Ten years ago, in 1993, Sylvester Stallone made a movie entitled Demolition Man .  He played a Los Angeles super-cop in the late 90s who is framed and sentenced to being frozen in suspended animation.In 2032, he is revived to solve an unprecedented crime wave.  He knows nothing of what has happened in the intervening 35 years.  Stallone's partner is a lady cop played by Sandra Bullock.  As they are driving down a LA street, Stallone asks where they are going."We are going two more blocks to turn left at the Schwarzenegger Presidential Library, then continue..."Stallone interrupts her.  "What did you just say about a library?" he asks."Well," Bullock explains, "After we passed the 32nd Amendment to the Constitution which allowed a naturalized citizen to become president..."Stallone interrupts her again.  "You mean that guy..."  He shakes his head with weary incredulity, waving off the rest of Bullock's explanation.  "I don't want to hear about it."Where did Stallone get his crystal ball?

There is an organization of conservatives which has met in private thrice annually since 1981.  As a member for over 20 years, I am obliged not to mention its name or membership.  Suffice it to say that virtually every major conservative figure in America belongs.

One of the most amusing things about the Washington Circus is how media feeding frenzies are almost always about phony irrelevant scandals, while truly serious scandals are ignored.

Let's start with two things we know for sure about Hillary.  First, she wants to be President.  Second, she will do anything to be so.  There is no lie she won't tell, no friend she won't destroy, no pledge she won't break, no slander she won't spread, no political dirty trick she won't employ in order to reside in the White House again, this time as the POTUS.Now let's look at one thing you should know about George W. Bush.  He's smarter than Hillary.

I recently received a very kind letter from ToThePointer Hagan Hetz, of the famous Fairview Evergreen Nurseries in Pennsylvania (www.fairviewevergreen.com). He wanted to know what I thought of President Bush's September 7 address to the nation on Iraq. OK, Hagan, here it goes. While listening to GW, I was thinking about Alberto Fujimori.

It is impossible for the ordinary human mind to fully grasp the evil of Joseph Stalin.  He purposefully engineered the starving to death of over ten million people in Ukraine.  In terms of mass murder, Stalin's Ukrainian Holocaust was an even greater crime than Hitler's Jewish Holocaust. Millions more were hauled off to be enslaved and die in the Gulag, or tortured and shot for the slightest suspicion of anything Stalin was suspicious of.  Many of his closest deputies were ordered to put their parents, wives, or children to death to prove their loyalty. Yet this tyranny, this monstrous evil, is not a mystery.  Evil exists, deeply embedded in certain human souls.  That isn't mysterious;  it is a basic fact of  human society.  The true mystery is why and how such is evil is tolerated.  Stalin tyrannized the Soviet Union for thirty years.  In all those years, there is not one single known attempt on his life.  Not one. Which then, is the greater depravity:  Stalin killing people, or no one killing him?  The former, of course.  Evil itself is the greater evil -- but toleration of it is the greater mystery.

When Albert Einstein wrote and offered his initial papers on the Special Theory of Relativity in 1905, he was an unknown clerk in the Swiss Patent Office with no academic credentials.  Needless to say, for established professional physicists, the overthrow of the principles upon which their lives' work was based by a 26 year-old kid nobody every heard of did not go over too well.

So almost 100 years later, here comes another kid, a high school dropout no less, who may impact 21st Century science the way Einstein did the 20th.  Peter Lynds, a 27 year-old broadcasting school tutor from Wellington, New Zealand,  may change the way that we think about time and its relationship to classical and quantum mechanics and cosmology.

Last month, in the August 18/25 issue, The New Republic (TNR) magazine ran a cover story which focused on my role in creating the Reagan Doctrine, which contributed to the downfall of the Soviet Union. While not critical of me directly, the article criticizes the leaders of the anti-Soviet freedom fighter movements the Reagan Doctrine supported.  This is supposed to serve as a warning to the Bush White House regarding putative support for anti-radical movements within the Moslem world.  Here is my response.  We'll see what TNR does with it.

You know I'm not Jewish.  And I'm not a supporter of Israel for Millennial Christian reasons (e.g., Jews have to get the Holy Land back before there can be a Second Coming).  I support Israel because I support Western Civilization, of which Israel is a part and because of which she is under attack.  And also because I think proto-hominids who slaughter women and babies on purpose have no right to exist.

It's party time for California Republicans.  They see Arnold as their salvation.  They could be right. 

No, it hasn't.  Yet when both TIME and Newsweek feature George Bush's dream opponent -- Howie "Dizzy" Dean -- on their covers in the same week, when Dan Rather and Tom Brokaw and Peter Jennings gush over him and the editors of The New York Times do all they can to promote his candidacy, you've got to wonder.

The good news in Iraq is that things are much, much better than the gloomy picture painted daily by the propaganda organ of the Democratic Party, the LME (The Liberal Media Establishment, consisting primarily of Time-Newsweek-New York Times in print, Rather-Brokaw-Jennings-CNN in television, and NPR in radio). Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz are directing the military in continuing a superb performance, Jerry Bremer is following their lead and not his putative bosses at State, oil production will soon hit one million barrels a day, and over 90% of Iraq's population is living under peace and increasing prosperity. The bad news is that State Department and CIA bureaucrats resolutely continue to be in the way of all of this. This is best exemplified by their personal vendetta against the one man who could lead Iraq out of chaos and into a flourishing democracy: Ahmad Chalabi, leader of the Iraqi National Congress.

Reading Ann Coulter’s new book, Treason is a lot of fun. She has to be the ballsiest chick in America. Part of what makes her so cool is that you know she would love that description of her.

