THE EMP ANNOYANCE
When Senator Jon Kyl (R-AZ), chairman of the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Terrorism, Technology and Homeland Security, held a well-publicized hearing on a specific new type of terrorist threat last April, a lot of folks got scared. It turns out the threat is marginal. Instead of being called the EMP Terror, it should be called the EMP Annoyance.EMP stands for Electro-Magnetic Pulse, caused by a nuclear bomb exploding not on or near the surface but high in the atmosphere. Kyl claims it’s the easiest way for America to be defeated by its enemies.An EMP attack from a single Scud missile, launched by a Nuclear Iran from a freighter in international waters, would have according to Senator Kyl, “irreversible effects on the country's ability to support any large fraction of its present human population. Those who survived would find themselves transported back to the United States of the 1880s.”I suppose this is what happens when politicians, well-meaning and patriotic (for let there be no doubt - John Kyl is one of the good guys on Capitol Hill) yet who know very little science get scared of a threat they don’t understand. (Again: Kyl is very bright - he was a Phi Beta Kappa in college and a smart lawyer - but he has no scientific background.)His staffers also didn’t do their homework - for it turns out that there already has been an EMP attack on an American city, and nothing much happened.
THE BEST SHOW ON C-SPAN
Here are two Chris Cox bottom lines. Bar none, no one Congress is more dedicated to capitalist free market freedom than him; bar none, no one in Congress is smarter.Now you may reply that being the smartest man in Congress is like being the tallest building in Topeka. But Chris would be the tallest skyscraper in just about any city. That’s why the Senate Banking Committee hearings on his nomination to run the Security & Exchange Commission are going to be so entertaining, a C-Span show you won’t want to miss.There are a fair number of bright people in the House, and a fair number of really stupid people in the Senate (we’re talking ratios here - there are some amazingly dumb Congressmen and some very bright Senators). The disparity is because it costs so much more to run for a state-wide Senate seat; thus the majority of Senators are millionaires who inherited their money (like Teddy Kennedy), or made it through a particular idiot-savant expertise (like Jon Corzine) which they think makes them an expert on everything.With few exceptions, every Senator’s ego vastly exceeds their brain-power. Arrogance, power, and stupidity is not a good combination, which is why the Senate is so dysfunctional. They love to prate and pose and pontificate and act so insufferably important in front of television cameras during their hearings. Which is why it’ll be so much fun to watch Chris take them apart.
SHALLOW THROAT
The self-outing of former FBI Deputy Director Mark Felt as "Deep Throat" still leaves the most important questions about Watergate unanswered. Bob Woodward has said Felt was Deep Throat, and he was seen visiting Felt at his Santa Rosa, California home in 1999. What is cloudy is how much of a role Felt played in the Watergate saga. We know of Deep Throat not from the reporting Woodward and Bernstein did for the Washington Post in 1972, but from their book, "All the President's Men." But Woodward's literary agent, David Obst, has said Deep Throat was not mentioned in the original book proposal, and emerged only after Woodward had discussed movie possibilities with Robert Redford. Is Deep Throat a Hollywood invention?
HOW SERIOUS IS PRESIDENT BUSH IN THE WAR ON TERROR?
As the President’s critics are rightly reminding him, more time has passed since 9/11 than transpired between Pearl Harbor and the surrender of the Japanese empire, and our most lethal enemies are still in power and still killing our people and our friends. It is good that the desire for freedom is now manifest among the oppressed peoples of the Middle East and Central Asia, and it is very good that dramatic strides toward self-government have been taken by the Georgians, Kyrgistanis, Ukrainians, Iraqis, and Lebanese. But it is not good enough. Indeed, it is shameful that we have yet to seriously challenge the legitimacy of the terror masters in Tehran and Damascus, who represent the keystone of the terrorist edifice.Our enemies know this, because, to their delight and perhaps their surprise as well, they are still in power throughout the Middle East. Until and unless they are removed, the terror war will continue, our friends in the region will be killed, tortured, and incarcerated, and the president’s vision of regional democratic revolution will go down the memory hole.
