Loyalty to Self Over Country
The Fifth Column Frank Salvato, Managing Editor
May 30, 2008

Like it or not, the reality is that we live in an extremely self-centered society. If you take issue with this statement just watch how pedestrians enter into crosswalks during rush hour. Ignoring that pedestrians only have the right of way when they are within the crosswalk, today’s bipeds don’t hesitate at all to walk directly in front of moving vehicles, expecting to be protected from trauma by their imagined “right” to occupy a space versus a 4,000lbs vehicle. While this example illustrates how being self-centered – or arrogant...or vacuous – can cause personal harm, these same character flaws can cause harm to the country.

It could be argued that the arrogance prevalent in today’s American culture is a direct by-product of our entitlement society; a society that manufactures high self-esteem and then bestows it on people who have done nothing to deserve it. Logic mandates that when a person believes that he is the “end all be all” it isn’t that far of a stretch for that person to develop a belief that he is owed the good things of life; to expect things rather than to work toward earning them. This can lead to a culture populated entirely with “chiefs” with nary an “Indian” to be found. A society – or an organization, government, team, etc. – cannot function when everyone expects to be the boss.

This prevailing character flaw is effecting more than the individual. Its collective societal impart is corroding the fiber of our nation and doing so in every walk of life.

In education we are seeing teachers, administrators and union infiltrators narcissistically injecting their special interest topics into class curriculum and beyond. Where in eras past the onus of education was on the mastery of the tools that contribute to the gathering of information, its discernment and the development of critical thinking skills, today there is more emphasis placed on sex education than reading and on diversity than the accurate teaching of American history.

The encroachment of special interest content in curriculum, at the hand of factional narcissism, is producing graduates who possess an artificially elevated level of self-esteem but no critical thinking skills. The self-centered nature of what can only be termed our public special interest educational system is churning out graduates who believe they are correct on every issue they address even when they know very little about the issue. After all, they have been taught that it is their right to be correct.

The cancer of societal arrogance can be seen in the public arena as well.

Former Presidential Press Secretary Scott McClellan is engaging the talk show circuit to promote his new “tell all” book about his disillusionment with his White House years. In his offering he contends that not only was he lied to about a number of things but that he himself perpetrated disinformation on the American public, sometimes unknowingly and other times with full knowledge of the truth. Of course, the Socialist-Progressive-Left is glomming onto his portrayal of the Bush Administration as the gospel, even in the face of repudiation by an overwhelming number of those who would know the truth.

I for one am categorizing McClellan’s literary effort as a work of fiction tinged with a splattering of reference to actual events and here’s why.

All you ever had to do was to watch a press conference led by McClellan to understand that he was never – in his wildest dreams – ever going to be offered one of those high-paying contributor jobs by FOX News, MSNBC or CNN. Besides being unable to cogently communicate the message of the White House, McClellan always seemed to be on the verge of “flop sweat,” the malady of perspiration occasionally affecting comedians who are “bombing.” To say his communication skills were wanting would be an understatement.

Because McClellan wasn’t “set for life” due to his years in the employment of the White House, it would seem a “no brainer” to write a book about them and as we all know the literary field is filled with nefarious characters who would put book sales above the truth.

I mention the truth because in interviews McClellan has eluded to the notion that former Vice Presidential Chief of Staff ‘Scooter’ Libby and Presidential Advisor Karl Rove colluded behind closed doors on the Valerie Plame issue. McClellan makes his claim while admitting he wasn’t privy to any conversation taking place between Rove and Libby on the issue. Rove has indicated that none took place. He explained that not only did their respective official duties require he and Libby to interact almost on a daily basis but that they were friends away from work. Even to the most appeasable eye it is transparent that McClellan included this assertion to sell books, most likely at the prodding of his publisher.

Which presents these questions: Why? Why now? Did he think beyond his own selfish reasons for writing this book before he signed on?

We have already arrived at the answer to the first question. McClellan did it for the money. Why now is apparent. The time is ripe for a scandal-ridden tell-all book on the Bush Administration. With the president not running for office, the Socialist-Progressive-Left and the rest of the Democrats would eat this book up. Congressman Robert Wexler (D-FL) has already indicated he wants McClellan to testify to his allegations in front of the House Judiciary Committee. McClellan’s allegations will no doubt be used by Leftist spin doctors in an effort to discredit John McCain, pay no mind to the fact that McCain and President Bush have clashed on just about every piece of legislation and appointment during the president’s tenure.

That leaves us with the third question: Did McClellan think beyond his own selfish reasons for writing this book before he signed on? The answer to this question is debatable but I have to believe that he didn’t.

While I take issue with McClellan’s talents as a presidential press secretary and his mastery of critical thinking skills, I don’t go as far as to question his patriotism. I believe he loves his country. That said I do not believe that he understands the consequences of his actions, and I believe his actions to be not only disloyal to a man who gave him perhaps the most important experience of his life but self-centered and visionless.

We stand, as a nation, with boots on the ground in a battle for the survival of our country, our uniquely American ideology. Where we have a violent and advancing foe in aggressive Islamofascism we also have a foe in those who would destroy our nation from the inside; the American Fifth Column. These people will stop at nothing and employ any propaganda – no matter how devoid of fact, no matter how transparently false – to succeed in electing and installing those who would transform our Constitutional Republic into a Socialist democracy. McClellan’s tome is a vehicle tailor made for this effort.

As we enter in to the final stages of this excruciatingly long election cycle (thank you Democrats) you can bet the farm that those who employ deceitful partisan political tactics in their quest for power will use the questionable information in McClellan’s book to their advantage. They will quote McClellan as an “in-the-know” Bush insider even though former Assistant to the President and Counselor to Vice President Dick Cheney, Mary Matalin, espouses that McClellan was a non-contributor in meetings and that he was seldom privy to policy discussions. The American Fifth Column will embrace McClellan’s allegations as truth and promote them with vigor through a complicit mainstream media.

Whether McClellan intended for his book to serve as a tool used to advance the American Fifth Column is uncertain, but one thing isn’t, the self-centered actions of this alleged friend to George W. Bush, the person, have done exactly that.

It would seem that in today’s America the concept of loyalty is wasted on the self-absorbed.

Frank Salvato is the Executive Director and Director of Terrorism Research for BasicsProject.org a non-profit, non-partisan, 501(c)(3) research and education initiative. His writing has been recognized by the US House International Relations Committee and the Japan Center for Conflict Prevention.

Let's face it. Supply and demand will never replace "need" and "greed" in political discussions of economic issues.

Talking about the "need" for more affordable housing or more affordable medical care is what will get politicians more votes this election year.

Voters don't want to hear about impersonal things like supply and demand. They want to hear about how their political heroes will stop the villains from "gouging" them or "exploiting" them with high prices.

Moral melodrama is where it's at, politically.

Least of all do voters want to hear about the most fundamental reality of economics-- that what everybody wants has always added up to more than there is.

That is called scarcity-- and if there were no scarcity, there would be no economics. What would be the point, if we could all have everything we want, in whatever amount we want?

There were no economists in the Garden of Eden because everything was available in unlimited abundance.

A politician with good rhetorical skills can create a new Garden of Eden in people's minds, though only in their minds. However, that is sufficient, if that vision or illusion can be kept alive until election day, and its failure to materialize afterwards can be explained away by the obstruction of villains.

One of the many ironies of politics is that those politicians who do the most to reduce supply often express the greatest outrage about high prices.

So long as the voters buy it, the politicians will keep selling it.

Make a list of those politicians who do the most to prevent our drilling for our own oil. Then make a list of those politicians who express the most outrage about the high price of gasoline. Don't be surprised if you see the same names on both lists.

Make a list of those politicians who most loudly lament the lack of "affordable housing." Then make a list of those politicians who have most consistently promoted restrictions on the building of housing, under the banner of "open space" laws, "farmland protection" policies, preventing "urban sprawl," and other politically soothing phrases Again, do not be surprised at seeing the same folks on both lists.

Is it really too "complex" to figure out that taking vast amounts of land off the market will make the price of the remaining land far more expensive? Or that houses built on very expensive land will be very expensive housing?

Despite the current decline in housing prices, a recent advertisement in a Palo Alto, California, newspaper listed a vacant lot for sale at $879,000. If you build anything more elaborate than a tent on that property, you are talking about a million-dollar home, be it ever so humble.

