John Galt is a financial analyst whose daily numbers, charts and graphs provide a clear picture of many financial sectors, both national and international. Here he plays with many national and internatonal possibilities/predictins for 2012 that could have an impact on the financial markets. "I only make these predictions for fun." he writes, but they are not that far off from being real, in my humble opinion.
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#1
his predictions are fun but nonsense. If one is to assume the entire bundle there is no way the Obama is reelected one would happen even with the voter fraud.
#5
And JUSTICE is not capable of understanding why Muslims are becoming apostate at increasing rates. Isn't his life going to be fun when nobody buys oil from the Saudis any more -- it seems theres shale oil for cracking everywhere except the Ummah. It sure looks like that, along with the continued thriving of Israel, is a sign that Allah does not approve of His believers.
It's a good thing JUSTICE's father retired before he was shot down out of the sky over Israel, or out of the sky trying to get to Israel -- that would have been so sad.
#8
My 2012 prediction. Muslims will destroy wealth at a faster rate than ever before.
With Oil shale and other real technologies coming on stream thanks to Islamists getting tied up lobbying against green insanity, the middle east will start to starve.
#10
Bright Pebbles, I agree. I think your time frame depends upon the next election however. a Republican could do it within that time frame, the current occupant would force Canada to do it alone and it might take longer.
#11
1) When you make predictions about certain countries it may help your case if you know how to spell the country (Colombia, not Columbia)
The rest of Galt's "predictions" are either blinding obvious or complete nonsense.
2) My own prediction is that this year will have one day more than usual, will end on December 31 (and not 21st) and that for one sucker who dies ten new ones are born.
Posted by: European Conservative ||
01/03/2012 14:58 Comments ||
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#12
With Oil shale and other real technologies coming on stream thanks to Islamists getting tied up lobbying against green insanity, the middle east will start to starve.
The Persian Gulf is the world's low cost oil producer. They will still make fabulous amounts of money at $50/barrel. Shale won't.
#15
Ahh, but the gulf economies can not run at less than $80/barrel. Thus the horns of the dilemma, social unrest or alternative suppliers. What to do, what to do...
h/t Instapundit, Vodkapundit
As we enter 2012, the presidential candidates would do well to wrap their minds and messages around these seven mathematical facts:
Every day, the U.S. government takes in $6 billion and spends $10 billion. This means that every day the federal government spends $4 billion more dollars than it has.
The real unemployment rate is a jaw-dropping 11 percent.
Every fifth man you pass on your way to work is now out of work.
College graduates are now 34% less likely to find a job under Obama than they were under President George W. Bush.
Every seventh person you pass on the sidewalk now relies on food stamps.
The ravages of the Obama economy now mean that more Americans live under the federal poverty line than at any time in U.S. history since records have been kept.
Under President Barack Obama, every fifth child in America now lives in poverty.
These are not partisan jabs, manufactured statistics, or ideological swipes. These are mathematical facts. And the presidential candidate who can most clearly and credibly articulate them--and their concomitant solutions--is bound to win.
Why? Because these facts point toward the solutions America must implement to avert the kinds of economic and social upheaval seen in Europe and elsewhere.
Start with mathematical fact number one--deficit spending. No person, family, business, or nation can spend more than it takes in and remain sustainable; it defies the simple laws of math and reason. And yet even as Washington hemorrhages $4 billion more than it has each day, citizens have watched as the farce that is "Super Committee" has proven it cannot even shave $1.2 trillion from America's $15 trillion debt.
The time for carping over the appropriate size of government is over. The laws of math have settled the argument: either we return to limited government or we face economic collapse. Those are the choices. Period. As Robert Samuelson noted yesterday, "We are shifting from 'give away politics' to 'take away politics.'"
Mathematical facts two and three--11% real unemployment and 20% male unemployment rate--focus the nation on the priorities of spurring economic growth, eliminating Obamacare, and adapting to the realities of the digital economy. Why aren't employers hiring? As a September 2011 report by UBS explained, "arguably the biggest impediment to hiring (particularly hiring of less skilled workers) is healthcare reform." And lest one forget, Obamacare hasn't even gone into full effect and won't until 2014. Even still, under Mr. Obama, the average family's health insurance premiums have risen $2,393.
