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 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 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 place became a nightmare war-zone during WWII, with Otto spending his pre-teen years trying not be killed by Nazis and Russians.
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
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.
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.
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
British Interests Fall to the Euro-Judges
Billed by the Government as nothing more than a toothless "declaration" at the Nice summit in December 2000, the Charter of Fundamental Rights is now to be enshrined as a legally-binding document in Part II of the new European Constitution, with profound effects on Britain's enterprise culture and legal system.
ELEPHANTS IN THE SAHARA
The picture here is of my son, Jackson, next to a prehistoric pictograph of an elephant in the heart of the Sahara Desert. It was carved in the rock thousands of years ago by ancient hunters when the Sahara was like East Africa is today, a well-watered grassland teeming with life.
Hannibal was able to acquire Saharan elephants for his army when he famously crossed the Alps to attack Rome in 218 BC. 2,197 years later, I conducted an expedition that retraced Hannibal’s route over the pass he used — the Col du Clapier on the French-Italian border — with
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.
Don’t Trade With Aliens
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