LIMBIC PICTURES
What launched the “Reagan Doctrine” - the strategy that dismantled the Soviet Empire - was a series of pictures. They were ones I had taken of individual Afghans, Nicaraguans, Angolans, and others who were risking their lives to rid their countries of Soviet tyranny. At a meeting in the White House in late November 1983, for the first time those attending actually saw what these people looked like - rather than reading classified reports about them, ink on paper. There were plenty of pictures of folks with weapons. But the picture that got to them most was of Amin, a young Afghan boy whose hands had been blown off by a Soviet butterfly bomb disguised to look like a toy: 
Such pictures can bypass all the information-and-analysis processing filters we have in our neo-cortex, and go directly to the primitive, emotional structure of the brain called the limbic system. They are Limbic Pictures, hitting the brain’s emotional bullseye. Because the Pro-Life movement has begun to understand the power of limbic pictures, an end to legalized infanticide in America may now be in sight.
DINNER WITH TOM
On Thursday evening, May 12, in Washington DC, a number of pro-Americans are hosting a testimonial dinner for House Majority Leader Tom DeLay. It will be a very impressive show of support for Tom by the conservative movement, and of its determination not to let the Democrats’ War on DeLay succeed. If you can be in Washington on May 12, I would like to personally encourage you to attend. The stakes in this war are large - control of Congress, smoothing or thwarting Hillary’s path to the White House - as explained earlier this month in Hillary’s War on DeLay . You can get the details and make your reservation by clicking here: Dinner with Tom. Or you can call Stacie Rumenap at the American Conservative Union, 703-836-8602. Please tell her you want to sit at my table. I hope I’ll see you there!
BACKUP
Microsoft XP comes with a backup utility. We’ve discussed it at least twice in the past, but only in advanced mode to backup System State. Today we’ll use it to backup numerous files at one time. Next week I’ll compare it to a free backup utility. When I discussed backing up the System State, I recommended first putting a CD into your drive, then choosing it as the target location for System State. With so many different files involved in a general backup, I suggest you put them all into a folder. Then write the entire contents of the folder to a DVD or several CDs. The total will almost certainly be too large for a single CD. I’ll be more specific as the article progresses.
NO APOLOGY, NO FUTURE
In 1997, I was in Budapest speaking to a conference of international business leaders. Another speaker was a Moscow television news commentator well-known in Russia, Boris Notkin. He informed his audience about how humiliated Russians felt, losing their Empire and the Cold War, not winning many medals in the Olympics, and having their Mir space station go belly-up. He warned of a dangerous anti-Americanism emerging among Russians, who resentfully blamed America for their problems. A gray-haired gentleman with a Central European accent stood up and asked Boris a question: “In addition to their feelings of humiliation and resentment, do Russians have any feelings of remorse for inflicting Communism upon so many countries? After their defeat in World War II, the Germans apologized to the world for being Nazis and for the horrible atrocities Nazism committed. After their defeat in the Cold War, will the Russians ever apologize to the world for being Communists and the equally horrible atrocities Soviet Communism committed?” Boris looked straight at the man and coldly answered, “No. Russians feel no remorse. They will not apologize.”This past Monday, April 25, Russian President Vladimir Putin reaffirmed this absence of remorse and refusal to apologize for the genocidal horror perpetrated by Soviet Communism upon so many countries and peoples. In a nationally televised speech to the Russian Federal Assembly in Moscow, he declared that “the collapse of the Soviet Union was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century.”The truth, of course, is that the existence of the Soviet Union was the greatest geopolitical disaster of the 20th century
THE DE-HOMOSEXUALIZATION OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH
A Vatican source has disclosed to To The Point a psychological trauma of John Paul II. Whenever Vatican investigators brought the results of their vetting process regarding an individual’s candidacy for bishop, cardinal, or other office, and they revealed he was a homosexual, John Paul II would refuse to believe it. He did so because accusing someone of homosexuality was a standard practice of the Communist government in his native Poland regarding anyone it regarded as an enemy of the state. From his ordination as a Catholic priest in 1946 to elevation to Archbishop of Krakow in 1963 and Cardinal in 1967, the then Karol Wojtyla witnessed this personal destruction repeatedly. So traumatized, he summarily dismissed such accusations as Pope, and would approve the elevation of anyone so accused. This is why the Catholic Church, from Bishops in Boston to the Vatican itself, is riddled with homosexuals today. As the Dean of the College of Cardinals and the Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Cardinal Ratzinger learned who the homosexuals are in the Vatican and the almost 3,000 dioceses in the world. As Pope Benedict XVI, he will encourage their departure from the priesthood.
