THE PILLAR GANG
Today's (2/17) Wall Street Journal has an op-ed by a CIA intelligence officer, Guillermo Christensen, entitled Un-Intelligence. The article exposes the self-serving attack on President Bush and the War in Iraq by a fellow CIA officer named Paul Pillar in the current issue of Foreign Affairs.
Pillar is now being lionized by the left for his anti-Bush screed - but you first learned about him here at To The Point in October 2004.
Porter At The Pass revealed that Paul Pillar and his left wing cabal at the CIA, which I named The Pillar Gang, was conducting a covert campaign of leaks and disclosures to damage George Bush's chances of re-election and help John Kerry's.
As explained in "Porter At The Pass":
YOGI IN IRAN
It's beginning to sink in to a lot of folks - from the State Department to the French Foreign Ministry to Egyptian intelligence - that Iran's Ahmadinejad is far more dangerous and wacko than the Ayatollah Khomeini.
Perhaps most interesting is that France is bellying up to the anti-Iran bar. There has been a major fallout, for example, between France and Hezbollah, the Iran-sponsored terrorist outfit. Chirac is so worried now about a major Hezbollah terrorist attack in Paris that he threatened Iran he would retaliate with nuclear missiles.
Finally we have arrived at Yogi Berra's fork in the road. Yogi advised that, "When you come to a fork in the road, take it." When both France and the US agree that the Ahmadinejad regime in Tehran has to be removed, you know we've arrived.AL GORE: CRAZY, STUPID, TREASONOUS, OR ALL THREE?
Former Vice President Al Gore is bitterly disappointed he was not elected president. Periodically, he expresses his disappointment in ways that gives us reason to be thankful he wasn't.
The most recent was last weekend, when he traveled to Saudi Arabia to make a speech denouncing the United States. The occasion was the annual Jeddah economic forum, which is sponsored in part by the family of Osama bin Laden (which claims to have distanced itself from the family black sheep).
Mr. Gore has not disclosed how much he was paid for his words of wisdom. It probably is less than the $267,000 former president Bill Clinton was paid for speaking to the group in 2002, but odds are his fee was in six figures.
Whatever Mr. Gore's speaking fee was, his hosts likely thought it a bargain, considering what the former vice president had to say.Chapter Twenty One: THE TRAP OF CHOLULA
The Jade Steps
Chapter Twenty One: The Trap of Cholula
They spent most of the siesta, the Spaniards' period of rest after the mid-day meal, having fun turning Spanish words into Nahuatl. Malinali was having so much fun it made her forgetful. She shook her head. "I must leave," she told them. "Our Mesheeka guests have come for their daily ceremony of complaining to Captain Cortez, and I must be there, for it is through me that they address their complaints."
"Have fun," Aguilar joked. Malinali sighed. "Our talking - that was fun. But ‘fun' and ‘Mesheeka' are two words that don't go together - in Spanish or Nahuatl."
Today is the nineteenth day here in Tlaxcala, she thought as she walked to Cortez's quarters, and for every one of those days, the Mesheeka emissaries who had accompanied them from Xocotlan had come to complain to Cortez about what terrible people the Tlaxcalans were, how they were all traitors and thieves and poor and wicked and not fit even to be slaves. It was so tiresome to hear and translate, and how Cortez could pretend to always be courteous and polite, or even stay awake, during the daily moaning, she didn't know.
When she saw the crowd of soldiers in front of Cortez's quarters, she realized something was different.
COMING TO YOUR CAR SOON: 3-D NAVIGATION
Do drivers want to see a photorealistic image of the road ahead on their navigation displays? Google, Volkswagen, and nVidia think so, and they're working on a mapping and navigation system that could present Google Earth satellite images of highways and buildings. Since 2005, Volkswagen of America's Electronic Research Lab in Palo Alto, California, has been developing prototype vehicles with the system. While there’s no projected date for the concept to become reality in production vehicles, it’s not far off.
