Barack Hussein Obama probably wouldn't be president if he hadn't taken a strong stand against the war in Iraq, which gained him the support of the antiwar Left. But he also talked about another war, the war in Afghanistan.  That was the important war, he said.  He'd beef up the U.S. presence there.  Politically, it made a great deal of sense.  The moonbats, thrilled by his opposition to the war in Iraq, overlooked Mr. Obama's hawkish rhetoric about Afghanistan.  And no Republican could accuse him of being weak on national security.  He wasn't against fighting America's enemies; he just wanted to fight them in the right place. But a national security policy designed chiefly for its effects on domestic politics has its drawbacks.  President Obama says little about Iraq these days, since he's essentially following George W. Bush's strategy there. And Afghanistan -- where he has announced he will boost U.S. troop strength by 17,000 -- has become "his" war. That war isn't going well.

In the Age of Zero, let's talk about  protecting your life and various components of it. Let's start with communications. In the past I have written about PGP¸ Kryptel and other applications for security. I would encourage you to take a look at a new secure email web application I came across called  4SecureMail. It's put together on a high-end platform to provide 99.99% uptime using Athlon servers, enterprise-class Cisco networking gear, multiple Tier 1 backbone connections, fully redundant power and all of the usual bells and whistles you would expect to find in a 21st Century secure email provider.  These folks have put together a first class secure infrastructure.

The bartender here in the HFR Saloon always eyes me warily when I say off-the-wall things like, "It doesn't matter how much I drink today because I'll still stay sober." He refused to serve me anything but soda water until I explained myself.  "Well, nothing could be more sobering than what happened to America this week.  You know how they say that in Chinese, the word for ‘danger' or ‘crisis' is the same word for ‘opportunity'?" He nodded, I continued.  "One thing this entails is that the bigger the danger, the bigger the opportunity.  I'm not sure I can imagine a bigger danger to my country than its president purposefully planning to destroy it - and with the political power to do so." "The opportunity on the other side has got to be amazingly big to match that," he noted.  "What is it?" "To get rid of all this liberal-commie anti-American fascist Big Brother crap once and for all.  To replace the Moocher America we have now with a Free America, a Constitutional America." His brow furrowed.  "So you're saying that having a president out to destroy America is what it takes to wake people up and get them to save America?  Does that mean you're glad to see this guy in the White House?" I winced.  "Ouch.  Let me think about that, man.  I better stick to soda water today, huh?"   "Good idea," he observed.

Do you understand why well-known economists, including Nobel Prize winners, are on opposite sides of the debate about the stimulus package and what should be done about the recession? Not only Americans, but people everywhere are confused, largely because the economists who are writing and speaking about what should be done have such fundamental disagreements. There are two main schools of thought. One group is under the broad umbrella of the Chicago or Austrian school economists who are heavily influenced by the teachings of F.A. Hayek (1899-1992) and Milton Friedman (1912-2007).  The economists of the Reagan White House were of this school. The members of the other group are commonly known as Keynesians, who accept many of the teachings of John Maynard Keynes (1883-1946) and his disciples.  Mr. Obama's economists belong to this school. Both schools offer reasonable explanations for what causes and what solves recessions.  But there is one outcome for which Keynesians have no solution:  stagflation.  It turns out that's just where we're headed.