Because it dominated the news this past weekend, many Americans are aware of the USA Today story May 11 revealing that the National Security Agency has established a data base containing the records of telephone calls made by tens of millions of Americans.

Not so many Americans are aware that USA Today's "scoop" is recycled news.  The New York Times ran a story on the NSA database last December.  It was treated then with the ho hum response it so richly deserves.

Cynics note the recycling occurred on the eve of Senate hearings on the nomination of Gen. Michael Hayden -- who as head of the NSA established the data mining program -- to be director of the CIA.  Could the leakers and the journalists going bananas over the recycled revelation be trying to sidetrack his nomination?

Whatever the reason, the contrast between the ink and air time given the NSA telephone number database rehash and the inattention given a startling al Qaeda document captured in Iraq could not be greater.

Do you think your taxes are too high or too low? Though I expect that well over 90 percent of you are thinking "too high," the liberal media and political class keep telling us taxes are too low.

The left-leaning intelligentsia, in their arrogant smugness, claim we just don't know what is good for us. Yet, they are the ones who ignore the empirical evidence and are unable to distinguish between variables and constants.

As a prime example, a May 7 editorial in The Washington Post, advocating higher tax rates on the rich, states: "Economics cannot predict how high taxes can be raised before they reach counterproductive levels."

The editorial then says an increase of "taxes on the top 1 percent by 5 percentage points would raise $85 billion annually or perhaps a bit less if it spurred some extra tax evasion."

Last September in my column Race, I discussed research which showed how quickly race disappears as an issue when it is not made an issue.  Today I want to talk about some research that shows how we might go about making race less of an issue to begin with.

First of all, race is an issue on an immediate perceptual level. It is one of the things that we notice right away.  This does not mean that we are all "racists," it simply reflects a fact of human nature and perception.

What's more, when we see the face of someone of our own race, we tend to see a unique individual right off the bat, but when we see the face of someone of another race, we tend to see the elements that make up that face rather than the face as a whole that reflects a unique person.

This has nothing to do with what we believe, or our values, or how we behave toward others.  It is more akin to a reflex, probably passed down to us from our ancestors who survived by being able to quickly identify a person not of their group, who may very well have been out to kill our beloved ancient kin.  (Our ancestors grew up in a rough neighborhood).

Yet the reflex does occur.  What is interesting is that it is a reflex that weakens considerably in the presence of positive emotions.  The research demonstrating this is discussed in a recent article in Psychological Science:  We all look the same to me: Positive emotions eliminate the own-race bias in face recognition.

Stock market groups are essential tribal entities - as opposed to "rational" economic entities.  Their thinking is more driven by tribalism than by economic self interest.  A case in point is the Saudi Arabian stock market.

With the booming price of oil, and production at a high rate, you would think that the Saudis would be flush with cash and eager to invest in their own country.  Indeed, the Saudi stock market (the Tadawul) was booming until recently, hitting an all-time high last February 23 of 20,624, and has since lost over 42% of its value, closing at 11,859 yesterday (May 18).

The collapse came immediately after the Al Qaeda attack on the Saudi refinery at Abquaiq, the world's largest refinery complex, on February 24.  If tribal news is so inordinately effective in crushing the Saudi stock market, it is plausible that Arab stock actions in the US are also affected.  In fact, this appears to be borne out.

With its billions of sites, the Web has become the natural place to turn for information about nearly any subject. Large search engines like Google and Yahoo have their little search bots running 24/7, gathering data on sites and reporting back to the database, which you tap into when you conduct your search.

Unfortunately, though, finding what you need isn't always so easy. The data you need are definitely out there - the problem is getting to the right site, ferreting out the useful Web pages from the 5 million others ones that might mention the term you searched for, but in a totally useless, completely irrelevant context.

There is an easy, fast, and free way around this dilemma - and that is to create your own personalized search engine.  Here's how.

A woman in a hot air balloon realized she was lost. She lowered her altitude and spotted a man fishing in a boat below.

