Poor Richard’s Almanak

Turkey’s Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has called for recognition of Hamas which won a landslide victory in Palestinian elections.

In an interview with The Washington Post published Saturday, Recep Tayyip Erdogan said isolating Hamas is the reason for the ongoing tensions in the region.

He criticized world leaders for failing to respect the political will of the Palestinian people who voted for the Palestinian resistance movement.

The talk is all of stimuli and other matters economic – how do we re-inflate the balloon of American prosperity? Reality has taken a hat-pin to it, and trillions have gone up in the smoke of foreclosed mortgages and credit-default swaps.

Panaceas are not lacking. Paul Krugman says it doesn’t matter what we spend our money on, as long as we throw it away rapidly and without forethought. I have no doubt that soon we’ll be hearing the ghost of Huey Long promising “Every man a king!” I fully expect the Townsend Plan to come back at some point, along, perhaps, with a revival of interest in pre-Leninist forms of Marxism.

THE possibility that, in an Obama administration, science will drive rational public policy provides an unprecedented opportunity to deal with a gnawing yet persistently neglected threat to the world: nuclear weapons.

No government is likely to declare how many strategic nuclear warheads it has, but the US and Russia are thought to possess at least 5000 apiece. The 2002 Strategic Offensive Reductions Treaty required each nation to have no more than 2200 “operationally deployed” strategic warheads by 2012, yet this represents no real progress towards disarmament, as the target number is essentially identical to that proposed at the 1997 summit on nuclear arms reduction between Bill Clinton and Boris Yeltsin in Helsinki, Finland.

California State Controller John Chiang announced on January 26 that California’s bills exceed its tax revenues and credit line and that the state is going to print its own money known as IOUs. The template is already designed.

Instead of receiving their state tax refunds in dollars, California residents will receive IOUs. Student aid and payments to disabled and needy will also come in the form of IOUs. California is negotiating with banks to get them to accept the IOUs as deposits.

California is often identified as the world’s eighth largest economy, and it is broke.

Prison buses are driving around empty in the Tucson area. Are Wackenhut and the DHS preparing for civil unrest?

Patrick J. Buchanan

“Where there is no solution, there is no problem,” geostrategist James Burnham once wryly observed.

Ex-Sen. George Mitchell, the latest U.S. negotiator to take up the Palestine portfolio, may discover what it was that Burnham meant.

For Israel’s three-week war on Gaza, where Palestinians died at a rate of 100 to one to Israelis, appears to have been, like Israel’s wars in Lebanon, another Pyrrhic victory for the Jewish state.

“The dreadful weapons are known as dense inert metal explosives (DIME), “an experimental kind of explosive” but only one of several new weapons that Israel has been using in Gaza, the world’s most densely populated regions.

Israel could not possibly have found a better place to experiment with DIME or the use of white phosphorus in civilian areas than Gaza.

The hapless inhabitants of the strip have been disowned. The power of the media, political coercion, intimidation and manipulation have demonized this imprisoned nation fighting for its life in the tiny spaces left of its land.”.. from the article.

Biblically Hell is supposedly down deep in the Earth. As the most unpleasant place in the universe, no one should desire to go there. A place reserved for the scum of the Earth, the unrepentant, the killers, the unforgiving and the evil. It’s a place of endless torment, torture and unimaginable suffering.

OF ALL the beautiful phrases in Barack Obama’s inauguration speech, these are the words that stuck in my mind: “You are on the wrong side of history.”

He was talking about the tyrannical regimes of the world. But we, too, should ponder these words.