Aside from the sheer enjoyment of watching her rhetorically eviscerate liberals, she performs a great public service in rehabilitating Joe McCarthy and exposing the Myth of McCarthyism. “McCarthyism is one of the markers on the left’s Via Dolorossa,” she observes. “It is their slavery, their gulag, their potato famine. Otherwise liberals would just be geeks from Manhattan and Hollywood.”

So let’s go beyond all the fun and outrage and cut to the chase. Coulter is fabuloso at explaining what aid and comfort three generations of liberals and Democrats have given to any and every anti-American cause and group on the planet, but she is at a total loss to explain why.

In the final concluding chapter, “Why Do They Hate Us?” you expect an answer to the question, and all she can come up with is: “Liberals think they are gods.” That’s it. What the heck is that? There is not even an explanation of what she could possibly mean.

Do liberals believe they (actually, no metaphors) reside in a non-physical supernatural realm and have magical powers to create and manipulate laws of nature? That is what it is to be a “god.” Treason can only offer gobbledygook as an attempt to explain why liberals are the way they are.

Further, America is hardly the only thing liberals are treasonous towards. Calling someone a traitor to their country doesn’t explain why they are a traitor to their race, their culture, their civilization, and their species.

Writer Susan Sontag has denounced the white race as “the cancer of human history.” She is white herself. A racist hatred of one’s own race — auto-racism — has become a defining characteristic of the white liberal mind. But just exactly what has that got to do with being anti-American?

We thus need a deeper understanding of what motivates liberals that goes far beyond simply hurling epithets of treason and traitor at them.

For such understanding, we need to travel to the Amazon. Among the Yanomamo and other tribes deep in the Amazon rain forests, it is an accepted practice that when a woman gives birth, she tearfully proclaims her child to be ugly.

In a loud mortified lament that the entire tribe can hear, she asks why the gods have cursed her with such a pathetically repulsive infant. She does this in order to ward off the envious black magic of the Evil Eye, the Mal Ojo, that would be directed at her by her fellow tribespeople if they knew how happy she was with her beautiful baby. Anthropologists observe that for most primitive and traditional cultures, “every individual lives in constant fear of the magical aggression of others… there is only one explanation for unforeseen events: the envious black magic of another villager.”

Envy is the source of tribal and traditional cultures’ belief in Black Magic, the fear of the envious Evil Eye. Reflect for a moment on the extent to which tribespeople in a tribal, “primitive” culture suffuse their lives with superstition, witchcraft, sorcery, voodoo, “black magic,” the “evil eye.” The world for them is teeming with demons, spirits, ghosts and gods, all of whom are malicious and dangerous — in a word, envious.

What Ann Coulter doesn’t understand is that the liberal mind is an atavism, a regression to a primitive mentality. Liberals believe in Black Magic just as strongly as Yanomamos. What makes a liberal is his or her fear of the Evil Eye of Envy.

An American liberal’s primary motivation is not to betray his country. It is to appease the envious. Liberalism is not a political ideology. It is a psychological strategy to avoid being envied. What causes someone to be a liberal is the fear of being envied. It is the fear of being envied that is the source of “liberal guilt.”

This is most easily seen in the children of wealthy parents. Successful businessmen, for example, who have made it on their own normally have a respect for the effort and the economic system that makes success possible. Their children, who have not had to work for it, are easier targets for guilt-mongering by the envious. So they assume a posture of liberal compassion as an envy-deflection device: “Please don’t envy me for my father’s money — look at all the liberal causes and government social programs I advocate!” Teddy Kennedy is the archetype of this phenomenon.

This is also why Hollywood is so liberal. The vast amounts of money movie stars make is so grossly disproportionate to the effort it took them to make it that they feel it is unearned. So they apologize for it. The Liberal’s strategy is to apologize for his success in order to appease the envious.

The passions of Limousine or Hollywood Liberals are not traitorous. They are frenzies of masochism. The more one fears being envied, the more one is driven to masochistic self-humiliation in attempts at envy-appeasement. Traitors are folks who go over to the other side for the money or some other self-interested reason. Liberals root for the other side precisely because they believe it is against their self-interests.

What, for example, could be more idiotic and masochistic than to oppose missile defense? This opposition cannot be understood unless one dispenses with its rhetoric and rationales and realizes that these folks at their emotional core do not want their country defended. The lunacy of the “global warming” hoax cannot be comprehended other than its masochistic advocates do not want their civilization to prosper. Culture-destroying illegal immigration policies are defended by those who do not want their culture to survive.

The lethality of Liberal Envy-Appeasement is that personally-felt guilt is projected onto the various social or tribal collectives to which the liberal belongs and are a part of his self-identity. Self-loathing is transformed into a loathing for one’s society or race.

White liberals become auto-racist, male liberals auto-sexist: racists towards their own race, sexists towards their own sex. Dimestore demagogues like eco-fascist environmentalists, feminazis, PETA animal rights loonies, NAMBLA pederasts, race hustlers like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, all get their strength from the liberal’s fear of their Evil Eyes.

As the Amazon tribeswoman who says her baby is ugly, so the white male liberal says his gender, his race, his country, his civilization, and even his entire species is ugly.

Fear of envy is very deep-seated in the human psyche. Only a youthful culture full of vigor and confidence can shrug it off, enabling that culture to flourish. The road to cultural ruin lies in the fear of envy reasserting itself from the primordial depths.

