Jeremy Grantham: All the World's a Bubble

How high will the Dow go? 15,000? 20,000?

How about 36,000?

While euphoria sweeps stock markets here and worldwide, there are at least a few voices of dissent.

One, unsurprisingly, is legendary value investor Jeremy Grantham -- the man Dick Cheney, plus a lot of other rich people, trusts with his money. Grantham, chairman of Boston firm Grantham Mayo Van Otterloo, has been a voice of caution for years. But he has upped his concerns in his latest letter to shareholders. Grantham says we are now seeing the first worldwide bubble in history covering all asset classes.

Everything is in bubble territory, he says.

Everything.

Doc Freeze has a new blog!

Check out Doc Freeze's new blog described as a blog about Politics, Poker and other Passions.

I am sure it will be quite entertaining!

World rallies for Darfur action

Protests have taken place around the world to demand intervention to end the fighting in Sudan's Darfur region.

For our part today, my two sons and I met Hilary Clinton who was visiting Reno as representatives of the nonpartisan organization, one.org . She mentioned that "Bono" (of U2) is a great friend...as Bush and Tony Blair have also claimed in the past. It must be great when world leaders are proud of the fact that they are your friend!

A Saudi Prince Tied to Bush Is Sounding Off-Key

WASHINGTON, April 28 — No foreign diplomat has been closer or had more access to President Bush, his family and his administration than the magnetic and fabulously wealthy Prince Bandar bin Sultan of Saudi Arabia.

Prince Bandar has mentored Mr. Bush and his father through three wars and the broader campaign against terrorism, reliably delivering — sometimes in the Oval Office — his nation’s support for crucial Middle East initiatives dependent on the regional legitimacy the Saudis could bring, as well as timely warnings of Saudi regional priorities that might put it into apparent conflict with the United States.
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Most bitingly, during a speech before Arab heads of state in Riyadh three weeks ago, the king condemned the American invasion of Iraq as “an illegal foreign occupation.” The Bush administration, caught off guard, was infuriated, and administration officials have found Prince Bandar hard to reach since.

China Needs an Einstein. So Do We.

If you look at Einstein’s major theories — special relativity, general relativity and the quantum theory of light — “all three come from taking rebellious imaginative leaps that throw out old conventional wisdom,” Mr. Isaacson said. “Einstein thought that the freest society with the most rebellious thinking would be the most creative. If we are going to have any advantage over China, it is because we nurture rebellious, imaginative free thinkers, rather than try to control expression.”
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“By being able to visualize and think imaginatively about science, he was able to see what more academic scientists failed to see, which is that as you try to catch up with a light beam, the waves travel just as fast, but time slows down for you. It was a leap that better-trained scientists could not make because they did not have the visual imagination.”
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If we want our kids to learn science, we can’t treat science as this boring or intimidating thing. “We have to remind our kids ... that a math equation or a scientific formula is just a brush stroke the good Lord uses to paint one of the wonders of nature,” Mr. Isaacson said, “and we should look at it as being as beautiful as art or literature or music.”
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My favorite Einstein quotation is that “imagination is more important than knowledge.” A society that restricts imagination is unlikely to produce many Einsteins — no matter how many educated people it has. But a society that does not stimulate imagination when it comes to science and math won’t either — no matter how much freedom it has.

Saudis Arrest 172 Militants, Seize Arms

CAIRO, Egypt (AP) -- Police have arrested 172 militants who were plotting to attack Saudi Arabia's oil fields, Saudi state television reported Friday, showing video of explosives, ammunition and firearms found buried in the desert.

U.N. Aid Chief Tours Darfur's Refugee Camps

Attacks on relief workers in Darfur have increased, with 12 aid workers killed last year. Melissa Block talks with NPR's Gwen Thompkins, who visited the Darfur camps for the displaced and health clinics along with U.N. World Food Program Executive Director Josette Sheeran.

