HATING HORATIO
Ancient Rome's greatest historian was Titus Livius, known to us as Livy (59 BC-17 AD). In the Second Book of his monumental history of Rome, Ab Urbe Condita (From the Founding of the City), he tells the famous story of Horatio at the Bridge. In 510 BC, Rome was threatened with destruction from an invading army of Etruscans. All Romans living in the countryside had abandoned their homes and fled for protection inside the city. The city walls were heavily garrisoned, but the most vulnerable point was a wooden bridge, the Pons Sublicius, across the river Tiber and into Rome. When Etruscan forces focused their attack on the bridge, the Roman troops guarding it fled in fear - save for one man, a soldier named Horatius, whom we call Horatio. Watching the President's State of the Union speech last night, I thought of Horatio at the bridge. When I talked to Tony Snow, the president's spokesman today, I understood why.
CLEANING YOUR REGISTRY AND HARD DISK WISELY
I've discussed playing with the Windows Registry in the past. Tweaking the registry is risky but necessary. As a constant reader of what's new on the net, I found a new safe registry cleaner that's easy to use and is free. For Windows users, there's usually nothing riskier than playing with the all-powerful and awe-inspiring Registry. One wrong move - one incorrect click of the mouse, one letter, number or hash mark out of place - and you can kiss productivity good-bye, as you will be stuck for hours, if not days, reinstalling, recovering and retreading your computer's operating system and hard drive, seeking what once was, but has been lost. And yet, the Registry needs treatment, once in awhile. A gunked-up Registry can seriously slow down your computer, if not paralyze it altogether. Windows fix-it sites will all give you instructions on what to look for and how to clean things, but you have to be careful - one wrong move, and you know what happens. It takes guts, wisdom and expertise to work the Registry. It's no place to fool around if you don't know what you're doing. That's why I was so happy to get my hands on a new, easy to use, very safe, very wise and very free Registry cleaner...
THE SURGE IS ALREADY SUCCEEDING
Three interesting things have happened since President Bush announced plans to "surge" U.S. troops. First, al Qaeda appears to be retreating from Baghdad. Second, the radical cleric Moqtada al Sadr is retreating. Third, Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki is retreating from his support of al Sadr. And the surge has barely begun. Yet the Democrats say it has to fail.
THE COMING COLLAPSE OF VENEZUELA
If Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez deliberately intended to sabotage his nation's economy, he would be hard-pressed to do anything different from what he is now doing to his country. It has been widely reported that Mr. Chavez has been increasingly taking control of the oil, telecommunications and energy sectors, as well as the media. What has not been reported is the full extent of the corruption in Venezuela and how this ultimately will destroy the economy. The financial scandal taking place there is far bigger than Enron, and may ultimately even exceed the U.N. "oil-for-food" scandal, the biggest financial disgrace of all time. Venezuela has had a rapidly growing economy for the last few years, due to high oil prices, but the house of cards is about to collapse.
DEMOCRAT VULTURES
David Ignatius, the highly esteemed journalist at The Washington Post, wrote a revealing column last week based on an extensive interview with Democratic congressional leader Rahm Emanuel. Here is the last paragraph:
The secret for the Democrats, says Emanuel, is to remain the party of reform and change. The country is angry, and it will only get more so as the problems in Iraq deepen. Don't look to Emanuel's Democrats for solutions on Iraq. It's Bush's war, and as it splinters the structure of GOP power, the Democrats are waiting to pick up the pieces.This is vulture politics. Rahm Emanuel's Democrat Party is so bereft of a sense of national responsibility, that he apparently feels comfortable brazenly telling The Post that his plans for his Democrat Party is to not even try to stop things from getting worse in Iraq - so they can pick up the political pieces afterward. His is a party of vultures.
EATING THE FBI’S LUNCH
The FBI's bumbling in the war on terror, and the tendency of the FBI to promote the bumblers, has made it one of our weakest links in the chain of agencies tasked with protecting America's security. Foreign spies have been eating the FBI's lunch for years. Katrina Leung, for example, was permitted to pass along critical national secrets for years after she'd confessed to being a spy for Red China because the two FBI agents who were supposed to be monitoring her were sleeping with her. Neither of those agents was punished. The ghastly reality is that, for many senior people in the FBI, their careers come first, the reputation of the FBI second. The security of the United States is a distant third.
