Oil below $34

WTI is now below $34/bbl!!
Enjoy while it lasts!!
Drive, fly... splash on your carbon footprint this Christmas!

Oil Derricks - Christmas

Barack Hussein Obama II

So after all the effort from Bush Jr, he is replaced by a middle eastern looking chap by the name of Hussein... almost forgot, Hussein II!

Somebody must be laughing out loud in his tomb!

President Hussein's father, a Kenyan chap with the same name, converted from Roman Catholicism to Islam and took the name Hussein.

His father also made all his wives convert to Islam!

Beware Michelle, you may soon have to shop for a Hijab!

Beware USA!

Beware Western Civilization!

The Obamas - veiled Michelle Obama
Islamic dress at a mosque in Jakarta

GOD - the evidence

Radical Islam: do we need any other proof that god does not exist?
(a few other forms of extreme religion will also qualify!)

No Allah sign

Long live the king of Bhutan!

Who cares that the US has its first mixed-race president ever...

Let's look instead to a tiny dot in the map of Asia.

Who we really want to salute is the sovereign of Buthan!

Long life to King Jigme Khesar Namgyel Wangchuck, who will rule over the only country where the guiding principle is Gross National Happiness!

King Jigme Khesar Namgyel Wangchuck of Bhutan

10 French soldiers killed in Afghanistan

EU flag with mourning black stripe

10 French soldiers were killed and 21 injured after Taliban guerrillas ambushed a patrol east of Kabul, in the Sarobi district.

This happened barely one day after president Sarkozy completed a tour of Afghanistan. Before this tragic events, opinion polls showed that less than 25% of the French supported France's role in the conflict, and yet even the French Communist Party favours the war!

Europe should be able to accept its casualties with pride, but for  its own wars and causes. Europe is accepting US orders in a war euohemistically called "Operation Enduring Freedom" that makes no sense and that is lost from the very first day!

Have politicians on both sides of the Atlantic forgoten the image of a castrated president Mohammad Najibullah hanging from a post in Kabu's Aryana Squarel? He was the Karzai of the Soviets...

Time is on the side of the Taliban, and even America's closest ally in the region, Pakistan, covertly supports them  through their Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI).

The west need to cut its losses and leave Afghanistan immediately. Negotiate with Mullah Omar. What is the difference if the Taliban control the country now or in 5 years?

Once the Taliban are in power they must be talked to and traded with, otherwise we create a new Iran or North Korea.

After all the terrorists that plant bombs in the West are usually Saudi or Pakistani, not Afghans. The predominant ethnic group in the country and in the Taliban are the Pashtun, a proud Indo-European people that mostly wants to be left alone. The world will be better off living with the Taliban than fighting them, after all they are a lot less radical than our Saudi "allies".

Kabul 1992: president Najibullah and his brother executed by the Taliban

Georgian games

The latest South-Ossetia crisis was initially presented as a David against Golias situation, with poor Georgia facing the "evil" Russian bear.

Politicians in the US and Western Europe (the latter with no excuse!) quickly accused Russia of a millions sins and of being the aggressor.

Time duly proved that the aggresion in fact came from Tblissi, probably looking for sympathy  from the West.

Nevertheless Europe needs to draw lessons from Mihail Sakashvili's games.

As the crisis started U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was in Tbilisi, pledging U.S. support for Georgia's bid to join NATO!

Imagine this had become a fact before the crisis: Georgia a member of NATO.*
Would we have been dragged to war with Russia for the madness of Sakashvili?
Any expansion of NATO needs to be subject to the closest scrutiny. There is no place for the countries in the Caucasus or the Ukraine. Even the expansion to the Baltics and Poland was an error, causing all kinds of problems between Europe and Russia, to the satisfaction of Washington DC.
In fact we must ask: what is in it for us, Western Europeans?
Liquidate NATO and we will be better off!!
(This irresponsible behaviour is a reminder of Kennedy's idiotic decision to place nuclear missiles in eastern Turkey, on the border with the USSR, that led to the so called Cuban missiles crisis and the world to near nuclear war.)

*Parallels must also be seen for Turkey's application for EU membership.

Condoleezza Rice and Mikhail Sakashvili in Tbilissi

South Ossetia war map - 2008

120th anniversary of the birth of Fernando Pessoa

our small homage with one of his poems:



  "Autopsychography"The poet is an inventor.
He invents so completely
That he succeeds in inventing
That the pain he really feels is pain.
And those who read what he writes
Really feel in the pain they have read,
Not the two which he felt,
But only the one they do not have.
And thus in the wheel ruts
There goes round and round, diverting Reason
That clockwork toy train
Which is called heart.

Translated by F.E.G. Quintanilha

More on Pessoa at MDaedalus.com

portrait of Fernando Pessoa by Almada Negreiros (Orpheu #2 on the desk)

Brazil: World's Third-Largest Oil Field

Petrobras, Brazil’s state-owned oil company, announced the discovery of the potential Carioca deepwater oil field, stating that it may hold 33 billion barrels of oil, making it the third-largest oil field ever discovered. Assuming Petrobras meant oil-in-place reserves, recoverable reserves should be about a third of this.


The Carioca area lies in the Atlantic, west of Tupi filed in the fertile Santos basin, off the coast of Sao Paulo state.


“It could be the world’s biggest discovery in the past 30 years, and the world’s third-biggest currently active field,” Haroldo Lima, head of the government’s oil and fuel market regulator, told reporters at an industry event in Rio de Janeiro.


Petrobras also has said previously it sees good prospects for major oil finds in the subsalt areas in the Campos and Espirito Santo basins north of Santos, but it is focusing mainly on Santos at the moment.

Gold reaches $1000 an ounce

gold ingots - Credit Suisse

Concerns about a possible US recession are seeing investors buy up refuge commodities such as gold as an alternative to equities or the greenback.

Since the January the value of gold has increased by 20%, following a rise of 32% last year.

This price behaviour cannot be explained by either scarcity or increased demand of gold as a metal, but only due to increase demand a means of storage of value. Gold is increasingly used as a hedge against global inflation and unreliable equities. Its trade grown immensely since the introduction of exchange traded funds (ETFs).

Is the increasing uncertainty about the economy in the US and in a number of European nations leading to a para-gold-standard age through the back door?

If the fears regarding these economies are not placated through good governance, then there is a lot more space for the price of the yellow metal to go up.

Oil at $100

Happy 2008!

Nice new year news: crude oil reaches $100.

Serves us well in the West for engaging in or supporting stupid wars, and moreover for leaving natural resources in the hands of greedy regimes in states that for the most part should never have become independent in the first place!

oil rig fireworks

Bravo Western world!