My assistant Alan Freed e-mailed to me a full page re Jim Puplava—here is the first paragraph:

Jim Puplava: Puplava Financial Services, Inc. President & CEO * Investment Advisor Representative * Puplava Securities, Inc. President & CEO * Registered Representative * Financial Sense & Financial Sense Newshour * Author & Host

David’s e-mail to me of March 12 said:

All of us are getting together in San Diego on the weekend, starting March 30th, to talk about geopolitics and the risks ahead, and we’d like to invite you to attend. Please get in touch with me, as we would really love your attendance. Looking forward to meeting you.
David

So on March 29, I was in one of San Diego’s splendid hotels, complete with a picturesque swimming pool, and at noon the next day I sat in Jim Puplava’s conference room together with six other conferees.

David had been prevented by whimsical weather from coming to San Diego, and on that day (Friday) we heard only his voice electronically. He came in person for the Saturday session (9 a.m.–2 p.m.). Contrary to the stereotype of a successful wealthy businessman, he turned out to be youthful and charming. On Sunday I was flying back to New York.

True, all my expenses plus an honorarium were paid by David. Renay Kennedy, David’s assistant, had arranged every detail and guided every step of mine by Internet and telephone to make my trip as effortless and pleasant as possible. Still, what on earth possessed me to rush across the United States for those two discussions?

Said Lois XIV, the absolutist King of France, and later Napoleon repeated: “The State—it is I.” The U.S. president cannot claim this, and anyway is to leave his post next year—possibly in still greater public irreverence. “The State—it is we the people.”

Unless “we the people” are made by new (enlightened and honest) media programs to understand today’s geopolitics, nay, geostrategy, the USA (and Western Europe) will be annihilated by China’s post-nuclear superweapons, such as molecular nano weapons, which make Mutual Assured Destruction obsolete, in contrast to nuclear weapons, which China, Russia, and the United States have been unable to use against one another, since nuclear weapons cannot find and destroy, say, the attacked country’s submerged submarines with nuclear missiles aboard, ensuring the attacked country’s retaliation, that is, Mutual Assured Destruction.

To reinforce my point, I quoted Eric Drexler’s expanded 2007 edition of his famous 1986 book, which edition I had received electronically free of charge several days earlier. Drexler is known all over the world to be the founder of nanotechnology, and in China his photographs are displayed at centers of science, and all of his books and articles are available in the Chinese Internet in English, with interpolations in Chinese.

To this, one conferee seated opposite me retorted that Drexler’s books contain no mathematical formulas and hence are not scientific. I rejoined that Drexler’s 500-page volume “Nanosystems,” published in 1992 and still on my shelves, is chock-full of mathematics and, in particular, mathematical formulas. To which, the conferee alertly responded by saying that they are wrong.

The fact is that the creation of weapons like nuclear weapons or molecular nano weapons consists of two stages: at the first stage a scientist works in his study, and at the second stage the weapon, such as the “atom bomb,” is constructed, in a Manhattan Project, a city of labs, and it took about five years to construct the “atom bomb.” After the first stage was over, Einstein, to prompt the second stage, wrote (Aug. 2, 1939) a letter to Roosevelt, in which he referred to a possibility (not certainty!) of the “atom bomb.” Some world-known nuclear scientists denied that possibility. Only the Manhattan Project proved how real the “atom bomb” was in about five years.

My reference to Einstein’s letter produced a stormy reaction of at least one conferee, who jumped up and proclaimed that the development of the atom bomb was initiated not by Einstein, but by “the British.” But I cited Einstein not to show that he (and no one else) initiated the development of the atom bomb, but to show that even he considered it a possibility, not a certainty. By the same token, Drexler’s molecular nano weapons are a possibility, not a certainty.

I witnessed the attempts of Drexler’s “Foresight Institute” to receive from the U.S. Congress part of its allocations for nanotechnology. Not a cent! If President Roosevelt had listened to those who said that the “atom bomb” is impossible, and Einstein was mistaken, yet Hitler had developed it, the world, including the USA, would have been his.

