The Jade Steps Chapter Thirty-One:  The Spanish Phoenix By nightfall, the expedition reached the town of Xaltepec on the far side of the valley.  It was deserted, and everyone had to forage for food.  Malinali tried to clean the bloody gashes on Cortez's head and the deep wound in his left hand, but Cortez shook his head.  "To a man, all of us are wounded, exhausted, and hungry," he told her.  "Organize help for them, tend to them... then you may have all night to tend to me." When Malinali returned, she found Cortez fast asleep.  At dawn the next morning, she tried to clean and bandage him as best she could, but he was anxious to get underway.  "Our only hope of safety lies in those mountains of Tlaxcala," he said, as he gazed at them looming above Xaltepec.  Slowly, slowly, the expedition trudged up into the mountains to the Tlaxcalan frontier fortress town of Hueyotlipan (way-oat-lee-pahn). There to greet them were King Xicotencatl, Chief Maxixcatzin, and Commander Chichimecatecle. "Malinche!  Malinche!" they cried out when they saw Cortez.  Chief Maxixcatzin threw his arms around him.  "How grieved we are at your misfortunes, and the number of our own people who have been killed with yours," he told Cortez through Malinali.  "We warned you not to trust the Mesheeka, but you went to their city and did not believe us.  Now all we can do is help with your wounds and give you rest and food.  Here you are home."

Why do non-Americans so dislike Americans or, at least, the American government?  Could part of the reason be because the U.S. State Department appears to think its mission is to be rude, insulting and condescending? This month, the State Department has set a new record by managing to insult the citizens of 123 different lands at one time in the International Narcotics Control Strategy Report: Volume II, Money Laundering and Financial Crimes. The 450-page report discusses what other countries are doing to reduce money laundering and financial crimes, which is fine. But then the authors go on gratuitously lecturing each of the countries by name about how they could do things "better." The Report, produced by the global nannies and nags at State, is filled with endless demands that other countries do a better job enforcing their laws, pass more laws, sign more international treaties and engage in some practices that would be illegal and unconstitutional in the U.S.    Some examples:

The Democrat Party is in thrall, we're told, of the mighty power of the Moonbat Left, with its millions of passionate adherents all ruthlessly organized via MoveOn.org to bring doom to any politician who dares oppose them. Their strength would literally be on parade, they boasted, in the nation's capital in a glorious resurrection of the left's finest moment of anti-war protest forty years ago.   More than a hundred thousand of them would march on the Pentagon, humbling their arrogant warmongering government over Iraq as their parents and grandparents once did over Vietnam. Why they chose March 17, 2007 as the "40th Anniversary" of the legendary-to-them March on the Pentagon is mysterious, as the latter took place on October 21, 1967. On that October day 40 years ago, well over 100,000 lefties, cheered on by Jane Fonda, Noam Chomsky, and Abbie Hoffman, marched from the Lincoln Memorial over Memorial Bridge and down to the Pentagon, where they were met by 2,500 armed Army soldiers. Lefty author Norman Mailer wrote a book about it, The Armies of the Night, which however poorly and egomaniacally written, won a Pulitzer Prize.  No one, not even as awful a writer as Mailer, is going to write a book about the pathetic fizzle of this last Saturday.  What a bust.

I can't adequately express how appreciative I am for all the prayers by TTP members for me and my family in response to What's Dhimmitude in Russian?  There were even a number of offers to bodyguard my family or provide us with safe houses!  It was so very touching I don't have the words.  A number of the messages brought tears to my eyes.  Thank you all so much. I also must tell you how much your prayers for Paul Joyal have meant to his family.  Paul's wife Liz sends you her deepest thanks. As of today (Thursday 3/15), Paul is still in intensive care.  He has begun to talk, but only physically, not lucidly - he can make sounds but not any sense.  To be in this state after two weeks shows how horrible the attack on him was by the Kremlin-hired gunmen. And now, two weeks later, I know why the Bush White House has been quiet about it.

Ann Coulter's famously calling Democrat presidential candidate John Edwards a "faggot" at the CPAC conference here in Washington earlier this month has scandalized a great many conservatives and every single Republican candidate. It was brilliant. That's a description, not approval.  I winced when I heard the forbidden word, not because it's forbidden but because it's so hurtful.  It's purposefully demeaning to homosexuals, especially to those who really can't help what they are. Yet Ann's use of the term was diabolically clever, for with it she accomplished her goal:  demolishing Edwards' candidacy.  With this one single word, she made sure John Edwards will never be elected President of the United States. She knew exactly what she was doing. 

