Big Fat Greek Funeral

It is hard to say when an article is better than another, but once you start reading this one by Mark Steyn you'll have no doubts that you're going through the best one of the year... well, at least so far.

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Metals?

Here’s an interesting insight that I obtained from a friend involved in energy issues:
1) Solar power and electric car batteries rely heavily upon rare earth metals.
2) The world’s largest repository of rare earth metals is China.
3) China has indicated that it will not export these metals, hence solar panels and car batteries will have to be built in China.
So, who is it that will benefit from “green jobs”, exactly?

Danny Lamieux

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Peer Review

Now THIS will most certainly have your jaw drop on the floor and you set your (provided you were so fool to buy it) DVD of "An Inconvenient Truth" on fire.

I'm so disgusted and infuriated, again, let me have a little pleasure: I TOLD YOU!!!!!!!

UPDATE 01: this is even more interesting.

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When the shit hits the fan

The results "to me" never added up, let's not even start talking about the models that never predicts the future, but when the data is a complete error riddled disaster and best scenario have more holes than a slice of Emmenthal then I'll say it: I TOLD YOU!

The sad thing is that in the end is the normal people to pay for this.

UPDATE 01: some more details on what now is apparently being called Warmergate.

UPDATE 02: the US monodailies journalists are doing what they do best: bankrupting their newspapers by writing more and more BS.

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Reminds you of something?

It will be of little avail to the people that the laws are made by men of their own choice if the laws be so voluminous that they cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood.

James Madison (1751-1836)

Health Care

Oh, and in case you are still utterly confused about what health care means and what one controlled and run by your government will mean for you, here is an enlightenment:

THE NATIONALIZATION OF YOUR BODY

CBC - Global Warming Doomsday Called Off

If you have already watched this.

You might take a look at this one too:

A Trillion Dollars

Did you know what a trillion dollars look like?

Here it is.

What he says and what he does

Many times I tried to sum up some of my ideas into well written points on how Africa can and cannot develop. Well apparently Mark Steyn beat me amply with this witty, ironic yet brilliantly written piece on what aid is and aid does...:

...A quarter-century ago at Live Aid, Bob Geldof stood on the stage of Wembley Stadium and bellowed at the developed world: “Give us yer fokkin’ money!” By the time of Live 8 in 2005, the message had evolved: the rockers were no longer demanding our money, only that we in turn beseech our governments to give more “aid” to Africa. In her new book, the Zambian economist (actually, more of an econo-babe) Dambisa Moyo takes aim at Sir Bob and Sir Bono beginning with the very title: Dead Aid. Government-to-government aid, says Miss Moyo, all but guarantees corruption and barbarism: a country that seeks private business investment will be accountable to the global markets; a country that raises public funds from taxes will be accountable to its own voters. But a government that gets “aid” from other governments is accountable to no one and nothing, and decades of easy money that make self-absorbed Western do-gooders feel swell about themselves have debauched the political culture of a continent. Which is why so much of the trillion dollars lavished on Africa since the earliest days of decolonization has wound up in this week’s president-for-life’s Swiss bank account while the conditions for domestic wealth generation improve not a whit...

so... what about Iceland?

Iceland never is at the center of the media's attention, even the big economic crack was sort of ignored by tv and newspapers, maybe mainly because no one here in Europe knew much of the Icelandic economy to start with.
The bubble has burst completely there, and now this article describing that crisis can make you understand the global crisis. Yes because after all Iceland has a "simpler" economy than France or Italy, so if you understand how the game got broken there then it's easier for you to understand the dynamics of it somewhere else.

Here is the usual and enlightening post by Mark Steyn.

Crisis explained ...by South Park

...aaaaand it's gone!!!

Road to Recovery

This is EXACTLY my position as to what Government Intervention means in a crisis.

BIG GOVERNMENT

THIS IS HUGE

OMG he's not Jimmy Carter, he's way beyond him!!!

Innovative Ideas for Development

As of today I am a collaborator of the blog called Innovative Ideas for Development. I'm feel honored to write in that blog, let me tell you a few things about it: it belongs to Nicholas Dominguez, who is currently with the Peace Corps in Kenya, although I guess the name if it speaks pretty much for itself and you should definitely get to know it by reading it!

UPDATE 01: Here is my first post on Innovative Ideas for Development.

The Crisis of Credit Visualized

The Crisis of Credit Visualized from Jonathan Jarvis on Vimeo.

Mining Your Own Business

If you know anything about macroeconomics and energy related policies, then this piece will surely SHOCK YOU FULLY!

