Archive for January 17th, 2009
Poppies and Pomegranates in a Narco-State
The world needs her more than ever
Akin to Oprah objecting to being called a glutton for eating all the cupcakes again, Afghanistan’s upset Hillary Clinton used the word “narco-state” to describe a country that readily admits it has no control over one of its own provinces, which just happens to be the province that produces the most opium, en route to processing into heroin.
So, the nation that exports 90% of the world’s heroin takes umbrage at the term “narco-state”? When it admits its own renegade province is responsible for all of those narcotics?
Interesting.
Delusional, but interesting.
The opium situation is a difficult one to control, even if Afghanistan could manage to bring its provinces in line.
Maybe Clinton will get the Afghani people to see the wonderful benefits of pomegranates.
Afghani pomegranates are the best in the world (but still unavailable in the US, where all the pomegranate seeds you sprinkle on your green tea yogurt at Pinkberry or juice you gulp from funny little POM Wonderful bottles comes from a single mature California orchard), and could actually yield more profit for Afghan farmers than poppies produce, but only after pomegranate orchards mature.
That’s hard to do in a constant war zone. It requires investment and patience, while poppy harvests are fast and easy in comparison.
If only Afghanistan actually controlled all of its provinces, and was able to encourage development of large scale pomegranate cultivation to usurp the opium industry.
But, look who’s talking. This is the United States, where Illinois is a corrupt embarrassment to the nation, hardly under any sort of ethical control itself. If we can’t produce an Illinois that’s run for the good of the people, with limited or nonexistent mob control, then how we can hope to push Afghanistan into eliminating its own crooks, criminals, and renegade provinces? Especially when Americans have just sent a whole bunch of Chicago machine politicians to do unto all of us what they’ve done unto Illinois.
Hillary Clinton’s sure got her work cut out for her. Our champ’s in for the fight of her life.
And we’ve got some baking to do. Lemon poppyseed Baked Alaska with pomegranate sorbet sounds like a great dessert for dinner tomorrow. Yes, in fact, we are that gay.
Welcome to BizarroWorld, because Ann Coulter's making an awful lot of sense these days
h/t AceofSpades for the clip above
In essence George Soros bought the Democratic party.
The media controls the Democrats, not the other way around.
Obama will either cater to the Left and lose in 2012, or stick it to the Left in his quest for a second term.
Much to our surprise, we’re actually listening to Ann Coulter and Rush Limbaugh and agreeing with large parts of what they have to say.
Welcome to BizarroWorld!
Do you have your new flag yet? The boring old flag is just garbage starting January 20th.
It's racist not to write all over the flag and deface it for Obama.
Let the Golden Age of Obama begin!
UPDATE: Here’s another one of those flags defaced Obamafied. Someone is obviously printing and distributing these. The large and small versions match exactly, and the people who have them are in various cities. This one was shown on CNN.com, held by an Obamafile along his train route to Washington yesterday. Is the Obama transition team handing these out?
We've never seen anyone do this to a flag, for anyone.
Another Hedge Fund Con Man Disappears With Hundreds of Millions
Welcome to the ongoing hedge fund mess, already in progress.
Another Hedge Fund manager has disappeared, following New York’s Bernie Madoff and his pre-Christmas grinching of billions in investments. This time it’s Arthur Nadel, from Scoop Management Inc., which oversaw Valhalla Investment Partners in Florida. No one knows how much damage Nadel’s done, but it looks like $350 million has vanished into thin air today.
Hedge Funds are the biggest scam we’ve ever encountered in our adult lives.
There’s a woman we know in New York who’s our age, early 30s, who is truly utterly and completely clueless. She’s rarely held any job for any length of time, but worked at Morgan Stanley for a while in the late-90s, so believes she’s some sort of financial whiz because she made close to six figures there for a while (back when they were practically throwing money out the windows to anyone who wanted it). A nervous breakdown or two since then, she’s worked in nonprofit development for a while, at small community art galleries and the like. She’s managed maybe one or two people under her, tops, and is truly the most emotionally unstable person we’ve ever met. One bad relationship, and she’ll quit her job to move to New Zealand or Italy for months.
Last year, someone asked her to be the CFO of a new hedge fund he was starting up.
If you know this woman, you’d realize that’s as ridiculous as one of us here walking up to NASA and telling them we’re ready and able to be an astronaut. And not just any bozo sent to space, but captain of the Space Shuttle, ready for a mission to Mars. Despite having absolutely no idea how to fly a spacecraft, and no business being anywhere near one. But we’re qualified because we’ve seen Apollo 13 twelve times – and worked at Morgan Stanley years ago.
This woman just wanted the title “CFO”, and couldn’t see she’d have absolutely no idea what she was doing, or that it would be a disaster for everyone.