Many of the places with very high housing prices have very modest homes on very small amounts of land. The San Francisco Chronicle ran a story about a graduate student seeking a place to live, "visiting one exorbitantly priced hovel after another."

It is not at all uncommon for land to cost more than the housing that is built on it, in those places where politicians have made housing unaffordable with land use restrictions under pretty names-- all the while lamenting the lack of affordable housing.

So long as politicians can get some people's votes by publicly feeling their pain when it comes to housing costs, and other people's votes by restricting the building of housing, they can have a winning coalition at election time, which is their bottom line.

Economists may point out that the different members of this coalition have conflicting interests that could be better resolved through competition in the marketplace. But how many economists have ever put together a winning coalition?

So long as voters prefer heroes and villains to supply and demand, this game will continue to be played. It is not because supply and demand is too "complex" to understand, but because it is not emotionally satisfying.

In one of those typical San Francisco decisions that makes San Francisco a poster child for the liberal left, the city's Board of Supervisors is moving to block a paint store from renting a vacant building once used by a video rental shop.

That paint store is part of a chain, and chain stores are not liked by a vocal segment of the local population. Chain stores are already banned from some parts of San Francisco, and at least one member of the Board of Supervisors plans to introduce bans on chain stores in other areas.

Chain stores have been disliked for decades, at both local and national levels. Taking advantage of economies of scale that lower their costs of doing business, chain stores are able to charge lower prices than smaller independent stores, and therefore attract customers away from their higher-cost competitors.

The economics of this is certainly not too "complex" to understand. However, politics is not economics, so politicians tend to respond to people's emotional reactions-- and if economic realities stand in the way, then so much the worse for economics.

All sorts of laws and court decisions, going back as far as the 1930s, have tried to prevent the economies of scale that lower costs from being reflected in lower prices that drive high-cost competitors out of business.

Economists may say that benefits always have costs, that there is no free lunch-- but how many votes do economists have?

There was a time when courts would have stopped politicians from interfering with people's property rights by banning chain stores. After all, if whoever owns the vacant video rental store in San Francisco wants to rent it to the paint company, and the paint company is willing to pay the rent, why should politicians be involved in the first place?

However, once the notion of "a living Constitution" became fashionable, the Constitution's protection of property rights has been "interpreted" virtually out of existence by judges.

The biggest losers are not people who own property but people who have to pay higher prices because politicians make it harder for businesses that charge lower prices to come into the community.

Despite the political myth that government is protecting us from big businesses charging monopoly prices, the cold fact is that far more government actions have been taken against businesses that charge low prices than against businesses that charge high prices.

The biggest antitrust cases of a century ago were against the Great Northern Railroad and the Standard Oil Company, both of which charged lower prices than their competitors.

The Robinson-Patman Act of 1936 was called "the anti-Sears, Roebuck law" because it was directed again this and other chains that charged lower prices than smaller retailers could match.

For a long time, there were so-called Fair Trade Laws designed to keep low-cost businesses in general from charging low prices that drive high-cost businesses out of business.

Fortunately, enough sanity eventually prevailed that Fair Trade Laws were repealed. But the emotional needs that such laws met were still there, and today they find an outlet in hostility to Wal-Mart and other "big box" stores-- especially in San Francisco and other bastions of the liberal left.

People have every right to indulge their emotions at their own expense. Unfortunately, through politics, those emotions are expressed in laws and administrative decisions by people who pay no price at all for indulging either their own emotions or the emotions of the people who vote for them.

That is why the Constitution tried to erect barriers to government power, of which property rights were one. But, once judges started saying that "the public interest" over-rides property rights, that left politicians free to call whatever they wanted to do "the public interest."

Neither economics nor property rights are too "complex" to understand. But both get in the way of willful people who seek to deny other people the right to make their own decisions.

Anyone who doesn't like chain stores is free not to shop there. But that is wholly different from saying that they have a right to stop other people from exercising their own freedom of choice. That's not too "complex" to understand.

You think the war in Iraq is costing us too much? Read this:

Boy, am I confused. I have been hammered with the propaganda that it is the Iraq war and the war on terror that is bankrupting us. I now find that to be RIDICULOUS.

I hope the following 14 reasons are forwarded over and over again until they are read so many times that the reader gets sick of reading them. I have included the URL's for verification of all the following facts.

1. $11 Billion to $22 billion is spent on welfare to illegal aliens each year by state governments.
http://tinyurl.com/zob77
2. $2.2 Billion dollars a year is spent on food assistance programs such as food stamps, WIC, and free school lunches for illegal aliens.
http://www.cis..org/articles/2004/fiscalexec.html
3. $2.5 Billion dollars a year is spent on Medicaid for illegal aliens.
http://www.cis.org/articles/2004/fiscalexec.html
4. $12 Billion dollars a year is spent on primary and secondary school education for children here illegally and they cannot speak a word of English!
http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0604/01/ldt.0.html

5. $17 Billion dollars a year is spent for education for the American-born children of illegal aliens, known as anchor babies.
http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0604/01/ldt.01.html
6. $3 Million Dollars a DAY is spent to incarcerate illegal aliens.
http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0604/01/ldt.01.html

7. 30% percent of all Federal Prison inmates are illegal aliens.
http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0604/01/ldt.01.html
8. $90 Billion Dollars a year is spent on illegal aliens for Welfare & social services by the American taxpayers.
http://premium.cnn.com/TRANSCIPTS/0610/29/ldt.01.html

9. $200 Billion Dollars a year in suppressed American wages are caused by the illegal aliens.
http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0604/01/ldt.01.html

10. The illegal aliens in the United States have a crime rate that's two and a h alf times that of white non-illegal aliens. In particular, their children, are going to make a huge additional crime problem in the US
http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0606/12/ldt.01.html>

11. During the year of 2005 there were 4 to 10 MILLION illegal aliens that crossed our Southern Border also, as many as 19,500 illegal aliens from Terrorist Countries. Millions of pounds of drugs, cocaine, meth, heroin and marijuana, crossed into the U. S from the Southern border.
http://tinyurl.com/t9sht

12. The National Policy Institute, "estimated that the total cost of mass deportation would be between $206 and $230 billion or an average cost of between $41 and $46 billion annually over a five year period."
http://www.nationalpolicyinstitute.org/pdf/deportation.pdf>
13. In 2006 illegal aliens sent home $45 BILLION in remittances back to their countries of origin.
http://www.rense.com/general75/niht.htm>

14. "The Dark Side of Illegal Immigration: Nearly One Million Sex Crimes Committed by Illegal Immigrants In The United States." http://www.drdsk.com/articleshtml

The total cost is a whopping $ 338.3 BILLION DOLLARS A YEAR!
Are we THAT stupid?
If this doesn't bother you then just delete the message. If, on the other hand, it does raise the hair on the back of your neck, I hope you forward it to every legal resident in the country including every representative in Washington, D.C. - five times a week for as long as it takes to restore some semblance of intelligence in our policies and enforcement thereof.

" In God We Trust " May God always bless America!

Will the Ice Caps Melt?
American Thinker ^ | January 22, 2008 | Jerome J. Schmitt

Posted on 01/23/2008 2:49:50 PM PST by neverdem

"The engineer has learned vastly more from the steam-engine than the steam-engine will ever learn from the engineer."
-- Prof John B. Fenn, Nobel Prize, Chemistry, 2002

There is considerable debate over whether the "greenhouse gas" effect will raise the temperature of the atmosphere by between 1-5°C over the next 100 years. But even if you grant for the sake of argument the Warmist claim that the earth's atmosphere will go up a full five degrees Centigrade in temperature, Al Gore's claim that ocean levels will rise 20 feet thanks to global warming seems to ignore the laws of thermodynamics. I am no climatologist, but I do know about physics.

Anyone who has ever spent time in a temperate climate following a snowy winter realizes that when the air temperature rises above 32°F the snow and ice do not melt immediately. We may experience many balmy early spring days with temperatures well above freezing while snow drifts slowly melt over days or weeks. Similarly, lakes and ponds take some time to freeze even days or weeks after the air temperature has plunged below zero. This is due to the latent heat of freezing/melting of water, a physical concept long quantified in thermodynamics.

That aspect of basic physics seems to have been overlooked by climatologists in their alarming claims of dramatic and rapid sea-level rise due to melting of the Antarctic ice caps and Greenland glaciers. But of course, we have learned that models predicting global warming also failed to take account of precipitation, so overlooking important factors ("inconvenient truths") should not cause much surprise anymore.

