New Light on Litvinenko "Poisoning"

From RIA Novosti and interesting article on Vyacheslav Zharko, who worked with Berezovsky and MI6 gathering intelligence. Here is the quote which summarizes my argument more or less from months ago when I argued that it was Litvinenko who was himself responsible for his own death:

"On the whole there was an absolutely negative attitude toward Litvinenko withinBerezovsky's circle. Eventually, Boris Abramovich [Berezovsky] moved him away from himself and considerably cut his allowance," Zharko said.
"The British at the same time declined his services. He [Litvinenko] kept telling me that he needed money badly. Possibly, that with the help of [Akhmed] Zakayev and his other Chechen 'friends' he could have got involved in smuggling of radioactive materials, and then - by accident or not - received a lethal dose. This is my personal opinion."

The New Maradona is HERE!

Check this...self explanatory video of an amazing goal by Messi.

Military Draft is only way for success in Iraq

I'm not saying I'm supporting a civilian draft, but here is my argument why it is the only way to security.

According to Wikipedia, Iraq, has a population of roughly 27 million people. 75-80% of the population lives in the problem areas of Iraq, I just didn't count the area's where the Kurds live because there seems to be not as much violence in the North. So at 75% that is about 20 million people to prove security for. This is not mentioning the thousands of foreign insurgents that have entered the country.

Now lets consider Chechnya, a population of about 1 million. We know that there are about 100,000 Russian soldiers initially securing Chechnya, and they fought around 15,000. So that is a ratio of about 6 to 1, and 1 to 10 in terms of civilians. Therefore, they needed one soldier for every 10 civilians. At the moment there are 30,000 soldiers in Chechnya, with only roughly 500 militans remaining. This is a ratio of 60 to 1 and 1 to 33 when it comes to civilians. It is more or less a time of peace, or you can say that all major fighting has ended.

There are currently about 150,000 soldiers in Iraq, for a population of 20 million, this is a proportion of 133:1. It can be estimated that there are over 100,000 insurgents in Iraq. That is a 1.5 to 1 ratio.

Based on this estimates we are largely outnumbered in our capabilities in Iraq. Even if you consider it a time of peace or light fighting, we need roughly another 350,000 troops to be able to provide real security, if taking Chechnya as an example, and a close example if you consider the types of resistance, the only thing that is not matched is the terrain, where in Chechnya there is an advantage because it is easier to hide in the mountains.

So in other words, we are way below our troop count and any withdrawl of troops can create severely dangerous conditions...and complete failure, based on the statistics.

Recession Late 2007, USA Hypocrisy

In case you don't know there is a recession coming in late 2007, and already GDP growth has slowed. The main indicator was a few months ago, late 2006, because the yield curve is inverted, which could mean many different things, but most likely a recession within twelve months of this accurance. So late 2007 there will probably be a recession. I'm hoping interest rates will be lower by this summer in anticipation, maybe.

Also, they criticize other countries for covering up their wars, well check the Iraqi war. Barely any footage out of the war zone, none on prime time, no information coming out of there. Highly restrictive for journalists to move around there, and very dangerous. They spend more time covering the death of one person than they do a crisis which has already killed thousands. So realize that we live far from freedom in todays society, and great hypocrisy still exists to a great extent.

Winter Storm - Upstate New York February 2007

Well here are the promised pictures from the "storm". We got about 2 feet of snow in total.

Diamond Laptop

You know, when you think that everything is out there, they come out with a diamond laptop. The laptop has 470 diamonds on the cover. I don't know how many sales they will get, but I guess since they are doing it, there must be a market for these kind of lavish luxuries.

Snowing

It's been snowing for the past two weeks or so, and should snow for another week. Took some quick pictures from my dorm window. More to come tommorow: