Chapter Twenty-Seven: “I SHALL CUT OFF CORTEZ’S EARS!”
The Jade Steps Chapter Twenty-Seven: "I Shall Cut Off Cortez's Ears!" Over the next several weeks, the Spaniards marveled at how the Mesheeka accepted the loss of their gods. Perhaps, they surmised, it was because the Mesheeka had been taught by their priests that if the gods were not fed the blood of human hearts, the sun would not rise and the world would collapse into darkness and chaos. Day after day, week after week, there were no sacrifices and the sun kept rising. Maybe the priests were wrong. Maybe the new gods of the strangers were more powerful than the ones of old. Malinali heard these whispers, and did her best to encourage these thoughts among the Mesheeka. Then one afternoon, a worried Orteguilla came to see Malinali. "Doña Marina, I am afraid Montezuma is plotting something. He has been having meetings in secret with several of his nobles, which I am not allowed to hear. He keeps talking about how he must be free of his prison so he can perform the ceremonies of Tlacaxipeualiztli (tlah-kashee-pay-ooh-ah-leesh-tlee). What does this mean?" "It means the Aztec month of Tlacaxipeualiztli is about to begin. Sacrifices must be made to the god Xipe so plants will grow. Montezuma and the highest nobles must impersonate the gods in a sacred dance wearing a particular costume." She paused, sighed, and put her hand gently on the young boy's. "Thank you, Orteguilla, for coming to me and telling me of this. The costume Montezuma and the nobles wear for the dance is made of human skins, flayed from the bodies of captives. Tlacaxipeualiztli means The Flaying of Men."
FRYING PANS AND FIRES
We've all heard the expression "Out of the frying pan and into the fire," to go from bad to worse than bad. The question of the moment in America is: Will that be what voters do on November 7? Congress's summer recess ended this week, with Congressistas, Senatorials, and their staffers flooding back into town. The mood on Capitol Hill is not upbeat. The Pubbies know what a lousy job they've done, the Demmies terrified the voters will figure out they are a lousy alternative. That's why the electorate is in such a lousy mood: Let's see, frying pan or fire? An example of how demoralized conservative Republicans are in Congress was the shouting match that took place this morning during the GOP Caucus, a weekly meeting of all Republicans in Congress.
WHY WOULD ANY DECENT HUMAN BEING SUPPORT THE UNITED NATIONS?
[Tibor Machan and I have been friends for almost 40 years. I remember when he taught at Cal-State - and reminded him, when I read his column, that back then I had a bumper sticker on my car that simply said: CommUNism.] In 1972, I was not rehired at the Department of Philosophy of the California State University, Bakersfield, even though I fulfilled the requirement of finishing my dissertation and obtaining my PhD to be reappointed. I was mystified - I had a good publication record, my teaching went quite well as a beginner. So what was up? I had a friend in the office. She checked out the secret records they could still keep on people back then and learned that those records contained something totally irrelevant to my qualifications. I had written a letter to the editor of the local paper, The Bakersfield Californian, in which I argued that the United Nations is mostly a coercive international organization that lacks any moral or even political legitimacy.
WHY GOVERNMENT ALWAYS GETS BIGGER, NEVER SMALLER
Assume you are a mid-level bureaucrat in a government regulatory agency, and you know your pay and title depend on how many regulations you are responsible for administering, and the number of people who work for you. Do you think you would push for more or fewer regulations? Assume you are a corporate regulatory compliance officer, and again you know your pay depends in part upon the number of regulations you must comply with, and the number of people who work for you. Would you tend to favor a world with more or fewer regulations? Or, assume you are an elected politician, and a major scandal occurs because a financial manager has embezzled funds. Are you more likely to get coverage on the TV news if you say, "We already have laws against theft, and the authorities will take care of it," or if you say, "We need more regulations to stop greedy financiers"?
NUKE IRAN
Why isn't the world afraid of Jews With Nukes? It's terrified of the prospect of Mullahs With Nukes - but Israel already possess hundreds of nukes and no one freaks out about it. Least afraid are the Mullahs of Iran and their leader, Mahmoud Ahmadinutjob, who glories in threatening to wipe Israel "off the face of the earth" and arming its enemies like Hezbollah. The reason they are not afraid and the world is not worried about Jews With Nukes is what philosopher Ayn Rand called The Sanction of the Victim. She defined this as "the willingness of the good to suffer at the hands of evil." In other words, Ahmadinutjob is using the moral decency of Israel as a weapon against it. He is betting his country's existence that Jews are too virtuous to do to him what he most desires to do to them. He expects them to be sacrificial victims doomed by their own virtues. It is now being argued in Israeli halls of power that his assumption should be a fatal mistake. Atlas may be about to shrug in Jerusalem.
REINSTALL WINDOWS EASILY
The first thing to do is start saving Windows Updates locally for faster reinstalls. You can download XP updates as program files, save them on your hard drive, reload them when you need to, and even share them between computers. Begin with downloading Windows XP Service Pack 2. Keeping a reinstallable version of SP2 handy will save you more download time than all the other XP updates put together. Download SP2, or order the update on CD (note that the first of these two links begins the download automatically)
THE WORST EX-PRESIDENT
The State Department has granted a visa to Mohammad Khatami, the former president of Iran, to visit the United States. Mr. Khatami is coming this week chiefly to attend meetings at the United Nations. He also will speak at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard; at a function sponsored by the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) in Arlington, Virginia, and at the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C. And he will meet with former president Jimmy Carter. Mr. Khatami requested the meeting with Mr. Carter. Perhaps to say "thank you." Thanks to James Buchanan (1791-1868), Pennsylvania's unfortunate contribution to the presidency (1857-1861), Jimmy Carter can claim not to have been the worst president in U.S. history. But he is unquestionably the worst ex-president, snuggling up to every tyrant who will allow his buttocks to be smooched.
DEMOCRACY IN LIBYA?
Muamar Qadaffi has run Libya as an Islamic dictatorship since 1969. The history of his oppression and sponsorship of terrorism is long. Ronald Reagan called him "The Mad Dog of the Middle East." It took George W. Bush to bring Qadaffi to heel. After Bush chased Saddam Hussein out of Baghdad and into a spider hole, Qadaffi called up Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi and told him he didn't want to end up like Saddam. So Qadaffi came clean on his WMD program, the extent of which stunned the clueless CIA. He invited international inspectors to Libya, where they removed several tons of chemical weaponry, and dismantled an active nuclear weapons program. As a result, this past May 15, the State Department announced the US was restoring full diplomatic relations with Libya. Hotels in Tripoli and Benghazi are full of US oil execs and other businessfolk making deals. Yet Qadaffi remains a dictator and Libya the antithesis of a democracy. Until this week.
WHY LIBERALS ARE FASCISTS
Doesn't it seem odd that the kids who started the 60s anti-establishment protest riots on college campuses with the Free Speech Movement (Berkeley, 1964) are the college professors or politicians today who most vehemently suppress free speech among their students or constituents in the name of political correctness? How can this be? How can worshipping at the shrines of Diversity, Tolerance, and Multiculturalism result in trials and expulsions for students, or jail for citizens, who express ideas with which the worshippers are not in agreement? The answer is the intimate connection between Subjectivism and Fascism. And nowhere was this on display more than in California this week.
THE UNSUNG JEWISH NAVY
The Israeli navy rarely gets the spotlight, but it briefly drew attention in July when a Hezbollah anti-ship missile surprised a command vessel, killing four sailors. Then the coverage turned back to the war in the air and on the ground. Hearing only about what went wrong at sea, we missed a terrific, positive story. We've been missing it for years. The Israeli navy is the state's smallest military arm, with only 1,500 personnel on active duty and reservists rounding out crews. But the service has an enormous mission - which it's been executing quietly and superbly for decades. Which brings me to terrorists on jet skis...