Jan 01
Hot Chocolate
A good old parable with a moral that might explain how our world has dug itself into the mess it is in today even as it offers a way out. In short, it defines stress as everyone’s desire to have more than others have as opposed to what they need. You can read the full text here
Jan 01
Q: What is the difference between Santa Clause & Tiger Woods?
A: Santa stops at 3 ho’s
Jan 01
A re-enactment of the Battle of the Plains of Abraham is won by the French …without firing a shot. Canadian National Battlefields Commission chairman Andre Juneau says battle re-enactment plans have been scrapped, “because of the impossibility of ensuring the safety of the public and the participants.” Quebec sovereigntists denounced the planned celebrations as an insulting reminder of their ancestors’ defeat 250 years ago. Many threatened to protest the events.
Jan 01
Harkening back to those headier days of Einsteinian Relativity, the Nobel Committee determines that, relative to his predecessor, it follows that the “glass is half full” with U.S. President Obama. After just 3 months in office, he is awarded a Nobel Peace prize not for what he has done but for what he might be able to do.
Jan 01
Fashion Designers in England celebrate the 50th birthday of everyone’s favorite material girl by unveiling(?) a line of Burka Barbie dolls for auction. What can anyone hope to achieve by unveiling a veil. This could be a veiled threat – but to whom?
(Hurting) Headitor’s note: It should be noted that Mattel [the company that owns the Barbie brand] has not announced plans to market this line to the masses (catholic or otherwise). Experts (that would be me and the voices in my head) speculate that this may be their Politically Correct way of ”aveiling” themselves of some free publicity and market tests; or perhaps they were just reluctant to eat into the prophets expected from their official new line of “Totally Tattoo Barbie” dolls that was released in April 2009. Mattel’s promotional material read, “Customize the fashions and apply the fun temporary tattoos on you too“
Jan 01
Nidal Malik Hasan, a U.S. Army major serving as a psychiatrist killed 13 and wounded 32 others at Fort Hood, Texas. An American-born Muslim of Palestinian descent, he once lectured other psychiatrists on Islam, and stated that non-believers would be sent to hell, decapitated, set on fire, and have burning oil poured down their throats. According to The Associated Press, Hasan’s lecture also “justified suicide bombings.” Officials at Walter Reed Medical Center repeatedly expressed concern about Hasan’s behavior during the entire six years he was there. In the spring of 2008 (and on later occasions) several key officials met to discuss what to do about Hasan. According to NPR, fellow students and faculty were strongly troubled by Hasan’s behavior, which they described as “disconnected,” “aloof,” “paranoid,” “belligerent,” and “schizoid.” He was also the subject of at least one FBI investigation prior to the shootings but the FBI terrorism task force had determined him not to be a threat prior to the shooting.
Jan 01
A recent audit found that the guys who are watching your books like a vulture, have lost $3million since 1999 because hundreds of former Revenue employees were mistakenly left on payroll after they quit or were let go. Meanwhile, a little further down the road, the other guys who are guarding our gold reserve at the Royal Canadian Mint lost track of $15.3 million in gold. Fortunately, after spending $1.3million on follow-up audits it turned out the Mint was only guilty of not being able to count – that and an accidental garage sale that saw $3 million in gold sold at well below market value to some US refineries.
Jan 01
$700,000,000,000 (a.k.a. $700 Billion and/or the new “$1.44 day” version of public teat bailouts)
The US Congress bails out their banks to the tune of $700 billion (plus what was previously spent on Fannie Mae & Freddie Mac). Across the pond, the U.K. announces a $700 Billion dollar bailout of their own for British bankers. Talk about your get out of jbail free. To put $700 billion into perspective, it is estimated that the US has spent approximately $700 billion on their war liberation investiture of Iraq, since it commenced in 2002. It is also $100 Billion more than the entire annual budget for all US social programs. In Canadian dollars, $700 Billion is the approximate total value of Canadian investments in Registered Retirement Savings Plans (or what they used to be worth before they went kerplunk courtesy of the fine mess our bankers got us into).
Expert Analysis: The 700 billion dollar figure has been selected, not based upon a Nobel Prize winning can’t miss formula, but more along the lines off its being the biggest number that can be pitched without being associated with the dreaded and probably more realistic Trillion dollar word – i.e. 750 Billion would become ¾ of a trillion dollars and any thing over that would be dubbed close to a Trillion – hence $700 billion. [Okay, I’ll admit that was actually my analysis; however, given that the experts got us into the predicament in the first place, perhaps that’s for the better.]
Jan 01
It’s not just the economy stupid!
In March of 2008, the research director for Canada’s National Farmers Union announced that, “The decline in food supplies we’re seeing now is steeper than any time since the Second World War,” he says, “maybe in the past century.” Some blame a “biofuel boondoggle” that has seen 20% of the U.S. corn crop go into creating ethanol last year, in order to provide only 1% of that country’s fuel needs. Rather than driving down the cost of gasoline, it has succeeded in driving up the price of everything else. By reducing the supply of corn that is available for feeding livestock, the price of meat, milk and eggs has gone up 10 to 20 per cent. Meanwhile, water is becoming the greatest worry of all. World use increased six-fold between 1990 and 2005, the majority of that going to agriculture. Water tables in important farm belts of the U.S., China and South Asia are plummeting — in India by as much as three metres a year. Factor in Asia’s sudden enthusiasm for red meat and the sense of crisis only deepens: producing one kilogram of grain-fed beef requires five times the water a kilogram of cereal grain does, which helps explain why the outgoing CEO of Nestlé SA, the world’s biggest food-maker, recently raised water scarcity as one of the great challenges facing the world. Bottom Line: Given that our (pirate) captains of finance and industry are apparently stupid enough to get the global economies into their current state, I can understand how they might also be overlooking these unsettling details especially given that their collective culinary palettes are currently attuned to a feeding frenzy at a wholly different kind of (billion dollar) hog trough.
In a related story: Wait a minute I may have been mistaken. At least one “expert” seemed to be in tune with the real deal. Lost in the billions of other frauds and scandals of 2008 (which included the arrest of Bernard Madoff, the former chairman of the Nasdaq Stock Market on charges of running a $50 billion “Ponzi scheme”) is a little “Made in Canada” hedge fund called Sextant Capital Management. Sextant’s sophisticated investors gave $22 million to Otto Spork, a former dentist who used it to buy investments in two private companies with ownership stakes in northern glaciers. Spork, has recently moved to Iceland, and apparently envisions these glaciers as the source of fresh water that can be sold around the world. These companies have no revenues, certainly no profits, and no prospect for operations in the foreseeable future; however, according to Sextant, their value has surged by 984 per cent in the couple of years since the Sextant fund was launched. The Ontario Securities Commission has barred Sextant from selling its fund to any more clients pending regulatory hearings in the weeks and months ahead.
Jan 01
Barack Obama. Hey, what can I say? Every time the man opens his mouth things don’t seem quite as bad as they might be. He is the American Dream incarnate. I have no illusions though. All the slick rhetoric in the world won’t solve what ails the Americans; however, just having someone who sounds intelligent at the helm is better than someone who is clearly beating around the Bush for answers.