GOOGLE’S SECRETS – AND YOURS
Warren Buffett can feel confident about sinking his $4 billion into Israel - at least from an electronic-security point of view. I can say with utmost certainty that the country's most sensitive secrets are safely stowed away on secure servers, inaccessible to the public. Try as I might, I couldn't find any Word documents marked "top secret" regarding Israel's plans regarding Iran on the Ministry of Foreign Affairs Web site; no PowerPoint presentations on Israel's alleged nuclear weapons program on the Ministry of Defense site; no PDFs on future political plans on the main government site - nothing, nada, not a thing! Even using the special advanced "Google hacking" techniques I learned from Johnny, I couldn't get an untoward, scandalous or headline-making fact on any of the burning issues of the day. One less thing for Warren Buffett to worry about.
ISRAEL, IRAN, AND AUGUST 22
In military parlance, a "spoiling attack" is when you see your enemy mobilizing to strike you, you hit him first to throw him off balance. By responding more vigorously to the kidnapping of its soldiers and the rocket attacks on its cities than Hezbollah likely expected, Israel may have launched a spoiling attack on Iran. On July 20, Iran said it would reply on August 22 to the Western package of incentives for ending its nuclear program. For Westerners, the only thing peculiar about this is the length of time Iran is taking to respond, since for us, the date August 22 has no special meaning. But it may have more significance for Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
HOW TO SAVE AMERICA FROM BECOMING ARGENTINA
If you knew the U.S. government was going bankrupt primarily because of spending on Social Security and Medicare, and the only solutions were the following, which one would you pick? (1) Doubling individual and corporate income tax rates. (2) Immediately cutting Social Security and Medicare benefits by two-thirds. (3) Immediately cutting all federal discretionary spending (including defense) by 143 percent. (4) Reforming Social Security and Medicare by moving from the current defined benefit plans to a program of individual investment accounts, like the current 401(k) and Medical Savings Account (MSA) plans. Many leading economists of the political right and left have concluded the U.S. government will not be able to pay its creditors, including its current and future retirees, the full value of promised benefits, unless current policies are radically changed. So we must choose.
A LESSON LIBERALS NEVER LEARN
The Israeli-Hezbollah war wouldn't have happened if John Kerry were president, John Kerry told the Detroit News last Sunday. President Bush hasn't devoted the attention to the Middle East that he would have, Mr. Kerry told reporter Valerie Olander. Sen. Kerry didn't explain how his personal attention would have prevented Hezbollah's abduction of two Israeli soldiers, or its firing of rockets into Israeli cities, and Ms. Olander didn't ask. Sen. Kerry has misplaced confidence in his own persuasive powers, and in what can be accomplished by diplomacy. The lesson liberals like Kerry can never seem to learn is that diplomacy based on hubris and cowardice inevitably leads to failure.
CONCORDIA
This is K2, the highest mountain in the world next to Everest, at 28,250 feet. It is so inaccessibly remote in the Karakorum mountains behind the Himalayas on the border between Pakistan and China, that very few human beings have ever seen it. Last week I was privileged to take a small group of Americans to the base of K2 by helicopter. It was the first helicopter expedition ever to K2, which otherwise takes 10 days of very high-altitude trekking to reach. An enormous glacier flows from the south face of K2 called the Godwen-Austen glacier, which meets another huge glacier flowing from a mountain called Baltoro Tengri. The confluence of these glaciers is known to mountaineers as "Concordia." It is the consensus of the world's professional mountaineering community that at Concordia is the single spot of greatest scenery on planet earth. But Concordia could stand for so much more.
THE LUNACY OF A BRITISH LEGACY
The border between Pakistan and India is one thousand eight hundred miles long, running from the Karakorum-Himalaya mountains next to China all the way to the Indian Ocean. Along its entire length, there is one land crossing for foreigners, between Lahore, Pakistan and Amritsar, India, called Wagha. To make the crossing, you take a taxi to the Pak side of Wagha, where porters are waiting to carry your bags. After going through passport and customs control, you walk a thousand yards over bare ground to the Indian side, where your Pak porters turn over your bags to a swarm of Indian porters who fight amongst themselves to carry them. When the porters start grabbing your bags from each other, you have to physically intervene to keep your bags from being torn apart. It is over 100 degrees in the shade.
OBVIOUS TO A BLIND MAN
I suppose if you live long enough you get to see everything at least twice, and in recent days I've seen replays of two old blunders that I'd hoped I wouldn't have to endure again. The first is the Friend Who Has Gone Too Far, and the second is the Enemy Who Is Really Our Friend. The first time I saw the Friend Who Has Gone Too Far was in December 1981, a very long quarter-century ago. Reagan was finishing his first year in office, and the first signs of the fall of the Soviet Empire were bubbling to the surface in Poland, where the Solidarity trade union was challenging the Polish Communist regime. Pope John Paul II was using the word "solidarity" in some very provocative ways, and you could feel the earth shifting beneath the feet of the Soviets. It was pretty clear, even then, that if the Kremlin did not find an effective way of breaking Solidarity, the entire structure of the Soviet empire might well crack wide open. And so, late in December, as I recall, military rule was declared in Poland, Soviet military forces were moved to the borders, and Solidarity leaders were rounded up and arrested. And a liberal Republican Senator got on national television to excuse the Soviets.
THE ROAD TO AGRA
If I ask you to think of India, the image that most likely appears in your mind's eye would be the Taj Mahal. Arguably the most famous building in the world and considered by many to be the most beautiful structure mankind has ever created, it was completed in 1648 by the ruler of India, Shah Jehan, to immortally entomb his beloved wife, Mumtaz Mahal. There is a painful problem with this image, however, for the great majority of folks in India: the Taj Mahal isn't an Indian building. It's Moslem, and thus for Indians a symbol of Islamic imperialism. The Moslem invasion of India had begun with Mahmud of Ghazni (now in present-day Afghanistan) in 1001. Historian Will Durant observed:
The Mohammedan Conquest of India is probably the bloodiest story in history. It is a discouraging tale, for its evident moral is that civilization is a precarious thing, whose delicate complex of order and liberty, culture and peace may at any time be overthrown by barbarians invading from without or multiplying within.The Taj Mahal is in Agra, about 120 miles south of New Delhi - and it was on the road to Agra that I reflected on the extraordinary complexity of Indian history.
A WINDOW OF OPPORTUNITY
9/11 happened when Osama bin Laden looked at us, and thought we were ready to be had. We were politically divided, and squabbling over everything. We clearly were not prepared to take casualties in direct combat. The newly elected president seemed unable to make a tough decision. And so Osama attacked, expecting to deliver a decisive blow to our national will, expecting we would turn tail and run, as we had in Somalia, and expecting he would then be free to concentrate his energies on the defeat of local apostates, the creation of his caliphate, and the organization of Muslim revenge for the catastrophes of past centuries.
PROTECTING YOUR CHILDREN
A few of my friends caught their children on websites that I'll describe below. They asked me what to do about it. I did some searching on the Web, and this article is a compilation of what I found out. As you read you'll find it's really fearsome. The short answer is: Your kids aren't going to stop using MySpace and Facebook, but at least you can give them safety helmets and kneepads.