We are persistently being reminded by our multinationals of the 1.3 billion customers of China who are eagerly waiting to hand over their hard earned cash for our products and services.

They have used this as justification to invest incredible amounts of American shareholder equity to construct so much China-based manufacturing capacity it will make your head spin. In all this excitement and jubilation of incalculable profit making opportunity, it sure would be nice to know: who is going to pay for all this stuff?

Millions of American shareholders have been led to invest in capital-intensive,  technology-stripping joint ventures to produce vast quantities of just about everything for people who do not have the money to pay for it.

These joint ventures are some of the most lopsided that have ever been conceived. This brings new meaning to Lenin's famous remark that in pursuit of short term profits, "Capitalists will sell the rope which the communists will use to hang them".

The China Dream has forever been a fairy tale with countless western industrialists being seduced into betting the ranch on a mythical market that will never exist.

The most recent was last weekend, when he traveled to Saudi Arabia to make a speech denouncing the United States. The occasion was the annual Jeddah economic forum, which is sponsored in part by the family of Osama bin Laden (which claims to have distanced itself from the family black sheep). 

Mr. Gore has not disclosed how much he was paid for his words of wisdom.  It probably is less than the $267,000 former president Bill Clinton was paid for speaking to the group in 2002, but odds are his fee was in six figures.

 
As a Moslem, I've followed with great agony and embarrassment the buildup of religious frenzy across the Moslem world in response to the cartoons published in a Danish newspaper.

On the one side the show of force by Islamists underlined the extent to which Islam has been hijacked by radicals and on the other side it emphasized the vulnerability of open societies to the growing influence of militant Islam.

The demonstration of violence by the Islamists forced the democratic societies to face up to the reality that Moslems who do not reject some of the basic precepts of political Islam can never integrate in a secular society. They will always remain a hurdle in the development of a pluralist setup and intellectual progress.

Objective reality exists.  Determining what it is can be tricky, particularly when we mix feelings, beliefs, assumptions, and past experiences.

In other words, separating out what is objective reality from our internal subjective experience is not an automatic process.  It takes practice, it takes conscious investigation, and it takes a willingness to question our pre-conceived assumptions, beliefs, and expectations.

For example, when I concentrate, I contract the muscles on my forehead between my eyes (the procerus muscles, to be exact).  When my wife sees me contract those muscles, her immediate assumption is that I am angry.  But I am not angry, I am just concentrating.

So a good skill to learn and practice is to distinguish the meaning you make of things internally from the actual objective events in the world.

Here is a simple exercise that will help you learn how to do this: