Chapter Two: PRINCESS Malinali giggled. It was the kind of squeal and squeak that only a little girl who is deliriously happy can have. She was hiding behind a curtain in her father’s palace. “Ixkakuk! Ixkakuk!” her father called out, using his nickname for her, meaning Beautiful Goddess. “Where are you? I can’t find you!” He crept up to the curtain. “But when I do, I’m going to?” he grabbed the bulge in the curtain? “tickle you to death!” The little girl’s shrieks of mirth rang through the palace. King Teteotcingo released his grip, and Malinali raced away across the throne room laughing and yelling, her father chasing after her. The uproar reached the ears of Malinali’s mother, Queen Cimatl, in an adjoining chamber attended by her courtiers. She sighed disapprovingly. “You would think the King would have more important matters of state to attend to than to play with little girls.”

It’s a common debating trick to focus on one perceived error in your opponent’s argument, ignore all the other points, and pretend that if you can refute that one point every other point and therefore the entire argument is refuted. Thus I have gotten a lot of flack over my noting, in The Hiroshimic Imposture , that so-called Soviet suitcase nukes built in 1988 could not be set off with a cell phone as claimed because there were no cell phones back then. As Joe Farah kidded me in a Front Page interview, “The cell phone is 30 years old. I had a cell phone in 1988. Jack’s memory is a little faulty here.” I’m sure Joe is right - about his having a cell phone the size of a brick back then. The only guy I saw with one in those days was Ollie North. So yes, there were American cell phones. But Soviet cell phones? Nope, no such thing. The first cellular systems were introduced into Russia in 1992 after the collapse of the Soviet Union, using the analog NMT (Nordic Mobile Telephony) protocol.

We initiate this week a new feature in To The Point: the serialization of a novel I am writing entitled The Jade Steps. Every week from now on until completion, there will be a successive chapter. We begin today with Chapter One: Casa Colorada. This is a historical novel, the true story of one of history’s most remarkable and influential women. Her life sounds like a fairy tale, but it’s history, it actually happened. Her name was Malinali. The Jade Steps has a two-fold purpose. The first is to tell Malinali’s story, as fascinating as it is unknown. The second is to bring peace to the civil war raging in the soul of Mexico. I hope you all enjoy it. --- JW Chapter One: CASA COLORADA

Let’s say a young white fellow is caught entering a New York subway station by a watchful policeman, who discovers 50 pounds of high explosives in his backpack. Upon interrogation, the fellow explains he was instructed to blow up the station by the Holy Cheendon, whose voice he hears in his head, because for doing so the Cheendon will send him to Paradise located in the Andromeda Galaxy.Such a fellow would not be a Moslem crazy, just plain crazy. But what if there is something specifically screwed up in his brain that’s making him crazy - and it is this same something that turns some Moslems into suicidal terrorists?

Not quite two years ago, in Terrorism and Tiny Zibbs, I discussed why one of the principal causes of Moslem terrorism is that so many Moslem men are afraid of women. This was made quite evident in a London Daily Telegraph poll of British Moslems conducted last week that stunned the British. 24% of British Moslems, it turns out, are sympathetic with the feelings and motives of the suicide bombers attacking London, and almost one-third believe that: “Western society is decadent and immoral and that Moslems should seek to bring it to an end.” The outrage this provoked caused most folks to overlook the poll’s internals, which showed that the great majority of those alienated British Moslems are men. Very few British Moslem women want to bring Western society to an end, for that society respects them as full human beings and gives them freedom to act as such. So all this soul-searching navel-gazing blather in the British liberal press agonizing over the failure of British society to cure Moslem alienation utterly misses the point - as liberals almost unfailingly do. The fault, the blame, the cause of Moslem terrorism, hatred, and alienation lie not with us in the West, but with the cultural defects of Moslems themselves - and specifically of Moslem men.

Four months ago, on March 16, I told you about The Real Lockbox - a real fix of Social Security being devised by Republicans in Congress, superior to President Bush’s and designed to drive Democrats up a defensive tree. I then promised I would update you on its progress - and now I can report it is fast becoming legislative reality.

Let’s face the meaning of the Supreme Court’s 5-4 Kelo vs. City of New London decision: We have a fascist judicial system in place of a Constitution. We no longer have a Constitution, it has ceased to exist. In justifying their abolition of private property rights, John Paul Stevens writing for the majority of Anthony Kennedy, David Souter, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer, and himself - the Fascist Five - pronounced that “Local officials, not federal judges, know best in deciding whether a development project will benefit the community.”Taking him at his word, a New Hampshire businessman named Logan Darrow Clements sent a written request last week to city officials of the town of Weare, seeking their approval to build a hotel at 34 Cilley Hill Road. Such approval would entail eminent domain condemnation proceedings authorizing the seizure of the private home currently at this address. The owner of the home is Supreme Court Justice David Souter.

It’s summer, which means summer vacation, which means for some of you buzzing off to a distant time zone and getting wigged out on jet lag. For business travelers, jet lag can translate loss of mental acuity into loss of an important deal. For government folk, it can translate into failed negotiations or embarrassing misstatements to a foreign press. I’ve used a five-step jet lag avoidance method for some years now. I’ve given it to a number of corporate CEOs, diplomats, Capitol Hill staffers, Congressmen and Senators. They tell me it works. It works for me. Here it is and I trust it will work for you.