Benefit Rummage Sale in Reno

Recently, Leanna Zamora, a registered nurse at Saint Mary's has been diagnosed with a cancerous tumor at a young age of 39 years. She is a single mother of three children ( 11 years old, 5 years old, and 22 months) and has been given less than 2 years to live.

So how can you help?
Collect all the things that have been building up in your garage or closet. Anything that can be sold, clothes, furniture, dishes, etc.

Where do you bring them?
L'uva Bella Wine Gallery will be a drop site or
this address below:
30 Deer Valley Ct.
(Galena Country Estates)
Take Mt. Rose Hwy
Right on Telluride
Left on Solitude
Left on Deer Valley Ct.

Donations will be accepted until May 4th!!!
May 5th is the day of the Rummage Sale at the above address.

All money raisef from the Rummage Sale will go to Leanna Zamora's children.
Please help us help this young mother secure her children's future.
Thank you for your kindness.

If you have any troubles bringing your donations to these 2 locations please call 775-772-9311 and make arrangments to have them picked up for you.

I Have a Persisting Daydream

From Saudi Eve...



I have a persisting daydream

I walk a Saudi street.. I'm wearing a abaya.. every type of harassment I've ever been subjugated to on a Saudi street (staring, terrifying religious advice, explicit sexual advances..etc.) are instead represented by one action: people pulling on my abaya, one after the other, force depends on how severe the harassment is..

I carry this futuristic beam weapon, I shoot them, they evaporize.
I become larger with each hit I make.. and the abaya gets torn a bit each time.. after a couple of hits, I'm very large (tall as a two story house) and almost naked, I'm left with a two piece ensemble that looks like a belly dancers' costume but black.. yet no one comes near me now.. they are afraid..


after that, I just walk the streets of Saudi.. feminine, and undisturbed.

A Good Provider Is One Who Leaves

I have highlighted the stats but read the article to get a personalized understanding of what these migrants lives. When I was in Saudi Arabia, we had many Filipino, Bangladeshi, Sri Lankan, Jordanian etc..."guest workers." Nearly everyone of these I met was incredibly kind and unselfish, toiling away to send money back home to help their family. In many cases the grandparents raised their grandchildren as the parents were working overseas.
The Filipinos highlighted in this article stood out in their kindness, work ethic, and caring. One of the highlights of my 8 years in Saudi Arabia was developing a deep understanding of the wonderful qualities of the Filipino culture through my many friendships with the nurses st the King Khaled Eye Specialist Hospital.

About 200 million migrants from different countries are scattered across the globe, supporting a population back home that is as big if not bigger. Were these half-billion or so people to constitute a state — migration nation — it would rank as the world’s third-largest.
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Migrants worldwide sent home an estimated $300 billion last year — nearly three times the world’s foreign-aid budgets combined. These sums — “remittances” — bring Morocco more money than tourism does. They bring Sri Lanka more money than tea does.
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Yet competing with the literature of gain is a parallel literature of loss. About half the world’s migrants are women, many of whom care for children abroad while leaving their own children home.
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With about one Filipino worker in seven abroad at any given time, migration is to the Philippines what cars once were to Detroit: its civil religion.
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Nearly 10 percent of the country’s 89 million people live abroad.
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There are a million O.F.W.’s in Saudi Arabia alone, followed by Japan, Hong Kong, the United Arab Emirates and Taiwan. Yet with workers in at least 170 countries, the O.F.W.’s are literally everywhere, including the high seas. About a quarter of the world’s seafarers come from the Philippines. The Greek word for maid is Filipineza.
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‘Patient’ Capital for an Africa That Can’t Wait

Amen, Mr. Friedman!

Scenes like this remind you that Africa is neither all tragedy nor all renaissance. It is a diverse continent that’s struggling to find its way in the global economy and has both of these extremes, but is much more in a middle place that looks like that field in Karatu: a wild, unregulated, informal, individual brand of capitalism, which we need to channel into formal companies that can grow and scale up, even with corrupt governance.

