Celebrity Apprentice -- Annie Duke / Melissa & Joan Rivers/ Clint Black / Donald Trump

Wow -- great episode. Having just watched a full season of the amazing UK Apprentice with Alan Sugar, I was pleasantly surprised to have enjoyed this particular episode. Overall, even when compared to the original Apprentice with non-celebrity candidates, the UK's version direction and cinematography is perfect. I think both Trump and Sugar make great decisions. Perhaps I prefer Sugar's less showy style a bit more, but America prefers more ostentatious showmanship.

In any case, back to this (9th) episode of the Celebrity Apprentice. After the end of this show I'm sure of one thing: Annie Duke is the smartest woman I've ever seen. Now let's assume that she lived in Europe a few centuries ago and was the wife of a king, i.e., the queen. It wouldn't be a surprise if she got to that position without special hereditary privileges. Either way, if she was the queen, let's further assume, as was the case the vast majority of times, that the queen and women in general didn't have any outright power in the legal sense. The king did. However, as the queen, she would have had the opportunity to be a very powerful adviser. Now let's say that Clint Black was the king. He would have been very autocratic, yet open to advise (albeit grudgingly) from his wife and a couple other people.

In this scenario, Annie Duke would have been the ruler of the country. Everything she said, Clint would have done. Why? Because she is the smartest woman I've ever met :-). She is absolutely brilliant at manipulating people to get what she wants. It is simply amazing.

Now, if she were allowed to be the queen and legal ruler, she would have been a brilliant ruler, better of course than Clint Black. She probably would have been better than Elizabeth I. Perhaps she was in another lifetime!

As for Melissa, yeah, you were the odd one out like in a high school clique, but you didn't have as much to contribute! And Joan, you're the funniest woman I've ever met, but you're no angel yourself. The only sweet one in this group was the golf pro Natalie Gulbis.

Great episode!

P.S. I agree with Trump that people don't really change. The way they come out is who they are. Environmental factors slightly swing a skyscraper one way or the other, but the structure itself is extremely rigid. I think that's why it's so amazing all the different traits that people have, especially stuff that they're good at. Some people are great at music, or engineering, or design, or teaching, or nurturing, or comforting, or socializing with people, or manipulating people, or writing, or running, or stealing, or fighting, etc., etc. In one way or another, whatever each one of us has, that's the dice that was rolled by natural selection.

America's Next Top Model Cycle 12

I watch this show with my girlfriend. Awesome show. At the start of the last season, Cycle 11, I noticed that there were a disproportionate number of black girls which made me wonder if there was some form of affirmative action going on. There might have been, and the atmosphere was very ghetto at the beginning of the show, but as usual, the judging was very objective throughout that season, as in any other.

This season is not quite the same, there is less of the ghetto factor. BTW, I did feel sorry for the black girl from Buffalo getting kicked out--it looks like she's had a very tough life for such a young person.

In general I don't like affirmative action because in the long term it hurts the people it's supposed to help, but it's Tyra's show, and the judging is always on the spot. Having said that, you do have to feel sorry for people who've had no choice with the way they were brought up, and perhaps that should be taken into account. In any case, if you do have a ghetto background, learn how to speak properly if you want to succeed because you'll have to speak on camera for commercials. That goes for the white ghetto-wanna-be girls too.

Peace out.

Jim Rogers - The Fed is the Problem

Great commentary from a very smart man:

Ron Paul Video Compilation / Peter Schiff Video Compilation

I've been following Ron Paul ever since he announced his candidacy for the President. He's the only one that made sense to me: get our troops out of unnecessary wars (which is bankrupting this country), balance the budget by cutting government spending, get rid of the IRS and the Federal Reserve, cut taxes, and leave the government out of most decision making.

I recently came across a financier who has very similar economic views: Peter Schiff, president of Euro Pacific Capital, a broker/dealer outfit. What makes Mr. Schiff special is that he predicted the collapse of the housing and financial bubbles. As you will see in some of the videos I've compiled, he never backed down in his beliefs while other so called "experts" were laughing at him (unsurprisingly some of these fools are still making the rounds of business-related talk shows).

Like Ron Paul and Peter Schiff, I believe that America is headed for an eventual economic collapse unless the government does things differently--mainly stay out of the way of the free market. Unfortunately right now, the opposite is happening.

Here's a compilation of recent videos of both men that pertain to the financial bubble, the government bailouts, and the future of America.


Ron Paul Video Compilation

Ron Paul Explains How The Financial Bubble Was Created
Sample quote: "When a federal reserve system, a central bank creates easy money, easy credit and has interest rates lower than they should be, business people do the wrong things, they make mistakes--it's called mal-investment, and we've been doing it for a long time, it causes financial bubbles and they have to be corrected. Actually recession is therapy for all the mistakes..."

