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

A great many conservatives are seriously steamed about George Bush even thinking about sending American soldiers to fight and possibly die in some Liberian Rumble in the Jungle. 

Liberal Democrats only advocate putting American soldiers in harm’s way when they perceive no US national security interest.  Whenever there is such an interest, they are dependably opposed.  Thus they were against the War in Iraq but are now all for Americans getting shot in Liberia by rival gangs of heavily armed thugs stoned on marijuana.

The last place in the world American soldiers should be sent to is some anarchic hell-hole

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

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

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

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

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

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 —