Every time I'm here something weird happens. This time Bush lost. Cool.
People ask me where I stood politically you know. It's not that I disagree with Bush's economic policy or his foreign policy. But that I believe he was a child of Satan here to destroy the planet Earth.
Yeah, I'm a little.. a little to the left there, I was. I was leaning that way.
Yeah you know who else is going, little Quayle boy. Little Damien.
Is that guy Damien? Tell me those blank empty eyes aren't gonna glow red in the very near future.
[eyes roll back in head]
Stop making jokes about meee. Nrrr. I'll spell potato any fucking way I want. Nrrrr.
Rioters in LA, let's nuke them.
Bush was a pussy Nrr
He held me back.
Frightening people man. Bush tried to buy votes towards the end of the election. Goes around, you know, selling weapons to everyone, getting that military industrial complex vote happening for him. Sold 160 fighter jets to Korea and then 240 tanks to Kuwait and then goes around making speeches why he should be Commander-in-Chief because, "We still live in a dangerous world."
Thanks to you, you fucker!
What are you doing? Last week Kuwaitis had nothing but rocks!
They're arming the fucking world man. You know we armed Iraq. I wondered about that too, you know during the Persian Gulf war those intelligence reports would come out:
"Iraq: incredible weapons - incredible weapons."
How do you know that?
"Uh, well... We looked at the receipts Haar."
"Ah but as soon as that cheque clears, we're going in."
"What time's the bank open? 8? We're going in at 9."

The World in 2025

where the author leaned heavily on the recent National Intelligence Council Report

Global Trends 2025: A Transformed World

I was moved (wine had something to do with it) to write to the Gleaner that I thought Heine, like the NIC, is missing the biggest trend of all, to wit, the direct connections of the Internet.

I forgot all about the LTE until someone from Jamaica approached me out of the blue on Facebook.

When I googled appropriately I found....

Jamaica Gleaner News - The world in 2025 - Letters - Tuesday | December 30, 2008

The Editor, Sir:

I read with interest Jorge Heine's article of December 21 and would like to raise a couple of points in response.

Heine entirely ignores what is probably the most important trend in the past 200 years. This is the direct "peer-to-peer" connection and accelerated in recent times by the pervasive spread of the Internet and related communications.

This connection is already making conventional transaction-based business models obsolete and leading to a move to service provision instead.

The music industry - in which Jamaica is a fine participant - was where this process began.

Where music leads, so will finance follow, particularly in nations without the barriers to entry of First World nations, and huge legacy investment in obsolete infrastructure and business. In Kenya, for instance, we currently see mobile payment subscribers being added at a rate of 15,000 per week.

Jamaica is well placed - with a little lateral thinking - to leap past the moribund global financial system to new, networked and 'peer-to-peer' forms of credit and investment using legal frameworks which are neither public, state nor corporate, but a new alternative based upon partnership law.

My advice to Jamaica is: do some lateral thinking and ignore conventional solutions.

I am, etc.,

Found the owner of a pair of women's boots left here over Yule. No scandal involved. Halved my email backlog. Was awarded a bottle of cognac for giving someone a slogan that went on a T-Shirt for a company. Heard one of my clients is cutting down their marketing budget. Watched Mock the Week on Youtube. Rancho Triloqvisto is quieter than a turkey farm on Boxing Day.

You can't be me, I'm taken

Hat top to ZarkSeven:

This strip has been circulating around for the past couple of days.  You mainly see people attribute it to being 15 years old, but I haven't found an actual date for it.  Given that Bill Watterson published the last Calvin and Hobbes strip 13 years ago tomorrow, the 15 year attribution could be correct.  In any case, it sure echoes the financial crisis of recent days. ...

For your entertainment: the latest internet sensation, from Blackpool, predicted to be the biggest pop act of 2009.

Victoria Hesketh has not even released a single yet, but such is her following that she has just topped a BBC poll of more than 130 music industry movers and shakers, to find the most promising new talent of the year.

Not so very original, but "Oi'll gifit foive". What is more interesting is how her talent emerged.

You can't be me, I'm taken

I remember a few good frosts in the Lisbon area when I was a kid, but nothing like we had today: cars, roof tops, grass, everything covered by 2 to 4 mm of ice. I have experienced stuff like this in the mountains, but not here by sea side.

For tonight the Meteorologic institute is warning of snow in the coast all the way down to the Algarve. I set a bike ride for tomorrow with my comrades, it should be interesting.

Vencit omnia veritas.

Kate and Gerry McCann have condemned a Conservative activist who boasted about dressing up as Madeleine McCann at a party, calling his actions "offensive".

Matthew Lewis has now apologised "unreservedly" to the McCanns. He was expelled from the party after telling friends of his New Year party exploits.

