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%.
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
On Wednesday, April 7, 2004, the Washington Post ran this headline:
U.S. Forces Take Heavy Losses As Violence Spreads Across Iraq
About a Dozen Marines Killed; Foreigners, Scores of Iraqis Die
To the fathers, mothers, wives, brothers, and children of the Marines who died, the losses are the heavy indeed. There is nothing so precious as the blood of our soldiers, Marines, airmen, sailors, and civilians who willingly lay their lives on the line in service to their country. We can never replace them, and we must always remember them.
Nevertheless, I am angered at the sensationalist journalism that would lead the uninformed to believe our Army and Marine Corps are being bled white in Iraq.
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
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 key indicators of Bush’s impending victory on November 2nd is a historic shift in Jewish voting habits. American Jews in unprecedented numbers will cast their ballot for a Republican president. Cliff Alsberg, a writer and television producer in Los Angeles, has written this compelling essay addressed to his fellow Jews still struggling with their reflexive compulsion to pull the Democrat lever. -JW
I am writing to you today as members of my “extended family”—my family of fellow Jews and fellow Americans with whom I most strongly identify and who I most cherish.
Never before have the stakes in a presidential election been greater for us; both here at home and abroad. Never before has there been a clearer choice between two candidates, and never before has so much depended on us-- both as Jews and as Americans.
I’d like to address six key issues that invariably affect each of us as both Jews and Americans. I urge you to read and to “listen” to these issues with an open heart and an open mind. If you are truly “undecided”, I implore you to dig deep within your heart to weigh the consequences of your vote. If you are already a staunch Kerry supporter, I respectfully ask you to remain open and intellectually honest for the duration of this letter.
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.**
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
If you thought American Universities were repositories of masochistic appeasement of enviers of Western Civilization, compare them to those of Israel’s. If you need to sober up after all those Christmas parties, this article will do it quickly. –JW
“How could you report the war in Iraq if you sided with the Americans?”
“How can you say that George Bush is better than Saddam Hussein?”
These are some of the milder questions I received from an audience of some 150 undergraduate students from Tel Aviv University’s Political Science Department. The occasion was a guest lecture I gave last month on
When Albert Einstein wrote and offered his initial papers on the Special Theory of Relativity in 1905, he was an unknown clerk in the Swiss Patent Office with no academic credentials. Needless to say, for established professional physicists, the overthrow of the principles upon which their lives' work was based by a 26 year-old kid nobody every heard of did not go over too well.
So almost 100 years later, here comes another kid, a high school dropout no less, who may impact 21st Century science the way Einstein did the 20th. Peter Lynds, a 27 year-old broadcasting school tutor from Wellington, New Zealand, may change the way that we think about time and its relationship to classical and quantum mechanics and cosmology.
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 —
Bruce Vincent is the Executive Director of Provider Pals, a nation-wide urban/rural youth exchange program based in Montana. He was the recipient of a Preserve America Presidential Award, presented to him by the president in the White House. This is his account of an extraordinary moment between him and President Bush that occurred at the end of the presentation. I invite you to send this on to friends who may benefit from knowing the kind of man America is blessed with to have as her president. -JW
Stepping into the Oval Office, each of us [the awardees] was introduced to the President and Mrs. Bush. We shook hands, received our awards with photo op and participated in informal conversation.
He and the First Lady were asked about the impact of the Presidency on their marriage and, with an arm casually wrapped around Laura, he said that he thought the place may be hard on weak marriages but that it had the ability to make strong marriages even stronger and that he was blessed with a strong one.
He noted that it would be a mistake to come to the Oval Office and entertain a mission to “find yourself.” He said that with all of the pressures and responsibilities that go with the job, you'd best know who you are when you put your nameplate on the desk in the Oval Office. He said he knows who he is and now America has had four years to learn about who he is.
When we departed the I said to him, "Mr. President, I know you to be a man of strong faith and have a favor to ask you." As he shook my hand he looked me in the eye and said, "Just name it."
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
When John Kerry testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in April 1971, he admitted that he had probably broken the law by going to Paris and meeting with North Vietnamese and Viet Cong leaders. (From page 188 of the hearing record: "I realize that even my visits in Paris . . . in a sense are on the borderline of private individuals negotiating, et cetera. I understand these things."
The prohibition against private individuals negotiating--which has been on the criminal statute books since John Adams was President--is contained in 18 U.S.C. Section 953 and is a felony.)
I was serving my second tour of duty in Vietnam at the time, and while I was painfully aware of the lies Kerry was telling Congress and the American people about what was happening in Vietnam (pretending to speak for "all" Vietnam veterans, calling us "war criminals," saying 60-80 percent of us were "stoned" twenty-four hours a day, and the like), I was unaware until recently that he was also involved in exploiting the families of American POWs in Vietnam.
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