The scientific data necessary to calculate the amount of heat necessary to melt enough ice to raise ocean levels 20 feet is readily available on the internet, and the calculations needed to see if polar cap melting passes the laugh test are surprisingly simple. Nothing beyond multiplication and division, and because we will use metric measures for simplicity's sake, much of the multiplying is by ten or a factor of ten.

Let's review the math. The logic and calculations are within the grasp of anyone who cares to focus on the subject for minute or two, and speak for themselves.

I should first mention that the only source of energy to heat the atmosphere is the sun. The average energy per unit time (power) in the form of sunlight impinging on the earth is roughly constant year-to-year, and there are no means to increase or reduce the energy flux to the earth. The question merely is how much of this energy is trapped in the atmosphere and available to melt ice thus effecting "climate change".

How much heat must be trapped to raise the atmospheric temperature by a degree centigrade (or more) can be readily calculated, knowing the mass of the atmosphere and the specific heat of air. Specific heat is simply an empirically-determined quantity that corresponds to the number of units of heat energy required to raise a specific mass of a substance, in this case air, by 1 degree in temperature. A common unit of energy familiar to most of us is the calorie. But for simplicity, in this calculation I will use the MKS[*] metric unit of the Joule (J), which, while perhaps unfamiliar to many readers in itself, is the numerator in the definition of our common unit of power, the Watt[†] = Joule/second.

The mass of the atmosphere can be found here. We also know that it is principally composed of air, so without loss of accuracy in what is essentially an "order of magnitude" calculation, it is fair to employ the specific heat of air at constant pressure, C_p which also can be referenced on the internet here. While this has a value that changes with temperature, it doesn't change by orders of magnitude, consequently, I choose the value at 0° C, which, as we all know, is near to the global mean temperature at sea level. In this I err on the side of caution, overestimating the heat energy in the calculation below, because as we all know, both air pressure and temperature drop with altitude. Also note that while the specific heat value cited uses the unit °K in the denominator, this is equal to a °C. I use the tilda (~) as symbol for "circa" or "approximately".

Mass of atmosphere:	5 x 1018 kg
Specific heat of air:	1.005 kJ/kg-°C
Heat needed to raise the temp of the atmosphere 1° C:	~5 x 1018 kJ
Heat needed to raise the temp of the atmosphere 5° C:	~2.5 x 1019 kJ

It is instructive now to compare this quantity of heat with the amount that would be required to melt sufficient volume of ice from the Antarctic ice to raise the sea-level by 20-feet as predicted by Al Gore. Although ice floats, ice and water are very close in density, so at first approximation, it is fair to say that the volume of sea-water required to raise sea-level by 20-feet would be equivalent to the volume of ice that would need to melt to fill the ocean basins in order to cause that rise. Consequently, let's first roughly calculate the volume of seawater necessary.

The surface area of the earth can be looked up here. It is 5.1 x 10⁸ square kilometers, which I convert to 5.1 x 10¹⁴ square meters below for the purpose of our calculation. Al Gore's 20-foot-rise is equal to ~6 meter. Let's use the commonly cited figure that 70% of the earth's surface is covered by the oceans and seas. Accordingly,

Area of earth's surface:	5.1 x 1014 m2
Proportion of earth's surface covered by water:	70%
Area of oceans and seas:	~3.6 x 1014 m2
Sea level rise predicted by Al Gore:	20 feet = 6 m
Volume of water necessary to raise sea-level 20-feet:	~6 x 1024 m3
Volume of ice that needs to melt to raise sea-level 20-feet:	~22 x 1015 m3

This is where the latent heat of melting comes into the equation. As we all know, when we drop an ice cube into our glass of water, soft-drink or adult-beverage, it quickly cools the drink. Heat is transferred to the ice from the liquid in order to melt the ice; this loss of heat cools and reduces the temperature of the liquid. This cooling continues until the ice melts completely.

Scientists have long known that a mixture if ice and water (ice-water) remains at the freezing / melting point (0° C = 32°F). Adding heat does NOT change the temperature, it just melts more ice; withdrawing heat does NOT change the temperature it just freezes more water. The temperature of ice-water will not rise until all the ice is melted; conversely, the temperature of ice-water will not fall until all the water is frozen. The heat that would have otherwise raised the ice temperature is somehow "stored" in the melt water - hence "latent heat".

As an aside, the transformation of the latent-heat of steam into work via steam-engines has had, and continues to have, vast industrial importance. The early systematic study of steam-engines in order to improve their performance, laid the groundwork for the science of thermodynamics, which undergirds essentially all of physics and chemistry.

It turns out that latent heats of melting (and evaporation) are generally very large quantities when compared to the amount of heat necessary to change temperatures. Also, as usual in such analyses we normalize to units of mass. Since the density of water/ice is roughly a thousand times higher than air, this also greatly impacts the magnitudes of energy involved, as you will see below. So let's proceed with the calculation.

The latent heat of melting of water can be looked up here. It is 334 kJ/kg of water. One of the benefits of the metric system is that 1 ml = 1 cm³ = 1 g of water; this "built in" conversion simplifies many engineering calculations. Remembering this fact, we do not need to look up the density of water. Converting this density, 1g/cm³, to MKS units, yields density of water = 1000 kg/m³. We now have all our data for the rough calculation:

Volume of ice that needs to melt (from above):	~22 x 1015
Density of water and ice:	1000 kg/m3
Mass of ice that needs to melt:	~22 x 1018 kg
Latent heat of melting for water	3.34 x 102 kJ/kg
Heat necessary to melt ice to achieve 20-foot sea-level rise	~ 7.4 x 1021 kJ

Following this "back of the envelope" calculation, let's compare the two energy values:

Heat needed to raise the temp of the atmosphere 5° C:	~2.5 x 1019 kJ
Heat necessary to melt ice to achieve 20-foot sea-level rise	~7.4 x 1021 kJ

There is a difference of 300* between these two figures. Even if I am wrong by an order of magnitude, there is still an enormous difference. This does NOT mean that ice caps have not melted in the distant past nor that ice-age glaciers have not grown to cover much of the northern hemisphere; it simply means that the time scales involved to move sufficient quantities of heat to effect such melting or freezing occur over what we scientists commonly call "geological" time scales, i.e. hundreds of thousands and millions of years.

Even if sufficient heat is trapped in the atmosphere to raise it the maximum value predicted by anthropogenic "global warming" alarmists (5^°C) over the next 100 years, hundreds of times more heat energy must be imparted into the ice-caps to melt sufficient ice to raise sea-levels the catastrophic levels prophesied by Al Gore.

I humbly submit that this might constitute a flaw in his equations.

*Editor's note: a transposed decimal point led to an incorrect multiple used here when this article was first published. The energy required is nevertheless hundreds of times greater than evidently assumed by Al Gore.

Jerome J. Schmitt has a degree in mechanical engineering from Yale, and is president of NanoEngineering Corporation.

---

[*] MKS = meter-kilogram-second instead of cgs units = centimeter-gram-second for the units of length, mass and time.

[†] -After James Watt, inventor of the first practical steam-engine which employed a separate condenser.

Hack Attack: Build a Hackintosh Mac for Under $800

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Hack Attack

Build a Hackintosh Mac for Under $800

If the high price tag for Apple hardware has kept you from buying a Mac but you're willing to roll up your sleeves and get adventurous, you can build your own "Hackintosh"—a PC that runs a patched version of OS X Leopard. What?!, you say. Apple's move to Intel processors in 2006 meant that running OS X on non-Apple hardware is possible, and a community hacking project called OSx86 launched with that goal in mind. Since then, OSx86 has covered major ground, making it possible for civilians—like you and me!—to put together their own Hackintosh running Mac OS 10.5. Today, I'll show you how to build your own high end computer running Leopard from start to finish for under $800.

Right now the cheapest Mac on sale at the Apple store is a $600 Mac Mini sporting a 1.83GHz proc, 1GB of RAM and an 80GB hard drive. For $200 more, your Hackintosh can boast a 2.2GHz proc with 4GB of RAM, a 500GB drive, and a completely upgradeable case for expanding your setup in the future.

Building a DIY Mac requires some work on your part, so be ready to dedicate time to this project. To make things as easy as possible, I'm going to lay out how I built my Hackintosh from start to finish, from the hardware I used to the final patches I applied to the Leopard install. If you can build a Lego set and transcribe text, you've got all the basic skills required.

