THE FUTURE OF ONLINE PRIVACY
The coming years will make you more vulnerable than ever What are the dangers of storing ever more e-mail, documents, photos and financial account information online? I first read interviews with experts and then designed several scenarios that depict what could happen in the next few years if technological innovation and public policy trends in three categories - online storage, location tracking and biometrics - remain on their current course. Tracking Your Location The scenario: The police are at your house on official business, your inbox is flooded with pornographic ads - and all you did was drive to the mall to buy an anniversary gift. Welcome to wireless location tracking in the year 2020. On Saturday morning, you jumped into your car and plugged in your new high-speed Internet phone. The phone downloaded data to the car's real-time holographic traffic map and guided you to the mall along the route with the least traffic. To find the jewelry store, you downloaded a map of the mall to your phone. The turn-by-turn directions took you past a new lingerie shop, so you wandered inside for a few seconds. Then you proceeded to the jewelry store, and in 15 minutes your shopping was done. A little later, you started receiving raunchy multimedia messages hawking sex toys. While you were inside the lingerie shop, the store's data reader pinged your phone via Bluetooth and then automatically bought your contact information from commercial data brokers. Now its affiliate, which sells novelty adult items, can legally market to you via e-mail, claiming an ongoing business relationship.
THE DEATH OF THE ARGUMENT FOR MAN-MADE GLOBAL WARMING
One year ago, in September 2005, you learned what is actually causing whatever global warming the earth is experiencing. Solar Warming explained the specific mechanism involved: the sun's increased magnetic activity deflecting the rain of cosmic rays upon the atmosphere, resulting in fewer clouds reflecting sunlight back into space and thus a warmer earth. This month, scientists at the Center for Sun-Climate Research at the Danish National Space Center in Copenhagen released the results of very well-designed and controlled experiments demonstrating the chemical mechanism of cosmic ray action upon cloud formation. Folks, this a big deal. These are the results of a controlled experiment by serious scientists, not some GIGO (garbage-in/garbage-out) computer climate modeling. They experimentally demonstrate how the cause of global warming or "climate change" is the sun, not us. The argument for man-made global warming is dead.
WHY SHOULD WE RESPECT OUR ENEMIES?
Freeman Dyson, who is a famous physicist and Professor Emeritus at the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton University, argues in the current issue of The New York Review of Books that the 9/11 Moslem terrorists are deserving of “respect” : "Yes, I wrote that we should respect our enemies as human beings in order to understand them. I do not retract or apologize for this statement. I would like only to add a more general statement, that our lack of respect for our enemies made it harder for us to deal with them effectively." Yet it needs to asked: Why should one respect someone as a human being? Does the mere fact of membership in the human species amount to some worthwhile achievement? No. Why then respect one merely for being human? Hitler was human, child molesters are human and it is pretty preposterous to consider them worthy of any sort of respect. So, that part of Professor Dyson's claim is arguably false. Let's take the other part. Why would lack of respect imply lack of understanding? Much of the world around us deserves no respect at all, yet we can understand it pretty well. As a physicist, while he understands them, does Professor Dyson respect the electron or the quark?
WHY IS NORTH KOREA OUR PROBLEM?
As the U.S. takes the lead in formulating the international response to North Korea's (apparently fizzled) nuclear test, there is a question which ought to be asked: Why is this our problem? In 1950, this was easy to answer. The fledgling democracy in South Korea was too weak to protect itself. North Korea was then an agent of an international Communist conspiracy. But that was more than half a century ago. The Soviet Union has collapsed. North Korea remains Stalinist, has a formidable military, and still dreams of conquering the South. But its objectives are peninsular, not global, and it has little likelihood of obtaining them, even without American intervention. That's because South Korea now has a formidable military, which could be made much more formidable if the South Koreans chose to do so. South Korea today has more than twice the population of North Korea, 24 times the national wealth. So why can't the South Koreans take care of the problem themselves?
THE IMMORALITY OF LOSING A WAR
Have Americans lost the will to win wars? Not just in Iraq, but anywhere? Do we really believe that being nice is more important than victory? It's hard enough to bear the timidity of our civilian leaders - anxious to start wars but without the guts to finish them - but now our military leaders have fallen prey to political correctness. Unwilling to accept that war is, by its nature, a savage act and that defeat is immoral, influential officers are arguing for a kinder, gentler approach to our enemies. They're going to lead us into failure, sacrificing our soldiers and Marines for nothing: Political correctness kills. It's all in the Army's new counterinsurgency doctrine laid out in Field Manual 3-24. The doctrine is so dishonest and cowardly that it's message is: Let our troops die, just don't hurt anyone's feelings.
