NO APOLOGY
The consensus of film critics is that three of the four best Western movies ever made were those starring John Wayne: Stagecoach (1939), Red River (1948), and The Searchers (1956). (The fourth is Gary Cooper’s 1952 High Noon.) Many critics consider The Searchers to be one of the greatest movies, period, and has been the subject of numerous academic seminars. It is a lesser known John Wayne Western, however, that contains an important lesson for our relations with the Moslem world.Directed by John Ford, made in 1948, entitled She Wore A Yellow Ribbon, it stars Wayne as Capt. Nathan Brittles as a retiring Cavalry officer facing an Indian attack (The New York Times’ review at the time called Wayne’s performance “Oscar-caliber”). The memorable line is the advice he gives to a junior officer. It’s listed by Guinness as one of the top 100 film quotes of all time:
Never apologize, son. It’s a sign of weakness.It turns out that there is a growing number of aficionados of “SWAYR” who have bought the DVD at Amazon and taken this line to heart. What’s interesting about them is that they work at the Pentagon, the State Department, and the Bush White House.
OUR PATHOLOGICALLY ANTI-AMERICAN MEDIA
The headline on the top of the front page of the New York Times yesterday, May 26, was: "FBI told of Koran abuses." The wording of the headline and the prominence of the display give the casual reader the impression the story -- written by Neil Lewis -- was new, and that the story was true. Neither is so. Lewis' story was based on reports of interrogations by FBI agents of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay in 2002 and 2003. He noted in his third paragraph that "they are accounts of unsubstantiated allegations made by the prisoners under interrogation." The New York Times didn't mention that an al Qaeda training manual, captured a couple of years ago by British police, instructs detainees to make false charges against their captors. So why is so much of the media giving so much prominence to a recycled story of unsubstantiated charges made by America's enemies who have been told to make false accusations if captured?
SITH PEACE
In 1977, the original Star Wars morality play of heroes fighting for freedom against the evil Galactic Empire resonated with millions of people struggling for their own freedom against the Evil Empire of the Soviet Union. Now in Star Wars III, George Lucas wants folks to associate the Galactic Empire with America and the freedom-destroying dictator Palpatine with George Bush. So it was gratifying to see both adults and kids in the audience not taken in by this stupidity, and howl with derisive laughter when Anakin Skywalker becomes Darth Vader and wails “Noooooooooooooooooooo!” upon learning his wife has died. Despite its special effects eye candy, the movie is a joke, pathetically written and acted.. It does, however, contain one supremely educative moment. It’s not when Obi-Wan blurts out unintelligibly, “Only the Sith deal in absolutes” (as if the whole point of all six movies isn’t about the absolutes of the Sith as evil bad guys and the virtue of fighting against them). It’s Palpatine’s rationale for suppressing rebellion against his tyranny: When the rebels are defeated, there will be “peace.” Let’s hope Star Wars III teaches lots of people the difference between the “peace” that comes from submission and the peace that comes from freedom. Thus, lots of Moslems should see it. Earlier this month in The Golden Fleece of Freedom, we discussed how there was no word for peace in Russian. It turns out there is no word for peace in Arabic either.
MEXICAN NAZIS
Two weeks ago on May 14, a small group of folks staged a peaceful rally in Baldwin Park, a predominantly Hispanic Los Angeles suburb. It was to demand the removal of a monument to anti-white racist hatred and bigotry, which is on public property and was erected by the city council at taxpayer expense. Here is one of its inscriptions: 
They, of course, are the hated “Anglos,” the white European-Americans who “stole” the land from Mexico - who stole it from Spain who stole it from Indian tribes such as the Chumash (not the Aztecs, whose empire was in central Mexico, 2,000 miles away from LA), who stole it from other Indian tribes like the Shoshone. The rally was met by a far larger, violent counter-demonstration led by an organization of Mexican Nazis who call themselves Reconquistas. These are people who want to “reconquer” the entire American Southwest ceded to the US in 1848 and have it become part of Mexico again. One of the Reconquista chants was “Go back to Europe, go back to England, Gringos.” Another was, “Viva (long live) Zarqawi, the Gringo Killer,” in praise of arch-terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s killing American soldiers in Iraq. I first wrote about the Reconquistas two years ago in America’s Curse. Since then, they have become ever more explicitly and virulently pro-terrorist. The Baldwin Park incident this month is simply the latest example of how impossibly dangerous Mexican illegal immigration has become to America’s national security.
