FORWARD AWAY!
We are happy to announce a new feature for To The Point. A lot of you have expressed frustration that they could not easily forward a Members Only article to their friends. There is an email function, but to access an emailed article, you had to be a TTP member yourself. The only other way was to copy and paste an article into the text body of an email message. Our problem was that an emailed link to one article in To The Point would open up access to the entire site. We solved this with software providing a "one-time use" for just that article. Here's how it works. All TTP articles have two small icons in the top right corner, one for Print, one for Email. For any article you'd like to email to a friend or friends, just click on the icon and enter your friend(s) email address(es). Add your name, address, and whatever message subject you want. Push send. That's it. Your friend will get a link which will bring up the article on the To The Point webpage when he clicks it. Your friend has full access to that article - but only that article. He or she is in the site for just this "one-time use." Hopefully, they will benefit so much from the article they will be persuaded to subscribe themselves! But there's no sales pitch attached, just the article itself. So many of you have asked for this - wanting to share the wealth of To The Point - and now we can oblige. So feel free to forward away!
ARAB TRANSPARENCY
Indonesia, as per Will Indonesia Save Islam?, is not the only place in the Moslem world struggling against Jihadi Islamism. It turns out that there are hosts of folks in the Arab world who oppose the Jihadis, the Saudi Wahhabis, the Salafists who want a Dark Ages Islam. Now they have a voice. It's an independent Arabic website called Middle East Transparent. There are English and French versions (click on "English" in the top banner), but many of these articles are by Westerners. It is articles by Arabs written in Arabic that make this site so influential. "Metransparent" gets around 50,000 unique visitors a day, almost all from Moslems living in the Arab world. There's nothing else like it - for it gives voice to Arab writers still residing in countries with no intellectual freedom. These are not exiles safely pontificating from Paris coffee shops and London salons. These are men - and women - who have the courage to speak out under their own names from within Syria, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Yemen, Libya, Algeria, and every other Arab nation.
MICROSOFT ONENOTE: The Best Personal Organizer
Many programs have been written over the years to help computer users organize their contacts, to-do lists, notes and progress, to link Web sites to certain topics, and to offer a variety of other activities. These programs include Microsoft Outlook itself. In recent years, however, the demands on such programs have become increasingly severe, including video, audio, sharing content and allowing others to revise content with all the revision capabilities of Microsoft Word. It is unusual for Microsoft to get something right the first time, but the program I use very successfully is Microsoft OneNote, an add-on to Microsoft Office. If you aren't a Premium Subscriber to Microsoft Developer Network (MSDN) Downloads, as I am, you can buy it separately at $99. It is well worth the money. Here's why.
WHY IS MOOKIE STILL ALIVE?
Why is the Moqtada al Sadr - nicknamed "Mookie" by our troops - still alive? That this question can still be asked illustrates why things are going south for the U.S. in Iraq. The Moqtada al Sadr is a creature of Iran, which funds his militia. Twice before (in April and August of 2004) he ordered uprisings against U.S. troops. At the time, there was a warrant out for his arrest for the murder of (the genuinely moderate) Shia cleric Ayatollah Abdul Majid al Khoei, who was gunned down by Mahdi army members in April, 2003. "Mookie" al Sadr has the blood of dozens of Americans, and thousands of Iraqis, on his hands. There is evidence he has been coordinating with al Qaeda. Yet al Sadr is not dead. He is not in prison. He is in the government. And people wonder why U.S. policy in Iraq is failing.
WILL INDONESIA SAVE ISLAM?
There are 245 million folks in Indonesia. 88% of them, or 215 million, are Moslem, comprising the largest Moslem population on earth. Just 8% of Indonesians are Christian, 2% are Hindu, and only 1% are Buddhist. Yet the most famous landmark of Indonesia - the archaeological wonder of Borobudur - is Buddhist. In fact, it is the world's largest Buddhist monument. Indonesia's most famous tourist destination and most famous culture is the island of Bali. The people of Bali are not Moslem. They are Hindu. Indonesia used to be Buddhist and Hindu, and is a long ways from Arabia. How did this place become Moslem? Answering that question may lead us to a surprising conclusion: Our focus in the War on Islamic Terrorism has been the Middle East, then secondarily with fears that Europe is becoming Eurabia. But it may well turn out that this war will be won or lost in Indonesia.
BORIS. BILL, AND MONICA: TROUBLE FOR HILLARY?
