Last week’s column ended with a promise:
“Next week we can discuss further issues, such as what course of action to take if an intruder is a dialer. You sure don’t want expensive calls made to porn sites off your computer.”
I’m going to break that promise.
In the last two weeks I’ve received fewer intruders attempting to invade my computer through my email.
China faces the biggest property default on record as credit curbs threaten to break the housing boom, leaving a string of "ghost towns" across the country.
The Chinese newspaper Economic Daily News said Xingrun Properties, in the coastal city of Ningbo, is on the brink of collapse with debts of $570m, mostly owed to banks. The local government has set up a working group to contain the crisis.
"As far as we know, this is the largest property developer in recent years at risk of bankruptcy," says Zhiwei Zhang, from Nomura Securities. "We believe that a sharp property market correction could lead to a systemic crisis in China, and is the biggest risk China faces in 2014. The risk is particularly high in third and fourth-tier cities, which accounted for 67% of housing under construction in 2013."
Yu Xuejun, the banking regulator for Jiangsu province, says developers are running out of cash. This risks undermining land sales needed to fund local government entities. "Credit defaults will definitely happen. It's just a matter of timing, scale and how big the impact is," he said. The charts below tell the story.
Might as well start with the belly-laugh of the week. Who is this?
It's the President of France, Francois Hollande. The pic was taken Tuesday (9/03) during his visit to a school in Denain, a city in northern France, and put online by AFP (Agence-France Presse, the government owned & operated news agency). It instantly went viral and has all France in hysterics.
AFP pulled it within hours, issuing a "mandatory kill" order to its outlets not to publish it, as it damaged the "dignity" of the president. Too late. President Imbécile is now Hollande's nickname for millions of Frenchfolk.
Don't you wish all of America could laugh at Zero that way? This week we may be on the verge of your wish being granted. And not just America, but most all of the entire world.
Measures that slow the economy block better solutions
Should Americans be spending more on public security, or less? After a week of two horrific events, the Boston Marathon attack and the Texas fertilizer-plant explosion, most would probably answer the above question by saying, “We’re not spending enough.” Such an emotional response is not surprising particularly after seeing the highly competent and courageous response of the police, firefighters and medical first responders.
On Friday, I received an email from a friend asking the question, “Did it make sense to close down half of Massachusetts for a day to capture one 19-year-old suspected terrorist? No, unless he was part of a bigger cell which was the unknown for the police. Did the huge redeployment of law enforcement resources for the week to catch the perpetrators result in more nonrelated terrorist murders or auto fatalities (or perhaps even fewer)?”
One occasionally hears the comment that “we should spend whatever is necessary” to stop terrorism. It sounds good, but on reflection, it makes no sense, and here's why...
After Mr. Obama delivered his second inaugural address week before last, it has been dawning on people that his political strategy is that of the Thunderdome in Mel Gibson's Mad Max 3 movie: "Two men enter, one man leaves." He is totally win/lose, the total antithesis of win/win.
From Mau-Mau tautology mixed with Marxist ideals inbred from his absent father and a mother enriched in the heresies of the deep left Communism of Frank Marshall Davis, this man has unfurled his true colors.
Unbridled by the need to appear moderate for his next campaign, "the One" has declared war on anything or anyone who would stand in the way of his Progressive radical agenda.
Yes, Saul Alinsky's hand can be seen everywhere along with Chicago thuggery, but there is much more.
Chuck Berry on American Bandstand, 1959:
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Take the lyrics to heart:
Oh well, oh well, I feel so good today,
We just touched ground on an international runway
Jet propelled back home, from overseas to the U. S. A.
New York, Los Angeles, oh, how I yearned for you
Detroit, Chicago, Chattanooga, Baton Rouge
Let alone just to be at my home back in ol' St. Lou.
Did I miss the skyscrapers, did I miss the long freeway?
From the coast of California to the shores of Delaware Bay
You can bet your life I did, till I got back to the U. S. A.
