Category: Current Affairs/Politics

Al-Qaeda’s Wet Dream

Imagine for a second you’re a terrorist intent on inflicting unimaginable harm on your enemy. Now let’s further imagine that your enemy is the United States… The sun rises over your holy mother land, a land now inhabited by the infidels. You don your Kalishnikov, climb out of your cave,

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This Company’s Burn Rate Should Scare The Hell out of You!

Burn Rate: Investopedia – “The rate at which a new company uses up its venture capital to finance overhead before generating positive cash flow from operations. In other words, it’s a measure of negative cash flow.” Day in and day out I review businesses. Most are privately run businesses, some

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Why I love PRISM

If you drink poisoned water thinking it’s safe you’re a victim. If you drink poisoned water knowing it’s poisoned you’re an idiot. In that context, I have been a complete idiot. I’ve stored unencrypted financial information on companies which I’ve been researching on Dropbox I’ve used Gmail I’ve used Skype

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S”pain”… Still More to Come

  Spain. For those who may not be aware, Spain is a country which enjoyed one of the largest real estate manias in living memory. It continues to find itself mired in economic, political and subsequent social stresses. By the way, if you are not already a subscriber to one

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Talking Turkey With Chris Mayer

Turkey holds many fond memories for me. It was a country I first travelled to on a whim, after watching Midnight Express. The film is based on the true story of a young American student sentenced to spend 30 years in a Turkish prison for smuggling hashish out of Turkey.

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When the Theatre Clears

James Rickards, the author of the book Currency Wars tells a short story along the following lines: you’re sitting in a movie theatre and a couple of people get up and leave. Nobody takes much notice, now a half a dozen people all get up and leave at the same

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A Can’t Lose Deal… “Public” Venture Capital

After the debacle that was Solyndra, we hoped that “public” venture capital would die a much deserved death. Alas, we once again underestimated the arrogance and self-professed intellectual superiority of the bureaucrats! Well we, cynics of “public” venture capital (aka government sponsored business), should hide in shame. We obviously didn’t

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What comes after Marbles?

When I was a young child, like millions of kids before me, marbles enveloped my life. They were “The in thing”, desirable, a medium of exchange or barter, yet close to completely worthless in terms of intrinsic value. I remember the various shapes, sizes and colours. The little glass balls

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