My contention that David Tice et al. could and should as top-level business analysts create television programs that would educate the public geostrategically and at the same time be interesting enough to compete commercially with what the U.S. media communicated about Iraq for four years, or about Iran’s 15 British prisoners for three weeks. Several conferees declared that my project is impossible, since the Americans are attracted in media programs only by “pop” for their entertainment, and what involves their own personal destinies, not the destiny of their country or mankind.

This was one of those sweeping generalizations, condemning a whole nation. “But what about my readers?” I remonstrated. “More than a thousand of them have sent me e-mails, showing how intelligent, understanding, and appreciative they are.”

The conferees said that my readers are a statistically insignificant exception.

The form of government in the United States or in Britain is called nowadays “democracy.” Strictly speaking, the word refers to universal suffrage—the right of every psychiatrically healthy adult to vote and be elected. That aspect of the form of government which is concerned with the defense of rights is, strictly speaking, a “constitutional republic” in the United States, and a “constitutional monarchy” in Britain, which did not have universal suffrage until the early 20th century. The question is: How are democracy and constitutionalism possible in the United States if the Americans, with statistically insignificant exceptions, cannot rise mentally above “pop” entertainment, and their own personal destinies? Bernard Shaw said (considering himself Irish) that the English are a nation taking only football seriously. But is this paradox not only funny, but true? What nation has created constitutionalism in the post-Roman West, starting from Magna Carta of 1215? The greatest political thinker of the post-Roman West was John Stuart Mill, an Englishman, and he became world-known due to his English readers, not any universities, the government, or the parliament. On the other hand, Shaw admired Stalin’s Russia, a countrywide concentration camp.

During our second San Diego discussion (Saturday, 9 a.m.–2 p.m.) David was at our conference table. According to his schedule paper, I was to “lead” the discussion with the item: “China’s potential for first strike.”

The fact is that there was no need for me to assure the other conferees, let alone David, that China is developing its “potential for first strike.” It would have been on my part preaching to the converted. One of the six “agenda items” David mentioned in his schedule paper for the conference was “Zhang Hongbao warning.”

My column about Zhang Hongbao began as follows:

His name is Zhang Hongbao, and the Chinese dictatorship declared him to be a criminal, but he managed to escape from China to the United States, where he was recently [in January 2007] “killed in a car accident.”

In 2005, “World Chinese Net” posted his essay: “The Chinese Communist Party’s Post-Nuclear Super Weapons and Its Geostrategic Goal.”

Before its publication, his assistant in New York (Zhang was living in Los Angeles) had shown the article to me. I read it and said that it was incomprehensible to the non-Chinese. His assistant asked me to edit it. I said that this was impossible. The article had to be rewritten in English, not just edited.

Then they took some expressions from my columns and incorporated them into Zhang’s article. Thus the words “. . . Post-Nuclear Super Weapons and Its Geostrategic Goal” in the title of his article in the “World Chinese Net” of 9/25/2005 are one of my expressions, as was obvious to all who had read my columns. I was glad if I thus helped, and I praised Zhang’s article: the title of my column about it was “A Native Chinese on the China Dictators’ World Conquest.”

So, my question in our San Diego discussion was not whether the dictators of China are planning a (nano?) death blow with a bandit’s bludgeon (shashou jian) at the West and above all the United States, but how to enlighten, wake up, educate Westerners, and above all Americans, about this mortal danger, comparable to Hitler’s use of nuclear weapons, had he developed them ahead of the United States.

In the USA, there is no dictator who could convert the country (“The State—it is I”) into a military complex, developing super weapons against China, while the media would present China as an amiable and amicable trade partner and concentrate its daily military zeal on Iraq because certain top federal officials still hope to benefit from some of its incredible wealth of oil.

Yes, David W. Tice and those willing to join him (like myself) must create new television programs and new movies, both interesting to watch to as many people as possible but also at the same time geostrategically enlightening and hence contributing to the election of geostrategically enlightened members of the executive and legislative branches, and their adoption of the geostrategically enlightened policy of Western survival in face of the global dangers no less formidable than was Nazi Germany or Soviet Russia, and today add China’s and Russia’s development of post-nuclear super weapons, capable of delivering a sudden mortal blow without Mutually Assured Destruction.