Today, America’s elite universities have degenerated into fascist cesspools of envy-appeasement. America’s airlines compromise passenger security by harassing people at random, rather than racially profiling Arab and other Moslem men. The entire fascist phenomenon of political correctness — perhaps best exemplified by the New York Times editorial page — is nothing but a massive exercise in envy-appeasement.

One of the silver linings of September 11 is that it made the American people mad enough to reject envy. They now could care less if Moslems or the French or whomever are envious of them. That rejection must be applied to the envy-panderers and envy-appeasers within America herself.

Rejecting envy is the key to America’s cultural resurgence and survival. Fear of the Evil Eye is the only thing that gives the Evil Eye any power. Without fear of it, the Evil Eye is impotent.

Calling folks traitors solves no problems and provides no solutions. Conservatives instead need to reach out to liberals and help them overcome their fear of envy. The Christian and American solution is to enable liberals to feel proud, rather than embarrassed, to be themselves, to be American, to be a participant in Western Civilization, and to be a human being.

A great many conservatives are seriously steamed about George Bush even thinking about sending American soldiers to fight and possibly die in some Liberian Rumble in the Jungle. 

Liberal Democrats only advocate putting American soldiers in harm’s way when they perceive no US national security interest.  Whenever there is such an interest, they are dependably opposed.  Thus they were against the War in Iraq but are now all for Americans getting shot in Liberia by rival gangs of heavily armed thugs stoned on marijuana.

The last place in the world American soldiers should be sent to is some anarchic hell-hole in Africa.  Very few African countries have any viable existence, being make-believe constructs of 19th century Western Europeans playing at building colonial empires.  This is especially true of the region of West Africa.  Yet if one were to try and discern an important issue of genuine national security to the United States regarding West Africa, there is only one.  You guessed it:  oil.

All along the coast of West Africa, oil companies are reporting the discovery of enormous amounts of offshore crude oil.  This is right across the Atlantic Ocean from us.  There is a lot of talk now in Washington think-tanks and on the Hill about how we badly need to replace Saudi Arabia as our, and the world’s, oil lynchpin.  This is GW’s goal in the current attempt to create a stable democratic Iraq and in the near-future attempt to do the same in Iran.

Even so, we cannot be dependent for oil on the Middle East as a whole, nor, the thinking goes, upon Russia either.  We need a backup, and a big one.  That’s why eyes on the world map are now focusing on West Africa.

Thus the argument that political stability in West Africa is required to attract the huge capital investment necessary to extract all that oil. 

You may remain less than convinced this is a strong enough case to send American soldiers to Liberia.  But you should also be asking yourself, “How could I get into this and make some money in the West African oil game?”

That brings me to a tiny place called Gambia.  A former British colony penetrating into Senegal as far as British gunboats could go up the Gambia River, this is a pleasant peaceful place with a stable democratically elected government, and a judicial system based on British law.  It has beautiful beaches attracting a lot of tourists (many of them German women who seem to have an inordinate lusting for young Gambian men). 

Gambia doesn’t have any oil.  What it does have is a government that realizes crude oil must be refined in order to use it.  

An privately-held American company with significant experience in private-sector infrastructure projects in  West Africa, Global Management Group (GMG), has been granted the exclusive right to build, own, and operate the sole oil products storage depot in Gambia, and subsequently, a 250,000 bpd (barrels per day) crude oil refinery.  The Gambian government has granted 1,000 acres of land to GMG and located it in a tax-free zone.  The Gambian investment code provides for 100% foreign ownership of the depot and full repatriation of dollar profits. Financing from the African Development Bank for the refinery is currently being arranged. 

Within 10 years, over 20% of US oil imports may be from Africa.  No new oil refinery has been built in the US for over 20 years.  Located on the tip of Africa’s western bulge right on the Atlantic, Gambia is an ideal location to process African crude to be shipped to America.  Once GMG completes the oil storage depot, it gets the green light for the refinery.

I know the fellow who runs GMG, Bruce Gilfix, who once crossed the length of eastern Tibet with me.  I asked him if there was any way my TTP subscribers could get in on this.  After all, even a tiny piece of the profits from processing 90 million barrels of oil a year is interesting.  He said yes.  Strategy Advisors will put you in touch with Bruce.  They can be reached at 240-988-1406.

Just remember, should you get involved and end up at one of the luxury hotels or beaches of Banjul (Gambia’s capital) someday, watch out for those German tourist ladies.

I am currently engaged in writing a screen treatment for a motion picture to be made by a Hollywood producer friend of mine. The movie's working title is La Malinche (lah-mah-lin'-chay), and is the true story about one of history's most remarkable and heroic women.

Her name was Malinali. She was born a Princess. When her father, the King, died, her mother remarried and had a son. Now a threat to her step-brother's inheriting the throne, her mother sold her into slavery.

Beautiful and smart, Malinali became the favorite slave girl of a local chieftain. When powerful strangers came from an unknown land, the chief made a present of the slave girl to their leader. The year was 1519, and the strangers' leader was named Hernando Cortez.

The military threat of North Korea is not its nukes. They are a geostrategic threat, as they will be sold to rogue states and terrorist groups. The military threat is the 11,000 artillery tubes dug in the mountains along the North Korean side of the DMZ, 500 of which are long-range.

My friend Edward Goodliffe called me yesterday from the offices of Pan Southern Petroleum Corp. in Puckett, Mississippi.  He’s on Pan Southern’s board and wanted to tell me about a fascinating oil play he thought ToThePointers should know about.

