How Do Kids Come Up With This Stuff?

They used to say my generation was going to pot… I’d say the new one is going to “smarties”

1 Hour Away In Vancouver

Screw those people that think they need to turn off our lights to take part in Earth Hour… it’s the Celebrate Human Achievement Hour at 8:30PM today

The Competitive Enterprise Institute is holding a counter-protest during the same time period called Celebrate Human Achievement Hour, which will “salute the people who keep the lights on and produce the energy that helps make human achievement possible.”

Green and private conservation are fine. We have no problem with an individual (or group) that wants to sit naked in the dark without heat, clothing, or light. Additionally, we would have no problem with the group holding a pro-green technology rally. That is their choice. But when this group stages a “global election” with the express purpose of influencing “government policies to take action against global warming,” we have every right as individuals to express our vote for the opposite

If Human Achievement Hour is at all a dig against Earth Hour, it is so only by the fact that we are pointing out what Earth Hour truly is about: it isn’t pro-earth, it is anti-man and anti-innovation. So, on March 28th, CEI plans to continue “voting” for humanity by enjoying the fruits of man’s mind.

Got all systems ready… let’s light up Vancouver before we the rain rolls in again tonight for another week of dark.

photo credit: @ly$ in wonderland

Running Out Of Time

photo credit: fsgm

Now that Obama has decided to go all in… you might want to take the time to read this article from the The Atlantic on the the implications, and what it will be like when the IMF steps in.

by Simon Johnson, a professor at MIT’s Sloan School of Management, who was the chief economist at the International Monetary Fund during 2007 and 2008.

Emerging-market countries have only a precarious hold on wealth, and are weaklings globally. When they get into trouble, they quite literally run out of money—or at least out of foreign currency, without which they cannot survive. They must make difficult decisions; ultimately, aggressive action is baked into the cake. But the U.S., of course, is the world’s most powerful nation, rich beyond measure, and blessed with the exorbitant privilege of paying its foreign debts in its own currency, which it can print. As a result, it could very well stumble along for years—as Japan did during its lost decade—never summoning the courage to do what it needs to do, and never really recovering. A clean break with the past—involving the takeover and cleanup of major banks—hardly looks like a sure thing right now. Certainly no one at the IMF can force it.

In my view, the U.S. faces two plausible scenarios. The first involves complicated bank-by-bank deals and a continual drumbeat of (repeated) bailouts, like the ones we saw in February with Citigroup and AIG. The administration will try to muddle through, and confusion will reign…

Our future could be one in which continued tumult feeds the looting of the financial system, and we talk more and more about exactly how our oligarchs became bandits and how the economy just can’t seem to get into gear.

The second scenario begins more bleakly, and might end that way too. But it does provide at least some hope that we’ll be shaken out of our torpor. It goes like this: the global economy continues to deteriorate, the banking system in east-central Europe collapses, and—because eastern Europe’s banks are mostly owned by western European banks—justifiable fears of government insolvency spread throughout the Continent. Creditors take further hits and confidence falls further. The Asian economies that export manufactured goods are devastated, and the commodity producers in Latin America and Africa are not much better off. A dramatic worsening of the global environment forces the U.S. economy, already staggering, down onto both knees. The baseline growth rates used in the administration’s current budget are increasingly seen as unrealistic, and the rosy “stress scenario” that the U.S. Treasury is currently using to evaluate banks’ balance sheets becomes a source of great embarrassment.

Under this kind of pressure, and faced with the prospect of a national and global collapse, minds may become more concentrated.

The conventional wisdom among the elite is still that the current slump “cannot be as bad as the Great Depression.” This view is wrong. What we face now could, in fact, be worse than the Great Depression—because the world is now so much more interconnected and because the banking sector is now so big.

It’s a great article… read on.

LA For The Week

Thought of the day…

Breakfast is the only meal of the day that I tend to view with the same kind of traditionalized reverence that most people associate with Lunch and Dinner.

I like to eat breakfast alone, and almost never before noon; anybody with a terminally jangled lifestyle needs at least one psychic anchor every twenty-four hours, and mine is breakfast. In Hong Kong, Dallas or at home — and regardless of whether or not I have been to bed — breakfast is a personal ritual that can only be properly observed alone, and in a spirit of genuine excess.

The food factor should always be massive: four Bloody Marys, two grapefruits, a pot of coffee, Rangoon crepes, a half-pound of either sausage, bacon, or corned beef hash with diced chiles, a Spanish omelette or eggs Benedict, a quart of milk, a chopped lemon for random seasoning, and something like a slice of Key lime pie, two margaritas, and six lines of the best cocaine for dessert….

Right, and there should also be two or three newspapers, all mail and messages, a telephone, a notebook for planning the next twenty-four hours and at least one source of good music….

All of which should be dealt with outside, in the warmth of a hot sun, and preferably stone naked.

Hunter Stockton Thompson (July 18, 1937 – February 20, 2005)

And perhaps the most rambling interview ever:

Hunter Thompson and Kieth Richards. Where are the subtitles when you need them. Great interview where they discuss everything from the Rosemont concert to J Edgar Hoover. Starts fuzzy then cleans up nice.

Saturday Video – Truth In Advertising

This is the interpretation of the great good one selling the raping of America.

Great subtitles to the world’s longest election campaign.

Is it me, or has he been on the air every day since he’s been elected. Maybe if he would put half as much effort on governing, and solving the financial crisis, he may learn to be a leader.

Time To Go Galt

In Canada, it’s been long accepted that going Galt was simply a prudent way to live – the tax rates are structured to make sure we all stay in the lower zone of income – punishing those that get too far above. It’s the Wayne Gretzky rule – score too many goals and they’ll move the net.

I have long planned revenues around not going over the small business 200K profit allowance, so I wouldn’t fall into the maximum tax bracket. This strategy used by most successful small business has held Canada back for years.

For those that aren’t aware of the “Atlas Shrugged” book, here’s what Going Galt means:

The plot of Rand’s novel is simple -  The United States is governed by bureaucrats, “looters” and “moochers,” who penalize and demonize creative people. The country is in decline because creative people are disappearing — they have followed the innovative John Galt to a mountain enclave, “Galt’s Gulch,” where they watch society crumble. Creativity has gone on strike, and the engine of capitalism cannot run without it.

It pretty much fits the Obama government to a ‘T’. He is forcing the people who can actually turn things around, entrepreneurs, into taking this year off.

So today, where we have a congress of looters in the US that has decided to tax anyone bonuses in bailed out companies at 90% – pretty much declaring that bonuses are no longer allowed (under the manufactured ploy of the AIG ‘crisis’): More »