Ron Paul talks about how to balance the budget and takes a snipe at economist Paul Krugman and other Keynesians
Sample quote: "If they're still winning the Nobel Prize we're in serious trouble"; "The culprit really, is the Federal Reserve, the monetary system, and this spendthrift Congress that we have and government."

Ron Paul discusses the financial bubble at a Congressional Financial Services Hearing
Sample quote: "If we got here by spending too much money, borrowing too much money, inflating too much money, the Federal Reserve too involved in central economic planning through manipulation of interest rates, and the Congress passing too many regulations--as long as we think that's benign, has nothing to do with it, then I guess it seems very logical that we come up by spending more money, borrowing more money, printing more money, and writing more regulations and think we're gonna get different results."

Ron Paul schools Bernanke on the bailout plan and the Great Depression
Sample quote: "In the depression we tried to fix prices, which is exactly what we're doing now... The Austrian school of economics... their key point is, don't mess around with prices because if you do you become socialistic... Here we are in price fixing again. You say that part of your mandate is price stability. I hardly think that price stability comes by price fixing... The Federal Reserve is not smart enough, Treasury is not smart enough, Congress is not smart enough to know what prices are. So I think that is the greatest danger what we're doing here is we're price fixing and that is what I'm convinced prolonged the [Great] Depression in the 1930s..."

Ron Paul on the Auto Bailout
Sample quote: "We are on the road to nationalization!!!"

Peter Schiff Video Compilation

Peter Schiff predicting the financial bubble in 2006-2007!

Peter Schiff: U.S. Banks are worthless!
Sample quote: "They might as well flush their money down the toilet!"

Peter Schiff on the Auto Bailout
Sample quote: "Government money isn't going to fix the problem, it's simply going to perpetuate the problem. First of all two wrongs don't make a right. Just because the government illegally and improperly bailout Wall Street doesn't mean they have to make the same mistake with Detroit."

Peter Schiff predicts doomed economy under Obama
Sample quote: "It can get very bad. I've talked about the prospects of hyperinflation in the United States and that's something that we're actually dealing with. The government is really trading inflation for depression right now. They think they can inflate their way out of this problem, but they can't, and the underlying problem is once the rest of the world really senses the direction our currency is going in and once the creditor nations who have been funding our consumption and buying our bonds, once they stop doing that and they will, then the demand for dollars is going to collapse."

Peter Schiff makes 2009 predictions Part 1 / Part 2
Sample quote: "What is happening is Americans are broke. We've borrowed all this money to spend and now we can't borrow any more mainly because the creditors have reached their limit, they don't want to lend any more, so the government is borrowing for us, but they're forcing us into debt by taking on additional liabilities, but we need to start paying off our debts, we need to start savings again so that we can have money to lend out to entrepreneurs to start businesses, to make capital investments so we can go back to work producing goods instead of consuming them. But the government is simply pouring gasoline on a fire that it set, and it's gonna do a lot of damage with all these stimulus' and bailouts."

Why are there so many people in China?

Why is China's population so large? I've been trying to figure out the ultimate cause and I think I have a possibility that is quite simple. First let's take a look at the proximate causes (the best source I could find about China's population is at Columbia University):
--From a historical perspective, China's population has always been large--it was already around 60 million around the birth of Christ (perhaps around 1/4 of the world, around what it is today)
--China's long civilization allowed for improvements in agricultural techniques and the clearing of large areas for agriculture.
--New crops from the New World increased food output in otherwise marginal agricultural areas

The ultimate cause, however, is...... RAIN!!! There is a reason why the diversity of species is generally greatest in areas of high rainfall and warm temperatures. Humans are also bound by nature and our density is dependent upon available resources dictated by climate.

I'm posting a population and rainfall map of China below. As you can see, they are very similar (source 1; source 2):




Of course, if you think about the history of human civilization, this all makes sense. From Cairo to Rome to New York to Beijing (Peking), all major cities are near a water source. I don't think I can name any large city in the world that is not near a river, lake, or ocean (except Mexico City with its large aquifers?).

Incidentally, India, with the second biggest population, also receives a huge amount of rainfall. The Himalayas block moisture from reaching Nepal and Tibet, much as the Cascades block moisture from reaching eastern Washington here in the U.S. I've never been to India or Nepal, but I can tell you that the difference in the landscape is amazing between areas west of the Cascades such as Seattle and areas east of it. The former is green and lush, the latter looks like a dessert (it almost is) except in irrigated areas. The population density follows the same pattern as rainfall.