THE COLORADO CANARY
The meta-story regarding the mid-term elections is how the Democrats can't wait to get to the voting booth to inflict electoral doom upon their enemies, while Republicans are so depressed they will either stay home or have to be dragged to the polls.
Maybe, but there's this Colorado canary in the Democrat coal mine that's warbling a contrarian song. In Colorado you can vote up to 30 days ahead of election day by absentee ballot. To do so you must of course request a ballot. The absentee ballots won't be counted until November 7th, but what is known is the number of requests for them. It turns out that the number of requests by registered Republicans is way up from past years while those from registered Democrats is way down. Here's more of the buzz heard in the halls of the Capitol Building three weeks out:
GOOGLE BOUGHT YOUTUBE: GOOD IDEA?
It has been perhaps a year and a half since I first heard of YouTube. The service is not quite two years old and already it's worth $1.6 billion (!) - at least it's worth that much to Google. My gut reaction to Google's pursuit and purchase of YouTube is that it was caught up in a second Internet boom that will undoubtedly go bust. Honestly, how can a business of any kind less than two years old be worth nearly $2 billion? Okay, Google is not driving a truck filled with money to YouTube's doors; this is a stock swap. Even so, value is value. On the other hand, Google may know what it's doing. YouTube has the most coveted online commodity of all: eyeballs - and lots of them. And every single set visits YouTube almost every day to see the latest crazy, unusual, wacky videos. I know kids of friends who do so. Their parents call them iVideots.
IF ONLY DEMOCRATS HATED KIM JONG IL AS MUCH AS GEORGE BUSH
If Democrats went after America's enemies with the relentless ruthlessness with which they attack Republicans, the Axis of Evil would be toast. No sooner had North Korea made its (either botched or faked) nuclear bomb test last weekend than Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid and Sen. Hillary Clinton were blaming it on "the failed policies of the Bush administration." Democrats tend to view foreign policy crises through the narrow prism of their impact on domestic politics. But the villain here isn't Bill Clinton or George Bush. It's Kim Jong Il. And what's important here is not which party controls the House of Representatives. It's whether we can prevent a second Korean War. The Democrats are behaving as if the cost of another Korean War with thousands of American soldiers dead is the price they'd willingly pay to gain control of the House.
IMPLODING IRAN
[This is the text of a speech I am giving on Friday, October 13 to an organization composed of prominent conservative leaders throughout the country called the Council for National Policy. --JW] How many of you here have been members of CNP since the 1980s and remember the critical role the CNP played in generating support for anti-Soviet freedom fighters? Please raise your hand. Keep them up, thanks - now, the rest of you notice who these folks are. Remember them, and after this panel, go up to them and ask them what it was like 20 years ago when the thought of collapsing the Soviet Union seemed completely off the wall. Yet it was the incessant, unrelenting, demand of thousands, millions, of conservatives who belonged to organizations led by members of the Council for National Policy, that enabled the Reagan Administration to support and supply with money, training, and equipment, anti-Soviet freedom fighters. And that turned out to be the key to winning the Cold War. I want to talk to you today about how you, as current members of CNP, can play the same role in winning the war on Islamofascist terrorism by ridding the world of its principal sponsor, the Mullahcracy ruling Iran.
CELEBRATING COLUMBUS AND WESTERN CIVILIZATION
Today, October 12, is the 514th anniversary of Christopher Columbus' landing on Guanahani (now known as San Salvador or Watlings) island in the Bahamas on October 12, 1492. Unfortunately, Columbus Day is for most Americans just an excuse for a three-day weekend, which is why it fell on Monday, October 9. What it should be is a commemoration and celebration of Western Civilization - which is why the Left hates Columbus and his holiday. Fortunately, North Korea's botched nuclear bomb explosion shooed the Columbus Day protestors off the newspaper pages and television screens. Thankfully ignored was the usual spectacle of American Indians using the holiday to denounce the White Man and his genocidal war-mongering culture-destroying earth-murdering imperialism, blah blah blah - with White Liberals joining in, masochistically condemning their own civilization. But they will be at it again next year, so let us suggest to them now that they abandon every vestige of the civilization they hate as so evil - for else they are bottomless hypocrites. Not just every material benefit - electricity, the wheel, and all post-Stone Age inventions. Every psychological vestige as well - starting with the very concept of American Indian or Native American or any other collective term. For the reality is that there were no Indians in America when Columbus discovered it.