She shouted to him, "Excuse me, can you help me? I promised a friend I would meet him an hour ago, but I don't know where I am."

The man consulted his portable GPS and replied, "You're in a hot air balloon, approximately 30 feet above a ground elevation of 2346 feet above sea level. You are at 31 degrees, 14.97 minutes north latitude and 100 degrees, 49.09 minutes west longitude."

She rolled her eyes and said, "You must be a Republican."

No, not Bill Casey, Ronald Reagan's DCI.  Casey Stengel.  After winning 10 pennants in 12 years including 5 straight World Series managing the New York Yankees, Stengel spent 3 dismal years trying to manage the hopeless New York Mets.  They were so inept that at one point, Stengel blurted out the immortal line, "Doesn't anyone here know how to play this game?"

Porter Goss asked the same question of the team he was managing, the CIA - and the team owner fired him. 

The saga of the sacking of Porter Goss is one of such gargantuan incompetence on the part of the Bush White House that it finally tears any loyalty conservatives have to this presidency.

Amidst all the gloomy news of the week - Goss' firing, Bush's poll numbers falling to almost Nixonian levels as he continues to refuse to protect our borders, on and on - yesterday's (5/11) headline provided welcome comic relief.

Putin Warns Arms Race Not Over Yet screamed the front page of papers like the Washington Times.  For folks on the White House National Security Council and in foreign policy think tanks around town, this was funnier than a Seinfeld rerun or Larry the Cable Guy.

Putin had delivered his state-of-the-nation address to the Russian Parliament, or Duma, and was desperate to appeal to Russian egos mortally wounded by America's winning the Cold War.  Russians, you see, would rather wallow in nostalgia for the Cold War when they were feared and respected than be free.

The terrible irony is that such nostalgia is so masochistic. 

If you live in Washington and you're a guest on Fox News, the producers graciously send a car and driver to take you to the studio and back home after the show.  One of the Fox drivers is a colorful character everyone calls "Wolf."  He grew up in Yugoslavia (in what is now Bosnia), and he told me a very illuminating story.

Wolf had read The Natural Gas Solution (soon after we first met he became a TTP subscriber) and explained how he knew it was accurate.  "I drove a Yugo car when I lived in Sarajevo back in the 70s," he said.  "Gas was so expensive and it was rationed.  So I, like several of my friends, installed a CNG (compressed natural gas) tank in the trunk, hooked a line up to the carburetor, and ran the car on natural gas.  We got such great mileage and the car ran so well, that we could drive to Trieste (in Italy) on weekends."

Jack,
An independent Ph.D. energy economist disagrees with your dismissal of LNG (liquefied natural gas).  He claims "it's economic to transport LNG at $3-3.50 mBTU [million British Thermal Units]," and that "if the world price is high enough, it will make economic sense for producers to liquefy it and send it to China."  In other words, natural gas (NG) is not "de-coupled" from the world market as you say.  He asserts that natural gas is "just as fungible as oil."

John M.

Reply:

John,
Could this fellow be shilling for Chevron or some other outfit hyping LNG?

You've got to hand it to President Bush.  For a pretty decent, straightforward guy, he sure has a knack for making enemies.

The economy is booming.  There has been no successful terrorist attack in the United States since Sept. 11, 2001.  Al Qaeda officials acknowledge we're winning the war in Iraq.  Yet in the history of polling, only three presidents have had job approval ratings as low or lower than President Bush does now.

They were Richard Nixon and Jimmy Carter just before they left office, and Harry Truman after he had fired Gen. Douglas MacArthur.  Mr. Bush is about where Mr. Carter was (34 percent), but still has a ways to fall to reach the nadirs of Nixon (24 percent) and Truman (23 percent).  Will he?

Which country receives the most in total foreign aid from all donors? The official numbers show Iraq at the top with $3 to $18 billion in aid (depending on how you define "aid") and all the other recipient nations of the world at less than $3 billion per year.

However, if you look at which nation benefits most from foreign subsidies, the U.S. would come out on top by a very wide margin.