Last week (2/28), JAMA, the Journal of the American Medical Association, published a hit piece on antioxidant vitamins.  JAMA's Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of beta carotene, vitamin A, and vitamin E concluded that taking supplements of them increases one's chances of death by 5%. The lamestream media gleefully ran stories on the study, with headlines like "Vitamins Can Kill You." It's the whores of JAMA and their media shills who can kill you, not vitamins. Note the "Meta" in the study's title.  That means it's an analysis of other studies, not research itself.  What these folks did is, out of the close to a thousand clinical antioxidant studies, they cherry picked 68 that showed what JAMA wanted.   And they had to lie about many of those in order to force the data to fit their pre-ordained conclusion.

Is there something inherent in Islam that has resulted in most Moslems living in poor countries, with the exception of the relatively few who live in the oil rich states? This was just one of the questions a group of American and Islamic scholars and experts were trying to answer in Doha, Qatar, last week. Qatar has the world's second largest gas reserves (after Russia) along with considerable oil, yet it only has about 200,000 citizens (and 600,000 foreign workers). The city of Doha, where roughly half of the population lives, gives the appearance of being the world's largest and most modern and luxurious conference center. The reality for most Moslems is radically different. There about 1.3 billion Moslems (21 percent of the world's population), contrasted with 2.1 billion Christians (about 33 percent of the world's population). While Christians are disproportionately rich, Moslems are disproportionately poor.

When the DOW tanked on Tuesday (2/27), losing over 400 points, the comparison du jour was to the Black Monday crash of October 19, 1987 - which was of course silly, as the former was only a 3.3% loss in value, while the latter was 22.6%. Nonetheless, it prompts me to tell you a story, which starts in the Chang Tang Plateau of northern Tibet.  That's where I was at the time of '87 crash, leading an overland expedition from Beijing to Kathmandu across Tibet north to south.  We heard about the crash from BBC broadcasts on my short wave radio.  One expedition member, Big John Perrott, had a panic attack.  Having no way to reach his broker - northern Tibet is about as remote as you get - he thought he was bankrupt. By the time we got to Lhasa by the end of the month, and John could call his broker, the market - and his portfolio - were well into recovery.  He said he'll be forever grateful for being in the Chang Tang on Black Monday. But while I was in Tibet on Black Monday, a good friend of mine was in a meeting at the White House.

Suppose there's a Mafia Don.  Not a benign and pro-American Marlon Brando Godfather, but a ruthless brutal gangster who hates America and holds a bottomless grudge against her. Let's suppose this Mafioso has amassed an enormous personal fortune of ill-gotten gains.  Stashed away in hidden bank accounts and assets all over the world, his net worth exceeds 20 billion dollars - billion with a ‘b'. But say that's just his personal stash.  Say the total amount of money his gang has accumulated is 300 billion - almost a third of a trillion dollars in cash.  Say he controls it. Let's finally suppose that this centibillionaire anti-American gangster has an arsenal of several thousand nuclear bombs, most of them in the nose cones of intercontinental missiles aimed at us. If there were such a man, shouldn't we be a bit more worried about him than a bankrupt midget in Persia without a single real nuke to his name? For there is indeed such a man.  His name is Vladimir Putin, President of Russia.

The only TV news I watch is Fox.  CBS has that blonde airhead, ABC/NBC have nonentities, and CNN is the English translation of Al Jazeera.  But lately I can't even watch Fox, for the only news it seems to cover is the ersatz drama about a bimbo with giant mariachis. No doubt that giant mariachis are among the most wondrous creations in the known universe - but endless discussion of the deceased possessor of two of them is not news.  At least, not any longer.  Shouting, "Enough already!", I either click the off button on the remote, or go in search of a CSI rerun or John Wayne movie. Pretty soon, of course, viewers will get bored with the Anna Nicole story and move on to some other silliness.  So let's do a thought experiment.  Suppose, just suppose, that Fox doesn't let up, keeps featuring the story, dissecting every detail, comes up with new revelations, month after month after month after month. Now suppose all other news outlets do the same.  For months, stretching on into the interminable future.  Would you go (a) out of your mind, or (b) no longer pay attention to nor have any interest in the news altogether? Welcome to the Anna Nicole Presidential Campaign - with no giant mariachis.