The Hardware

There's no definitive best bet for a Hackintosh hardware configuration, so you may be able to experiment and come up with a better selection of parts than I did. However, I can guarantee that Leopard will (or at least has) run successfully on this hardware setup.

To make things easy, I've put together my entire hardware setup as a wish list on Newegg. (You may notice that the total price is listed at around $850, but I knocked $110 off the price tag due to a couple of mail-in rebates—so "Under $800" it remains, however fudgingly.)

The build consists of a 2.2GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor, a total of 4GB of RAM (four sticks at 1GB each), an ASUS P5W DH Deluxe motherboard, a GeForce 7300GT (the same basic video card that comes installed in the default Mac Pro configuration), a 500GB hard drive, a DVD burner, and an Antec Sonata case (which I've always liked for its looks and quiet fans). The motherboard is the most important element, since the patches we'll apply later are tailored specifically for this motherboard. You could probably tweak a lot of the other hardware without many complications, but if you stick with this motherboard and follow the installation instructions, you shouldn't see any major complications.

The Build

Now that you've got all the parts, it's time to start putting your Mac together. We've detailed every step of the computer building process at one point or another in the past here on Lifehacker, so rather than cover that ground again, I'll outline the process with links to our previous instructions. As always, be sure to read your hardware manuals before you begin—particularly from the motherboard—to get to know your hardware before you start the installation. Also, always remember to be careful of static electricity and always keep yourself grounded and your board unpowered until you're finished.

1. Install the motherboard and CPU: You can follow these instructions almost without variation, but the heatsink and fan installation, in particular, is a touch different. Rather than hooking the heatsink to your motherboard, the included Intel heatsink pops into place. For a more detailed description of how this works, consult your motherboard's manual and the manual included with your processor.
2. Install your RAM: The only thing you need to keep in mind when you're installing the RAM is that you should install the matched pairs—that is, the pairs that come in the same package—in like colored slots. This isn't strictly necessary, but it's a good practice and generally means better performance.
3. Install the video card: These instructions actually detail how to install a PCI card, which is just a more general way of looking at your video card. The card we're using is a PCI Express card and should be installed in the top (orange) PCI slot.
4. Install the hard drive and DVD drive: Your hard drive is an SATA drive, which is not the type of drive installed in the instructions (though they do address SATA drives). Just connect one of the power supply's SATA power cables to the drive and then connect the drive to the red SATA connector on your motherboard (it's labeled on the board as SATA1). Follow the same basic instructions to install your DVD drive but plug the drive into one of the other SATA ports (I used the SATA4 port).

When you've finished putting everything together, your open case should look like the nearly completed image below. In that picture, I've yet to install the hard drive and DVD drive and I still need to connect the case power and other connectors to the motherboard. (You may install other features of the motherboard if you prefer, like the FireWire connector for the back of the case).

To make sure everything's working properly, close it up, plug it into a monitor and keyboard and power it up. If the computer boots into the BIOS (by pressing Delete when prompted), you're ready to move on. If the computer won't boot, you may have to open the case back up and double-check your installation. Among other things, be sure that your RAM is properly seated.

I should note that at this point of my installation, I ran into a bum power supply unit (PSU) in my case. Unfortunately that meant that I didn't know whether the PSU was bunk or my motherboard was fried, and since I don't own a voltage meter it took an extra trip to Fry's and some troubleshooting to get to the bottom of it. The point is that when you're building a PC yourself, you can and should be prepared to run into snags, so if you're not ready to troubleshoot if a problem arises, you may want to think twice before trying this. That said, I've built several PCs in the past and this was my only major snag in the course of a build, so it's also very likely that your build could go off without a hitch.

Either way, as soon as you're able to boot into the BIOS, you're ready to get started with the pre-installation.

Pre-Installation

There are two things you need to tackle to prepare your computer for installation. First, you'll need to tweak your BIOS settings to properly work with the Leopard install. Second, you need to patch the Leopard DVD to install on your newly built Hackintosh computer.

Tweak your BIOS: The first thing I did once my build was finished was update my BIOS, since the default BIOS wasn't properly recognizing my processor. Luckily doing so is pretty simple. Just head over to the ASUS download site, narrow down, and then download the latest BIOS for your motherboard. Once downloaded, just stick the file on a USB flash drive. Then boot up your build and enter the BIOS setup. Like I said above, power on your computer and hit Delete when prompted to boot into the BIOS.

Once you're there, arrow to the Tools tab of the BIOS, select EZ Flash2, and then hit Enter. Now choose your flash drive by tabbing to the appropriate drive, find the BIOS file you downloaded, and install it. When the BIOS has updated, your computer should automatically restart.

Now that you've updated your BIOS, you're ready to get into some nitty gritty preparation. If you plugged in your drives like I suggested during your build, you should see your hard drive and DVD drive listed in the BIOS as Third IDE Master and Fourth IDE Slave. (Don't worry about the fact that your hard drive isn't listed as the Primary IDE Master.) Arrow down to IDE Configuration and hit Enter.

In the IDE config, you want to set "Configure SATA As" to AHCI. Next hit Escape once to go back to the Main screen. Now hit the right arrow key to move to the Advanced tab. In the Advanced section go to "Onboard Devices Configuration" and set "JMicron SATA / PATA Controller" to Disabled.

Now you need to arrow over to the Boot tab to configure the boot priority (which tells your computer what order you want to boot off devices in your computer). Go to "Boot Device Priority" and set your DVD drive as priority one and your hard drive as priority two.

Done? Then you're ready to move onto patching your Leopard DVD.

Patch Leopard for your Hackintosh: There are a couple of different ways one could go about creating a patched Leopard DVD. The easiest is probably to download an already patched version using BitTorrent (I can attest to having seen the patched version floating around before Demonoid went under, but it's probably available elsewhere as well). The second method requires patching a Leopard DVD yourself, which isn't really as hard as it sounds.

If you decide to go the first route and you find a pre-patched version off BitTorrent, you can skip to the next section. Otherwise, let's get down to work. To patch the Leopard install disc, you'll need a Mac and a pre-patched image of the Leopard installer on your desktop. You can get this in two ways: Either by downloading the image—again with BitTorrent—or by buying and then ripping a Leopard DVD to your hard drive. Either way you choose, when you're finished you should place the ripped installer on your desktop and make sure that it's named osx-leopard105.dmg.

Now it's time to get patching. To do so, you need to grab the patch files (created by the resourceful OSx86 forum member BrazilMac, who bundled the patch files and whose instructions I followed for the installation), which you can download from one of many sources here under the "FILES FOR THIS GUIDE" section at the top of the page. After you've downloaded the zipped patch files, unzip the archive and drag all of the contents of the archive to your desktop (it should contain two files and three folders in total).

UPDATE: We've removed direct links to the forum post containing the patch files on the OSx86 Scene Forum.

Now open the 9a581-patch.sh shell script in your favorite text editor. At the top of the file, replace XXX with your username on your Mac (so that it reflects the path to your current desktop). For example, mine would look like:

APDIR=/Users/adam/Desktop
DMG="/Users/adam/Desktop/osx-leopard105.dmg"

While we're at it, let's edit the 9a581PostPatch.sh file as well. This time, edit the fourth and fifth lines at the top of the file to look like this:

PATCH="/Volumes/LeopardPatch/leopatch/" # path to the patched extensions
LEO="/Volumes/Leopard" # path to Leopard installation

Save and close both files.

Finally, it's time to patch the DVD. Open up Terminal, type sudo -s, then enter your administrative password (your login password). Then type cd Desktop and hit Enter. Now you're ready to apply the patch. Keep in mind that you'll need plenty of space on your hard drive to perform the patch. I had around 20GB of free space when I did it, though I'm sure you could get away with less. To execute the patch, type:

./9a581-patch.sh

and hit Enter. The patch will now execute, which means you've got some time on your hands. You've been working your ass off up until this point, though, so kick back and relax for a bit. I didn't have a clock on it, but I'm pretty sure the patch took at least an hour on my MacBook Pro.

If you have trouble with the patch and you've got less free space, try freeing up some hard drive space and trying again. When the patch has successfully completed, you should see a new file on your desktop: Leo_Patched_DVD.iso weighing in somewhere around 4,698,669,056 bytes. Now we've got to burn this image to a DVD.

