Thursday & Friday April 16 & 17, 2009 (diary)

We are still not into the dry season. The last couple of days have been rather humid with the odd thunderstorm here and there, and today, Thursday lunch time there is a sustained refreshing downpour of rain. Towards the end of it I drive to Palmerston and have a delicious seafood laksa from the Bahn Thai take away in the shopping Centre's food court. It is by far the best I have had in recent times with a more than generous quantity of seafood (Laksa is a coconut based noodle soup which may contain chicken, beef or seafood, or a "Combo" mixture of these.).
In the evening a bridge teams (of 4) competition at the Palmerston Bridge Club which is most enjoyable.

Friday (on account of the late bridge evening) I sleep in late, followed by a quiet day reading, almost having completed Evelyn Waugh's The Sword of Hour trilogy, a most enjoyable read. Waugh has a great love for words, especially unusual words and applies them throughout his writing with comfortable fluidity.
It is still mostly overcast all day and somewhat humid but not too warm.   In the evening it is back to bridge, this time at the Darwin Bridge Club, playing with Dev an old friend of mine. We manage to end up a respectable second for the night.

I am (hopefully) at the tail end of another cold. This is easy to pick up here with the varying humidity at present. My muscle cramps and pains I am happy to say however have all but disappeared. I have been taking fish oil capsules (Omega 3) as well as some mineral supplement tables every day and my body feels pretty good at present. I will continue with the Martinshof saga, but am waiting for some photos to arrive which my sister Wivica has sent me from Germany.

Saturday & Sunday April 18 & 19, 2009 (diary)

Saturday I have another seafood laksa in Palmerston then on to the Library to find some new books. I find several books by E M Forster on the "Top Shelf" and select the very first book he wrote, at age 26 : Where Angels Fear to Tread. believe I have read his "A Passage to India" many years ago, but will probably read it again shortly as well as "Howards End" which I have never read before.

I quite enjoy reading several books by the same author one after the other. I have done this with Irène Némirovsky, Len Deighton and now just again with Evelyn Waugh. I feel emotionally closer to them this way.

When I return home, prompted by its book title I start playing "Fools Rush In ... where Angels Fear to Tread", the famous song by Rube Bloom and Johnny Mercer, and eventually end up with a descent recording of it.

Sunday it is still rather overcast most of the day. I watch the Insiders Program on ABC TV, then am off to the Stokes Hill Wharf for a lunch of grilled prawns from the Portside Char Grill. I read and watch TV for the rest of the day.

Monday April 20, 2009 (politics : World financial crisis)

Strong leaders always lead from the front. This (as history shows time and time again) means that they often find themselves alone with their ideas and decisions, leaving most of the general public way behind. In time the public catches up taking a more benevolent view of the leader.
In politics this happened for example to the Duke of Wellington and his boss, Prime Minister Jenkinson, who encountered much opposition to waging the war against Napoleon up to the very end, the Battle of Waterloo. It also happened to Winston Churchill who was strongly opposed (especially by socialists and trade unions) to fighting a "not winnable war" against Hitler up until the time that German bombs started to rain on London.

Above examples are taken from an article by Claudio Veliz in the April 2009 Issue of the Quadrant Magazine ("George Bush and History's Croakers"). This article also provides a very credible insight into the main cause of the present financial crisis.
Its root cause can be traced back and followed through the actions of three (US socialist) Democratic Governments : L B Johnson, Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton. Their dramatic interference with the US banking system was directly responsible for the distortion of financial markets and their ultimate collapse.

Lyndon Johnson, through his 1968 Fair Housing legislation set up two dynamic Government-Sponsored Enterprises (GSEs), known as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. The idea of the legislation was to extend the "American dream" of owning a home to the poorer section of the nation (mostly of Hispanic and Afro-America origin) by giving them home loans they would clearly never be able to pay back. But as long as house prices went up this was considered "not a problem".

Jimmy Carter strengthened this policy with his 1977 Community Reinvestment Act and Bill Clinton vigorously enforced it.
All US banks had to extend mortgages to "bad lending prospects" in proportion to the percentage of poor people in the area they operated in. "The bigger the amount mortgaged to the least credit worthy applicants, the better for the bank's prospect of being favourably viewed by the state financial regulators."

The two GSEs, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, could not give out mortgages to individual applicants directly, but bought them up from banks and other mortgage institutions, bundled them into attractive share packages and sold them on the world market under a AAA credit security rating (!!!). By 2008 this amounted to a value of 5 trillion US dollars, half of all mortgages issued in the United States.

It was George W Bush (contrary to all the blame the Democrats, especially its leader Miss Pelosi, tried to deflect to him) who right from the start of his first term in 2001, saw the danger the Nation was facing and put forward legislation to impose stricter control over the GSEs and the banking system in general. His attempt, and all those of successive following years were blocked by the Democrats (disregarding strongly declining house prices). In the crisis year of 2008 alone 7 of his attempts were blocked, only his 8th was passed by the Democrats, when it was already far too late.
I am sure that History will show G W Bush in a far more positive light than he is viewed at present. What worries me today is that in the USA, UK and Australia, socialist Governments are in charge of fixing the very problem their own fundamental ideology has created. It is like putting a fox in charge of the chicken pen.