The streets are frozen solid here in Washington, its dangerous to even walk to the Metro much less drive around, and I am having so much fun.  It's a tossup over what's more hilarious, the global warming freaks in Congress having to cancel a hearing about how we're all going to fry because of snow blizzards and freezing rain, or the talking news heads endlessly blathering about Anna Nicole. Most fun of all though is how GW is leading Pelosi Galore right down Primrose Lane - right this way, Nancy. First he gets her to waste enormous amounts of time in full public view trying to get an impossibly stupid "non-binding" resolution devoid of meaning that has outraged her radical left hate-America base - because they want her to spend her time on defunding the war. Now that she's making an empty fool of herself to normal voters and infuriating her most fervent supporters at the same time, Bush gets her into a frothing tizzy over Iran.  "The President has no authority to go into Iran," she hyperventilates, thinking that GW is about to land the Marines at Bandar Abbas, seize the Iranian oil fields, bomb the nuke facilities into radioactive rubble, and plunge the world into genocidal chaos. The lady is being played like a Stradivarius, and she doesn't even know it.  She's oblivious!  This is a thing of sheer beauty.  It can snow and freeze all it wants.  I'm enjoying the view.

In this occasional series on science, which started a year ago (2/06) with The Search for Dark Matter, I discussed Einstein's concept of special relativity last August in A Personal Journey Through Relativity.  Jack Wheeler provided an engaging account of it two years ago (2/05) in Aristotle, Einstein, and Ayn Rand. Einstein though did not have a Theory of Relativity  -- ‘a' as in one.  He had two.  His Special Theory is about the relativity of time.  His General Theory is about the relativity of gravity.  The puzzles and paradoxes of the first pale in comparison to those of the second. So much so that most anyone can visualize clocks telling time at different rates and astronauts coming back from another galaxy much younger than the people they left on earth.  The math and explanations may be hard but one can at least visualize the effects of special relativity. It seems well-nigh impossible to visualize gravity not as a force but as a manifestation of curved space.

I very much appreciated the responses and comments regarding The Fragility of Islamofascism posted in the TTP User Forum.  I also received requests to explain the Koran's "Satanic Verses" more fully. The saga of the Satanic Verses starts with the earliest accounts of Mohammed's life written by accepted Islamic scholars such as Ibn Ishaq (died 767 AD) and al-Tabari (d. 923). "Accepted" means by Islamic tradition.  Mohammed supposedly died in 632 and Ishaq wrote about him over 100 years later - so could not have interviewed anyone who knew him.  Yet we only know of Ishaq through quotes of him by Tabari, who lived 300 years after Mohammed. Thus the earliest source of Mohammed's life and the alleged founding of Islam was written three centuries later.  The saga of Mohammed is a myth for which there is no genuine historical evidence whatever.  I discussed this in The Myth of Mecca, written a few days after the Moslem attack on America of September 11, 2001. So we are talking "sacred history" here, not actual history. 

What is a "hedge fund"? If you have trouble answering the question, you are not alone, because the term is commonly used to describe many types of pooled investments that may have little in common with each other. Yet despite the lack of agreement about what exactly are hedge funds, a host of politicians, commentators and financial regulators now advocate more regulation of them.  I am sure you are just so surprised.

For those doom-and-gloom pessimists convinced of the inevitability of the Islamization of Europe, here's a wonderfully cheery news bulletin:  Moslem imams are fleeing Holland in droves. Of course, the BBC reports this as proof of Dutch Islamophobia.  The tuth is that the Dutch are finally waking up to the threat of Islamofascism in their midst.  There are over one million Moslems in Holland now, and in cities like Rotterdam, well over a third of the children are Moslem. Now, if the Dutch could just get regular Moslem immigrants to follow their imams out of the country... Yet there is far better news in France.  The fate of Europe will be decided there in the presidential election on April 22, with a runoff if necessary on May 6.  The "Sego-Sarko" race is the most important political event in the world for 2007.

Wow.  That's my and everybody else's reaction to our first To The Point Rendezvous in Las Vegas last weekend (1/26-28).  The abundantly clear lesson we learned was:  members of To The Point really get along with each other! At every get together, I was so hesitant to begin speaking as I didn't want to interrupt folks who were having such an obvious good time together.  Then again, I had such a good time. Another thing I learned is that TTPers are a curious bunch.  I can't begin to remember all the topics we discussed.  Countries all over the world.  The Washington circus.  How politicians exemplify a Hyper-Peter Principle. The Peter Principle, that people are promoted to their level of incompetence, applies to companies.  Politicians (and bureaucrats in general) shoot way beyond it, into hyper-incompetence.  The just-elected governor of Nevada, Jim Gibbons, is a perfect example.  He is an absolute fool, and is wife Dawn is an even greater ditz.  Sad to say, he's a Republican. Yet a neighbor Democrat governor, Bill Richardson, is...