Will the saga of the world's most famous fellatrice return to haunt Hillary in 2008? There's this fascinating whisper making the Washington rounds that says yes. While convoluted and circumstantial, a number of plugged-in Washingtonians believe it. The story starts with Boris Yeltsin. Yeltsin was President of Russia from its emergence after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 to 1999. In October of 2000, part three of his autobiography was published, Midnight Diaries. In it, there was an astounding revelation: That in "late 1996," after Bill Clinton's re-election in November, he (Yeltsin) received a highly classified report from his Foreign Intelligence Service (Russian acronym SVR, formerly a branch of the KGB). Russian intel had learned that the President of the United States was having an affair with an intern named Monica Lewinsky. This was over a full year before the world learned of the scandal via the Drudge Report internet website on January 19, 1998. The President of the United States was about to be blackmailed.
NORTH KOREA: THE NEXT CHRISTIAN NATION IN ASIA
2008. That's the number that dooms North Korea's lunatic tyrant Kim Jong-il. If there's one thing the Chicoms in Beijing are not going to let anyone screw up, it's their coming-out party to the world, the 2008 Olympics. They are not about to tolerate some nuclear fruitcake causing a million-death war on their doorstep. That's why they are studying Romanian history, circa 1989. That was the year that communist generals in the Securitatae (secret police) staged a putsch and seized power after executing Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu and his wife Elena. Their death by machine-gun was videotaped. Baby Kim has a copy, and is requiring all his subordinates to view it. It's to teach them a lesson, but you'd think that it would give them ideas instead. It's a good bet that the Chicoms will soon be instigating a Romanian-type overthrow of Baby Kim and installing a new regime in Pyongyang. It won't be a pro-West democracy promising disarmament and union with South Korea - but it will be far less belligerent and far more peaceful. Such a regime will be a colony of China and will resist demands for genuine democratic elections. What it won't be able to resist is its being rapidly Christianized.
THE FUTURE OF ONLINE PRIVACY
The coming years will make you more vulnerable than ever What are the dangers of storing ever more e-mail, documents, photos and financial account information online? I first read interviews with experts and then designed several scenarios that depict what could happen in the next few years if technological innovation and public policy trends in three categories - online storage, location tracking and biometrics - remain on their current course. Tracking Your Location The scenario: The police are at your house on official business, your inbox is flooded with pornographic ads - and all you did was drive to the mall to buy an anniversary gift. Welcome to wireless location tracking in the year 2020. On Saturday morning, you jumped into your car and plugged in your new high-speed Internet phone. The phone downloaded data to the car's real-time holographic traffic map and guided you to the mall along the route with the least traffic. To find the jewelry store, you downloaded a map of the mall to your phone. The turn-by-turn directions took you past a new lingerie shop, so you wandered inside for a few seconds. Then you proceeded to the jewelry store, and in 15 minutes your shopping was done. A little later, you started receiving raunchy multimedia messages hawking sex toys. While you were inside the lingerie shop, the store's data reader pinged your phone via Bluetooth and then automatically bought your contact information from commercial data brokers. Now its affiliate, which sells novelty adult items, can legally market to you via e-mail, claiming an ongoing business relationship.
THE DEATH OF THE ARGUMENT FOR MAN-MADE GLOBAL WARMING
One year ago, in September 2005, you learned what is actually causing whatever global warming the earth is experiencing. Solar Warming explained the specific mechanism involved: the sun's increased magnetic activity deflecting the rain of cosmic rays upon the atmosphere, resulting in fewer clouds reflecting sunlight back into space and thus a warmer earth. This month, scientists at the Center for Sun-Climate Research at the Danish National Space Center in Copenhagen released the results of very well-designed and controlled experiments demonstrating the chemical mechanism of cosmic ray action upon cloud formation. Folks, this a big deal. These are the results of a controlled experiment by serious scientists, not some GIGO (garbage-in/garbage-out) computer climate modeling. They experimentally demonstrate how the cause of global warming or "climate change" is the sun, not us. The argument for man-made global warming is dead.
WHY SHOULD WE RESPECT OUR ENEMIES?
Freeman Dyson, who is a famous physicist and Professor Emeritus at the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton University, argues in the current issue of The New York Review of Books that the 9/11 Moslem terrorists are deserving of “respect” : "Yes, I wrote that we should respect our enemies as human beings in order to understand them. I do not retract or apologize for this statement. I would like only to add a more general statement, that our lack of respect for our enemies made it harder for us to deal with them effectively." Yet it needs to asked: Why should one respect someone as a human being? Does the mere fact of membership in the human species amount to some worthwhile achievement? No. Why then respect one merely for being human? Hitler was human, child molesters are human and it is pretty preposterous to consider them worthy of any sort of respect. So, that part of Professor Dyson's claim is arguably false. Let's take the other part. Why would lack of respect imply lack of understanding? Much of the world around us deserves no respect at all, yet we can understand it pretty well. As a physicist, while he understands them, does Professor Dyson respect the electron or the quark?