Luckily the patch removes lots of unnecessary files so we've shrunk the almost 7GB install DVD to 4.38GB, just enough to fit on a single-layer DVD. To burn the image, insert a blank DVD, open up Disk Utility, select the Leopard_Patched_DVD.iso file in the sidebar, and then click the Burn button. Once it's finished, you're finally ready to proceed to the installation.

But just one more thing before you do. Copy the patch files that we just unzipped from your desktop to a USB thumb drive and name the drive LeopardPatch. We'll need these files for the post-installation patch that we'll apply later.

Installation

If you've followed all of the steps up to this point, you should now be ready to fire up the patched Leopard install DVD. So power on your Hackintosh, insert the DVD, and let the boot process begin (you did remember to set the DVD drive as the first boot device, right?). You'll be prompted to press any key to start the installation or hit F8 for options. Hit F8.

You'll now see the boot: prompt. Enter -v -x and press Enter. (Don't ask me why, but this is the only way the install DVD would boot for me. Not using these options caused the boot to hang indefinitely every time.) You should now see lots of text scrolling over your monitor. You may even see some daunting errors. Don't be alarmed; just let it continue. After several minutes, the graphical Leopard installer should be staring you in the face.

Format the install drive: I know that you're raring to install now that you're finally here, but there's one thing we need to do first: Format our hard drive so that it's prepared to receive the Leopard installation. So go to Utilities in the menu bar and select Disk Utility (if you don't have a working mouse yet, you can still access the menu bar from the keyboard). Once Disk Utility fires up, it's time to format the drive. Here's how:

1. Select your hard drive in the left sidebar.
2. Click on the tab labeled Partition.
3. Select a 1 partition Volume Scheme, name the volume Leopard, and choose Mac OS Extended (Journaled) as the format.
4. Last, click the Options button and choose Master Boot Record as the partition scheme.

Now that your drive is ready, so are you.

Install Leopard: This really is the easiest part—just follow the on-screen instructions and choose your newly created Leopard partition as the install destination. Then, before you make that final click on the Install button, click Customize and de-select Additional Fonts, Language Translations, and X11. These components were removed so we could fit everything on the patched DVD, so we won't be installing them now.

Now you're ready. Click install and grab a quick drink. In around 10 minutes, Leopard should have installed, leaving you with just one more step before you're running with the Leopard.

Post-Installation

After the installation completes, your computer will automatically restart. Unfortunately you're not ready to boot into Leopard just yet—you've got one thing left to do. So insert the thumb drive you copied the patches to and, just like last time, hit F8 when prompted by the DVD. Again, enter -v -x at the boot prompt and hit Enter. When the install disc finally loads, go to Utilities in the menu bar and select Terminal. It's time to apply the post-install patch.

When terminal loads, type cd /Volumes/LeopardPatch at the prompt and hit Enter to navigate to the patch directory. Now, just like when you patched the install disc, type:

./9a581PostPatch.sh

...and hit Enter. The script will move and copy files about (answer yes when prompted), and when it's finished, you'll be prompted to restart your computer. When your computer reboots this time, you're ready. It's time to boot into Leopard.

OSx86 on Your Hackintosh

Let your computer reboot, but be sure to leave the install DVD in the drive. When the DVD prompts this time, just let the countdown time out. When it does, your installation of Leopard will automatically boot up. You've done it!

From this point forward, you're running Leopard on your PC just as though you were running Leopard on a regular Mac. You'll be jubilantly welcomed in a handful of languages as if Steve Jobs himself is shaking your hand for a job well done. All of your hardware should work exactly as you'd expect. Your sound, networking, and video will all work off the bat. (I haven't tested the motherboard's built-in wireless yet, but it reportedly works.) Your iPods will sync flawlessly, and CDs and DVDs read and burn just as you'd expect.

On the software front, Mail, Address Book, iTunes, and everything else I've tried so far work flawlessly. Firefox is browsing, Quicksilver is doing its thing, Spaces are rocking, Stacks are stacking, Cover Flow is flowing, and Quick Look is previewing. I haven't tried Time Machine yet, but the patch we used reportedly works with Time Machine as well.

UPDATE: After you complete your install the first go round, here's how to upgrade to OS X 10.5.1 (the first update to Leopard) in just a few simple steps.

But Really, How Does It Work?

I'm still stretching my legs in this new build, and I'm planning on bringing some benchmarks to the table soon so you have a better idea how this machine matches up to its Mac counterparts, but so far it's running like a champ. UPDATE: I benchmarked my Hackintosh against a Mac Pro and MacBook Pro and it stood up very well. Check out the benchmarks here. The only problem with the install at the moment is that it won't boot without the Leopard DVD in the DVD drive at boot—meaning that every time you reboot you'll need to make sure that the Leopard DVD is sitting in the DVD drive. It's not a dealbreaker for me by any means, but it's an annoyance. I've found one post suggesting a workaround at the OSx86 forums (near the bottom of the first post in the thread), but I haven't tried it yet. If and when I do, I'll be sure to post an update.

And that's that. It's a chore to set up, to be sure, but it's also the most powerful Mac per dollar I've ever used. If you've got any experience building a Hackintosh of your own or you've got any questions, let's hear them in the comments.

Adam Pash is a senior editor for Lifehacker who loves a good hack and cherishes his Macintosh, so building a Hackintosh was a perfect fit. His special feature Hack Attack appears every Tuesday on Lifehacker. Subscribe to the Hack Attack RSS feed to get new installments in your newsreader.

Black Colleges
By Walter E. Williams
Wednesday, January 9, 2008

The Lincoln Review, a Washington-based black think tank, published an article titled "What Does the Future Hold for Historically Black Colleges?" in its September/October 2007 edition. It recalled the experiences of Bill Maxwell, a St. Petersburg Times columnist and editorial board member, when in 2004 he took a huge pay cut to teach journalism at Stillman College in Tuscaloosa, Alabama.

He wanted to fulfill a promise he made to professors who taught him during the 1960s at Wiley College in Marshall, Texas, and Bethune-Cookman College in Daytona Beach, two historically black colleges. He was in for surprise and disappointment.

Professor Maxwell recalls his experiences in the St. Petersburg Times. The first column, "I had a dream" (www.sptimes.com/2007/05/13/Opinion/I_had_a_dream.shtml ) discusses the non-academic environment at Stillman College. His first day in his English class, Maxwell had to shout to get the class to come to order. He assigned a 500-word essay. When he read the essays, he said, "During my 18 years of previous college teaching, I had never seen such poor writing -- sentence fragments, run-on sentences, misspellings, wrong words and illogical word order." One paper read: "In my high school, prejudism were bad and people feel like nothing." In another: "Central High kids put there nose in other people concern."

Maxwell says that only a few students bothered to take lecture notes. He had to teach basic grammar lessons and teach students how to use a dictionary, lessons that should have been learned in elementary or junior high school. The college issued free laptops to students who maintained a passing grade-point average. Some used their computers in class for text messaging. When Maxwell confronted the students, he was met with hostility. A few students left during class to make calls or send text messages. Two female professors were threatened by two male students when they were told to put away their laptops in class.

Professor Maxwell's second column, "A dream lay dying" relates more of his experiences at Stillman (www.sptimes.com/2007/05/20/Opinion/A_dream_lay_dying.shtml ). He recalls, ". . . nothing was more appalling than the students' disregard for college property." He recalls the time when the Tuscaloosa Fire Department had to put out trash can fires in King Hall, saying, "I was angry and embarrassed to see a team of white firefighters trying to save a dormitory named for the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. that black students had trashed." A white firefighter asked him, "Why do they do this to their own buildings?" Touring the building, Maxwell said that even without the fire it looked like a war zone. "Holes had been kicked and punched in the walls. Windows were broken, floors were scarred and most of the furniture was damaged. The two dorms routinely underwent major repairs after each semester."

A week before leaving Stillman for good, Maxwell saw a group of male students who habitually hung out in front of King Hall. He approached the group and asked, "Why don't you all hang out somewhere else?" "Who you talking to, old nigger?" one replied. Maxwell said, "You give the school a bad image out here." They laughed and dismissed him with stylized waves of the arm.