THE INDO-CHINA CON
These two Tibetan lamas blowing their tunchen horns, are calling the Buddhist faithful to prayer atop the Stok monastery in a remote Himalayan region called Ladakh. The river below is the Upper Indus. On the other side of the mountains in the distance is China - for Ladakh is in India, that part of Tibet that escaped seizure by the Communist Chinese. I took this picture in 1993. The Chicoms’ courtship of India has been much in the news lately, with India usually portrayed as swooning over Beijing’s attention and flattery. Dire predictions are being made of India being suckered into a strategic Sino-Indo alliance with China the dominant partner. Analyses are being issued celebrating India jilting the US in favor of China, causing the “souring of the India-US honeymoon.” Don’t believe it. For all those worried or elated about China’s bonding with India to America’s detriment, here’s the reality without the filters and blinders: It is India that is playing China like a fiddle, not the other way around.
NORTON GHOST
Norton Ghost is one of two backup programs I recommend. This program backs up entire hard drives. You are given several choices - to another local hard drive, to removable storage, or to a network hard drive. If you choose to back up to removable storage, you’ll have to use a number of DVDs. I use Norton Ghost to back up my C drive to my D drive. I’m using about 60 GB of my 160GB C drive. This is compressed to approximately 50GB on my 160GB D drive. You can restore individual files or folders. Or restore your whole system in case your disk crashes. I’ll run you through the whole process:
COMMENCEMENT
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: There goes the only man I ever respected. He’s what every boy dreams he’ll grow up to be - and wishes he had been when he’s an old man.
NO APOLOGY
The consensus of film critics is that three of the four best Western movies ever made were those starring John Wayne: Stagecoach (1939), Red River (1948), and The Searchers (1956). (The fourth is Gary Cooper’s 1952 High Noon.) Many critics consider The Searchers to be one of the greatest movies, period, and has been the subject of numerous academic seminars. It is a lesser known John Wayne Western, however, that contains an important lesson for our relations with the Moslem world.Directed by John Ford, made in 1948, entitled She Wore A Yellow Ribbon, it stars Wayne as Capt. Nathan Brittles as a retiring Cavalry officer facing an Indian attack (The New York Times’ review at the time called Wayne’s performance “Oscar-caliber”). The memorable line is the advice he gives to a junior officer. It’s listed by Guinness as one of the top 100 film quotes of all time:
Never apologize, son. It’s a sign of weakness.It turns out that there is a growing number of aficionados of “SWAYR” who have bought the DVD at Amazon and taken this line to heart. What’s interesting about them is that they work at the Pentagon, the State Department, and the Bush White House.
OUR PATHOLOGICALLY ANTI-AMERICAN MEDIA
The headline on the top of the front page of the New York Times yesterday, May 26, was: "FBI told of Koran abuses." The wording of the headline and the prominence of the display give the casual reader the impression the story -- written by Neil Lewis -- was new, and that the story was true. Neither is so. Lewis' story was based on reports of interrogations by FBI agents of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay in 2002 and 2003. He noted in his third paragraph that "they are accounts of unsubstantiated allegations made by the prisoners under interrogation." The New York Times didn't mention that an al Qaeda training manual, captured a couple of years ago by British police, instructs detainees to make false charges against their captors. So why is so much of the media giving so much prominence to a recycled story of unsubstantiated charges made by America's enemies who have been told to make false accusations if captured?
SITH PEACE
In 1977, the original Star Wars morality play of heroes fighting for freedom against the evil Galactic Empire resonated with millions of people struggling for their own freedom against the Evil Empire of the Soviet Union. Now in Star Wars III, George Lucas wants folks to associate the Galactic Empire with America and the freedom-destroying dictator Palpatine with George Bush. So it was gratifying to see both adults and kids in the audience not taken in by this stupidity, and howl with derisive laughter when Anakin Skywalker becomes Darth Vader and wails “Noooooooooooooooooooo!” upon learning his wife has died. Despite its special effects eye candy, the movie is a joke, pathetically written and acted.. It does, however, contain one supremely educative moment. It’s not when Obi-Wan blurts out unintelligibly, “Only the Sith deal in absolutes” (as if the whole point of all six movies isn’t about the absolutes of the Sith as evil bad guys and the virtue of fighting against them). It’s Palpatine’s rationale for suppressing rebellion against his tyranny: When the rebels are defeated, there will be “peace.” Let’s hope Star Wars III teaches lots of people the difference between the “peace” that comes from submission and the peace that comes from freedom. Thus, lots of Moslems should see it. Earlier this month in The Golden Fleece of Freedom, we discussed how there was no word for peace in Russian. It turns out there is no word for peace in Arabic either.