There’s a small reserve in a remote area of the state called Bentonia Field.  It was drilled in the late 1980s by Coho Resources and has thus far yielded 1,700,000 barrels of oil from multiple pay zones.  Coho, however, has suffered massive mismanagement and has gone in and out of bankruptcy several times.  Bentonia became neglected, with its equipment falling into disrepair.  Coho was bought recently by Denbury Enterprises, which is now auctioning off Coho’s smaller fields that they don’t wish to develop.  Bentonia is one of them.

Bentonia is now producing over 2,500 barrels a month.  Even with Coho’s extravagant production costs, profits exceed $20,000 per month.  Pan Southern has determined that the yield could easily and quickly be doubled.  As Pan Southern owns its own workover rig and equipment and has its own experienced field crew, it can greatly reduce expenses entailed in employing contract rigs and crews.

Geological studies indicate that Bentonia is capable of producing another 1,000,000 barrels of oil over the next 12-15 years with prudent operations.  Pan Southern’s opinion is that Bentonia can generate between $50,000 to $80,000 per month profit and ultimately yield $15,000,000 in its life.

Since Bentonia is in such a remote location unfamiliar to most oil production operators, and since most operators are only interested in much larger reserves and production, it may be auctioned for the scrap value of the existing equipment now on the field.  The salvage value is estimated at $239,000.

The reason for the “Carpe Diem” in the title above is that the Bentonia auction will be held this coming Wednesday, July 16.  Pan Southern is willing to offer a healthy portion of Bentonia’s profits to investors providing the funds necessary for the winning auction bid.  As Bentonia is already producing, this is a deal that would generate an immediate ROI.

Should you be interested, call Strategy Advisors at 240-988-1406.  Carpe Diem.

[Disclosure Note:  I am not a shareholder in Pan Southern or have any financial connection to the company.]

In a talk entitled "The Map of the Future" I gave last week in Dallas, I discussed which countries throughout the world were or could become the greatest threats to America's national security. At the top of the list, more dangerous than Iran or North Korea or China, I placed Mexico. The bottomless inferiority complex that Mexico feels towards America is summed up in an old saying known to all Mexicans as "Mexico's Curse," the lament that their country is "So far from God, so close to the United States." The truth, however, is the reverse. Today, Americans lament "America's Curse," that their country is so close to Mexico.

Ronald Reagan was fond of describing the ultimate optimist:  a young boy digging determinedly through a huge pile of horse manure, shouting "There's got to be a pony in here somewhere!"So here I am, that kid trying to find the pony buried in this pile of, ah ... manure the Supreme Court just dumped on America.

Book Discussion : Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (Scholastic: 2003)

Like so many other kids, my son learned how to read by reading Harry Potter. He was five years old, and would sit next to me as I read Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone to him.

He began picking out words as his eyes followed my hand moving down the page as I read. Then phrases, then parts of sentences, and by the end of the book, entire sentences. That was in 1997. When Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets came out the next year, Jackson and I read it together, trading off reading a page or chapter section. The following year, Jackson, now seven, read most of Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban to me.

Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire arrived via Fedex from Amazon on July 8, 2000. Jackson was consumed by it, announcing on July 12 that he had finished all 768 pages. This was hard to believe — I mean, the kid had just turned eight — so I read the thing myself to be able to quiz him. “What was the password Harry used to get into Dumbledore’s office?” — questions like that. He knew them cold, like he had committed the entire tome to memory.

Thus my confession. When the Fedex truck pulled up in our driveway last Saturday, I bagged Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix for myself. Jackson had a weekend swim party going, so while he and his buddies splashed around in the pool, I sunk in an easy chair with a pot of coffee. Sometimes, you have to give all that stuff you’re supposed to do a rest, just park it for a while, and do something for the sheer hell of it. So I read the whole darn thing, 871 pages, in 24 hours.

I can report that in the intervening three years since “HP4”, J.K. Rowling has not lost her story-telling touch. She creates this entire world for you in which you live while reading. By now it’s a familiar and comfortable world, absorbing and engrossing, a saga of epic heroism struggling and defeating evil. However…

At this point, if you intend to read HP5 and don’t want the ending spoiled before you do — please don’t read any farther. Come back when you’ve finished it.

So here we go — and again, I’m about to reveal what happens near the end. You’ve been forewarned.

I think J.K. blew it. I think she screwed up the climax. HP5 is a wonderful exposition of tyranny and how it can take over a society. Dolores Umbridge starts out as a teacher and progressively establishes fascist control over Hogwart’s. Her takeover is aided by the establishment media, the wizard equivalent of The New York Times. Only a paper disdained by the wizard elite (a wizard New York Post) dares to tell Harry’s true story.

Umbridge is the apotheosis of fascism, a wizard Saddam Hussein, who recruits Hogwart’s thugs and bullies (led of course by Draco Malfoy) to be her personal storm trooper enforcement squad. The decent kids band together to form a resistance movement called Dumbledore’s Army. Harry begins secretly training the D.A. kids in jinxes and counterjinxes using their magic wands. Acts of sabotage start appearing all over Hogwart’s.

Rowling has set everything up for for a climactic revolutionary battle between Umbridge and her thug enforcers, and Harry’s D.A. rebels — the classic fight throughout the medieval castle between the usurper-tyrant and the good guys. And it never happens.

When the attack comes, the D.A. scatters. Instead of them regrouping to the rescue (as Harry and Hermione have been caught), Hermione suckers Umbridge out to the forest for this wimpy let-down substituting for an emotionally-satisfying climax. The whole HP theme is good triumphing over evil by the ordinary rising to greatness. Rowling constructed a modern morality tale of freedom vs. fascism decisively leading to a dramatic crescendo, then wanders off into literary cacophony.