TSANTSAS IN ECUADOR
The first tribe I ever lived with made these. It’s a human shrunken head, made by the Shuara Jivaros in the Amazon jungles of Ecuador. They call it a tsantsa, and this particular one was given to me by Chief Tangamashi when he adopted me into his clan in the summer of 1960. I was all by myself and 16 years old. The practice of shrinking your enemy’s head was once confined to the Amazon, but now it has evidently spread to Ecuador’s capital, for that is what a mob in Quito attempted to do this week with the president of their country, Lucio Gutierrez. I know headhunters, and this was no haphazard, spontaneous revenge-raid. This was well-planned and well-executed. Tangamashi would have approved, and felt he had something in common with the organizers - Porter Goss and Paul Wolfowitz. With the coup in Quito this week, the Bush Administration has finally launched its effort to rescue South America from the threat of Hugo Chavez.
SELL THE LAND!
If you spent more each month than you made and got deeper and deeper into debt, but had an asset equal to your debts, like a big expensive boat you never used, what would you do? If you were rational, you would sell the boat. The U.S. government has spent more than it receives in tax revenue for most of the last 75 years, and, as a result, the national debt and the associated interest payments have gotten bigger and bigger. But what is not well known is that the U.S. government also has many trillions of dollars of assets, which may exceed the value of the debt. I say "may" because, in fact, no one knows because the government has no accurate balance sheet of what it owns and what it owes. For instance, the federal government owns somewhere between 600 and 700 million acres of land, or over 30 percent of all U.S. land.
TIPPING POINT FOR THE CHINA-IRAN-NORTH KOREA AXIS OF EVIL
It has long been assumed that a repressive regime could survive as long as it had the will to crush any opposition, and that clever tyrants could deflect hatred of their regime by conjuring up an external enemy. There is still a tendency, particularly among intellectuals, to assume that these principles apply to contemporary dictatorships like those in China, Iran, and North Korea. Yet recent events suggest that these three countries, which are united by common interests and which help one another with advanced military technology, from missiles to WMDs, are losing control despite their fierce determination to cling to power and eventually fight and win a great war against the West. All three have nearby examples of new democracies, and their peoples are asking, with increasing intensity, why they are not permitted to govern themselves.
MIRACLE MAX IN EUROPE
There was a very funny movie made back in 1987 called The Princess Bride. Imagine an Errol Flynn swashbuckler with a Monty Python script. One of my favorite scenes is when the hero, Westley (played by Cary Elwes) is wounded and his friends drag his limp body to a Yiddish Wizard named Miracle Max (played by Billy Crystal) in hopes of saving him. But it’s too late. He’s dead, they tell Max. “Look who knows so much,” Max replies after examining Westley. “It just so happens that your friend here is only MOSTLY dead. There is a VERY BIG DIFFERENCE between mostly dead and all dead. Mostly dead is slightly alive. With all dead, well, with all dead there's usually only one thing you can do.” “What's that?” his friends ask. Max answers, “Go through his clothes and look for loose change.” It turns out there was an adaptive replay of this scene in the Sistine Chapel this week. The College of Cardinals dragged in the limp body of European Christianity - which means of European civilization and culture - and placed it at Josef Ratzinger’s feet. Can you save him? they asked, because we are afraid he’s dead. Their Dean and Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith replied that yes, he is mostly dead - but not all dead, so there is hope for his revival. That hope is what elected Cardinal Ratzinger to the papacy.
CELL MODEMS
A friend bought a new PDA and offered me his old one at a price I couldn’t refuse. I still feel the wisest strategy, as I mentioned in a previous column, is to wait several months until combination ultra-light portables with digital cameras, radios and MP3 players come attached. Still, for 100 shekels ($22) how could anyone refuse? I looked for a method of connecting a PDA or laptop to the Internet without having to use Wifi or regular Ethernet connection. Why not a cellphone? My phone is all set up for Internet; at the press of a button I can surf the Web. Was there any way I could transfer that connection to my laptop or PDA? Turns out there is. Here's how.