ISLAMOCOMMUNISM
This past week, the chief proponent of Jihadi Islam and the use of terror to force people to believe in his religion, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran, traveled to Latin America to create an alliance with three atheistic Communists: Hugo Chavez of Venezuela, Daniel Ortega of Nicaragua, and Rafael Correa of Ecuador. This emerging "Marxist-Islamist entente," as it has been described, has caught a lot of folks by surprise. How in the world, they ask, could Chavez toast Ahmadinutjob by hailing him as the leader of "a revolution kindred to the Venezuelan revolution: the Islamic revolution." What could the imposition of atheistic Marxism upon a society, Chavez's goal, have in common with the imposition of a theocracy? The answer must be, can only be for these puzzled folks, the bond of anti-Americanism. As an editorial in the conservative New York Sun expresses it:
That the left makes common cause with the Islamists is one of the bizarre facts of modern geopolitics. The only thing Marxists like Messrs. Chavez, Ortega, and Correa have in common today with the likes of Mr. Ahmadinejad is a hatred of America. That is the foundation on which the Marxist-Islamist scheme is formed and the motivation behind any actions it carries out.
The New York Sun is almost infinitely superior to the New York Times in its understanding of the world. It is well aware of the dangers of the alliance of Marxists and Islamists to America's national security. Yet the common bond between the two is far, far deeper than a simple emotion of hate. The bond is as deep as you get. It is metaphysical. That is because Marx and Mohammed share the same view on the nature of reality.
WEREWOLVES IN IRAQ
I think that, for the most part, Americans' knowledge of history comes from movies and television. It's hard to deal fully with real history in either medium. Hardly anyone knows, therefore, that after the death of Hitler in the bunker and the surrender of Germany in World War II, there was a vicious Nazi terrorist resistance to the occupiers of the Reich. Formed by remnants of the SS who called themselves the "Werewolves," they are described by Canadian historian Perry Biddiscombe in his book, The Last Nazis: "The Werewolves did considerable damage. Their...guerrilla warfare and vigilantism caused the death of several thousand people, either directly or through the...reprisals that they provoked. The property damage...equaled tens of millions of dollars." Big numbers in that long-ago world, big enough to constitute an "insurgency" every bit as worrisome as the Iraqi version, at least early on. And it provoked a brutal repression on our part.
CRYSTAL GAIL MANGUM
[One of the most infuriating aspects to the Duke Rape Case is the media's refusal to disclose the name of the woman involved. She is only identified as "the accuser," while the real victims in the case, the Duke lacrosse players, have had their names and pictures broadcast to every inhabitant of the planet. Not in this article. The woman's name is Crystal Gail Mangum. Google her name and you will get 16,000 hits. There is even a Wikipedia entry on her. So we are hereby happy to end the journalistic conspiracy and insert her name along with "accuser." ---JW] CBS's "Sixty Minutes" broadcast Sunday (1/14) showed many people the gross abuse of prosecutorial power in the Duke rape case. Durham district attorney Michael Nifong indicted three Duke University lacrosse players last April after a stripper who performed at a team party claimed she had been raped. The accuser, Crystal Gail Mangum, picked the three defendants from a photo lineup consisting only of lacrosse players, a violation of police procedures. (Clearly innocent people are supposed to be mixed in with suspects.) Liberals rushed to condemn the Duke lacrosse players because they loved the narrative: rich white guys abuse poor black woman. Some furious backtracking is taking place as evidence of their innocence mounts. A new verb, to "nifong," has been coined. It's a synonym for "to frame."
COAL AND KYOTO
There were a lot of responses to and questions about Arabia in America. After discussing them, we'll discuss how "global warming" is just a scam to de-industrialize America and has nothing to do with cutting world-wide CO2 greenhouse gas emissions. John Boland made a very informed and cogent case for the safety and practicality of nuclear power. Ryan M. asked about the role of natural gas, in light of The Natural Gas Solution from last May. Bill Gregory mentions the trillion barrels of oil in Colorado and Wyoming that can be extracted from oil shale with new in situ technology. While I am all in favor of more nuclear power plants, they produce electricity and not gasoline to run our cars. I focused on coal not for power plants but on coal-to-oil liquefaction plants to replace the 11 million barrels of foreign oil we import every day. The grotesque phoniness of the Left on global warming is most clearly demonstrated regarding coal. Pelosi Galore is forming a new House Committee on Global Warming, while Barbara Boxer is submitting a bill to ban all coal power plants in the country. It's all hate-and-blame America all the time.