Trust me, the movie version of HP5 will have Harry’s D.A. fighting Umbridge’s goons from the parapets.

Now Jackson is buried in the book. He’ll be finished in a few days. I can hardly wait to see if he notices that, for all her fantastic writing talent, J.K. wimped out at the end.

(PS: No matter what I think — read the book anyway. You’ll have a great time. Believe me, reality will still be here when you’re done.)

In early 1994, Hillary Clinton was riding high. Her plan for government seizure of the entire health care system of America was being treated by the media as a fait accompli. The Republicans, led by Newt Gingrich in the House and Bob Dole in the Senate, had capitulated. HillaryCare was a done deal.Then one lone Senator stood up in the well of the United States Senate and announced that he was going to single-handedly pull the emergency brake on the runaway train. "This plan to nationalize health care," he announced, "will pass over my cold dead political body." By September, Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell bitterly pronounced HillaryCare legislatively dead due to "Republican obstructionism." But the obstruction wasn't Republican. It was one single Republican Senator. His name was Phil Gramm.

Let's do what we're supposed to do here, and get right "to the point": The most important country in the world at this moment is Iran.

BOOK DISCUSSION : Adventure Capitalist by Jim Rogers (Random House, 2003)

It’s a great concept: A guy makes a killing on Wall Street, then drives a bright yellow Mercedes 152,000 miles around the world through 116 countries with his girlfriend (later wife), making interesting observations and giving you valuable investment advice all along the way.

Well, it’s a concept. This book is a real rough ride. There’s “take-home value” here that you can use for your portfolio’s benefit, but there are so many chuckholes, so many intellectual flat tires that the journey can be grindingly infuriating.

Rogers is one of those guys who is very smart and continually has to prove it to you by being endlessly sarcastic. I’d call him a smart rectum. The other thing to realize is that he is not a businessman. He’s a Wall Street guy. He’s never been an entrepreneur with his own business and payroll making his own products. He made his money investing other people’s money in other people’s businesses. So sprinkle a little salt on what he has to say about “capitalism.”

One moment you’re cheering over his call for the complete abolishment of the IMF and the World Bank, his denouncing “UN fatcats” and NGO (non-governmental organizations, normally government subsidized) do-gooders as “international parasites.” You appreciate his informing you that food aid to Ethiopia has destroyed an entire generation’s ability to grow their own food, and that the “greatest growth industry in Africa today” is selling stolen stuff (bags of rice, clothing, etc.) donated by American and other Western charities.

Your eyebrows raise when he says that the Chinese are the best capitalists in the world because they don’t take siestas, and calls Shanghai the “Emerald City of 21st Century capitalism.” Evidently he didn’t notice most all of the skyscraper office buildings he stood in awe of in the Pudong business district are vacant and bereft of occupants.

You get angry and disgusted when he claims there is “no religious persecution” in China, and praises its Communist government for giving its people such “extensive religious freedom” (Tibet is never mentioned once).

And then you start laughing out loud at the breathtaking kookiness. “Africa should organize a new continentwide congress,” he grandly proposes, “made up of representatives of (all the African) countries… (to) “redraw the borders of the various African nations… (creating) “many more countries than there are now.” In other words, African leaders are going to get together and break apart their countries into pieces. This takes naïveté into a supernatural dimension.

Sometimes the kookiness is so absurd that you can’t laugh, you’re just stunned into silence. The book ends with a gratuitously vicious attack on Alan Greenspan, concluding that Greenspan didn’t resign from the Fed when Bob Rubin quit as Treasury Secretary in 1998 because “he had nowhere to go — he knew he could not get another job.”

Should I take back the first part of Rogers being a smart rectum?

You may have no doubt when you see his asserting that “North Korea is no conceivable threat to us.”

At the end of the road, what you’ve got is a wealthy guy who believes that driving through a country for a few days qualifies him to sagely and deeply pontificate upon it. Sometimes he gets it right — Spain has one of the best-managed economies in Europe, Tanzania may be on the verge of a boom — and sometimes flat wrong — Angola is now one of the world’s great investment opportunities, all of a Central Europe is going to be an economic disaster.

And other times you just want to toss the book into File 13, such as when he advocates — seriously — the abolition of all passports in the world. Anyone should be able to freely immigrate to any country they want. There should be no limits whatever to immigration to the US, or any other nation. Yes, this was written over a year after September 11, 2001.

You may find nuggets in Adventure Capitalist that are valuable and useful. But in order to extract them, you’re in for a long, long slog.

In 1957, a 21 year-old kid named Otto Kuczynski showed up at Ellis Island in New York harbor with his teen-age wife, Hërta, an 8 month-old baby boy, and all the money he had in the world: $27.For centuries, Otto's family lived in the village of Beregomet in a fairly-tale region of primeval forests and ancient castles tucked into a corner of southeastern Europe known to the Romans as Dacia, and millennia later, to the Austrians as Galicia. When the Austro-Hungarian Empire was broken up after WWI, Galicia was made a part of Romania and called Northern Bucovina. The place became a nightmare war-zone during WWII, with Otto spending his pre-teen years trying not be killed by Nazis and Russians.