I received this terrific idea from TTPer Chris Landrum from Kennewick, Washington. It was in response to the No Apology article last week, describing how a number of folks at State and the Pentagon are sick and tired of our kowtowing groveling constant apologies to Moslems. Inspired by John Wayne’s famous line as Captain Nathan Brittles in She Wore A Yellow Ribbon - “Never apologize, son, it’s a sign of weakness” - these folks even sent a DVD of SWAYR to the White House. Chris Landrum’s idea is to have a SWAYR to the White House campaign - hundreds, hopefully thousands, of Americans ordering the movie at Amazon and having it sent to President Bush at the White House, together with a letter demanding No More Apologies to Moslems. Want to participate? It’s easy:

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.

Today is John Wayne’s 98th birthday. He was born on May 26, 1907 in Winterset, Iowa, weighing 13 pounds. His birthplace is a museum, and a few years ago I took my son Brandon to visit it. There was a guest book, opened to a page with the entry, in the entrant’s handwriting, Name: Ronald Reagan. Address: 1600 Pennsylvania Ave., Washington DC. To celebrate the birthday of a truly great American, let me tell you how John Wayne saved the Marine Corps from being disbanded after World War II.

The cutting-edge, ultra-tech, hyper-hip bible of the alpha geeks is Wired Magazine. If you want to be knowledgeable about the future of the Information Age, you have to subscribe to Wired. So it was with a great deal of satisfaction that I read a cover story in Wired’s current June, 2005 issue about a young physicist who was overthrowing Einstein and revolutionizing the concept of time. Satisfying, because To The Point subscribers learned about him almost two years ago, in September, 2003. The Wired article is entitled Time’s Up, Einstein, on pages 124-126, describing how a high school dropout in Wellington, New Zealand named Peter Lynds wrote a paper, "Time and Classical and Quantum Mechanics: Indeterminacy vs. Discontinuity," that challenges the foundations of modern physics. The paper was published in the August 2003 issue of the peer-reviewed journal Foundations of Physics. It took Wired a little under two years to tell its subscribers about Lynds. It took To The Point less than a month, in The 21st Century Einstein. Frankly, I think it is very cool for To The Point to be, in this case, more wired than Wired.

There’s been a lot of acute commentary on the Newsweek-in-the-media-toilet/Koran-in-the-Gitmo-toilet story. It makes the excellent point that rioting Moslems murderously freaking out over this cannot be looked upon with respect and seriousness. Just imagine, goes one analogy, if upon hearing Al Jazeera published a story about Al Qaeda sympathizers in Pakistan desecrating the Bible, Southern Baptists in Alabama went berserk with rage, attacking a Birmingham mosque and killing everybody inside. How tolerant and forgiving would world and American media be towards their humiliation and bruised feelings? But of course this would never happen, because Southern Baptists, like other Christians, are civilized. Once again, it turns out, Moslems have disgraced their religion with uncivilized behavior. There’s also been a lot of justified disgust directed at Newsweek for publishing the equivalent of yelling fire in a crowded theatre. The MSM’s reputation has been taken down another notch, which is a definite social good. Let’s hope Newsweek’s paid circulation drops concomitantly. Yet there is another silver lining to this sorry episode that may have long term benefits to our national security. It has to do with the identity of Michael Isikoff’s source for the KoranToilet story.

Now that John Bolton’s UN Ambassador nomination has been sent to the Senate floor, the hot question is: will they or won’t they? Will the Dems filibuster? Maybe, but more likely is they won’t, as it would all but guarantee the quick enactment of the stupidly-named “nuclear option” of ending judicial filibusters. Either way, the betting on Capitol Hill is that he will be confirmed.As he settles in to his new UN offices, don’t expect John Bolton to have been the least bit intimidated by the Dem’s vendetta against him, nor to lie low and not rattle anybody’s cage for a while. That’s not what GW is sending him to do at Turtle Bay. John has quite a list of cages he intends to rattle, and the first one belongs to France.

A number of US soldiers fighting in Iraq have become afflicted with a horrible disease called leishmaniasis (leesh-mun-eye-ah-sis). They get it from the bite of a sand-fly which injects a parasite into their bloodstream. The “cutaneous” version of the disease causes huge, ghastly, and painful boils on the face and other areas of the skin - thus the name, Baghdad Boils. The “visceral” version destroys the liver and other internal organs and can be fatal.Compounding the problem is that the treatment seems worse than the cure. It’s a 20-day therapy of being injected with sodium stibogluconate (commercial names: Pentostam or Stibanate), which can leave every joint in your body with screaming pain, plus give you unending blow-your-head-off migraines.There is some very recent research which indicates a way to greatly increase the effectiveness of the antileishmanial drug therapy while greatly decreasing its painful side effects. If you have any friends in the military, know of any soldier suffering from this affliction, or know any soldier serving in Iraq who may be at risk from sand-fly bites, you may want to make them aware of this.It involves the use of a common bioflavanoid called quercetin.

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!