some ingteresting thoughts on Afghanistan

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123819872705562003.html#mod=todays_us_opinion

This is a nice uplifting article. I suppose if the an EMP doesn't get us first, this will do the same trick......

Read the article here..........

Everyone likes to be 90 seconds from catastrophe.......

Mmmmmm, more Octomom.

In the same vein, here is another article I thought was good....

Here is the Link:
http://ibdeditorials.com/IBDArticles.aspx?id=322782906144146


If you are too lazy to read (you know who you are...) here is a link to the audio file. Please pardon the short ad that preceeds it.

Thanks for the forward Justin. I hope people really understand how these guys got rolled by the monkeys in Washington....

A letter to the editor of the NY Times which is an email their head of Commodities sent to Ed Liddy, CEO of AIG (who was brought in last fall and earns a princely $1 per year for the berating infront of Congress he has been receiving. Oh yeah, plus he probably spends 12 or 16 hours a day running a company too...)

Maybe Barney {Frank, head of House Financial Services Committee} , Chris {Dodd, Head of Senate Banking Committee, who was the largest recipient of AIG campaign contributions}, or Barry {POTUS, and 2nd largest recipient of AIG contributions} ought to read this before they grab their pitchforks and completely destroy the incentive to be productive in one's jobs. If you have a skillset that is in demand, don't you have a right to be paid for it?

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/25/opinion/25desantis.html?_r=3&sq=Jake%20DeSantis&st=cse&scp=1&pagewanted=print

You know you are famous when you get a Holloween Costume about you a good 7 months before Halloween

So, things like this really tick me off. There is such double speak and BS in Congress. They have no idea what they are talking about...

One would think if you were an 80% owner of something, you would want things to be as prfitable as possible......


Read this article....

So in 2 months its my birthday, if anyone is looking for any gift ideas, may I propose a suggestion....

This looks like it is going to be THE product of 2009. I-phone look out.

www. pomegranatephone.com











P.S. a trip to Nova Scotia would be fine too I guess.......

An interesting read.......

http://www.cnbc.com/id/29434104

Welcome back gets shut down.....

So I might be back but my employer decided this was a good week to block "social networking and personal sites." I can view my blog, but they have blocked the ability to post to it at work. me having the motiviation to do so at home is SEVERELY limited. I will try my best though, no promises......

welcome back to me. quote of the day...

"You cannot legislate the poor into freedom by legislating the wealthy out of freedom. What one person receives without working for, another person must work for without receiving. The government cannot give to anybody anything that the government does not first take from somebody else. When half of the people get the idea that they do not have to work because the other half is going to take care of them, and when the other half gets the idea that it does no good to work because somebody else is going to get what they work for, that my dear friend, is about the end of any nation. You cannot multiply wealth by dividing it."

Dr. Adrian Rogers

Another good Peggy Noonan this week.

I like her writing style alot. Very simple. Observational.

Read it here.

Two interesting excerpts.....

It's Sully and Suleman, the pilot and "Octomom," the two great stories that are twinned with the era. Sully, the airline captain who saved 155 lives by landing that plane just right—level wings, nose up, tail down, plant that baby, get everyone out, get them counted, and then, at night, wonder what you could have done better. You know the reaction of the people of our country to Chesley B. Sullenberger III: They shake their heads, and tears come to their eyes. He is cool, modest, competent, tough in the good way. He's the only one who doesn't applaud Sully. He was just doing his job.

This is why people are so moved: We're still making Sullys. We're still making those mythic Americans, those steely-eyed rocket men. Like Alan Shepard in the Mercury rocket: "Come on and light this candle."

But Sully, 58, Air Force Academy '73, was shaped and formed by the old America, and educated in an ethos in which a certain style of manhood—of personhood—was held high.

What we fear we're making more of these days is Nadya Suleman. The dizzy, selfish, self-dramatizing 33-year-old mother who had six small children and then a week ago eight more because, well, she always wanted a big family. "Suley" doubletalks with the best of them, she doubletalks with profound ease. She is like Blago without the charm. She had needs and took proactive steps to meet them, and those who don't approve are limited, which must be sad for them. She leaves anchorwomen slack-jawed: How do you rough up a woman who's still lactating? She seems aware of their predicament.

Politicians keep saying, "People have to begin to understand we're in bad shape," and "People should realize it's a crisis." I think they know, Sherlock. Do you? Our political leaders are like a doctor who rushes to the scene of a terrible crash, bends over a hemorrhaging woman and says, "This is serious, lady, you can't take it lightly." She looks up at him: "Help me, do something, I'm bleeding out!" The doctor, to the local TV cameras: "I hope she knows she's in trouble."