At a time of gross discrimination, black colleges were crucial. Their graduates played a vital role in the unprecedented socioeconomic progress made by black Americans. Today, there's a question about the value of most, but not all, black colleges. According to the Journal of Blacks in Higher Education, the 2005 graduation rates at black colleges ranged from a high of 77 percent at Spelman College to a low of 7 percent at the University of the District of Columbia. Only seven black colleges, out of 53 listed, had a graduation rate of higher than 50 percent. Given these numbers, the preparation and performance of students at most black colleges, one has ask whether these colleges have outlived their usefulness.

Dr. Williams serves on the faculty of George Mason University as John M. Olin Distinguished Professor of Economics and is the author of More Liberty Means Less Government: Our Founders Knew This Well.

http://www.american.com/archive/2007/august-0807/the-decline-and-fall-of-declinism
The Decline and Fall of Declinism

By Alan W. Dowd Tuesday, August 28, 2007

Filed under: Big Ideas, Economic Policy
Some people don’t want to admit it, but America is in great shape.

McDonalds- 2Under the heading “The end of a U.S.-centric world?” the PostGlobal section of The Washington Post website recently declared that “U.S. influence is in steep decline.” It was just the latest verse in a growing chorus of declinist doom-saying at home and abroad.

In 2004, Pat Buchanan lamented “the decline and fall of the greatest industrial republic the world had ever seen.” In 2005, The Guardian’s Polly Toynbee concluded that Hurricane Katrina exposed “a hollow superpower.” In 2007, Pierre Hassner of the Paris-based National Foundation for Political Science declared, “It will not be the New American Century.”

And the dirge goes on.

It’s a familiar tune, of course. We heard it in the early 1990s, when economists, political scientists and pundits were quipping that while the U.S. and Soviet military superpowers waged the Cold War, it was economic superpowers Japan and Germany that won it; in the 1980s, when Paul Kennedy led the chorus by concluding that America was tumbling toward “imperial overstretch;” in the 1970s, when the U.S. slipped into a malaise; and in the 1960s, which began with the U.S. unable to dislodge a communist dictator 90 miles off its coast and ended with the U.S. unable to hold back the spread of communism half-a-world away.

But the declinists were wrong yesterday. And if their record—and America’s—are any indication, they are just as wrong today.

Any discussion of U.S. power has to begin with its enormous economy. At $13.13 trillion, the U.S. economy represents 20 percent of global output. It’s growing faster than Britain’s, Australia’s, Germany’s, Japan’s, Canada’s, even faster than the vaunted European Union.

In fact, even when Europe cobbles together its 25 economies under the EU banner, it still falls short of U.S. GDP—and will fall further behind as the century wears on. Gerard Baker of the Times of London notes that the U.S. economy will be twice the size of Europe’s by 2021.

Declinists were wrong yesterday. If their record—and America’s—are any indication, they are just as wrong today.

On the other side of the world, some see China’s booming economy as a threat to U.S. economic primacy. However, as Baker observes, the U.S. is adding “twice as much in absolute terms to global output” as China. The immense gap in per capita income—$44,244 in the U.S. versus $2,069 in China—adds further perspective to the picture.

America’s muscular economic output comes courtesy of the American worker, who is growing ever more productive. Matthew Slaughter of the National Bureau of Economic Research details in The Wall Street Journal how, beginning in 1995, U.S. worker productivity began to accelerate. “From 1996 through 2006 it doubled, to an average annual rate of 2.7 percent.”

Another recent analysis—surprisingly filed by The New York Times—notes that this technology-driven “productivity miracle” has not manifested itself in other developed economies. Citing research (PDF) by John Van Reenen and others at the London School of Economics, the Times concludes that when U.S. firms take over foreign firms, the latter enjoy “a tremendous productivity advantage over a non-American alternative…It is as if the invisible hand of the American marketplace were somehow passing along a secret handshake to these firms.” As Reenen and his colleagues conclude, it appears that the way “U.S. firms are organized or managed…enables better exploitation of IT.”

This should come as no surprise. As Derek Leebaert explains in The Fifty-Year Wound, the information technologies that began emerging in the late 1980s “forced decentralization and demanded the sort of adaptivity made for America.”

So what do these numbers and comparisons tell us? For starters, as historian Niall Ferguson points out in Colossus, they tell us that the U.S. share of global productivity “exceeds the highest share of global output ever achieved by Britain by a factor of more than two.”

They also serve to explain how the United States can withstand not just the human losses and psychological blows of a 9/11 or Katrina, but the sort of economic and financial blows that would have overwhelmed any other country on earth.

Just consider what the U.S. economy has lost since 9/11. One estimate posited that by the end of 2003 the U.S. could have lost as much as $500 billion dollars in GDP as a result of 9/11. That’s roughly the size of the entire Iranian economy or half the Canadian economy.

As to Katrina, Congress poured $122 billion into the vast disaster area—and that was just in the 12 months immediately following the storm.

None of this was budgeted or foreseen, yet the U.S. economy dusted itself off and soldiered on.

While the declinists routinely remind us that the U.S. spends more on defense than the next 15 countries combined, they seldom note that the current defense budget accounts for barely four percent of GDP—a smaller percentage than the U.S. spent on defense at any time during the Cold War. In fact, defense outlays consumed as much as 10 percent of GDP in the 1950s, and 6 percent in the 1980s.

The diplomats who roam the corridors of the UN and the corporate chiefs who run the EU’s sprawling public-private conglomerates dare not say it aloud, but the American military does the dirty work to keep the global economy going—and growing. “The hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist,” as Thomas Friedman observed in 1999.

“Globalization,” adds Robert Kaplan, “could not occur without American ships and sailors.”

Some argue that globalization is just another word for Americanization, and they may be right.

Dell and HP dominate the global PC market. More than 330 million PCs are running Microsoft software worldwide. Apple iTunes has displaced Sony’s music-downloading system—inside Japan. Google was created by a pair of Stanford grad students without any government help at all, yet it so dominates the Web that the EU is pouring some $290 million into birthing an answer.

Ferguson observes that half of the 30,000 McDonald’s restaurants are located somewhere other than the U.S., and that 70 percent of Coke’s thirsty drinkers reside outside North America. Starbucks has stores in 39 countries—from Austria to the United Arab Emirates to Australia.

WalMart has 2,700 stores outside the U.S., planting the low-price banner in 14 countries. “In the past year,” boasts the WalMart corporation, “the company became majority owner of Seiyu in Japan, completed its acquisition of Sonae in Brazil, and expanded into six new markets including Northern Ireland, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua.” WalMart projects global sales of $344 billion in 2007, positioning the retail juggernaut just outside the top 30 in global rankings—for national GDPs.

The converse, even in this global economy, simply does not hold. Although Americans are notorious for appropriating from other cultures, they are not flocking to British retailers, or buying Afri Cola, or logging on to some Euro-Google, or purchasing French PCs.

But don’t take my word for it. As French president Nicolas Sarkozy matter-of-factly puts it, “The United States is the world’s leading economic, military and monetary power…Your economy is flourishing, your intellectual life is rich.”

Not bad for a nation in “steep decline.”

Alan Dowd is a contributing editor with The American Legion Magazine, a columnist with Frontpage Magazine and a contributor to Political Mavens.

HOW ABOUT SOME GOOD NEWS FROM AFRICA FOR A CHANGE
BusinessWeek

In Depth November 29, 2007, 11:47AM EST text size: TT
Can Greed Save Africa?
Fearless investing is succeeding where aid often hasn't

by Roben Farzad

It isn't easy for Masoud Alikhani to check on his investment. The Iranian-born Briton owns a facility in Mozambique that turns jatropha, a hardy, drought-resistant plant, into biodiesel. An October visit starts with an 11-hour flight from London, his home base, to Johannesburg. From there he jumps into a four-seat Piper Seneca II for a wobbly three-hour flight to Maputo, Mozambique's capital, during which one of the passengers, this writer, gets violently ill. On landing at Maputo's airport, where soldiers stand guard on the roof, Alikhani spends an hour wading through the bureaucratic muck of visa clearance and immunization checks. Then it's back on the plane for a 90-minute flight along the Indian Ocean coast to the province of Inhambane. At the 7-Eleven-size airport there, Alikhani is met by his brother and business partner, Said, for a 90-minute drive past wayward livestock and random brush fires to the village of Inhassune. At the end of a long dirt road, on a vast tract of reclaimed scrubland, sits the Alikhanis' massive biofuel complex. They try to visit every two months.

