Weekend Odds and Ends

My book review ended up being posted a day early so now since I had nothing planned for this Friday, I figured I'd throw up yet another round-up type column. These are some stories that were either sent to me by friends or something I saw that didn't warrant a full column per se but I wanted to comment on them anyway.

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The first article come from the desk of John Brodigan

AIRHEAD ADMITS THREAT

A dimwitted teen phoned in a terrifying bomb threat to LaGuardia Airport - forcing panicked passengers to evacuate a plane - so she could buy herself time to get on the flight to avoid an explosive love triangle.

Airheaded Anna Tarasov, 19, admitted to The Post yesterday that she came up with the scheme because the subway made her late for her impending flight from New York to Georgia to confront a jealous boyfriend.

"I remember thinking it wouldn't be such a big deal. It totally slipped my mind about the terrorists," the red-faced teen said...

In my program, the clients have to ascend four levels in order to successfully discharge from the program. If they don't earn their levels it's usually because myself or other clinical staff feel that they are not ready to move up. However, the client will frequently reframe it that we held said client back from getting, "their" level. In turn we on the clinical staff will say that it is only themselves that can hold them back from completing the program.

This is why I laughed at the notion that the "subway" made her miss her flight. Now I've been on the NYC subway many times and yes there are times when things happen and you get stuck, but in this case, I'm willing to give the benefit of the doubt to the MTA. In reality, she probably didn't leave on time and didn't account for subway time, thus making herself miss the plane.

This bit about calling in a bomb threat; that just shows how the average American child views the War on Terror. They don't. Unless you have a relative overseas, I think that most kids today haven't got a clue as to what's going on the world, and unfortunately, that person has an equal vote to mine. I hope this idiot just get probation.

Now onto more serious business:

Iran, Venezuela declare war on petrodollar

Iran and Venezuela have joined forces in an effort to undermine the U.S. dollar. In October 2005, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez announced that Venezuela was ready to move the country's foreign-exchange holdings out of the dollar and into the euro. He also called for the creation of a South American central bank designed to hold in euros all the foreign-exchange holdings of the participating countries.

Beginning in 2003, Iran began demanding oil payment in euros, not dollars, although the oil itself was still priced in dollars. Iran has announced the intention of opening an Iranian Oil Bourse in March to challenge NYMEX (the New York Mercantile Exchange) and IPE (London's International Petroleum Exchange).

Saddam Hussein may well have signed his death warrant in 2000 when he began the process of convincing the United Nations that Iraq could sell Iraqi oil for euros, not dollars. Saddam ultimately received U.N. permission to convert Iraq's $10 billion oil-for-food foreign reserves from dollars to euros.

The risk to the United States does not involve how oil is priced – oil could conceivably be priced in any liquid currency, since pricing is a largely technical issue needed to establish transaction values. The real issue is foreign-currency reserves.

The United States relies on approximately 70 percent of all foreign-exchange currency to be held in dollars because we sell Treasury debt into that foreign-exchange market. Should Venezuela and Iran succeed in creating a worldwide flight of foreign-exchange reserves away from the dollar and into the euro, the move could depress the value of the dollar.

Dwindling foreign exchange dollar holdings could end up pushing the Treasury to sell debt into a smaller international supply of dollars, with the dollar not being as strong as it is today. Increasing the cost of our "twin deficits" – the budget deficit and the trade deficit – would have detrimental effects on the U.S. economy and on a Bush administration which seems to have lost traditional Republican budgetary discipline. Continued

In my commentary titled "War is Money" I talked about the Iranian oil bourse and what it means to the possibility of war against Iran. I've said it before and I'll say it again, there will be war before this administration allows Iran to cause our economy to go straight down the tubes. You can bet that if the Iranians decide to take the Russian, that is the deal in which uranium enrichment will be done in Russia rather than in Iran, somehow the US will find a way to undermine the deal, thus setting Tehran up for the kill.

On a personal note, I did spend nearly all of last year saying that something like this was going to happen. Where's my TV and/or radio deal Mr. Murdoch?