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The Religion of Environmentalism

I have been asked to talk about what I consider the most important challenge facing mankind, and I have a fundamental answer. The greatest challenge facing mankind is the challenge of distinguishing reality from fantasy, truth from propaganda. Perceiving the truth has always been a challenge to mankind, but in the information age (or as I think of it, the disinformation age) it takes on a special urgency and importance…

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THE RELIGION OF PEACE

Earlier this week I had lunch with one of the most extraordinary human beings gracing our planet -- His Holiness the Dalai Lama. Our gracious hosts were Lalit Mansingh, Indian Ambassador to the US, and his wife Indira at their Residence in Washington. I congratulated Ambassador Mansingh on his country being a sanctuary where Tibetan culture and religion still freely flourishes, such as in the regions of Ladakh and Zanskar.

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Our Heroes and Theirs

[Editor's Note: Last Tuesday night, September 9, a Palestinian suicide-terrorrist set off a bomb at Cafe Hillel in Jerusalem.  The following was written by Jan Medved, an Israeli businessman whose son was one of the first upon the scene.] Last night's terror struck close to home. The boom of the blast at Cafe Hillel on Emek Refaim Street shook the windows of our house and left no doubt that we were hit again -- this time in our own neighborhood.

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The 21st Century Einstein

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.

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Freedom Fighters and the New Republic

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.

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Israel Needs Rowdy Yates

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.

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THE NIFTY FIFTY

As we come to the end of summer, it is time to take our minds off Middle East maelstroms, California circuses, and world craziness in general, and spend time instead on a summer soliloquy.

For some time now, my youngest son Jackson and I have been embarked on a project we call his “Nifty Fifty.”  That is, for him to travel to and learn something really interesting about each of all fifty American states.

Jackson is now 11 years old.  He has been with me twice around the world and to the North Pole three times.  He has been 2,000 km across the Gobi Desert and Mongolia, 2,500 km across eastern Tibet, 3,000 km across the Sahara, and lived with Eskimos in Greenland and tribes in the heart of the Amazon.  But above all, I want him to experience his own country, America.

This summer, instead of wandering off to some remote corner of the globe, we concentrated on his Nifty Fifty.  At the summer’s start, Jackson was at 26.  Now, at summer’s end, he’s at 40.  In a succession of trips in July and August, he and I have driven almost 6,000 miles (10,000 kilometers) across our country.

Of course, Dad gets something out of this too.  For me, this has been an opportunity to re-experience my country, to learn more about it along with Jackson.  And the main lesson is this:  America — the real America — is still here.

We are all being inundated from the Left and the Right with the message that America is going to hell in a handbasket.  From the Left we get the message of hate, since a distinguishing characteristic of liberals is an endless attempt to appease the envy of America’s critics.  From the Right we get the message of fear, since a distinguishing characteristic of conservatives seems to be an endless state of anguish over America’s losing her virtues.

Not that conservatives can’t marshal considerable evidence for their anguish, the Mexicanification of California and the Supreme Court sodomizing Texas being two examples from a multitude.  Nonetheless, after traveling down back roads and wandering through communities from Savannah, Georgia to Cedar Rapids, Iowa, spending time with cowboys in Muskogee, Oklahoma, farmers in the Boot Heel of Missouri, students at Notre Dame in Indiana, fisherfolk in the Outer Banks of North Carolina, and presidents of companies in New York City, I can assure you that this is a country of extraordinary cultural strength.

The impact of driving 6,000 miles through America can for me be epitomized in three words:  beauty, peace, and friendliness.

I lost count of the number of times during those 6,000 miles that I was overwhelmed by scenes that caused me to think, “This is such a beautiful country.”  The northeastern corner of Iowa is one huge postcard.  The so-called “Trail of Tears” from Arkansas to Oklahoma is through paradisiacal parkland that any Indian should think was a Happy Hunting Ground.  Then there are the towns.

From Galena, Illinois to New Bern, North Carolina, America is filled with beautiful towns with beautiful homes.  Yet America’s beauty is of a particular kind — not ostentatious and imposing, but a Middle Class Beauty, prosperous, comfortable, well-kept, clean, regular people living good lives and taking care of what is theirs.

Liberals will now be scoffing at this point, asking what about all the slums, the poverty, the crime, the hicks in their undershirts on the front porch of their shacks with their yard littered with empty beer cans and old cars up on cinder blocks?   That stuff is out there all right, but it’s isolated and rare.  Like the small blue islands amidst the vast red ocean in the US County map depicting the 2000 presidential election results (Bush red, Gore blue).

You have to go out of your way to search and find those poverty patches the liberals caterwaul about and claim are Typical America.  Drive 6,000 miles and you will learn they are Atypical America.  Like liberals themselves.

America the Beautiful is not just a song — it is reality.  Another reality is America the Peaceful.  This is the antithesis of a violent country.  Trust me, I have been in a lot of wars, and in a lot of countries enduring a lot of violence.  Countries with a lot of soldiers patrolling streets and guarding buildings, where people are nervous, skittish, and suspicious.  America is the opposite.  America exudes an aura of peacefulness.  Everywhere Jackson and I went, folks were going about their lives peacefully — the total opposite of fearful suspicion.

The third reality that most impressed Jackson and me is America the Friendly.  In hundreds of interactions, from trap shooters in Bellefontaine, Ohio, backwoodsfolk in the hills of southern Tennessee, people on the streets of Chicago when you ask them for directions, vendors in Charleston, South Carolina, high school kids in Dallas, on and on, people were pleasant and friendly toward us.

We live in such an incredibly wonderful country.  We can get back to all its problems in September.  Just take a moment now to put all of our national woes aside, and reflect how impossibly lucky we are to be living in this place at this moment in history.

I am trying my best to enable Jackson to experience this first-hand.  He’s getting a handle on America’s origins, from where the first shot was fired at North Bridge in Concord to the last at Surrender Field in Yorktown.  He’s seen America’s wonders from Yellowstone to Mammoth Cave.  Yet he is coming to understand that America’s greatest wonder is Americans themselves.

One afternoon we were driving through a small town in eastern Oklahoma.  We drove past a couple in a pick up truck.  They were clearly in their sixties or seventies, grandma and grandpa.  Grandma, however, wasn’t sitting by the passenger window.  She was sitting in the middle, next to grandpa, like they were teen-agers on a first date.

I pointed them out to Jackson, and reminded him of the line in a favorite song of his, American Pie, where Don McLean sings about his being “a teen-age bronking buck with a pink carnation and a pick up truck.”  “That is so cool,” was Jackson’s observation.  “Old folks just like teen-agers.”  He looked at me with a big smile.  “Only in America, huh, Dad?” he asked.

“That’s right, buddy.” I replied.  “You’ll only see that in America.”

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Has the Major Media Become Republican?

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.

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CHILDISHNESS IN IRAQ

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.

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BEYOND TREASON

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.

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A British Reporter Tells The Truth About American Soldiers In Iraq

Whether the deaths of Uday and Qusay Hussein were self-inflicted or not, the military operation to capture them was immaculate.   There were no American deaths, 10 minutes of warnings were given over loudspeakers, and it was the Iraqis who opened fire. So sensitive was the American approach, they even rang the bell of the house before entering. The neat operation fits squarely with the tenor of the whole American campaign, contrary to the popular negative depiction of its armed forces:  that they are spoilt, well-equipped, steroid-pumped, crudely patriotic yokels who are trigger-happy yet cowardly in their application of overwhelming force.

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TRAITORS TO THEMSELVES: The Civil War Inside Mexico’s Soul

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.

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Getting In On African Oil

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.

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