Dr. Jack Wheeler
TYRANNY AND THE BOOGIEMAN OF ISLAM
As you can see, this woman is not Chinese. She’s European, a Celt. Although she looks young, she’s 4,000 years old, born before 2,000 BC - in what is now China. It turns out European Caucasians got to China before the Chinese. The lady is known as the Beauty of Loulan, where her mummy was found in the ruins of an ancient city on the eastern edge of the Takla Makan Desert. Archaeologists have unearthed hundreds of mummified remains from such ruins (many with blonde or red hair), and using DNA analysis, have determined that Caucasians populated the entire area, geographically known as the Tarim Basin, for a thousand years before Han Chinese arrived. The Chinese Communists hate this research and are trying to suppress it - for it supports the claim of the Uighur people who live in the Tarim Basin (the Chicoms call it Xinjiang Province) that the region does not belong to China and never has.
BOLIVIA’S ROAD TO NOWHERE
Remember this map in Bye-Bye Bolivia last April? A favorite protest tactic of Evo Morales’ socialist mobs is to block roads leading to Bolivia’s capital, La Paz. This may backfire big time. Serious candidates for the world’s scariest roads are the thin ribbons of asphalt that plunge off the Bolivian highlands to the lowlands. There are only two, and since the lowlands produce most of Bolivia’s wealth, they are the lifelines to all those protesting folk way up there in the Andes. So don’t be surprised if the guys in the lowlands, the targets of Morales’ demands to nationalize and expropriate their wealth, blow the roads and destroy those two thin lifelines. They won’t do it themselves. Brazilian Intelligence - ABIN (Agencia Brasileira de Inteligencia Nacional) - will do it for them.
THE FIVE-STEP JET LAG SOLUTION
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.
BACK TO AFRICA
It’s very easy to get bitten by the African bug, the one that compels you to keep coming back to the most primeval place on our planet. I took this picture in the Serengeti in 1971, I’ve been going back to Africa every chance I got ever since, and by the time you read this I’ll be there again. Africa has been a lot in the news this week. The G8 forgiving billions in debt by African countries; Little Bobby Mugabe, Zimbabwe’s depraved dictator, bulldozing thousands of poor people’s homes into rubble for not supporting him; President Bush hosting his counterparts from five African countries in the White House. One of them was Festus Mogae of Botswana. Bush hailed Botswana as an African model of democracy, and you have to give Mogae credit for this. What comes up for me, however, is the war the Botswana government has been waging against the last remaining cultural link humanity has with its original lifestyle, with our ancestors who birthed the human race, the Bushmen.
SEND SWAYR TO THE WHITE HOUSE
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 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.
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 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.
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.
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.
HOW JOHN WAYNE SAVED THE MARINES
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.
MEXICAN NAZIS
Two weeks ago on May 14, a small group of folks staged a peaceful rally in Baldwin Park, a predominantly Hispanic Los Angeles suburb. It was to demand the removal of a monument to anti-white racist hatred and bigotry, which is on public property and was erected by the city council at taxpayer expense. Here is one of its inscriptions: 
They, of course, are the hated “Anglos,” the white European-Americans who “stole” the land from Mexico - who stole it from Spain who stole it from Indian tribes such as the Chumash (not the Aztecs, whose empire was in central Mexico, 2,000 miles away from LA), who stole it from other Indian tribes like the Shoshone. The rally was met by a far larger, violent counter-demonstration led by an organization of Mexican Nazis who call themselves Reconquistas. These are people who want to “reconquer” the entire American Southwest ceded to the US in 1848 and have it become part of Mexico again. One of the Reconquista chants was “Go back to Europe, go back to England, Gringos.” Another was, “Viva (long live) Zarqawi, the Gringo Killer,” in praise of arch-terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s killing American soldiers in Iraq. I first wrote about the Reconquistas two years ago in America’s Curse. Since then, they have become ever more explicitly and virulently pro-terrorist. The Baldwin Park incident this month is simply the latest example of how impossibly dangerous Mexican illegal immigration has become to America’s national security.
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.
MORE WIRED THAN WIRED
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.
THE SILVER LINING OF THE KORAN IN THE TOILET
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.