The brothers are among a growing cadre of intrepid investors looking for treasure in the 30-plus sub-Saharan African nations stretching from Mauritania and Somalia in the north to the continent's southern tip. There's no blueprint for this kind of investing: The best opportunities must be dreamed up and then created from scratch. The Alikhanis saw upside in a fallow cotton plantation. In Nigeria, U.S.-based private equity firm Emerging Capital Partners last year helped acquire an abandoned factory in hopes of supplying the continent with desperately needed fertilizer. South Africa-based microlender Blue Financial Services, energized by an investment from Wall Street last year, now has 171 branches in nine countries, with offices opening soon in Rwanda, Cameroon, Swaziland, and elsewhere. All told, at least $2.6 billion in private equity deals have been struck this year in the region (excluding more-developed South Africa), nearly seven times the 2005 figure.

This is the investing world's final frontier, so undeveloped and impoverished that it makes other extreme emerging markets like Colombia and Vietnam seem like marvels of modernity. Airports open and close arbitrarily. Roads are often unpaved and clogged. Gasoline and diesel are scarce, and rolling blackouts common. The medical precautions are even more forbidding: Traveling to mosquito-infested interiors requires a round of injections and weeks of antimalarial pills that often induce hallucinations.

In many ways, Africa's economic situation seems hopeless. While $625 billion in foreign aid has poured in since 1960, there has been no rise in the region's per capita gross domestic product, notes William R. Easterly, economics professor at New York University. What's more, from 1976 to 2000, Africa's share of global trade dropped to 1%, from an already negligible 3%. The U.N.'s scale of human development, which considers health, education, and economic well-being, ranks 34 African nations among the world's 40 lowest. Thus far, foreign aid hasn't made a dent.

Greed, however, might. Thanks to the global commodities boom of the past few years, sub-Saharan Africa's economies, after decades of stagnation, are expanding by an average of 6% annually—twice the U.S. pace. And like bees to honey, investors are swarming into the region in search of the enormous returns that ultra-early-stage investments can bring. Blue Financial, for example, has already netted its early private equity backers a ninefold gain thanks to the 385% rise in its stock since its October, 2006, initial public offering in Johannesburg. Emerging Capital Partners has bought all or part of 42 African companies this decade and cashed out of 18, with gains on their investments averaging 300%. "The money we can make is matchless," says Emerging Capital Partners CEO Thomas R. Gibian, a former Goldman Sachs (GS) banker.

The region's public stock markets are attracting foreign investors, too. Stocks in resource-rich nations such as Botswana, Nigeria, Zambia, and many others are rising to record highs. In recent months, investment bank UBS (UBS) and others have published thick reports on Africa's investing opportunities, hailing as a major virtue the fact that markets there don't move in tandem with those of the rest of the world.

Demand for African stocks is so robust, in fact, that it has created a bottleneck. Because these markets are tiny and illiquid—Zambia's total market value is just $2 billion—foreigners can't pile in all at once. Those who don't want to wait on the sidelines must find their own opportunities away from the stock exchanges. "The private equity skill set is really in demand here," says Gibian. His firm has invested more than $400 million in sub-Saharan Africa this year, vs. $325 million in the previous six years combined.

Of course, these investors may well be courting disaster. International monitors consistently place the region in the lowest tier of their rankings for business friendliness. Some governments, such as that of Zimbabwe President Robert Mugabe, expropriate assets outright, while others bleed businesses dry over time. If those problems don't do lasting damage to an investment portfolio, a commodities crash certainly would. A mass exodus of investors would snuff out Africa's flickering progress in a hurry—not only its GDP growth but also the burgeoning informal economy that isn't counted in official statistics: backyard and roadside businesses that have suddenly arisen to tap the continent's growing income.

Many African leaders have come to regard private investment as the only route to sustainable economic development. "Investors put their money down for what they will get as a profit," says John Agyekum Kufuor, Ghana's President, in his palace in the capital city of Accra: "It's business." Botswana President Festus Gontebanye Mogae even appealed directly to private equity and hedge fund managers during a September trip to New York. Over time, these leaders hope, the benefits accruing from private investment will give locals more of a vested interest in the permanence of historically volatile institutions—governments, currencies, banks—and put sub-Saharan Africa on a path to self-sufficiency. But for that to happen, the region must first prove that it can be hospitable to cold-eyed investors.

Masoud Alikhani is no moral crusader; he thinks the "We Are the World" movement of the 1980s, which sought donations to end African hunger, "made beggars of whole nations." The burly 66-year-old is among the new wave of investors at the tenuous nexus of venture capital and agribusiness in Africa. Five months ago he pitched a large hedge fund in New York on the merits of ESV Biofuels, as his company is called. The fund's partners agreed to take a tour of the facility in January. "We are capitalists and opportunists," says Alikhani. "We are doing this to make money. That's the only way to help."

Mozambique, one of the poorest and most neglected places in the world, seems frozen in time. After wresting independence from Portugal in 1975, the nation was ravaged by a civil war in which more than 1 million of its citizens were killed, maimed, or displaced. An uneasy peace arrived only in 1992. Since then the country has been on the tumultuous path to economic liberalization, alternating between double-digit growth and recession. More than three-quarters of its people remain desperately poor. Yet as Alikhani watches children pick through dumpsters outside Maputo's airport, he sees only upside. "Mozambique," he says, "is booming."

With a degree in agroeconomics, Alikhani seems most comfortable when ticking off facts about crop yields and other arcana. He earned his Wall Street bona fides during stints as a trader at Prudential and Lehman Brothers (LEH) in the 1980s. From 1993 to 1998, he was CEO of a steel, metals, energy, and agribusiness concern in emerging Russia. Today, in addition to his ESV duties, Alikhani holds board seats at three small, publicly listed commodities companies, including a diamond miner.

But ESV is a whole other bag of seeds. Last year, it bought a long-abandoned cotton plantation in a malaria-laden stretch of Mozambican bush, grabbing 27,000 acres with a lease for 198,000 more. It expects to plant nearly 17,000 acres, harvest its first jatropha seeds, and press its first batch of oil by this time next year. Assuming the Alikhanis and their two other partners succeed in wooing outside investors, ESV could break even by 2011—and sooner if biofuel prices keep rising.

Already, ESV has become the province's biggest private employer, with a staff of 620. Locals who hadn't earned money in years are making from $60 a month to as much as $2,000 for managers. "When we started, we told people it is a startup, a cash-eating animal," says Said Alikhani. "The faster we begin production, the sooner the benefits come to all."

Inhassune's revival is already under way. Mosquito control, power lines, and potable water have quickly arisen from a barren stretch of bush. "I'd be the last person in the history books to go down as a philanthropist," says Renier van Rooyen, ESV's South African on-site manager. "But you cannot run a business when your workers are out with malaria or sick from dirty water." On a warm weeknight, villagers greet the season's first rainfall with dancing and singing. "There was nothing here before," shouts Ineve, a fieldworker, over beating drums. Others proudly brandish newly issued government ID cards. ESV employees have been lining up behind the schoolhouse for hours to register to vote for the first time in their lives.

Women stand out as the most eager beneficiaries of the ESV experiment. Many walk as far as five miles each way to get to the plantation. (The Alikhanis say they plan to import bicycles from London.) Women are also disproportionately willing to budget the time and money to tend small patches of onions, maize, and papayas, which they sell at Inhassune's new 20-stall marketplace. In a nation haunted by AIDS, "women who work are not subordinate to the will of men with risky behaviors," says Pablo Smango, a public-health inspector in Beira, Mozambique's second largest city. "They control more of their own destiny."
PROMISE AND PERIL

The most obvious investing opportunity in Africa lies in its most pressing need: food. The continent supports one-seventh of the world's population and holds nearly a quarter of its land. But according to UBS, sub-Saharan Africa produces just $178 worth of goods per agricultural acre, compared with $457 in Latin America and $1,077 in Asia. A crippling fertilizer shortage is the main problem.

Emerging Capital Partners, the biggest U.S. private equity firm operating in Africa, sees opportunity there. Among its most daring investments is a $35 million stake in Notore Chemicals, a massive fertilizer project in the oil-producing Niger Delta, home to daily kidnappings and an ongoing armed rebellion. Government graft and neglect ran the 12-year-old plant aground in 1999; Emerging Capital bought its stake in the shuttered facility in 2006. "The government figured a dollar in its pocket was more valuable than the $10 it would make by fixing the conveyor belt," says Genevieve L. Sangudi, a 31-year-old Tanzanian-born, Columbia University-educated MBA who shuttles in from her home in Washington to oversee Emerging Capital's portfolio.