As for the male unemployment rate, the problem is threefold. First, male graduation rates continue to lag behind those of women. Second, American manufacturing, which used to be a primary source of male employment, is dying a quick death. Third, incarceration rates of males continue to skyrocket. In 1982, there were 500,000 people in prison (the majority of them males). Today, that figure stands at a towering 2.5 million. And that is to speak nothing of those whose crimes do not warrant jail time but will nonetheless permanently appear on their record when applying for a job.
Once former inmates and those with arrest records attempt to enter the workforce, they will be slapped by the new reality of the digital economy: no longer can people with blights on their record fudge or fib on job applications; employers can and do run national background checks for a few dollars and the click of a mouse.
What this means is that the old days when a kid could mess up and rebound are rapidly evaporating as competition among job applicants becomes fiercer by the minute. Couple this with fact number four--a drop in college graduate employment from 90% under Mr. Bush to 56% under Mr. Obama--and the fierce competition of a digital age comes into sharp relief.
Facts five, six, and seven--1 in 7 Americans on food stamps, 46 million under the poverty line, and historic childhood poverty rates--speak to the failures of Mr. Obama's entire economic approach. Again, the argument over whether government should spend more on social programs has already been settled by the laws of math. Mr. Obama has added more to the national debt than all presidents from George Washington through Ronald Reagan--combined. The Keynesian experiment has been a miserable failure. Math doesn't lie.
These seven facts mean that all presidential candidates must speak to a singular reality: America is a debtor nation. Indeed, America has $15 trillion less than the homeless man you see on the street. Put another way, that homeless man is $15 trillion richer than the United States of America. All the presidential candidates--including Mr. Obama--should stop and ponder that reality for a moment.
After all, it's a mathematical fact. Mind you, IMHO, there is no such thing as a "mathematical fact"
Nowadays American children learn that 1 + 1 = 2 and 2 x 2 = 4 are "math facts", as opposed to provable statements.
h/t Donald Sensing
It is customary at this time to act like two-faced Janus, looking back at the year that has passed while predicting what may happen in the one ahead. However, from what we have seen of the two great political fantasies of our age, it is now much easier to say what is likely not to happen. Each of these acts of make-believe has got so out of hand that a violent collision with reality is inevitable. But those who are in their grip are so locked in denial that it is only safe to predict that nothing will bring them back to earth until that nemesis intervenes.
A first prediction is that it is no longer conceivable that the sad little nonentities who preside over the affairs of the EU will be able to find any rational way out of the hole they have dug for themselves over the euro.
...We must not forget, however, that, when it comes to nations running up a debt out of control, our own Government is still having to borrow an additional £2.5 billion every week, just to fund its own overspending which, despite all talk of cuts, still races upwards. Any moment now, our own national debt will top the £1 trillion mark, having more than doubled in six years. However damaging a disintegration of the euro may be to our economy in 2012, we also face a crisis we have brought upon ourselves one for which our Government has no more of a real answer than do the impotent rulers of the eurozone.
...We are left in an equally insoluble mess by the ebbing away of what we can now see was the greatest and most damaging scare-story in history: the belief that the world was threatened with catastrophic warming by human emissions of carbon dioxide.
#1
The European leaders could save Europe, but they won't, as they are driven by a failing ideology that allows no compromise to the outcome they demand.
They crave an elite-run "United States of Europe", that is just as nationally controlled and seemingly powerful as the US. And in this attempted evolution, they refuse to pull back and change direction when they foul up.
And reinforcing defeat almost never works.
The first thing they must do is back off the drive for central control, because some of their members just do not have the discipline they need for balanced national order, and being integrated does not make them balanced, but instead makes Europe more imbalanced.
Putting technocrats in charge of their undisciplined political class is unlikely to make them more disciplined, either. While it may help in the short run, it will do so only in a superficial way.
Democratic politics in Iraq is not for the faint-hearted, even in the best of times. But Nouri al-Maliki's current moves are a qualitative departure from the past. He is not just seeking advantage over his political rivals, but to permanently discredit them and, in the process, threatens to disenfranchise a large part of Iraq's population. He risks unravelling Iraq's promising, if bumptious transition to genuine democracy, potentially plunging his country into renewed civil war in the bargain.
American observers are wringing their hands over these developments, bemoaning the US' sharply decreased leverage, while US leaders attempt to employ what diplomatic suasion they can to calm the situation. Meanwhile, President Obama's political detractors point to these startling reverses, along with a general upshot in violence, as yet more evidence of the American administration's incompetence in failing to negotiate an extended mandate for US military forces in Iraq.
All see the current risks to the US' painful investment in Iraq posed by the end of the US military presence, whether they publicly hail the US departure as a victory, as the administration does, or denounce it as a failure. Seemingly none, however, perceive the real opportunities posed by the US' new posture in Mesopotamia.
Debka sez:
League monitors fail in their mission to curb brutal regime violence in Syria and the ten-month popular defiance continues to rage, President Bashar Assad is digging in for a full-scale civil war.
A fortress is under construction for the Syrian ruler, family, his loyal generals and ruling elite in the northwestern Alawite (Al-Ansariyyah) Mountains -- should Damascus become too hot for them.
Ah, now I understand why Israel ordered those bunker-busters...
From there, the Assads will continue to fight for their survival.
These mountains have the only dense forests in the vicinity of Syria's Mediterranean coast. The Al-Ansariyyah range averages 32 kilometers (20 miles) in breadth and a peak elevation of just over 1,200 meters. The tallest mountain, Nabi Yunis east of Latakia, is 1,562 meters (5,125 feet) high. The range slopes down from its northern tip to an average altitude of 900 meters (3,000 feet) and 600 meters in the south.
Military and intelligence sources report Syrian engineering corps crews working at speed to build a fortified encampment, partly inside caves and tunnels, on the wooded slopes. Its perimeter is enclosed with anti-tank defenses armed with anti-air batteries.
When finished, the camp will be one of the most heavily fortified strongholds in the Middle East.
In support of the Syrian dictator, large groups of Alawite families began moving in the last week of November from the mixed towns of Latakia, Hama and Homs to new homes in the encampment - apparently on a signal from Assad's intelligence and security services.
Fortified facilities stocked with supplies are being provided for Alawite families unable to leave their towns and villages.
This mass relocation encompasses around a million Alawites, or a third of the 3.5 million members of this deviant offspring of this ruling Shiite Muslim faith, which numbers just over one-tenth of Syria's total population.
By reestablishing his headquarters in a mountain fortress, Bashar Assad hopes to achieve two goals:
To keep his Alawite following out of harm's way in a full-scale civil war. They face bitter Sunni revenge for the brutal persecution its adherents have suffered from Assad father and son for 37 years.
Clustering Alawite families in protected cantons will guarantee their loyalty to Bashar Assad and his clan.
Middle East sources report that not all Alawite clan leaders are willing to following the ruler into his mountain bastion. Some communities have gone over to the other side, for the first time in the ten-month popular uprising against his regime.
In the flashpoint Homs and Hama regions, a dozen Alawite village chiefs have struck deals with local rebel militia chiefs including the Free Syrian Army for guaranteed immunity from attack provided their sons refuse to join Assad's state-backed private paramilitary Shabiha.
The inability of Assad and his henchmen to prevent these desertions from his own clan betokens the president's declining authority beneath the bloody surface of the contest in the strife-torn country.
#4
Hey, his father's top strategist used to work for der Fuhrer. Same tactics...
Posted by: Water Modem ||
01/03/2012 6:27 Comments ||
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#5
Here was one Alois Brunner Alois Brunner (born 8 April 1912) is an Austrian Nazi war criminal. Brunner was Adolf Eichmann's assistant, and Eichmann referred to Brunner as his "best man."[1] As commander of the Drancy internment camp outside Paris from June 1943 to August 1944, Brunner is held responsible for sending some 140,000 European Jews to the gas chambers. Nearly 24,000 of them were deported from the Drancy camp. He was condemned to death in absentia in France in 1954 for crimes against humanity. In 1961 and in 1980, Brunner lost an eye and the fingers of his left hand, respectively, as a result of letter bombs sent to him by Mossad.
Posted by: Water Modem ||
01/03/2012 6:34 Comments ||
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#6
Oh Oh... the US subsumed Gen Gehlen's eastern europe and Russia spy org so this doesn't look good.
It has been alleged that Brunner found a working relationship after WWII with the Organisation Gehlen.
He then fled Germany only in 1954, on a fake Red Cross passport, first to Rome, then Egypt where he worked as a weapons dealer, and then to Syria, where he took the pseudonym of Dr. Georg Fischer. In Syria, he was allegedly hired as a "government advisor" with some suggesting he was advising the Syrian dictatorship on torture and repression techniques, some dating from his time as an SS torturer. He also allegedly trained Kurdish rebels to operate against Turkey, and shipped arms to Algerian rebels during their war of independence with France. Syria has constantly refused entry to French investigators as well as to Nazi hunter Serge Klarsfeld who spent nearly 15 years bringing the case to court in France. Simon Wiesenthal tried unsuccessfully to trace Brunner's whereabouts.[citation needed]
In his 1980s interview by the German magazine Bunte, Brunner declared that his sole regret was not having murdered more Jews. In a 1987 telephone interview to the Chicago Sun Times, he stated: "The Jews deserved to die. They were garbage, I have no regrets. If I had the chance I would do it again..."[13] He was reported to be living in Damascus under the alias of Dr. Georg Fischer.[1] Although there were unconfirmed reports that Brunner may have died in 1996, he was reportedly sighted in 2001.[citation needed]
In 2011, the German news magazine Der Spiegel reported that the German intelligence service BND had destroyed its file on Brunner in the 1990s, and that remarks in remaining files contain conflicting statements as to whether Brunner had worked for the BND at some point.[14]
Posted by: Water Modem ||
01/03/2012 6:38 Comments ||
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#7
At the end of World War II, thousands of Nazi war criminals found refuge in South America and in Arab countries, including Syria. Damascus welcomed Nazis partly out of ideological sympathy for the Hitler regime, and partly because the German fugitives were useful allies in Syria's war to prevent the creation of the State of Israel in 1948.
Israeli military intelligence reports during that first Arab-Israeli war were filled with references to the presence of Nazis, especially as commanding officers, among the Syrian forces attacking northern Israel. Indeed, there were so many Germans in the Syrian ranks that when the Haganah (the Labor Zionist militia that became the Israeli Army) defeated the Arab forces in Haifa in April 1948, its official terms for a truce included a provision that "European Nazis will be delivered to [the British] Military [authorities]."
During the 1950s and 1960s, the names of prominent Nazis living in Syria began to surface. One was SS Captain Theodor Dannecker, who had helped Adolf Eichmann implement Hitler's genocide policy in France, Bulgaria, and Hungary. When the legendary Israeli spy Eli Cohen took up residence in Damascus in 1962, his Syrian acquaintances introduced him to Karl Rademacher, a senior Eichmann aide who had been involved in the mass murder of Jews from Belgium, Holland, Croatia, and elsewhere. After the war, Radmacher had fled to Syria and became an official in the Syrian Secret Service.
The most notorious of the Nazis granted asylum in Syria was another top Eichmann aide, SS Lieutenant Alois Brunner. After being convicted in France in 1954 of responsibility for the murders of more than 100,000 Jews, Brunner disappeared. Two decades later, the famed French Nazi-hunters Serge and Beate Klarsfeld tracked down Brunner in Damascus, where he was making a comfortable living as an adviser to the Syrian intelligence services. LINK
Posted by: Water Modem ||
01/03/2012 6:47 Comments ||
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Posted by: Water Modem ||
01/03/2012 6:57 Comments ||
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#9
This is reminiscent of Citadelle Laferrière, the largest fortress in the Americas, built by Haitian leader Henri Cristophe.
The official purpose of the Citadelle was to protect his kingdom of North Haiti from French invasion, but for practical purposes it was against an invasion from South Haiti and to protect Cristophe from revolution in the North.
Oddly enough, North Haiti was fairly prosperous under Cristophe, because he kept many of the tyrannical French policies that had existed before, requiring hard labor from his subjects to support agriculture and business, as well as building and improving infrastructure. He even codified the law into 'Code Henry'.
But because South Haiti was more liberal, its people did not work and it was generally falling apart, and quite resentful of the prosperity of the North.
The North finally collapsed because Christophe had a stroke, which crippled him enough so that his people, sensing weakness, revolted. He then shot himself in the head with a silver bullet.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
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