AMERICA’S CURSE

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 (more…)

Finding the Supreme Court’s Pony

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.

This is not going to be easy.  Saddam Hussein saddamized Iraq.  The Supreme Court has sodomized America.  On top of that, the Justices have resurrected Jim Crow Laws, only this time they are anti-white and anti-asian, not anti-black.

The pony in the manure (more…)

Stop Health Fascism: Where Is Phil Gramm When We Need Him?

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 (more…)

Book Discussion : Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix

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, (more…)

The Persian Lynchpin

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.

Note the new link we’ve posted on the TTP home page: The Movement of Iranian Students. I urge you to read the Proclamation they issued: “To the Free People of the World” this past Sunday, June 22, 2003 (www.iran-daneshjoo.org, click on the 6/22/03 Press Release). It will absolutely blow you away.

These are the folks conducting the demonstrations you’ve been reading about in Tehran and other cities in Iran. Here are some excerpts from (more…)

The Road Map and the Garden Path

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 (more…)

The Betrayal of a Hero

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 (more…)

Book Discussion: Adventure Capitalist by Jim Rogers

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 (more…)

The Fraud of Selling Fear

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. This is (more…)

Why Arabs Are Envious of Israel

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.

Israel, the 100th smallest country, with less than 1/1000th of the world’s population, can make claim to the (more…)

Coming Soon: DOW 10,000

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 (more…)

The Commoditization of Oil

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.  (more…)