A trip to Notore's facilities in the heart of the Delta shows both the promise and the peril of investing there. The first leg of the journey is to Lagos, Nigeria's commercial capital of 15 million, as dysfunctional and chaotic a city as any on earth. Packed minibuses sit bumper to bumper on overburdened highways as beggars tap windows in search of charity. The landscape is dotted with barbed-wire fences and burning piles of trash. "If someone in Lagos sees a pothole," goes a local saying, "he doesn't ask why it isn't filled, or where to find the gravel to fill it. He wonders: Where can I buy tires big enough to ride over the pothole?'" It takes two hours to travel the 18 miles from the airport to the Protea Kuramo Waters hotel, a high-gated, diesel-generated fortress where, because of the chronic lodging shortage in the city, occupancy is reluctantly granted at $500 a night, a sum that doesn't guarantee a working toilet.

The next stop in Notore's private airplane is Port Harcourt, a bleak Delta city an hour away. The locals here have endured years of neglect at the hands of multinational oil companies and government officials easily bribed out of enforcing environmental regulations. Natural gas, a valuable by-product of oil drilling, is simply burned off in open flares, further darkening the Delta's wretched air. "The Delta is now Nigeria's biggest risk," says Bolaji Balogun, 40, founder and CEO of Lagos investment bank Chapel Hill Advisory Partners. "It needs its own Marshall Plan."

Emerging Capital and Notore want to redirect natural gas to a more beneficial use: nitrogen fertilizer, of which natural gas is the main ingredient. "You cannot let this humongous asset waste away while Nigeria flares gas and imports fertilizer," says Onajite P. Okoloko, Notore's 41-year-old chief executive. The Delta native shakes his head as he recalls his father and uncle blaming God instead of tired soil when their maize and fruit crops wouldn't grow for consecutive seasons. "Half of Nigeria's economy is agriculture," he says. And yet "70% of the country sits on arable but poorly used land. Do the math."
`AN AMAZING OPPORTUNITY'

On their arrival at Port Harcourt's tiny airport, Okoloko and Sangudi are greeted by a former U.S. Special Forces operative turned mercenary for Notore. He ferries the group into a double-armored SUV. At the airport's exit, a local armed guard jumps in. "Welcome," he says, clutching a machine gun. A flatbed pickup truck with five more armed guards leads the nervous procession.

The 1,380-acre Notore facility, rusting and overgrown with weeds, sits in a marsh surrounded by gas flares. The decrepitude belies Emerging Capital's tall plans for the plant: By next year, Notore will become the only nitrogen-based fertilizer producer in sub-Saharan Africa, going from zero output to 600,000 tons per year of high-grade urea pellets. Okoloko is looking to hire 1,000 locals. Having locked in a 20-year gas contract on favorable terms, Notore will produce its fertilizer at less than $100 a ton; the market price is $350 to $450. "It's stronger and cheaper than much of what you find in the West," says Sangudi. "An amazing opportunity." "We want to compete internationally," adds Okoloko. "But we have to take care of Nigeria and Africa first."

Sangudi will be moving from Washington to Lagos in a few months, another young financier flocking to the region. Bankers and buyout shops—from Renaissance Capital and Morgan Stanley (MS) to Deutsche Bank (DB) and JPMorgan Chase (JPM)—are piling in, trying to one-up each other by offering huge signing bonuses for local talent. "The capital coming in is blind," says one of Sangudi's friends, who works for a big private equity rival. "It needs my eyes." The influx is worsening an already dire housing shortage. Owners of decent apartments in Lagos now demand as much as three years' rent in advance. Sangudi notes with bemusement that leasing a two-bedroom unit could set her back as much as $80,000. "There is serious money to be made here," she says.

Agriculture isn't sub-Saharan Africa's only investment draw. Microlending—the making of small, unsecured loans to ordinary people—is bringing in big profits for a raft of publicly traded companies all across the continent. Blue Financial is among a new breed of so-called salary-microlenders, which make loans only to formally employed borrowers and take payments directly from their paychecks. The set-up helps Blue manage its risks: Bad loans are only in the 3%-to-4% range, remarkably low in a part of the world where fewer than one in five people has a bank account.

Unlike its peers, however, Blue has turned a relatively small Wall Street investment into rocket fuel. Early last year it secured $15 million from insurance giant American International Group (AIG). The deal gave AIG a 23% stake in Blue and two board seats—and gave Blue the imprimatur of a Wall Street titan. Blue expanded its operation from three nations to nine in a year. That burst set the stage for Blue's IPO last October—fresh capital that has spurred even faster growth.

Blue has also turned its equity into a critical component of its lending process. It uses the cachet of its AIG stake and surging stock price to coax cheap capital from development banks like International Finance Corp. and the Netherlands Development Finance Co. "Our equity investors give us leverage," says David van Niekerk, Blue's 34-year-old founder and CEO. "All of a sudden, knocking on doors has become a hell of a lot easier. You have to play that trump card." Blue keeps its cost of capital low—around 14.5%—and loans money in the 20% to 30% per year range, a fraction of local interest rates. Brisk demand for loans has sent its revenues jumping 140% this year as earnings per share have soared 400%.

On a chilly October morning, van Niekerk, tanned and dressed in a crisp peach-colored oxford shirt, looks more like a playboy than a financier. He's aboard the company's swank eight-seat jet for a trip to branches in Botswana and Zambia. The plane lands in Gaborone, a global diamond hub near the Kalahari Desert that's plastered with ads from local loan sharks. Thebo, an electrician, waits outside Blue's branch practicing his lines. He's in the market for a home-improvement loan, in a race against the soaring cost of cement. "I need this," he says. "I can't afford to stop buying petrol and food just to work on my house." Behind him is an ad for funeral insurance. Botswana is full of reminders of mortality; AIDS afflicts up to a third of its adult population. Van Niekerk goes into the back office to check on a row of salary-verification agents who typically approve applicants within an hour.

By lunchtime, the jet is off to Livingstone, Zambia, a tourist hub near the breathtaking Victoria Falls. In town, branch manager Calculus Siachono reports that Blue's business is brisk. He notes with pride that a local man is making a fortune building and selling oxcarts and is on his fourth loan.

Some complain that Blue's salary-based lending does nothing to help unemployed or informal workers. Critics also argue that Blue takes advantage of its borrowers by, essentially, mortgaging their future labor. "It's indentured servitude," says Wagane Diouf, a native Senegalese who runs AfriCap Investment, a private equity firm that invests in microfinance companies that don't use paycheck deduction. Van Niekerk counters that Blue has no recourse if a borrower loses his job, and that Blue's development-bank financing stipulates that its lending can't be abusive. "Why would we jeopardize that?" he asks. One financier says salary microlending is hastening economic evolution. "Pioneers in African banking collect high fees. But others will come in to compete, and eventually the banks will buy them all out—and everyone's borrowing costs fall."

That result won't come to pass, of course, if Africa's inexperienced borrowers turn out to be worse credit risks than microlenders anticipate. But the case of Mercy Mubanga, a 52-year-old grandmother, widow, and breadwinner for a family of eight, offers hope. She earns $185 a month as a police department secretary in the township of Maramba, in southern Zambia. Thanks to three loans from Blue—at progressively lower interest rates—she has tripled her income by moonlighting as a backyard poultry farmer, raising chickens to sell in the village market. After paying for a tin roof and hiring two men to expand her coop, Mubanga now seeks another loan to double her flock, school her two grandchildren, and perhaps build an extension on her tiny house. "We really must have more space," she says, rocking her 2-year-old granddaughter.

New York investment bank Nova Capital Partners helped make Mubanga's transformation possible. The seven-year-old boutique has found a profitable niche lining up financing for African companies. In early 2006, Blue hired Nova to find a Wall Street backer. Nova, aware that AIG's money managers were looking to expand its Africa portfolio, made the case for Blue—and scored the investment. That cash, in turn, made possible Mubanga's loans and many others. But Nova's bankers are unsentimental. "We're driven by what our investors want—returns," says Nova Senior Partner David S. Levin, ripping into a crab cake at New York's Palm West restaurant. "There's only so much time to do this before everyone else gets in."

BusinessWeek Senior Writer Farzad covers Wall Street and international finance