To be "led down the garden path" is to be lured by subterfuge into a garden of seduction. The metaphor is of modern origin, with the OED (Oxford English Dictionary) revealing its first use in the 1920s. It denotes being misled, deceived, conned, seduced, hoodwinked. This is why the so-called Road Map for Arab-Israeli Peace should be called the Garden Path instead.George Bush has been led down the Garden Path by the State Department. The entire "Road Map" enterprise is an ego-trip by Foggy Bottom bureaucrats in the obsessively pro-Arab Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs (BNEA). Led by Assistant Secretary William Burns, the BNEA guys feel they have been shown-up and humiliated by Rumsfeld's Pentagon. They look upon the military victory in Iraq as their diplomatic failure. They are determined to have the geopolitical spotlight taken off Rummy and shine instead on whom it rightfully belongs: them.

The root cause of the Arab-Israeli conflict is envy. The Jews created a civilization out of the wilderness and a garden out of the desert, while the Arabs continued to mire themselves in medieval tyranny and poverty.Read the following compendium of facts about Israel while imagining yourself to be Arab. Knowing that their two basic exports to the world are oil and suicide terrorists, reflecting upon the totality of the facts below by comparison has driven Arabs criminally insane with envy.

If there is one thing that truly infuriates me in the investment business it's the goofy gurus I call French Bears.The French, you see, are intellectual descendants of the 17th century philosopher René Descartes. Descartes taught his fellow Frenchmen that consciousness somehow creates reality. His most famous quote is cogito ergo sum -- I think, therefore I am. This of course is exactly backwards: it's because Descartes is what he is, a human being with a brain, that he can think at all. The French have been getting things backwards ever since, always putting theory above reality.

I do not have a crystal ball and cannot predict the future.  Yet there is now in place a full alignment of “the correlation of forces,” driving the US economy forward.  Thus I am going to predict that the DOW will be above 10,000 by October.  What’s more, it will stay above 10,000 throughout 2004. Did Y2K Cause the Recession?

There is an interesting theory claiming that Y2K helped precipitate the recession.  Remember that it began March 2000 when the Dow and Nasdaq peaked.  What happened was that in preparation for Y2K, corporate America compressed four years of IT budgets into one year.  Instead of spending $200 million on IT a year, Citibank for example spent over $800 million in 1999 alone.  Thus, for the next three years, 2000-2002, IT budgets remained a fraction of what they normally would have been.  Finally now, they are getting back up to speed — and so are tech stocks.  We all know the Nasdaq is up over 20%.  But have you been watching the Goldman Sachs Internet Fund lately?  It’s up almost 60% for the year (i.e., in the last five months). The Correlation of Forces

Al Qaeda on the run, victory in Iraq (albeit with a messy cleanup), low-low dollar, low-low interest rates, low-low inflation, front-loaded tax bill, looser credit rules (re secondary source collateral for business loans), high productivity, lower labor costs, solid consumer confidence and optimism, creative energy and ingenuity exploding — it’s all there, ready to roll, folks.  All 16 of the Lipper Stock-Fund Indexes are up for the year (except for gold), nine of them in double digits — and this economy is only emerging from slumber, just starting to build up a head of steam. Read My Lips

The bottom line is that there is No Way José that GW is going to make his Dad’s mistake.  The American economy is going to be Moving and Grooving for a year or more before November 2004.  There is as much chance that the Democrats can pull a repeat of 1992 as Al Sharpton has of being their nominee.  Rational Exuberance

Sure, a lot of things could go wrong.  Even weak and confused, Al Qaeda could still pull off a major hit (but not a series of them).  China could recover from the SARS crisis and continue to suck jobs out of the US, prolonging a “jobless recovery.”  All kinds of disasters are imaginable.  Yet right now the rational odds are for America’s economic revival.  I think you can bet on it.  Frankly, the one thing I’m queasy about is that I’m being too cautious.  Stay above 10,000 for 2004?  I won’t be shocked if the DOW is at an all-time high — that’s above 11,722.98 — by Election Day.

When was the last time you thought or worried about the price of aluminum?  How about copper?  Nickel?  Lead?  How about cattle, coffee, or cocoa?  Wheat?  Corn? All of this stuff is important in our daily lives and in world commerce.  But unless you are a commodities trader, their prices are not of much concern to you.  One principal reason they are not is that they are plain and simple commodities.  Their prices and markets are not politicized. Thus the single greatest impact of America's victory in Iraq will be the commoditization of oil and the end of its politicization. 

There is a group of human beings whom I find to be unintelligibly mysterious.  In fact, I believe them to be aliens who, while visiting earth occasionally, actually reside in a space ship floating in the interstellar ether.  I am referring, of course, to currency traders.

For the most part, other kinds of traders — guys who make it their profession to trade things like stocks or bonds or commodity futures — are normal people.  For the most part, currency traders are nuts.

There is simply no explanation for the euro rocketing up far above the dollar since the US victory in Iraq.  Yesterday (5/6/03) the euro closed above $1.14.  The aliens at UBS Warburg are predicting the euro will go to $1.20. 

One reason given is the money flows into European bond markets.  Irresistibly attractive, claim the aliens, are 10-year German government bonds at 4.07% and Italian government bonds at 4.27%, as compared to the paltry 3.82% for US Treasurys.

This is conclusive proof currency traders live in outer space, believing that 0.45 of 1% is too high a risk premium to pay for betting your life savings on the credit worthiness of the US rather than that of an Italian government.

Pricewaterhouse Coopers is now projecting that the best to be expected from the French and Italian economies this year will be at little over 1%, Germany’s under 1%.  2004 will be worse.  Euro-zone unemployment is now at 8.7% and heading towards 9.  Germany is at almost 11% unemployment.  The French Finance Ministry projects the government deficit will be 3.4% of GDP for 2003.  Germany will be higher.  This is far above the upper limit of 3% agreed upon for euro-zone membership.  The US’ “record deficit” that worries the aliens will be coming in at around 2.8% of the $10+ trillion US GDP.