Africa needs many things, but most of all it needs capitalists who can start and run legal companies. More Bill Gateses, fewer foundations. People grow out of poverty when they create small businesses that employ their neighbors. Nothing else lasts.
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A good example of what happens when you combine patient capital, talent and innovation in Africa is the Kenyan company Advanced Bio-Extracts (ABE), headed by Patrick Henfrey. He and his partners put together a fascinating group of both white and black African farmers and scientists to build the first company in Africa to cultivate the green leafy plant artemisia, often called sweet wormwood, and transform it into pharmaceutical grade artemisinin — a botanical extract that is the key ingredient in a new generation of low-cost, effective malaria treatments commonly known as artemisinin-based combination therapies (ACTs). Malaria still kills nearly one million people in Africa every year.

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Nthenya Mule, Acumen’s Kenya country director, commented to me that the stereotype of Africa is that it is hopeless and just waiting around for the West to come to its rescue. In reality, she added, “there are positive things happening in Africa, but they are not happening overnight, and some are happening quietly. ABE is exemplary. You will not see it as front-page news, but in 18 months they set up a factory with 160 people interfacing with 7,000 farmers and supplying one of the major pharma companies in the world.

CALL IN DAY: Support Targeted Sudan Divestment Legislation for Nevada!

Dear Nevada anti-genocide activists,

Help Nevada lead the charge; over fifteen other states are considering targeted Sudan divestment legislation!

Call in Day on Monday, April 23 2007 from 1- 3pm.

If you are unable to call during the designated time please do so at your earliest convenience.

IT IS TIME TO:
Take back Nevada's dollars from companies that fund the genocide in Darfur.

* Targeted Sudan divestment legislation already has the support of Nevada Congressman Jon Porter and Senator Harry Reid.
* Ask House Speaker Barbara Buckley to support targeted Sudan divestment legislation. Her support is crucial to passing legislation in the state.
* Ask Senators Randolph Townsend and Steven Horsford to support targeted Sudan divestment legislation. Their support is crucial to passing legislation in the Senate.

Nevada Should Not be Complicit in Genocide
---------------------------------------------

Who To Call

Call Nevada House Speaker Barbara Buckley at 775-684-8537.

You can also e-mail Speaker Buckley:
bbuckley@a sm.state.nv.us

Call Nevada State Senator Randolph Townsend at 775-684-1450.

You can also e-mail Senator Townsend:
rtownsend @sen.state.nv.us

Call Nevada State Senator Steven Horsford at 775-684-1429.

You can also e-mail Senator Horsford:
shorsford@ sen.state.nv.us
What to Say: Talking Points

You are a resident of Nevada who cares about ending the genocide in Sudan. Respectfully ask the Nevada legislators to support targeted Sudan divestment legislation. It is important that Nevada divest from foreign companies that contribute to the genocide in Darfur where over 400,000 have died and 2.5 million have been displaced since 2003.

Please contact us at divestment@genocideintervention.net if you have any questions.
Join the Campaign

Join the Nevada targeted Sudan divestment campaign as we continue to fight for targeted divestment legislation. Email us at divestment@genocideintervention.net if you would like to be part of this campaign.

Money-driven Medicine

Interesting post from the metacool blog..

I was impressed by this book by Maggie Mahar; the subtitle is The Real Reason Health Care Costs So Much. The book has the most coherent, supportable, and fleshed out anti-market story I've seen. It both tries to explain why the current system works as it does, and historically how it evolved from more modest and less expensive ways of doing business. It's not just a rehash of the usual stories about the VA system or France. The discussions of the growth of for-profit hospitals, the increasing specialization of medicine, the problems with pay for performance, and markets for medical devices are all full of interesting tales.

I interpret the basic story as this: the American health care cost spiral comes from suppliers and their entrepreneurial abilities to market expensive and highly specialized services of dubious medical efficacy. Medical care starts off as ambiguous in value and hard to measure in quality. Customers are cowed by doctors and other family members into accepting or even demanding what is offered to them. Third-party payments make the problem worse, and government intervention has stoked rather than checked the basic dynamic. You end up with massive expenses, lots of stupidity, and - because of its expense -- radically incomplete coverage. Every now and then the extra services do pay off, but not frequently enough to boost American stats on health care quality.

