I love this picture taken in 1988.
See the guy with the camera around his neck standing behind the boy? That’s current Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin pretending to be a tourist when we know today that he was a KGB agent.
The more I ponder this CNN article, the more chilling it is. Two American teenagers were recruited by a Mexican drug cartel to assassinate people in Laredo, Texas on orders from south of the border.
Both teenagers received six-month military-style training on a Mexican ranch. Investigators say Cardona and Reta were paid $500 a week each as a retainer, to sit and wait for the call to kill. Then they were paid up to $50,000 and 2 kilos of cocaine for carrying out a hit.
Think about that for a minute — a criminal organization in a foreign country recruited American, gave them military training in a foreign location, then paid them to kill other Americans on American soil.
Now, swap “Mexican drug cartel” for “Ahgani Taliban.” Tell me how that’s different. If the Taliban recruited Americans, trained them in a terrorist camp in Afghanistan, then sent them back to the U.S. to kill Americans…what would the U.S. response be?
I read a couple months ago that the CIA considers instability in Mexico a bigger threat to the U.S. than instability in Iran. I’m starting to believe it.
I have always loved Art Deco architecture. I don’t why, but I’ve always had a very emotional response to it — the buildings on South Beach, the Chrysler Building, the city hall of our own Sioux Falls, etc.
I just stumbled on this NY Times article about the city I lived in until I was six — Napier, New Zealand. Apparently there was an earthquake there in 1931 that about leveled the town. It was completely rebuilt in the 1930s…in Art Deco style (given the decade, it make sense). In fact, Napier calls itself “the Art Deco city.”
This has me wondering if there’s any connection between the apparently prevalent architectural style of my home town, and the fact that I’ve been drawn to Art Deco my entire life.
(Image courtesy of the Napier City Council.)
I know a lot of people have offered a lot of explanations for the current financial crisis, but I would go so far as to say that House of Cards, a CNBC documentary available for free on Hulu, is the absolute definitive history and explanation of what got us where we are.
Phenomenally well-made, it starts just after 9/11, and explains, step-by-step, the snowball that delivered us here.
We go from Alan Greenspan in a helicopter over Ground Zero thinking he needed to drop interest rates to keep the economy going, and we end up with an investor in Dallas realizing that things were about to fly apart, so he starts buying credit default swaps. What happens in between is compelling.
In particular, the last 30 seconds of the show have some comments from Alan Greenspan which I can’t shake. Paraphrasing, the host states that greed was root cause of all of this. Greenspan responds:
“Yes, and you’re going to pass some legislation that’s going to prevent this? Try it.
Human nature is such that this will happen again. It won’t happen for some time, but we will be having this same conversation again, sometime in the future.”
It’s 90 minutes long, but you won’t regret it. This should be required viewing for any finance class. It answered or clarified every lingering question I had.
My title may seem a little dramatic, but this CNN piece echos my exact sentiments about this Rihanna/Chris Brown situation.
While it may be unfair that she has to bear the burden of being a role model for young girls in her personal conduct — jeesh — I can’t help but think that she’s setting a terrible example, and is setting back the decades long campaign against domestic violence. I hope moms around the country are telling their daughters that the talented young singer is making a very dangerous choice.
There are girls — probably thousands of girls — who consciously or subconsciously look to women like Rihanna as a role models. On average, these girls will now be just a little, tiny bit more likely to stay in abusive situations. After all, if the rich, beautiful Rihanna took her abuser back, why shouldn’t normal people like them do that too? Some of them will be beaten for it. Some of them might die for it.
She had a chance to be a hero for women everywhere. She didn’t do it, and has thus contributed to the problem.
I’m writing this post in front of an actual fireplace at the Retreat Center at Camp Omega. Not the anti-septic gas ones we have in our houses now, but a stone fireplace that burns real wood.
To start it, you have to do more than flick a switch. You have to work and plan — you have to roll up newspapers, and put them in first, then stack logs of top, then light and pray. The initial excitement as the newspapers catches had to be tempered by a hope that the logs get involved. Sometimes they don’t, and it dies and quickly as it started.
But then, on the second or third try (I’m no Boy Scout…) it works, and you get a haughty sense of self-satisfaction. It’s tempting to beat your chest and yell, “I have built fire!! Bow before me!!”
When it burns, it doesn’t burn silently. The logs pop and hiss and whine as they burn, and every once in a file, a support log weakens to the point where the whole structure comes down in a shower of sparks.
Watching it is addictive. A group of us will just sit around the fireplace and stare into it We occasionally speak, but are otherwise just content to be hypnotized by the flames.
The heat isn’t uniform. Sometimes it’s blazingly hot so that your entire face gets warm to the touch. Then it burns low, and you have to grab a poker, brave the heat, and jostle things around until it heats up again.
Man, how I miss these fireplaces. Our home has a gas version — flick a switch on the wall, and blue flame consistently rises up behind thick glass through fake logs coated with some chemical that makes them look red hot.
It’s a sad subsititute. I miss real fire.