Good luck with the new King!

Joe the plumber

Joe Wurzelbacher

"Your new tax plan is going to tax me more, isn't it?" the plumber asked, complaining that he was being taxed "more and more for fulfilling the American dream."

Barack Obama

"It's not that I want to punish your success. I just want to make sure that everybody who is behind you, that they've got a chance for success too,"

"My attitude is that if the economy's good for folks from the bottom up, it's gonna be good for everybody ... I think when you spread the wealth around, it's good for everybody."

Every two decades, more or less, there is a new guy coming out, explaining that the market doesn't work, that when the tide is high the majority of the boats will be stuck on the bottom, blah, blah....
Why does it happen every two decades (+ or -)? My theory is that you need to appeal to the young people to push this idea each time. Young people don't rely much on experience. The reason why now is working great is because nobody I know that is younger than me understand anything about history, and here starts the problem. But is doesn't end there, I don't see people understanding economy around. Today we are surrounded by ready-to-eat information, we tend not to study a problem, not to analyze and not to calculate. The result is that almost everybody prefers to read the "answer" to a problem in a free-of-charge street distributed newspaper (I'm sure there is at least one in your town too) instead of verifying the problem with the data we know, why? Cos people don't know anything. They just pick the nicest theory around.

If to this you add the ability of the MSM to avoid the reality but to feed you only certain news, the laziness of young minds to think cos they fall into the belief their mind are better than their parents' simply cos "now" they swim well in the technological broth and their parents are lost in it, the radicalized presence of 68ers teachers all over the 1st world and what they preach

I cannot even think to explain how wrong it is Obama's vision of economics.
What he just explained in a couple of sentences (see above), it is the pure definition of Socialism. And it never worked.
You can see multiple example in South America.
If you take away with taxes from a guy who has already too much taxes to pay the result is that he will not hire anybody. But then you're taxing also other ppl, so they will not buy services around anymore, they'll try to do it themselves, like you do in a isolated farm, the result is called: recession.
Recession is not when the stock market hit a bump. Recession is when at the end of the month the people doesn't have enough to spend. What's the strategy of Mr Obama for that? More taxes so we can redistribute wealth around. Any country that tried redistribution failed. The reason? There are many, some are economical, some are philosophical.
When you take away the money a person gain through his work you are telling him two things: hide the money or work less.
When you give the money to a person that doesn't work you are saying: don't work or keep working undocumented cos this way you get two salaries.

The problem is that when you go that far in elevating to the gods this shapeless shiny object called "for the common good", you will destroy more and more the good of the single person, to the point in which you'll go from taxing the money, to taxing the private property and, eventually to take away the ownership of that private property. Excuses and reasons will always be provided, you can be sure of that. Here is the opinion of a Columbia University professor about it, yes, one of those mind-shaper you pay thousands and thousands of dollars to have your sons lobotomized by:

The answer to global warming is in the abolition of private property and production for human need. A socialist world would place an enormous priority on alternative energy sources. This is what ecologically-minded socialists have been exploring for quite some time now.
Louis Proyect

You implement a system like this and you have a rotten economy within a decade.

I don't like the economical proposals done by McCain either but the Obama's ones are a sad, sad joke.

UPDATE 01:

Charles, the great...

THIS, pretty much summarize my position on both candidates. I've never read such a spot on articles by Charles Krauthammer.

Convicted felon Tony Rezko. Unrepentant terrorist Bill Ayers. And the race-baiting Rev. Jeremiah Wright. It is hard to think of any presidential candidate before Barack Obama sporting associations with three more execrable characters. Yet let the McCain campaign raise the issue, and the mainstream media begin fulminating about dirty campaigning tinged with racism and McCarthyite guilt by association.

But associations are important. They provide a significant insight into character. They are particularly relevant in relation to a potential president as new, unknown, opaque and self-contained as Obama. With the economy overshadowing everything, it may be too late politically to be raising this issue. But that does not make it, as conventional wisdom holds, in any way illegitimate.

McCain has only himself to blame for the bad timing. He should months ago have begun challenging Obama's associations, before the economic meltdown allowed the Obama campaign (and the mainstream media, which is to say the same thing) to dismiss the charges as an act of desperation by the trailing candidate.

McCain had his chance back in April when the North Carolina Republican Party ran a gubernatorial campaign ad that included the linking of Obama with Jeremiah Wright. The ad was duly denounced by the New York Times and other deep thinkers as racist.