 Donald Rumsfeld’s quip about “Old Europe” is pinpoint apt not just politically but economically.  The major economies of continental Western Europe, particularly France and Germany are aged, inflexible, unresilient.  The American economy is the opposite on all three counts.

There is no possible rational reason for betting that euro-based economies will outperform the US over the foreseeable future.  Yet the currency traders in rocketing up the euro over the dollar are making precisely that bet.  For whatever reason, currency traders are indulging in a spasm of collective insanity similar to the dotcom delusion of the late 90s.

Since rationality is too much to expect of them, it is best to ignore this market entirely.  Ride the DOW and Nasdaq, place your investment bets where you otherwise feel comfortable, but it’s best to let the currency traders sail off into space all by themselves.

I could not suggest more strongly that you read Bernard Lewis’ latest book, The Crisis of Islam: Holy War and Unholy Terror (Modern Library, 2003).  Its compact 164 pages contain an abundance of revelations. 

We are so often told, for example, that a basic cause of the hatred radical Moslems feel for the West is the Crusades.  Yet, Mr. Lewis explains, the capture of Jerusalem by the Crusaders in 1099 was largely ignored by the main Moslem powers in nearby Damascus and in Baghdad.  After Saladin retook the city in 1187, the Moslem world forgot about it for 700 years, until it became the focus of Jewish immigration.   Rage and humiliation over the Crusades is a very modern bellyache.

Every liberal boffin and pundit from those infesting the State Department’s Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs to Robert Novak could benefit from grasping Mr. Lewis’ observation that the Palestinian issue is “the licensed grievance.”  Far from being “the key to peace in the Middle East,” the “Arab-Israeli problem” is merely a useful deflection and scapegoat for Arabs who have little or no political and economic freedom in their own countries and whose governments grant little or no permission to complain about it.

You’ll find dozens of similar revelations here, all lucidly and concisely expressed.

If you want a clear grasp of why Saudi Arabia is such a fount of Moslem terrorism and radicalism today, read Dore Gold’s Hatred’s Kingdom:  How Saudi Arabia Supports the New Global Terrorism (Regnery, 2003).  Saudi Arabia is the worst religious dictatorship on this planet, controlled by a heretical Islamic sect called Wahhabism (named after its founder, Mohammed ibn Abdul Wahhab, who established a mithaq or covenant with a tribal leader, Mohammed ibn Saud in 1744, to create a Saudi political-religious state).  Billions of Saudi petro-dollars have enabled the Saudi state religion to spread its message of hate and intolerance to mosques and medressahs (religious schools) throughout the world — including 80% of the mosques in America.  As former CIA Director Jim Woolsey says, “If you read one book to understand the roots of al-Qaeda’s fury, it should be this one.”

As we focus on foreign threats to our freedom, let’s do so on domestic threats as well.  One of the greatest comes from the left’s relentless assault on the morality of capitalism.  Enron-type corporate scandals fuel endless denunciations of business and businessmen, and assertions that “business ethics” is an oxymoron.  It is of the most critical importance that this fury be prevented from achieving its goal: to serve as a rationale for more government control over our lives and possibilities to prosper.  This requires a moral defense of the morality of capitalism.  Two philosophy professors have done just that in A Primer on Business Ethics, by Tibor Machan and James Chesher (Rowman & Littlefield, 2003). 

For Machan and Chesher, business is an honorable profession.  It is “the specialized, professional dimension of human commerce, and as such has its moral foundation in the virtue of prudence.”  The authors apply this concept to advertising, financial services, management, employment, corporate ethics, and public policy.  What they have to say about insider trading (they’re for it) and bribes/kickbacks (it depends) are solid eye-openers.  This book should be required reading for all college professors teaching business classes, not to mention their students.

All three of these books are available at Amazon.com.

The World Health Organization or WHO announced today that “the worst is over” regarding the SARS epidemic in Vietnam, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Canada.  WHO pronounced Vietnam for being the first country to eradicate the disease, and praised it for doing so transparently, quickly, and efficiently.

One reason Vietnam was able to do so is because it closed its border with China.  For notably absent in the WHO announcement was any praise for China.  The worst is not over for China.  The worst — far worse — is yet to come.

90% of SARS cases worldwide to this day are in China.  This percentage will climb.  By covering the epidemic up when it first emerged in Guangdong province last November, rather than institute the sort of health security actions performed by Vietnam, the PRC government has let the SARS toothpaste out of the tube. 

Much has been made by the mandarins of Beijing shutting down theaters et all, taking all sorts of measures to bolt the Beijing barn door shut.  Too late — SARS is streaking across the Chinese countryside now, on the loose and uncontrollable.

Further, the cover-up continues.  TIME Magazine Asia Edition today (4/28/03) disclosed the city government of Shanghai is suppressing info on SARS, treating SARS cases as “a state secret” to prevent panic not only among its 17 million citizens but among international businessmen doing business there.

Thus while the rest of the world — provided it remains alert and doesn’t let it’s guard down — may have dodged the SARS bullet, China may be gut shot.  The economic consequences for both China and America may be enormous.

For the first time in years, China admitted that it ran an overall trade deficit for the 1st Quarter of 2003, in the amount of $1.03 billion.  China has been claiming huge trade surpluses year after year, but as with most stats coming out of Beijing, these are phony — as imports from Hong Kong are not counted.

The putative reason given for the deficit was higher oil prices, but the real reason is people doing less business and buying fewer Chinese goods due to SARS.