GLOBAL WARMING FREEZES UP
On the heels of record freezing weather in Europe, there was a story this week (carried by the Drudge Report and WorldNetDaily so you may have seen it) about a Russian scientist predicting global cooling. Russian astronomer Khabibulo Absudamatov expects a “decrease in the flow of the Sun’s radiation,” over the next several years which will lead to cooling, not continued warming of the planet. While his prediction may be right, he is wrong about the cause. As discussed in Solar Warming last September, it’s not the sun’s heat radiation causing a warmer earth, it’s the sun’s magnetic activity. In Solar Warming, we discussed the cost-free solution to global warming: Let the world’s airlines use high-sulfur jet fuel while flying at cruise altitude. The solution to global cooling is the mirror image of this: Have international jetliners burn their fuel “rich” at altitude. Give them a tax credit as an inducement.
LIBERTY VS. DEMOCRACY
Would you prefer to live in a country that has: (1) The rule of law with an honest civil service, strong protection of private property and minority rights, free trade, free markets, very low taxes, and full freedom of the speech, press and religion, but not a democracy? (2) Democracy and a corrupt court and civil service, many restrictions on economic freedom, including very high taxes, with limited rights for minority religions, peoples and speech? Many mistakenly believe democracy means liberty, but a quick review of world democracies show that is not true. Almost all democracies restrict economic liberties more than necessary. Many have corrupt court and civil service systems, inhibit women's rights, constrain press freedom and do not protect minority rights and views.
YELLOW-BELLIED LILY LIVERED US MEDIA COWARDS I
The New York Times had an editorial Tuesday, February 7, on the controversy triggered by publication in a Danish newspaper of 12 caricatures of the Prophet Mohammed. "The New York Times and much of the rest of the nation's news media have reported on the cartoons but refrained from showing them," the editors said. "That seems a reasonable choice for news organizations that usually refrain from gratuitous assaults on religious symbols..." The very next day, Wednesday, February 8, the Times published, gratuitously, an image of the Virgin Mary in elephant dung. And the New York Times was one of many newspapers which in 1989 published a photograph of Christ on a crucifix submerged in a vat of urine. Washington Post executive editor Len Downie told Editor & Publisher he wouldn't publish the Danish cartoons because of "general good taste." Had Mr. Downie developed his good taste a week earlier, the Post might not have published a cartoon of a quadruple amputee soldier so vile all six members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff wrote a letter to the editor protesting it. Most in the news media don't mind offending people who express their outrage by writing letters to the editor. But when the offended threaten to cut off the editor's head, editors become more "culturally sensitive."
YELLOW-BELLIED LILY-LIVERED US MEDIA COWARDS II
In Czechoslovakia under communism it was common to see signs reading "Workers of the world, unite" in the windows of fruit and vegetable stores. Vaclav Havel, in his book, "Living In Truth," discerned the significance of those signs. As elaborated by Stanley Hauerwas, professor of Theological Ethics at Duke School of Divinity, Mr. Havel knew the shopkeeper does not believe the sign. He puts it up because it was "delivered from the headquarters along with the onions." The grocer thinks nothing is at stake because he understands that no one really believes the slogan. The real message, according to Mr. Havel, is "I'm behaving myself... I am obedient and therefore I have the right to be left in peace." But Mr. Havel shrewdly points out that even a modest shopkeeper would be ashamed to put up a sign that literally read, "I am afraid and therefore unquestioningly obedient." He is, after all, a human being with some sense of dignity. I would argue that this Czechoslovakian parable of the self-deceiving green grocer goes a long way to explaining the decision of most American news outlets not to republish the Danish cartoons currently stirring up so much of Islam.
THE BUSINESS OF PIRATING
Sophisticated net surfers will have noticed that, despite my proclamations that "It can't be done," there is a plethora of commercial movies - the kind you buy on DVD - that are available for download on the various "pirate" services, of which Kazaa is (was) the most well known. Actually, when I say "can't," I mean "shouldn't" - but there is technology, both hardware and software that allows intrepid souls to "rip" (copy) DVDs off the disk and onto their computers. You don't have to be police lineup material to use the methods described below to copy DVDs. Maybe you want to make backups or copies of a wedding or Bar-mitzvah DVD to send to family and friends abroad. So how do they - and we - do it?