Looking hard for a drive-in, searching for a corner café
Where hamburgers sizzle on an open grill night and day
Yeah, and a juke-box jumping with records like in the U.S.A.
Well, I'm so glad I'm livin' in the U.S.A.
Yes. I'm so glad I'm livin' in the U.S.A.
Anything you want, we got right here in the U.S.A.
The Anti-American infestation in the White House is presently giving speeches and airing campaign ads threatening that his Republican opponent wants to "drag us back to the 1950s."
That's a threat? More like a promise. Yet again, Zero demonstrates his total cluelessness about America. Far, far more Americans are nostalgic over the 50s, rather than fearful. Chuck Berry's Back In The USA epitomizes why.
Have you ever wondered why Arab Palestinians think Jerusalem is so important to them? Why they say there will never be Arab-Israeli peace until they control it? They say it's because of the "sacredness" of the Al Aqsa Mosque.
So here's a thought experiment: What if it were discovered that Moses, of whom the Bible says, "no man knoweth of his grave site," was buried in Mecca?
What would be the response of the Islamic world if millions of Jews began claiming that Mecca was sacred to them now just as it is sacred to the Moslems, and demanded that they had the right to build a Dome of Moses next to the Kaaba as a pilgrimage shrine honoring the Founding Patriarch of the Jewish People?
Well, not quite yet, but soon. The funniest headline of the week was "South American Leaders Support Bolivia Gas Nationalization." Yesterday (5/4), at Puerto Iguazo, Argentina, Brazil President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva and Argentine President Nestor Kirchner met with Venezuela's Hugo Chavez and Bolivia's Evo Morales and promised to "respect" Morales' nationalization of Bolivia's natural gas.
Only folks who are interested in buying bridges in Brooklyn are going to believe that.
As we discussed over a year ago in Bye Bye Bolivia, Brazil gets 60% of its natural gas from Bolivia. Argentina gets 200,000 cubic yards of Bolivian gas a day. Lula and Kirchner are going to tolerate a threat to this from Morales-Chavez about as much as a capybara will let himself be swallowed by an anaconda.
Andrei Illarionov resigned just in time. As an admirer of the capitalist philosophy of Ayn Rand and the laissez faire economics of Ludwig Von Mises, his resignation this week as Vladimir Putin’s chief economic advisor is a disaster for Russia.
But his announcing that “Russia is no longer a democracy,” serves to keep intact the record of there never being a war between two democracies should war break out between Russia and Ukraine.
For the day of Illarionov’s resignation (Tuesday, December 27), the Russian Defense Minister threatened to invade Ukraine.
Shortly after Pearl Harbor, Winston Churchill came over and addressed Congress. He asked, rhetorically, "Who do they think we are?"
It was an important question, because we must understand what our enemies think about us. Churchill's implicit answer was, "They think we're suckers, and they think we won't be able to beat them."
The Fascists and Nazis believed that we had become soft and effeminate, that we were so hooked on materialism and self-indulgence that they, the representatives of a younger, more virile, and more spiritually robust races and nations would easily dominate us and impose their will on us.
The Terrorists have the same contemptuous vision of us. And if you look at the way they deal with our governments, you will see a mixture of contempt and bemusement, as they repeatedly get us to go for the same tricks and deceptions.
Last week’s column ended with methods to ignore low threat intruders, rather than delete them and risk damaging your computer. We learned how to ensure that Ad-watch opens each time we reboot so that the intruders will have a more difficult time invading our computers.
Still, we’re left with cookies that pop-up advertisements while we’re surfing, Windows registry entries that direct emails enticing us to click potentially dangerous attachments or web sites, and possibly more.
The accumulation of registry entries slows your computer. The registry becomes larger and fragmented.
I’ll introduce a few new tools to mitigate some of these irritants.
Russia risks a wave of capital flight and a shattering economic crisis as the West prepares a package of sanctions over the seizure of Crimea.
Chancellor Angela Merkel spelled out the danger for Russia in a speech to the German Parliament yesterday (3/13) that silenced pro-Kremlin voices in her own coalition and left no doubt that Europe is now fully behind the US on punitive measures.
"If Russia continues on its course of the past weeks, that will not only be a great catastrophe for Ukraine. It will cause massive damage to Russia, both economically and politically," she said. "None of us wants it to come to this, but we are determined to act. Let me be absolutely clear; the territorial integrity of Ukraine is not up for discussion."
The West has threatened visa bans and an asset freeze on individuals as early as next Monday (3/17) unless Russia steps back from the brink on the annexation of Crimea. And that is only the begining.
Russia has threatened to retaliate with "symmetrical sanctions" but Tim Ash, from Standard Bank, said it is a one-sided contest that Moscow cannot win. Here's why.
As we start Labor Day Weekend, we've had the weirdest week of a weird summer. What's good about it is that it is shining a klieg light on Zero's Anti-Midas Touch - that everything he touches turns to merde.
The trigger for this is Zero's playing Hamlet over Syria. There is a cacophony of voices on the Left and the Right screaming at him. Both ultra-leftie Dennis Kucinich and conservative fire-breather Ralph Peters are going apoplectic that he might attack. The New York Times is advising him, on the other hand, to "Bomb Syria, even if it is illegal."
The most thoughtful and balanced voice is Newsweek's Ken Pollack, who advises: Go Big or Stay Home. He dispassionately gives the case for, and for not, intervening. His conclusion is Napoleon's: "If you start to take Vienna, take Vienna" - but the odds are high that Zero will do something half-fast, an inconsequential purely face-saving attack that will make the entire situation worse than ever.
The Anti-Midas Touch in action.
My own view is that Assad and his brother Maher - who ordered the poison gas attack - should be specifically targeted by cruise missiles and killed. I agree with the Wall Street Journal's Bret Stephens that Zero should target the Assad brothers personally as he did Bin Laden.
Yet we can trust Zero not to do the right thing. The good news will be that whatever screw up he does, everyone will be mad at him for it.
The success of the Reagan-Thatcher era has been quickly erased
The great tragedy of our time is that so few know economic history; thus we have been doomed to repeat the mistakes of a generation ago, and millions suffer.
By the late 1970s, many viewed Britain and the United States as in terminal decline. The United Kingdom had been rotting for decades. The empire had been lost, and Britain began to look more and more like a Third World country as incomes stagnated and inflation soared.
Then, along came a remarkable lady, Margaret Thatcher, who said “no” to the status quo and through incredible toughness, ability and just plain smarts turned around Britain.
On this side of the Atlantic, the United States was also in despair. Real incomes had stagnated, inflation seemed to be out of control, and the establishment political class had little idea of what to do. President Carter referred to the country as being in a “malaise.” Out of the American West, a savior, Ronald Reagan, rode into Washington and turned around the nation.
In the wilds of Louisiana's St. James Parish, amid the alligators and sugar plantations, Lester Hart is building the $750 million steel plant of his dreams. Over the past decade, Hart has constructed plants for steel producer Nucor everywhere from Trinidad to North Carolina. Today, he says, Nucor sees its big opportunities here, along the banks of the Mississippi River, roughly an hour west of New Orleans by car.
"The political climate here is conducive to growth," Hart explains as he steers his truck up to the edge of a steep levee. "We are here because so much is going on in this state and this region. With the growth of the petrochemical and industrial sectors, this is the place to be."
Nucor isn't alone in coming to Louisiana, or to the vast, emerging region along the Gulf Coast. The American economy, long dominated by the East and West Coasts, is undergoing a dramatic geographic shift toward this area. The country's next great megacity, Houston, is here; so is a resurgent New Orleans, as well as other growing port cities that serve as gateways to Latin America and beyond.
While the other two coasts struggle with economic stagnation and dysfunctional politics, the Third Coast - the urbanized, broadly coastal region spanning the Gulf from Brownsville, Texas, to greater Tampa - is emerging as a center of industry, innovation, and economic growth.
