLEMS IS SAUDI ARABIA
As corrosive as the Saudis have been for our system, they're far worse for Moslems. The crucial point you have to grasp is that the Saudis don't give a downtown damn about Moslems - flesh-and-blood men, women or children. They only care about Islam. They'd sacrifice tens of millions of Moslems to further their perversion of the faith. I've visited over a dozen Moslem countries and many more that have significant Moslem minorities. In every case, I've found the Saudis funding evil. From Thailand to the United States, the Saudi goal is to prevent Moslems from integrating into their host societies. In poor countries, such as Kenya, they pay families to pull their children out of state schools and send them to madrassahs - where they learn to recite the Koran, but no career skills. The Saudis don't mind if Moslems live in poverty and squalor - as long as Moslems don't identify with the societies around them. They want strict religious and cultural apartheid.
IF YOU’RE SERIOUS ABOUT SECURITY FOR YOUR DATA
In this week's tips, we first talk about a security application that is from the open source community and is cross platform compatible for Windows, Linux, and Mac OSX. The name of this application is Truecrypt and it truly is a secure application to store your data. Say you want to create a lock box vault on your hard drive for storing critical files. Possibly examples could be taxes, credit card info, banking or investments and passwords. Other utilities can do this, however Truecrypt allows you to encrypt with several protocols at once. You create a volume of files that is hidden and invisible on your hard disk and you encrypt it with AES, Twofish, Serpent and other encryption protocols. Be sure and click on (and read!) the Protection of Hidden Volumes Against Damage link in Truecypt's left side bar. No other program out there will offer you this kind of protection.
TRYING TO MAKE A BUCK IN BELGIUM
This is a personal story of what it's like doing business in Europe - specifically a part of Europe called Wallonia, or French-speaking Belgium. In 1976 Occidental Oil constructed the Claymore Alpha gas production platform for the North Sea. The platform had a total steel component of more than 600,000 tons. The modus operandi was to construct the platforms with prefabricated modules of 500 tons weight max each and put them together module by module. Since the North Sea only allows a good weather gap of 1 to 2 months each year in summer time, the costs and time delays were staggering. A Dutch maritime engineer-pioneer, Pieter Heerema, had the fantastic idea to start constructing with 5,000 ton modules, ten times as big as before. He was the first to use an old tanker, welding compartments in it, and with the help of sensors and computer steering pump with massive pumps seawater in or out of the different compartments to counterbalance the heavy loads. But he had a very big problem. I made the mistake of trying to solve it in Belgium.
BARACK “DON’T KNOW MUCH ABOUT HISTORY” OBAMA
In his victory speech after the North Carolina primary, Sen. Barack Hussein Obama said something that is all the more remarkable for how little it has been remarked upon. In defending his stated intent to meet with America's enemies without preconditions, Sen. Obama said: "I trust the American people to understand that it is not weakness, but wisdom to talk not just to our friends, but to our enemies, like Roosevelt did, and Kennedy did, and Truman did." That he made this statement, and that it passed without comment by the journalists covering his speech, indicates either breathtaking ignorance of history on the part of both, or deceit on the part of both.
THE STUPIDITY OF $4 A GALLON
The average retail price of a gallon of gas in the U.S. this week is $3.61, according to the Energy Information Administration. That's up 55 cents a gallon from this time last year. Many analysts expect the price to approach $4 a gallon this summer. Anticipating this, last month Sen. John McCain proposed suspending the 18.4 cent a gallon federal gasoline tax between Memorial Day and Labor Day. Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton has endorsed the idea. Sen. Barack Hussein Obama has denounced it. Sen. Obama wasn't always hostile to such "gimmicks." As an Illinois state senator, he voted three times temporarily to suspend that state's gasoline tax. Gasoline prices then were about $2 a gallon. The 5% Illinois state sales tax on gasoline was suspended, despite Mr. Obama's objection, in June of 2000 for the remainder of the year. The suspension led to a price decline of three percent compared to neighboring states.
HALF-FULL REPORT 05/02/08
What could be more delightful than the Dems tearing themselves apart? That they go broke doing it. The best news of the week - Jeremiah "God Damn America" Wright trashing Obambi and Obambi trashing him back - shouldn't qualify for the HFR as the glass is just too intoxicatingly, overflowingly full. And, besides, we discussed this in Obama in Greece. But right in second place has got to be Democrat Coffers Run Dry. The Dems have raised so many millions - and blown them all. Only Democrats could do this. What do they know about living within their means, anyway? Even a DNC official admitted that it's "nuts that we're spending so much money fighting each other instead of Republicans." To which we can only say, don't stop now. We're enjoying seeing your IQ-challenged donors seeing their money go up in smoke, for nothing. We're also enjoying listening to the grinding and gnashing of Democrat teeth over...
OBAMA IN GREECE
If you could bring the playwrights of Ancient Greece - Sophocles, Aeschylus, Euripides, Aristophanes - from 5th century Athens to watch the Democrat primary race of today, they would recognize it instantly. It is a perfect Greek tragedy. All the incredible amounts of money being spent, all the frantic energy and hysteria, the entire swirling maelstrom created by a vast cast of characters - all of it is for naught, for there can be only one outcome, an inescapable outcome of doom. The old playwrights would scoff at our naïve notions of free will, our arguments that each of the participants in the tragedy - such as the "superdelegates" - really do have the capacity to act for themselves. No, they would say, the characters have no choice, for no matter what they do, they are drawn into a trap of ineluctable fate, like a fly caught in a web of invisible silk strands, so invisible he doesn't know he's caught while the spider approaches. The 5th century Greeks would have understood the play. A 4th century Greek would understand what happens to the audience watching the play.
THE BEST FRIEND OF TERRORISTS IN IRAQ IS THE NEW YORK TIMES
If James Glanz wins a prize for his reporting from Iraq, it will be for fiction. Mr. Glanz is the bureau chief of the New York Times in Baghdad. When Iraqi troops began an offensive March 25 to take Basra from the Mahdi Army, an Iranian-backed militia nominally headed by the Moqtada al Sadr, he and his colleagues described the fighting (which spread to other cities in southern Iraq and to the Sadr City section of Baghdad) as a military defeat and a political catastrophe for Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al Maliki. After three weeks of reporting nothing but alleged Iraqi government setbacks, it must have come as a shock to subscribers of the New York Times to read, in a dispatch April 20 from Mr. Glanz and Alissa Rubin, that "Iraqi soldiers took control of the last bastions of the cleric Moqtada al-Sadr's militia in Basra on Saturday." Ignorance and stupidity alone cannot explain how the New York Times reported this story so wrong for so long.