CHAOS IN KWAREZM
Last August in To The Point, Ariel Cohen in Terror in Tashkent told you about two Islamist movements in Uzbekistan, the IMU (Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, a designated terrorist group) and Hizb-ut-Tahrir. What Uzbekistan dictator Islam Karimov has done with the stupidity of only which a Soviet apparatchik is capable, is to drive moderate Moslems into their arms. The Massacre of Andijan that took place last Friday, May 13, with Uzbek soldiers murdering hundreds of men, women, and children in cold blood, is only Karimov’s latest effort to do so. When he took power, he promptly blew the most monumental opportunity in the Moslem world to create a modern Islam. As the head of the Soviet Communist Party in Uzbekistan, Karimov seized power as the USSR dissolved into its constituent Republics in 1990. His primary goal since then has been to hold on to that power at all costs, turning Uzbekistan into a police state. As a Soviet apparatchik, he has no understanding of economics, no appreciation for the consequences of destroying the environment, and no capacity to prevent his paranoia from becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy. Karimov’s standard rationale for power is holding up the boogeyman of terrorist Islam. “I am the only thing in the way, I am the only man capable of preventing a Taliban takeover of Uzbekistan,” he claims. On the contrary, he may have made it inevitable.
BOLTON’S FIRST CAGE
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.
RELIEF FROM BAGHDAD BOILS
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.
PRETENDING TO BE HAPPY
Last week was the 13th birthday of my youngest son, Jackson. One evening a few days before, I was engrossed in writing on the computer when my wife reminded me it was Jackson’s bedtime. He was in bed reading, waiting for me to kiss him goodnight. As I walked down the hall towards his room, my brain was filled with thoughts about the article I was working on. I was on autopilot and all I could think about was what I would write when I got back on the computer. For some reason, I stopped and stood still. Somehow, an extraneous thought had popped into my consciousness from nowhere. It seemed just a moment ago when he was a little boy. Now, in just a few days, Jackson would become a teen-ager. The time was not far off when he will be too big a kid for me to kiss him goodnight. The time was not far off when he will not be down the hall at all.
THE GOLDEN FLEECE OF FREEDOM
When you were a kid, do you remember reading the great epic of Greek mythology called Jason and the Argonauts? Sent on a mission he is not expected to survive by the man who has usurped his throne, Jason assembles a crew of heroes, including Hercules, Orpheus, Castor and Pollux, and sails in the great ship Argo across the Euxine Sea to the distant land of Colchis to capture the legendary Golden Fleece.Its a marvelous adventure story which the ancient Greeks believed was not myth but true. And sure enough - it turns out that Colchis was a real place and there really was a Golden Fleece. At the east end of the Black Sea (the Greeks called it the Euxine), there is a range of huge mountains called the Caucasus. The mountain streams that poured down the Caucasus and into the Euxine carried so many particles of gold that the folks who lived there - the Colchians - would peg sheep skins in the streams to trap the gold particles in the wool. Colchis is one of the most ancient lands in the world. Its where the original Caucasians came from. Today it is called Georgia. This week, George Bush sailed in Air Force One to modern Colchis to be wildly welcomed by hundreds of thousands of Georgian Argonauts thanking him for rescuing the Georgian Golden Fleece from its former conqueror, Russia.The people of Georgia recognize George Bush as the savior and protector of freedom that he is. Why cant the Russians? Churchill said Russia was an enigma wrapped in a riddle inside a puzzle. Why cant they live in peace with their neighbors instead of always wanting a piece of their neighbors? Part of the answer must lie in there being no word for peace in the Russian language.
ITS TIME! IN MINSK AND MOSCOW
Next week, the President of the United States will stand next to the President of Russia in Moscow’s Red Square commemorating the end of World War II. Last week, you learned in No Apology, No Future that on his way to and from Moscow, Bush will meet with the leaders of former Russian colonies Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, and Georgia on how to end the dictatorship of Aleksandr Lukashenko in Belarus. The Kremlin has publicly voiced its displeasure with these meetings. Yet it ought to be far more concerned with an unknown, anonymous student alliance that has successfully overthrown autocrats in four ex-Soviet states, and now has Belarus and Russia itself in its gunsights. While its constituent student groups have names, the alliance itself has no name and no leader. Here is its history:
INSULATED FROM HONESTY: The Quarter-Trillion Dollar Asbestos Criminal Conspiracy
In the past dozen years, 700,000 people have sued over 8,000 companies, schools, and municipalities for asbestos-exposure damages. In 2003, some 110,000 individual claims were filed in that year alone. Asbestos litigation has bankrupted over 70 corporations, costing 60,000 jobs, and forced companies to pay out over $70 billion in court judgments and settlements. The suits were filed as “class action” lawsuits by trail lawyers, who of course got most of the money. The litigation is predicted to eventually produce as many as 3 million individual claims, with a final total of $200 to $300 billion paid by businesses and insurance companies in judgments - or by the taxpayers via Arlen Specter’s bill in the Senate should those companies go bankrupt which many will. That’s over a quarter of a trillion dollar pot of ripped-off gold at the end of the trial lawyers’ rainbow. And over 95% is willful fraud. The quarter-trillion dollar asbestos litigation is a criminal conspiracy between plaintiff trial lawyers and the medical doctors they bribed to fake the evidence.