HOW JOHN WAYNE SAVED THE MARINES
Today is John Wayne’s 98th birthday. He was born on May 26, 1907 in Winterset, Iowa, weighing 13 pounds. His birthplace is a museum, and a few years ago I took my son Brandon to visit it. There was a guest book, opened to a page with the entry, in the entrant’s handwriting, Name: Ronald Reagan. Address: 1600 Pennsylvania Ave., Washington DC. To celebrate the birthday of a truly great American, let me tell you how John Wayne saved the Marine Corps from being disbanded after World War II.
MORE WIRED THAN WIRED
The cutting-edge, ultra-tech, hyper-hip bible of the alpha geeks is Wired Magazine. If you want to be knowledgeable about the future of the Information Age, you have to subscribe to Wired. So it was with a great deal of satisfaction that I read a cover story in Wired’s current June, 2005 issue about a young physicist who was overthrowing Einstein and revolutionizing the concept of time. Satisfying, because To The Point subscribers learned about him almost two years ago, in September, 2003. The Wired article is entitled Time’s Up, Einstein, on pages 124-126, describing how a high school dropout in Wellington, New Zealand named Peter Lynds wrote a paper, "Time and Classical and Quantum Mechanics: Indeterminacy vs. Discontinuity," that challenges the foundations of modern physics. The paper was published in the August 2003 issue of the peer-reviewed journal Foundations of Physics. It took Wired a little under two years to tell its subscribers about Lynds. It took To The Point less than a month, in The 21st Century Einstein. Frankly, I think it is very cool for To The Point to be, in this case, more wired than Wired.
DANGER IN THE HORN OF AFRICA, INDIFFERENCE IN FOGGY BOTTOM
As you are reading this, 300,000 Ethiopian fighters are pitched astride the border from 200,000 Eritrean soldiers, separated by less than 4,000 UN peacekeepers (a mission that incidentally costs taxpayers almost $200 million per year). Half a million heavily armed men facing each other with hate-filled eyes and itchy trigger fingers. Even a minor incident could spark all-out war. And a number of State Department bureaucrats seem determined to do nothing to prevent it.
DEMAGOGUERY DANGERS IN DEUTSCHLAND
It is common for politicians in trouble to seek scapegoats for their own incompetence and wrong-headedness, but when this begins getting widespread popular support, both the people's liberties and pocketbooks are in danger. Given its history, one would think Germany's people would be particularly resistant to demagogy. Unfortunately, that is not the case. Recently, Franz Muntefering, head of Germany's left-wing Social Democratic Party (the SPD), which also is the lead party in the governing coalition, accused business leaders of being "anti-social" and like "swarms of locusts." Rather than denounce him for attacking businesspeople and "international capital," other SPD leaders joined in the denunciations. The chairman of Lufthansa airline and a director of the "Invest in Germany" organization, Jurgen Weber, replied to the SPD leaders: "If it turns out that this criticism of capitalism has a fundamental nature, then we don't need an Invest in Germany organization any more."
PREVENTING THE NIGHTMARE: Terrorists Attacking America with Russian Nukes
In 2003, Sheikh Nasir bin Hamid al-Fahd, a prominent Saudi cleric close to al-Qaeda, provided a comprehensive religious opinion (fatwa) justifying the use of nuclear weapons against the United States, even it killed up to 10 million Americans, under the pretext that the U.S. is to blame for the deaths of 10 million Moslems.Over 20 million Moslems - 7% of the total population - live in Russia today. The increasing influence of Salafi/Wahhabi Islam among them may facilitate penetration of the Russian military-industrial complex by collaborators and sympathizers of terrorist organizations.Anti-Americanism pervades the Russian elite from the top down and is escalating in the media. A former senior Russian officials stated that "U.S. behavior [vis-à-vis Russia] is not that of a friend, but of an adversary... While we need to talk to the U.S., we need to keep in mind that it is an enemy." Such anti-Americanism may facilitate illicit transactions involving nuclear weapons or components in which the Russian seller or thief understands that the U.S. is the likely target.
SAVE THE WOMEN, SAVE OURSELVES
The brutal treatment of Iranian women by the Mullahcracy is a daily occurrence. As "Iran Focus" recently reported, "at least 54 Iranian girls and young women, between the ages of 16 and 25, are sold on the streets of Karachi in Pakistan on a daily basis," according to "a senior women's affairs analyst...speaking to a state-run news agency." The analyst, Mahboubeh Moghadam, added that there are at least 300,000 runaway girls in Iran right now, the result, in Moghadam's words, of "the government policy which has resulted in poverty and the deprival of rights for the majority of people in society."Professor Donna M. Hughes, at the University of Rhode Island, one of the few Western scholars courageous enough to keep reporting on these horrors, says that the enslaved women are typically sold to people in the Arab countries of the Persian Gulf, such as Qatar, Kuwait, and the United Arab Emirates. But the slave trade is not limited to the Islamic world.