From Wal-Mart on down, company after major company is banning all travel to China.  Nike, which produces almost 40% of its shoes in China, is planning to move its production out of the country. The Canton Trade Fair, the single largest in China, is canceled.

The reverse quarantining of China by international businessmen is bad enough, but as SARS really explodes throughout the countryside, and within major cities like Shanghai, Americans and others will become afraid of buying Chinese-made goods.

It is already starting to happen with Nike shoes labeled “Made in China.”  There is little rational chance of such shoes, or other items such as shirts and clothing being infected, but once fear sets in, that rational chance doesn’t matter.  China’s exports are set to fall off a cliff.

The World Bank reported 8.0 economic growth for China in 2002, and projected 7.2 for both 2003 and 2004.  You can kiss that latter number goodbye.

These growth numbers are just as phony as the trade numbers, in any regard.  They are pumped up by state spending and subsidies for state-owned enterprises (SOEs) making stuff nobody buys.  The “state secret” the Chinese government is more afraid of being exposed than SARS in Shanghai is that its banking system is bankrupt.  That system goes over the SARS cliff with the exports.

As the fragile China economy implodes, the Beijing Mandarins will be forced to start spending their stash of over $240 billion in foreign reserves.  The Chinese currency — called renminbi domestically, yuan internationally — is de facto pegged to the dollar.  As they spend those reserves to import goods and prop up the banks and currency, the dollar’s value against the euro (already improving since the end of the Iraq war) will accelerate.

The stock of any US companies who are exporters, or whose US-made products have been suffering from Chinese competition, should be good buys.  Short those folks who are in China deep, who are dependent on selling stuff labeled “Made in China.”

Following Nike, companies are going to flood out of China to set up shop elsewhere in Southeast Asia, particularly Vietnam, Thailand, and Malaysia.  The stock exchanges of these countries will be buys.  Possibly India as well, but only if Indian bureaucrats can miraculously evolve from ponderously slow-moving elephants to critters that can move quickly to drain regulatory swamps and barriers to competition.

History moves in funny ways.  China has sought to insulate itself from being infected with the economic maladies of its neighbors, from Thai banking crises to Japanese stagnation.  Now an infection from within — a homegrown disease coming from nowhere out of the filthy mixture of ducks and pigs and people living tightly together in vast numbers — may prove lethal to its economy, its social structure, and its communist government.

No matter how bad SARS gets, China will recover.  Business and businessmen will return.  But that is later.  Right now, there is a disaster, and it’s going to get a lot, lot worse before it gets better.  There is no virtue or altruistic nobility in ignoring the opportunity this represents to make money by shorting China.

It is important to understand that that the actual death rate for SARS is far higher than the currently reported rate. The death rate publicly given in press reports is a percentage of the reported cases, now running at a little over 2%. The figure to focus on however is the death rate as a percentage of the recovered cases. This figure is much higher, over 10%.

This month we’re going to focus upon books on Islam.  The first thing to do in this regard, however, is to go into the To The Point  Archives and read the Myth of Mecca article.  It explains how the religion of Islam was invented as a religious rationale to justify Arab imperialism.  At the end of that article, you’ll see a list of sources, all of which I strongly recommend as works of serious professional scholarship:

 • Al-Rawandi, I.M. Origins of Islam:  A Critical Look at the Sources.  Prometheus, 2000 • Crone, P.M.  Meccan Trade and the Rise of Islam.  Oxford, 1987.** • Newby, G.D. The Making of the Last Prophet:  A Reconstruction of the Earliest Biography of Mohammed.  Columbia, 1989. • Wansbrough, J. Quranic Studies:  Sources and Methods of Scriptural Interpretation.  Oxford, 1977.** • Warraq, I. M. The Quest for the Historical Muhammad.  Prometheus, 2000.*

[A * denotes that it is currently available at Amazon — www.amazon.com — while ** means Amazon lists it as out of print but possibly available used.  All of the books below are in stock at Amazon.]

There are a number of “popular” books (written for the “intelligent layman” rather than the academic scholar) on Islam currently out now.  Here are three I can personally recommend to you:

 • What Went Wrong? by Bernard Lewis.  Oxford, 2002.  Lewis teaches at Princeton and is the premier historian of the Middle East.  There is nobody better in explaining the historical path of Islam from medieval triumph to contemporary failure.

 • Islam Unveiled by Robert Spencer.  Encounter, 2002.  A very readable critical analysis of basic Islamic tenets.  Highly useful are the repeated parallels between Islamic and Soviet ideology.

 • The Sword of the Prophet by Serge Trifkovic.  Regina Orthodox, 2002.  This is another critical analysis of Islamic history and morals, coupled with a discussion of Western appeasement of Islam.  One weakness is the author’s unrelieved vitriol towards the Turks.

Talking about vitriol, nothing can match Oriana Fallaci’s The Rage and the Pride (Rizzoli, 2002).  There is nothing calm and dispassionate here.  It is a total cri du coeur, cry of the heart., and it needs to be read by every member of Western Civilization.

Lastly, I’d like to suggest a work of world class scholarship, Islam and Dhimmitude by Bat Ye’or (Farleigh Dickinson, 2002).  Ye’or is the foremost expert on “dhimmitude,” second-class citizenship of Jews and Christians subjected to Islamic rule over the last 1400 years.  She uses her prodigious historical erudition to focus upon Western Europe’s acceptance of dhimmitude today in its relationship with Islam.  This is a work of major importance.

Dr. Wheeler's Final Behind The Lines Column from Strategic Investment