Medical suppliers, and not insurance company overhead costs, are the main villain of the piece. The author wishes to put doctors back in charge and liberate them from the need to satisfy patients as customers.

Joshua Bell: Hailed by peers, ignored on street

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Joshua Bell is one of the classical music world's iconic figures, but fame didn't stop the Grammy-Award winning violinist's music from falling on deaf ears at a subway stop in Washington.

Bell, 39, received the most coveted prize in classical music -- the Avery Fisher prize -- on Tuesday, two days after The Washington Post revealed that he had failed to draw even a tiny crowd while performing in an anonymous setting.

The boyish-looking Bell swapped his formal concert garb for jeans, a T-shirt and a baseball cap to play six classical pieces outside a Metro station in a test of perception and public taste conducted by the Post.

Bell says the results after 43 minutes during morning rush hour -- $32.17 and only one of 1,097 people who passed by recognizing him -- were more surprising than being asked to do the stunt in the first place.

"I was quite nervous and it was a strange experience being ignored," Bell, a former child prodigy who attracts a young following and commands ticket prices of $100 or more at his concerts, told Reuters on Wednesday.

Playing a violin handcrafted in 1713 by Antonio Stradivari and reported to cost around $3.5 million, Bell said he expected that rush-hour commuters might not be open to listening to music "or experiencing art."

"I expected that, but it was still almost hurtful sometimes when somebody just walked by when I really did try to play my best," he said. "It was difficult to see."

Here's more about the experiment:

Nothing. Or very little -- $32 in exchange for 43 minutes of music, which is only bad if you're Joshua Bell. And aside from the lack of monetary compensation, very little attention from adults (click thru here for a few must-see videos of Bell playing in context). Who listened? According to the article, only the children, with a few exceptions:

There was no ethnic or demographic pattern to distinguish the people who stayed to watch Bell, or the ones who gave money, from that vast majority who hurried on past, unheeding. Whites, blacks and Asians, young and old, men and women, were represented in all three groups. But the behavior of one demographic remained absolutely consistent. Every single time a child walked past, he or she tried to stop and watch. And every single time, a parent scooted the kid away.

Why the kids? Partly because they know beauty in their hearts and not in their analytic brains. Partly because they're not rushing somewhere like all the adults (even if they're in tow -- young children don't rush anywhere they don't want to go). The kids were listening because that's what kids do. They listen and observe with an intensity that only the most talented and highly-trained professional ethnographers can muster. In the face of such beauty and mastery, how could they not spend these precious moments of life soaking in the music?

After Cancer, A New World View

“I look at the news differently these days -- not as stories I'll need to cover; I'm more removed now. I look at what's happening as just another person who lives on this planet. And it's clear the world has gone mad. ”

Conan O' Brien Commencement Speech to the Havard Class of 2000

I'd like to thank the Class Marshals for inviting me here today. The last time I was invited to Harvard it cost me $110,000, so you'll forgive me if I'm a bit suspicious. I'd like to announce up front that I have one goal this afternoon: to be half as funny as tomorrow's Commencement Speaker, Moral Philosopher and Economist, Amartya Sen. Must get more laughs than seminal wage/price theoretician.
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I've dwelled on my failures today because, as graduates of Harvard, your biggest liability is your need to succeed. Your need to always find yourself on the sweet side of the bell curve. Because success is a lot like a bright, white tuxedo. You feel terrific when you get it, but then you're desperately afraid of getting it dirty, of spoiling it in any way.

I left the cocoon of Harvard, I left the cocoon of Saturday Night Live, I left the cocoon of The Simpsons. And each time it was bruising and tumultuous. And yet, every failure was freeing, and today I'm as nostalgic for the bad as I am for the good.
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I'll go now, to make bigger mistakes and to embarrass this fine institution even more. But let me leave you with one last thought: If you can laugh at yourself loud and hard every time you fall, people will think you're drunk.