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!
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.
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.
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.
LINDER’S 16TH PROBLEM
One of the very first “Liberation Links” we put up at the inception of To The Point was to John Linder’s FairTax. John is a Republican Congressman from Georgia who has authored a bill, HR 25 for the 109th Congress, that would in his words, “repeal all corporate and individual income taxes, payroll taxes, self-employment taxes, capital gains taxes, estate taxes and gift taxes - and replace it with a revenue-neutral personal consumption tax.”If the FairTax were to become law, the IRS would cease to exist, and we would pay our taxes like we buy a gallon of gasoline. Yes, that gallon and just about everything else would cost 23% more in a national retail sales tax - but since business-to-business transactions are not taxed, nor would businesses be paying corporate taxes or the employers’ share of payroll taxes, consumer prices would drop by at least that 23% if not much more. The extent of the explosion of increased prosperity that would happen throughout America if the FairTax were to replace the IRS is difficult to exaggerate. Let’s put it this way: The FairTax would be the single greatest act of wealth creation in the history of man.We are now fast approaching a tipping point of acknowledgement that the federal tax code is irretrievably broken and has to be replaced. Linder’s FairTax is by far the best fix. Except there’s this one little problem - actually, it’s the 16th problem.
THE SAHARA SNOWSTORM
It is obvious to anyone with open eyes that the Grey Lady of the New York Times is a liberal propaganda sheet rather than a real newspaper. The examples are legion of its pushing stories twisted to the left. But equally important are stories it refuses to report, that it doesn’t want its readers to know. On January 26-27, 2005 there was a tremendous snowstorm in the Sahara Desert. Much of the Sahara in Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia were blanketed by an enormous snowfall, the worst in over half a century. Here are the NASA satellite photos.You would think a snowstorm in the Sahara would be news - but you never heard about it because such a story conflicts with the liberal secular religion of Global Warming.Here’s another example: The Kirkuk-Ceyhan pipeline has been pumping oil from northern Iraq to Turkey’s oil terminal at such a rate now that Iraq is back to just about 100% of pre-war oil production. It’s one reason for oil prices dropping off the spike of nearly $60, and heading below $50. But such a story, folded into the larger story that security is improving in Iraq so that the country will be exporting well over 2 million bpd by fall, conflicts with the liberal media con that the world economy is failing and oil is rising because of President Bush (oh, yes - and now, according to Nancy Pelosi, also Tom DeLay!)Just two small examples why you can understand the world far better by subscribing to To The Point instead of the New York Times…
VICTORY AND CERTAINTY
At the newly-opened World War II Memorial in Washington, there are inscribed in stone these words of FDR:
No matter what else a contemporary conservative may think of FDR, he was not embarrassed to be American. It is inconceivable that a modern liberal, his brain filled with the goo of moral relativism, multicultural diversity, and the compulsion to Blame America First, could demand that America’s “righteous might” achieve “absolute victory” over its enemies. What characterizes this statement is moral certainty, the sure and certain conviction that America was in the right and the Nazis and Imperialist Japanese were in the wrong with no doubt or equivocation. The “Greatest Generation” of Americans was called such because its members were motivated by this conviction.Americans will never entrust their security to a president who doesn’t grasp this, who embraces moral relativism and rejects moral certainty - or at least seems to. If a Liberal Democrat arose to embody the undiluted patriotism of FDR, the door to the White House would be open to him - or her - especially if he - or she - could convince most folks such an embodiment was real while slyly winking to the liberal elite that it’s a con.