This was patently absurd. Racism is treating people differently and invidiously on the basis of race. Had any white presidential candidate had a close 20-year association with a white preacher overtly spreading race hatred from the pulpit, that candidate would have been not just universally denounced and deemed unfit for office but written out of polite society entirely.

Nonetheless, John McCain in his infinite wisdom, and with his overflowing sense of personal rectitude, joined the braying mob in denouncing that perfectly legitimate ad, saying it had no place in any campaign. In doing so, McCain unilaterally disarmed himself, rendering off-limits Obama's associations, an issue that even Hillary Clinton addressed more than once.

Obama's political career was launched with Ayers giving him a fundraiser in his living room. If a Republican candidate had launched his political career at the home of an abortion-clinic bomber -- even a repentant one -- he would not have been able to run for dogcatcher in Podunk. And Ayers shows no remorse. His only regret is that he "didn't do enough."

Why are these associations important? Do I think Obama is as corrupt as Rezko? Or shares Wright's angry racism or Ayers's unreconstructed 1960s radicalism?

No. But that does not make these associations irrelevant. They tell us two important things about Obama.

First, his cynicism and ruthlessness. He found these men useful, and use them he did. Would you attend a church whose pastor was spreading racial animosity from the pulpit? Would you even shake hands with -- let alone serve on two boards with -- an unrepentant terrorist, whether he bombed U.S. military installations or abortion clinics?

Most Americans would not, on the grounds of sheer indecency. Yet Obama did, if not out of conviction then out of expediency. He was a young man on the make, an unknown outsider working his way into Chicago politics. He played the game with everyone, without qualms and with obvious success.

Obama is not the first politician to rise through a corrupt political machine. But he is one of the rare few to then have the audacity to present himself as a transcendent healer, hovering above and bringing redemption to the "old politics" -- of the kind he had enthusiastically embraced in Chicago in the service of his own ambition.

Second, and even more disturbing than the cynicism, is the window these associations give on Obama's core beliefs. He doesn't share the Rev. Wright's poisonous views of race nor Ayers's views, past and present, about the evil that is American society. But Obama clearly did not consider these views beyond the pale. For many years he swam easily and without protest in that fetid pond.

Until now. Today, on the threshold of the presidency, Obama concedes the odiousness of these associations, which is why he has severed them. But for the years in which he sat in Wright's pews and shared common purpose on boards with Ayers, Obama considered them a legitimate, indeed unremarkable, part of social discourse.

Do you? Obama is a man of first-class intellect and first-class temperament. But his character remains highly suspect. There is a difference between temperament and character. Equanimity is a virtue. Tolerance of the obscene is not.

"The Nastiest Character Assassination"

This blog is not new to scandals, even if we talk about big, huge scandals like the Annans-COTECNA-OilForFood one. My position is quite clear in these cases: there stand the smart-ass, there lies the unveiled scandal, here I am trying to put down a comment or a timeline to a complex scam or a horrible plot.
But in this case things are terrible and yet the scandals that many newspaper where bitching about is not even there. When it comes to the Wolfowitz-Riza situation, well you might wanna point your camera in other two or three directions. I'm not saying that this is a lucid global plan, we both know that if two people rows in the same direction the boat goes towards the same target. All I'm saying is that the more I read about this the more I think that when the media, and the high-ops of the World Bank and some Euro-Asian pressure did to them and, by that to the countries of the third world that were the target of the World Bank is simply unspeakable.
They could as well say to the press that the anti-corruption campaign operated by Wolfowitz wasn't actually meeting too many agendas.

Here is a great article talking about this, by the never resting Christopher Hitchens.

What's extraordinary for me is:

• that the so-called MSM never realize who Shaha Riza was and how pathetic and unpresentable were those accusations
• that they all eagerly and pathetically tried to have Shaha Riza pass for just a girlfriend of Wolfowitz (this demonstrates that even the most politically correct and heart bleeding liberals when it comes to middle east and women's parity together with the name of a person (Wolfowitz) who proved to be the best director of the World Bank and totally immune to scandals and by the way, close to the Administration, well they're read to lapidate her.
• the rest of the world keeps bumping into me repeating... hhhmmmm, don't know exactly the facts but the newspaper this morning said it was a big scandal and a case of corruption so it has to be that way

The real deal of this post had to come at the end. Here is an interview with Chrystia Freeland, in the end pay attention on the enthusiasm about how brave and great they were to be the first to publish the non-scandal about Wolfowitz. Beside the fact that she seems to present a gossip tabloid. One thing is sure: I'll never buy the Financial Times.

Technorati Tags: Politics, Wolfowitz, Riza, World Bank