Sullivan Voters Know a Star When They See One

Jackie Joyner-Kersee. Eric Heiden. Mark Spitz. Sarah Hughes. Bonnie Blair.

These are some of the names on the Sullivan Award, given for the past 76 years to the best American athlete in the traditionally amateur sports.

A new name is now going on that trophy, that of a young woman born in Russia, without bones in her lower legs, a double amputee at 18 months.

Jessica Long of Dundalk, Md., is the first Paralympic athlete to win the Sullivan Award, given by the Amateur Athletic Union rather quietly last Wednesday night in New York.

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Long won three gold medals at the Paralympics in Athens in 2004, at age 12, and trains against able-bodied swimmers at home, beating most of them. Last year she won nine gold medals in world competition in South Africa. She also swam in a one-mile race across Chesapeake Bay. And for recreation, she climbs rocks.

“She’s basically fearless,” said Julie O’Neill, the manager of the Paralympic swim team, based in Colorado Springs.

Making Them Talk

More on torture and "24"--video from the New Yorker (no subscription required)...

In her article “Whatever It Takes,” Jane Mayer writes about the use of torture in the televison show “24,” and the politics of the show’s executive producer, Joel Surnow. Here Mayer talks about torture and television, with clips from “24.”

Torture

Last night I heard a most powerful account of a torture victim, Dianna Ortiz, a nun who suffered unspeakable cruelty in Guatemala. She was a young convent graduate who went to Guatemala to teach Mayan children to read and write and to "be proud of their culture."She was abducted in 1989 after numerous death threats and tortured by Guatemalan police, apparently in collusion with American military personnel. Political considerations aside, her individual account of her degradation was incredibly sad.

As she stated, "I wish each of you could have one minute to look into my soul." During several times in her presentation, she backed away from the podium and sat in a nearby chair weeping for minutes on end. She seemed to be crying from a place deep in her soul that we could not see. She seemed to be crying not only for herself, but for torture victims everywhere, for the "woman who is being raped by a coke bottle being thrust in her vagina, for the man who is being 'waterboarded' in a pool filled with human waste, for the mother who is watching the fingernails and toenails being pulled out of her two and a half-year old baby in front of her."

Her promise to herself while in solitary confinement was that she would tell the world the story of her those who tortured her, and not shutter them away in the inner confines of her mind. She also made the point that 98% of the torture victims she has met have confessed to things they did not do in order to avoid further psychological and physical pain--that the hit show "24" and other Hollywood productions misrepresent the validity of torture in obtaining reliable information. She has started an organization "Torture Abolition and Survivors Support Coalition International." The website is tassc.org. I would encourage you to to there and check it out and even contribute...

I will see if she will give me permission to put up the audio of her show on a website. If so I will link to it.
She also has published an account of her torture:Blindfold's Eyes: My Journey From Torture To Truth (Paperback). I will have a review up of this book when I am done reading it. Here is a link to a review from salon.com (subscription may be required): "The Blindfold's Eyes" by Dianna Ortiz

Darfur Collides With Olympics, and China Yields

WASHINGTON, April 12 — For the past two years, China has protected the Sudanese government as the United States and Britain have pushed for United Nations Security Council sanctions against Sudan for the violence in Darfur.

But in the past week, strange things have happened. A senior Chinese official, Zhai Jun, traveled to Sudan to push the Sudanese government to accept a United Nations peacekeeping force. Mr. Zhai even went all the way to Darfur and toured three refugee camps, a rare event for a high-ranking official from China, which has extensive business and oil ties to Sudan and generally avoids telling other countries how to conduct their internal affairs.

So what gives? Credit goes to Hollywood — Mia Farrow and Steven Spielberg in particular. Just when it seemed safe to buy a plane ticket to Beijing for the 2008 Olympic Games, nongovernmental organizations and other groups appear to have scored a surprising success in an effort to link the Olympics, which the Chinese government holds very dear, to the killings in Darfur, which, until recently, Beijing had not seemed too concerned about.