The only reason that train wreck didn’t happen was the guy trying to put the hedge fund together couldn’t pull enough cash into it to go forward (at least that’s what this woman told us, but who knows what the truth was). We know for a fact they tried soliciting investors and laid all the groundwork, but the hedge fund didn’t happen.
So, this bunch never got to con anybody out of their life savings.
But the most interesting thing about all of it is that we honestly believe the woman we know was being set up to be the patsy for the con. We told her as much, but she wouldn’t listen (so at least she’s consistent, since she never listens to reason in anything she does). It seemed like picking someone who didn’t know what she was doing to be CFO, someone who just wanted the job as an excuse to buy fancy suits and play a power role, was a setup for her to take the fall when the hedge fund went under. Her name was going to be scrawled over all the paperwork — and she’d be the last one standing in the office when the hedge fund manager beat a hasty retreat to Argentina.
It was something out of that 80s miniseries “Billionare Boys Club”, where a group of young California con men created the BBC investment club for the sons of wealthy Californians, where “BBC” stood for whatever anyone wanted it to be. “Bombay Bicycle Company”, “Billionaire Boys Club”, “Banana Berry Cantaloupe”, whatever. Since the company wasn’t real, it was deliberately nebulous enough for you to twist it into anything you personally wanted it to be, whatever your own imagination required. Whatever it took to suck you into the ponzi scheme.
That’s the same con deliberately worked into all the Hope! and Change! propaganda of the past year. No one knows what change is coming. No one can define what we are supposed to hope for, or expect. It is different for everyone, with no big picture realization that a major train wreck is coming. Everyone wants to play make-believe.
Just like that woman who thinks she can be a CFO, when she’d have trouble, with her limited professional experience, managing a small store or restaurant — but she hopes she can be in charge of hundreds of millions of dollars in investments. Because she wants that fancy title on her business cards, so she can slip them into a new Armani pinstripe and hit the bars in New York as someone IMPORTANT.
There are many, many more hedge funds that are going to collapse in the days ahead. If it wasn’t for this woman in New York we know personally, we’d have never been clued into the Billionaire Boys Club shennanigans going on, as hedge funds are rarely discussed in the news. If memory serves, this woman was still talking about being the CFO of a hedge fun back in June of 2008…so that means there could be hundreds if not thousands of hedge funds that were still forming up through the summer of last year.
That’s a lot of Bernie Madoffs and Arthur Nadels to come. And more hedge funds with unqualified CFOs at the helm, not even realizing their investment group’s going under, because they only took the job to go shopping anyway.
Hope!
Change!
Brace for impact!
Michelle Obama's Adventures in Chicago Pay to Play Politics
h/t Michelle Obama Watch for the graphic above, and the quoted brief history of Michelle Obama’s magical raise — right when her husband was elected to the Senate…and just before Obama used his position as Senator to secure massive earmarks for Michelle’s employer, The University of Chicago Hospital.
Since Michelle took a leave of absence from her job at the hospital to campaign for her husband full time last year, University of Chicago never filled her position or assigned her duties to others (said duties comprised of diverting poor black patients away from University of Chicago Hospital to lower-quality medical facilities so U Chicago would not be stuck with as many expensive indigent care cases. The Hospital wanted only patients with solid insurance coverage, so Michelle’s “community outreach” was focused on dissuading everyone out there without insurance cards from ending up on U Chicago Hospital’s rolls). We hear they have no intention of hiring another “VP of Community and External Affairs” now that Michelle is gone for good, a position that was created solely for Michelle, coinciding perfectly with the moment in time the hospital wanted to triple her salary, out of the blue, coincidentally a few months after her husband was elected to the Senate.
Imagine the luck!
Everyone keeps talking about what color they think Michelle will wear to the Inaugural Balls on Tuesday.
Will she wear Nancy Reagan red?
Will she wear regal purple?
Will she wear the trademarked (and creepy) Hope! Change! New Kind of Politics! Smurf-blood blue?
HillBuzz on Twitter
We still honestly don’t understand what Twitter is, but are trying to learn more about the latest and up-and-coming tech people are talking about. A friend of ours here in Boystown’s always talking about Tweet this and Twitter that, but we thought those were some kind of rave, or a winter induced skin condition.
Evidently, it’s all some kind of messenging thing, for those portable phones that are out there now (whatever will they think of next!).
We’re going to give this a go, but can’t promise we’ll understand it anymore than Anime.
Tom Hanks calls black people in California un-American!
Do not believe anything this man tells you
Tom Hanks has bravely come out and called black people un-American for openly supporting discrimination in California, since 85% of blacks overwhelmingly supported Proposition 8 this November (more than any other demographic group).