Tory chairman Caroline Spelman said the Conservative Future activist's actions were "completely unacceptable".

Conservative Future being the replacement organisation for the young conservatives, who wre dispanded in the 80's after too many similar activities by its members.

Give a politician an inch, and he'll think he's a ruler

Jan. 9 (Bloomberg)-- Henry Paulson may be the most powerful manager of money in the world and he still couldn't do for taxpayers with the $700 billion bailout of American banks what Warren Buffett did for his shareholders in investing in Goldman Sachs Group Inc.

The Treasury secretary has made 174 purchases of banks' preferred shares that include certificates to buy stock at a later date. He invested $10 billion in Goldman Sachs in October, twice as much as Buffett did the month before, yet gained warrants worth one-fourth as much as the billionaire, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. The Goldman Sachs terms were repeated in most of the other bank bailouts.

Paulson's warrant deals may give U.S. taxpayers, who are funding the bailouts, less profit from any recovery in financial stocks than shareholders such as Goldman Sachs Chief Executive Officer Lloyd Blankfein and Saudi Arabian Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, owner of 4 percent of Citigroup Inc., said Simon Johnson, former chief economist for the International Monetary Fund.

The transactions are "just egregious," said Johnson, a fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington. "You want to do it the way Warren does it."

Below is an actual example of a recent WaMu loan mod with a 5-year $1 million bullet payment. This mod takes exotic lending to level I have never witnessed in my 20-years of mortgage banking. This makes a Pay Option ARM looks safe and cozy -- and puh-lease do not tell me this is great because it frees him up to spend money into the economy.

Banks offering and borrowers actively accepting this style loan mod will guaranty that the housing crisis stays will us for a long time to come. This borrower will lose his home in 5-years, I have no doubt. That is of course unless his house price goes up 100% AND great, low rate super jumbo money returns to the market so he can refi out of it - then again, many lenders won't even refi a loan that has had a previous loan mod done.

Property Value: $800k

Note amount: $1 million plus deferred interest

New Mod amount: $1.053 million

First TWO years rate/payment: 1% and $878

Third year rate/payment: 3% and $2633

Forth year rate/payment: 5% and $4389

FIFTH YEAR PAYMENT - THE BULLET: ALL OUTSTANDING BALANCE DUE AND PAYABLE
[specimen img at the source]

Now --before Barry signs the Stimulus Package-- is a good time for Mr Baker to clarify his concept of "rent-to-own" underwater remediation through owner- or bank-financing.

In Related News | Bloomberg |

Citibank agreed to support, which serviced about 7 percent of all U.S. mortgages last year, agreed to support federal legislation that will let bankruptcy courts reset mortgage rates for borrowers

Ever the loss leader.

Diversity is the key to economic and political evolution.

And I'm not sure why I am supposed to be reassured by the idea that Obama is "listening" to Paul Krugman when this is how it's phrased:

If Paul Krugman has a good idea, in terms of how to spend money efficiently and effectively to jump-start the economy, then we're going to do it. If somebody has an idea for a tax cut that is better than a tax cut we've proposed, we will embrace it. So, you know, one of the things that I think I'm trying to communicate in this process is for everybody to get past the habit that sometimes occurs in Washington of whose idea is it, what ideological corner does it come from. Just show me. If you can show me that something is going to work, I will welcome it.

If Paul Krugman has an idea that Obama actually recognizes as a good idea, despite the fact that he seems to be following Reagan polices, then sure, fine, we'll listen to Krugman, I mean, hey, we're not gonna dis him just because he's Krugman - we'll listen to anyone who has an idea we think is good - always bearing in mind that we hired Larry Summers, and not Krugman, because we think Krugman is just another liberal we don't have to listen to. We wouldn't think of hiring and listening to the people who have been right just because they've been right when we can hire people who have been consistently wrong and listen to them because - well, because being wrong is such a good idea!

"Dividends don't lie." Skip to next paragraph

Chalk up the death of another Wall Street cliché.

In the late bull market, dividend payments provided one of the seemingly strongest arguments for the bulls. Maybe earnings numbers could be manipulated, but dividend payments required cash. If the company had the cash to hand out, you could be confident the earnings were real.

It was a lie.

It is now becoming clear that the great news on the dividend front from 2004 through 2006 was not an indication of solid corporate performance; it was just another sign of lax lending standards. Lenders who willingly handed out money to homeowners with bad credit were even more generous to corporate borrowers.

Now the situation has reversed. The quarter just ended had the worst dividend news for American companies in half a century, and this quarter could be even worse. Many corporate boards review annual performance and decide what to do about the dividend during the first two months of each year, and it is not likely to be a happy time.

Until those meetings are completed, buying stocks for their high dividend yields may be risky.

I'm not used to paying 2x as much for a taxi ride as I am for my accommodation, though.

you are the media you consume.