THE CHINESE GLASS HOUSE
This past weekend, the Chinese Communist government organized a protest demonstration in front of the Japanese Embassy in Beijing. Under the watchful eyes of Chinese security agents and police, the young protestors were encouraged to throw stones at the embassy in protest over the latest Japanese history textbook continuing to omit mention of Japanese atrocities in China during World War II.Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao, on a charm offensive in India at the time of the protest, told reporters in New Delhi that “Only a country that respects and takes responsibility for history can win over peoples’ trust, in Asia and the world at large… (the protest in Beijing) should prompt deep and profound reflection in Japan.”A Japanese response to the Chinese accusations will soon be forthcoming. There will be bland public statements, such as Prime Minister Koizumi’s to the Kyodo News Agency: “Any country can face criticism, but it is not good to let confrontation heighten because of that.” Then there will be the unofficial response, a private letter to Wen Jiabao on Koizumi’s official letterhead, which notes:
I, along with many of my fellow Japanese citizens, must admit to being astounded at your admonishing us to “take responsibility for history,” and to engage in “deep and profound reflection” on our history. Astounded because you pretend not to see how much this advice applies to you and the Communist Party of China.There is an old English proverb of which I am sure you are aware: People who live in glass houses should never throw stones. The government of the People’s Republic of China is such a glass house.The letter is going to be faxed, emailed, mass-reprinted and covertly distributed to millions of folks in the People’s Republic by Taiwan Chinese agents who have gotten a copy. Here it is in full:
HILLARY’S WAR ON DELAY
The most powerful Congressmen have, in addition to their regular offices in one of the House Office Buildings (Cannon, Longworth, or Rayburn) on the south side of Capitol Hill, a private office in the Capitol itself. It was in such an office earlier this week that I asked a member of the House leadership about the MSM (mainstream media)/Democrat vendetta against his colleague, Tom DeLay.“Hillary’s fingerprints are all over it,” came his response. “She has no intention of having to deal with an opposition party controlling the House as her husband did for six years and Ronald Reagan did for eight. She has a very clear plan for seizing control of the entire United States government, which includes orchestrating Democrat control of the House in 2006 so it is firmly in place when she is elected president in 2008.”It is, then, at Hillary’s direction that the Washington Post, the New York Times, and the entire Liberal Media apparatus are waging a relentless war upon House Majority Leader Tom DeLay.
BYE-BYE BOLIVIA?
This map of Bolivia may about to become obsolete: 
For some time now, a lot of Bolivians have been conducting a “Gas War,” blocking roads, demonstrating in cities like El Alto and Cochabamba to prevent the export of Bolivian natural gas by foreign companies. The fellow coordinating the protests is Evo Morales, a Marxist prot�g� of Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez, the leader of the MAS (Movement Towards Socialism) Party, and also the leader of coca leaf growers (the stuff that’s made into cocaine). The protests brought down the presidency of Gonzalo Sanchez do Lozada in October 2003 and continue to escalate: 820 in the last 17 months. The current government of Sanchez’s successor Carlos Mesa in teetering. There’s just one problem for Morales and Chavez. The Bolivians who are protesting are not the Bolivians who live where the gas is. Bolivia is about to split in two.
NOW THERE IS ONE
We only recognize giants when they are gone, heroic ages when they are past. The day will come when America’s children will learn that the 1980s was such an age, bestrode by three giants who together rid the world of one of the great evils of history, the Soviet Union. They were Ronald Reagan, Pope John Paul II, and Margaret Thatcher. Now, only one is left. We mourned the passing of Ronald Reagan last year, Pope John Paul’s this, so before we mourn Lady Thatcher’s, who turns 80 this October, let us acknowledge the incalculable debt those who live in freedom today owe to this triumvirate of truly extraordinary human beings. It is easy to believe the hand of Providence set them on history’s stage one after the other in the short space of two years, exactly at the time America and the West was on the verge of surrender to the seeming inevitability of Soviet power. Easy to believe with hindsight. But at the time,a Polish priest, an English woman commoner, and an American movie actor were about to confront the most evil power in the world. How off the wall do you want history to get? Truth is not simply stranger than fiction, it is more dramatic and awe-inspiring.
