While the oligarchs of Havana were celebrating New Years Eve (wonderfully depicted by Coppola) Fidel moved into the city and took power while Batista and Meyer Lansky fled. Perhaps it’s time to remove the embargo and get on with a normal relationship with Cuba.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7AOOdU2bIN8]
Harry Shearer’s new Art installation, The Silent Echo Chamber , derived from the precious minutes on the satellite feed before our talking heads “go live”, reminds me of one of his greatest finds. Laura Ingraham shows her “b**ch from hell” persona during her short lived Fox News TV series. harry has disabled the embedding feature so he can sell advertising. Double click on the video and it will take you to his you Tube channel.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q3lCfHtaR30]
George Bush always bought Mikheil Saakashvili’s act. Barack Obama should not. The Georgian President is an accident waiting to happen. Getting closer to him will only draw us in to more pain and sacrifice.
As winter bears down on Georgia, Mr. Saakashvili has found himself on the defensive. In August, he ordered an attack on separatists in South Ossetia, one of two territories — Abkhazia is the other — where Georgia and Russia had been locked in a 15-year standoff. Georgian forces were quickly routed, and Russia seized both territories.
Mr. Saakashvili has cast the attack as a necessary response to a Russian invasion, but no evidence has emerged to verify the claim, and political opponents have said he acted rashly.
Having lost the war with Russia and wrecked most of his military equipment, guess who he wants to pay for the replacement?
The change in American administrations injects further uncertainty for Mr. Saakashvili, who enjoys warm personal friendships with President Bush and Senator McCain. Mr. Saakashvili said he had no worries about continued support from the United States, which has pledged $1 billion in aid and will sign a strategic cooperation treaty with Georgia this week.
But key questions remain, among them: Will the United States re-equip Georgia’s battered military, at a cost its defense minister estimated at $8 billion to $9 billion?
Obama should take a pass on that bailout.
Earlier this month I wrote that the contrarian play for investors would be moving into smart bond funds like the ones Loomis Sayles run. So far it has worked our pretty well.
More rumors about Steve Job’s health were flying around the Web today.
Shares of Apple Inc. were on their way to a gain Tuesday when a website reported that Chief Executive Steve Jobs was in “rapidly declining” health.
The company’s stock sank from about $88 to $84.72 within minutes of the report, which cited an anonymous source and was posted on the Gizmodo technology website.
The notion that the whole value of the company is tied to one man is a disservice to all the incredible engineers and designers that work on Apple products. Jobs is brilliant, but he acts as more of an editor than a creator at the company and I have no doubt that the company will continue to prosper if he needs to leave for health reasons.
At least in LA, when most retail stores looked like funeral parlors in the last week, the Apple Store was cookin’.
More rumors about Steve Job’s health were flying around the Web today.
Shares of Apple Inc. were on their way to a gain Tuesday when a website reported that Chief Executive Steve Jobs was in “rapidly declining” health.
The company’s stock sank from about $88 to $84.72 within minutes of the report, which cited an anonymous source and was posted on the Gizmodo technology website.
The notion that the whole value of the company is tied to one man is a disservice to all the incredible engineers and designers that work on Apple products. Jobs is brilliant, but he acts as more of an editor than a creator at the company and I have no doubt that the company will continue to prosper if he needs to leave for health reasons.
At least in LA, when most retail stores looked like funeral parlors in the last week, the Apple Store was cookin’.
The psychologist Michael McCullough has written a new book entitled Beyond Revenge: The Evolution of the Forgiveness Instinct
“Brain-scan studies have shown that when people pray or meditate, there’s a lot of activity in two parts of brain that are important for self-regulation and control of attention and emotion,” he said. “The rituals that religions have been encouraging for thousands of years seem to be a kind of anaerobic workout for self-control.”…Religious people, he said, are self-controlled not simply because they fear God’s wrath, but because they’ve absorbed the ideals of their religion into their own system of values, and have thereby given their personal goals an aura of sacredness. He suggested that nonbelievers try a secular version of that strategy.
“People can have sacred values that aren’t religious values,” he said. “Self-reliance might be a sacred value to you that’s relevant to saving money. Concern for others might be a sacred value that’s relevant to taking time to do volunteer work. You can spend time thinking about what values are sacred to you and making New Year’s resolutions that are consistent with them.”
Read John Tierney’s article and then let me know your thoughts?
Burmese Military Dictators
Back in September I wrote about Posse Comitatus and the apparent contingency planning of the Third Infantry Division for domestic unrest. Now it looks like the Army War College is thinking about the same thing.
Widespread civil violence inside the United States would force the defense establishment to reorient priorities in extremis to defend basic domestic order and human security. The causes could be unforeseen economic collapse, loss of functioning political and legal order, purposeful domestic resistance or insurgency, pervasive public health emergencies, and catastrophic natural and human disasters.
I know it’s important for planners to think about “the known unknowns” (wasn’t that a Rumsfeld quote?), but there is a reason the Founders wanted to limit military involvement in domestic affairs. The English Civil War and Cromwell’s military dictatorship was still a part of their near term historical memory.
That’s the bad news. The good news comes from a note from my friend Vince Farrell.
There is now $8.85 trillion in cash, bank deposits and money market funds and that is equal to 74% of the market capitalization of the stock market. The Leuthold Report says this is the biggest since 1990. As we have been saying for some time, this pool of money will tire of earning close to 0% interest and will start to move out the risk spectrum.
I think Vince is probably right on this and that may be a big help to Barack in the coming months as confidence begins to return.
A couple of years ago, Vanity Fair published this picture of the daughters of Walter Noel. All were married to rich South American or European financiers who worked at their father’s Hedge Fund, the Fairfield Greenwich Group, that was the largest feeder fund for Bernard Madoff. The sons were very good at finding huge sums of money in Latin America to invest in Madoff. But now that the whole thing turned out to be a con, very few of the investors from South of the Border seem to be coming forward.
Wealthy Latin Americans appear to be among the big losers in the $50 billion Ponzi scheme orchestrated by financier Bernard Madoff, although many in the region are reluctant to step forward due to the private nature of Latin American fortunes, worries about security, and concerns about tipping off local tax authorities.
South American oligarchs hiding their money from the tax authorities is nothing new. The con men getting conned does add a touch of irony to the story.
