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.

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.

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.)

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.

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.

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 (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.