THE POPE IN CHINA
If you make your way to the northwestern tip of Yunnan province in China, drive from Dali to Baoshan, take a four-wheel drive track up the stunningly beautiful Salween River all the way to within a few miles of Tibet, then hike about three hours up into the mountains, you’ll come to the village of Baihanluo. In this incredibly remote place, you’ll come upon this: 
A Christian church. A Catholic Church to be specific, built in the 1880s by French Catholic missionaries who had trekked from French Indo-China. Still lovingly cared for by the Bai and Lizu tribespeople (not Han Chinese) who live here, it remains a place of great spiritual tranquility.
RED ZIMBABWE
It used to be called Rhodesia, named after its colonial founder, Cecil Rhodes. Before that it was Southern Rhodesia, distinguished from Northern Rhodesia, now called Zambia after the Zambezi River. It was one of the most beautiful and productive countries in the world when I was first there in the early seventies. Now it is hell on earth. It is, of course, Zimbabwe.As most all African countries, it is a national fiction, a colonial construct with no historical or cultural viability as a country. It has been run since “independence” in 1980 by one of the world’s most racist dictators on earth, Robert Gabriel Mugabe, who changed Rhodesia’s name to Zimbabwe after the ruins of a stone fortress built 800 years ago by the Karanga people.All elections are completely rigged by Mugabe’s party, the ZANU-PF. The parliamentary elections held today will be no exception. It was patently rigged elections that caused the recent overthrow of the corrupt governments in Georgia, Ukraine, and last week in Kyrgyzstan. These were hailed as “velvet” revolutions, peaceful and bloodless. You can have no such hope for Zimbabwe. Africa doesn’t do bloodless.
RESPITE FROM LUNACY
I just returned from ten days on the Nile in Egypt. It was a special experience to see it once again, this time through the eyes of my 12 year-old son Jackson. A wonderful side-benefit to such an experience is that you get to ignore newspaper headlines and all the general craziness of the world, if only for a few days. I didn’t read a single paper or magazine while I was gone. So when I arrived back home to wade through those that had piled up in my absence, one lunatic event after another kept popping out at me. After plenty of goofy international headlines, my laughing fits continued with stories here in the US. 59 former State Department diplomats have written a letter demanding the Senate not confirm John Bolton as Ambassador to the UN. Among the signers were Princeton Lyman, Monteagle Stearns, and Spurgeon Keeny. These weirdo first names are not made up inner city jive monikers like Paluja Ratoomba. Only Ivy League ultra-blue-blood aristocrat pansies get names like that. I’m sure Bolton is worried sick that a bunch of over-the-hill Little Lord Fauntleroys are scared he is going to explain reality to the representatives of Third World dictatorships. But then the lunacy stopped being funny. The Bush Brothers’ refusal to prevent Terri Schiavo’s killing will do lasting political damage to them both.
EARTH TO SPACESHIP PUTIN
The White House is becoming increasingly concerned about Pootie-Poot. He actually said point-blank to one of Bush’s key advisors: “Mr. Bush is in no position to criticize me on my actions towards the Russian press - look at how he fired Dan Rather.”
CLEOPATRA WAS A BLONDE
No, this is not a blonde joke. If you want one of those, go to this week’s Humor File. Cleopatra was in fact a blonde. That’s because she was not Egyptian. She was a Macedonian Greek, with hair as blonde as Alexander’s. Alexander conquered Egypt in 332 BC, then went on to subdue all of the Middle East. When he died nine years later, his just-conquered empire was fought over and carved up by his generals. The one who ended up running Egypt was Ptolemy (367-283 BC). Declaring himself Pharaoh, he founded the Ptolemaic Dynasty, with twelve Ptolemies in succession, many of whom had wives named Cleopatra. The Cleopatra we know, lover of Julius Caesar and Marc Antony, was the daughter of Ptolemy XII, and entitled Cleopatra VII (69-30 BC). There was not a drop of Egyptian blood in the Ptolemies. They remained 100% Greek, including the Queen of the Nile herself Cleopatra. Can you imagine Elizabeth Taylor as a blonde? It kind of shakes up your image of history. I am writing this overlooking the Nile in Cairo. The Pyramids of Giza are in the distance. If there is one thing omnipresent in Egypt it’s history - and most all of that history is old, in more ways than one. For 3,000 years, Egypt has been a sleeping giant. Now it may be about to reawaken.