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,

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

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

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

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

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

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.**

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

[Written ten days after the start of The War in Iraq, March 31, 2003]Let me say it straight. I am almost sixty years old, and I have never in my life been prouder to be an American than I am today.I was talking to my friend Tony Blankley, editorial editor of the Washington Times, the other day, and when I compared George Bush to Ronald Reagan, Tony replied, “It may turn out to be the other way around.”

Doomsday scenarios were ever-popular during the Cold War. But the reality was that if a nuclear missile hit a U.S. city, we would know for sure who launched it: the Soviets. Thus we knew against whom to retaliate. And thus the Cold War was conducted without a single nuclear shot fired.We are now facing a threat an order of magnitude or greater than that of the Cold War. What if a nuclear bomb goes off in a U.S. city and we're not sure who did it, so we don't know against whom to retaliate?

STRATEGIC INVESTMENT, January 2003

One hundred and sixty years ago, in 1843, the Commissioner of the US Patent Office, Henry Ellsworth, reported to Congress:  “The advancement of the arts, from year to year, taxes our credulity and seems to presage the arrival of that period when human improvement must end.”  (This is the source of the spurious quote attributed in 1899 to Ellsworth’s successor, Charles Duell, who never said “Everything that can be invented has been invented”).

Human improvement did not come to an end in 1843, nor will it in 2003.  In fact, I think 2003 is going to

One of the meta-reasons America won the Cold War is that Russians play chess, while Americans play poker. Chess demands great skill and intelligence, particularly at developing complex long-range strategies and anticipating your opponent's moves.  But it bears little resemblance to life in the real world.  It is completely static and open.  Nothing is hidden.  Poker is very different.  You have to guess what your opponent has and the extent to which he is bluffing.  In business, in politics, in life in general, the folks who know how to play poker will almost always fare better than those who know how to play chess.

Across the world, today's newspapers carried front-page headlines similar to that of the Washington Times:  "Russia Remains Silent on Deadly Knockout Gas."  The mystery of the Knockout Gas's identity has been solved.

In the deepest heart of the Gobi Desert of Mongolia, just south of the Flaming Cliffs where Roy Chapman Andrews discovered dinosaur eggs in the 1920s, there is a naked spine of mountains called the Gurvan Saihan. In the Gurvan Saihan there is a valley called Yol Alyn, the Vulture’s Mouth. And in the Vulture’s Mouth, there is a glacier.

It is not a big glacier, the ice buildup of a stream that refuses to melt even in the heat of the Gobi summer. But it is a glacier nonetheless, thick enough for my son Jackson and I to walk

When penguins in Antarctica get hungry, they get nervous.  Grouped together on an iceberg, none of them wants to be the first to jump in the water and go fishing — because there just might be a leopard seal waiting for them.  There’s nothing in the sea a leopard seal finds more tasty to eat than fresh penguin.

So the waddle (on land or ice, a group of penguins is a waddle;  in the water, it’s a raft) bunches together, the ones in the back pushing forward, the ones in the front backing up away from the ice edge.  When

One of the most critical imperatives for Israel right now is to stop the suicide bombing.  One of  the best ways would be to blow up the bombs -- and preferably the bomber along with it --  prematurely.  The ideal would be to blow up the bomber so only he (or the occasional she) dies and no innocent Israelis.Here are two different versions of how to accomplish this.

It is obviously important that OBL (Osama bin Laden) not be simply hunted down and shot to death. He should be captured and interrogated until all the information he has about his terrorist network has been extracted from him – then he should be summarily executed. No trials, no being "brought to justice." What, then, would the most efficient and effective form of interrogation be?

As many recent commentaries have noted, there was no unified command of Afghan “Mujahaddin” freedom fighters resisting the Soviet occupation of their country in the 1980s. There were about half a dozen major groups and a host of smaller ones.

The legendary commander Ahmad Shah Massoud, assassinated by OBL (Osama Bin Laden) agents just before The Atrocity, belonged to the “Jamiat” group led by Burhanuddin Rabbani. Qari Baba, the famous commander in Ghazni who looked like a cross between Buddha and Genghiz Khan, was part of the Harakat group. Ramatullah Safi was the most outstanding commander of the Gailani group.

For an increasing number of Islamic historians, the tradition of Mohammed being the source and explanation of the Arab Conquest, wherein Arab tribesmen on horseback emerged out of the Arabian deserts to conquer Syria, Mesopotamia, Persia, Afghanistan, Egypt, Libya and Spain in less than 80 years (636-712), stands history on its head. They demonstrate that the story of Mohammed uniting various Arab tribes as Genghiz Khan did for the Mongols, and providing them with the religious fervor to conquer in the name of Islam, is "sacred history," rather than real history.

Jack Wheeler Strategic Investor, July 2001

The origin of the phrase “thinking out of the box” comes from an intelligence test called the Nine Dot Box.  Imagine three rows of three dots, each equally spaced some distance apart on a regular piece of paper.  The task is to connect the dots with a  minimum number of lines drawn by a pen or pencil.  The only rules are:  you must draw a line through every dot once and only once, all lines must be straight (no curves), and your pen/pencil cannot leave the paper. 

Most people cannot figure out how to do

Early last October, a senior White House henchman, let’s call him Richard Head, paid Janet Reno a visit.  The conversation went something like this. 

Head:  Ms. Reno, the president is very concerned that you do the right thing regarding criminal investigations of his administration. 

Reno:  That’s reassuring, Richard — may I call you Dick? 

Head:  Yes — so we at the White House would like you to prosecute Bill. 

Reno (spilling her coffee):  Prosecute the president?  But I thought no matter how massive the evidence against him, I was to stonewall… 

Head:  No, Ms. Reno, that’s the wrong Bill —