A follow up to my "talking up" the economy post from the other day...

By Bradley Schiller

President Barack Obama has turned fearmongering into an art form. He has repeatedly raised the specter of another Great Depression. First, he did so to win votes in the November election. He has done so again recently to sway congressional votes for his stimulus package.

AP

In his remarks, every gloomy statistic on the economy becomes a harbinger of doom. As he tells it, today's economy is the worst since the Great Depression. Without his Recovery and Reinvestment Act, he says, the economy will fall back into that abyss and may never recover.

This fearmongering may be good politics, but it is bad history and bad economics. It is bad history because our current economic woes don't come close to those of the 1930s. At worst, a comparison to the 1981-82 recession might be appropriate. Consider the job losses that Mr. Obama always cites. In the last year, the U.S. economy shed 3.4 million jobs. That's a grim statistic for sure, but represents just 2.2% of the labor force. From November 1981 to October 1982, 2.4 million jobs were lost -- fewer in number than today, but the labor force was smaller. So 1981-82 job losses totaled 2.2% of the labor force, the same as now.

Job losses in the Great Depression were of an entirely different magnitude. In 1930, the economy shed 4.8% of the labor force. In 1931, 6.5%. And then in 1932, another 7.1%. Jobs were being lost at double or triple the rate of 2008-09 or 1981-82.

This was reflected in unemployment rates. The latest survey pegs U.S. unemployment at 7.6%. That's more than three percentage points below the 1982 peak (10.8%) and not even a third of the peak in 1932 (25.2%). You simply can't equate 7.6% unemployment with the Great Depression.

Other economic statistics also dispel any analogy between today's economic woes and the Great Depression. Real gross domestic product (GDP) rose in 2008, despite a bad fourth quarter. The Congressional Budget Office projects a GDP decline of 2% in 2009. That's comparable to 1982, when GDP contracted by 1.9%. It is nothing like 1930, when GDP fell by 9%, or 1931, when GDP contracted by another 8%, or 1932, when it fell yet another 13%.

Auto production last year declined by roughly 25%. That looks good compared to 1932, when production shriveled by 90%. The failure of a couple of dozen banks in 2008 just doesn't compare to over 10,000 bank failures in 1933, or even the 3,000-plus bank (Savings & Loan) failures in 1987-88. Stockholders can take some solace from the fact that the recent stock market debacle doesn't come close to the 90% devaluation of the early 1930s.

Mr. Obama's analogies to the Great Depression are not only historically inaccurate, they're also dangerous. Repeated warnings from the White House about a coming economic apocalypse aren't likely to raise consumer and investor expectations for the future. In fact, they have contributed to the continuing decline in consumer confidence that is restraining a spending pickup. Beyond that, fearmongering can trigger a political stampede to embrace a "recovery" package that delivers a lot less than it promises. A more cool-headed assessment of the economy's woes might produce better policies.

Mr. Schiller, an economics professor at the University of Nevada, Reno, is the author of "The Economy Today" (McGraw-Hill, 2007).

Stimulus, what stimulus??

Will the stimulus actually stimulate?
Economists say no.

http://www.mcclatchydc.com/227/story/62082.html

Good thing the government is going to handling ALL aspects of our lives soon. Looks like alot of people are ready for it.

One of my regrets in life....... I didn't come up with this...

The giant caterpillar

An oldie, but a goodie.....

www.yetisports.org

Since Woody thinks I'm a "Republican whore" for my post from Bloomberg the other day, I thought I would throw in a second source...

Is the Wall St. Journal respectable, even if it does appear on the opinion page?

As a side note, I find these days its hard to find anything actually covered that might be divisive OUTSIDE of the opinion pages.


A Health-Tech Monopoly
Another surprise in the stimulus fine print.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123431432273870909.html

How much is a trillion dollars?

Well, considering I was a failed math major, lets take this one step at a time. How much is a billion? If I gave you, (which I won't) $1 per second, it would take 31.7 years to have a billion dollars. Now, if I recall, there are 1,000 billion in a trillion....... so, $1,000,000,000,000 would take 31,700 years to receive if I gave you $1 per second (which I won't). Thats a long time. The really amazing part is, congress did it in 17 days. Too bad I don't build electric golf carts, haven't spent wildly in excess of my state budget, or need a digital converter box to watch digital tv, I could get me some of that.

Another way to look at it is that the US economy cranks out somewhere around $10 trillion worth of goods and services a year. So far since about mid last year, we have managed to either spend or guarantee assets of approximately $9.7 trillion. Basically, its like we as a country could have just called in sick for a year. Granted, that doesn't mean we will spend that whole amount, but its still on the line.

Must be nice to have a printing press in your basement.