i pick the ending

I have not been posting so much for a number of reasons. l'il solipsist is the biggest one, but I have been engrossed in other areas of study besides. I wrote a post over two days (many, many interruptions), and was just finishing, when blogger crashed it, and it was gone. I will try to reproduce it...

Politics are very interesting these days. I don't fixate on US candidate nomination races - that is all part of the "look at the pretty bauble", or the "lay back and think of England" type of distractions. Canada is a rudder-less ship over-taken by pirates who drink from lead tankards (it is the Canadian politics that have my attention lately).

I picked up a little snippet of curious information; the various churches, of various denominations, own 7-8% of all inhabitable land on Earth. That is a lot of land, and you can bet that those holdings are not mortgaged. Talk about cornering the market...

Driven to distraction by gas/energy prices? (pun intended) Do you think that it is "Peak Oil"? Hurricane Katrina? All those emerging economies like China and India? Horseship! This article on the Oil Pimps might have you revisiting those ideas. And you thought that price manipulation on a vast scale was unlikely...

This article entitled 20 reasons new megabubble pops in 2011 might have you thinking that all we "bears" who refused to buy over-priced Real Estate are actually pretty prescient, if not down-right genii. Those who bought in the last few years will be under water for a very long time, and may never recover their "investment". I smell a lot of foreclosures and bankruptcies in the pipe. I'm glad that I have respectable savings while the rest of the hemisphere has negative savings.

Still excited about the Olympics? An article over at The Republic has a few things to say about that. A couple of excerpts; (emboldening mine)

...the Olympics is not just the two-week show that happens on television in February 2010. It is a decade-long preparation process that includes real estate deals at a ferocious pace, road and rail and venue construction through zones that would never be allowed under normal, calmly-considered circumstances, and of course there is the ubiquitous security preparations comprising the biggest single expense item in the whole expensive affair.

...the IOC’s rules that insisted that publicly-released cost estimates for games preparations borne by the citizens of host cities cannot include allowance for inflation during future years of construction, even though all normal and routine budget plans for all projects public and private include calculations of the future value of today’s dollars over the course of multiyear construction projects. The purpose of this rule can only be to obscure the true costs for cities thinking about making bids to host future Olympic games.

Kevin Potvin goes on to explain that the only Olympic experience that Vancouverites will have is through television, and a city carved up by security perimeters (he neglects to mention the property tax increases and the years of living in a city under construction - with the concomitant traffic snarls, noise, dust, etc.)

My wife and I, and li'l solipsist are planning on being in Mexico for that time in 2010. We can't really afford it, but I won't be able to take running into military road blocks, etc. - especially as we can expect to see an American military presence here (thanks to Harper/Bush deal on that). I am likely to be shot, or at the very least arrested, in such a scenario.

This is all a bit of a pessimistic rant, but there is a bright spot; the neighbour who is flipping their house after 9 months are having an Open House today, and it is very quiet. Just a few tire-kickers, from what I can tell.